The Menstrual Imaginary in Literature by Natalie Rose Dyer

Author:Natalie Rose Dyer
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030598136
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

You compare your filial bond to various flora and elements, which imbues your maternity with a terrestrial quality. You pay homage to a pre-verbal prosody, a rhythmic knowledge of the child and of his suffering (perhaps more so than his joys), a powerful lasting bodily mediation, which isn’t idealised, but rather encapsulated through a highly personal poetic testimony.

Clearly, Julia you desire something beyond the law (of the father), which is related to maternity and equal to oblivion. ‘Oblivion: a blinding, choking, yet tender mist’ (143). As such, a valuable primary nonverbal influence rooted in the orchestrations of the maternal body is given credence in the creative content of your essay ‘Stabat Mater’—which your term ‘the semiotic.’ You innovatively posit ‘this internal graft, this crease inside [between mother and child], which with the cutting of the umbilical cord becomes another person’ (145). You enthuse that women ought to try to remember this frontier of maternal embodiment , that is, the ‘atoms, molecules, scraps of words, fragments of phrases’ in which women live (147). Indeed, by elaborating this ‘internal graft’ or ‘crease of life’ in semiotic terms a valuable maternal influence tinged by oblivion, tenderness and love, can be drawn on and written by women at the level of culture. Certainly, your ‘Stabat Mater’ anticipates later writings on the semiotic, abjection and maternal eroticism.

In the final part of ‘Stabat Mater’ you argue for an ethics of the ‘modern age,’ which involves ‘bringing the law flesh, language, and jouissance,’ towards an ethical ‘reformation’ (151). You call for a radical ethical maternity, which is brought to language by women through their psychical drives, or jouissance and is also brought to the law. To some extent you run risk of overly assimilating women’s flesh and jouissance to a law that would disavow them at every turn Julia (i.e. in keeping with the Lacanian assertion of the power of the symbolic to bring the subject under the law of the father). You argue that ‘Heretical ethics—herethics—may just be that which makes life’s bonds bearable, that which enables us to tolerate thought, and hence the thought of death’ (152). If the Christian construct of womanhood subsumed under maternity has been represented specifically with respect to the Virgin Mary, whereby according to its vast iconography women’s sex is an empty shell that can only receive sound, is unable to speak, or indeed give birth to a flow, then your herethics potentially makes enormous tremors in the earth—from the other side of the law. Let the law get a massive fright, rupture, be repelled by the powerful mother it senses: she who cannot be contained, controlled, or erased! For a woman’s maternal ‘internal graft’ or ‘crease inside’ that she may choose to regularly trace and touch on is a psychic threshold related to fluids, animalism and death, which potentially brings forth an enormous flood of poetry. By identifying a frontier of heterogeneous maternal embodiment women can periodically draw on a poetic pre-discursive language that enumerates their multivalent sexual difference (which you term the semiotic).

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