Electra or Persephone?
Matricide in Rebecca Solnit and Jeanette Winterson
Else Werring
MA European Languages 60 ECTS
Department of Literature, Area Studies and European Languages Faculty of Humanities
University of Oslo
Supervisor: Associate professor Bruce Barnhart
November 2020
Electra or Persephone?
Matricide in Rebecca Solnit and Jeanette Winterson
Else Werring
ENG 4394- Master’s Thesis in Literature in English (60 credits)
Abstract
This thesis is a study of two autobiographical ‘matricides’: Rebecca Solnit’s The Faraway Nearby (2014) and Jeanette Winterson’s Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal (2011).
It engages both texts with Suzette Henke’s theory of ‘Scriptotherapy’.’Matricide’ denotes a re-working of one’s internalized mother and may be read as a side- kick to Freud/Lacan, for whom individuation revolves around patricide - and Jocasta’s voice is silent. Feminists have advocated the myth of Demeter and Persephone as a better model for understanding
mother/daughter relations. On this scheme, individuation is a process recurring through life.
While Julia Kristeva thinks matricide necessary, Luce Irigaray dreams of a post-patriarchal world in which the need for it is eradicated. Chapter one shows the relevance of Kristevan thought, while chapters two and three reach more Irigarayan conclusions, because underneath each mother’s corpse, Solnit and Winterson are battling patriarchal distinctions between space/time and body/mind. I argue that both Solnit’s and Winterson’s matricides epitomize moves from ‘linguistic turn’- toward a ‘materialist feminism’ and may ultimately be read as Deleuzian ‘becomings’. This builds on the work of Rosi Braidotti, Elizabeth Grosz and Tamsin Lorraine, who fuse Irigaray’s thought with that of Gilles Deleuze. I also engage the memoirs in dialogue with Jean Francois Lyotard, Elizabeth Freeman, Melanie Klein, Donald Winnicott and Adrienne Rich.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank my supervisor, Associate Professor Bruce Barnhart, for trusting me to find my own way, and for searching out silver linings when I got stuck.
A heartfelt thanks to Edvard, Astri and Sam, for never letting me forget that I am an embodied mind.
Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION ... 1
CHAPTER 1: MATRICIDE ... 7
1.1 Electra or Persephone? ... 7
1.2 Winterson ... 12
1.3 Solnit ... 18
1.4 Conclusion ... 25
CHAPTER 2: SPACE/TIME ... 27
2.1 A Rhythm of One’s Own ... 27
2.2 Winterson ... 33
2.3 Solnit ... 44
2.4 Conclusion ... 54
CHAPTER 3: BODY/MIND ... 55
3.1 Becoming-Alice ... 55
3.2 Winterson ... 61
3.3 Solnit ... 80
3.4 Conclusion ... 94
CONCLUSION: ... 96
BIBLIOGRAPHY: ... 100
1
INTRODUCTION
‘And the one doesn’t stir without the other. But we do not move together. When the one of us comes into the world, the other goes underground. When one carries life, the other dies. And what I wanted from you, Mother, was this: that in giving me life, you still remain alive’
(Luce Irigaray, And The One Doesn’t Stir Without The Other)
This thesis is a study of two autobiographical ‘matricides’, namely Rebecca Solnit’s The Faraway Nearby (2014) and Jeanette Winterson’s Why Be Happy When You Could Be
Normal (2011). ‘Matricide’ sounds dramatic, but the sort of murder in question is one where the internalized mother survives her daughter’s symbolic destruction. Both memoirs under investigation are written by daughters who – in middle age - lay their mothers’ ghosts to rest through autobiographical writing. These mother/daughter plots are cyclical – and in cyclical time, death means re-birth. It is not only a question of mothers’ death/rebirth, however, but about how each daughter herself, through matricide, lets her own self die in order to be reborn.
Adrienne Rich states, in Of Woman Born (1986), that women often write to ‘recapture the intense attachment to her own mother’s body, an embodied memory that exists prior to – and beyond, language’. This is a subversive memory, argues Rich (Boulos-Walker 1998, 160).
- Why subversive, rather than simply reactionary? Because, it is arguable, culture wants us to forget our messy entanglements with maternal bodies. Even though the theories I build upon in this thesis are severely critical of Freud, they are indebted to the Freudian insight that ‘the ego is first and foremost a bodily ego’ (Grosz 2018, 85). Material feminist Elizabeth Grosz thinks an important task for feminism is to think beyond the body/mind distinction and that much feminist thought fails to do so. Even if Freud also fails at this, a return to Freudian incarnation provides a relief, to Grosz, from ‘conventional… theories of subjectivity’ (83).
The Freudian body, however, is a masculine body, and his theory of individuation concerns fathers and sons. Thus, asks Marianne Hirsch:
‘In asking where the story of Jocasta is in the story of Oedipus, I am asking not only where the stories of women are in men’s plots, but where the stories of mothers are in the plots of sons and daughters’ (Hirsch 1989, 4).
2
‘Matricide’ may be understood in two interconnected ways: one is the individuation process each person goes through – in order to become a self, one must to some extent break with one’s parents. The other is the socio-historical phenomenon of how women, men and individuation is understood in the cultural imaginary. Freud relates the individual to the culture at large : patricide’ happens both in the individual and in the cultural imaginary.
Feminist reworkings insist that his ‘patricide’ glosses over an earlier ‘matricide’, a crime that has been committed, then covered up, creating a wound that we cannot mourn properly because it has been given no symbolic representation (Wieland 2000,). Melanie Klein goes a long way toward putting words to this matricide in her theories of pre-Oedipal ambivalence, recurring through adult life (Klein 1990).
The term popularly associated with ‘matricide’ in psychoanalytic theory is the ‘Electra complex’, a term often erroneously attributed to Freud. In fact, it was Jung who coined the term ‘Electra complex’, which was rejected by Freud. Freud thought the Oedipus myth appropriate to describe both boys’ and girls’ individuation, but this process is more complicated for girls, who never completely separate from their mothers (Eliot 1994, 15/
Chodrow 1989, 69). After Freud’s rejection, Jung too abandoned the Electra idea (Kilmartin 1997, 269). As we shall see, however, post-Freudian psychoanalytic feminism does not altogether want to abandon the Electra : she represents the covered up crime committed by patriarchal thought, the one Freud and Lacan don’t want to admit to.
Post-Freudian psychoanalysis has criticised the androcentrism of Freudian theory, where femininity is conceived of as little more than a negation of ‘normal’ male sexuality (Eliot 1994, 16). Bracha Ettinger, for instance, argues that women still suffer from ‘interpretations concerning penis lack- and envy (Ettinger 2019, 124). For Ettinger, a more fitting metaphor for mother/daughter relationships than Oedipus/Electra is the myth of Demeter and
Persephone. While the Freudian/Lacanian narrative is a linear story of ‘progress’, the re- worked feminist narrative is cyclical. Demeter is the goddess of fertility and harvest, and the mother of Persephone. One day, Persephone is captured by Hades. Through Demeter’s grief the earth becomes barren, and Zeus intervenes to prevent disaster. Hades tells Persephone she can leave, but then offers her a pomegranate – when Persephone willingly eats the seeds, this symbolizes her sexual union with Hades and ensures that she will return to the underworld after a stay with her mother (Hurst 2012,177). From then on, Persephone spends one third of her time with Hades in the underworld, and the rest of her time with her mother. Mother and daughter are separated but the divide is not permanent (Hirsch 1989,35). In the words of
3 Marianne Hirsch, ‘the repeated cycle relies neither on murder, nor reconciliation, but on continued opposition’ (ibid,36).
For Melanie Klein and Julia Kristeva, however, Electra is not altogether out of the picture.
