by bell hooks
Conveniently, the story that is told in public discussion denies the adult Harrison’s seductive agency—however self-destructive. Giving new meaning to the phrase “drama queen” she acts in complicity with a public narrative (not solely of her own making) that makes it seem as though this is a courageous coming-out story where incestuous male violence is being exposed. In some cases Harrison is talked about as though she is now a “S.C.U.M. Manifesto radical feminist” warrior in from the trenches. Interviewed by Patricia Towers, Harrison admits that while writing she was tempted “not to take responsibility, to say I may have been twenty, but, in truth, I was a child, and I was taken advantage of. And if I was not physically, brutally forced, then on an emotional level I was forced.” Towers affirms this logic by saying, “Which by the way, I think is true.” The text succumbs to this temptation. Stylistically, since Harrison skillfully mixes girlhood memories with adult memories and the voice is consistent, readers at times cannot distinguish the two. At times I had to read passages again to see if the experiences described were those of the girl or the woman. Harrison also acknowledges that her other temptation was to characterize herself as “some sort of iconoclast … a bad girl … a transgressor.” While she claims to have sought a middle ground in the text, acknowledging that she “was taken advantage of” and yet “did have responsibility,” there is no passage one can cite that even hints at an acknowledgment of responsibility. There is no critical reflection on her choices. Simply writing positive descriptions of the erotic interaction with her father does not convey the agency she implies. Clearly, there are ways in which Harrison wants to be both victim and victor.
Ironically, there are no descriptions of sexual intercourse with either father or other male partners in The Kiss. Indeed, Harrison claims not to remember what she actually did sexually with the father. Again this becomes a way to lay claim to the common memory loss incest victims often suffer, but then if we are to believe the Harrison of interviews that she chose this, the writer who remembers all manner of details from early childhood, it seems odd that she cannot remember details of this adult sexual experience. Sensationalizing this narrative, Harrison and the press obscure the reality that much of what this book graphically exposes is not about incest.
In actuality much more than a narrative of incest, the book chronicles Harrison’s intense vicious rivalry with her mother, of which consensual incest is one of the weapons of betrayal. It’s her own version of Mommie Dearest in reverse. As a reader who is not from a culture that insists that hating one’s parents is essential to the development of self and identity, I was both awed and appalled by the intensity of Harrison’s competition with her mother—the extent to which she saw herself as a rival competing both for the affections of her mother’s parents and the love of her absent father. When I first left my southern religious rural working-class world to enter Stanford University, one of the big cultural shocks for me was the extent to which the upper-class white students there expressed hatred and contempt for their parents. Coming from a culture where I was not raised to believe I needed to express hatred of my parents, I found the idea of children competing with parents in power struggles shocking. It fascinates me that this feature of privileged class life is often taken as a norm. Many of my white professional women friends from such backgrounds see nothing strange about the hatred Harrison expresses towards her mother. Naomi Wolf’s book Promiscuities explores the lives of young white girls from privileged class backgrounds. To her this competition is a norm. She contends “each of us nursed an emerging sexual competition with our mothers.”
In The Kiss the daughter’s hatred is portrayed as a response to her mother’s narcissism, her lack of maternal care. Yet the mother’s class position allows her to be indifferent to her daughter’s needs, knowing that other caregivers will meet them. When it comes to issues her mother thinks are important she asserts parental guidance, yet it is never enough to win her daughter’s love. One of the truly moving moments in this book is the description of the caring reunion between the adult Kathryn and her dying mother. Significantly, even that event is eroticized by Harrison. Returning for a final moment alone with her mother’s dead body, Harrison writes: “I touch her chest, her arms, her neck; I kiss her forehead and her fingertips.… I reach under the bottom half of the lid for the catch to unlock but find none. I slip my hand down as far as I can, past her knees, past the hem of her white dress. I want to touch and know all of her, want her feet in my palms.”
