Towards an ambivalent vulnerabilityan ethical approach to mother-daughter relationships in contemporary British fiction

Abstract

This doctoral thesis offers a study of the notion of vulnerability as an ambivalent concept in the context of contemporary literary studies. Given the attention that the notion of vulnerability has received in multiple fields of study in the last two decades, it seems necessary to test its potential as a tool in contemporary literary criticism. I suggest exploring the notion without reducing its understanding to either a completely negative or positive characteristic, but rather, as an ambivalent notion that encompasses different states of potential. Following this approach, three main aims are pursued: first, to demonstrate that vulnerability does not problematise the ethical encounter, but that it can foster an ethical connection towards alterity; second, to show that mobilising vulnerability through its manifestation, recognition, and sharing it explicitly, can result in a positive transformation for the self and others; and third, to demonstrate that contemporary British fiction is both a useful lens to observe ambivalent vulnerability and a helpful source to move ethically towards the other. This dissertation engages with an interdisciplinary framework, an approach that tackles the notion of vulnerability from a more abstract and philosophical perspective, establishing a dialogue with questions of moral philosophy, ethics of care and sociology, to end with the analysis of individual experiences of vulnerability represented in literary form through four selected novels. The novels under analysis are Kate Atkinson’s Behind the Scenes at the Museum (1996), Rachel Cusk’s Arlington Park (2006), Emma Healey’s Whistle in the Dark (2008), and Kit de Waal’s The Trick to Time (2018). Whereas the first two authors have received more scholarly attention, Healey’s and de Waal’s novels are widely unexplored. All the chosen literary works provide useful accounts of how vulnerability becomes an essential feature in mother-daughter relationships. My analysis demonstrates how these novels openly expose vulnerability as a central characteristic of life, which shapes personal identity as well as social connections with others. I demonstrate how vulnerability is exacerbated in the mother-daughter dynamics while it is used as a transformative tool towards an ethical connection and self-growth. This PhD thesis is divided into seven central chapters that are preceded by an introduction. The first two chapters constitute the theoretical framework of the thesis. Chapter 2 engages with the notion from a philosophical perspective, especially informed by Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics of alterity. Chapter 3 explores vulnerability in its social dimension, putting the notion in connection with the ethics of care and the study of literature. The following four chapters are devoted to the close-reading of each of the aforementioned novels. I present the conclusions of the previous analysis in the last chapter, where vulnerability stands out as an intersectional condition, useful to mediate in ethical conflicts and essential to understand personal and relational development.