Klein’s paper called ‘Some reflections on the Oresteia’ (Klein 1963) became influential to Kristeva, who incorporated the notion of matricide into her theory of ‘abjection’ (Kristeva 1985). Donald Winnicott’s theory also builds on Klein and allows for the term ‘matricide’
because he sees the symbolic destruction of mothers, and mothers’ subsequent survival, as integral to emotional health (Winnicott 1971, 2005). The sort of ‘matricide’ in question here, therefore, is one where mothers survive their daughters’ destruction. As will become clear, both Winterson and Solnit have gone through several such ‘destructions’ and ‘regenerations’
of their internalized mothers. What I find interesting about the works studied in this thesis is that they both epitomize ‘matricides’ conducted at around 50 years of age after several previous such ‘killings’ have already taken place. As Winterson notes, ‘Strangely, even when we have stopped growing physically, we seem to have to keep growing emotionally…Rigidity never works’(34). The mother/daughter work continues affecting daughters’ lives into
adulthood, long after their mothers are physically dead and gone. Why?
This is where Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray reach diametrically opposed conclusions.
While for Kristeva, building on Melanie Klein, daughters’ matricides are necessary, in a sense, for feminism to progress, because matricides create and re-create daughters’ continued emotional health, Irigaray’s theory provides a glaring critique of what she calls the western
‘male imaginary’ which is what has made ‘matricide’ necessary in the first place. The whole of western culture, argues Irigaray, is founded on matricide. But in a different world – a world which it is our task to fight for – this would be unnecessary. My thesis illustrates how both Kristevan and Irigarayan conclusions can be drawn from Solnit’s and Winterson’s memoirs.
As we shall see, I think these texts epitomize each daughter’s pull beyond ‘linguistic turn’
feminism in order to retrace some material ‘excess’ that has been glossed over. Both texts epitomize a desire to return to the body – through the mother - after having tried, for a while, to ‘transcend’ as minds - but finding that something is yet amiss.
Solnit and Winterson’s matricides are not all about seeing mothers merely as ‘objects’
rather than ‘subjects’ – This is what feminists have criticized psychoanalytic theory for (e.g Hirsch 1989). They make an important point: there is an overwhelming tendency to describe mothers from the ‘outside’ rather than letting them speak for themselves. From an Irigarayan perspective, however, this judgement assumes a too strict distinction between subjects and
4 objects, mothers and daughters. Thinking matricide may also be a search for lost origins - a re-imagining one’s mother as a subject, part of whom goes on living inside her daughter long after the mother herself is gone. Allowing for Kleinian ambivalence to resurface may release empathy and compassion alongside more ‘thorny’ affects. Both Winterson’s and Solnit’s memoirs may be accused of ‘mother blaming’. Building on Klein and Kristeva, however, I show in chapter one how allowing for anger to re-surface is a precondition for rediscovering each author’s ability to create, love and connect. In the following chapters, however, I dig beneath each mother’s corpse, where I find proof of a more Irigarayan conclusion: matricide might not be necessary in a post-patriarchal world, because what Solnit and Winterson are trying to get rid of by killing the mother are certain patriarchal structures embedded in language. My thesis builds on the Lacanian insight that becoming a self is about accessing language in some way or other. If our first road to selfhood has harmed us, one way to heal is to re-position ourselves- in-language. The ‘talking cure’ has long been acknowledged as a solution, but as these texts show, there also exists a ‘writing cure’.
The first chapter of my thesis explores Solnit’s and Winterson’s texts in light of the move from Freud to psychoanalytic feminism – from the Freudian focus on ‘patricide’ to the post-Freudian emphasis on the mother. ‘Matricide’ sounds anti-feminist, but the idea that a person’s individuation requires a symbolic killing of the (internalized) mother is about acknowledging - instead of denying - the power of the mother. As we shall see, individual matricides may be read against a background of feminist theory in the sense that mothers and daughters belong to different generations of feminism. The two texts explored in this thesis also point to matricide as a roundabout sort of ‘patricide’, because re-working the internalized mother attempts to rid each daughter of cultural values/ideals that the mother could not help but embody. While Virginia Woolf had to kill ‘the angel of the house’ in order to write, Solnit and Winterson’s maternal depictions are anything but angelic. Intriguingly, however, what lies beneath their mothers’ corpses are each daughter’s battle with patriarchal
(mis)understandings of (dis)embodied selves in space/time.
The understanding of ‘matricide’ as a version of ‘patricide’ makes sense if linked to Adrienne Rich’s distinction between motherhood as ‘experience’ versus ‘institution’. In Of Woman Born (1986), Rich distinguishes ‘between two meanings of motherhood, one superimposed on the other: the potential relationship of each woman to her powers of reproduction and to her children; and the institution – which aims at ensuring that that
potential – and all women – shall remain under male control’ (7). She relates a vivid memory
5 from a summer holiday where she went without her husband to Vermont, and ‘without a male adult in the house’, she relinquished the ‘duties of the clock, schedules, naps, regular
mealtimes…’. Rich and her three sons ‘fell into what I felt to be a delicious and sinful rhythm… like castaways on an island of mothers and children.’ (194-5). Had Solnit and Winterson’s mothers lived in a post-patriarchal world, where allowing themselves ‘delicious and sinful rhythms’ did not require fathers to be absent, it is arguable that they would have been better mothers. As it turned out, however, these mothers – willingly or not - passed on their ‘disempowered’ identities to their daughters – who write in a refusal to be – in Solnit’s words: ‘the helpless gender together’.
Chapter two examines why, in both Solnit’s and Winterson’s texts, time and space seem so important. Both are postmodern writers, rejecting a linear time conception. Their narratives are cyclical, but they both fuse cyclical and linear time by writing cyclical narratives of progress, or spiral-narratives. Matricide becomes a form of Lyotardian anamnesis – and ‘forward repetition’ – as in a Nietzschean eternal return allowing for a release of difference rather than sameness. Both texts also display a longing to still the
demand for progress, to stop, breathe - even to let themselves ‘die’ - in order to be reborn. The memoirs display a nostalgia, one might think, for what Kristeva termed ‘monumental time’, where time and space intersect – a room of their own in which to feel free. In Irigarayan terms, they seem to be longing for a long lost ‘something’ that there are no words for within the symbolic order. However, Kristeva’s concept of ‘monumental time’ is not entirely fitting to understand Solnit and Winterson’s nostalgia, because ‘monumental time’ stands still. By contrast, Solnit and Winterson write to construct ‘rhythms of their own’ – as in nomadic spaces. Both authors uproot themselves by allowing for what Elizabeth Freeman calls
‘temporal drag’. Such ‘deterritorialization’ is painful. In order to cope, both writers need a home-away-from-home – one, in Winterson’s words, ‘outside’ of time –They find this ‘home’
in myths, fairy tales, reading and writing. Interestingly, myths and fairy tales perform what Donald Winnicott states as the essential mothering function, which is mirroring. I think, therefore, that Solnit and Winterson’s ‘rhythms of their own’ are versions Winnicottian
‘potential space’.
