Daughters leaving Mothers: family bonds as structural patterns in Anita Brookner's novels.

Abstract

My thesis is centred on the analysis of the mother-bond in Anita Brookner's novels. Especially, I focus on the first three novels written by the author: A Start in Life, Providence and Look at Me, and the second-last novel Leaving Home. Using studies of scholars who have applied psychoanalysis to literature and art, my approach is psychoanalytic in search of definition and understanding of Brookner's characters internal unconscious processes. My thesis is that Brookner's novels are about lack, the originary one as it is experienced by a child (and human being), the loss of the mother. In Brookner's novels the relationship between mother and child is very frequently (but not necessarily) the relationship between mother and daughter. The mother-bond, and the severance from the mother and its bond, is, I think, at the core of Brookner's novels. Brookner's early novels establish a pattern leaving the protagonist, at the end of the story, in a state of paralysis or regression. My thesis is that Leaving Home opens to a new vision of hope.