Motherhood and Representation

The Mother in Popular Culture and Melodrama

E. Ann Kaplan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136093807
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

From novels of the nineteenth century to films of the 1990s, American culture, abounds with images of white, middle-class mothers. In Motherhood and Representation, E. Ann Kaplan considers how the mother appears in three related spheres: the historical, in which she charts changing representations of the mother from 1830 to the postmodernist present; the psychoanalytic, which discusses theories of the mother from Freud to Lacan and the French Feminists; and the mother as she is figured in cultural representations: in literary and film texts such as East Lynne, Marnie and the The Handmaid's Tale, as well as in journalism and popular manuals on motherhood. Kaplan's analysis identifies two dominant paradigms of the mother as `Angel' and `Witch', and charts the contesting and often contradictory discourses of the mother in present-day America.

Part I

HISTORY AND THEORY DISCOURSES

1

INTRODUCTION

When I first conceived of this book in 1982, it was still true to say that the Mother, as subject in her own right, had received relatively scant scholarly treatment (see E.A. Kaplan 1983c). The Mother was in sense everywhere – one could hardly discuss anything without falling over her – but always in the margins, always not the topic per se under consideration. The mother, that is, was generally spoken, not speaking; she was usually discussed as an integral part of a discourse (because she really is everywhere) that was spoken by an Other. She was a figure in the design, out-of-focus; or, if in focus, then the brunt of an attack, a criticism, a complaint, usually in the discourse of a child (male or female) or in that of an adult (male or female) concerned to attribute all ills to the mother.

An absent presence, then. Present but absent. Two scenes in two very different King Vidor movies demonstrate the point: in The Crowd, the scene of the hero’s birth manages to refuse the birthing mother any reverse shot; the anxious father looks at the bed where his son is being born, and we have the reverse shot of the doctor bending over the bed where the mother is, but the spectator is not allowed to see her. Then, behind the father, we see in the mirror, the doctor hand the baby to the nurse (see Figure 1). The scene concludes with the son being handed to the father. In Stella Dallas (made ten years later), there is a breakfast scene in which the tired mother’s labour goes as unrecognized as her actual presence; the image shows her bending over the sink in the rear, and she comes into the frame only to speak for the Father.¹

Figure 1 King Vidor’s The Crowd (1928)
John Smith’s father waits nervously to learn he has a boy. The mother who has given birth is excluded from the scene. Mirror image shows doctor and nurse with the baby.

It was not then so much that the mother had not received attention as that she had mainly been studied from an Other’s point of view; or represented as an (unquestioned) patriarchally constructed social function. Few scholars had been interested in understanding her positioning or her social role from inside the mother’s discourse, in whatever context, of whatever type. Few scholars studied the oppressive aspects of patriarchal maternal representation or the mother’s unwitting acceptance of mythic ideals impossible to achieve on the level of the social formation; or looked at the maternal as figuring the archetypal patriarchal feminine inherited from nineteenth-century sentimentalism.² The lack of cultural discourses setting forth woman’s subjective pleasures in mothering (apart from such pleasures taking place under the auspices of the Father or the state) has still not been adequately studied; nor has the possibility of a desire for the child for its own sake been examined. No one has yet answered Kristeva’s question, “What is it about this representation (of the patriarchal or Christian Maternal) that fails to take account of what a woman might say or want of the Maternal …?” (Kristeva 1985: 101), largely because the question is so difficult to answer. How can any historical (i.e. “real life” mother) know whether what she thinks she wants really reflects her subjective desire, or whether she wants it because it serves patriarchy (that she has been constructed to want to please)? Since patriarchy wants women to want children, in other words, how can a woman distinguish her desire for the child from that imposed on her?

While this question interests me greatly, my terrain here is representation, not historical mother-subjects. The question about the desire for, and pleasure in, the child (whether biological or adopted) informs my examination of cultural products (i.e. I am looking for discourses setting forth a mother’s subjectivity), but, as will become clear, dominant materials (significantly) are rarely interested in any such subjectivity – a telling fact in itself. I will show that at the very moment when mother-subjects start to gain attention, this subjectivity is displaced into concern with the foetus.

Figure 2 King Vidor’s Stella Dallas (1937)
Stella’s prematurely aged mother silently slaves away at the sink in rear of the frame, while Stella and her brother discuss his lunch.

The 1980s have seen an unprecedented amount of attention paid to the mother from a whole variety of perspectives, including feminist and theoretical ones.³ Much of the work has come out of the social sciences, is of an empirical nature and involves contemporary mothers and children. Since my work has to do with representations of the mother, and largely deals with the past, I have not been able to use a great deal of this material. Historians’ work, on the other hand, has been invaluable, even if those scholars and I sometimes disagree about the truth-value of the historical account. Literary and psychoanalytic studies clearly overlap most with what I am doing here, and the influences particularly of Julia Kristeva and Monique Plaza from France, and of American theorists attempting to combine French and American psychoanalytic perspectives, will be obvious (cf. Dinnerstein 1976; Friday 1981; Dally 1982; Margolis 1984; Chodorow 1978). I continue to believe that Lacan’s theories are still central for work on representations, but I am interested in positioning psychoanalytic insights derived from Lacan within a broad framework that includes other theoretical views.

