Traumata

by Meera Atkinson

  Upon further reflection, Freud concluded that what he had encountered in his friends that day was a kind of revolt against mourning. Upon seeing the beautiful and valued object, these two sensitive men, he reasoned, had perceived the mourning inherent in loss and struggled against it. Foreshadowing his major work on mourning and melancholia, which would not be published for another two years, this essay was written during the First World War. War had been looming over Europe the day the men had taken their walk together. ‘One year later,’ Freud writes in the essay, ‘the war broke out and robbed the world of its beauties. It destroyed not only the countryside through which it passed and the works of art which it met with on its path but it also shattered our pride in the achievements of our civilisation, our admiration for many philosophers and artists and our hope of a final triumph over the differences between nations and races.’ Yet even in the face of war’s mass devastation, Freud held firm that those who refused beauty because of its transience were ‘simply in a state of mourning for what is lost’. He stated that beauty’s transience gives rise to two different impulses: one is the refusal, the ‘aching despondency’ of his companions; the other is ‘rebellion against the fact asserted’, the rejection of transience and an unreasonable and impossible ‘demand for immortality’.

  Kristeva’s move, following on from Freud, was to pose, and somewhat address (the chapter is very short), the following question: ‘by means of what psychic process, through what alteration in signs and materials, does beauty succeed in making its way through the drama that is being played out between the loss and the mastery over the self’s loss/devalorization/execution?’ Death and trauma hover over Freud’s thinking on beauty and transience, and death asserts itself even more overtly in Kristeva’s treatment. ‘In the place of death and so as not to die of the other’s death, I bring forth – or at least I rate highly – an artifice, an ideal …’ She goes on to explain the way in which the psychic process of idealisation functions as allegory through a dynamic construct of sublimation. ‘Like feminine finery concealing stubborn depressions,’ suggests Kristeva, ‘beauty emerges as the admirable face of loss, transforming it in order to make it live.’

  My move, humble undergrad style, was to submit a philosophy essay drawing on these brief moments in Kristeva’s and Freud’s oeuvres to make connections between patriarchy-related depression in women and the endemic preoccupation with youthful beauty. I argued that women in advertising-swamped contemporary culture are positioned and conditioned en masse to use ‘feminine finery’ to conceal ‘stubborn depressions’ born of aeons of patriarchy. As a result, women and girls tend to be obsessed with achieving and maintaining an ideal of physical beauty to mask centuries of structural losses, resulting in a collective preoccupation with beauty that serves as a bandaid on a gaping socio-political wound – beauty, socialised and industrialised as a form of currency, provides a way to exist in the face of those losses and lack of access. I did not quite understand at the time that I was getting at collective trauma as a multi-generational, gendered operation, but I felt sure I was tapping a vein.

  For another student assignment, I mined the work of philosopher Georges Bataille, for whom beauty sets the stage for physical eroticism, itself understood as a death-denying and death-defying transgression (the good old sex/death equation). According to Bataille, we human beings experience ourselves as inescapably discontinuous (we die) and long to experience ourselves as continuous – a contradictory state of flux. We seek to transcend the limits of life without going so far as to cross the critical life/death boundary. Profanation serves as an achievable transgression and beauty is something of a gateway. Bataille maintained that beauty is valued for the way it conceals our animal aspect (the hairy parts, base characteristics) – until sex comes along to reveal it. The further removed from the animal we are – the more polished and preened – the more erotic and exciting that animalistic revelation ultimately is. In his view, eroticism marks the fusion (or promise of fusion) of separate entities involving the play of discontinuity and continuity. In the Introduction to Eroticism, Bataille speaks of the Marquis de Sade’s assertion that we come closest to death (continuity) through the ‘licentious image’.

