Essential Essays

by Adrienne Rich

  Thus, women who identify themselves primarily as mothers may seem both threatening and repellent to those who do not, or who feel unequal to the mother-role as defined by Chopin. Lily Briscoe, too, rejects this role: She does not want to be Mrs. Ramsay, and her discovery of this is crucial for her.

  5

  The loss of the daughter to the mother, the mother to the daughter, is the essential female tragedy. We acknowledge Lear (father-daughter split), Hamlet (son and mother), and Oedipus (son and mother) as great embodiments of the human tragedy; but there is no presently enduring recognition of mother-daughter passion and rapture.

  There was such a recognition, but we have lost it. It was expressed in the religious mystery of Eleusis, which constituted the spiritual foundation of Greek life for two thousand years. Based on the mother-daughter myth of Demeter and Korê, this rite was the most forbidden and secret of classical civilization, never acted on the stage, open only to initiates who underwent long purification beforehand. According to the Homeric hymn to Demeter of the seventh century b.c., the mysteries were established by the goddess herself, on her reunion with her daughter Korê, or Persephone, who had been raped and abducted, in one version of the myth by Poseidon as lord of the underworld, or, in a later version, by Hades or Pluto, king of death. Demeter revenges herself for the loss of her daughter by forbidding the grain—of which she is queen—to grow.

  When her daughter is restored to her—for nine months of the year only—she restores fruitfulness and life to the land for those months. But the Homeric hymn tells us that Demeter’s supreme gift to humanity, in her rejoicing at Korê’s return, was not the return of vegetation, but the founding of the sacred ceremonies at Eleusis.

  The Eleusinian mysteries, inaugurated somewhere between 1400 and 1100 b.c., were considered a keystone to human spiritual survival. The Homeric hymn says:

  Blessed is he among men on earth who has beheld this. Never will he who has had no part in [the Mysteries] share in such things. He will be a dead man, in sultry darkness.‡‡

  Pindar and Sophocles also distinguish between the initiate and “all the rest,” the nonbeatified. And the Roman Cicero is quoted as saying of the Mysteries: “We have been given a reason not only to live in joy but also to die with better hope.” The role played by the Mysteries of Eleusis in ancient spirituality has been compared to that of the passion and resurrection of Christ. But in the resurrection celebrated by the Mysteries, it is a mother whose wrath catalyzes the miracle, a daughter who rises from the underworld.

  The rites of Eleusis were imitated and plagiarized in many parts of the ancient world. But the unique and sacred place, the only place where the true vision might be experienced, was the shrine at Eleusis itself. This was the site of the “Virgin’s Well” or fountain where Demeter is supposed to have sat, grieving for the loss of Korê, and where she returned to establish the ceremonies. This sanctuary was destroyed, after two thousand years, when the Goths under Alaric invaded Greece in 396 a.d.

  But for two thousand years, once a year in September, the mystai or initiands underwent purification by sea bathing, then walked in procession, carrying torches and bundles of myrtle, to Eleusis, where they finally had access to the “vision”—“the state of having seen.” Pigs (animals sacred to the Great Mother) were slaughtered in sacrifice to Demeter, and eaten in her honor as a first stage in initiation. Only initiands and hierophants were allowed into the innermost shrine, where Korê appeared, called up by the voice of a thundering gong. There, in a great blaze of light, the queen of the dead, Persephone, appeared with her infant son, a sign to human beings that “birth in death is possible . . . if they had faith in the Goddess.” The real meaning of the Mysteries was this reintegration of death and birth, at a time when patriarchal splitting may have seemed about to sever them entirely.

