Jill Marsden

What is it to be a mother when you have been forsaken as a wife? Surprisingly, this question is largely absent from analysis of the “abandoned” woman in both literary texts and the cultural narratives that inform them. Taking Simone de Beauvoir’s The Woman Destroyed (1967) as the classic account of the abandoned wife, this chapter will argue that the mother is missing from the dominant patriarchal discourse of marriage. Too frequently critical attention is devoted to the plight of the failed wife at the expense of any acknowledgment of her successful mothering, an omission that attests to the invisibility of “motherwork” within the ideological construction of motherhood as natural, normative and apolitical. Situating Patricia Highsmith’s Edith’s Diary (1977) and Elena Ferrante’s The Days of Abandonment (2002) in dialogue with Beauvoir’s text, this discussion will show how each text renders visible the labour of mothering, revealing not only how the literary protagonists “read” their respective maternal scripts but also how motherhood might be re-written once divested of patriarchal assumptions. Significantly, each character uses writing in order to process her changed circumstances, revealing the power of narrative to shape the material conditions of experience.

It is winter 1876 in Sorrento, the air bright and taut. Nietzsche’s pen is poised for a new direction in his philosophy but first he pauses ‘like a wanderer pauses, to take in the vast and dangerous land through which [his] mind [has] hitherto travelled’ (GM P: 2). This ‘pause’ on the path marks the beginning of the aphoristic style of writing that will characterize Nietzsche’s ‘middle period’; from this point on, thought-as-travel will be less a metaphor than the material practice of thinking outside. As Nietzsche’s connection to university philosophy atrophies, walking becomes thinking. Writing from Sorrento to Reinhart von Seydlitz, Nietzsche imbues his strolling with allegorical significance.

The aloneness of creativity is quite unlike other solitudes. Time spent writing and thinking is time spent “away,” in a kind of exile from the daily clamor of life. For the migrant spirit of Emily Brontë’s poem, to be “most away” is to seek more than distance from the distractions of sociality. It is to slip out of existence for a while—to savor a kind of reprieve from a human location in things. “Wandering wide” the free spirit feels itself distributed through regions undetermined by the familiar co-ordinates of earth and sky. Night winds stir the starscape, tempting the wanderer with the promise of other suns. There is something both disarming and familiar about this freedom, as if in our creative solitude we reconnect with those domains guessed at and half-glimpsed in dreams.

The isolation of the individual ought not to deceive us: something flows on underneath individuals.

Although it impinges on virtually everything that he writes, Nietzsche’s thinking of becoming is never elaborated in comprehensive terms. Silently and anarchically, the energy of becoming pulses through his writings, a dark and vagrant current upon which so much of his philosophy is buoyed. From his first acquaintance with the serenity of ancient Greek art, Nietzsche had the suspicion that something rippled underneath the orderly and implacable Hellenic world. In The Birth of Tragedy he suggests that Apollonian delight in restraint, exemplified by the imposing columns and statues and rigid political structure of the Doric state, could only be understood as a permanent military encampment against the rush (Rausch) of the Dionysian (BT, 4). In his later writings on will to power the world is envisaged as a “sea of forces flowing and rushing together, eternally changing, eternally flooding back, with tremendous years of recurrence, with an ebb and flood of its forms” (KSA, 11:38 [12]).

This chapter argues that Nietzsche’s philosophy is of central importance to affect theory, particularly in the field of literary criticism. Marsden explores the idea that literary texts generate new and strange affective forces but that these are frequently commuted to normative models of human experience when analyzed by literary critics. Inflecting Brian Massumi’s influential work on affect theory with a Nietzschean critique of value, Marsden offers a reading of William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury and Carson McCullers’ The Member of the Wedding, which remains alert to the power of affective becoming to communicate “senses without names.”

The year 1903 saw the publication of one of the most extraordinary discussions of corporeality and cosmic connection ever to impact on occidental history. The work, entitled Memoirs of My Nervous Illness was written by Daniel Paul Schreber, presiding judge of the Court of Appeal at Dresden and subsequent subject of Freud’s well-known case study of psychosis. The Memoirs constitute a fascinating record of the illness for which Schreber was hospitalised, an account which elaborates unprecedented possibilities for bodily reconfiguration via a unique technology of transhuman contact. A work of such labyrinthine complexity defies any easy summary, yet there is an important sense in which Schreber achieves what very few thinkers in the Western tradition have managed: namely, a sustained meditation on the integration of human life with extra-human systems — a genuinely exploratory rather than a merely reflective philosophy.