For the most part, it is not sex that Medea has on her mind but survival. Although she is finally given all the assurances she seeks, she does not believe them. She kills her children to save them from a worse fate: ‘I swear, there is no way that I shall leave / my boys among my enemies so they / can treat them with atrocity.’72 It is interesting that it is the image of sexual frenzy that has most popularly attached itself to Medea, and that what gets lost in translation is any trace of the reasons a mother might have for thinking there is no longer any place in the world for her own children. Véronique Olmi’s bestselling 2001 rewrite of Medea has the title Bord de mer (the translation Beside the Sea loses the pun mer/mère, by the sea/mother at the edge). Before murdering her two sons on a visit to the seaside, the mother goes quietly mad and dreams of spending her life in bed with her children watching the telly, ‘holding on to the remote, we’d have switched the world off as soon as it fucked up.’73 Across the centuries, like the Oresteia, Medea still speaks to us. ‘Medea gets away with it,’ writes Margaret Reynolds on the history of Medea in performance: ‘That is why we love her … She allows us, if only for the length of her performance, the freedom to perform ourselves – or, rather, the selves that we should be, if we were not bound by convention, by law, by order and decree.’74
But it is Christa Wolf’s 1996 retelling that is, for me, the strongest act of reclamation and the true feminist text. In this version, Medea does not kill her children, nor Creon’s daughter Glauce, nor her brother Absyrtus, who, in another strand of the legend, she murdered before fleeing her original home of Colchis with Jason. If all this is laid at her door by the citizens of Corinth it is because she has uncovered that city’s grotesque secret, the murder of Glauce’s sister by Creon in order to keep his succession out of the grasp of his wife, who after the killing goes silent and progressively mad (likewise, it is Medea’s father who had murdered Absyrtus, whom he saw as a rival for the succession). ‘Either I’m out of my mind,’ Medea muses in her first soliloquy, ‘or their city is founded on a crime.’75 This makes Medea into a psychoanalyst – the allusions are explicit – as she slowly persuades the ailing Glauce that she knows the truth, saw the deed. Medea taught her, Glauce reflects, that ‘there is no thought I must forbid myself to have.’76
Above all, Medea’s true crime is to shatter a myth of collective innocence. She is a scapegoat, another mother who is guilty because everyone else has failed: ‘They’re looking for a woman who will tell them they are not guilty of anything.’77 Worse, by exposing the crime she risks plunging the whole nation into sorrow: ‘Someone must grieve.’78 Remember Adrienne Rich: ‘We know too much at first hand [of] the violence which over centuries we have been told is the way of the world, but which we exist to mitigate and assuage.’79 In Wolf’s version, it is because Medea assuages nothing that she is indicted of all crimes. It is because she knows that the city is built on the corpses of children that she is hounded out of Corinth. Wolf has used her Medea to write a parable of Germany in the twentieth century – in On the Natural History of Destruction, his account of the silence that followed the Allied bombing of German cities at the end of the Second World War, W. G. Sebald writes of the ‘well-kept secret of the corpses built into the foundations of our state’.80 Above all, she has turned Medea into a story of what happens when a woman is held responsible for the ills of the world. ‘She [Medea] has no need of our doubt, of our endeavours to do her justice,’ Wolf writes in her prelude. ‘We must venture into the darkest core of our misjudgement – of her and of ourselves – simply walk in, with one another, behind one another, while the crash of collapsing walls sounds in our ears.’81
2
PSYCHIC BLINDNESS
LOVING
Matilda the Musical, adapted from Roald Dahl’s novel, opens with what might be described as the paradox of maternal recognition. A troupe of hideously grimacing children sing ‘My mummy says I’m a miracle’ in such a way as to suggest that they are monsters; meanwhile, Matilda, who really is miraculous in so far as she has magic powers, fails to be recognised or understood by her parents. Her mother, unaware she was pregnant more or less up to the point of delivery, clearly neither wanted nor knew what to do with a baby. Her father was expecting a boy (he persists in calling Matilda ‘boy’ until almost the end of the musical). They both hate their daughter for her gifts, and have nothing but contempt for the love of reading into which she pours her unhappiness and through which she escapes it. Matilda is special, we are repeatedly told. She needs to be seen. She is eventually adopted by a schoolteacher, Jenny Honey, who recognises her unique qualities – Jenny is an orphan, her mother died in childbirth (in the book, when she was two). The implication is that Jenny can save Matilda because she herself was denied, and therefore knows what it is that Matilda is looking for. Failed mothers are everywhere – overinvested, neglectful, dead. Just how high the stakes are can be gauged by the immense difficulty Dahl had in completing his story. In the first version, Matilda herself did not survive.