Chapter 3 examines how both Solnit’s and Winterson’s texts display a fight between head and heart; ‘mind’ and ‘body’. Their mothers (and cultures) have taught them to prioritize the mind over the body and assume that body/mind can be separated – Language has operated on this assumption since antiquity but the body/mind distinction has long since been refuted
6 in theory. Even so, it is still hard to get rid of. Traditionally, ‘masculinity’ was tied to elevated minds, while ‘femininity’ was tied to ‘mundane’/fixed-idealized bodies. This is why it has been so important for feminism to invoke a strict distinction between sex and gender, so as to transcend the trappings of female embodiment. Recent developments in feminist thought, however, have argued that this distinction needs further nuancing, and I believe the reasons behind this to be reflected in Solnit’s and Winterson’s matricidal memoirs. While both have been raised by mothers intent on erasing body in favour of ‘mind’, both daughters feel the other way around. In chapter three, I explore how Solnit’s and Winterson’s matricides epitomize moves from ‘linguistic turn- to materialist feminism; a move, I argue, that releases Deleuzian ‘lines of flight’ and ultimately becomings-woman, -girl, and -animal. But Solnit’s
‘becoming’ seems to get stuck in a way that Winterson’s does not. The Faraway Nearby may be read as illustrative of the feminist critique of Deleuze, namely that ‘becoming’ is not the same for a man as a woman – or, as in this case, the same for two different women. This is because we all have different starting points. In Winterson’s words: ‘in order to leave home, one must first have a home to leave’.
While Kristeva argued for women to fuse 1st and 2nd wave feminism: to bring their
‘cyclical’ minds into the symbolic (linear) realm, Irigaray wanted women to fight for the right to maintain their difference outside the symbolic order. Kristeva and Irigaray have both been accused of essentialism but we might argue that what these feminists are intent on is not to equate women with ‘mere’ bodies, for that pre-supposes a sharp distinction between body and mind. Yes, they do think women’s body- IQ has been silenced in language. Men too are oppressed in this way, but individuation has historically been harder for women. The reason for this has nothing to do with biology and everything to do with culture. Yet insofar as bodies and cultures cannot be strictly separated from one another, there will always be a corporeal excess in culture and vice versa. I think theories that present identity as ‘up for grabs’ and bodies as blank slates with which we are free to do whatever we want conceal fundamental aspects of lived experience. While Solnit and Winterson’s texts both display a longing for some ‘corporeal’ space outside of linear time, this does not mean that they want a return to an essentialist pastoral ‘Utopia’. Rather, they are carving out for themselves what Donald Winnicott calls ‘potential space’ in acts of post matricidal self- mothering. Another way of reading their texts is that they are Deleuzian quests to re-imagine a mode of living that pushes beyond the body/mind distinction.
7
CHAPTER 1: MATRICIDE
‘For Love… has two faces; one white, the other black; two bodies; one smooth, the other hairy. It has two hands, two feet, two tails, two indeed, of every member and each one is the exact opposite of the other. Yet, so strictly are they joined together that you cannot separate them’ (Virginia Woolf, Orlando).
1.1 Electra or Persephone?
As we saw in the introduction, ‘The Electra Complex’ is not really a psychoanalytic concept, because Freud does not want to admit to something like ‘matricide’ having taken place. His theory concerns fathers, sons and patricide. In the words of Christina Wieland:
‘The understanding which emerges (always within western culture) is of a masculine psychic structure…founded on a psychic murder, the murder of the early mother, and the subsequent elevation of the father to custodian of the
psyche. The feminine psyche emerges as a response to this masculine terror of the mother’(Wieland 2000,9).
The Freudian Oedipus Complex occurs between 3-5 years, when boys are thought to discover that half the population lack a penis, and assume that this is a result of castration.
This is coupled with experiences of intense attachment to the mother and a rivalry with the father for her attention. The boy comes to fear that the father may castrate him like he probably has the mother. The Oedipus complex is resolved when the boy introjects his father’s authority into the super-Ego and enters the ‘phallic stage’, where he will eventually renounce the mother and replace her with another love object (Trotta et al 2018, 3-4). This is a theory about boys, therefore. Female sexuality is a ‘dark continent’ and girls are ‘not-boys’:
the girl discovers penises, assumes she has been castrated and develops penis-envy. She feels inferior and blames her mother for this lack. She substitutes her penis-wish with the wish for a baby and transfers her love for the mother to the father, in the hope that he might give her a baby (ibid 4). Since the dissolution of the Oedipus Complex involves the identification with the same-sex parent, however, the girl cannot, like the boy, relinquish her attachment to the mother – instead, she must identify with the mother with whom she continues to have an ambivalent attachment. (Chodrow 2006, 234). This means that the girl’s super-ego is an internalized ‘castrated, self-denying subjectivity’ and an object of ambivalent love and hate (ibid). In spite of his emphasis on girls’ continued attachment to the mother, Freudian theory
8 stresses the girls’ resentment towards the mother for her ‘castrated’ state (ibid) resulting in what may be interpreted as an unrepresented ‘matricide’. In Lacan’s theory, we can also detect a ‘matricide’ because the child must give up its mother, so to speak, to enter into the
‘symbolic order’, where femininity remains unrepresented. Lacan replaces the Freudian penis with ‘the Phallus’ – which means the signifier of whatever the mother desires apart from her baby. The mother/girl do not per se desire a penis– but the baby desires that the mother be ever present and realizes to her chagrin that she cannot. She assumes that this is because the mother wants ‘the phallus’ which exists elsewhere. Lacan also refers to this as ‘the paternal metaphor’ and ‘the Name of the Father’ – these terms do not refer to a flesh and blood father, but to whatever the mother desires, apart from her baby. When the child enters the ‘symbolic order’ it experiences this as ‘castration’ as it must renounce its hope for a blissful union with the mother and identify as a separate individual. The Lacanian Oedipus complex is what takes place as the child enters into language, therefore (Bailly et al. 2018, 100).
As already mentioned, Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray respond to this in different ways. On Kristeva’s reading, ridding oneself of one’s mother ‘becomes the sine qua non for accessing the symbol’ (Kristeva 2001, 134). This means that the infant’s entry into language is conditioned on matricide. This is not entirely destructive, however. In Black Sun (1989), Kristeva argues that aggressive impulses towards the mother, if repressed, may be turned against oneself and produce depression (Wieland 2000, 11). Kristeva reworks Kleinian theory into her own theory of abjection (Kristeva 1982). The abject is the in-between state between subject and object, what we cannot logically box in. Corpses (human or thing?) and rotten food (nutrition or poison?) are examples of the abject. They confront us with uneasiness because remind us of embodiment/mortality and we cannot place them properly The same sort of uneasiness confronts us, argues Kristeva, in relation to mothers (57-59): my mother is both me and not-me. We crave a mothers’ love, yet fear being engulfed by her. This sounds
negative, but the theory of abjection is coupled with a belief in the immense power of mothers and an acknowledgement of the maternal that has been erased by Freud (ibid 57). Kristeva argues that a re-working of the mother/daughter relationship tends to happen after daughters become mothers themselves (Stabat Mater,1977). I believe, however, that this ‘becoming- mother’ does not have to mean the physical act of giving birth. One way of re-actualizing Kristeva’s point is to read her ‘becoming-mother’ as a way of ‘giving birth to oneself’ through writing, caring for others, teaching or creating – I think both Solnit and Winterson ‘give birth to themselves’ in such a way. Kristeva argues that women pay a high price for entering into
9 the symbolic order, where they must leave aspects of their ‘feminine’ generativity behind. For her, it is necessary to break with the symbiotically-maternal and move into language. But we need continually to rethink the symbolic structure we inhabit, because it is founded on 2500 years of patriarchal thought, sometimes hidden between phrasings that we take for granted.
Luce Irigaray argues that ‘matricide’, as symbolized through the Oresteia, portrays patriarchy’s victory over matriarchy. Freud’s patricidal theory on the ‘primal horde’ in Moses and Monotheism and Totem and Taboo describes patricide as a founding act for society – but this glosses over the more ancient murder – ‘that of the woman-mother’ (Green 2012, 3).