  Combining this strand of Bataille’s work with Angela Carter’s reading of de Sade’s novels Justine and Juliette, about two sisters with very different temperaments and trajectories, I wrote a philosophical pop culture essay postulating that Marilyn Monroe and Madonna (at least in her then early-’90s incarnation – the era of the Gaultier cone bra and her Sex book) respectively mastered the art of beautification as the ‘Blonde Goddess’ ideal of their times. (Blondeness is crucial here as an erotic signifier in pop culture conferring as it does a halo, an ethereal ‘lightness’ suggestive of sacredness and continuity.) Though they shared many characteristics – both American, both young women when they rose to fame, both having lost their mothers at an early age – they evoked eroticisms of different kinds: Justine/Monroe was ruled by the heart; beauty used, abused and defiled, while Juliette/Madonna was in control; a survivor and a libertine who subverted her symbolic blonde invitation to be profaned by actively taking part in profanation. MM and Madonna, I proposed, were twentieth-century Justines and Juliettes in terms of embodying distinct types of feminine positions and behaviours in the patriarchal social order. But, I argued, their films The Misfits and Madonna: Truth or Dare revealed a kinship between the two women in these works. ‘Something haunts the screen and it is this,’ I wrote: ‘the sisters’ unavoidable cultural roots as women. Even as Madonna sucks on a bottle in faux fellatio, even as she simulates masturbation on stage or scolds her messy young dancers there is something melancholic about her, a vague relationship to Monroe.’ In other words, even though Juliette appears to be more feminist, more liberated, wielding power and enjoying freedoms traditionally only available to men, both figures perform a masquerade of glamorous blonde beauty over the top of cultural wounding. As Carter points out, Juliette’s triumph is ‘just as ambivalent as is Justine’s disaster. Justine is the thesis, Juliette the antithesis.’ ‘For Carter,’ I wrote in conclusion, ‘neither Justine nor Juliette is a worthy role model for the women of today and it would seem to follow that neither is Monroe nor Madonna. Carter did speak of “a future in which might lie the possibility of a synthesis of their modes of being, neither submissive nor aggressive, capable of both thought and feeling”.’ I ended the essay with the claim that the challenge of realising this vision is to be met not in the spotlight, but in the privacy of our own beings and the forum of our own lives as we struggle – whatever gender identification or hair colour – towards a meeting of heart and head. Are we there yet?

  My theoretical explorations re beauty were instrumental to my education but they failed to purge me of my painful personal obsession and my incessant sense of falling short of beauty’s demands. The therapist I found myself hashing it out with took the view that my perfectionistic obsessiveness and boundless insecurity stemmed from a vortex of shame, fear and heartache, born of childhood abandonment. There was a void, she said, where a solid sense of self ought to be, and I filled it with a need for perfection and attention, and medicated it with approval from others. Unmedicated, I went into withdrawal and felt the presence of the underlying ‘dis-ease’. The solution was straightforward but far from easy: stop the bandaid behaviours and, with help, allow buried fears and feelings to surface. The process took its clumsy, incomplete course and, with the passage of time and maturation, it brought some relief.

  Over the years I’ve softened towards the body parts I railed against in my youth. I no longer spend unhappy hours meditating on every flaw, though I occasionally catch sight of myself in unflattering lighting, or see a bad photograph, and slip back into disparaging thoughts of old. People speak of self-acceptance as if it’s an absolute that one either possesses or doesn’t, but I view it as a continuum, a sliding scale. Hokey self-acceptance memes circulate in the scrolling social-me
dia simulacrum like hyperreal pep talks, yet platitudes don’t help us where we hurt. When I think about the countless hours of my life lost to perfectionist gloom, I regard that self-obsession as a brutal taskmaster that held me hostage. As a young woman it kept me from making love with abandon. It kept me from wearing what I liked. It kept me from going swimming in summer. I wonder what I might have done with that time, what I might have achieved, had I not been so oppressed by the weight of perfectionism.