  At the end of the ceremonies, according to C. Kerenyi, whose study of Eleusis I have drawn on for most of the above, the hierophant turned to the initiates and showed them a cut-off ear of grain:

  All who had “seen” turned, at the sight of this “concrete thing,” as though turning back from the hereafter into this world, back to the world of tangible things, including grain. The grain was grain and not more, but it may well have summed up for the [initiates] everything that Demeter and Persephone had given to mankind: Demeter food and wealth, Persephone birth under the earth. To those who had seen Korê at Eleusis this was no mere metaphor.22

  A marble relief of the fifth century b.c., found at Eleusis, portrays the goddesses Demeter and Korê, and between them the figure of a boy, Triptolemus. Triptolemus is the “primordial man,” who must come to Demeter for her gift of the grain. According to one myth, he is converted from a violent, warlike way of life to a peaceful, agrarian one, through his initiation at Eleusis. He is supposed to have disseminated three commandments: “Honor your parents,” “Honor the gods with fruits,” and “Spare the animals.” But Kerenyi makes clear that Triptolemus is not an essential figure at Eleusis.23 Demeter as “tranquilly-enthroned” grain-goddess had existed in the archaic past, giver of fruits to man. But in her aspect as Goddess of the Mysteries she became much more: “she herself in grief and mourning entered upon the path of initiation and turned toward the core of the Mysteries, namely, her quality as her daughter’s mother.” (Emphasis mine.)24

  The separation of Demeter and Korê is an unwilling one; it is neither a question of the daughter’s rebellion against the mother, nor the mother’s rejection of the daughter. Eleusis seems to have been a final resurgence of the multiple aspects of the Great Goddess in the classical-patriarchal world. Rhea, the mother of Demeter, also appears in some of the myths; but also, Korê herself becomes a mother in the underworld.25 Jane Harrison considered the Mysteries to be founded on a much more ancient women’s rite, from which men were excluded, a possibility which tells us how endangered and complex the mother-daughter cathexis was, even before recorded history. Each daughter, even in the millennia before Christ, must have longed for a mother whose love for her and whose power were so great as to undo rape and bring her back from death. And every mother must have longed for the power of Demeter, the efficacy of her anger, the reconciliation with her lost self.

  6

  A strange and complex modern version of the Demeter-Korê myth resides in Margaret Atwood’s novel, Surfacing. Her narrator—a woman without a name, who says of herself that she “can’t love,” “can’t feel”—returns to the island in Canada where she and her family lived during World War II. She is searching for her father, who had been living there alone and has mysteriously disappeared. Her mother is dead. With her lover, and another couple, David and Anna—all more or less hippies in the American style, though professing hatred for all things Yankee—she returns to the place where her childhood was spent. She searches for clues to her father’s whereabouts, in the surrounding woods and the neglected cabin. She finds old albums and scrapbooks of her childhood, saved by her mother; her mother’s old leather jacket still swings from a hanger. She also finds sketches of Indian pictographs, made by her father. Her hippie friends are restless and bored in the primitive setting of the island, although they constantly express disgust with American technological imperialism. But it’s the men in the novel—Canadian as well as Yankee—who are destroying the natural world, who kill for the sake of killing, cut down the trees; David brutally dominates Anna, sex is exploitative. Finally the narrator learns that her father’s body has been found in the lake, drowned, evidently, while attempting to photograph some Indian wall-paintings. The others in her party are picked up by boat to return to civilization; she remains, determined to get back into connection with the place and its powers. She crawls naked through the woods, eating berries and roots, seeking her vision. Finally she returns to the cabin and its overgrown, half-wild garden, and there

  . . . I see her. She is standing in front of the cabin, her hand stretched out, she is wearing her grey leather jacket; her hair is long, down to her shoulders
, in the style of thirty years ago, before I was born; she is turned half away from me. I can see only the side of her face. She doesn’t move, she is feeding them: one perches on her wrist, another on her shoulder.

  I’ve stopped walking. At first I feel nothing except a lack of surprise: that is where she would be, she has been standing there all along. Then as I watch and it doesn’t change I’m afraid, I’m cold with fear, I’m afraid it isn’t real, paper doll cut by my eyes, burnt picture, if I blink she will vanish.

  She must have sensed it, my fear. She turns her head quietly and looks at me, past me, as though she knows something is there but she can’t quite see it . . .

