SOURCE: Parker, Emma. “From House to Home: A Kristevan Reading of Michèle Roberts's Daughters of the House.” Critique 41, no. 2 (winter 2000): 153-73.

In the following essay, Parker draws on the feminist theories of Julia Kristeva in an analysis of Roberts's novel Daughters of the House.

Women writers have a penchant for burning down paternal houses that do not offer their female protagonists satisfactory homes.¹ In Daughters of the House, Michèle Roberts prefers to transform rather than destroy the house in which her two main female characters reside, a metaphor for the patriarchal symbolic order,² and she attempts this through an exploration of the conditions Julia Kristeva calls abjection and estrangement. Roger Luckhurst's recent reading of Daughters of the House points to the usefulness of psychoanalytic insights in reading Roberts's text. His essay, like mine, focuses on the relationship between memory and history; but whereas Luckhurst uses theories...