Mothers
and Daughters: The Myths We Live By
Remarks for Mount Holyoke College Donors and Chairholders Dinner
- May 7, 2005
by Elissa Gelfand, Chair, French Department
Many of us in this room are the daughters of mothers; and, among
those, many are also the mothers of daughters. No surprise, then,
that we are drawn to stories that spring from this crucial relationship.
For nearly two decades, I have taught a seminar on French and Francophone
women’s novels that compel us to think about the mother-daughter
bond over time and across different cultures. I have come to understand
that, although the institutions of motherhood and childhood have
changed greatly through western history,some of their founding myths
are still very much with us. As mothers and as daughters living
in particular societies, we at once choose and are chosen by these
enduring narratives of a female life. In my brief comments this
evening, I will be addressing three questions: What myths underlie
our way of conceiving mothers and daughters? How have those stories
been contested by contemporary feminist critics? And, how can these
critiques help us read women’s family fictions? I will end
by connecting important features of these narratives to women’s
experiences at Mount Holyoke.
There are three classical myths from western culture that, I believe,
have had the most potent influence on our conceptions of mothers
and daughters. The best-known development story is that of Oedipus
(and, it is no coincidence, of course, that Freud chose this model
as his basis for theorizing human maturation and identity formation).
You will remember that in Sophocles’s Oedipus The King, a terrifying
prophecy – that Oedipus will kill his father and marry his
mother - leads his parents, Jocasta and Laïus, to cast out
their son. Unaware of his past, the adult Oedipus goes in search
of his origins. In the process, he fulfills the dreaded prophecy:
he kills Laïus and marries Jocasta. Jocasta derides the oracle,
saying, “God keep you from the knowledge of who you are,”
and thereby stands in the way of Oedipus’s quest. When the
truth is revealed, she kills herself. The psychoanalyst Christiane
Olivier, one of many who have reread the Oedipus myth critically,
raises several important questions: Why did Jocasta have to be killed
off? What if she denied the prophecy because she knew the truth
but did not wish to relinquish her desire? Why do mothers effortlessly
say their sons are going through the Oedipal stage but never think
to themselves, “I’m going through my Jocasta stage?”
The conventional reading of Oedipus views the powerful mother from
the son’s point of view only; it gives us no hint of Jocasta’s
feelings when she gave up her son or when she discovered her second
“husband”’s true identity. All that matters is that
this destructive figure be silenced so that order can be reestablished.
As Olivier urges, “We must revive Jocasta and understand the
mother according to her own needs and desires”; we must “desacralize”
the mother so she can at once be a mother and a woman.
The second myth whose archetypes have informed our thinking is that
of Electra, daughter of Clytemnestra and Agamemnon and sister of
Iphigenia and Orestes. In Sophocles’s version of her story,
Electra’s mother, Clytemnestra, orders her lover, Aegisthus,
to kill Agamemnon so that they can rule together. Although Clytemnestra’s
motive is revenge for Agamemnon’s having sacrificed their other
daughter, Iphigenia, to the gods, Electra instead sees sexual betrayal
and a thirst for power as her mother’s true reasons. For Electra,
Clytemnestra is “my outrageous mother, if mother she is/When
she lies down to sleep beside that man.” Once again, the desiring
mother is condemned. Further, it is her brother Orestes, not Electra,
who kills Clytemnestra, so that order can be restored – Electra
exercises no agency here. What has most troubled critics in this
story, however, is that the mother-daughter relationship is, by
definition, one of hatred and misunderstanding: in Electra’s
words, “My own mother who bore me has become/My worst enemy.”
As we know, Freud embraced this mother-daughter conflict as the
cornerstone of normal female development. Even in his relatively
late essay, “Femininity,” he asserts that “the [necessary]
turning away from the mother is accom-panied by hostility; the attachment
to the mother ends in hate.” Well we might ask: do daughters
really hate their mothers?
