In Search of Our Literary and Feminist HERitage: Thinking Back Through Our Mothers / Thinking Our Mothers Through, with Alison Bechdel, Adrienne Rich, and Virginia Woolf

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In her 1929 landmark feminist essay entitled A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf argues: “we think back through our mothers if we are women”. Woolf thus highlights the necessity for women writers to both find their place in a specifically feminine tradition and take part in the establishment of a feminine literary heritage, or – if one were to try and translate the French concept of “matrimoine” – HERitage. This paper offers to examine the legacy of this Woolfian paradigm by exploring the literary, artistic, and feminist works of two North-American authors whose works repeatedly pay tribute to Woolf: Alison Bechdel and Adrienne Rich. Indeed, in “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Revision” and Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution, Adrienne Rich keeps engaging with Woolf’s essays and fiction in order to conceptualize the specificity of women's contributions to the literary tradition, but also to examine the complexity of motherhood and the ambivalence of the mother-daughter relationship. As for Alison Bechdel, in her second graphic memoir, entitled Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama, she recycles – textually and visually – Woolf’s most autobiographical novel, To the Lighthouse, in order to explore both the ties that link her to her mother, and the debt she owes to her various feminist and literary foremothers, including Virginia Woolf and Adrienne Rich. “[W]e have many mothers, those of the body and those of the soul” Ursula Le Guin once pointed out, inviting us to explore the connexions that can be drawn between conceptions of a feminine literary filiation and conceptions of the mother-daughter dyad. As such, this paper aims to highlight how feminine, feminist, and matrilineal filiations repeatedly intertwine and overlap in the works of Bechdel, Rich, and Woolf, while unravelling how this complex HERitage lies at the crossroads of personal, literary, and feminist history.