Freudian theory erases the maternal contribution to selfhood. If the mother is to be brought out of her invisible confinement and accorded symbolic representation, the relation between mothers and daughters needs to be rehabilitated. A central part of this process is to develop a
‘feminine imaginary’ through a re-working of myths (ibid, 5). As we shall see, both Solnit and Winterson are deeply engaged in the weaving of their own mother/daughter plots into myths, fables and fairy tales in a quest to tell their own stories rather than ‘be told by them’.
Irigaray thinks western culture has reduced women to the maternal function, while at the same time denying this function any real symbolic value (ibid, 18). She forefronts the ‘feminine’ as
‘fluidity’, explicitly referring to the intrauterine encounter – but Irigaray’s embodied concepts are metaphors for something more abstract : feminine selves are ‘fluid’ - less rigid, more open to change of persepctive – the ‘two lips’ speak together allowing thought to move beyond binary oppositions, in contrast to the one-dimensional ‘phallus’. These ‘feminine’ modes of existence are desirable goals also for men. The placental metaphor allows for a view of individuation that is neither a merger – nor a need for an ‘atomized’ existence - but a relational mode of existence allowing for mediation by a ‘third term’ (ibid 13) – Irigaray imagines a ‘sensible transcendental’, equipping her readers to translate her bodily metaphors , giving rise to a ‘corporeal logic’ (Lorraine 1999) that renders utopian dreams political. As we shall see, many aspects of this ontology fit well with a ‘Deleuzian logic’ as well. The term
‘sensible transcendental’ is , I think, meant for de Beauvoir’s readers to understand that it is possible to ‘transcend’ feminine entrapment in a manner in a less cerebral way, more aligned with feminine embodiment than de Beauvoir’s philosophy allows for.
Both Kristeva’s and Irigaray’s thoughts on matricide are compatible with the myth of Demeter and Persephone. Granted, Persephone never kills Demeter, but the two are separated and re-united at regular intervals ; and this constitutes an ongoing process . The difference between Kristeva and Irigaray lies in the fact that Kristeva seems more interested in the
10 breaks of this process, while Irigaray is more concerned with the continuity it represents.
Even if my argument will eventually align itself with Irigaray, in this first chapter, I show how Kristeva’s theory is more fruitful than Irigaray’s as concerns these particular matricides.
This chapter shows how Winterson and Solnit’s mother/daughter plots may be read as
‘therapeutic texts’ mourning the lost mother, how this mourning is a work of love where embracing ambivalence is crucial for them in order to release creativity and connection.
Autobiography as Scriptotherapy
In autobiography, argues James Olney, experience is transformed into literature.
(Olney 2016, 7). One might argue that all literature does this, but in studying fiction, there is always the risk of committing the intentional fallacy. Autobiographies may more easily lend themselves to psychoanalytic readings, not necessarily of the authors themselves but of the implied authors as they emerge from the texts.
Suzette Henke argues that autobiographical writing may be just as effective as psychoanalysis in the healing of trauma, since healing through psychoanalysis works by a process of re-memory rather than one of transference (Henke 2000, xi). Henke’s view of the therapeutic process accords in part with that of Donald Winnicott, who explains that the therapist is there – not as someone who makes clever interpretations, but as a mirror for the patient (Winnicott 2005, 158). It seems likely that it is this mirroring that takes place through autobiographical writing, but in that case, the writer functions both as analyst and anaylsand.
‘Scriptotherapy’ refers to ‘the process of writing out and writing through traumatic experience in the mode of therapeutic re-enactment’(ibid, xii). According to Henke, three selves emerge from a ‘therapeutic’ text: (a) the authorial consciousness, or narrating I, (b) the early,
fragmented version of the self, and (c) ‘the ostensibly coherent subject of utterance evinced through the process of narrative disclosure’ (ibid, xv). Henke is not entirely clear about the difference between (b) and (c). As I understand it, both correspond to a narrated I, but while (b) is discovered, (c) is created. This view echoes Georges Gusdorf’s emphasis on
autobiography as ‘a projection from the interior realm into exterior space where in becoming incarnated it achieves consciousness of itself’ (Gusdorf 2016 27). In the words of Virginia Woolf writes: ‘It is only by putting it into words that I make it whole; this wholeness means it has lost its power to hurt me’(Woolf 2015, 85). Solnit and Winterson, arguably, both ‘re- create themselves’ through autobiographical writing.
Mother-blaming
11 In feminist theory, ‘mother blaming’ refers to the common practice of assuming that the mother is the problem, almost no matter what has gone wrong with someone. According to Paula Caplan, there are ‘myths about mothers that allow us to take anything a mother might do and turn it into evidence of something “bad” about her’ (Caplan 2007, 593-4). While we have enormous expectations of mothers, fathers are not held to the same standard. In The Mother/Daughter Plot (1989), Marianne Hirsch examines literary accounts of the
mother/daughter dynamic, and what she finds is an ongoing suppression of the maternal – mothers tend to be either a destructive force or simply invisible. According to Hirsch, being a feminist is not compatible with seeing mothers merely as ‘objects’ rather than ‘subjects’, and this is a major problem for psychoanalytic theory (Hirsch 1989,4). Hirsch’s critique is right in its emphasis on our need to hear mothers’ own voices. I believe, however, that some
feminists’ fear of mother-blaming is too black/white, whereas the heart of the matricidal matter is an ambivalent grey. Merely idealizing mothers, like merely blaming them, does not contribute to constructive discourse, because mothers are multifaceted human beings. We rarely make the effort to blame invisible people who do not matter. In some sense, therefore, blame may involve an element of respect. Why, after all, did Freud place such an immense importance on patricide?
This is where Melanie Klein may help us. For Klein, in order to mature , one needs to mourn the lost mother through embracing ambivalence. Internalized ‘bad mother’ AND ‘good mother’ must be integrated into a complex whole as the individual moves from the ‘paranoid’
to the ‘depressive’ position’. Klein’s theory is attractive because of its emphasis on the fluidity and continued movement between positions, rather than earlier psychoanalytic stress on ‘stages’. Acquiring a capacity to love, for Klein, requires the ability to mourn the loss of the mother, while retaining a constructive internalized model of her. A pre-Oedipal infant is not in Freudian ‘merger’ but already capable of ambivalence: ‘When it feels frustrated at the breast’ he constructs a ‘phantasy’ of attacking it and ‘wishes to bite up and tear up his mother and her breasts’ (Klein 1975, 308) These aggressive fantasies, however, are followed by guilt and a fear that he has destroyed the mother – in his imagination, he now puts the pieces back together again and repairs her (ibid) – this process is called love-guilt-reparation and can be re-activated in adult life (ibid 309). When the baby/adult feels guilty and fears persecution, it is in the ‘paranoid position’ where it only sees the mother as a part- object. The aim, however, is to move to the ‘depressive position’ in which the loved one becomes ‘whole’– the world is no longer so black/white, but an ambivalent grey.
12 Moreover, it is important to note that through the study of individuals, we may get a glimpse of larger social structures – when individual daughters blame their mothers for unhelpful upbringing, it may be that what they are blaming has more to do with oppressive social structures than with mothers themselves. As Adrienne Rich has shown in Of Woman Born, motherhood has long been at work as a patriarchal institution, one under which
individual mothers have had little room for self determination. Rich argues for each mother to imagine that she were free to mother more on her own terms – which she labels ‘motherhood as experience’. Clearly, Solnit’s and Winterson’s mothers have been harmed by ‘motherhood as institution’.
1.2 Winterson
Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal (Happy/Normal) is Winterson’s first autobiography, although arguably all of Winterson’s fiction draws on her life experience.
According to Winterson herself, all her work may be traced back to the underlying theme of her mother:
‘I have written love narratives and loss narratives - stories of longing and
belonging. It all seems so obvious now – the Wintersonic obsessions of love, loss and longing. It is my mother. It is my mother. It is my mother.
