This chapter has the title ‘The agony and the ecstasy’. I realise it may seem that the first of these has had the strongest voice. True, the broken edges of Ferrante’s mothers and her writing are mostly in tune with the world’s grief. But ecstasy is part of the picture. Over the years, Ferrante has come closer and closer to the idea that writing emerges out of an ‘ecstatic condition’: ‘The ecstasy of the writing is feeling not the breath of the word that is liberated from the flesh but the flesh that has become one with the breath of the words.’99 She calls it a ‘disembodiment’, but not, surely, as normally understood, since in this formula, flesh, far from being transcended, is now breathing through the words. What I hear her describing is a form of writing that lifts off only because it has immersed itself in the depths, beginning – as tends to be the case – with mothers: ‘the literary truth [of motherhood] has yet to be explored … the task of a woman writer today is … to delve truthfully into the darkest depth.’100 Or, to put it more simply, Elena Ferrante has let the cat out of the bag on behalf of mothers, and I, for one, could not be more grateful.
INSIDE OUT
To be a mother is to be saturated with the good and evil of the day. But unless you are very lucky, or privileged, or both, there is always the chance that evil will seize the hour, as my mother often tells me in relation to her never-ending grief for her daughter, my sister, who died more than twenty years ago. At the very least, it seems fair to say that, as much as a new, unpredictable beginning against the crush of totalitarian logic (Hannah Arendt’s cry), each birth arrives with a history not of its own choosing. And since, to risk a cliché, there must surely be dark as well as lightness ahead, a mother who yearns most powerfully for her child to embody the free, the new, the best – as mothers mostly cannot help but do – is in danger of inscribing her denial of history, her own flight from suffering, across the body and mind of her child.
‘Your nakedness,’ Sylvia Plath addresses her newborn daughter in ‘Morning Song’, ‘Shadows our safety.’1 ‘Morning Song’ is a love poem, a tribute to the fragility of the new arrival it celebrates. But Plath knows that no mother can make the world safe. If Plath had had her way, the published collection of Ariel would not just have opened with this poem whose first word is ‘Love’; it would have ended with the poems that have come to be known as the Bee Sequence, the last of which – ‘Wintering’ – ends on the word ‘spring’. Notoriously, Ted Hughes excised the poems that seemed most obviously to allude to the breakdown of their marriage, and ended the collection with later poems written in the days before she died, making her death seem poetically inevitable.2 But Plath’s own carefully laid-out selection was eloquent. Opening with the birth of her child, it allowed joy – love, spring – to be in touch with, and frame, the darkness of shadows. Feminists have rightly objected to the blatant attempt by Hughes to silence Plath’s rage as a woman and to exonerate himself (charges given a new edge by the recently uncovered letters from Plath to her former therapist suggesting Hughes had been violent towards her).3 But today I see his greatest offence as editor of her work residing in the way he curtailed and framed her all-encompassing voice as a mother.
‘All I want is for you to be happy.’ What mother, parent, would not stand by that appeal, however impossible a demand it must be? First, as the demand to be happy, rather than, say, to be alive in your own life; then, as a kind of vicarious living through one’s child; and finally, as most likely the death knell for any chance of happiness, since you surely kill happiness the moment you ask someone to be happy on behalf of anybody else. That same sister once told me with great pleasure how she had found herself on a train talking to a woman who had migrated from the Caribbean in the 1950s and then worked her way through the system, against considerable odds, to become the head teacher in a London school. She threw her head back in a paroxysm of laughter at the suggestion that a parent should want their child to be happy, as if the whole idea was some kind of sick joke, the very last thing a mother should ask for – of – her child. She had the ills of the world at her fingertips, but she was not world-weary, more like jubilant at all that needed to be done. This was in the 1970s, long before her son became one of the most renowned analysts of anti-black racism in the UK and beyond (he did her proud, as one might say).
I always remember that story – its stubborn, expansive generosity of spirit – when I think of the way mothers are expected to lock any feelings of despair behind closed doors, especially in those first precarious moments of a mothering life. Perhaps what goes by the name of ‘postnatal depression’ is a way of registering griefs past, present and to come, an affront to the ideal not least because of the unbearable weight of historical memory and/or prescience it carries. It has recently been suggested that ‘bipolar’, with the neat, over-clarifying split it records and enacts as a term, should be replaced with the more old-fashioned ‘manic depressive’, which at least gives back to the sufferer the dignity of lament, and therefore of potential self-understanding.4 The term ‘postnatal depression’ retains the lament but, assigned to hormone imbalance, the condition is now most often treated with drugs, or the quick-fix therapy known as CBT (cognitive behavioural therapy), or in some cases with electroconvulsive therapy, as so graphically described by the novelist Fiona Shaw.5 It, too, could do with being re-entered into the canon of human distress, psychically and historically meaningful, as opposed to a purely clinical matter.
