Uneasy Possessions: The Mother-Daughter Dilemma in French Women’s Writings, 1671–1928 by Katharine Ann Jensen (review)

Reviews 221 analysis of whatever critical concern is willed to be operative in the work. The essays thus uniquely and surprisingly explore the varieties of Beckettian pain, inspired by this mutually interdependent relationship between the writer’s emotional and physical experiences of pain, loss, and suffering, and pain’s incidence in his characters. Beckett, the editors write in their introduction,“was compelled to write on pain, himself being in pain and sympathizing with the other people’s pain” (21). This theme is explored most fully in the first essay, Mark Nixon’s lucid and detailed account of how Beckett’s early aesthetics emerged from the biographical experiences of pain that led him to study the traditions of quietism, pessimism, and melancholia. In arguing that Beckett consistently “sought to find a cultural, artistic solution for a personal problem” (33), Nixon offers a fresh analysis of Beckett’s early development as a writer and establishes a thematic that will be taken up by many of the other writers in the volume, including excellent contributions by Graley Herren, Garin Dowd, Yoshiki Tajiri, and Jonathan Boulter. In addition to the freshness of these approaches, the editors have wisely included a variety of critical points of view, and pain is actively engaged rather than taken as a matter of course. Given the subject matter, Elaine Scarry’s influential The Body in Pain naturally forms an intertextual thread running through each of the ten collected essays. But Beckett’s work is shown to confirm Scarry’s accounts of pain just as often as it disrupts them. Particularly in the latter essays, the privacy of Scarry’s account gives way to new and unexpected models inspired by the thought of Blanchot, Levinas, and Agamben. This plurality of pain’s presence throughout Beckett’s oeuvre is what makes the present volume a key source for scholars interested in thinking through pain’s role in shaping Beckett’s worldview, and in exploring the Beckettian subject more generally. Towson University (MD) Jacob Hovind Jensen, Katharine Ann. Uneasy Possessions: The Mother-Daughter Dilemma in French Women’s Writings, 1671–1928. Newark: UP of Delaware, 2011. ISBN 978-1-61149038 -9-1. Pp. 450. $90. Jensen presents an ambitious, comprehensive, and unique study centered around the work of five French women writers from four centuries: Marie-Madeleine de Lafayette, Madame de Sévigné, Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun, George Sand, and Colette. The purpose of this study is to analyze the psychological power relationships between mothers and their daughters and their effects on identity and the self. In these texts, daughters are often treated as objects possessed by their mothers, who deny them their psychic autonomy in order to satisfy their maternal desires. Jensen relies on Jessica Benjamin’s intersubjective psychoanalysis theory, which argues that paradoxically, mutual recognition between mother and daughter is necessary for a daughter to differentiate herself from her mother and build her own identity. The analysis starts in chronological order with Lafayette’s La Princesse de Clèves (1678). Jensen elucidates previously unanswered questions in this chapter. One of the main questions is how the Princesse breaks away from maternal possession and how she successfully creates her own identity after her mother’s death. In chapter 2, the author examines Madame de Sévigné’s desire to be an individual and to be recognized as a writer (140). Jensen shows how much Madame de Sévigné needed her daughter to validate and recognize her mother’s talent in her letters. However, on her side, Sévigné does not recognize her daughter’s desires, but imagines a “fantasy daughter” (176) that does not exist in real life. In chapter 3, Jensen analyzes Vigée-Lebrun’s Souvenirs, in which the author uses her daughter to represent herself as“ideally feminine” (201), a loving and tender mother.Vigée-Lebrun also invents a“fantasy daughter,”representing her as her“alterego ”, her “self-reflective object” (214). Chapter 4 analyses the relationship between George Sand’s two ‘mothers’ who raised her: her biological mother and her grandmother on her paternal side. Jensen starts her analysis by questioning why there is a discrepancy between the way Sand was viewed and what she wrote in...