The Mother in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: Psychoanalysis, Photography, Deconstruction

Ten The Mother Tongue in Phèdre and Frankenstein

195 t e n The Mother Tongue in Phèdre and Frankenstein My poor mother, how strange was your love. — e u r i p i d e s , Hippolytus Apparently, Phèdre and Frankenstein make strange bedfellows. Racine’s tragedy is the exemplary text of seventeenth-century French drama while Mary Shelley’s horror tale has been read as a gloss on the English Romantic imagination. Although Phèdre is written in French and Frankenstein in English, these two texts speak to each other through a haunting figure for the foreignness of language itself. Both authors supplement the body of their texts with prefaces that recount the genesis of their works and name sources of foreign origin. Racine acknowledges his debt to the Hippolytus of Euripides, and Shelley attributes the inspiration of her tale to French translations of German ghost stories, but these explicit references to foreign sources are only traces of a tacit obsession common to both texts. By speaking about foreign origins, these two texts both speak about language in terms of errancy and exile: To speak about origins is to speak one’s alienation from them. Phèdre and Frankenstein speak to each other through Marder-Ch10.indd 195 Marder-Ch10.indd 195 11/10/2011 4:20:50 PM 11/10/2011 4:20:50 PM 196 Photo-Readings and the Possible Impossibilities of Literature the echoes of a common obsession with the relationship between the question of origins and that of language; these two questions converge in a figure that, through the marks of its absence, becomes curiously central. The question of origins and the implicit impossibility of speaking about them is articulated through the figure of an absent mother who dictates and engenders the texts that circumscribe her absence. Both texts are haunted by the specter of a mother who is ultimately unspeakable. The horror that permeates these texts emanates from the figure of a mother confronting the indelible trace of an offspring that she engenders but that is also foreign to her. Both works stage scenes of monstrous or unnatural childbirth that simultaneously recall and obliterate the strange affiliation between the mother and language. To be born is to be born into language and to be exiled from the mother. In this sense, the word “mother” is profoundly meaningless and can be read only as a figure of speech, even as the figure from which speech necessarily springs. How can the word “mother” speak the unaccountable event of our birth, which we can neither remember nor bear to forget? In Phèdre and Frankenstein, the desire to speak stems from an impossible desire to account for the mother and from an attempt to efface the mark of this unaccountability . The desire to speak recalls an impossible desire for the mother, a desire that she bear the burden of our birth by remaining the silent witness to a time we can only imagine but never know, a time before we needed to speak our alienation from her. In both texts, however, the mother’s legacy is not the safe haven of prelinguistic plenitude, but rather the strange exile of speech itself. The Mother’s Legacy “Par où commencer?” Where to begin? So Phèdre says as she begins to break the silence around which the drama unfolds. This question interrupts Phèdre’s first dialogue with Oenone, which is characterized by verbal detours that circumscribe the unnamed cause of her silence. Phèdre’s response to this question seems at first like one more circumlocution. Instead of beginning to speak about her own illicit desire, she speaks about her mother and her mother’s desire. Phèdre’s allusion to her mother, however , is only apparently a refusal to speak. She might well ask, “Where to begin?” for the story of her still unspoken woe and the language with which Marder-Ch10.indd 196 Marder-Ch10.indd 196 11/10/2011 4:20:50 PM 11/10/2011 4:20:50 PM The Mother Tongue in Phèdre and Frankenstein 197 she could tell that story both, in a sense, precede her. Her question leads her inexorably to the question of the mother. To begin to speak is to begin to speak about the mother. But to speak about the mother is to enter into a labyrinth of discourse and desire from which there is no exit: O haine de...