How far, then, have we come? In relation to the bodies of mothers, we have come far, but only so far. In Greek embryology, pregnancy is shadowed by a not wholly dissimilar idea of foetal harm. The foetus is always in potential danger from its mother, who is solely to blame if anything goes wrong, such as the birth of a premature or sickly child. Diseases of Women, the Hippocratic medical treatise of the fifth century BC, lists the activities that endanger the embryo, notably when the woman is sick or weak: lifting weights, jumping about, fainting, eating too much or too little, being flatulent, having a womb that is too large or too small, becoming fearful or alarmed or receiving a blow. The list is of course deranged, veering from common sense (the first two, although neither likely if she is sick or weak), to matters over which she has no control (the size of her womb), to realities – fainting, fear or alarm, receiving a blow – for which she can hardly be held responsible.
Above all, in Greek embryology, in a trope at least partly reiterated by Judge Major, the womb was a site of struggle. The victorious foetus, now too large and hungry to be fed by the mother, had to fight its way out of the maternal body, tearing the maternal membranes, thrashing about with its arms and feet. Unlike chickens, whose mothers could be relied upon to hatch their brood at the appropriate time, the human mother had to be vanquished for life to begin. Likewise in Shakespeare’s time, it was believed that the pregnant mother could suffocate her foetus. In his 1635 treatise The Nursing of Children, Jacques Guillimeau suggests that the mother can choose to intercept her baby by strangling it in the womb. Excess feeding and ‘surfetting’ would have the same effect. Birth came about through the mother’s deficiency, when the supply of air or food failed.45 Guillimeau was just one of several commentators who believed that breast milk was ‘whitened blood’, a derivative of menstrual blood and potentially lethal.46
We have watched the link between childbirth and war receiving its starkest delineation in the bitter words of Greek and Roman mothers on the stage. Now we can perhaps appreciate these mothers as lifting into the public domain, seizing to their own ends – ‘defamiliarising’ would be Brecht’s term for such radical political gestures – this image of the womb as a battleground. Tracking violence to inside their bodies, classical medical discourse made women accountable for everything that could possibly go wrong (since this is the primordial battle from which all other battles follow, that presumably also includes war itself). In one version of gestation, where the mother, as well as the father, was at least recognised as contributing to the creation of an embryo, her seed was the weakling and, in a lethal struggle, the paternal seed had to be victorious to secure the birth of a son. In the very role by which she was defined, the best thing a mother could therefore do for her unborn infant was to defeat herself.
Most disturbingly, one embryological account, without mitigation of overbearing maternal accountability and guilt, sees the woman as playing no role in gestation. She is merely the passive recipient of the male seed – ancillary and culpable, both. This is Apollo in The Eumenides, the final play of Aeschylus’ Oresteia, giving one of the most renowned defences of this crooked vision:
The woman who is called the ‘mother’ of the child is not the parent,
but rather a nurse of the newly sown embryo.
He who impregnates generates, while she, as a stranger for a stranger,
preserves the shoot if the god does not harm it in some way.47
‘Stranger for a stranger’ – remember that just seven years later, in 451/450 BC, Athens will secure the citizenship of its people against all foreigners to the city. Being a stranger to your own child therefore symbolically wipes out any civic, political allegiance between mother and child. Apollo presents this argument in defence of Orestes, on trial at the court of Athena for having murdered his mother Clytemnestra in revenge for her killing his father Agamemnon. Clytemnestra had likewise been motivated by revenge. Agamemnon had sacrificed their daughter Iphigenia to the gods in exchange for a fair wind that would allow his fleet to set sail and defeat Troy after the abduction of Helen.
