Mary Jacobus, First Things: The Maternal Imaginary in Literature, Art, and Psychoanalysis. New York and London: Routledge, 1995. ISBN: 0-415-90384-X. Price: £14.99 (Paperback)

In FirstThings, Mary Jacobus provides a wide-ranging discussion of a question that has troubled many feminist readers of psychoanalytic theory: how does the maternal imaginary involve itself with theconstruction of the female subject? In addressing this topic, Jacobus draws together divergent materials. Her sources are alternately visual, scientific, historical, or literary, and the scope of her analysis extends from pre-romanticism to contemporary reproductive law. This diversity is one of the strongest features of the book, and Jacobus succeeds in focusing each chapter to reinforce her central thesis, which locates the role of the maternal in both the development of and the disturbances in (Freudian) subjectivity. In particular, Jacobus argues that, in the construction of the self, gender difference is inscribed by the repression of the maternal; as a result, later experiences (or representations) of sexual desire distinct from reproduction threaten to undermine female identity and produce a ruptured subject. Part two, entitled "Melancholy Figures," employs these theoretical concerns (with a Kristevan emphasis) to illuminate romantic period texts by Wollstonecraft, Shelley, Sade, and Malthus. In her analysis of Wollstonecraft's travel book, Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden , Jacobus reads the text as an account of amatory melancholia, in which the maternal imaginary becomes a sign for the movement from childhood to female adulthood. It is a fascinating interpretation: the child Fanny functions as a substitute for Wollstonecraft's own impossible sexual desire for Imlay, creating an "internally divided relation of mother and daughter [that] becomes the basis for a gender-specific mode of identification and a precarious, expensive subjectivity" (74). In this section of the study, there are occasional weak links between textual analysis and historical or ideological events, and this comprises my only significant criticism of Jacobus' work. For example, her effort to link Wollstonecraft's personal narrative of melancholy with the psychic aftermath of the French Revolution is not entirely persuasive, requiring greater detail and a more extended theoretical discussion of group psychology than she offers here. The third essay of this section, which offers a discussion of Mary Shelley's TheLastMan , raises the same concern. To my mind, her claim that TheLastMan "calls out of be read as a prophetic commentary on [AIDS]" (123) never becomes particularly illuminating, despite the otherwise provocative account she provides in this essay of the novel's biographical resonances with Shelley's life. Jacobus' reading of Malthus and Sade, however, is the best section of the entire book, and it provides an insightful account of the anxious politics of reproduction and maternity in the decades after the French Revolution. PhilosophyintheBedroom , she argues, can be read as "a no-holds-barred disquisition on population growth" (84-5) which, unlike Malthus' PrinciplesofPopulation , offers "the possibility of separating sexual pleasure from reproduction" (85). Despite the contrast between these two sexual economies that emerges, Jacobus demonstrates that, in the end, both function of isolate the maternal body as a site of phobic desire. Part three, "The Origins of Signs," focuses on Klein's psychoanalytic work, especially her work with preoedipal contributions to subjectivity; in her "attempts to recover [Klein's] missing theory of signs" (iv), Jacobus is ultimately lead to consider both the role Klein plays for Lacan and Kristeva and the source of Lacan's "brutality" (138) toward Klein. For Lacan, she argues, Klein herself is seen as brutal because she seeks literally to graft the oedipus complex and the symbolic order onto her young patients. The blurred distinctions Klein creates between the categories of symbolic and imaginary unsettle Lacanian theory, in part because she seems to associate the "origins of signification" …