  I go up to where she was. The jays are there in the trees, cawing at me; there are a few scraps on the feeding-tray still, they’ve knocked some to the ground. I squint up at them, trying to see her, trying to see which one she is.

  Later, she has a vision of her father in the same place:

  He has realized he was an intruder; the cabin, the fences, the fires and paths were violations; now his own fence excludes him, as logic excludes love. He wants it ended, the borders abolished, he wants the forest to flow back into the places his mind cleared: reparation . . .

  He turns toward me and it’s not my father. It is what my father saw, the thing you meet when you’ve stayed here too long alone . . .

  I see now that although it isn’t my father, it is what my father has become. I knew he wasn’t dead . . .

  Atwood’s last chapter begins:

  This above all, to refuse to be a victim. Unless I can do that I can do nothing. I have to recant, give up the old belief that I am powerless and because of it nothing I can do will ever hurt anyone. . . . The word games, the winning and losing games are finished, at the moment there are no others but they will have to be invented. . . .26

  She is no “free woman,” no feminist; her way of dealing with male-identification, the struggle with a male culture, has been to numb herself, to believe she “can’t love.” But Surfacing is not a programmatic novel. It is the work of a poet, filled with animistic and supernatural materials. The search for the father leads to reunion with the mother, who is at home in the wilderness, Mistress of the Animals. In some obscure, subconscious way, Atwood’s narrator begins to recognize and accept her own power through her moment of vision, her brief, startling visitation from her mother. She has worked her way back—through fasting and sacrifice—beyond patriarchy. She cannot stay there: the primitive (her father’s solution, the male—ultimately the fascist—solution) is not the answer; she has to go and live out her existence in this time. But she has had her illumination: she has seen her mother.

  7

  The woman who has felt “unmothered” may seek mothers all her life—may even seek them in men. In a women’s group recently, someone said: “I married looking for a mother”; and a number of others in the group began agreeing with her. I myself remember lying in bed next to my husband, half-dreaming, half-believing, that the body close against mine was my mother’s.§§ Perhaps all sexual or intimate physical contact brings us back to that first body. But the “motherless” woman may also react by denying her own vulnerability, denying she has felt any loss or absence of mothering. She may spend her life proving her strength in the “mothering” of others—as with Mrs. Ramsay, mothering men, whose weakness makes her feel strong, or mothering in the role of teacher, doctor, political activist, psychotherapist. In a sense she is giving to others what she herself has lacked; but this will always mean that she needs the neediness of others in order to go on feeling her own strength. She may feel uneasy with equals—particularly women.

  Few women growing up in patriarchal society can feel mothered enough; the power of our mothers, whatever their love for us and their struggles on our behalf, is too restricted. And it is the mother through whom patriarchy early teaches the small female her proper expectations. The anxious pressure of one female on another to conform to a degrading and dispiriting role can hardly be termed “mothering,” even if she does this believing it will help her daughter to survive.

  Many daughters live in rage at their mothers for having accepted, too readily and passively, “whatever comes.” A mother’s victimization does not merely humiliate her, it mutilates the daughter who watches her for clues as to what it means to be a woman. Like the traditional foot-bound Chinese woman, she passes on her own affliction. The mother’s self-hatred and low expectations are the binding-rags for the psyche of the daughter. As one psychologist has observed:

  When a female child is passed from lap to lap so that all the males in the room (father, brother, acquaintances) can get a hard-on, it is the helpless mother standing there and looking on that creates the sense of shame and guilt in the child. One woman at the recent rape conference in New York City testified that her father put a series of watermelon rinds in her vagina when she was a child to open it up to his liking, and beat her if she tried to remove them. Yet what that woman focuses her rage on today is that her mother told her, “Never say a word about it to anyone.”

