Between Amniotic and Semiotic: The Kristevan Maternal Body in Contemporary British Women’s Fiction

Iro Filippaki

doi:10.30827/tn.v6i1.26185

Autores/as

Iro Filippaki American College of Greece

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.30827/tn.v6i1.26185

Palabras clave:

Maternidad, Julia Kristeva, literatura británica de mujeres, ambivalencia, cuerpo materno

Resumen

Desde su influyente estudio Poderes de la abyección (1980) hasta su conceptualización más reciente de la dependencia materna (2014), la ambivalencia concomitante de la maternidad ha sido tanto un tema recurrente en la escritura de Julia Kristeva como su método dominante para demostrar las afinidades entre la transformación corporal y el desarrollo psíquico. Al mismo tiempo, la narración literaria de posguerra de las “elecciones imposibles” de la maternidad, en palabras de Harnett (2019), ha dejado marcas dispersas pero memorables en el canon literario británico contemporáneo. Escritoras británicas, tanto experimentales como consagradas, han intentado documentar el flujo y reflujo afectivo del cuerpo materno, así como la propia maternidad, en tanto que experiencia individual e institución cultural y socioeconómica (Staub 2007). Este ensayo examina estas obras literarias desde una perspectiva kristeviana, intentando un rastreo literario de la “herética” del amor materno (Kristeva 2014) en autoras británicas seleccionadas que han imaginado y articulado heréticamente la ambivalencia maternal en la época de entreguerras y contemporánea. Sirviéndonos de la narrativa post-realista de Olive Moore (1939), Doris Lessing (1988) y Jessie Greengrass
(2018) como trampolín para un análisis kristeviano de los cuerpos maternos, argumentamos que la conceptualización de una herética del amor materno encuentra su contrapartida literaria en una tradición continua de exploración femenina de la madre ambivalente a través de un estilo narrativo experimental que a su vez refleja la construcción de un nuevo cuerpo materno.

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