But mother is our first love affair. Her arms. Her eyes. Her breast. Her body.
And if we hate her later, we take that rage with us into other lovers. And if we lose her, how do we find her again?’ (Happy/Normal 160)
The first half of Happy/Normal enters into dialogue with Winterson’s acclaimed debut, the semi-autobiographical bildungsroman Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985). Oranges relates the story of young Jeanette, adopted by fanatic Pentecostal parents who subject her to a gruelling exorcism when they discover their daughter is a lesbian. Happy/Normal is a re- working of that same old wound, but the truth coming out now, almost 30 years later, is bleaker: ‘And I suppose the saddest thing for me, thinking about the cover version that is Oranges, is that I wrote a story I could live with. The other one was too painful. I could not survive it’(6). In Oranges, Winterson now confesses, she ‘invented the character of Testifying Elsie who looks after little Jeanette and acts as a soft wall against the hurt(ling) force of the mother. I wrote her in because I couldn’t bear to leave her out’ (6).
Even so, those who have read Oranges will recognize the first half of Happy/Normal.
The second half, however, charts unfamiliar territory and explains why the coming-of-age
13 story has been re-actualized now, in mid- life. Winterson has recently split up from her
girlfriend – reactivating the old attachment trauma. Around the same time as the break-up, she found her adoption papers, began a search for her birth mother, had a nervous breakdown and attempted suicide. This crisis led to yet another visit to the past through memoir-writing.
The plots of both Oranges and Happy/Normal are centred around the gargantuan Mrs.
Winterson who, as one reviewer puts it, ‘transcends the strictly mortal in her dimensions and her power, a monolith to whom any version of ‘mother’ cannot do justice.’(Harrison 2012).
Winterson’s father, by contrast, is a mere shadow who ‘only hit me when under instruction from my mother’ (47). Constance Winterson is described as a ‘medieval martyr, gouged and dripping for Jesus’ (223):
‘in our house God was Old Testament and there was no forgiveness without a great deal of sacrifice. Mrs Winterson was unhappy and we had to be unhappy with her. She was waiting for the Apocalypse’ (9).
Perhaps because Mrs W, as she is also referred to, had no friends and ‘hated being a nobody’
(1), she locked her daughter in the coal hole, told her the devil had brought her to the wrong crib and burned her books (‘The trouble with a book is that you never know what’s in it until it’s too late’(33).
Winterson cannot remember a time when she wasn’t setting her story against her mother’s: ‘To avoid the narrow mesh of Mrs.Winterson’s story I had to be able to tell my own’ (5). She is clear about the therapeutic effect writing has on her: Through Oranges, aged 24, she declares: ‘I wrote my way out’ (6). Now, aged 50, she is back at that same place, needing to write to untangle herself, once again, from her mother: ‘When I began this book I had no idea how it would turn out. I was writing in real time. I was writing the past and discovering the future’ (Happy/Normal, 226).
Healing herself through writing, for Winterson, is about discovering new language where previously she had none: ‘All of us, when in deep trauma, find we hesitate, we stammer, there are long pauses in our speech…We get our language back through the language of others’ (9). This new language may, if we are lucky, heal ‘the rupture reality makes on the imagination’:
‘fiction and poetry are doses, medicines. What they heal is the rupture reality makes on the imagination. I had been damaged and a very important part of me had been destroyed – that was my reality, the facts of my life; but on the other
14 side of the facts was who I could be, how I could feel, and as long as I had words
for that, images for that, stories for that, then I wasn’t lost.’ (42)
With this quote, Winterson’s text lends itself to a Lacanian interpretation. As we enter into the
‘symbolic order’, we suppress an ‘inexpressible excess’ that we do not have words for (Paccaud-Huguet 2006, 281-3). Although post-Freudian feminists like Kristeva and Irigaray criticise Freud/Lacan, they appreciate Lacan’s situating of Freud’s theory in language . Becoming a self is deeply tied up with acquiring one’s own language, that is, of course, built on the foundation of a shared, cultural understanding of the world. For Kristeva and Irigaray, women have historically paid a higher price than men for entering the ‘symbolic order’
because the shared cultural understanding underpinning language is founded on 2000 years of patriarchal thinking.
Winterson echoes these ideas when she writes of healing oneself from ‘the rupture that reality makes on the imagination’. Healing is, for Winterson, and as we shall see, also for Solnit, about tracing out fragments of our shared language/culture, applying it to one’s own subjective experience, and deciding for oneself what to keep and what to discard. Winterson, reflecting on her own individuation process vis à vis her mother, notes that she was taught early that ‘whatever is on the outside can be taken away at any time. Only what is inside you is safe’(41) – this ‘safe’ interior is built around her own private means of expression: ‘I had lines inside me. A string of guiding lines. I had language’ (42). After remembering how her mother burnt her books, Winterson remarks how this incident formed her writing style–
‘collecting the scraps, uncertain of continuous narrative. What does Eliot say? These fragments have I shored against my ruin’ (43). Writing is about taking control of language rather than letting language control you: ‘there are two kinds of writing; the one you write and the one that writes you. The one that writes you is dangerous. You go where you don’t want to go’(54).
Winterson’s memoir (as well as her earlier autofiction) might be accused of mother- blaming. Yet Winterson is very explicit about being a feminist – which, arguably, does not fit well with being a ‘mother blamer’. This is why, as stated above, Melanie Klein’s theory is so relevant to her text, because throughout, Winterson embraces ambivalence:
‘I am trying to avoid the miserable binary of ‘this means so much to me/this means nothing to me’ I am trying to respect my own complexity. I had to know the story of my beginnings but I have to accept that this is a version too. It is a true story but it is still a version’ (229)
15 The version, as she calls it, needs ‘bad mother’ to resurface in all her monstrosity because without that monster, access to ‘good mother’ also vanishes.
Reductive ‘good’ and ‘bad’ labels, however, simply cannot do justice to Mrs Winterson’s larger- than- life persona, who ‘sat in a deckchair most of the day reading sensationalist literature about hell’(104):
‘She was a flamboyant depressive; a woman who kept a revolver in the duster drawer, and the bullets in a tin of Pledge. A woman who stayed up all night baking cakes to avoid sleeping in the same bed as my father. A woman with a prolapse, a thyroid condition, an enlarged heart, an ulcerated leg that never healed, and two sets of false teeth- matt for everyday, and a pearlized set for ‘best’’. (1) We learn quite soon, however, that in spite of her theatrical exuberance, Mrs W herself felt like ‘a nobody’ (1) and that Jeanette ‘only later, much later, too late’ understood ‘how small she was to herself. The baby nobody picked up. The uncarried child still inside her’ (3). This insight has cost Jeanette dearly, because in order to see her mother in this compassionate light, she has had to relive the utter powerlessness of childhood abuse. Mrs Winterson was subject to labyrinthine, unpredictable dark moods - ‘her own black hole that pulled in all the light’
(119). Christianity’s gospel of meek humility was lost on her: she ‘prayed standing up, more like an Old Testament prophet than a sinner on her knees’ (69) Jeanette was ‘beaten as a child and learned early never to cry’(2) She was often locked out of the house overnight – or worse- inside the coal hole (21). When these things happened – not infrequently – her father did nothing to defend her: ‘…when Dad comes home, he’ll let me in, and he’ll say nothing, and we’ll act like it’s normal to leave your kid outside all night…’(4)
The worst incident of abuse, however, and again one from which her father failed to protect her - was the exorcism Mrs.Winterson arranged for a sadistic priest to conduct after discovering Jeanette in bed with another girl. She was ‘locked in the parlour with the curtains closed for three days’, deprived of sleep and repeatedly beaten by a church elder who then attempted rape to show her ‘it would be better than with a girl. A lot better’ (81). After the exorcism (and probably before), Jeanette built what Winnicott calls a ‘false self’ to protect herself: ‘I was sure of what to do. I would do whatever they wanted but only on the outside.
