An alien mother/daughter plot

If Lory is indeed ‘in league’ with the alien, and if the dissipation of hu/man entropic energy and the cosmic reproduction are part of her ‘crazy plot’, the question arises what the nature of her alliance with the alien could be. What alternative plot besides the one derived from Aaron's focalization emerges when we highlight Lory's relationship with the alien?

I want to suggest that another possible plot in ‘A Momentary Taste of Being’ is what Marianne Hirsch indicates as a ‘mother/daughter plot’. In her book The Mother/Daughter Plot, Hirsch examines the intersection of familial structures and structures of plotting in Western women's writings of the nineteenth and twentieth century. At the centre of her attention is the relation between mothers and daughters, who are ‘the female figures neglected by psychoanalytic theories and submerged in traditional plot structures’. Freud's notion of the family romance (Familienroman) functions as a controlling figure for her interpretations of nineteenthcentury, modernist and postmodern novels by women writers. The Freudian family romance comes down to an imaginary interrogation of the subject's origins, by which story and the familial experience get linked together.

Hirsch investigates the divergent versions of the family romance that surface in female-authored novels. The development of the female revision of the Freudian pattern she summarizes as follows. In conventional nineteenth-century plots the female family romance is guided by the heroine's desire for self-determination, and hence a disidentification with the fate of other women, in particular of her mother. This implies that mothers tend to be absent or silent in these novels, while maternal attachments are often displaced by fraternal bonds. In modernist plots, the heroine's desire for independence is supplemented by artistic ambitions, while she displays an oscillation between maternal/female and paternal/male affiliations.