Horrible Mothers: Representations across Francophone North America
222
Horrible Mothers: Representations across Francophone North America
222eBook
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Overview
For too long the main narratives of motherhood have been oppressive and exclusionary, frequently ignoring issues of female identity—especially regarding those not conforming to traditional female stereotypes. Horrible Mothers offers a variety of perspectives for analyzing representations of the mother in francophone literature and film at the turn of the twenty-first century in North America, including Québec, Ontario, New England, and California.
Contributors reexamine the “horrible mother” paradigm within a broad range of sociocultural contexts from different locations to broaden the understanding of mothering beyond traditional ideology. The selections draw from long-established scholarship in women’s studies as well as from new developments in queer studies to make sense of and articulate strategies of representation; to show how contemporary family models are constantly evolving, reshaping, and moving away from heteronormative expectations; and to reposition mothers as subjects occupying the center of their own narrative, rather than as objects. The contributors engage narratives of mothering from myriad perspectives, referencing the works of writers or filmmakers such as Marguerite Andersen, Nelly Arcan, Grégoire Chabot, Xavier Dolan, Nancy Huston, and Lucie Joubert.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781496218278 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Nebraska |
| Publication date: | 12/01/2019 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 222 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
The Whore and Her Mother
Exploring Matrophobia in Nelly Arcan's Putain
Pauline Henry-Tierney
J'ai eu trop de mères, trop de ces modèles de dévotes réduites à un nom de remplacement. ... [J]'ai eu trop de ces mères-là et pas assez de la mienne, ma mère qui ne m'appelait pas car elle avait trop à dormir.
— Nelly Arcan, Putain
In the opening pages of Québécoise writer Nelly Arcan's autofictional debut novel, Putain (2001), the narrator proclaims that she has had too many mothers — an overabundance of the sister-mothers from her fervent Roman Catholic education, yet not enough of her own mother, a woman described by the narrator as "une larve" (18), a wormlike creature who exists only in a vegetative, mute state throughout the text. The maternal dynamic dominates the text with the mother's shadowy absent-presence weighing down oppressively on the narrator as an ominous forewarning of what she considers to be her own impending destiny. For Arcan's protagonist, the fear of her own "destin de larve" (53) is all-consuming. In this study, I will explore the intense feelings of matrophobia experienced by the narrator. I will begin by examining how the narrator perceives her mother in terms of the images she employs to describe her and the feelings evinced from such portrayals. I will then look at the roots of the narrator's matrophobic angst, such as her phobias of corporeal degradation, desexualization, and social alienation. Finally, I will explore how prostitution and death are seen as subversive strategies to disrupt and ultimately reject the maternal cycle. Drawing upon maternal feminist theorist Adrienne Rich's elaboration of matrophobia and Simone de Beauvoir's critique of the phenomenological socialization of maternity, I will explore the specific interactions Arcan textually maps out between matrophobia, sexuality, and corporeality and their resultant implications for our understanding of maternal relations.
While the dynamics of mother-daughter relations have universal resonance, the specificity of the Québec context in which Arcan is writing is essential to our understanding of female genealogies in this sociocultural moment. Writing on the cusp of the third millennium, Arcan's voice joins with other contemporary Québécoise writers such as Marie-Sissi Labrèche, whose transgressive narratives explore maternal relationships through topoi such as sexuality and corporeality. While Gill Rye observes a trend in contemporary French literature in which "mothers are becoming narrative subjects in their own right" (15), the mothers in these texts remain silent, reflective, perhaps, of the persisting traditional values assigned to women in Québécois culture. As Andrée Lévesque explains, in efforts to populate and affirm the economic stability of the province, official discourses from the state and the Catholic Church sought to define women solely in relation to motherhood. Over the years, many Québécoise writers have explored the persistence of this legacy and its repercussions for female genealogies, and Arcan's text constitutes an important perspective on the mother-daughter issue in a postmillennial context. Despite the increasing audibility of Arcan's posthumous voice, scant critical attention has focused on her exploration of maternal relations and none on the question of matrophobia.
