Mother Matter: Transcorporeality in Carole Maso and Joan Didion

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Rereading the Hymn to Demeter, an early Western mother-daughter myth, as paradigm, this article traces female agency, narrative experimentation, and the merging of interiorities with the environment through two present-day stories of mothering and
loss by female writers Carole Maso and Joan Didion. In each of the texts, affect and bodily experience contribute to formal alinearity and repetitive looping to challenge the emphasis on futurity that often governs procreative narratives. Simultaneity, not teleological progression, defines the contradictory emotional and physical states depicted in matrifocal texts. By examining the mother’s experience in each text, I extend Stacy Alaimo’s concept of transcorporeality – the always already occurring enmeshment of the human with the “more-than-human world” – through the physical body to the empathic,
affective spheres.