Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and Maternal Subjectivity

Alison Stone

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136593512
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory
• Index: Social Sciences

In this book, Alison Stone develops a feminist approach to maternal subjectivity. Stone argues that in the West the self has often been understood in opposition to the maternal body, so that one must separate oneself from the mother and maternal care-givers on whom one depended in childhood to become a self or, in modernity, an autonomous subject. These assumptions make it difficult to be a mother and a subject, an autonomous creator of meaning. Insofar as mothers nonetheless strive to regain their subjectivity when their motherhood seems to have compromised it, theirs cannot be the usual kind of subjectivity premised on separation from the maternal body. Mothers are subjects of a new kind, who generate meanings and acquire agency from their position of re-immersion in the realm of maternal body relations, of bodily intimacy and dependency. Thus Stone interprets maternal subjectivity as a specific form of subjectivity that is continuous with the maternal body. Stone analyzes this form of subjectivity in terms of how the mother typically reproduces with her child her history of bodily relations with her own mother, leading to a distinctive maternal and cyclical form of lived time.

1 From Mothering to Maternal
Experience

We must give . . . new life to the mother, to our mother within us and between us. . . . We must also find#x2026;the words, the sentences that speak the most archaic and most contemporary relationship with the body of the mother, . . . the sentences that translate the bond between her body, ours, and those of our daughters.

Luce Irigaray, ‘The Bodily Encounter with the Mother’

My aim in this chapter is to motivate and situate my concerns with the maternal body and maternal subjectivity with respect to several ideas and bodies of literature that address maternity. These include Freudian and Lacanian traditions of thought about the paternal function; psychoanalytic ideas about the good-enough mother; the rise of ideals of intensive mothering in the late twentieth century; and recent fictional and autobiographical writing by or about mothers. I shall also address some objections that might be raised against my approach to maternal subjectivity.

I. THE PROBLEM OF MATERNAL SUBJECTIVITY

In Western civilization there has been a widespread tendency to understand the maternal body and the self in opposition to one another. Arguably, this has been the case from the beginnings of this civilization in ancient Greece and the Judeo-Christian tradition through to the present day.¹ There has been a persistent assumption that becoming a self requires one to separate oneself from one's early relations to the maternal body. The maternal body has repeatedly been interpreted as the background, environment, first home and container, which everyone must leave behind to become a self. Traditionally, this was a self in the sense of a full participant in the community and its organizing spiritual, political, or cultural values. The most common modern version of these assumptions is instead that one must leave the maternal body behind to become an autonomous individual subject, the author and architect of the meaning of one's experience and of the normative authority of the values and meanings to which one commits oneself.

Where it has been upheld, this requirement to separate from the mother has been taken to apply to girls and boys alike. Yet girls must in some sense also remain identified with their mothers and the maternal body so as to assume a female identity. Consequently, female selfhood and, in modern times, female subjectivity have been problematic. The same set of entrenched assumptions about the self has made maternal selfhood and subjectivity problematic: to become a mother is to re-inhabit and become re-immersed in the field of maternal body relations, but, according to these assumptions, this re-immersion precludes one from having the status of a meaning-making self.

Some readers may object to these sweeping claims about ‘Western civilization’, thinking that this supposed unity contains too many heterogeneous strands for us to speak about it as a whole. However, despite this heterogeneity, we can identify certain influential strands and traditions within this civilization and can trace the hold they have had on our collective imagination. Let us remember that the Christian Church traditionally saw the pains of pregnancy and child-bearing as consequences of Eve's sin. On this view, the whole field of maternal body relations was tainted by sin; by implication, spiritual value required transcendence of this field. Partly due to institutional support of this kind, and partly for psychological reasons (see Chapter 2), ideas about the need to leave the mother behind have had marked influence on our culture.

It may be objected that no philosophers or major theorists explicitly argue that selfhood requires a break from the maternal body, so that I am criticizing views that nobody has ever endorsed at a reflective level. However, my target is not so much philosophical theories of the self as prevailing assumptions that, I believe, have been embodied in our forms of social life—our social imaginary, at least its dominant strands (on this concept see Gatens and Lloyd 1998, Taylor 2004). These assumptions have had wide currency even though few philosophers have explicitly defended corresponding views of the self. Moreover, it may be argued—as Irigaray amongst others does—that many canonical Western philosophers have implicitly imagined the self in opposition to the maternal body even if they have not so theorized it, and that this imagining shapes their writings. For instance, according to Irigaray (1985a), Plato's myth of the philosopher escaping the cave expresses a fantasy of escaping the maternal womb and, by extension, the maternal and female body.