Apollo’s task is to explain why the murder of Agamemnon, king and husband, is more punishable than the crime of matricide. He is struggling. This is his fourth attempt – first he argues that Orestes acted on Zeus’ command, then that Agamemnon, killed by treachery, was a man and a king (as if there were no treachery in matricide), then that the life of a murdered man is irrevocably lost (as if that were not true of all deaths, which must include the deaths of women). For psychoanalysis, this would be defined as the ‘kettle logic’ of the unconscious, a self-defeating pile-up of arguments in which each one finally wipes out the next. The chorus, on the other hand, is having none of it. In the final play of the trilogy, they are the voice of the Eumenides, or Furies, whose role is to ‘hound matricides to exile’.48 For them, Clytemnestra’s crime is the less heinous because she was not of Agamemnon’s blood. When Orestes retorts, ‘But am I of my mother’s?’ they reply: ‘Vile wretch! Did she not nourish you in her own womb? / Do you disown your mother’s blood, which is your own?’49
In similar vein, in Sophocles’ Electra, Clytemnestra claims to her enraged daughter that Agamemnon had no right to sacrifice Iphigenia when he ‘did not labour an equal amount of suffering (lypès)’. The mother’s part in childbearing is greater, with ‘the quantity of pain the measure’: ‘he who sowed her, like the one who bore her, me’.50 Clytemnestra will be murdered by Orestes, but she is at least given the chance to make her own case, even if doomed, before she dies. In this, ironically, she has Athenian law on her side. Marriage between half-siblings was only classified as incest if they shared the same mother (whereas marriage between half-siblings who shared a father was fine). The mother–child bond was therefore the most intimate. Apollo is making his stand against commonly felt, legally recognised belief.51
In Robert Icke’s brilliant 2015 Oresteia adaptation, Clytemnestra’s voice moves front of stage. Why, she asks, ‘does the murder of the mother count for less than that of the father?… Why is the mother’s motive for murder lesser than the son’s?’ She herself then provides the answer to her own question as only a woman can: ‘Because the woman is less important.’ In the London production, Lia Williams pronounced these words with biting, spaced emphasis, as if her forfeit life relied on the audience paying heed (having her testify after death on her own behalf in the courtroom is, of course, Icke’s radical invention).52 Clytemnestra is a grieving mother, bereft of a daughter whose murder by her father is the key precipitating factor, too easily erased from sight but to which Icke gives due status. ‘This whole thing,’ she addresses the ghost of her daughter, ‘this whole thing is about you.’ Inside the bloodied bathrobe of his dead father, Orestes finds a note stating ‘Child Killer’, which is projected in capitals onto a vast screen at the back of the stage.53
In this version, Apollo is not present at the trial. The judgement still falls against Clytemnestra. But the doctor who speaks the truth to Orestes throughout the play states unequivocally that matricide is the greater inhuman offence: ‘her act was not like yours. / Agamemnon did not lift her from her crib. / He did not breastfeed her.’54 In Aeschylus’ version, as she pleads with Orestes for her life, Clytemnestra exposes her breast, which gives him pause, but finally to no avail.
Apollo’s speech in Aeschylus’ text at least has the virtue of showing how the idea that mothers have no role in the creation of life leads directly to a justification for killing them. Likewise, Athena pronounces her judgement in favour of Orestes on the grounds that no mother gave her birth. In fact, this is another matricide, as her mother, the goddess Metis, is wiped out in the myth that she sprang ready formed from the head of Zeus (who had swallowed her).55 Right at the start of the trilogy, Agamemnon tells of a portent in which two kings of birds ravenously tear the body of a pregnant hare: ‘Big with her burden, now a living prey / In the last darkness of their unborn day.’56 Aeschylus’ trilogy ends with Orestes pardoned, his name restor
ed to the royal house over the body of his dead mother. The modern version ends instead with Orestes, in a state of dizzy anxiety, repeating four times: ‘What do I do?’ In Colm Tóibín’s retelling, House of Names (2017), Orestes is haunted by the cries of Clytemnestra and Iphigenia as she is being slaughtered (the mother’s agony finally more important than the crime for which he kills her).57
‘How,’ asks French psychoanalyst André Green, ‘is he to acquire his rightful belonging and add his name to his father’s lineage, yet also destroy the means by which he came into his life?’58 This is hatred of mothers raised to the nth degree, the bedrock, even in the teeth of progress, of what mothers are still up against. In 2015, Icke’s Oresteia played to packed houses in London. Something in this play, even rerendered for our times, still resonates. Why, if not that mothers remain our favourite sacrificial objects, as disposable as they are indispensable to life? Why, if not that mothers continue to be the container for all our plaints, and to bear the brunt of an unjust world?
