Discuss the representation of the figure of the mother in La femme gelée and Les mots pour le dire.

The writings of Marie Cardinal deal primarily with aspects of women's experiences, such as female identity, the mother-daughter relationship, writing and the body. Les mots pour le dire is considered to be the “pivotal work” in Marie Cardinal’s career to encompass all of these factors and displays “an intensely conflicted mother-daughter relation”, wherein the narrator’s mother conforms to religion and society, thus imposing her values and ideals upon her daughter. As Collette Hall suggests, Cardinal did come to writing in order to escape “the power of a destructive mother”, although also as “a quest for the nurturing mother” in order to search for a lost world in their existences. This differs from the relationship and interplay shown between the narrator and her mother in Annie Ernaux’s La femme gelée. Although still not completely influential and all-powerful, we can interpret the mother as more of a guiding force to her daughter in the latter novel, as opposed to “an implacable and ultimately tragic maternal figure” in Les mots pour le dire. This essay sets out to discuss the portrayal of the mother figure in both of these novels in turn and to document, at any point, the differences or even similarities between the two works of 20th century female autobiographical literature.

Firstly, in Les mots pour le dire, we can clearly distinguish the relationship between the narrator and her mother in the scene in which the narrator is ill. This illness is a possible technique used in order to get attention or find a minimal display of love from her mother and she is successful in doing so, although it is the only time that her mother approves of her in any way. Everything in the scene is much ritualised, like procedure at an altar, with all of the equipment laid out perfectly, which implies a heartless, soulless action of calculation and coldness. Her mother