Kate Clephane is a mother who abandons her daughter, Anne, but not out of harsh material necessity, far from it, as she is a wealthy New York socialite who decides she has to escape a stifling marriage to a controlling husband at any price. For several years she has tried in vain to adapt to his point of view, to her mother-in-law’s exacting standards and ‘to all the unintelligible ritual with which they barricaded themselves against the alarming business of living’.35 The abandonment is not therefore casual. She acts out of despair (again it will take feminism many years before it catches up with her to make the destruction of women by the so-called normal family one of its loudest refrains). At her mother-in-law’s outraged instigation – backed by lawyers, judges, trustees, guardians, ‘all the natural enemies of women’ – she has been allowed no contact with her daughter since she left for France on the cusp of the new century.36 These are the people who have the power to order her life. Years later this will still be the reality for many women who choose to leave the marital home. I once knew a woman who lost custody of her children in the early 1980s – all her friends, her advocates, were discouraged from testifying as character witnesses on her behalf in court because they were divorcees and/or lesbians.
Kate Clephane’s predicament has an afterlife long beyond the end of the First World War, where the novel begins, when the mother-in-law has died and she is summoned back to New York by her forgiving daughter, eighteen years after, as she puts it, she had lost her: ‘“lost” was the euphemism she had invented (as people called the Furies the Amiable Ones), because a mother couldn’t confess, even to her most secret self, that she had willingly deserted her daughter.’37 She returns to a heartless opulent world, whose characters merge into a ‘collective American face’, and who have been strangely comforted by a war that barely touches them.38 Kate, like Wharton, was awarded a war medal for her work in France. The passing reference to the Eumenides, however – ‘the Furies the Amiable Ones’ – tells that we have entered the world of Greek tragedy. The Eumenides, we should remember, are powerless to save the mother from a pitiless fate.
If The Mother’s Recompense is a tale of abandonment and retribution, it is no less the story of a mother love that turns suffocatingly on itself. Such love is an offspring of guilt. There is agony lurking at its core. A mother, this story suggests, is most likely to go in search of it only in so far as she feels she has already failed. How can anyone expect this all-encompassing love to save the world when it is on a doomed mission to save itself? The recompense of the title is therefore ironic and something of a decoy. Wharton lifted it straight from the identical title of Grace Aguilar’s sentimental paean to a mother’s love, published posthumously in 1851: ‘There are many sorrows and many cares inseparable from maternal love,’ the mother of Aguilar’s book states with overweening piety, ‘but they are forgotten, utterly forgotten, or only remembered to enhance the recompense that sweetly follows.’39 Wharton’s novel has a very different tale to tell. The epigraph – ‘Desolation is a delicate thing’ – is from Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, which, as Wharton’s biographer Hermione Lee points out, leads in the poem to an image of sleepers who dream visions: ‘And call the monster, Love / And wake, and find the shadow Pain.’40 The idea that love might be shadowed by pain may seem a commonplace, but not to anyone who has been reading most discourse, certainly at the time Wharton was writing, on the topic of mothers.
It is obvious from the outset that no good can come from the love Kate is praying she will refind in her relationship with her daughter: ‘Kate felt as if they were two parts of some delicate instrument which fitted together as perfectly as if they had never been disjoined – as if Anne were that other half of her life, the half she had dreamed of and never lived … the perfection she had sought and missed’ (the repetition ‘perfectly’, ‘perfection’ is already a giveaway).41 If for a while it looks as though her dream might be realised, it is definitively shattered from the moment she discovers that her daughter is engaged to marry Chris Fenno, the young man from Baltimore with whom she herself had the most serious love affair of her life, after the man for whom she deserted husband and daughter turned out to be no more than a flashy man with a yacht. At this point, the world of soap opera meets that of Greek tragedy – one reason this is such a compulsively readable novel. She has never got over this affair. Having decided she cannot possibly tell her daughter the truth, she confronts her former lover in a failed attempt to end an engagement she believes must lead to catastrophe. ‘Perfect love,’ we are told in another line cited in the novel, ‘casteth out fear.’42 It appears not.
