Fifty pairs of eyes were not enough to get around that one woman with, she thought. Among them, must be one that was stone blind to her beauty. One wanted some most secret sense, fine as air, with which to steal through keyholes and surround her where she sat knitting, talking, sitting silent in the window alone; which took to itself and treasured up like the air which held the smoke of the steamer, her thoughts, her imaginations, her desires. What did the hedge mean to her, what did the garden mean to her, what did it mean to her when a wave broke?8
And this, precisely, is what Virginia the artist achieved; but the achievement is testimony not merely to the power of her art but to the passion of the daughter for the mother, her need above all to understand this woman, so adored and so unavailable to her; to understand, in all complexity, the differences that separated her mother from herself.
The woman activist or artist born of a family-centered mother may in any case feel that her mother cannot understand or sympathize with the imperatives of her life; or that her mother has preferred and valued a more conventional daughter, or a son. In order to study nursing, Florence Nightingale was forced to battle, in the person of her mother, the restrictive conventions of upper-class Victorian womanhood, the destiny of a life in drawing rooms and country houses in which she saw women going mad “for want of something to do.”9 The painter Paula Modersohn-Becker was, throughout her life, concerned—and fearful—that her mother might not accept the terms of her life. Writing in 1899 of her struggles with her work, she says: “I write this especially for mother. I think she feels that my life is one long continuous egoistic drunken joyousness.” On leaving her husband she writes: “I was so fearful that you might have been angry. . . . And now you are so good to me. . . . You, my dearest mother, stay by me and bless my life.” And, the year before her own death in childbirth:
. . . I am in continuous tumult, always . . . only sometimes resting, then moving again towards a goal . . . I beg of you to keep this in mind when at times I seem unloving. It means that all my strength is concentrated towards one thing only. I do not know whether this should be called egotism. If so, it is the most noble.
I put my head in the lap from which I came forth, and thank you for my life.10
Emily Dickinson’s famous statement that “I never had a mother” has been variously interpreted; but surely she meant in part that she felt herself deviant, set apart, from the kind of life her mother lived; that what most concerned her, her mother could not understand. Yet when her mother suffered a paralytic stroke in 1875, both Dickinson sisters nursed her tenderly until her death in 1882, and in a letter of that year Emily Dickinson writes:
. . . the departure of our Mother is so bleak a surprise, we are both benumbed . . . only the night before she died, she was happy and hungry and ate a little Supper I made her with so much enthusiasm, I laughed with delight . . .
Wondering with sorrow, how we could spare our lost Neighbors [her correspondents] our first Neighbor, our Mother, quietly stole away.
Plundered of her dear face, we scarcely know each other, and feel as if wrestling with a Dream, waking would dispel . . .
And the daughter’s letter ends with the poet’s cry: “Oh, Vision of Language!”11
“Between Sylvia and me existed—as between my own mother and me—a sort of psychic osmosis which, at times, was very wonderful and comforting; at other times an unwelcome invasion of privacy.” This is Aurelia Plath’s description of the relationship between herself and her daughter Sylvia, from the other side. The intensity of the relationship seems to have disturbed some readers of Plath’s Letters Home, an outpouring chiefly to her mother, written weekly or oftener, first from college and later from England. There is even a tendency to see this mother-daughter relationship as the source of Sylvia Plath’s early suicide attempt, her relentless perfectionism and obsession with “greatness.” Yet the preface to Letters Home reveals a remarkable woman, a true survivor; it was Plath’s father who set the example of self-destructiveness. The letters are far from complete‡ and until many more materials are released, efforts to write Plath biography and criticism are questionable at best. But throughout runs her need to lay in her mother’s lap, as it were, poems and prizes, books and babies, the longing for her mother when she is about to give birth, the effort to let Aurelia Plath know that her struggles and sacrifices to rear her daughter had been vindicated. In the last letters Sylvia seems to be trying to shield herself and Aurelia, an ocean away, from the pain of that “psychic osmosis.” “I haven’t the strength to see you for some time,” she writes, explaining why she will not come to America after her divorce. “The horror of what you saw and what I saw you see last summer is between us and I cannot face you again until I have a new life . . .” (October 9, 1962). Three days later: “Do tear up my last one . . . I have [had] an incredible change of spirit. . . . Every morning, when my sleeping pill wears off, I am up about five, in my study with coffee, writing like mad—have managed a poem a day before breakfast. . . . Terrific stuff, as if domesticity had choked me. . . . Nick [her son] has two teeth, stands, and is an angel . . .” (October 12, 1962).12§
Psychic osmosis. Desperate defenses. The power of the bond often denied because it cracks consciousness, threatens at times to lead the daughter back into “those secret chambers . . . becoming, like waters poured into one jar, inextricably the same, one with the object one adored . . .”13 Or, because there is no indifference or cruelty we can tolerate less, than the indifference or cruelty of our mothers.