We are dealing, then, with assumptions and imagery: not logically coherent arguments but a web of associations and pictures concerning the maternal figure—associations that can be highly tenacious, to which we can be deeply attached without realizing it. Within this web, the mother is a bodily figure who conjures up intense affects. She is seen as the figure whom one must leave behind, and hence she is assumed to be the background to the selfhood of others but not herself a self or (in modernity) a subject. In another variation on these themes, the mother is dangerous, threatening to hold us back from selfhood, to prevent us from leaving her behind.

It may now be objected that these assumptions are rather vaguely specified, and if that we look at any particular forms under which they have been held, we encounter ideas too various to be appropriately treated as a unity. Certainly, I will be discussing a wide range of ideas about the need to break away from the mother (discussions that will hopefully give substance to my claim that these ideas have been long and widely held). These ideas include the ancient Greek view, articulated by Aeschylus in his Oresteia, that one must detach oneself from the mother to become a self qua member or citizen of the polis. The Gospels suggest that one must distance oneself from the mother to become a self qua member of the spiritual community. The modern, more individualistic view that separation from the mother is necessary for autonomy finds expression in many recent texts by men and women, including Simone de Beauvoir's memoirs (see Chapter 4) and Hitchcock's film Psycho (see Chapter 2). In the twentieth century some theorists have explicitly affirmed the requirement to break from the mother—above all psychoanalysts, including Freud and Lacan. The expectation that we should separate, then, has been expressed under a series of changing interpretations, corresponding to changing interpretations of the self. Yet, varied as these forms are, we can identify them as strands of a single history.

To be sure, psychoanalysis has also spearheaded the recognition, increasingly widespread in the twentieth century, that our early relations with our mothers are central in forming our selves. Often, though, it has been thought that our mothers lay the foundations of our selves or of capacities for subjectivity which nonetheless require a break from the mother for their complete realization or exercise. For example, for Margaret Mahler, our early ‘symbiosis’ with our mothers enables us to become separate selves, but in doing so we leave behind this same early state of symbiosis (see Chapters 4 and 5).² For Donald Winnicott, interactive mother-child play fosters the child's relational capacities but thereby enables the child to transfer its play-relations into the wider cultural world, leaving relations with the mother behind (see Chapter 3). Thus, mothers have increasingly been recognized to mediate children's transitions from nature to culture, body to mind. But because the mother embodies this transition, it has still tended to be thought that full entry into culture and civilization requires us to leave behind the mother and her transitional realm.

II. MATERNAL TROUBLES

To consider how these inherited ideas can impede mothers today from being subjects, let us look at some recent fictional and autobiographical treatments of mothering. I begin with Jane Campion's 1993 film The Piano. Its main character, Ada, has for no known reason been mute since she was six. When the story begins, her father has arranged her marriage to a man in New Zealand. Ada communicates with the other characters only through her daughter Flora, who translates for others her mother's entirely personal sign-language; Ada also expresses herself by playing the piano. Thus, Ada remains within the pre-verbal realms of bodily gesture and of pure affective expression, realms proper to Ada as a mother—as is indicated by the contrast with Flora her daughter, who can speak directly to others. The Piano thus dramatizes the antithesis between maternity and meaning in a patriarchal society—its patriarchal nature being shown by Ada's treatment as an item of exchange amongst men.

But perhaps The Piano over-dramatizes this antithesis. Surely in general mothers can and do speak? The question, though, is whether mothers can speak in ways that articulate their particular position within maternal body relations, and can create linguistic forms and narrative structures that provide this articulation. Is there available to mothers any distinctly maternal speaking position? Anne Enright asks this question. ‘What I am interested in’, she writes in Making Babies: Stumbling into Motherhood, ‘is not the drama of being a child, but this new drama of being a mother…about which so little has been written’ (2005, 42). In fact, much has been written about this drama, but Enright's real question is whether mothers can write about their drama as mothers. Thus, she continues: ‘Can mothers not hold a pen? Or is it just…that we are all children, when we write?’ Enright suggests that we all write from the position of the child who breaks from their maternal past; to re-inhabit maternal body relations is to cease being able to do this.