* * *
At some time in the 1980s, a French feminist told me that her partner had announced out of the blue that for the first time in his life he could envisage a woman as both mother and lover. I think this was meant to be the highest compliment, the implication being that, in the normal run of things, once a woman has a child she ceases to be desirable. But, he was generously reassuring her, this would not happen in her case. I don’t think the mother’s way of seeing things had even crossed his mind, the possibility that many mothers, out of sheer exhaustion and discomfort, not to speak of their absorption in and the demands of their baby, might, at least for a while after childbirth, lose interest in sex. Some years later, when I had just become a mother, a close friend pronounced as a kind of dire warning that any woman taking a lover while she was still the mother of a baby or young child would summon the wrath of the gods on her head. As if motherhood brings the idea of a woman as a subject of sexual desire to a complete standstill. Mothering would then be one of the ways a culture purifies itself of the sexuality that mostly still brings motherhood about today. Even if, as critic Rachel Bowlby has pointed out, the advances of reproductive technology mean we are approaching a time when we will no longer be able to assume that children come ‘from two parents, of two sexes, who once had sex’.59 Or, in the words of Elena Ferrante – to whom we will be returning – ‘no one, starting with the mother’s dressmaker, must think that a mother has a woman’s body’ (she is citing Elsa Morante, her favourite contemporary woman writer).60
This, too, is an old story. When Hamlet confronts his mother in the closet scene, he begins by lambasting her with the outrage of his uncle having murdered and ousted his father, but by the end of the scene, it seems that this is by no means the only, or even the main, offence: ‘Who’ll chide hot blood within a virgin’s heart / When lust shall dwell within a matron’s breast?’61 Matron means married woman or grandmother, but the key is, of course, that she is his mother: ‘You are the Queen, your husband’s brother’s wife, but would you were not so. You are my mother.’62 If a mother persists as a sexual being, then the virtue of virgins – the next generation of mothers – will be destroyed. Do not, he issues his final instructions, ‘let the blunt King tempt you again to bed’.63 In Icke’s Oresteia, the autopsy of Clytemnestra reveals that, in addition to neck and torso, her body shows stab wounds in the genitals.64 It is not only for the killing of his father that she is being punished by her son.
But it is the mother’s sensuality towards her own children that is the greatest taboo. When Victoria Beckham posted a photo on Instagram of her kissing her five-year-old daughter on the lips on her birthday in the summer of 2016, there was a public outcry (some trolls called them ‘pervy’ and ‘lesbians’). In this, the scandals of child abuse have played their part. But, even where there is no question of abuse, the eros of the mother–child relationship, of which mothers speak to one another under their breath, still tends to be frowned upon or rarely talked about. On this matter, Ancient Greece and Rome can be seen as rather more progressive. Cleopatra, deemed the most desirable of women, was the mother of four children, one, she claimed, by Julius Caesar and the three youngest by Mark Antony, something which most representations of Cleopatra conspire to forget (although there is an allusion to her children at the end of Shakespeare’s play, it tends to be overlooked, and no one I mentioned it to had the faintest idea she was a mother). In fact, the silence began with Octavian in a bid to stop his conflict with Mark Antony being seen as a civil war, his offspring potentially in arms against hers in a battle for the keys of the city state.