In its original conception, the book would have taken the rest of my life to accomplish – or, alternatively, a vast array of scholars from a variety of disciplines (as one publisher’s reader pointed out). What I think needs doing (and over ambitiously had suggested I would attempt) is bringing together the history of social discourses about the mother, changes in the economic and technological spheres, literary and filmic images of the mother, and both psychoanalytic mother discourses and the psychoanalytic processes mothering involves. “Perhaps such a project,” the reader noted, “would need a ‘team’ made up of scholars from a number of different disciplines.”

I have thus drastically curtailed my aims in order to mitigate the problem of over-generalization and lack of sufficient focus that the original conception inevitably entailed. This book’s contribution to the recent proliferation of work on the mother is first, its specific focus on representations rather than on what I will shortly call “the historical” or “real life” mother, who is usually the object of study; second, its theorizing the mother-representations as produced through tensions between the level of the “historical” (I use the word, for want of a better, to indicate the level of social institutions, political/economic discourses, scientific/technological developments), and the level of the “psychoanalytic.” (Again, this word is used for want of a better to indicate the psychodynamic level – the terrain of Freud’s unconscious, of the individualist discourse, but also of the Lacanian Imaginary, and of how humans come to be subjects.)

Thus, while the weight of the book and its main focus is on mother-representations in literary and film texts (together with those in popular magazines, journalism and writings by child-care experts), it was impossible to account for these representations without reference to the “historical” and “psychoanalytic” discursive levels. The book analyzes the mother within three distinct (but ultimately related) representational spheres, those of the historical, the psychoanalytic and the fictional. These roughly correspond to three main kinds of discursive mothers, namely, first, the mother in her socially constructed, institutional role (the mother that girls are socialized to become, and that historical or real mothers strive to embody); second, the mother in the unconscious – the mother through whom the subject is constituted – who is first fully articulated by Freud at the turn of the century as the split-mother: this mother is later theorized more fully by (largely female) analysts; and third, the mother in fictional representations who combines the institutionally positioned mother, and the unconscious mother. The fourth mother, who may be called the “real life” mother (the bodily mother) or the historical figure who interacts daily with her child (and who can be studied by social scientists) lies outside my discursive scope, because I believe she is ultimately not-representable as such. She is, nevertheless, enormously important to me (as to many feminists), and it is hoped that the knowledge this study produces will have some impact on her often conflicted, difficult and marginalized life. To the extent that discourses construct mothers on the level of lived reality, work that helps to produce positive change on the discursive level (as I hope this book does) should be beneficial.

Since the level of the fictional lies at the intersection of the other two levels (i.e. the historical, the psychoanalytic), traces of those levels exist within the different kinds of discursive texts under study, and enter into the analysis. In some cases, the mother in the fictional is close to the institutionally constructed mother; but at other times she diverges widely. It is at those moments that the unconscious, Imaginary mother comes to dominate representations, often because some threat has emerged through social changes.

The book’s opening sections, sketching in the historical and psychoanalytic spheres, are necessarily broad-ranging and generalizing, but hopefully this will be compensated for in the third, large section on mother-representations in literary, film and social texts. Where possible, I indicate relations among the three spheres, but I deliberately avoid constructing a theory that might explain ways in which the spheres are inevitably interconnected. If deconstruction has taught us anything, it is to suspect high-modernist, totalizing theories. In the context of ever-increasing “data” available to researchers, it is, in any case, virtually impossible to arrive at a “grand theory.” The need is for phenomena broken down into manageable units within which coherence may be achieved. My contribution is to demonstrate how fictional mother-representations are produced through the tensions between historical and psychoanalytic spheres, and then to organize (and analyze) the contradictory mother-discourses and ideologies within specific texts.

Other aspects of the book to be noted are, first, its broad historical span (it encompasses North American culture – including European influences – from 1830 to 1960, with a look at recent developments in the final chapter); second, its linking of nineteenth-century popular literary texts with twentieth-century film; third, its attempts to locate clearly the terrain on which it works, thereby situating social science research as different from, but orthogonal with, what I am doing; and finally its addressing filmic and literary mother-representations and discourses via a series of interlocking theoretical frameworks – those of nineteenth-century melodrama and its twentieth-century film versions, mothering theory (past and present), and recent feminist research on female subjectivity, spectatorship and representation.

The first section on the “historical” (Chapter 2) outlines the broad historical context for the book; it charts changes in motherhood as a social institution, and in corresponding motherhood discourses, from Rousseau and the nineteenth century to postmodernism. I locate a pre-modern mother (who lies beyond my frame); an early modern mother (who emerges in Europe with Rousseau and the institutions needed by the first Industrial Revolution, but whose influence on North American discourses is clear); a high-modernist mother constructed through social changes in post-Romanticism (leading up to the First World War) and evident in full-blown modernism (between the two World Wars); finally, a postmodern mother. This latter figure is currently being constructed in response to social developments, particularly those arising from various 1960s movements (including feminisms), the rapid rise of multinational corporate capitalisms (the international financial elite) and the electronic technological revolution.

