Thinking Back Through Our Mothers: The Legacies of Nancy Chodorow

Taking off from two scenarios, this chapter will offer a two-part reflection on Chodorow’s profound influence on literary study and the new directions that influence might take. Coinciding with the feminist critical turn to women’s literary genealogies, dubbed “gynocriticism”, Chodorow’s Reproduction of Mothering provided a theoretical framework for conceptualizing the dynamics of women’s literary inheritance. These dynamics are echoed in Virginia Woolf’s Room of One’s Own (1929), whose narrator famously proclaims that “we think back through our mothers if we are women.” By making the psychoanalytic discourse of object relations available for literary study, Chodorow initiated a paradigm shift from the model of oedipal rivalry presumed to characterize masculine literary inheritance to the dynamics of merger and separation that characterize the mother–daughter relations between and within books authored by women. Forty years later, feminist critics accustomed to thinking back through our literary mothers are learning to think forward through the object world bequeathed by the death of our literal mothers. In this second scenario, in which it is our mothers who separate from us, lingering only in the things they leave behind, I ask how the “reproduction of mothering” might help us chart the material terrain of women’s object relations.