ABSTRACT
In Lucas Malet's major works of the early twentieth century, artists, paintings, photographs, icons and visions still featured prominently. They conveyed Malet's growing preoccupation with the themes of motherhood, (social) mothering and transmission, as many of these artworks are in fact objects connected with mothers or mother substitutes. However, ignoring the conventional constructions of motherhood, which usually emphasized nurturance, unconditional love and selflessness, Malet's The Survivors suggested that mothers' role in relation to war might be more complex and complicit than such essentializing suggested. Malet's earlier intermedial style and decadent themes combine and mutate to generate a true Modernist text, the author's only novel about the birth of the female writer, the necessity of writing and the potential legacy of Victorian mothers to modern daughters. Malet's definitive break away from the nineteenth-century realist narrative and its deployment of monocular visuality is dramatized by the visuality/textuality opposition acted out in the mother-daughter conflict which underlies this novel.
