Narrating mother-daughter relationships: A kleinian analysis of Joyce Carol Oates's later novels

The mother-daughter relationship has been a recurrent theme in Joyce Carol Oates's fiction, whose career spans a period of over fifty years. Three of her recent novels—I'll Take You There (2002),Missing Mom (2005), and Mudwoman (2012)—attest to the writer's sustained interest in placing the stories of the protagonists within the context of their complicated psychological connections with their mothers. Oates's novels gain added interest when read in the light of the Austrian British psychoanalyst Melanie Klein's object-relations theory, which posits that an infant's early relationship with his/her mother will bear an immense influence on his/her psychological life as an adult. According to Klein, an infant goes through two main developmental phases in the first year of life: "the paranoid-schizoid position" and "the depressive position." In the former, the infant perceives the mother in a fragmentary way, as a composite of the part-objects of "the good breast" (when his/her needs are satisfied) and the "bad breast" (when s/he feels frustrated). As s/he continues to work through the polar emotions of satisfaction and aggression, love and hatred through this stage, the infant gradually enters the second phase where s/he begins to perceive the mother as a whole object and develops more sophisticated emotions such as guilt: entertaining the notion that his/her own aggression might have caused the loss of "the good breast," s/he attempts "reparation," an emotional state that can also be observed in adults who mourn for their loved ones. While all of Oates's three recent novels are plotted around the common core of the daughters' struggles to come to terms with the loss of their mothers, this thesis argues, Oates introduces compelling variations to her representation of the mother-daughter relationship in each novel, variations that can best be understood through the insights provided by the Kleinian theory. The thesis discusses how these variations are reflected in the narrative technique of each novel as well.