Women and Ireland as Beckett's Lost Others: Beyond Mourning and Melancholia (review)

Rina Kim's Women and Ireland as Beckett's Lost Others is one of a number of recent books to combine archival research with theoretical analysis of Beckett's texts. Kim claims that Beckett was greatly influenced by Karin Stephen's Psychoanalysis and Medicine: a Study of the Wish to Fall Ill (1933), which he read and took notes on while undergoing psychotherapy in London during the 1930s. More ambitiously, Kim wishes to connect Stephen's work with Melanie Klein's work on child psychology and establishes this connection, with some sleight of hand, in the introduction to Women and Ireland. The specific Klein texts that Kim wishes to utilize were written after Stephen's text and long after Beckett's stay in London—key texts such as "Mourning and its Relation to Manic-Depressive States" (1940). Kim explains, "I attempt to read Klein through Stephen and through Beckett's reading of Stephen because Klein added significantly to Freud's theory of mourning and melancholia, and developed her theory of loss further than Freud to include symptoms such as mania and paranoia as reactions to the loss of the love object" (8). Thus, one of the key elements of Klein's theory, the "positions," would not have been something that Beckett read in the 1930s. However, what Kim is interested in showing is that later Beckett works make "reparation" with earlier Beckett texts; or, more precisely, restore the damaged "objects" of women and Ireland presented in the early texts through creating positive female characters or female centered plays, such as Footfalls (1975) and Rockaby (1980). In this way, Kim's theory is sweeping and plays solidly into the idea that Beckett repeats and rewrites the same (or nearly the same) text over and over.

On the one hand, the psychoanalytic framework is interesting and Kleinian psychoanalysis has some curious features, which could relate to certain Beckettian manifestations. On the other hand, the "long sonata" of the first chapter, "Severing Connections with Ireland: Women and the Irish Free State in Beckett's Early Fiction," requires a degree of faith on the reader's part that may not be readily forthcoming. If she is to make her claims convincing, Kim must first combine women and Ireland—a familiar theme more widely, but less so in Beckett criticism—with Beckett's poor treatment of each in his early work; if we are to read Beckett's later writing as a form of reparation, there must first be something to repair. The "French fiction," in turn, is presented as a "melancholic disavowal of the loss of the loved ones and therefore as an emotional reaction" (16).

The fact that Beckett treats his early female "characters" rather badly—Smeraldina is a case in point—is widely known and does not present an interpretive problem. But some of Kim's attempts to marshal Beckett's regret in later life as evidence of fictional reparation represent a bit of a leap. She points to Beckett, as an old man, recounting to Knowlson the regret he felt for modeling his grotesqueries on his cousin, Peggy Sinclair: "such a sense of guilt and repressed grief [in regard to Peggy Sinclair] affects the representation of the females in Beckett's later works, . . . Ireland, equally important, stands for the place where male characters have left their loved ones behind" (47). The route to reparation is through the "French fiction" in which Kim selectively returns to the Beckett archive, not to quote Karin Stephen but to cite Beckett's notes on Ernest Jones's Papers on Psycho-Analysis (1912). This selectivity is all right in itself, but the insights gleaned from Jones are not particularly salient. For instance, in a subsection of chapter two, "Memories and Melancholia in Beckett's Early French Fiction," titled "Taboo of Names," Kim discusses "First Love" and Molloy and the difficulty with names: Lula/Anna and Ruth/Edith, respectively. With the latter...