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The second chapter of this book, ‘Mosaics and Ink Blots: Gothic mothers in Arab women’s writing’, explores what I call “daughtering”, following Claire Kahane’s germinal assertion about women’s Gothic writing, where she identifies that what ‘draws me inward is the spectral presence of a dead-undead mother, archaic and all-encompassing, a ghost signifying the problematics of femininity which the heroine must confront’ (The Gothic Mirror. In The (M)Other Tongue: Essays in Feminist Psychoanalytic Interpretation. Cornell University Press, 1985, 336). Here, the absence of a mother or forebearer requires a daughter to perform an investigation. This investigation leads the daughter to perform ‘critical fabulation’ (S. Hartman, Venus in Two Acts. Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 12 (2): 11, 2008), which in some cases restores a fuller sense of personhood and vitality to the spectral mother. In other instances, patterns of experience emerge, which I read through Hanadi Al-Samman’s ‘mosaic’ narratives in Arab women’s writings (Anxiety of Erasure: Trauma, Authorship, and the Diaspora in Arab Women’s Writings. Syracuse University Press, 2015, 16), which register repeated patterns of violence and subjugation across generations of women. I analyse biographical and bio-fiction texts like Joumana Haddad’s The Seamstress’ Daughter (2019) and Jean Said Makdisi’s Teta, Mother and Me (2005) alongside purely fictional texts, including Nawal El Saadawi’s The Fall of the Imam [Suqūṭ al-imām] (2009 [1988]), and Miral Al-Tahawy’s Gazelle Tracks [naqarat el-ẓeba’] (2008) and The Tent [al-khiba’] (1998 [1996]). I read fiction and memoir together to show how the creative capacities of writing allow these authors to theorise modernity’s erasure of women’s histories, and to gather knowledges about said histories, especially through the use of critical irrealism and Gothic tropes. We begin with this aspect of many of these texts to establish the core concerns of women’s knowledges and spectrality and ghostliness as unifying themes between texts.

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Mosaics and Ink Blots: Gothic Mothers in Arab Women’s Writing

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  • 发表日期：

    2025年

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  • Roxanne Douglas

摘要

The second chapter of this book, ‘Mosaics and Ink Blots: Gothic mothers in Arab women’s writing’, explores what I call “daughtering”, following Claire Kahane’s germinal assertion about women’s Gothic writing, where she identifies that what ‘draws me inward is the spectral presence of a dead-undead mother, archaic and all-encompassing, a ghost signifying the problematics of femininity which the heroine must confront’ (The Gothic Mirror. In The (M)Other Tongue: Essays in Feminist Psychoanalytic Interpretation. Cornell University Press, 1985, 336). Here, the absence of a mother or forebearer requires a daughter to perform an investigation. This investigation leads the daughter to perform ‘critical fabulation’ (S. Hartman, Venus in Two Acts. Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 12 (2): 11, 2008), which in some cases restores a fuller sense of personhood and vitality to the spectral mother. In other instances, patterns of experience emerge, which I read through Hanadi Al-Samman’s ‘mosaic’ narratives in Arab women’s writings (Anxiety of Erasure: Trauma, Authorship, and the Diaspora in Arab Women’s Writings. Syracuse University Press, 2015, 16), which register repeated patterns of violence and subjugation across generations of women. I analyse biographical and bio-fiction texts like Joumana Haddad’s The Seamstress’ Daughter (2019) and Jean Said Makdisi’s Teta, Mother and Me (2005) alongside purely fictional texts, including Nawal El Saadawi’s The Fall of the Imam [Suqūṭ al-imām] (2009 [1988]), and Miral Al-Tahawy’s Gazelle Tracks [naqarat el-ẓeba’] (2008) and The Tent [al-khiba’] (1998 [1996]). I read fiction and memoir together to show how the creative capacities of writing allow these authors to theorise modernity’s erasure of women’s histories, and to gather knowledges about said histories, especially through the use of critical irrealism and Gothic tropes. We begin with this aspect of many of these texts to establish the core concerns of women’s knowledges and spectrality and ghostliness as unifying themes between texts.