During a recent visit to South Africa, the incidence of postnatal depression was described to me as ‘pandemic’, prevalent at the highest rates among the poor blacks, who are, of course, most strongly affected by the unremitting anti-black racism of the country and the persistence of vicious forms of social and economic inequality. A recent South African study focused on depression among low-income black mothers of older children towards whom they found themselves, to their utmost despair, enacting forms of violent rage. When asked how they understood their anger and aggression, they gave three main causes: the demanding child and their longing to be an ‘ever-bountiful, ever-giving mother’; the inconsiderate child who made them acutely aware of their own need for attention, support and respect; and the child engaged in violence and drug abuse who thwarted the mother’s yearning for ‘a new identity and a new life through her child’.6 Note the mirror-type reflection, or descending spiral, that binds the depressed mother to her child: the child’s demands drive the mother to insane perfection; the inconsiderate child underscores the radical neglect of her own life; the violent child destroys the hope for a better future that the child was meant to personify.
As the authors of this study insist, these stories also bear witness to the strong correlation between ‘major’ depression and poverty, a link that tends to be overlooked clinically, and that must be hugely exacerbated by the promise of a better life with the end of apartheid, a promise that has not materialised for the majority of blacks in South Africa. It also shows these women, longing as they were for recognition and support as mothers, repeating an age-old pattern in which a woman’s anger, because it is socially unacceptable, is internalised as potential violence against herself and/or her child. But what stood out for me is the vicious circle of idealisation inside which these women were trapped. One by one they sourced their rage to ‘the pain and disappointments associated with not being the mothers they wanted to be’.7 They felt they had failed because they lashed out at their children; but they lashed out at their children because they felt they had failed. ‘Melancholy murderousness’ is the title of the study. There can be no clearer example of the self-defeating, violence-inducing character of idealisation as it bears down upon mothers – notably the most disadvantaged and vulnerable mothers – in an unjust world. Yet again we see how, when the world turns ugly, when it cannot bear to confront its own cruelty, the punishing of mothers darkens and intensifies.
* * *
Throughout this book I have argued against the pernicious weight of the ideal. But it has only been in the course of
writing it that I have come to think that the worst, most insufferable demand that so many cultures of the modern world impose on their mothers is not just the saccharine image laid across the mother in expectation of a better future, but the vast reach of historical, political and social anguish that we thereby ask a mother to nullify. We expect her to look to the future (what else is she meant to do?), but the seeming innocence of that expectation is an illusion, as if it were the task of mothers to trample over the past and lift us out of historical time – or, in the version that at least has the virtue of its own sentimentality, to secure a new dawn.
My maternal grandmother’s family perished in Chełmno extermination camp during the Second World War. My grandparents in London wanted nothing more than to be safe in their new surroundings, for their two daughters to bear no trace of the atrocity that irredeemably scarred their own lives. But the education of girls formed no part of their vision. Their most fervent wish was for their daughters to get married, to a Jewish man, of course, have children and ‘settle down’ (an idea that might bear some scrutiny, since, as a therapist once said to me, moments of feeling settled once and for all tend to be life’s interruptions). Barely twenty years old, my mother was married off to my father, who was returning from his own trauma, having been tortured in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp. She had wanted to be a doctor, but was not allowed by her parents to take up the place she had secured at medical school, so she was married to a doctor instead.
Her ambitions for the lives of her own daughters would grow from that thwarted moment and reach for the sky. But, I find myself asking, whatever made her think that this would be enough to silence the past? That educational and sexual freedom – upending the constraints of her life, and for which I will always be grateful – could guarantee a future unstained by that awful history? Maybe there will always be a radical disjunction between what a child is and what a mother most fervently wants for her child. Maybe that is one of the agonies of being a mother: to find that your child harbours in the recesses of their soul a story from which you had hoped against hope, once and for all, to free them. ‘With the best will in the world’, was one of the sayings I heard repeated throughout my childhood, as if somewhere the grown-ups knew that they were asking – could not help but ask – the impossible of themselves.
When I was a teenager, I came across the account of ‘housewives’ psychosis’ in de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. Every morning before we went to school, my sister and I, and eventually our younger sister, were expected to join in the ritual three-cloth cleansing of the entire home: wet, dry and methylated spirits. As I look back on it now, I don’t think, as she cleaned the house spotless, that my mother ever realised there was nothing she needed to expiate, that she had not been the perpetrator – not ever, not now nor in the distant past – of any crime. It has become commonplace to describe my mother’s generation as housewives without feminism – indeed, it is in response to this post-war closeted domesticity that 1970s second-generation feminism begins. But the point is mostly made without any allusion to the legacy that must have played such a key role in driving them mad. Certainly, no one seems ever to have explained to this generation of housewives and mothers – de Beauvoir did not make the link – that they were not, and should not feel, guilty for a war whose every lingering trace the bright, glittering home in which they had settled down was meant to wipe away for ever.
