Issue Details: First known date: 2002... 2002 Babies Eat Their Lace : Elizabeth Jolley and the Slaughter of Decorum
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Notes

  • Acknowledgements suggest that this article is a based on the author's 1993 review and her 1997 criticism.

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon After Electra : Rage, Grief and Hope in Twentieth-Century Fiction Eden Liddelow , Melbourne : Australian Scholarly Publishing , 2002 Z1007599 2002 multi chapter work criticism

    'Electra was the daughter of King Agamemnon of Argos, who sacrificed his other daughter Iphigenia for a fair wind to the Trojan War. Upon his return ten years later, he was killed with his captive concubine Cassandra by his wife Clytemnestra and her lover, who then enslaved Electra, whose only hope lay in her exiled brother Orestes. The daughter suffered range and grief; but so, too, did the mother.

    'For the infant upon separation from the mother rage and grief are necessary stages on the way to autonomy. The ‘good breast’ is the love, warmth and sustenance the mother provides; the ‘bad breast’ their withdrawal. Depression arises from the fear of being left abandoned and alone. Mother and child project these feelings upon each other. The psychoanalytic work of Melanie Klein and Julia Kristeva shows that in some cases these states persist into adulthood – and into literature.

    'Marguerite Duras and Nadine Gordimer see in the struggle of a subject people for self-determination the journey of a self. For Eva Figes and Helen Garner the loss of childhood recalls a Fall which must be redeemed. In the world of Jean Rhys, Janet Frame and Ania Walwicz the collapse of the self revolutionises language. Elizabeth Jolley finds mythological power in the older woman. And Susan Sontag’s melancholy aesthetic starts from a view of the self as a ‘text which must be deciphered.’ The struggle is never without hope for these distinguished novelists.' (Publication summary)

    Melbourne : Australian Scholarly Publishing , 2002
    pg. 118-136, notes 194-195
Last amended 31 Aug 2023 14:25:32
118-136, notes 194-195 Babies Eat Their Lace : Elizabeth Jolley and the Slaughter of Decorumsmall AustLit logo
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