NOVEL

Deborah Moggach is a contemporary British author who published her first novel in 1978 and, since then, she has published twenty novels, most of which focus on the complexity of family and intergenerational relationships within the context of contemporary UK. Through some of her novels such as Close Relations (1997), These Foolish Things (2004) and Something to Hide (2013), Moggach explores how characters who are reaching their late middle age and old age negotiate their ageing experience by revising their life trajectories with the aim of finding a meaning to their past years and coming ones. In the case of Deborah’s novels, the main characters rarely pursue this path on their own; contrarily, their narratives are entangled with those of family members, old friends or new acquaintances. In this specific research, I will look at the way in which Moggach reflects on different topics related to the ageing process – sex and desire, loneliness, life review, disease and care, wisdom, among others – as well as the way in which relationships inform, either for good or for bad, of this ageing process to the main protagonists.

Blake Morrison is a British poet and writer who has also published a wide range of non-fiction books among which two memoirs dedicated to the ageing and dying processes of his father and his mother stand out. And When Did You Last See Your Father? (1993) and Things My Mother Never Told Me (2002) are immensely rich accounts of the relationship of Morison with his parents as well as the ways in which being a witness and a carer of sorts of their ageing and dying processes had a very strong impact on his own understanding of life, ageing and death both as a person and as a creator.

Researcher: Maricel Oró Piqueras.

Cultural representations have traditionally portrayed the mother as a one-dimensional figure of sacrifice and unconditional devotion to her children. In the last decades, however, contemporary writing by women has examined the many complexities of what allegedly is the most “natural” of female roles. The fiction of Elena Ferrante (Naples 1943) follows a line of women writers who place the mother figure at the centre of feminine identity while seeking to liberate it from its stereotype as static, silent and sacrificial, therefore presenting motherhood in all its nuances – unpleasant, contradictory or even unspeakable. Ferrante’s fiction thus seems to be an attempt to reverse the historical silence about the maternal while revealing its nuanced quality.

The mother-daughter relationship in Ferrante’s novels underscores an existential aspect of feminine subjectivity. In her novels, feminine identity is understood as an intricate fabric, interlaced with the maternal through complex threads: indeed, the characters’ struggle to separate from their mothers is a pattern in Ferrante’s fiction. However, even if detachment from the mother and everything she represents is supposed to mitigate the protagonists’ anxieties, it ultimately brings about isolation and estrangement from the world and especially from themselves. I argue that the protagonists’ quest for identity will not result in separation as in the Freudian model but rather in the merging of mother and daughter, which is evidenced in the daughters’ eventual reconciliation with (and even transformation in) their mothers. Ferrante’s female protagonists ultimately turn to the maternal on their path towards reconciling with the past and (re)constructing their identities as women. While poignantly shedding light into the dark corners of a mother’s life, Ferrante’s fiction succeeds in portraying the mother-daughter relationship in all its ambivalence without diminishing its magnitude, while revealing the mother-daughter bond as essential for the construction of a woman’s identity.

Researcher: Emma Domínguez Rué

Kate Morton’s novels often revolve around family narratives that extend along different generations, thus establishing bonds among women belonging to the same family that distort spatial and temporal boundaries. The family stories portrayed in these novels comply with Jean Michel Ganteau’s poetics of vulnerability comprising features like loss and trauma, the crisis of truth, and temporal disarray, since characters face traumatic situations, they must unravel family secrets, and they return to a past that inevitably impinges on the present. Hence, Morton’s novels arise as vulnerable textualities that reveal the fragmentary identities of their protagonists along the aging process.

These narratives also distort the limits of traditionally-established life stages. Accordingly, they also exemplify the concept of novels of female development—as coined by theorists like Elizabeth Abel, Marianne Hirsch and Elizabeth Langland—which defends that the process of female awakening takes place later in life and by means of epiphanies that delineate a circular rather than a linear development. Morton’s novels also illustrate Margaret Gullette’s claim about the need to disassociate narratives of progress with youth and narratives of decline with old age, since, in Morton’s fiction, female characters tend to embrace their identities at a later stage in life, thus suggesting decline in early periods and progress in later phases.

Finally, drawing on Ganteau’s thesis contending that intertextuality has often been interpreted as a feature symptomatic of vulnerable textualities, insofar as it underpins the fragmentary and dependent quality of these texts, Morton’s novels comprise manifold echoes with other textualities, especially from the genres of Gothic fiction and Victorian novels, but also of fairy tales and myths from the classical tradition. As a case in point, the recurrence of three female generations comprising the grandmother, the mother and the daughter brings to mind Robert Graves’s mythical trope of the triple goddess, which contributes to establishing connections between female characters, nature, and the life cycle.

Researcher: Marta Miquel-Baldellou

I have been exploring literary and cultural representations of ageing, with a particular focus on family and intergenerational relationships through the lens of gender perspectives. The writers I have focused on are Deborah Moggach, Diana Athill, Erica Jong, Anne Ernaux, Roald Dahl, and Mitch Albom. I looked into how they depict the intricacies of ageing and old age in relation to informal care and dementia, and how these experiences contribute to and change parental relationships. I have paid special attention to older female writers and how taking care of their mothers alters their perceptions of ageing as daughters. Diana Athill, Erica Jong, and Anne Ernaux’s personal and fictional works reveal how, once their parents can no longer recognise them because of dementia, the daughters are compelled to reinvent themselves in new roles that affect their sense of identity and femininity. My future work will focus on illness and dementia narratives through the lens of intergenerational relationships with a special focus on masculinity, care ethics, and personhood. Exploring the role of masculinity and ageing in caregiving situations will contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of how societal expectations and gender norms shape the experiences of men involved in the care of ageing family members. This investigation will also shed light on the ethical considerations that underpin the caregiving process and how they, in turn, impact family dynamics, identity, and personal relationships.

Researcher: Ieva Stončikaitė