In The Well of Loneliness, a novel by now notorious for its pathological-tragic view of lesbianism, Radclyffe Hall suggests an almost preternatural antipathy between Anna Gordon and her lesbian daughter Stephen. It is Stephen’s father who—through having read Krafft-Ebbing—“understands” her, and treats her as he might a tragically maimed son. Her mother views her from the first as a stranger, an interloper, an alien creature. Radclyffe Hall’s novel is painful as a revelation of the author’s self-rejection, her internalizing of received opinions against her own instincts. The crux of her self-hatred lies in her imagining no possible relationship between Anna the mother and Stephen the daughter. Yet there is one passage in which she suggests the longing for and possibility of connection between mother and daughter—a connection founded on physical sensation:
The scents of the meadows would move those two strangely. . . . Sometimes Stephen must tug at her mother’s sleeve sharply—intolerable to bear that thick fragrance alone!
One day she had said: “Stand still or you’ll hurt it—it’s all round us—it’s a white smell, it reminds me of you!” And then she had flushed, and had glanced up quickly, rather frightened in case she should find Anna laughing.
But her mother had looked at her curiously, gravely, puzzled by this creature who seemed all contradictions. . . . Anna had been stirred, as her child had been stirred, by the breath of the meadowsweet under the hedges; for in this way they were one, the mother and daughter . . . could they only have divined it, such simple things might have formed a link between them . . .
They had gazed at each other as though asking for something . . . the one from the other; then the moment had passed—they had walked on in silence, no nearer in spirit than before.14
A woman who feels an unbridgeable gulf between her mother and herself may be forced to assume that her mother—like Stephen’s—could never accept her sexuality. But, despite the realities of popular ignorance and bigotry about lesbians, and the fear that she has somehow “damaged” her daughter in the eyes of society, the mother may at some level—mute, indirect, oblique—want to confirm that daughter in her love for women. Mothers who have led perfectly traditional, heterosexual lives have welcomed their daughters’ women lovers and supported their domestic arrangements, though often denying, if asked, the nature of the relationship. A woman who fully and gladly accepts her love for another woman is likely to create an atmosphere in which her mother will not reject her.¶ But that acceptance has fi
rst to be found in ourselves; it does not come as an act of will.
For those of us who had children, and later came to recognize and act upon the breadth and depth of our feelings for women, a complex new bond with our mothers is possible. The poet Sue Silvermarie writes:
I find now, instead of a contradiction between lesbian and mother, there is an overlapping. What is the same between my lover and me, my mother and me, and my son and me is the motherbond—primitive, all-encompassing, and paramount.
In loving another woman I discovered the deep urge to both be a mother to and find a mother in my lover. At first I feared the discovery. Everything around me told me it was evil. Popular Freudianism cursed it as a fixation, a sign of immaturity. But gradually I came to have faith in my own needs and desires. . . . Now I treasure and trust the drama between two loving women, in which each can become mother and each become child.