Critics have suggested that the plot stretches credulity; or worse, that the novel is the bitter, uncomprehending rant of a childless woman writer with a hostile relationship to her own mother. Wharton’s mother forbad her from reading novels until she was married and showed no sympathy for her writing career. There is, of course, another way of seeing this: that, in taking on such a delicate, fraught topic for women from beyond the experience of her own life, Wharton has revealed the remarkable reach of her mind. Indeed, paradoxical or counter-intuitive as it may sound, it might well be that at this time it was only a childless woman who could grant herself permission to ‘confess, even to her most secret self, that she had willingly deserted her daughter’. In this, Wharton confirms Rich’s suggestion that without the testimonies of childless or ‘unchilded’ women, as she prefers to name them, we would all suffer from spiritual malnutrition.43
Either way, it is the unlikely plot of Wharton’s novel that allows her fully to expose the dangers of the intimacy longed for by mother and daughter alike. With remarkable boldness, she probes the undertow of their proximity, refusing to shy away from its lurking shadow of incest (one rarely spoken reason why such proximity excites praise and censoriousness in equal measure). Incest, most obviously, in so far as mother and daughter are in love with the same man. But incest, too, in the overbearing, body-to-body eros that binds the mother and her daughter: ‘It did not seem to her, at the moment, as if she and her child were two, but as if her whole self had passed into the young body pressed pleadingly against her … as if it were her own sobs that were shaking her daughter’s body.’44 Kate is frightened at the likeness of her love for Anne ‘to that other isolated and devouring emotion which her love for Chris had been’.45 ‘It is not clear,’ Hermione Lee comments, ‘whether the “incest-element” is the mother’s desire for her daughter, or her horror at the spectacle of her with her own lover.’46 The point being that Kate herself struggles to make the distinction.
On this basis and without a trace of moral compunction, Wharton pitches the mother–daughter idyll, as it was meant to be, into sheer horror. Kate now faces a dilemma that is ‘natural and unnatural’, ‘horrible, intolerable and unescapable’ (like incest), a problem ‘too deeply rooted in living fibres to be torn out without mortal hurt’. Similarly, Freud explained that there can be no quick fixes in the mind because you cannot pluck out the neurotic symptom without damaging the healthy tissue in which it is psychically embedded.47 She has entered a ‘mad phantasmagoria’.48 As if to say, enter this zone of the heart and there is no rational limit to what you may then find: ‘A dark fermentation boiled up into her brain; every thought and feeling was clogged with thick entangling memories … Jealous? Was she jealous of her daughter? Was she physically jealous?… Was that why she had felt from the first as if some incestuous horror hung between them? She did not know – it was impossible to analyse her anguish.’49
Kate comes close to suicide, dashing madly one night into the streets; while Anne – in the deluded belief that Chris has called off the engagement because of the disparity in their fortunes – tries and fails to persuade her mother to disinherit her: ‘You want me to go on suffering then? You want to kill me?’50 At one point Kate is compared to a moth ‘battering itself to death’ against ‘an implacable blaze’.51 There can be no resolution. If Kate gets her way and stops the marriage, then how long before ‘moth
er and daughter were left facing each other like two ghosts in a grey world of disenchantment?’52 In the end, the wedding goes ahead, with Kate’s agonised, reluctant acquiescence. In the carriage on the way to the ceremony, she wishes her daughter all the happiness there ever was in the world ‘beyond all imagining’: ‘“Oh, mother, take care!” Anne retorts, “Not too much! You frighten me.”’53
Too much binding closeness, even – especially – between a mother and daughter, is killing (mother love with a vengeance). Under the veneer of civilisation, Wharton unpicks the fabric of a cliché, exposing the dangerous impulses for which such love – still idealised today – can act as both vehicle and cover. At the end of the novel, the mother’s only recompense is the moral strength she gains from leaving once more for France and renouncing everything. Resolute and thoughtful, she is nonetheless, as Wharton makes a point of telling us, cut off from any trace of saving knowledge (her anguish is impossible for her ‘to analyse’). But what mother in this place, at this time, had the tools to transform the historic cruelties of a world barely out of the war, or her own predicament, into understanding?