In the book, Dahl makes a point of stating which of these forms of parental failure is worst: parents ‘who take no interest in their children … of course are far worse than the doting ones’, although the venom he directs at the latter is pretty intense.1 What is apparent, however, is that to be seen by a mother is a mixed blessing, to say the least. Too much and you will be a monster, not enough and the chances are you will also enter a not fully human world. It is the genius of Dahl’s story to make something very difficult and very strange – Matilda is nothing if not strange – seem easy and obvious. A mother, as most writing on mothers seems to concur, must be there for her baby. This process will only kick in if she recognises the baby as her own, but not as ‘His Majesty the Baby’, to use Freud’s formula, not as a narcissistic object, a mirror that perfectly reflects her own ideal image back to herself (‘My mummy says I’m a miracle’). Instead, her task is to recognise who the baby is for her or himself, even though what that might mean is something neither of them can possibly know in advance. Such uncertainty is, it seems, hard to tolerate. Perhaps that is why ‘His Majesty the Baby’ continues to wield such power. After the birth of Prince George in July 2013, the UK was given a more or less daily dose during the grand royal tour in April the following year, as the infant was credited, among other things, with having quelled any remnants of Republicanism in Australia. Proffered as a role model for mothers all over the world, the Duchess of Cambridge must also turn her firstborn into a king. The challenge will be to stop him becoming a monster or a nobody (or, most likely, a bit of both).
My question in this chapter is: what is being asked of mothers when they are expected to pour undiluted love and devotion into their child? I have called this section ‘Loving’, but it comes in a chapter with the title ‘Psychic Blindness’, which should provide a hint (‘Love as Perversion’ could have been another title for what follows). After all, whenever love is expected or demanded of anybody, we can be pretty sure that love is the last thing being talked about. Like the injunction to be spontaneous, a state that can only arise unbidden, the demand to love crushes its object and obliterates itself.
Expecting mothers to be perfect is, of course, not unrelated to the drive to perfection of the so-called ‘overinvested’ or ‘narcissistic’ mother, who sees the whole world – a world that must be flawless – in her baby. Or to put it another way, if you are asking mothers to be perfect, why wouldn’t they pass that impossible demand on to their child? Any mother who obeys this diktat could therefore be said to be perversely fulfilling the requirements of her role. Perfection breeds perfection, lives frozen at the core, compulsively fawning over themselves (it is surely no coincidence that perfection is also the false promise of consumer objects, which is why every disappointing purchase leads to the next).
Once again, Dahl’s hideous, miraculous children serve to make a profound point. Bringing up a child to believe it is a miracle is not an act of love but a form of cruelty, even if at the
opposite pole from that of neglect. How can such a child find a place in the world, since the only person they will be able to see will be themselves? This is the opposite of saying that all children are miracles, a proposition that recognises each child as unique while placing every single child in the world on a par with each other. Nor does it have anything to do with the wonder that can fall on a mother in relation to her newborn child, what the British child psychoanalyst and paediatrician D. W. Winnicott, and many psychoanalysts after him, term ‘primary maternal preoccupation’, which refers to the form of all-absorbing attention that a mother, in the very earliest stages, bestows on her baby. This may be something many mothers recognise without accepting its punishing intensifier, the version of motherhood into which it is often so effortlessly folded: a mother must live only for her child, a mother is a mother and nothing else.