This “macro” historical sphere references the broad historical movement produced by economic conditions, political movements and scientific/technological developments. The macro sphere moves inexorably in tandem with these forces, which produce changes, not only within nations, but also in relations between nations: they also produce the discourses I indicate, which move from the construction of the “mother” as a new, self-conscious, patriarchal social role (with Rousseau); through the revolutionary modernist discovery of subjectivity (with Freud, and his theory of the unconscious, which, ironically, did not lead to discussion of the mother’s subjectivity; rather it produced the mother as the one through whom “I,” the child, become a subject); to recent mother-discourses in reaction to (but also reflecting) postmodern theories of the decentered subject, and of the end of totalizing narratives.

In the past century, changes in the macro-historical sphere have been dramatic and rapid, impacting directly on both the family as institution, and particularly on the mother. The impact of reproductive technologies, and the discourses they have spawned, is merely the most awesome recent example of what I have in mind.

The danger of invoking the broad historical span lies in the difficulty of amassing empirical evidence to support generalizations, and of taking into account specific historical contexts, cultural, racial and class differences, the changing nature of the reading/viewing public, the contexts of production and exhibition, and so on. In order to narrow the project and make possible a coherent tracing of select historical mother paradigms, I decided deliberately to limit this study to what I call the “Master” Motherhood Discourse as it worked to position white, middle-class women as subjects in very specific ways. The concept of a “Master Discourse” derives ultimately from Nietzsche, who, in his Genealogy of Morals, comments on the difficulty of eradicating ourselves from the intellectual traditions of established authorities:

The masters’ right of giving names [he notes] goes so far that it is permissible to look upon language itself as the expression of the power of the masters: they say “this is that, and that,” they seal finally every object and every event with a sound, and thereby at the same time take possession of it.

(Nietzsche 1954)⁴

Nietzsche was uninterested in the specifically male domination of the moral traditions he warred against, but this is central to my purposes here. The discourse of motherhood that I am exploring is not accidentally a “master” discourse: its patriarchal aspects are precisely what I want to unravel.

But the method here mainly relies on Foucault’s work, particularly his discourse theory as evident in the volumes on sexuality (see especially the Introduction in Foucault 1978). I explore the ramifications of what is a prevailing cultural discourse (in the period of study) of the Ideal “angel” Mother pitted against her evil “witch” opposite, as it was developed (and then embodied itself) in specifically nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century iconography, myths, images and representations. My study is, then, limited to tracing paradigms in white, North American, middle-class culture, as this culture consolidated itself in the early nineteenth century following Rousseau’s lead.

Understanding this prevailing or “dominant” discourse is crucial even for groups that the dominant marginalizes (e.g. Black, Jewish, Hispanic and other American ethnic groups, the various working classes, the poor and the homeless, the non-traditional family, where the stepmother, the adoptive mother, or surrogate may be central; or where homosexual couples are raising children, and so on). A study could be made of mother images in the sub-culture of each of these groups (and hopefully this book will inspire such studies, if they are not already underway), but such a study could benefit from knowledge of how the dominant paradigm, oppressive for the minority group, came into being, how its very presence constructs (as part of its ideology) other groups as “marginalized.” I do deal with the appropriation of minority discourse by the dominant in Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Imitation of Life.

I do not argue that mothers in particular, or individual families (even those fitting into the white, heterosexual, biological norm) necessarily operated according to the dominant discourse. Some presumably did, others did not; as in any period, on the level of lived experience there is clearly a wide range of social practices. These, I believe (following here Tony Bennett and others who have developed the concept of “reading formations”: see Bennett 1986; Laclau undated, cited by Bennett; Laclau 1980; Pêcheux 1982) depend on one’s particular sub-cultural group, be that ideological (feminist, minority, class), ethnic, institutional or other. Feminist historians have begun to discover the surprising resiliency of women to their oppressive positioning across the decades; they have found moments in every period when women took up rebellious stances against practices that created hardship and suffering. But this in no way negates the constant presence of myths on a totally different, unconscious level. It is this level that I deal with in the book’s second section on the “psychoanalytic” sphere.

I argue here that women’s activist capacities and resilience in the face of oppressive institutional positioning exist alongside the centrality to their lives of the intra-psychic and unconscious terrain, which often produces women’s complicity with patriarchal norms. Changes naturally take place in this sphere of the psychoanalytic, but compared to that in the macro-historical sphere, change in the intra-psychic terrain is more slow; it can act as a kind of brake for the economic, technological and political forces which would otherwise proceed unimpeded. It is therefore an ideologically ambivalent terrain.

Nevertheless, there are dramatic changes in the early twentieth century in thinking about this terrain. High modernism’s most central discovery, along with Marx’s theories, was Freud’s theory of the unconscious and his “discovery” of subjectivity. Freud’s thinking revolutionized concepts of the human being from those that prevailed in the nineteenth century by positing an inner, psychic life not theorized before even if there to be glimpsed in the western literature (that is my concern here) from as far back as at least the Greek civilizati...