Empathy for Post-Abortion Grief in Louise Lambrichs's Journal d'Hannah (1993)

If abortion as a reproductive experience continues to retain a certain 'unspeakability' that keeps it on the margins of culture, the expression of grief or mourning in its wake remains even more inexpressible; to voluntarily terminate a pregnancy, no matter how fraught the circumstances, would seem to require the forfeiture of a right to acknowledge any resulting psychic loss. In her 1993 novel Journal d'Hannah, Louise Lambrichs gives us the 'diary' of a woman whose late-term abortion during WWII results in sterility. In mourning, Hannah creates an interior dream world in her diary in which her aborted daughter grows up in real time, as she remains unable to vocalize the pain of her loss to the exterior world. In this article, I explore the novel's capacity to push our understanding of what kinds of 'parental' mourning are acceptable and representable, and the ways in which the narrative confronts the lack of a broader cultural language with which to address this specific kind of grief.<br/> This article grounds its examination of Hannah's interiorized grief in theoretical notions of the unspeakability of trauma and feminist definitions of bodily integrity in the imaginary domain. I situate Lambrichs's work not as an anti-feminist indictment of abortion, as some have understood it, but as a challenge to open up a discursive space that enables an empathetic understanding of the diverse ways in which women deal with the voluntary termination of a pregnancy. Drawing on Barbara Johnson's (1986) exploration of the poetics of loss and abortion, I argue that the vocalization of post-abortion mourning need not result in the conclusion that taking 'the woman's feelings of guilt and loss into consideration... is to deny the right to choose the act that produced them' (33). The novel does not 'resolve' the tension of the confusing liminal space between life and death that abortion creates, but rather works to confront this liminality head on in a way that serves to question the limits of the ethics of parental mourning.

Afterword: Playing the discographic self

This afterword seeks to put the chapters of Defining the Discographic Self: ‘Desert Island Discs’ in Context into dialogue with one another, drawing out a number of common themes. In particular it develops the idea of the Desert Island Discs interview as a performance of identity, and explores the nature of the social engagement it creates in the studio, through the broadcast, and in the imaginary domain of the desert island. It also considers the current and possible future impact of digitalisation on the programme, and the extent to which the Desert Island Discs archive can support such digital humanities approaches as Franco Moretti’s distant listening.

The Shadow of Heterosexuality

In this essay, Cornell first invokes the concept of ‘imaginary domain’ to challenge the legal legitimacy of heterosexism in any form. She then claims that the imposition of heterosexism on the imaginary is a trauma whose severity can be grasped only with the help of psychoanalysis. Second, she argues that we cannot understand or undermine the power of heterosexist ideas without an alternative ethic of love. In beginning to think about a love that would necessarily pit itself against heterosexism, Cornell draws on Jacques Derrida's metaphor of the lovance.