And Venus was referred to as mater amoris or ‘mother of love’ (how can you mother eros other than incestuously, which might be the whole point?). This is Venus in Virgil’s Aeneid just after she has responded dismissively to her son Aeneas’ charge of neglect: ‘She spoke, and as she turned away, her rosy neck gleamed, while from her head her heavenly hair breathed a divine fragrance, her robes slipped down to her feet and in her step she was revealed as a true goddess.’65 The moment is both breathless and brutal: her sexuality, her body, is exposed as the naked truth of her cruelty towards her son, who interestingly only fully recognises her as his mother at this revealing instant. But other images are less damning. The Terra Mater, a panel of the Ara Pacis dated 13–9 BC, shows the mother goddess and her two children with her garment slipping gently from her shoulders (as this is a sculpture the exposure stops there). She is therefore also Venus, and her sensuality is part of her tenderness towards the two boys cavorting on her lap.
The eros of mothers can be turned against them at a stroke. In one striking classical example, Lysias composes the speech for Euphiletus, who is defending himself in court against the charge of murdering the Greek citizen Eratosthenes, who was his wife’s lover. To establish the harmony of their household, how intimate a place it had been before the affair, he begins by focusing on the love with which she suckled her son, before turning the tables completely by arguing that her motherly devotion was a distraction, a sensuous decoy, a plot. So dedicated did she seem that he could never have foreseen her treason. This scheming mother had even used the cries of the infant to hide her liaison. The innocence of breastfeeding slips effortlessly into guilt (as we will see in the next chapter, none of this has gone away).66
* * *
We are not done with the Greeks, although that ‘we’ will be qualified in what follows, because the Greek heritage is not the whole picture, or indeed ancestry, of modern times, which also has more than one story to tell. In one account, Greece in itself is indebted to an African inheritance, which the West has gone to great lengths to suppress.67 And, in its precolonial days, Africa offers models of mothers as fully engaged social and political beings. For example, in parts of what is now known as Uganda, queen mothers controlled the alliances of the clan, though such status was quashed in the nineteenth century when they were effectively enslaved by a new alliance of native elite and British colonial men.68 But if the Greeks are still present in our midst, there is no reason why, at moments, we should not learn from them and, at others, as we have seen in relation to Clytemnestra’s tragic tale, turn to face them and issue our reply. The lines from then to now are complex, covered neither by complacency at our progress, nor nostalgia for a better age (two limited options that imitate the way we are so often encouraged to think of our relationship to mothers).
To end, then, by returning to Medea, the most irredeemable mother of them all. ‘If Freud had been less preoccupied with Oedipus and more observant of Medea when he remarked that “aggression forms the basis of every relation of affection and love among people”,’ Nicole Loraux writes in Mothers in Mourning, ‘he would certainly not have added: “with the single exception, perhaps, of the mother’s relation to her male child.”’69 The great theorist of Oedipus, she elaborates, was blind to this strand of Greek tragic thinking, where wrath against the spouse triumphs over love for her two sons. But even this reading of Medea
is uncertain. In other versions of the tale, in circulation before Euripides, Medea does not murder her children: hatred of Medea drives the Corinthians to kill them, or else the relatives of Creon kill them in revenge after she has murdered Creon and fled to Athens, or she puts her children through a rite designed to make them immortal, during the course of which they die.70
Even in Euripides’ drama, what drives Medea to kill is not, or not only, her sexual rage against their father but equally the loss of his love for their children, which condemns them to an uncertain future. Her cry is for justice and that diatribe on the pains of mothering the lament of a mother whose greatest fear is that she and her children will be homeless and stateless, a condition we can surely not gloss over today (hence her plea to Creon for a stay of execution against being expelled from the city). Only in their final confrontation after the murder, when Jason accuses her of being ‘stung by thoughts of sex’ – ‘And you believe it justified / to kill them for the sake of sex?’ – does she return: ‘Do you suppose such troubles to be trivial for a woman?’71
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