  I’ve learned a little, too, about the warm comfort of allowing oneself to be loved and appreciated, imperfections and all. I remember sitting on my bed covered in unsightly chicken pox, horror-struck by my scab-ridden face, while my then-partner gently applied calamine lotion to each and every scab to help the itch. It seemed to me one of the most intimate moments I had ever shared with a lover, and I was so overwhelmed by it that I cried – not in distress, but out of sorrow for having not allowed myself to be loved like that in my self-conscious perfectionism. I don’t want to be enslaved to an ideal of beauty, or to be invested in it for a sense of worth, but I want to look my best. There are good reasons to care about how we present. Just as there is a continuum of self-acceptance, there’s a continuum of artifice, and we each have our own choices to make in terms of defining our position on that continuum.

  I watched my mother and grandmother pass through their fifties, where I now find myself, a time of life when visible ageing begins to assert itself more forcefully. There’s a photo of my grandmother in one of my mother’s albums that’s been there as long as I remember. This photo and the story that accompanies it entered family lore as a testimony to Glady’s character, capturing her quintessential tendency to deny the blatantly obvious. It’s a black and white Polaroid taken in the Maroubra council flat my grandparents occupied all through my childhood. She would have been in her late fifties or early sixties. Though she stands posed in stilettos and lacy underwear wearing a coy, expectant expression, she steadfastly claimed Johnny had snuck up on her and snapped the picture. My mother and I found it funny and ribbed her about it over the years because her story seemed to us the height of improbable false modesty. But looking at this remarkable image now, I don’t find it quite so funny. I’m searching for the right words, typing and then erasing words, unsatisfied with words. I look at this photo and I think of selfies and the way those who routinely take and post them are so often disparagingly cast as narcissistic. I see the kitsch of that apartment and the white vase in the background, one of the few items my grandfather’s family brought with them when they emigrated from Myanmar. It’s in my living room now, one of my most cherished belongings, the only thing of his I possess. I look at my grandmother frozen in this moment and I realise my mother and I missed something crucial: this photo not only reveals the central paradox of Glady’s obsession with beauty; it also testifies to the way society sets women up both to be highly invested in their sexualised image and to feel shame around – and try to hide or minimise – that investment.

  Even now, with my mother and grandmother long dead, it’s hard to speak these family secrets. There’s viscidness to this business of beauty, to the way it veneered across the three of us.

  Having outlived breast cancer, the sudden death of her only child, and the passing of Johnny, her husband of forty-eight years, Glady endured her last year on SSRIs with her two cats, and what remained of her formidable resilience and good humour, in a pokey housing commission flat in Sydney’s north-west, from which she steadfastly refused to relocate. She was a good-looking woman, even as she aged, not above flirting with my unsuspecting boyfriends, nor outdoing me in heel height or neckline. She never surrendered to comfort over glamour, refusing to cut her hair short even as it thinned to wisp-like strands, and rejecting the casual sportswear now favoured by many older women. Even towards the end, she fretted about her appearance, complaining if visitors caught her unprepared. She took time each day to prepare her face and hair, and she kept her floral make-up bag within easy reach beside the beige velvet armchair in which she could almost always be found in those last months of her life.

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  As my mother grew older and more reflective she regretted the surgeries, particularly the breast job. She became convinced that the implants contributed to her ill health and she joined the class-action suit against Dow Corning. It was impossible for her to prepare a comprehensive claim as she had undergone the surgery in the 1970s and there were limited hospital records, but she lodged what documentation she could gather, and when she died in 1997 I took over her claim as executor of her estate. In the end, after it had dragged on for many years, the women won the case and I received a measly payout of a few hundred dollars from the multi-million-dollar settlement. But there was more than dodgy implants to my mother’s regret. She expressed remorse about the shaky sense of self that drove her to surgery. She felt ashamed at what she felt was vanity and her gullibility to being swayed by Al’s encouragement at the time. In an understated way her change of heart acted as a final release from the burden of my long Be Beautiful apprenticeship. During the time in which we both wrestled with our demons, I felt sad every time we embraced and the two hard, alien implants pressed against me, but mostly I felt sad that my mother never knew how beautiful she was. I only hope that in those years of soul searching she came to understand how much more she was worth than appearance alone.