This book has tried to travel the world and cross epochs – from South Africa to Ancient Greece; from present-day America to slavery and its legacies; from UK post-Brexit to the lines laid down by British policy on mothers after the Second World War; from Naples to Syria. Framing the whole project has been the anguish of mothers and the hostility unleashed against them in response to a crisis of historic proportions that has brought to our shores mothers in search of health support to deliver their babies safely, along with thousands of unaccompanied minors whose mothers might never see them, and who might never see their mothers, again. But I have been writing as the daughter of a white, upper-middle-class mother in post-war Britain whose life is far away from the impoverished black mothers in Cape Town, who fall to pieces when they discover that the violence of their daily lives – the violence they most fear for their children – has entered their hearts, contaminating the very core of what it means for them to be a mother.
In Britain in the 1950s, the instruction a mother should impart to her children, or so it seemed to me as a daughter, was to keep everything in order, up to scratch. Be bold – as daughters we would have the freedoms our mother was denied – but above all hold everything safely in its proper place (the two expectations somewhat contradicting each other). To Gillian’s and my bemusement, my mother often said that what she would like most would be to wrap her daughters in cotton wool and glue us to the wall of her bedroom. It was a prospect whose appeal, needless to say, we failed to grasp. The fact that atrocity lurked beneath the veneer and in the attic, that memory could not be so easily subdued, was something not to be spoken (although the cotton wool image is the giveaway, as if she wanted to muffle the sounds).
But none of this was absent from our inner worlds. It is only very recently that my stepmother and I have been able to talk about the disturbance my father suffered for the rest of his days, consequent on what he had seen and endured in Thailand. Only in these past years have I understood that one manifestation of his distress, and one of my most troubling symptoms throughout my life, is something that, with no communication whatsoever between us on the topic, he and I shared. I had missed this connection, partly because I had always assumed, as daughters often do, that any suffering of body or mind I had inherited, in fact pretty much everything I inherited, must have come from my mother. Like a friend of mine who, permanently on the lookout for the first sign in herself of her mother’s Alzheimer’s, was wholly unprepared, when she suffered a stroke, to find herself afflicted with her father’s weak and ailing heart.
The task of a mother, as they say, is to calm the child’s fears. But no exhortation to mothers that I have ever read suggests for one moment that her ability to do so might be coloured by fears of her own. Remember North, Colonel Pargiter’s grandson, in Virginia Woolf’s The Years: ‘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?’8 A mother is meant to be as fearless as a lioness. Never mind the brute disregard this implies towards all other children in the world, the children of different class, colour or creed. Nor the unspoken implication that all children are in permanent danger of aggression (a bit of a problem if it is ‘civilisation’ you think you are talking about).
Even more relevant here is the fact that the image strips the mother of all memory and history, reducing her to an unthinking beast. That this is hardly a fair description of the mental lives of the non-human species of the world is clearly of no concern to North, who therefore sides with the drawing-room refinement he appears to critique. A lioness, it is implied, will instinctively protect her cubs because she has no internal life of her own to grapple with. Push a bit further and you might say that having nothing of her own to grapple with – being ‘all’ for her child at the cost of her own inner life – is the very definition, or at least the unspoken agenda, of being a mother. This, too, has a long history. For early proponents of ‘republican motherhood’ in the US in the eighteenth century, the nation’s stability depended on the civic virtue a mother cultivated in her child, which required her to be free of all ‘invidious and rancorous passions’.9
It is, of course, a truism of both feminism and Marxism that the image of stability represented by safe white middle-class homes is a complete myth, resting as such homes do on the exploitation of workers, women and colonies. Just as it is a truism of Freudian thought that the façade of civilised living – in natio
ns Freud referred to, with limited sympathy, as ‘the great world-dominating nations of white race’ and ‘our present-day white Christian culture’ – is precarious and phoney in direct proportion to the insistence with which it claims to believe unerringly in itself.10 ‘It goes without saying,’ Freud writes in The Future of an Illusion, ‘that a civilization which leaves so large a number of its participants unsatisfied and drives them into revolt neither has nor deserves the prospect of a lasting existence.’11 A simpler way of putting this would be to say there is a violence behind the norm, a violence which it is truly a form of insanity to expect mothers – on whatever social rung and wherever they find themselves in the world – to placate. Without question my mother has gifted me with the privilege that her family, refugees from horror, bravely secured for their daughters’ sake. But I also know that, against every fibre and bone in her body, she, like my father, has passed on to me a history I sometimes find myself warding off in the night, and which for her part has been too painful, consciously at least, to contemplate. Only once did she tell us of the day – she must have been about nineteen – when she found her mother stretched out on her bed, weeping hysterically, crumpled in her hand the telegram reporting the murder of her entire family in Poland.
Mothers Page 14