First appearing in Lynn Sukenick's 1973 essay on her study of Doris Lessing's female characters, the term "matrophobia" relates not simply to a fear of one's mother or maternity but rather to a fear of becoming one's mother. Sukenick explores the matrophobia experienced by Lessing's protagonist Martha Quest in Children of Violence (1952), describing the fear of becoming her mother as a catalyst for the development of the protagonist's own diametrically opposed subjectivity: "It is against her mother's vapidity that Martha Quest forms her character; her self-respect is fashioned out of her sense of difference from the woman who hovers uselessly in the margins of her life" (518). The term has been elaborated further by Adrienne Rich, who understands matrophobia as being manifested in a daughter's refusal to perpetuate subjugated patterns of female impotency inculcated through patriarchal order: "Thousands of daughters see their mothers as having taught a compromise and self-hatred they are struggling to win free of, the one through whom the restrictions and degradations of a female existence were perforce transmitted. Easier by far to hate and reject a mother outright than to see beyond her to the forces acting upon her" (235).
As my analysis of Putain will illuminate shortly, while the narrator does harbor feelings that vacillate from pity to sheer disgust for her mother, unlike Rich's definition, the narrator is acutely aware of the external forces acting upon her mother. Her castigation still remains sharp, since she is also admonishing her mother's complicity in those forces. Rich further delineates matrophobia as a self-splitting, an inward-looking form of self-annihilation in order to purge the latent maternal threat: "Matrophobia can be seen as a womanly splitting of the self, in the desire to become purged once and for all of our mothers' bondage, to become individuated and free. The mother stands for the victim in ourselves, the unfree woman, the martyr" (236).
As I shall discuss, this form of self-dissociation does take place in Putain, but in order to abate her matrophobia, the narrator subversively promotes extreme forms of splitting, ultimately seeing death (both real and symbolic) as a possible solution to the maternal dynamic. For now, let us consider who exactly the narrator fears becoming by analyzing the images the narrator employs to characterize her mother.
Maternal Imagery: Princesses, Cadavers, and Worms
From an early age the narrator is conscious of the maternal absence in her life, observing and framing her mother as an untenable figure and categorizing her progressive social withdrawal into different stages. For the narrator, the first stage, which lasted nearly four years, was "[la] période de cheveux" (9) ("the time of the hair" [3]), where only her mother's hair was discernible from the immobile mass under the bedsheets. Striking a parallel with the mother known as "la grande Claudine" in Anne Hébert's Le torrent (1989), whose hands were the only body parts perceptible to her son, such fragmented images are reminiscent of a queered version of Jacques Lacan's Mirror Stage, in which the infant's ego identity is formed through a process of identification with its mirror image by providing an illusory sense of mastery over the fragmented bodily experience that the mirrored alter ego provides. The persistence of the fragmented mother's body echoes Lacan's evocation of Renaissance painter Hieronymus Bosch's work, containing "images of castration, mutilation, dismemberment, dislocation, evisceration, devouring, bursting open of the body" (11), which he uses to illustrate the ever-present threat of the return of identity fragmentation. In this way, it seems that the narrator's subjectivity is precariously contingent upon the relationship to the mother. The mother's fragmented body incarnates Bosch's monstrous images, underlining the threat for the narrator of returning to a similar state of fractured identity. This state of staticity slowly gives way to "la période de la Belle au Bois dormant" (10) ("the time of Sleeping Beauty" [3]). The narrator's characterization of her mother in terms of a fairy tale heroine befits the narrator's childhood perspective. As Elizabeth Wanning Harries discusses in her study of women's autobiography and fairy tales, the use of this genre functions as an analogical, interpretative device, "a way of reading and even predicting the world" (103). According to Bruno Bettelheim, the fairy tale of Sleeping Beauty is symbolic of the adolescent's journey into sexual and corporeal maturity, with the period of sleep paradigmatic of the "long, quiet concentration on oneself" necessary for personal growth during puberty (225). In Sleeping Beauty the heroine's slumber ensues after she pricks her finger on a distaff (the blood symbolizes the bleeding in menstruation and first intercourse). The long sleep is a protective countermeasure against premature sexual encounters, and the wall of thorns enclosing the heroine only gives way "when Sleeping Beauty has gained both physical and emotional maturity and is ready for love, and with it for sex and marriage" (233). However, in Putain, the narrator's characterization of her mother as Sleeping Beauty offers a queering of the tale. In lieu of a period of quietude allowing for sexual maturation, the mother's sleeping represents her social regression and, conversely, her sexual degradation. As Wanning Harries explains, "[F]airy tales provide scripts for living, but they can also inspire resistance to those scripts and, in turn, to other apparently predetermined patterns" (103). Arcan's narrative disrupts the traditional script, with the Sleeping Beauty mother eventually dying from sleeping too much, having waited interminably for the kiss of a Prince Charming who, according to the narrator, "ne viendra jamais car il n'existe pas ou n'a pas voulu d'elle" (58) ("will never come, since he doesn't exist or didn't want her" [51]). By subverting the ending of the popular Brothers Grimm tale, we can read Arcan's dystopian version as a rejection of this idea of the heroine's fate being contingent upon masculine agency. In her study of female subjectivity in popular fairy tales, Marcia Lieberman observes that most heroines are characterized as "passive, submissive, and helpless" (190) and embedded in narratives that only serve "to acculturate women to traditional social roles" (185). Arcan's queering of Sleeping Beauty reflects her critique of the social structures it reifies, and her alternative ending serves as a way to stop the mother from further internalizing these subservient values. Nevertheless, the narrator's alternative of death for her mother remains equally bleak, since this solution does not empower the mother either.
