TY - JOUR

T1 - Mères fatales

T2 - maternal guilt in the noir crime novel

AU - Horsley, Lee

AU - Horsley, Katharine

PY - 1999

Y1 - 1999

N2 - We argue in this article that the coupling of "noir" conventions with an interest in maternal subjectivity has characterised the work of a number of female crime writers. Recent theories of maternal subjectivities (developed, for example, in the work of Jessica Benjamin, Elaine Tuttle Hansen, Marianne Hirsch, Brenda O. Daly and Maureen T. Reddy) have departed from the mother-blaming psychoanalytic emphasis of many earlier feminist critics, arguing instead the importance of recuperating the mother's perspective and voice, of disrupting "narratives that silence mothers" and allowing the maternal figure to be humanised. We compare male and female representations of "the guilt of the mother" in a range of crime fiction published from the 1940s to the present, and to analyse some of the ways in which an increasing interest in reclaiming the subjectivity of the mother has been reflected in noir crime novels written by women.

AB - We argue in this article that the coupling of "noir" conventions with an interest in maternal subjectivity has characterised the work of a number of female crime writers. Recent theories of maternal subjectivities (developed, for example, in the work of Jessica Benjamin, Elaine Tuttle Hansen, Marianne Hirsch, Brenda O. Daly and Maureen T. Reddy) have departed from the mother-blaming psychoanalytic emphasis of many earlier feminist critics, arguing instead the importance of recuperating the mother's perspective and voice, of disrupting "narratives that silence mothers" and allowing the maternal figure to be humanised. We compare male and female representations of "the guilt of the mother" in a range of crime fiction published from the 1940s to the present, and to analyse some of the ways in which an increasing interest in reclaiming the subjectivity of the mother has been reflected in noir crime novels written by women.

M3 - Journal article

VL - 45

SP - 369

EP - 402

JO - MFS: Modern Fiction Studies

JF - MFS: Modern Fiction Studies

SN - 1080-658X

IS - 2

ER -