On the inside I would build another self – one that they couldn’t see (82). This did not halt Mrs Winterson’s violent fury, however. Shortly after, Mr and Mrs W went on holiday, locking Jeanette out of the house with instructions to stay with the rapist priest, knowing full well this would set a trap for Jeanette to sneak into the house once her parents were gone. This
16 gave Mrs W an opportunity to send in her ruthless brother (whom she herself loathed)
accompanied by two aggressive Dobermans (109-10).
These tear- jerking incidents, however, do not tell Jeanette’s full truth about her adoptive mother. Like in Oranges, another version of Mrs W seeps through the narrative: a resourceful, vibrant mother figure often related with humour and compassion. As Winterson goes through the journey of finding her birth mother Ann, she ends up noting that she does not feel a biological connection: ‘I don’t feel, ‘Wow, here’s my mother’… I can’t be the daughter she wants. I couldn’t be the daughter Mrs Winterson wanted… I notice that I hate Ann criticising Mrs Winterson. She was a monster but she was my monster’ (229). And talking to her friend who directed Oranges for TV:
‘We were laughing about Mrs Winterson and how monstrous and impossible she was, but about how absolutely right for someone like me, who, like her, could never have accepted a scaled-down life. She turned inwards; I turned outwards.
’What would you have been without her?’(207)
What would she, indeed? Not an artist or writer, perhaps: ‘ If I hadn’t found books, if I hadn’t turned my oddness into poetry and the anger into prose, well, I wasn’t ever going to be a nobody with no money’(208) ‘… And yet there feels like an inevitability to who I am – …I guess that over the past few years I have come home’(209). Mrs. Winterson may have burned Jeanette’s books, yet she spent hours studying bible stories with her daughter, teaching her to read years before school age. ‘My mother taught me to read from the book of Deuterotomy because it is full of animals (mostly unclean)’ (26). Forbidding novels, of course, made it all the more enticing for Jeanette to keep reading in secret (33). A living contradiction, Mrs W sent her daughter to the local library every week to collect the detective stories to which she was addicted – there, Jeanette discovered the ‘English Literature A to Z’ shelf which was, incidentally, going to transport her to Oxford University. Moreover, studying the bible meant studying prose, poetry and story- telling from an early age: ‘The Bible is a very economically written text…A precursor of Twitter really…if you think how short the verses are…It’s very tight. And I think that really has shaped me in moving away from any rambling narrative’, Winterson says in an interview (Ermelino,2012, 54). While her father could barely read, ‘My mother was in charge of language …a good reader, confident and dramatic’ (27). Mrs
Winterson may have tried to lock her daughter in, but she also provided her with the key to escape: ‘Fed words and shod with them, words became clues. Piece by piece I knew they would lead me somewhere else’ (101). A gifted story-teller, Mrs Winterson invented an
17 alternative ending to Jane Eyre, the one novel she deemed acceptable because of the
missionary St.John Rivers, with whom - in Mrs W’s alternative version - Jane gets married :
‘And she did it so well, turning the pages and inventing the text extempore in the style of Charlotte Brontë’(102).
Humour – often black - runs like a guiding light through Winterson’s mother/daughter plot: ‘the one good thing about being locked in a coal hole is that it prompts reflection’. And:
‘We were not allowed books but we lived in a world of print. Mrs Winterson wrote out exhortations and stuck them all over the house. Under my coat peg a sign said THINK OF GOD NOT THE DOG. …But in the outside loo, directly in front of you as you went through the door, was a placard. Those who stood up read LINGER NOT AT THE LORD’S BUSINESS. Those who sat down read HE SHALL MELT THY BOWELS LIKE WAX. This was wishful thinking: my mother was having trouble with her bowels’. (101)
When Winterson finds her adoption papers, aged 50, she begins an arduous journey to find her birth mother, Ann. And she does find her, after overcoming an almost insurmountable bureaucracy as well as her inner demons (‘part Mrs Winterson, part Caliban… sometimes a baby, sometimes seven, sometimes eleven, sometimes fifteen’ (175). Ann is down to earth and likeable, but Jeanette has to undertake yet another journey through Kleinian love, guilt and reparation with her birth mother:
‘Ann came to London. That was a mistake. It is our third meeting and we have a serious row. I am shouting at her, ‘At least Mrs Winterson was there. Where were you?’ I don’t blame her and I am glad she made the choice she made. Clearly I am furious about it too.’ (229)
The acceptance finally gained through writing Happy/Normal, argues Arifa Akbar, is
‘the fact that a pre-adoptive identity – and its sense of wholeness – can never be
regained’. The meeting with Ann takes Winterson ‘back to Mrs W and the dual role that she occupied as a mother and a non-mother’ (Akbar 2011). In the end, Happy Normal’s spiralling mother/daughter plot is an embrace of Kleinian ambivalence about both of her mothers:
‘Ann… feels distress at Winterson-world and my other mother’s flamboyant craziness upsets her…
18 But, it’s true…I don’t mind. I certainly don’t blame her. I think she did the only
thing she could do…
And I do know, really know, that Mrs W gave me what she could too – it was a dark gift but not a useless one.
My mother is straightforward and kind. This feels odd to me. A female parent is meant to be labyrinth-like and vengeful. (214).
Ann is straight forward and kind, but would not have enabled Jeanette to develop her artistic flare in the way Mrs Winterson did. Mrs. Winterson, for her part, was moody and abusive, yet had a way with words and an epic gift for drama: ‘If a mouse ran across the floor,
Mrs.Winterson would explain it away as ectoplasm. “Immediately, it’s impressive”,
Winterson says. “Other people have mice. We have ectoplasm” ( Ermelino 2012). At times guarded behind her black- humour-shield, at other times unpolished, raw – Winterson’s memoir goes straight to the heart of the gut- wrenching wound at every person’s centre, fittingly described as ‘the missingness of the missing’:
‘I assumed that she hid books the way she hid everything else, including her heart, but our house was small and I searched it. Were we endlessly ransacking the house, the two of us, looking for evidence of each other? I think we were – she, because I was fatally unknown to her, and she was afraid of me. Me, because I had no idea what was missing but felt the missing-ness of the missing. We circled each other, wary, abandoned, full of longing. We came close but not close
enough…’(103) 1.3 Solnit
The Faraway Nearby (2014) is both a personal memoir and a collection of essays, each of which might be read independently from the rest, though, I would argue, at the cost of an overall loss of meaning. The memoir opens as the gripping tale about a daughter’s confrontation with her mother’s Alzheimer’s. Solnit writes about the healing power of
storytelling and implicitly promises her reader her own story. Behind the story of her mother’s Alzheimer’s, we sense, lurks a daughter who was never provided with the tools necessary to deal with intimacy and attachment, this daughter’s consequent lack of empathy and crippling emotional numbness – and the story of how, gradually, she managed to overcome these impediments to her happiness. It is a fancily packaged memoir, promising its reader a puzzle to be solved by navigating through a labyrinth of interconnected stories, myths, facts and fables, all of which share the common underlying themes of empathy and connection. The
19 Faraway Nearby is also an illness narrative about how physical illness, paradoxically, may cure emotional numbness. Multifarious stories are embedded within the frame narrative of Rebecca versus a heap of rotting apricots – the only ‘inheritance’ left her by her mother. The frame narrative device is structured like 1001 Nights, while the ‘therapeutic’ plot of a
daughter’s painful dilemma and recovery is based on the myth of Cupid and Psyche.