Continuing with the fairy tale imagery, the narrator also describes her mother as a witch: "[Q]ue dire sinon cette fente de sorcière qui ne peut tenir lieu de bouche, non, ce n'est qu'un trait qui donne au visage un caractère mortuaire, et ses doigts rendus croches d'être si fort rongés, ses doigts tordus de ne servir à rien" (33) ("[W]hat is there except that witch's slit that can't substitute for a mouth, no, it's just a line that gives her face a funereal look, and her fingers gnawed into eighth notes, crooked from uselessness" [27]). The description of the mother's mouth being no more than a slit presents her as an inaudible figure, thus emphasizing her lack of agency, as Andrea King underlines: "Cette sorcière nous fait penser à celle qui revient à travers la littérature, la femme-sorcière qui voudrait parler, mais qui est réduite au silence par l'ordre masculin et brûlée vive" (42) ("This witch reminds us of the recurring literary figure of the witch-woman who wishes to speak but who is silenced by the masculine order and burned alive"). Throughout the text, Arcan doubles the word fente to create an alignment between the mouth slit and the genital slit to underline the connection between women's capacity to speak and their sexuality, invoking Luce Irigaray's own doubling of the lips/labia sewn together by patriarchy ("Their words, the gag upon our lips" [212]), yet with women's sexuality promising the chance to reaffirm subjective agency ("Our lips are growing red again. They're stirring, moving, they want to speak" [212]). Furthermore, the funereal look of this slit links with the idea of the mortal decomposition of the mother's body, explicitly portrayed in the narrator's descriptions of her mother as a cadaver, "un cadavre qui sort de son lit pour pisser" (38) ("a corpse who leaves her bed to pee" [31]), "de mourir sous les couvertures d'être si peu vue, si peu touché" (49) ("dying under the covers from being so rarely seen or touched" [42]). This gnarled, macabre caricature of the mother as a witch runs through the text, with the threat of ensnarement looming over the narrator in a fairy tale–esque manner: "[C]e n'est pas eux mais moi qui suis du mauvais côté de la vie, celui du lit de ma mère, de sa cave humide de sorcière" (100) ("[T]he one who's on the wrong side of life is me, not them, I'm on the side of my mother's bed, in her damp witch's cellar" [91]). For the narrator, the comparison of her mother's bed to a witch's cellar highlights how she sees her as a force to be feared, and she is careful not to get too close to the mother for fear of entrapment in her own possible prostrate future.
Above all other characterizations, the narrator most frequently describes her mother as a worm. It is both what she does ("j'ai la nausée de répéter ma mère qui larve" [186] / "I'm queasy from repeating my mother who worms" [171]) and who she is ("sa vie de larve, sa vie de gigoter à la même place se retournant sur son impuissance" [36] / "her worm of a life, a life spent wriggling in the same place, tossing and turning on her helplessness" [30]). A worm is a common literary trope often used as a symbol of putrefaction and death, yet although the English translation of the French word larve is most commonly "worm" (as it appears most often in the English translation, Whore), it is not a worm in the sense of an earthworm (ver). Instead, larve is more accurately "larva," namely, the juvenile form many creatures inhabit before their metamorphosis into adulthood. The narrator describes how her mother is suspended in this sleep-induced coma, "une larve entre le sommeil et l'attente de prendre forme" (55) ("a worm hovering between sleeping and waiting to take form" [48]), yet she sees the bleak reality of her mother's inability to metamorphose and stake claim to her own subjectivity: "son agonie de larve qui se tord de ne pas ouvrir les ailes, et puis de toute façon elle n'a pas d'ailes et n'en a jamais eu, elle s'est effondrée bien avant d'avoir pu voler" (103) ("her agony about being a larva writhing from its inability to open its wings, but actually she has no wings and never did, she collapsed long before she could fly" [93]). The narrator then changes the image, instead likening her mother to a baby bird who is left crushed in the nest, trampled on by her brothers. As a woman, her mother is unable to fly from the nest or transform from the larva stage and ascend to a state of empowered subjecthood. Arcan's critique here echoes Rich's earlier sentiment about the way in which the construction of motherhood continues to connect women with bondage to men and patriarchy. Furthermore, the details of the mother collapsing, being crushed and trampled, also underscore her vulnerability. While a sense of pathos is evinced over the mother's unfulfilled potential, the narrator's contempt is equally present, characteristic of what Fran Scoble describes as the daughter's anger at the mother who concedes to her powerlessness (130). Having established a sense of who the narrator is scared of becoming, let us turn now to look at which aspects of the mother's life the narrator fears reproducing.