I suspect, as I search the room for the hunger…in [my daughter's] cry, that I have found a place before stories start. Or the precise place where stories start. How else can I explain the shift from language that has happened in my brain? This is why mothers do not write, because motherhood happens in the body, as much as the mind.…A child came out of me. I cannot understand this, or try to explain it. Except to say that my past life has become foreign to me. Except to say that I am prey, for the rest of my life, to every small thing. (Enright 2005, 47)

Grappling with the same antithesis of subjectivity and maternity, several contemporary novels depict mothers who lose their subjectivity on becoming mothers and regain it only by losing their children. As Gill Rye explores in her study of narratives of mothering in contemporary France, the pervasive theme in these narratives is not happiness but loss: of children who die young, grow up and leave home, or of whom mothers lose custody (Rye 2009). One of these narratives is Marie Darrieussecq's 1999 novel Le mal de mer (Seasickness, translated into English as Breathing Underwater). In this novel, an unnamed mother takes her daughter with her as she runs off to the Basque coast, leaving her husband, home, and job. A detective, hired by the husband who wants his daughter back, traces the mother and daughter. Confronted by the detective at the novel's end, the mother hands her daughter over, and the story concludes with the mother traveling to the airport to emigrate to Australia. Describing acts, sensations, and impressions rather than mental states and motivations, the novel offers no insight into the mother's state of mind at these events. Instead a watching ice-cream vendor describes the handover of the girl:

The guy [the detective] has taken the little girl's hand. Off they go, the two of them. There was a kiss, a handshake, the woman is still here; her sorbet drips on to the ground in pink splodges…She comes to life now, says goodbye to him, and walks off, throwing her cornet into a wastebin. (Darrieussecq [1999] 2001, 114)

As far as we know, the mother is willing to relinquish her daughter and she emigrates with no apparent plans to remain in contact. In terms of the narrative, the handover of the daughter marks the end of the emotional crisis through which the mother has been passing, which implies that the mother accepts with relief, or at least submits to, the handover of her daughter.

What was the mother's crisis? She felt submerged in a kind of psychical fusion with her daughter. We see this in the first chapter in which the two run away and camp overnight by the sea. Pausing to buy provisions at a supermarket and leaving her daughter in the car, the mother daydreams: ‘Leave the child, go out the other side, someone will find her, of course they will, and as for her—ten thousand francs, a plane ticket’ (Darrieussecq 2001, 15). The mother yearns to escape. Likewise, during the night, while the daughter sleeps in the tent, the mother runs off to look at the sea, which at this point symbolizes freedom, mental space, and privacy. Yet immediately before this, in the tent, the girl's ‘mother holds her so close that her buttocks are lifted slightly off the sand’ (5). The mother allows no distance between them, and is so alert to her daughter's potential needs that she can barely sleep—hence her need to escape. The daughter then wakes up, afraid, and goes looking for her mother, so that when the mother returns to the empty tent:

She thought, in the forest, that she'd lost her. She was only going to look at the sea…And then she saw her, an elf…She caught her, that fragile little body ready to melt in the night air…thought of swallowing her, reclaiming her; making her go back inside her womb, placing her arms nside her arms, her belly inside her belly, her head inside her skull. (53)

The mother is driven to escape from her daughter so as to leave behind the mergence and loss of self that the mother nonetheless deeply desires. Selfless mergence in maternal body relations versus individual selfhood predicated on the rejection of those relations; the mother is caught between these alternatives.