Nowhere in the stories of Oedipus and Electra is there a maternal
legacy of life, happiness, or efficacy. For that reason, contemporary
theorists who are re-reading the mother-daughter relation seek to
rescue the forgotten mothers, Jocasta and Clytemnestra, from oblivion,
and to recognize both the mothers’ and the daughters’
power and agency.These theorists also insist upon the importance
of the pre-Oedipal stage, when it is usually the mother who dominates
the child’s experience. These critics draw on a third, much
less often cited myth, one that has been crucial to current re-interpretations
of female development. I am referring to the story of Demeter and
Persephone. If you remember nothing else from what I say this evening,
please hold on to this, the only tale from Mediterranean civilization
told entirely from a woman’s point of view. In the Hymn to
Demeter, Demeter, the goddess of fertility, and her daughter Persephone,
enjoy a life of warmth and closeness together until Hades, the god
of the underworld and brother of Zeus, erupts above ground. He abducts
the adolescent girl and marries her. When she hears her daughter’s
cry, “grief seize[s] [the mother’s] heart”; she searches
the earth in vain for Persephone. At the same time, Persephone,
a “shy spouse” to Hades, resists him “through desire
for her mother.” The “raging” Demeter rebels against
the other gods by casting drought and famine upon the world. In
the end, she crafts a compromise with Zeus in which Persephone is
to spend two-thirds of the year with her mother and one-third with
Hades. When the two women are reunited, “Their minds are one,
they soothe/each other’s heart and soul in many ways.”
In order to suggest why this myth has been so important to critical
re-visions of women’s life stories, let me point out a few
of its notable features. First, this extra-ordinarily rich mother-daughter
paradigm recognizes and expresses the robust full range of maternal
emotions. Second, it presents a mother who is powerful and effective.
Third, it gives precedence to the initial mother-daughter intimacy
that is broken by the violent intervention of a man, Hades. Fourth,
it reunites mother and daughter who, at the end, maintain their
closeness but are two different women with distinct identities.
Finally, the principal structure of this story is a circle: the
circle of the return to the mother, the cycleof the seasons, the
recurrence of life and death. This complex structure rejects simple
narrative resolution and affirms multiple relationships; it refuses
the linear shape of conventional plots in which the laws of the
male/female couple – the “Hollywood” ending - win.
I hope you see how useful this myth can be for rethinking the mother-daughter
relation in our own lives, as well as in fiction. This story sets
up a woman-centered life-course that resonates with women’s
knowledge of how ambivalent and complicated our relationships really
are.
To give you a sampling of the many frameworks in which critics are
currently working, I draw on three thinkers whose ideas I find especially
illuminating. In her study/cum/memoir, Of Woman Born, Adrienne Rich
claims “motherhood” is a social institution anchored in
the nuclear heterosexual couple that separates women from one another.
The term “mother” itself is therefore a problematic cultural
construction that needs to be redefined according to women’s
own understanding and experience. For Rich, a mother is “a
woman who is devoted to other women”; as such, “mothers”
can be biological, adoptive, lesbian, creative, or metaphorical.
Moreover, echoing Persephone’s longing for Demeter, Rich underscores
the maternal body as a source of knowledge and self-knowledge for
the daughter; contrary to the mysterious “dark continent”
of Freudian theory that supposedly elicits the daughter’s disgust,
women’s bodies are precisely where their stories have survived
the centuries of forgetting. Perhaps most pertinent for my own teaching,
Rich connects the mother-daughter relation to women’s writing:
women’s narratives bear witness to “the great unwritten
story,” the mother’s, that was killed off when western
civilization was founded on the myth of paternal authority.
Luce Irigaray, one of France’s most influential theorists,
follows the French psychoanalytic penchant for abstraction by focusing
on “the maternal,” rather than the mother. It is important
to note that, unlike American thinkers, French critics such as Irigaray
insist upon the controversial notion of “difference,”
where feminine specificity is a source of a positive female identity.
