The mother-daughter knot : ambivalence, whiteness, trauma and relational politics in the fiction of Jean Rhys, Jamaica Kincaid and Toni Morrison

[Truncated] A deliberate use of a trope or figure of thought which involves turns or conversions in thinking helps disrupt and (re)form the logic of dichotomies. This thesis works on the premise that metaphorical logic offers an alternative methodology to ways of thinking about the representation of the trauma of racism in fiction. It is a feminist work that aims to challenge the invisible normativity of whiteness that still dominates the field of literary criticism. The conceptual metaphor is the knot which suggests the interwoven network of relational politics and primarily corresponds to a figural representation of the mother-daughter connection, one of the most ambivalent of all woman-to-woman relationships. This configuration aims to suggest both the dense complexity and circuitry of the mother­daughter dyad, which comprises separate subjectivities that are loosely tied together, bodily and psychically, interwoven and entangled with one another, joined but separate, the same and other, ambivalently fused by a sense of difference and commonality.