Death and the Mother from Dickens to Freud: Victorian Fiction and the Anxiety of Origins
Victorian culture is famous for its idealization of mothers and families, yet the popular novels of this period frequently feature mothers who are dead or otherwise absent. Through an analysis of the work of Dickens, Collins, Eliot, Darwin and Woolf, Carolyn Dever discusses this apparent paradox. She shows how the idealised dead mother is fundamental to the Victorians' idea of origins, and later becomes the central figure of Freudian psychoanalysis. Dever demonstrates that Victorian...
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An exploration of the idealized figure of the dead mother in Victorian fiction and Freudian psychoanalysis.
Preface1The lady vanishes12Psychoanalytic cannibalism393Broken mirror, broken words: Bleak House814Wilkie Collins and the secret of the mother's plot1075Denial, displacement, Deronda1436Calling Dr. Darwin1797Virginia Woolf's "Victorian novel"203Notes213Index230