Indeed, from the text one can assume that were it not for the vicious rivalry between mother and daughter for center stage in this upper-class extended family household, the dangerous liaison between father and daughter might not have occurred. When Harrison’s mother senses that an inappropriate relationship is happening between daughter and father, she takes the young adult Kathryn to a therapist. This becomes another terrain for competition. Kathryn is thrilled that she is able to “win” over her mother by convincing the therapist that nothing is taking place. Before they go to the appointment, Kathryn strategically chooses an outfit that she hopes will enable her to better “seduce” the therapist. Preparing for the visit by wearing a dress so short she confesses that “I can’t bend over without my underpants showing,” she is thrilled to see that the doctor falls for her and her lies. Her mother tells the psychiatrist, “I think they’re having sex.” Harrison recalls, “The doctor turns to me, his eyebrows raised, and I lie as I have never lied before or since. I’m a bad liar generally, but on this afternoon, wearing what I’m wearing, I am brilliant.… The doctor looks at me sitting before him in my vulgar dress, and he believes me. I know it, and so does my mother. He’s mine, not hers, and so I have what I wanted—what I thought I wanted. She is alone. I’ve taken her husband and now her only ally; the one person with whom she can share her troubles.” That Harrison continues to allow her own behavior to be overdetermined by hatred and competition with her mother even after she has left home and entered her own adult life is one of the saddest stories in this book. The fact that she ends the relationship with her father when the mother dies confirms that this competitive bond fueled Harrison’s destructive behavior.
According to Harrison, she kept nude photographs her father had taken of her, love letters he had written. Anyone who has studied the literature of coercive incest knows that this is not a common behavior pattern of abuse survivors. Harrison’s own pathological narcissism comes through her text as much as her father’s fetishization of his “beautiful” daughter. This psychological condition makes her a ripe candidate for the father’s seduction, for she is as taken with her own beauty as he is. Significantly, much has been made of Harrison’s blond beauty in commentary about the book. In his confessional essay “Sins of the Father,” her husband, Colin Harrison, boldly extols her beauty, commenting on the incest by sharing that even though he has fantasized her father’s death he can declare: “… as another man I dare say I understand a portion of his obsession. There was to be no denying him. There was no denying me.” Embedded in this comment are all the old patriarchal ways of justifying male sexual coercion and violence.
In The Kiss Harrison’s obsession with her blond beauty is always expressed in contrast to her mother’s darkness. Throughout the book racial metaphors of darkness and lightness are used to emphasize her specialness. Coming from a family of immigrant Jews whom she describes as dark, she is the golden beauty allied with the Christian father the family has cast out. Harrison comments: “The earliest directive either I or my mother received from her Jewish parents was to form ourselves in opposition to the children around us. Born in London, my grandmother and grandfather have lived all over the world. They’ve always considered America a land of convenience, hygiene, and safety, and one in which children are ‘dragged’ as opposed to ‘brought’ up.” Her mother’s choice of a Christian with German immigrant ancestors is her way to show contempt towards this Jewish world. Even though Kathryn is a grown woman when she first meets her dad
she writes: “The girl my father sees has blond hair that falls past her waist, past her hips; it falls to the point at which her fingertips would brush her thighs if her arms were not crossed before her chest.” No reviewers talked about the way in which ethnic and racial tropes formed the symbolic tightrope of the sadomasochistic bond between mother and daughter. The extent to which articles on the book focus on Harrison’s “blond beauty” contrasted with the dark world of her upbringing reveal the grave extent to which these tropes, as well as the antisemitism/racism they perpetuate, resonate in contemporary culture. They are so accepted a norm as to be unworthy of comment. A variety of needs are met in this public replaying of the original narrative of dark versus light, sensual educated rich Europe violently coupled with primitive puritanical America, Jew against Christian; the narcissism Christopher Lasch defined as the core of contemporary culture is affirmed, its pathological dimensions rendered normal. The grown-up Harrison can finally have the ongoing intense “gaze” from the parental authority she has longed for, a gaze that bows down to her beauty—to the power of her femininity, a power so intense it conquers all. And the greatest triumph is that Harrison, like the character in the movie Pretty Woman, not only transcends the pain of her past, she is rewarded with fame and money. Given such payoffs, “doing it for daddy” appears glamorous. Surely, the marketing of this book personifies the ethos of hedonistic consumerist capitalist patriarchal culture.