  Another young girl was gang-raped in her freshman year of high school and her mother said to her, “You have brought disgrace on the family. You are no good anymore.” . . . When she talks about these things now, the pain is as great as if it all happened yesterday.27

  It is not simply that such mothers feel both responsible and powerless. It is that they carry their own guilt and self-hatred over into their daughters’ experiences. The mother knows that if raped she would feel guilty; hence she tells her daughter she is guilty. She identifies intensely with her daughter, but through weakness, not through strength. Freudian psychoanalysis has viewed the rage of daughters toward their mothers as resentment for not having been given a penis. Clara Thompson, however, remarked, in a suprisingly early political view of “penis envy” that “the penis is the sign of the person in power in one particular competitive set-up in this culture, that between man and woman. . . . So, the attitude called penis envy is similar to the attitude of any underprivileged group toward those in power.”28 A contemporary psychoanalyst points out that the daughter’s rage at her mother is more likely to arise from her mother having relegated her to second-class status, while looking to the son (or father) for the fulfillment of her own thwarted needs.29 But even where there is no preferred brother or father, a daughter can feel rage at her mother’s powerlessness or lack of struggle—because of her intense identification and because in order to fight for herself she needs first to have been both loved and fought for.¶¶

  The nurture of daughters in patriarchy calls for a strong sense of self-nurture in the mother. The psychic interplay between mother and daughter can be destructive, but there is no reason why it is doomed to be. A woman who has respect and affection for her own body, who does not view it as unclean or as a sex-object, will wordlessly transmit to her daughter that a woman’s body is a good and healthy place to live. A woman who feels pride in being female will not visit her self-depreciation upon her female child. A woman who has used her anger creatively will not seek to suppress anger in her daughter in fear that it could become, merely, suicidal.

  All this is extremely difficult in a system which has persistently stolen women’s bodies and egos from us. And what can we say of mothers who have not simply been robbed of their egos but who—alcoholic, drugged, or suicidal—are unavailable to their daughters? What of a woman who has to toil so hard for survival that no maternal energy remains at the end of the day, as she numbly, wearily picks up her child after work? The child does not discern the social system or the institution of motherhood, only a harsh voice, a dulled pair of eyes, a mother who does not hold her, does not tell her how wonderful she is. And what can we say of families in which the daughter feels that it was her father, not her mother, who gave her affection and support in becoming herself? It is a painful fact that a nurturing father, who replaces rather than complements a mother, must be loved at the mother’s expense, whatever the reasons for the m
other’s absence. He may be doing his best, giving everything that a man can give, but the mother is twice-lost, if love for him takes the place of love for her.

  “I have always gotten more support from men than from women”: a cliché of token women, and an understandable one, since we do identify gratefully with anyone who seems to have strengthened us. But who has been in a position to strengthen us? A man often lends his daughter the ego-support he denies his wife; he may use his daughter as stalking-horse against his wife; he may simply feel less threatened by a daughter’s power, especially if she adores him. A male teacher may confirm a woman student while throttling his wife and daughters. Men have been able to give us power, support, and certain forms of nurture, as individuals, when they chose; but the power is always stolen power, withheld from the mass of women in patriarchy. And, finally, I am talking here about a kind of strength which can only be one woman’s gift to another, the bloodstream of our inheritance. Until a strong line of love, confirmation, and example stretches from mother to daughter, from woman to woman across the generations, women will still be wandering in the wilderness.

  8

  What do we mean by the nurture of daughters? What is it we wish we had, or could have, as daughters; could give, as mothers? Deeply and primally we need trust and tenderness; surely this will always be true of every human being, but women growing into a world so hostile to us need a very profound kind of loving in order to learn to love ourselves. But this loving is not simply the old, institutionalized, sacrificial, “mother-love” which men have demanded: we want courageous mothering. The most notable fact that culture imprints on women is the sense of our limits. The most important thing one woman can do for another is to illuminate and expand her sense of actual possibilities. For a mother, this means more than contending with the reductive images of females in children’s books, movies, television, the schoolroom. It means that the mother herself is trying to expand the limits of her life. To refuse to be a victim: and then to go on from there.