Like some of the book’s reviewers, I experienced frustration while reading this memoir.
Yet, the more I have dug into my own vexation, the more I have come to revere this text for what it reveals about a contemporary feminist’s matricidal dilemma. Reviewers explain their frustration in terms of Solnit’s ‘hypocrisy’, as her text fixates on the value of stories and storytelling, while her own story evaporates. I had the same reaction, but I think that behind Solnit’s inability to tell her own story, lies something more fundamental – and interesting.
The Faraway Nearby is a beautifully crafted memoir with a peculiar form. The first thing I noticed about the book was its elegant table of contents, structured like a mirror, and set out on the page ‘like a mountain tipped on its side’ (Romm 2013). The first five chapters have identical titles to the last five; the last title mirroring the first, the next to last mirroring the second and so on. The three middle chapters entitled ‘Wound’, ‘Knot’ and ‘Unwound’, hint at a knot at the heart of the narrative that will unwound itself. The book’s epigraph: ‘to the mothers and the wolves’, alludes to Virginia Woolf’s injunction to ‘think back through our mothers’. Thinking back – as well as forward - through her mother – is what Solnit does in The Faraway Nearby. Yet, she provides almost no detail about her own particular
mother/daughter plot. It is, however, often hinted at, as providing the glasses through which the narrator/protagonist sees her current world and her own place within it.
Apart from the epigraph and the table of contents, the next noticeable aspect of this memoir’s packaging is the curious baseline story running along the bottom of every page of the book. This text constitutes another chapter in itself, leaving it up to the reader whether to read this essay before or after the rest of Solnit’s memoir or whether to consider it an
irrelevant footnote. The baseline essay, once read, functions as a thematic frame for the rest of the book. The most important aspect of this thematic frame is the Cupid/Psyche myth, which Solnit explores in some detail. There are thus three frames around Solnit’s collection of essays: two intersecting frame narratives: about a heap of rotten apricots left to a daughter by an ailing mother and about how cancer treatment became the cure for Solnit’s emotional numbness. There is also another, thematic frame in the memoir’s baseline essay.
20 In this chapter, I explore the frame narrative as a therapeutic tale of matricide, illness and emotional healing. In chapter 2, I deal with Solnit’s post-matricidal re-positioning herself in space/time through her weaving together of myths and fairy tales, and chapter 3 explores the Cupid/Psyche frame and how it is linked to Solnit’s battle with the body/mind distinction.
The frame narrative begins thus: One day, in midlife, about a hundred pounds of apricots fell into Rebecca’s lap. They were left her, indirectly, by her mother. That is to say - her brother had picked them from her ailing mother’s garden, so her mother did not actually give them to her (11). Rebecca experiences ambivalence with regard to this ‘fairy tale
inheritance’ from her mother, who has given her practically nothing in life (28). The apricots represent Rebecca with an ‘impossible task’ just like fairy tale heroines are given impossible tasks on their heroic quests (5, 13). They carry a symbolic function as the only thing her mother has left her daughter. As such, the apricot heap induces strong feelings in Rebecca :
I had expected them to look like abundance itself and they looked instead like anxiety, because every time I came back there was another rotten one or two or three or dozen to cull, and so I fell to inspecting the pile every time I passed instead of admiring it (5)
The apricots, we soon discover, are a metaphor for the mother-daughter connection, which is virtually non-existent. Solnit has had a difficult childhood, with a narcissistic mother (13).
Rebecca’s brothers have been the audience for her mother’s best self, while she ‘was stationed backstage, where things were messier’ (ibid). Things become complicated for Rebecca,
however, when her mother develops Alzheimer’s. The mother/daughter relation, which has always been tenuous, seems to have at least been ‘fixed’ as such for some time in Rebecca’s mind. Until the Alzheimer’s and the apricots, Solnit has had some upheavals both with her real and internalized mother, but has found her peace with the relation. This fragile peace is shattered as the relation (along with internalized mother) starts festering and rotting in Rebecca’s mind, in tandem with the apricots:’ The pile began to look like an organism, a human- sized entity with a life of its own…I had a corpse decomposing on my floor’ (12).
Solnit’s apricot narrative is strikingly illustrative of Kristevan abjection (Kristeva, 1982). The apricots are both alluring and repulsive, and seem to threaten Rebecca’s tenuous sense of self. She holds onto the apricots because she is, in fact, deeply intrigued by what they represent (13). Instead of digging into her ambivalent feelings, however, Solnit leaves the apricot heap for a long while and meanders into a labyrinth of fairy tales, facts and fictions.
21 She then returns to her apricots on page 65, in a passage betraying her internal strife on the question of her mother:
‘My own story in its particulars hardly interests me now. The incidents have dissolved into the dirt from which certain plants grew…Or so I think, but maybe a moment in the dirt of that apricot summer is necessary. The apricots arrived in early August, and then everything with my mother began to deteriorate more ferociously (65)
Solnit’s own story, if these lines be read literally, both interests her and does not interest her:
she is ambivalent about the whole project of telling her story. Indeed, this internal strife seeps through the whole memoir; as if Solnit is speaking with several voices without herself being aware of the fact. One voice sets out with bravado to write a book telling her story, while another voice denies herself that right. It seems Solnit’s intended message is that her own story really does not interest her. What I perceive as her unintentional message, however, is that her own story - in spite of her claims to the contrary - interests her immensely, which is why she keeps circling around it, feeling simultaneously attracted and repulsed. While the particulars of her story, according to one of her voices, has ceased to interest her, she still deems it necessary to dig for moment ‘in the dirt of that apricot summer’ (my emphasis). The word ‘dirt’ suggests that what she is struggling with is her mother’s ghost in terms of the abject: cleaning up ‘dirt’ is indeed what Rebecca does – in an attempt to clean up her self - with her apricot preserving.
The next time we encounter the apricots, Solnit recounts how her friend comes over to help her deal with the apricots in ‘a fight against time’(81). Solnit’s narrator now offers her musings about rot as something both terrifying and alluring: as the emblem of death but also of re-birth: ‘Rot suggests something decaying, but the process is as much about something growing, something digesting its immediate surroundings and preparing to disintegrate it into its larger environment’ (ibid). In the following passage, the abject apricots are powerfully rendered as a ‘slime mold’ and ‘occupying army’ starting to smell and seep juices onto the floor, rot festering, germs multiplying, running out of control:
‘It felt so much like my life, this pile of what might be abundance in other circumstances requiring scrutiny, weeding, becoming slightly disgusting as the pile began to seep juices onto my floor and to smell a little. It felt like a living organism, a slime mold, an occupying army of apricots, as though it might
22 multiply, as though it might move of its own accord, and it was impossible to pick it free of rot.’ (81)
Again, we see a fearful fascination with the whole apricot phenomenon (the mother -daughter relation) , as something monstrous, a Deleuzian ‘becoming-animal’ that may begin to live its own life .Solnit’s protagonist/ narrator tries to gain control over the decaying fruit heap, yet reveals an awe at its resistance to her controlling efforts – will the heap one night ‘outsmart’
her? She makes a tremendous effort to clean up the apricot pile, because: ‘When everything was falling apart and nothing was certain, a pile of fruit even that vast was pleasantly
manageable by comparison’ (85). In spite of this conscious effort, however, it is as if Solnit’s unconscious wish is for the heap to run amok and take control of her instead. Might it not be tempting to simply let go and sink into the emotional chaos represented by the apricot heap?
The apricots then vanish, yet again, from the narrative, until page 123, when Solnit has finished preserving the apricots and is ready to give them away to a number of her friends.