The question then becomes how to acknowledge a new birth as the event that it is, without immediately divesting the newborn of its humanity. ‘Every infant born,’ writes Adrienne Rich, to quote again from Of Woman Born, ‘is testimony to the intricacy and breadth of possibilities inherent in humanity.’2 The rest of her book relentlessly charts how far motherhood as institution crushes that dream. For Hannah Arendt, in a passage Rich seems to be partly evoking, every new birth is the supreme anti-totalitarian moment. In Arendt’s view, freedom is identical with the capacity to begin. Over such beginnings, she writes, ‘no logic, no cogent deduction can have any power because the chain presupposes, in the form of a premise, a new beginning.’3 Totalitarian terror is therefore needed, ‘lest with the birth of each new human being a new beginning arise and raise its voice in the world’.4
In The Years, written on the eve of German fascism, Virginia Woolf treads similar ground. She is commenting on the dire consequences of parental exclusivity, on the damage it does to the social fabric – which was on the point of being rent beyond repair – to think it right to put your child, your family, before everyone else. She is also suggesting that, while England takes pride in its difference from Nazi Germany, there might nonetheless be a link between the overweening egoism of the bourgeois family and the autocracy of statehood (a point central to Three Guineas, which she was writing at the same time). At a family gathering in the mid-1930s – this final section of the novel is called ‘Present Day’ – North, the now grown-up grandson of Colonel Pargiter, is observing people politely enquiring about each other’s children: ‘my boy – my girl … they were saying. But they’re not interested in other people’s children, he observed. Only in their own; their own property; their own flesh and blood, which they would protect with the unsheathed claws of the primeval swamp, he thought … how then can we be civilised?’5 Protecting with unsheathed claws is an image commonly used to describe a mother lion with her cubs. In their different but connected ways, Rich, Arendt and Woolf are all describing how, at the centre of human nurture and in its name, the intricacy and breadth of human possibility can be sidelined or quashed before it has even begun. And the ones expected to fulfil this deadly template of absolute singular devotion and blindness – all under the guise of nourishing the world’s future – are mothers.
Rachel Cusk’s A Life’s Work, mentioned in the last chapter, provides a visceral account of the complete loss of any sense of social personhood that followed the birth of her first baby (the book was much praised and much hated on its publication in 2001). But perhaps it is because she charts that collapse so bloodily that at the same time she can see how motherhood can also offer a heightened emotional link to the world’s wider stage: ‘In motherhood, I have experienced myself as both more virtuous and terrible, and more implicated too in the world’s virtue and terror, than I could from the anonymity of childlessness have thought possible.’6 Unlike some of the Greek women we saw in the last chapter, becoming a mother does not allow her to remain in the public arena (instead ‘civilisation’ takes on the aura of something ‘vain and deathly’).7 But Cusk’s insight can help us to see why any discourse that dwells solely on the virtue of mothers and motherhood is such a con, since, among other things, it is asking women to conspire in cutting off the world from self-knowledge.
If we are all capable of virtue and terror, then no one culture, certainly not Western culture, can claim a monopoly on virtue, and the capacity for terror cannot be conveniently projected onto everyone other than oneself. ‘I do not see the mother with her child,’ Rich writes, once more way ahead of the game, ‘as either more morally credible or more morally capable than any other woman.’8 ‘I got depressed,’ Mary-Kay Wilmers writes on the birth of her first son in 1972, ‘because instead of maternal goodness welling up inside me, the situation seemed to open up new areas of badness in my character.’9 (Hard not to conclude that the expectation of goodness played its part in provoking the depression in the first place.) Why should mothers, any more than anybody else, be good? We talk of a mother’s suffocating love. But the one in danger of being smothered by love might not be the infant but, under the weight of such a demand, the mother.