Corporeal Matrophobia and Dialectics of Sexuality
The narrator's "manie d'être ma mère" (95) ("mania for being my mother" [86]) assumes myriad forms linked with issues of sexuality and corporeality. First and foremost, the narrator fears literally becoming her mother's body: "[C]e corps ... n'étant jamais la même chose d'une fois à l'autre, un corps qui me rappelle trop celui de ma larve de mère" (46) ("[T]his body ... is always changing, one thing today and another tomorrow, a body that reminds me too much of my worm of a mother's" [39]). The narrator fears corporeal degradation and the threat posed by the ageing body. Acutely aware yet simultaneously complicit in the reproduction of patriarchal constructions of femininity and beauty, the narrator evinces disgust at her mother's deteriorating body: "[C]hez les femmes c'est impardonnable, le flasque et les rides, c'est proprement indécent, il ne faut pas oublier que c'est le corps qui fait la femme" (48) ("[W]ith women, flab and wrinkles are unforgiveable, totally indecent, remember, it's the body that makes the woman" [41]). The narrator is conscious of what Naomi Wolf identifies as "the beauty myth," namely, a phenomenon imposed by patriarchal culture, which she delineates as the "last, best belief system that keeps male dominance intact" (12), since it invariably instigates a hierarchizing of women. A further consequence of the mother's ageing body that fills the narrator with angst for her own "destin de larve" has to do with the way in which the ageing body becomes socially ghettoized. Referring to her dystopian Sleeping Beauty mother, the narrator comments, "Mais j'allais oublier qu'elle est vieille et laide maintenant, personne ne voudra l'embrasser" (104) ("But I almost forgot that she's old and ugly now, no one will want to kiss her" [94]). As Beauvoir explores in La vieillesse, old people occupy the position of society's "Others," particularly in capitalist countries, where they are seen as economically inactive and, therefore, a social burden. In Le deuxième sexe, Beauvoir also attributes old people's marginalization to the materiality of the ageing body, which serves as an unwelcome reminder for active society of their own impending reality of ageing, illness, and death. Such marginalization, according to Beauvoir, is even more acute for women, whose physiological destiny carries greater signification than men's, since society continues to reify links between women and their biological functions: "Whereas the male grows older continuously, the woman is brusquely stripped of her femininity; still young, she loses sexual attraction and fertility from which, in society's and her eyes, she derives the justification of her existence and her chances of happiness" (633). Beauvoir's explanation substantiates the narrator's aversion to the mother's ageing body: the deteriorating, desexualized body functions as a mirror image for the narrator, reflecting her own eventual social decline and alienation.
(Continues…)
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments Introduction: Failing Successfully Loïc Bourdeau 1. The Whore and Her Mother: Exploring Matrophobia in Nelly Arcan’s Putain Pauline Henry-Tierney 2. Horrible Mothers in Mémère’s Kitchen: Queer Identity in New England Franco-America Susan Pinette 3. “I’m Not the Virgin Mary”: Rebellious Motherhood in Grégoire Chabot’s “A Life Lost” Chelsea Ray 4. Permissive Parenting: The Awful American Mother in Nancy Huston’s Lignes de faille Alison Rice 5. Lucie Joubert’s Ironic Rejection of Motherhood in L’envers du landau Natalie Edwards 6. Voicing Shame: From Fiction to Confession in the Work of Marguerite Andersen Lucie Hotte and Ariane Brun del Re 7. The Transgressive Mother in Nancy Huston’s Bad Girl: Classes de littérature Susan Ireland and Patrice J. Proulx 8. Forgiving the Horrible Mother: Children’s Needs and Women’s Desires in Twenty-First-Century Québécois Film Amy J. Ransom 9. Politics and Motherhood in Xavier Dolan’s J’ai tué ma mère and Mommy Loïc Bourdeau Contributors Index