It is most clear during lovemaking, when the separation of everyday life lifts for awhile. When I kiss and stroke and enter my lover, I am also a child re-entering my mother. I want to return to the womb-state of harmony, and also to the ancient world. I enter my lover but it is she in her orgasm who returns. I see on her face for a long moment, the unconscious bliss that an infant carries the memory of behind its shut eyes. Then when it is she who makes love to me . . . the intensity is also a pushing out, a borning! She comes in and is then identified with the ecstasy that is born. . . . So I too return to the mystery of my mother, and of the world as it must have been when the motherbond was exalted.
Now I am ready to go back and understand the one whose body actually carried me. Now I can begin to learn about her, forgive her for the rejection I felt, yearn for her, ache for her. I could never want her until I myself had been wanted. By a woman. Now I know what it is to feel exposed as a newborn, to be pared down to my innocence. To lie with a woman and give her the power of my utter fragility. To have that power be cherished. Now that I know, I can return to her who could not cherish me as I needed. I can return without blame, and I can hope that she is ready for me.15
In studying the diaries and letters of American women of thirty-five families, from the 1760s to the 1880s, the historian Carroll Smith-Rosenberg has traced a pattern—indeed, a network—of close, sometimes explicitly sensual, long-lasting female friendships characteristic of the period. Tender, devoted, these relationships persisted through separations caused by the marriage of one or both women, in the context of a “female world” distinctly separate from the larger world of male concerns, but in which women held a paramount importance in each others’ lives.
Smith-Rosenberg finds
. . . an intimate mother-daughter relationship . . . at the heart of this female world. . . . Central to these relationships is what might be described as an apprenticeship system . . . mothers and other older women carefully trained daughters in the arts of housewifery and motherhood . . . adolescent girls temporarily took over the household . . . and helped in childbirth, nursing and weaning . . .
Daughters were born into a female world. . . . As long as the mother’s domestic role remained relatively stable and few viable alternatives competed with it, daughters tended to accept their mother’s world and to turn automatically to other women for support and intimacy . . .
One could speculate at length concerning the absence of that mother-daughter hostility today considered almost inevitable to an adolescent’s struggle for autonomy. . . . It is possible that taboos against female aggression . . . were sufficiently strong to repress even that between mothers and their adolescent daughters. Yet these letters seem so alive and the interest of daughters in their mothers’ affairs so vital and genuine that it is difficult to interpret their closeness exclusively in terms of repression and denial.16
What the absence of such a female world meant on the newly opening frontier can be grasped from the expressions of loneliness and nostalgia of immigrant women from Europe, who had left such networks of friends, mothers, and sisters far behind. Many of these women remained year-in, year-out on the homesteads, waiting eagerly for letters from home, fighting a peculiarly female battle with loneliness. “If I only had a few good women friends, I would be entirely satisfied. Those I miss,” writes a Wisconsin woman in 1846. Instead of giving birth and raising children near her mother or other female relatives, the frontier mother had no one close to her with whom to share her womanly experiences; if cholera or diphtheria carried off a child or children, she would have to face the rituals of death and mourning on her own. Loneliness, unshared grief, and guilt often led to prolonged melancholy or mental breakdown.17 If the frontier offered some women a greater equality and independence, and the chance to break out of more traditional roles, it also, ironically, deprived many of the emotional support and intimacy of a female community; it tore them from their mothers.