Women who are mothers are not better or more creative than women who are not. They have simply chosen to do things differently, to live other lives. For that reason, Denise Riley concluded in War in the Nursery (1983), her path-breaking study of maternal social policy after the Second World War, feminism has nothing to gain from any validation of motherhood in the name of female creativity or power.10 This is not to say that motherhood cannot be experienced as creative or that being a mother does not give you another take on the world. It is simply to warn of the ease with which such an idea slips out of women’s own grasp and into the instructive mode – ‘Be good!’ – a demand, an imperative, a trap. Women writers like Rich and Cusk, and also Luise Eichenbaum, Susie Orbach, Rozsika Parker and Lisa Baraitser, who have long insisted on the complex run of emotions to which motherhood gives rise, are issuing a type of political corrective, sourced in but far outreaching the domain of motherhood itself.11
Parker’s book has the title Torn in Two, the one who is torn being, of course, the mother (as any mother will recognise). But there is another no less far-reaching implication. It is the demand to be one thing only – love and goodness incarnate – that is intolerable for any mother, and tears her mentally and physically to shreds. For it is perfectly possible to acknowledge that the love a mother may feel for her child is like no other, without buying into all the dire psychic trappings that are meant to follow. The idea of maternal virtue is a myth that serves no one, certainly not mothers, nor the world whose redemption it is meant to serve. Or to put it more simply, no woman who has ever been a mother can believe for a second that she is only ever nice (virtue and terror both).
We might also, perhaps scandalously, at least raise the question: who – mothers or non-mothers, parents or non-parents – loves children most? ‘People who choose not to have children,’ writes contemporary French philosopher Michel Onfray, ‘love them just as much, if not more, than parents who are abundantly fruitful.’ He continues:
Asked why he had abstained from producing an heir, Thalès de Milet replied: ‘Precisely because I love children … Who truly finds reality sufficiently desirable to introduce their son or daughter to the inevitability of death, to the treachery of man’s dealing with man, to the self-interest that fuels the world, to the burden of being forced to do tiring work for pay, if not to precarious employment? How could parents be so naïve, stupid and short-sighted as to love misery, destitution, poverty, old age and misery enough to want to pass them on to their offspring?… Should we really use the word love to describe the transmission of such evils to flesh of our flesh?12
You don’t have to buy into this view of life, or the outdated, male-centric issue of an heir, to accept the validity of the question, especially on behalf of women who, in the name of love, are expected to be mothers. Mothers do not have a monopoly of love in the world, nor should it be asked of them. Anyone claiming such a monopoly is likely to be suffering from tunnel vis
ion. Anyone trying to fulfil this demand will simply suffer. These are the partial tales of love, and they never ring true.
* * *
The supreme symbol of mother love is, of course, the breast, which reappears in modern discussions of motherhood having lost none of the punitive allure we saw in Ancient Greece (again, if anything it seems to have intensified). In The Conflict: How Modern Motherhood Undermines the Status of Women, Elisabeth Badinter, long-standing critic of twentieth-century Western ideologies of motherhood, argues that the position of mothers is getting worse.13 In response to the economic crisis, and what she sees as a crisis of identity between the sexes, a new eco-maternalism, an updated ecological version of the maternal instinct as ‘innate, essential, eternal, non-negotiable’, in the words of one commentator, is driving many women back into the home (although French women come in for special praise for bucking the trend). Badinter blames a ‘sacred alliance’ of reactionaries and a new ‘essentialist feminism’ with Mother Nature at its core. Central to this project is breastfeeding. In 1956, La Leche League was formed by American mothers to promote breastfeeding. By 1981, the LLL, as it is known, had 17,000 trained group leaders; by 1990 its book, The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding, had sold over two million copies. According to Badinter, the breastfeeding rate in the US rose from 38 per cent in the late 1940s to 60 per cent by the mid-1980s, and reached 75 per cent by 2011.14 ‘I AM THE MILK OF YOUR BREASTS. YOU SHALL HAVE NO OTHER FORM OF INFANT NUTRITION IN YOUR HOUSE’ was, according to Badinter, one of the pronouncements on the website Alternamoms, which takes its cue from the ‘Ten Commandments’ (sic) of the LLL (capitals original).15
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