THE MATERNAL BODY AND ITS SPATIAL REPRESENTATIONS IN IOANA NICOLAIE’S NOVELS
THE MATERNAL BODY AND ITS SPATIAL REPRESENTATIONS IN IOANA NICOLAIE’S NOVELS

Summary/Abstract: The body is seen today as an alter ego, fragmented in interchangeable pieces, emptied of imagery and separate from the self. Maternal body makes no exception. Mothers and children have become protheses and products, as David Le Breton puts it. The new medical discoveries explore motherhood (conception, pregnancy) as bodily experience and look for alternatives that exclude the mother’s subjectivity and even the mother’s body, ignoring the particular affective cohesion created between mother and infant in the womb and the consequences of its absence during pregnancy and in the child’s life. The maternal body is not a vehicle, but a relational experience that define the child’s subjectivity, identity and even sociability. The present study focuses on the metaphors of the maternal body in Ioana Nicolaie’s trilogy. These representations of the maternal body belong to a spectacular imagery that restore the symbolic dimension of the maternal body, stollen by hyperreality. Moreover, drawing on Bracha Ettinger’s matrixial paradigm, the study argues that maternity and the inner structure of the maternal body could offer a relational pattern able to substantiate our sociability.

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