ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author talks about the relationship between myth and theory, and between fiction and history, which have broad applications to contemporary issues in feminist theory. Drawing at this point on the work of Julia Kristeva, as well as on To the Lighthouse and fantasmatic memories recorded in Freud and Woolf, the author takes issue with those who have sought to claim for the original relations of mothers and daughters a simple purity only subsequently marred by the interventions of a culture seen as obtrusively masculine. Feminist revisions of psychoanalysis have tended to emphasize the project which Freud envisaged, archaeologically, as the excavation of the pre-Oedipal Minoan - Mycenaean civilization buried beneath the Hellenic Oedipal. The pre-Oedipal configuration which (re)produces the mother as the origin of all signification in Julia Kristevan theory not only allows Woolf's novel to read beyond Freudian theory, but suggests how a reading of Woolf might revise and extend feminist thinking about the pre-Oedipal.
