The Offspring of Disobedience

One more night (working on my final paper for my Master's).




Very cold end of April.



Hoping I've been able to wring sense out of these books & various articles & endless notes...to bring something new to bear on motherhood and the imagination (through 18th-century seduction novels). These past two years culminating in a project that keeps tearing me away from mothering, as I read maternal theory, ponder medical theories of monstrous imagination, wonder if I can borrow Carla Freccero's "fantasmatic historiography" to interrogate the persistence of a perceived divide between creativity and procreativity (Susan Friedman's terms), to try to write another history. 

Oh yeah, and this: 

"They all wanted to settle down into a perpetual and phantom coziness. They were all at heart sentimentalists—and sentimentalists, Yeats said, are persons 'who believe in money, in position, in a marriage bell, and whose understanding of happiness is to be so busy whether at work or play, that all is forgotten but the momentary aim.' Accordingly, they had all opted, long ago, perhaps at birth, for the domestic life, the enclosed life, the restricted life—the life, in brief, of the daydream."—Cynthia Ozick, 1969

Comments

  1. How did I miss this post and the wonderful family photo? I love it!! And I love that Cynthia Ozick quote.

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  2. That Ozick quote is just astounding to me!

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