Melancholic mothering: Mothers, daughters and family violence

Abstract

Through selected theories of melancholia, this paper seeks to shed some fresh interpretive light on the reproduction and disruption of gender, violence and family turmoil across generations of mothers and daughters. The originality of the paper lies in its exploratory deployment of theories of melancholia to consider issues of women, violence and generation. It addresses these matters through a discussion of the intergenerational emotional archives accumulated by two mother-daughter pairs in relation to their different experiences of sexual and other violence. It shares the mothers' experiences of violence in their childhood and shows how these help to shape the ways in which they raise thei..