Death Mother: Language Reflections of Interpellation in Mother-Daughter Relations

“Death Mother” : Language Reflections of Interpellation in Mother-Daughter Relationship The French philosopher Louis Althusser has employed the example of the policeman who shouts, “Hey, you there!” to display how interpellation functions in the context of ideology as a means of addressing the individual. Interpellation is a way of creating a subject, a rather legalized one put into force by the invisible reconciliation in a discourse-community; a policeman represents the laws to be applied in all aspects of life, in order to restore the order in society. Customs, traditions, rituels, ethical rules are all processes of legalizing interpellation within thought, belief and understanding which in turn have an absolute impact on language and speakers of language. Interpellation involves the very reality of man established throughout norms of interaction and interpretation imposed by ideology on language users. The eventual aim of the chain of ideology-interpellation-thought-language is to bring order and predictability into speakers’ employing language and constrain them by imposing on them a structure well fitting in the discourse-community they live in and by limiting the range of possible meanings to be created by them. For Althusser, as it is for Jacques Lacan, it is impossible to access the real conditions of existence due to our reliance on language; language serves to perpetuate relationships of hierarchy, power and domination. This study intends to display the reflections of interpellation within the language constructed by a mother-daughter relationship, emphasizing codes of preoccupations and constrains that appear by complex processes of recognition in a discourse-community. The theme of mother-daughter relationship is presented by Joyce Carol Oates, in her short story, Death Mother, clearly displaying the semantic meanings as the code of the language by which the characters struggle to comprehend and act upon their world. The verbal exchanges of the characters are aspects of how the mother monitors her daughter’s behaviour and in turn, how the mother, herself is monitored by impositions – ideology, interpellation, thought, language – to turn into subjects adopting the illusion that they (freely) accept their subjection that fits in cohesively, as extentions of the natural reality by which they make sense of the world around them.

Keywords

Language, Ideology, Interpellation, Althusser, Lacan, Death Mother, Joyce Carol Oates.