* * *
A century later, journalist Ariel Leve picks up the thread and writes her memoir of her mother – An Abbreviated Life, published in 2016 – from the other side of intimacy and neglect. Leve’s mother doesn’t exactly abandon her daughter, but she is a mother with whom the daughter has never spent a single full day of her life (eternal broken promises are a refrain). Nonetheless – for that very reason – she holds onto her daughter for dear life. When Ariel used to come home from school as a young girl she would often find her mother naked in bed, from where she would summon her daughter to re-create ‘The Happiest Day of My Life’. Ariel, and on one occasion a friend who had accompanied her home, would be expected to undress, curl up in a foetal position against her mother’s body, her mother would pretend to push her out from her vagina and she would crawl out between her legs (the friend, who went home and promptly told her own mother, never visited again).
This is another tale of a New York socialite that delves into the psychopathology of an elite, self-preoccupied world, in this case the city’s high artistic, bohemian life. Leve’s mother, Sandra Hochman – never named in the book but not hard to identify – was a successful poet who surrounded herself with celebrities from the worlds of art and literature, filling her house with parties that kept her daughter awake at night throughout her school years. Easy to dismiss as perverse eccentricity or indeed sheer madness – impossible on the other hand for any reader not to weep with rage on this little girl’s behalf – but then again not. Once again, this drama does not erupt out of nowhere. Motherhood without limits: in a twisted sense, Hochman is another mother who obeys this injunction to the letter. The more she neglects and manipulates her daughter, the more she calls absolute motherhood to her aid. Except that this time the story is told from the point of view of the daughter, who charts the damage with surgical precision: ‘There were no barriers between what my mother was experiencing and what I was exposed to. “We don’t keep secrets from each other” was a commandment. Nothing was ever withheld.’54 And with poetic eloquence (which is what saves her): ‘I had no choice but to exist in the sea that she swam in. It was a fragile ecosystem where the temperature changed without warning. My natural shape was dissolved and I became shapeless. A plankton drifting in the current of her expectations.’55
Hochman is another mother weighed down by her own guilt. But she does not know it. As a mother, she never sees herself as anything but perfect. Her flagrant narcissism, inseparable from her wilful passion for her daughter, offers a beautiful illustration of the mind of a mother in complete denial of itself. ‘What did the real damage was buried beneath the surface. Her denial that these incidents [of neglect and inappropriate intimacy] ever occurred and the accusation that I was looking to punish her with my unjustified anger. The erasure of the abuse was worse than the abuse.’56 We do not get the mother’s story, and we should remember how easy it is to blame the mother for all failings, but the daughter’s version receives ample confirmation from letters written by Rita, her father’s former girlfriend, who steps in to care for her, as well as from the many others whom she tracked down or discovered from her past in the course of writing her book.