Solnit has re-worked her internalized mother through abjection and apricot-preserving, and is now ready to use her internal mother as a blueprint through which she can connect to her friends. This is where Solnit’s apricot narrative coincides with her illness narrative.
A few months after her apricots have been preserved, Rebecca has a mammogram (91), then sends her text off on a long meandering journey about the life of Che Guevara, different understandings of empathy and emotional numbness, before we are told that she gets her first ‘round of diagnoses’ for breast cancer (119). Being ill becomes a turning point: ‘I asked for help. I was not in the habit of doing so. There were extremely unhelpful parents in my particular past, but asking is difficult for a lot of people (121). Being ill was an
unexpectedly positive experience, because it finally enabled Rebecca to be passive and child- like : ‘I occasionally wished that life was always like this, that I was always being showered with flowers and assistance and solicitousness, but you only get it when you need it. If you’re lucky, you get it when you need it’ (122).
Not only was cancer and recovery a positive experience for Rebecca, but so, it turns out, did her mother’s Alzheimer’s cure the mother/daughter relation. The more her mother forgot, the more her memories of their bad relationship waned: ‘During the early stages she felt more like a parent than she ever had, in that she was affectionate and enthused about me.’ (226).
‘Finally, the war ended. She forgot the stories that fuelled her wrath… When I was in my thirties and things with her were at their worst, I’d considered never
23 seeing her again, walking away from the chessboard. I think quitting then
would’ve frozen our relationship at its worst point. In this late era, well down the road called Alzheimer’s, my mother lit up at the sight of me’ (224)
As her mother’s condition deteriorates, her mother, paradoxically, becomes a happier person who lets go of old grudges. Day by day, old Mrs. Solnit becomes more childlike:
‘It resembled in some ways the stages of childhood running in reverse’(228) until one day she begins to behave almost like a baby (229). This time-reversal instigates new insights for Rebecca, about what constitutes a self ‘beyond possession or skills’ (231), and then starts a process where Rebecca sees her old self from afar, realizing that that person is dead, and someone new has taken her place : ‘When I read my old letters in which I talk about her, I see someone I hope I no longer am … I read those old e-mails and letters and remember the person who wrote them who no longer seems to be me. I blush, but to look at them is also to realize that I’ve metamorphosed (232).
This means that Solnit is finally able to see her mother in a new light – as a human being with hopes and dreams of her own – beyond motherhood. ’She was occupied all her life with moral questions and principles… More ethereal things came too, a pleasure in flowers and the bare branches of trees, in books, a certain kind of restlessness and uncertainty’ (233). And:
‘Now I see my mother in her prime as a woman driven by unseen forces… It was always clear that her reaction to me came out of misery that flowed through her as a set of conventional stories, commands, values, and standards. We were the helpless gender together’ (234).
Compassion for her mother’s plight emerges through the lines as Solnit increasingly sees her mother as a victim of what Adrienne Rich (1986) has called ‘motherhood as institution’:
‘My mother regretted not going to college, but she did take classes for free for a while…She took bookkeeping classes because it seemed more practical than whatever transformation she yearned for, whatever elevation the word college conjured for her’ (235)
Her own – as well as her mother’s illnesses, therefore, allowed Solnit to experience a newfound compassion for her mother.
24 While Solnit is clear about the therapeutic intentions of her memoir (3), The
Faraway Nearby is not, in my view, a ‘therapeutic text’ fitting in with Suzette Henke’s theory of ‘Scriptotherapy’ (Henke, 2000). One reason for this is that Solnit fails to tell her own story in its particulars. As one reviewer notes: ‘With so many stories available in these pages it is strange to find oneself longing for more of a story.’(Wilson
2013).This is not to say that the writing of it may not have had a therapeutic effect on its author. That, however, is beyond the scope of this paper. I am dealing with Solnit’s implied author - the textual self emerging from Solnit’s memoir, not with Solnit herself.
As mentioned, Suzette Henke defines Scriptotherapy as ‘the process of writing out and writing through traumatic experience in the mode of therapeutic re-enactment’(Henke, xii). Solnit insinuates that such trauma has taken place without backing up these hints with any concrete examples. The personal narrative in her text consistently ‘tells rather than shows’. Thus, instead of letting the reader experience how her mother was jealous of her, Solnit simply tells us that she was: ‘at the worst she begrudged me anything I had that she thought she hadn’t had’ (19) and ‘my story is a variation of one I’ve heard from many women over the years, of the mother who gave herself away to everyone or someone and tried to get herself back from a daughter’ (20). We are informed that there are good reasons for Solnit to have severed ties from her mother, but we are never shown what actually happened, nor how Solnit feels about it now– as readers, therefore, we do not get to experience the emotions felt by the memoir’s protagonist/narrator, and consequently have a hard time attaching ourselves emotionally.
According to Henke, three selves emerge from a ‘therapeutic’ text: (a) the authorial consciousness, or narrating I, (b) the early, fragmented version of the self, and (c) ‘the ostensibly coherent subject of utterance evinced through the process of narrative disclosure’
(ibid, xv). Solnit’s text displays an authorial consciousness but fails to provide her reader with an early, fragmented version of the self, thereby also failing to create a new ‘coherent version’
or subject of utterance through her writing. Rather, the new version of herself created through her writing is a split self speaking in several voices. As pertains the ‘early, fragmented self’, Solnit explains how her infant self learnt very early how to shield her emotional self behind a thick armour:
The child I once was read constantly and hardly spoke, because she was
ambivalent about the merits of communication, about the risks of being punished or mocked or exposed. The idea of being understood and encouraged, of
25 recognizing herself in another, of affirmation, had hardly occurred to her and
neither had the idea that she had something to give others. (63)
Young Rebecca learnt to be on her guard against expressing her feelings. Rather than a fragmented early self, therefore, the self emerging from this excerpt is not a ‘fragmented’ but a ‘fortified’ self. Solnit explains how this came about through a reversal of the maternal mirror. While her mother took the role of Narcissus, Rebecca was left no choice but to reciprocate as Echo: “I coped by retreating and maybe I did become a mirror, a polished surface that shows nothing of what lies beneath. We were in a looking-glass world where I knew more about her childhood than she did about mine. When I was an adult, we didn’t talk about me’ (29-30).
Solnit refers to her earlier self as a ‘polished surface’, implying, it seems, that this no longer applies. Yet a ‘polished surface’ is partly how I read the current textual self emerging from The Faraway Nearby. Robin Romm, reviewing Solnit’s memoir for the New York Times, shares Wilson’s frustration about the narrative’s lack of story:
…it would make sense to articulate what exactly she means by “story”. Here, story appears to include all narratives and ideas, whole or partial – anecdotes about friends, summaries of fairy tales, histories, intellectual musings – as well as what happens when you stitch these together. Solnit’s resistance to providing a set of parameters results at times in an obscurity of meaning (Romm 2013)
While I shared these frustrations upon working my way through Solnit’s narrative, I still find that there is something interesting taking place in her text that warrants further investigation.
The fact that the author clearly sets out to write a therapeutic text and telling her story – and then fails - intrigues me. A story of sorts does emerge from Solnit’s memoir however; it is a beautiful story about a deeply lonely individual who has fought and won an internal battle, through stitching other people’s stories to her own, so as to feel connected. This stitching together, as we shall see in chapter 2, is about re-positioning herself in time and space.
1.4 Conclusion
Both Winterson’s and Solnit’s matricides begin with anger at - and end up with compassion for - their mothers. Unlike Winterson, however, who wholeheartedly embraces Kleinian ambivalence, the ambivalence expressed by Solnit cuts less deep because Solnit is much less explicit about the ‘bad mother’. While Winterson’s ambivalence takes her reader