Motherhood in the Chilean Context

This book examines the representation of motherhood in the narrative fiction of the contemporary Chilean author Diamela Eltit (1949–). Through a close reading of Eltit's first six novels, my aim is to show that the terrain of the maternal body and mother–child relations are crucial to an understanding of her narrative oeuvre, which passionately scrutinizes and rearticulates symbolic representations of motherhood, sexuality and gender. All of the relationships portrayed in Eltit's novels stem from their intersection with the mother, or the maternal figure, but although motherhood is fundamental to Eltit's narrative, it remains a largely unexplored area of her work to date. I argue that Eltit portrays official discourses of motherhood as the material and symbolic basis for woman's oppression and, as such, her novels urgently demand that attention be drawn to the violence inflicted on the maternal figure by existing masculinist structures, which prevent woman's self-representation and oppressively regulate her desire.

Through the language and structure of her novels, Eltit foregrounds the corpus of signification as emerging from the specificity of the maternal body. She privileges a form of writing that seeks to recuperate the rhythms of the primal relationship to the mother, the libidinal impulses of the maternal body and the pulsations of the maternal unconscious, in this way allowing for the expression of the mother's concealed jouissance and a return to a pre-verbal moment of origin that is virtually inaccessible to language and memory. Also noteworthy is the recurring analogy between literary creation and procreation in Eltit's novels, which self-consciously expose the underlying conditions of their narrative production.

A variety of theoretical frameworks exist which seek to challenge dominant representations of motherhood and mother–child relations. In the field of object relations, for example, Nancy Chodorow explores the way in which the desire to mother is reproduced in girls through the structure of the mother–daughter relationship.