Encounters with time : arrested time in contemporary maternal grief narratives : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in English at Massey University, Albany, New Zealand
| dc.contributor.author | Dainty, Gretchen Emma | |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2024-06-25T21:17:36Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2024-06-25T21:17:36Z | |
| dc.date.issued | 2023 | |
| dc.description.abstract | Despite a ‘boom’ in the publication of grief literature since the late 1990s stories addressing the ongoing impacts of a child’s passing for a mother or maternal figure have been difficult to tell and rare to find. However, in recent times, such narratives have become more prolific, resonating with developments in grief psychology that perceive grief as adaptive and enduring. Additionally, narrative theory has expanded the boundaries of storytelling, allowing for ‘unnatural’ representations of time and temporal progression to express subjective experiences of loss. This thesis examines the representation of maternal grief in three narratives published during the 2010s, focusing on maternal subjective experiences of the passage of time. The selected narratives are: Blue Nights (2011) by Joan Didion, a memoir about the death of her daughter Quintana; Wave (2013) by Sonali Deraniyagala, an autobiographical account of the trauma following the deaths of her sons and family members in the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami; and Where Reasons End (2019) by Yiyun Li, a novel expressing an enduring relationship between a mother narrator and her deceased son. These narratives share a sense of disrupted temporality, as the narrators experience a stalling of linear time caused by the loss of their children. The immobilisation of temporal progression challenges Freudian-influenced stage models of grief that prevailed in the twentieth century and marginalised maternal grief stories. The writers analysed create differing impressions of ‘kinds of time’ that undo aspects of ‘real-world’ knowledge of temporality. Didion’s framing metaphor of twilight represents the stalling of time, where the narrator resists the reality of her daughter’s demise and the inevitability of death by dwelling in a liminal site, the ‘blue’ moments between day and night. The rupturing effect of the tsunami plunges Deraniyagala into a suspended state at the site of trauma. Between the wave and the outgoing tide, the present is extended until her loss is eventually claimed. However, Yiyun Li does away with time altogether, resulting in the detemporalisation of its protagonist through a fictional narrative method, where language becomes an ‘invisible landscape’. The ethereal animated conversation between the mother narrator and her deceased son transcends time. This topic holds significance for feminist interests and predicts broader societal incorporation of diverse cultural understandings of grief and perceptions of relationships between the living and the dead. Analysis of selected narrative and linguistic features of the texts will show how absence is felt, and how it is made meaningful in and by language. | |
| dc.identifier.uri | https://mro.massey.ac.nz/handle/10179/70004 | |
| dc.language.iso | en | |
| dc.publisher | Massey University | |
| dc.rights | The author | en |
| dc.title | Encounters with time : arrested time in contemporary maternal grief narratives : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in English at Massey University, Albany, New Zealand | |
| dc.type | Thesis |