While I found The Kiss a compelling memoir, it is not exceptionally well written or in any way sensational. Market forces created the sensational atmosphere surrounding publication of the book. Both Harrison and her husband acted in complicity with those forces. Harrison, like the wounded child in her book, seems to glory in the attention she receives, whether positive or negative. Her passion for press suggests that the pathological narcissism so eloquently evoked in the memoir continues to inform her life-choices. Harrison’s choices aside, critics clearly chose to critically comment on her writerly persona rather than the content of her text. Were she not a female there would have been no mention made in critical reviews of her longing for fame or her willingness to do whatever it might take to acquire it and she would not have been the target of conservative moral censure. Many male writers are pathologically narcissistic; it is rarely the basis of public critique of their work. Pathological narcissism does not enchant. Tedious and predictable, its presence does not necessarily negate or enhance the power of a writer’s work. In Harrison’s case it is the vision of herself as a writer that is diminished when she acts in complicity with media’s insistence that she justify the content of her memoir.
The work of all women writers is jeopardized when individual female authors are taken to task for the content of their writing. When critiqued on the basis of a double-standard patriarchal morality that led sexist women and men to demand that Harrison justify the content of her book because she is the mother of small children, Harrison simply complied. She did not challenge her critics to examine the sexist biases informing this type of critique. Her response was to tell the world again and again that she had wrestled with the impact her decision to write this book might have on her children and decided that it was best to tell her story. Significantly, her predecessor Anaïs Nin, who was determined to write about sexuality with the same freedom as any male writer, was never asked to justify her work on the basis of motherhood, even though she had a child. That Harrison was subjected to this type of moral critique was both an expression of antifeminist backlash and sexist notions of family values. When did we last hear critics demanding of any male writer that he consider the impact his work might have on his children’s lives?
In an article about Harrison titled “Sex with Daddy: Is Disclosure Always Better than Secrecy?” writer Mary Gordon addressed this issue, declaring: “I want to tell her that in making the decision she has, it is impossible that she will avoid muddiness, perhaps not of a literary but of a personal and familial kind. But what is certain is that if she didn’t publish this book, something would have been lost to her as both a writer and a human soul. These are the terrible questions that we open ourselves to when we have children.” Reading this passage I pondered whether Gordon included male writers when she chose to use the word “we.” More than any reaction to Harrison’s book, the most troubling one has been the judgmental moralism about whether or not being a mother meant that she should have published this story. Not once did I read any discussion of the book that critiqued the sexism underlying this question. Whenever any writer writes autobiographical work, ethical and moral issues arise. No one speculated about the moral right of Harrison to disclose information about her father or other family members who may not share her vision or her interpretation of the past.
Critics of Harrison deployed a patriarchal vision of the good mother to critique her work on moral grounds. Can we imagine Gordon posing these questions about a male writer: “Had she chosen her writing over her family. Had she exposed her young son and daughter to a lifetime of taunts about their mother and their grandfather.” Harrison lacks a feminist vision of herself as a writer, one that would demand an assertion of artistic freedom to create using any subject. She joins the conservative family-values chorus when she dramatically parades in an uncritical manner her sentimental response: “Writing and my children are the two most important things in the world to me.… I need to write to know who I am. But the task of being a ‘good enough’ mother to my children also gives me great solace.” In a world where writers are daily confronting issues of censorship, where antifeminist backlash has become an accepted norm, women, along with our male allies in struggle, should be disturbed by any insistence that we judge our writing by patriarchal notions of the good and bad mother.