  We tend to think of beauty and vanity as flippant, trivial pursuits, as if this concern with surfaces is itself inherently superficial. It is anything but. The body and appearance are bound up with more complex and weighty matters, with histories private and social, personal and political. Biology and nature. Reproduction and the survival of the species. Matters of the heart. Perhaps it is here that beauty’s deeply rooted connections to trauma can be most productively traced.

  My mother and I had both been, in some crucial sense, fatherless girls. We grew up in the shadow of absent and withholding men, yearning for their presence and affirmation. We learned soon enough that sex was the way to get attention from men and that the primary way for a woman to be sexually desirable was to Be Beautiful. As I emerged from a childhood marked by a frightening dependence on addicted and violent adults, the biological bloom of adolescence brought the heady discovery of a newfound power, a power I did not hesitate to use and abuse in my quest for freedom from those formative wounds and terrors.

  It seemed a logical progression, then, that as I lathered thick gooey collagen creams into the wrinkled faces of Potts Point dames I had a head full of men and dreams of escape.

  It’s 1979 and I’m fifteen, fucked up and restless. My mother and I are living alone after years of mayhem with her deranged or drunk boyfriends. Finally, everything is quiet. Too quiet.

  School is a year or so behind me, and I’ve killed time learning to be a secretary and a beautician, but I’m hopeless at both and will not work a day in my life as either. I’m not going to fit into a job or mainstream society anytime soon. I pass aimless hours roaming the streets of Glebe, daydreaming and staring off into the distance, conjuring up the ideal man with whom to lose my virginity. I see this event as some kind of magic portal into the hallowed realm of adulthood, and I’m itching to be an adult. It seems to me far better to be one than to be at the mercy of one. I imagine sex will transform me, making me instantly wise and womanly. I expect, from having read articles in Cleo, from years of films and songs and advertising, and from observing the lengths to which people seem to go for sex and romance, that the heavens will open up and all that is glorious and worth living for will reveal itself in a blinding flash. Meanwhile, during the days, I size up guys I come across as potential candidates. I imagine my hero as several years older, a surfer, with long honey-brown hair and tanned lean-muscled arms. In my mind’s eye, he glides on his board through sparkling pipes of aqua waves with the grace and strength of a dancer
while I sit on the beach watching in awe, heart swelling with pride.

  To break up the boredom while I wait for him to show, I visit grown-up friends, like Ernest, the elderly English gentleman around the corner who helped me break out of school and lets me bludge his Peter Stuyvesants, or the household of sex-worker lesbians where I eat Vegemite toast and grill the girls about blow-job technique. I have few friends my own age.

  Michelle Rutherford is one of the few and I spend more time with her than anyone else. The youngest of a large Irish-Australian Catholic brood of eight, she goes to St Scholastica’s, the boarding school around the corner. I’ve also befriended her brother Pete, who occasionally rolls into the city, taking leave from the country town out west where he works as a farmhand. I figure it was their dad’s multiple sclerosis that forced the family to move to the city. He’s in a wheelchair and he’s hard to understand on account of the MS, which has ravaged his speech, but he’s nice to me. Michelle’s mother, on the other hand, doesn’t like me much, and over time she’ll come to loathe me, not altogether unfairly, but the Rutherfords run an open house, so there’s no keeping me out.

  The oldest brothers, James and Jeremy, are absent. James is a law graduate who was an anti-conscription activist during the Vietnam War. Now he’s a respected journalist, having cut his teeth covering the Whitlam government. His career keeps him busy so we don’t see him much, but he does get me my first-ever job when he secures filing work for Michelle and me at the National Trachoma and Eye Health Program, established by Fred Hollows, who has been studying and treating eye defects in Aboriginal communities. Jeremy is off travelling somewhere. There are older sisters who come and go, the kind of women who might not shave their legs. One of them helped establish Elsie’s up on Westmoreland Street, the first refuge for women and children in Australia. I find her and her friends scary (they seem very serious and vaguely disapproving) but I’m curious.