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Reading with My Mother: Books as Objects
Abstract
I gingerly fold open the browned and stained cover of my mother's 1962 edition of The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton. The title page rests despondently unattached. Dementia first stole my mother's ability to read and then slowly took her life. I cannot ask her about the annotations she made throughout this text. Still, I can read with my mother through its inscribed pencil-written notes. An object blurring the borders between happiness and suffering, presence and absence. In this essay, I contemplate how the physical object of a book and embedded traces of another's reading evoke emotions, memories, and selves.
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Through psychoanalytical concepts, interview research and biographical text, this paper discusses the importance of objects in the lives of the bereaved. D. W. Winnicott's concept of the transitional object is used to analyse grief work through objects. Like the transitional objects of childhood, the bereaved often mourn through intimate things belonging to the now deceased. It is not just the experience and process of grief that transitions with and through objects, but objects too transition in terms of their status, value and meaning. Objects once intensely used in grieving are often experienced ambivalently later on. As concrete symbolic material, objects orient in time and space the often disorientating and displacing experiences of grief. This paper makes a temporal and category distinction between objects incorporated in the work of mourning and objects that, with time and distance, become the remembered objects of mourning. Melancholy objects are conceptualized as the memorialized objects of mourning. Yes Yes