It may also seem ironic that the growth of nineteenth-century feminism, the false “liberation” (to smoke cigarettes and sleep around) of the twentieth-century flapper, the beginnings of new options for women as birth control gained in acceptance and use, may have had the initial effect of weakening the mother-daughter tie (and with it, the network of intense female friendships based on a common life-pattern and common expectancies). By the 1920s, and with the increasing pervasiveness of Freudian thought, intense female friendships could be tolerated between schoolgirls as “crushes,” but were regarded as regressive and neurotic if they persisted into later life.**
4
“Matrophobia” as the poet Lynn Sukenick has termed it18 is the fear not of one’s mother or of motherhood but of becoming one’s mother. Thousands of daughters see their mothers as having taught a compromise and self-hatred they are struggling to win free of, the one through whom the restrictions and degradations of a female existence were perforce transmitted. Easier by far to hate and reject a mother outright than to see beyond her to the forces acting upon her. But where a mother is hated to the point of matrophobia there may also be a deep underlying pull toward her, a dread that if one relaxes one’s guard one will identify with her completely. An adolescent daughter may live at war with her mother yet borrow her clothes, her perfume. Her style of housekeeping when she leaves home may be a negative image of her mother’s: beds never made, dishes unwashed, in unconscious reversal of the immaculately tended house of a woman from whose orbit she has to extricate herself.
While, in Grace Paley’s words, “her son the doctor and her son the novelist” blame and ridicule the “Jewish mother,” Jewish daughters are left with all the panic, guilt, ambivalence, and self-hatred of the woman from whom they came and the woman they may become. “Matrophobia” is a late-arrived strain in the life of the Jewish daughter. Jewish women of the shtetl and ghetto and of the early immigrant period supported their Talmud-studying men, raised children, ran the family business, trafficked with the hostile gentile world, and in every practical and active way made possible the economic and cultural survival of the Jews. Only in the later immigrant generations, with a greater assimilationism and pressure for men to take over the economic sphere, were women expected to reduce themselves to perfecting the full-time mother-housewife role already invented by the gentile middle class.
“My mother would kill me if I didn’t marry.” “It would kill my mother if I didn’t marry.” In the absence of other absorbing and valued uses for her energy, the full-time “homemaker” has often sunk, yes, into the overinvolvement, the martyrdom, the possessive control, the chronic worry over her children, caricatured in fiction through the “Jewish mother.” But the “Jewish mother” is only one creation of the enforced withdrawal of nineteenth- and twentieth-century women from all roles save one.††
Matrophobia can be seen as a womanly splitting of the self, in the desire to become purged once and for all of our mothers’ bondage, to become individuated and free. The mother stands for the victim in ourselves, the unfree woman, the martyr. Our personalities seem dangerously to blur and overlap with our mothers’; and, in a
desperate attempt to know where mother ends and daughter begins, we perform radical surgery.
When her mother had gone, Martha cupped her hands protestingly over her stomach, and murmured to the creature within it that nothing would deform it, freedom would be its gift. She, Martha, the free spirit, would protect the creature from her, Martha, the maternal force; the maternal Martha, that enemy, would not be allowed to enter the picture.19
Thus Doris Lessing’s heroine, who has felt devoured by her own mother, splits herself—or tries to—when she realizes she, too, is to become a mother.
But even women with children, can exist in an uneasy wariness such as Kate Chopin depicts in The Awakening (1899):
. . . Mrs. Pontellier was not a mother-woman. The mother-women seemed to prevail that summer at Grand Isle. It was easy to know them, fluttering about with extended, protecting wings when any harm, real or imaginary, threatened their precious brood. They were women who idolized their children, worshipped their husbands, and esteemed it a holy privilege to efface’ themselves as individuals and grow wings as ministering angels.20
Edna Pontellier, seeking her own pleasure and self-realization (though still entirely through men) is seen as “inadequate” as a mother, although her children are simply more independent than most. Cora Sandel sets her heroine, Alberta, against an archetypal mother-woman, Jeanne. Alberta is a writer, “haunted in recent years [by the fear] of not appearing sufficiently motherly and domesticated.” She feels both reproached and wearied by the efficient, energetic Jeanne, who maintains an eye on everyone:
“Don’t forget your strengthening medicine, Pierre. Then you must lie down for awhile. You’ll work all the better for it. Marthe, you’ve scratched yourself; don’t touch anything before I’ve put iodine on it. You ought to look in at Mme. Poulain, Alberta, before she sells the rest of those sandshoes. . . . I don’t think Tot should be in the sun for such a long time, Alberta . . .21
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