Leve has written a plea for understanding. She becomes a writer – like her mother, a debt she fully acknowledges – in order to purge damage she believes has been hard-wired into her brain. But she also knows that the trials of being a daughter of such a mother – of being a daughter, we might say – cannot be dispersed by a diktat of reason. Mario, the man with whom she has made a new life, is a diving teacher in Bali, as far away from the world she has lived in as could possibly be (no gadgets, few comforts, no rush, and often no words). Alongside the writing, it is Mario and his two daughters who give her the air to breathe. But even though he is a man of the sea, he finally has no patience with the waters – dissolving, drifting plankton and currents – she is swimming in: ‘“Why can’t you just beat these demons and destroy them?”’ he says to her, genuinely baffled. ‘“You mean, why can’t I just get over it?” “Yes.” It’s illogical to him that I would be a thinking person who can’t control my thoughts. “Or if you can’t get over it, then deal with it in a rational, sensible, way.”’57
At one point in the book, Leve recounts coming across a poem by her mother in a collection about motherhood in a New York bookstore, which I was able to trace (try googling ‘mothers and poetry’ and see what you have to wade through: a mother’s love is a gift, a true love, for ever). Like many of the others in the collection, ‘Thoughts About My Daughter Before Sleep’ is a love poem that could have, almost, been written by any mother: ‘Ariel, one true / Miracle of my life, / I marvel to have made you perfect.’ At least Sylvia Plath saved the name Ariel for the poem about her horse, whose wildness of spirit she was not therefore projecting onto, living or controlling through, her baby daughter. This is the last stanza of Hochman’s poem, innocuous and clichéd enough, until it starts tipping, almost imperceptibly, into a more sinister zone:
And through you
I am born as I lie down
In the seedbox of my own beginnings,
Opening the wild part of me,
Once lost, once lost
As I was breathing
In the vines of childhood
The mother finds her own wild, lost beginnings deep within the body of her daughter (which perhaps explains why this daughter will have to be endlessly reborn). The miracle – to return to where this chapter began – is the mother’s doing alone: ‘I marvel to have made you perfect,’ a not so subtle rendering of the cry, ‘You owe me everything,’ which she also throws in her daughter’s face. But, I find myself wondering, would these lines have given me the slightest pause had I not first read the daughter’s chilling story?
You are born into the slipstream of your mother’s unconscious – as a therapist once said to me. No more so than in a culture that commands a mother to be all for her child. An Abbreviated Life is one more chapter in the cruel distortion of that command. We talk of the depths of attachment, but there can be no emancipation for mothers, no better life for the offspring of the future, unless we recognise what that seemingly innocent instruction – be all for your child – might mean. It should be clear by now that rational and sensible have very little to do with it, any more than controlling one’s thoughts. Mario is not the first man, and will surely not be the last, to believe that all it takes is a bit of self-mastery to be able to walk away and leave the realm of mothers behind (as if, such impatience suggests, we could offload onto mothers the burden of the unconscious and then despatch mothers and unconscious together). But this, too, is a crippling vision – his mildly exasperated call to reason, issued in the imperative mode, the flip side of the mother’s emotional hurricane. We have to look further. In most of the accounts of motherhood explored so far, something is missing or being pushed aside. N
othing less, I will now suggest, than a mother’s right to know her own mind.
HATING
Against what, we might then ask, is all this the defence? From the frenetic exhortations to breastfeed of the LLL to the ostracism of the ‘bad’ mother, to the blinding attachment that mothers are expected to invest in their child? On behalf of what are all these pious, punitive or simply dotty versions of motherhood – none of which seem to be mutually exclusive – doing cover? Elisabeth Badinter’s Mother Love, her original critique of the maternal instinct as inborn and universal, was published in 1981 to a storm of controversy in France. When her editor invited the renowned child psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim to contribute a preface, he replied:
I’ve spent my whole life working with children whose lives have been destroyed because their mothers hated them … Which demonstrates that there is no maternal instinct – of course there isn’t … This book will only serve to free women from their feelings of guilt, the only restraint that means some children are saved from destruction, suicide, anorexia, etc. I don’t want to give my name to suppressing the last buttress that protects a lot of unhappy children from destruction.1
The vitriol of this statement might take us close to the heart of the matter. There is, he concurs, no maternal instinct, which is why so many children are doomed (this was before the revelations of how Bettelheim treated the children in his care).2 There is also, as we have seen before, only the mother, no fathers and no hint of social deprivation mentioned, which means outside the nursery – the mother–baby bond – there is no world (it is therefore Bettelheim himself who tightens the maternal grip on the baby). Only guilt, it seems, will secure a mother to her child. Without such guilt, the child will not survive, although such an arrangement will scarcely make the child happy: ‘the last buttress that protects a lot of unhappy children from destruction’.
Mothers Page 8
