Death and the mother: from Dickens to Freud

Summary Analyzing texts by Dickens, Collins, Eliot, Darwin, and Woolf, as well as Freud, Klein, and Winnicott, Dever argues that fictional and theoretical narratives alike use maternal absence to articulate concerns about gender and representation. Contents 1. The lady vanishes; 2. "The epistemophilic impulse": psychoanalytic cannibalism; 3. Broken mirror, broken words: autobiography, prosopopeia, and the dead mother in "Bleak House"; 4. The narrative of the tombstone: Wilkie Collins and the secret of the mother's plot; 5. Denial, displacement, Deronda, or what it means to desire the mother; 6. Calling Mr Darwin: phylogeny, parthenogenesis, and the phantasy of the dead mother; 7. "His arms, though stretched out, remained empty": Virginia Woolf's "Victorian novel". Audience Note P ; R 251 BC H