Rachel Cusk experiences the same dilemma. In A Life's Work, she endeavors to regain the ‘unified, capable’ self that she only now realizes (or imagines) that she used to have, having lost it upon having her daughter. But she cannot recover that self, for doing so would mean leaving the baby's needs unmet, which she feels unable to do. Yet neither is Cusk made unified and capable by catering for her baby's needs, because she feels unable to abandon the former projects that gave her her earlier unity. The ‘unified, capable’ self, she writes,

proves elusive. Its constituents, resolutely hostile, are equally unruly. To be a mother I must leave the telephone unanswered, work undone, arrangements unmet. To be myself I must let the baby cry, must…leave her for evenings out, must forget her in order to think about other things. To succeed in being one means to fail at being the other. (Cusk 2001, 57)

We remember how Cusk described her exhaustion as a new mother:

In the morning I would sit up in bed, the room listing drunkenly about me, and would put a hand to my face, checking for some evidence of disfigurement: an eyebrow, perhaps, slipped down to my cheek, a deranged ear cluttering my forehead, a seam at the back of my skull gaping open. (Cusk 2001, 178)

Maternity, for Cusk, is disfigurement: the loss of the form and cohesion proper to a subject, a chaotic scrambling of body parts, with a hole in the head where intelligence formerly had its seat. The mother has sunk into an archaic field in which body parts and functions exchange places with and permeate one another—the field of early mother-child flux and interchange.

Apparently, maternity challenges (no doubt to varying degrees for different mothers) one's capacities to speak and make meaning and one's sense of being a single, unified subject. These are felt to be under threat, compromised, or recoverable only with difficulty and at the expense of other, newly acquired dimensions of life as a mother. The abilities that are threatened here may seem disparate, but they are connected by virtue of the modern conception of the subject. The subject is one who actively gives meaning to his or her experience (in speech, writing, or other modes), and who can do so only because at some level he or she identifies as the single agent performing this activity. But in becoming a mother, one ceases to be readily able to identify oneself as a single, unified agent, because one has returned in fantasy to the relational context of one's early childhood, before one achieved subjectivity by breaking from this context.³ To re-enter this context is to disturb the conditions under which one's subjectivity up until now has been possible.

This picture of mothering may seem one-sided and unduly negative. What about the joys of becoming a mother; the intense, at times euphoric love of mothers for their children; the mother's enjoyment of a deeply bodily and affective relation to this dependent human being; her pleasure in discovering or re-discovering forgotten dimensions of her personality that surface in the mothering relation?⁴ I do not deny these pleasures, but they arise from the same aspects of mothering—its bodily intensity and deep intimacy between mother and child—that equally tend to spell chaos and loss of agency on the mother's part. These aspects are attractive to mothers and, often, cause them difficulty. This difficulty, though, is largely an artifact of how we are used to thinking about subjectivity and the self—although this is not to say that all the difficulties of becoming a mother stem from contingent cultural constructions; some of them are arguably intrinsic to mother-child relations, as we will see later.

III. INTENSIVE MOTHERING

One might think that the difficulties charted by Campion, Cusk, Darrieussecq, and Enright do not reflect deep-seated cultural inheritances but are peculiar to contemporary, white, middle-class mothers. Arguably, these mothers are unusual amongst women in that they are used to being treated as autonomous individuals, and so, too, in finding this status undermined when they become mothers. However, mothers of many different social backgrounds tend to experience some difficulty in reconciling their maternity with a sense of autonomous selfhood (for evidence, see Oakley 1980, 1986). Even if these difficulties are most pronounced for contemporary middle-class mothers, this is because these mothers have had privileged access to the modern position of autonomous subject. Their difficulties therefore do manifest and illustrate broader tensions between modern ideals of subjectivity and the nature of maternity.

But why have these tensions not been dissolved or reduced by the circumstances of contemporary mothering? Today in the West, few women leave the paid workforce altogether on becoming mothers; they usually continue with paid work and professional life, in which, moreover, women now participate much more extensively than they did a generation ago. Men tend to be more involved with their children and families than they used to be, and many Western countries give these arrangements some support through schemes of maternity and paternity leave and childcare provision. Why, then, would mothers continue to experience the transition to maternity in terms of a loss of self and autonomy?

Part of the a...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Halftitle
• Routledge Studies in Contemporary Philosophy
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Maternity Between Body and Subjectivity
• 1 From Mothering to Maternal Experience
• 2 Parricide and Matricide
• 3 Maternal Space
• 4 Re-Assessing Mother-Daughter Relationships
• 5 Ambivalence and the Dynamics of Mothering a Daughter
• 6 Maternal Time
• 7 Maternal Loss
• Notes
• References
• Index