Whenever a writer of any gender chooses to disclose facts about his or her private life, revealing details about the lives of others without their permission, ethical issues should be considered. The value of ethical concerns about the politics of disclosure are diminished when reduced to the level of whether or not a woman writer’s memoir that shares an experience of consensual incest in her life is taking an action that will be harmful to her children. Had Harrison’s life choices been more informed by the feminist thinking and feminist movement that was happening in the culture during her twenties her dangerous liaison might never have taken place. Since it did happen and she has chosen to write about it again and again in both her fiction and nonfiction, it is disturbing that she and her critics have not allowed feminist concerns to shape their responses to the work.
Given the power of censorship and antifeminist backlash we should all be insisting that women writers continue to resist silencing. We should uphold and celebrate the rights of women writers to explore our imaginations to the fullest. This freedom can coexist with meaningful critical discussion of the politics of confession and disclosure. While the sensationalist hype and hysteria surrounding Harrison’s publication of her memoir will soon pass away, what will remain is the impact critical reception of this work has had on readers and writers. Public reception of this work has been used to serve notice on all women writers that critics will exercise the power to publicly judge and morally condemn the subject of women’s writing when it transgresses the boundaries of conservative convention and mainstream decorum. Significantly, writers and readers who value artistic freedom should critically respond—resisting this trend as it diminishes and devalues artistic integrity.
writing autobiography
To me, telling the story of my growing-up years was intimately connected with the longing to kill the self I was without really having to die. I wanted to kill that self in writing. Once that self was gone—out of my life forever—I could more easily become the me of me. It was clearly the Gloria Jean of my tormented and anguished childhood that I wanted to be rid of, the girl who was always wrong, always punished, always subjected to some humiliation or other, always crying, the girl who was to end up in a mental institution because she could not be anything
but crazy, or so they told her. She was the girl who sat a hot iron on her arm pleading with them to leave her alone, the girl who wore her scar as a brand marking her madness. Even now I can hear the voices of my sisters saying, “mama make Gloria stop crying.” By writing the autobiography, it was not just this Gloria I would be rid of, but the past that had a hold on me, that kept me from the present. I wanted not to forget the past but to break its hold. This death in writing was to be liberatory.
Until I began to try and write an autobiography, I thought that it would be a simple task, this telling of one’s story. And yet I tried year after year, never writing more than a few pages. My inability to write out the story I interpreted as an indication that I was not ready to let go of the past, that I was not ready to be fully in the present. Psychologically, I considered the possibility that I had become attached to the wounds and sorrows of my childhood, that I held to them in a manner that blocked my efforts to be self-realized, whole, to be healed. A key message in Toni Cade Bambara’s novel The Salt Eaters, which tells the story of Velma’s suicide attempt, her breakdown, is expressed when the healer asks her, “Are you sure sweetheart, that you want to be well?”
There was very clearly something blocking my ability to tell my story. Perhaps it was remembered scoldings and punishments when mama heard me saying something to a friend or stranger that she did not think should be said. Secrecy and silence—these were central issues. Secrecy about family, about what went on in the domestic household was a bond between us—was part of what made us family. There was a dread one felt about breaking that bond. And yet I could not grow inside the atmosphere of secrecy that had pervaded our lives and the lives of other families about us. Strange that I had always challenged the secrecy, always let something slip that should not be known growing up, yet as a writer staring into the solitary space of paper, I was bound, trapped in the fear that a bond is lost or broken in the telling. I did not want to be the traitor, the teller of family secrets—and yet I wanted to be a writer. Surely, I told myself, I could write a purely imaginative work—a work that would not hint at personal private realities. And so I tried. But always there were the intruding traces, those elements of real life however disguised. Claiming the freedom to grow as an imaginative writer was connected for me with having the courage to be open, to be able to tell the truth of one’s life as I had experienced it in writing. To talk about one’s life—that I could do. To write about it, to leave a trace—that was frightening.