A Complex Mixture of Fascination and Distaste
Relationships between Women in Pat Barker'sBlow Your House Down,Liza's EnglandandUnion Street
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 3636904 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Sarah Falcu (0000-0001-8850-6935, Yahoo (Spain), corresponding author) |
| Year | 2007 |
| Volume | 16 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 249-261 |
| Publication date | 2007-11-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of Gender Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0958-9236 • E-ISSN: 1465-3869 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/09589230701562947 |
| OpenAlex | W1972414073 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 6 |
This paper explores the women's stories in Pat Barker's three earliest novels: Blow Your House Down Barker, P. 1984. Blow Your House Down, London: Virago. [Google Scholar] , Liza's England Barker, P. 1986. Liza's England, London: Virago. [Google Scholar] and Union Street Barker, P. 1982. Union Street, London: Virago. [Google Scholar]. Using Kristeva's Kristeva, J. 1986. “Women's time”. In The Kristeva Reader, Edited by: Moi, T. Oxford: Blackwell. [Google Scholar] concepts of temporality from ‘Women's time’ Kristeva, J. 1986. “Women's time”. In The Kristeva Reader, Edited by: Moi, T. Oxford: Blackwell. [Google Scholar], it takes as its starting point the idea that Barker's women are trapped in a harsh cyclical timescale by gender, class and place. Motherhood therefore becomes another form of imprisonment, particularly when father figures are absent. Despite this, there are moments in the texts when women do experience connections that could be described as a more positive version of this cyclical time, one that gestures towards a female tradition, or genealogy. As this suggests, bonds between women in these novels, particularly mothers and daughters, are complex and often troubling, eschewing any easy version of female solidarity. They are more adequately described as bonds based on ‘a complex mixture of fascination and distaste’, evoking Luce Irigaray's work on relationships between women. This paper examines these bonds between women in the light of the work of Kristeva and Irigaray, focusing particularly on the relationships between mothers and daughters, arguably those at the centre of these ambivalent emotions
Ambivalence · Criminology · Imprisonment · Political science · Politics · Psychoanalysis · Sociology · Solidarity · Temporality · Contemporary Literature and Criticism · Gender Studies · History · Law · Philosophy · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies · Psychology · Short Stories in Global Literature
| Unique citing works | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1 |
| Citation span | 2025 - 2025 (1) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 1 |