Mediating Generation: the mother–daughter plot

Abstract

Virginia Woolf famously claimed that: ‘We think back through our mothers if we are women‘ and yet feminine creativity required the murder of the Angel in the House. Woolf and her sister Vanessa Bell could square this circle by drawing on Julia Margaret Cameron’s photographs of their mother – her niece and namesake – as a way of memorializing her while staking a claim to a specifically matrilineal artistic heritage. For Harold Bloom, on the other hand, generation is a matter of oedipal rivalry and ‘creative misreading‘. The ‘anxiety of influence‘, successfully negotiated, ensures the fertility of a vigorous, patrilineal genealogy. While it is much too tidy to propose a different genealogy for feminine creativity (women mis‐read their fathers and struggle with their brothers too), it is important to note that women artists have grown up for the first time in the twentieth century in a landscape of actual as well as elective artist – mothers, and that this is in itself ‘generative‘ and has contributed to their ability to produce new forms of public and monumental art. This paper explores the relevance of Woolf’s and Bloom’s arguments, among others, to an understanding of the patterns of inheritance and affiliation productive for women artists, with particular reference to the work of Rachel Whiteread.

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