Channels • 2021 • Volume 5 • Number 2 Page 19 Channels Vol. 5 No. 2 (2021): 19–27 ISSN 2474-2651 © 2021, Heidie Raine, licensed under CC BY-NC-ND (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/) Strained Differentiation: Negotiating Grief with Maternal Foundations in Laird Hunt’s Neverhome Heidie Raine English, Literature, and Modern Languages Introduction aird Hunt’s Neverhome tells the story of Constance Thompson, a young woman who leaves her husband, Bartholomew, and their lives as Indiana farmers to become a Civil War Union soldier under the male pseudonym, Ash. Once leaving her farm, Ash negotiates combat and camp-life in disguise, proving herself capable as a soldier. Early in the novel, she establishes an open line of communication with her deceased mother, who committed suicide a few years prior; Ash seeks her out in many moments of conflict and uncertainty. When Ash eventually ventures home from the war front, she discovers a group of men overrunning her farm. She shoots them, and in the process, accidentally kills her husband as well. Returning to her given name, Constance concludes the story in a state of distress. She resigns to solitude, visited only by the ghosts of her husband and mother. Though physically back in Indiana. Constance fails to feel as though she has truly arrived home because her war-related memories and familial traumas continually torment her. In his novel, Hunt explores how maternal identification can hinder the intertwinement of mother-daughter psyches. He highlights the struggle for such maternally identifying daughters to cope with the loss of a mother, her grief intensified by an unconscious desire for continued maternal intimacy as expressed in her dreams. Further, Hunt showcases how Ash’s repressive defenses—specifically, her skewed perceptions of reality in fantasized communication—work to avoid this unconscious longing, and thus, exposes the psychological debilitation Ash experiences as she negotiates differentiation alongside grief. Introductory Considerations The Fallibility of Critical Theory Before analyzing a text from a theoretical perspective, readers must first consider the validity and trustworthiness of any theoretical framework. For the Christian, presuppositional inconsistencies between critical theory and Biblical truth appear quickly and vibrantly. Psychoanalytic theory, developed by Australian neurologist and admitted
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTM4ODY=