Irigaray rejects the traditional psychoanalytic model in which the
foundational opposition between the masculine and the feminine –
between self and other, between subject and object, between the
paternal and the maternal – aligns the absent or passive term
of the binary with the feminine. As the absent “Other,”
the maternal is the object that arouses masculine desire; in seeking
to satisfy that desire, the paternal subject acts, speaks, and creates
– whence the founding of western culture. In Irigaray’s
view, the site where this cultural struggle between the masculine
and feminine plays out is the maternal body. To put this all another
way: as we saw with the silenced Jocasta and Clytemnestra, the prohibition
of maternal desire brought with it the repression of the maternal
voice. For that reason, says Irigaray, it is essential that women
express their desire, thereby liberating this repressed voice. By
writing and speaking fully as themselves, women will not only recognize
maternal power, they will redefine relations between women, and
between women and men, as life-affirming.
One less well-known critic I would like to mention is the British
sociologist Steph Lawler. In her important book, Mothering the Self,
Lawler bridges the gap between ahistorical, universalizing stances
such as Irigaray’s and the actual experiences of flesh-and-blood
women. She asks, “What does it mean, in…early twenty-first
century Euroamerican societies, to be a mother? To be a daughter?”
Using the Foucauldian premise that “knowledges about the self,…about
the mother-daughter relationship are produced and reproduced in
specific relations of social and political power,” Lawler examines
data from interviews with British women who are simultaneously mothers
and daughters. What she finds is that the women’s differing
experiences are rooted in class and gender-based expectations of
the roles they should perform. Throughout western history, women
have been held responsible for the physical and emotional development
of their offspring. Even the so-called “good-enough mother”
has to meet exacting standards. While Lawler’s research suggests
that mothers bequeath these demanding expectations to their daughters,
they also transmit messages of resistance. For Lawler, to resist
cultural prescriptions cannot be simply to reject current social
codes governing female behavior. This false notion of resistance
presupposes there is such a thing as total individual “freedom,
actualization, and fulfillment,” all of which Lawler sees as
illusions. For her, to resist is to acknowledge “the sheer
impossibility of living out the subject positions offered within
the discourses of mothering and daughtering.” To resist begins
with the understanding that “mothers” and “daughters”
are not pre-existing identities we simply adopt, but rather the
ongoing products of gendered social and political dynamics.
In this last part of my talk, I would like to turn briefly to three
women’s novels from French-speaking cultures in which the mother-daughter
relation is central. When read through the prism of these re-visionings
of motherhood and daughterhood, these fictions offer models of female
strength and efficacy. In that way, they contest not only the enduring
negative myths about women, but also the constricting attitudes
toward female development of the societies from which they arose.
For example, in Ancien Régime France, among the privileged
orders, marriages were usually made for reasons of wealth, politics,
and lineage, rather than love. Children were sent away to convents
or pensions when young and did not return until the age of marriage.
In the 17th century in particular, as the historian Jacques Gélis
puts it, moralists and educators deemed “mignotage,” or
excessive affection toward children, unreasonable, and therefore
dangerous. As a result, intimacy in families was rare. Except for
some widows and artistic patrons, women generally did not function
in the public realm from which written stories and histories arose.
How remarkable, then, that the first great novel in France, Mme
de LaFayette’s The Princess of Clèves, published in
1678, should center on an unusually close mother-daughter relationship.
Mme de Chartres, who is her daughter’s confidante and who takes
the unusual step of educating her daughter herself, teaches the
Princess that she must above all be unique: unlike the other women
of their society, her daughter must not fall prey to the amorous
games that prevail at the court; she must, instead, remain faithful
to her husband. Even while the mother insists upon her daughter’s
virtue, the novel makes clear that it is difficult for a woman to
maintain her honor amid the pressures of gallantry and intrigue.
All a virtuous woman can do is flee the court, which Mme de Chartres
herself had done when she was widowed and which the Princess, too,
ultimately does. Since this is a novel, there is, of course, a love
story. The princess falls passionately in reciprocated love with
the Duke of Nemours. And, it is here that the mother-daughter bond
prevails: unable to reconcile her personal happiness with the expectations
of female virtue she has so thoroughly embraced, the princess ultimately
renounces her passion; in doing so, she heeds the maternal lessons,
in effect returning to her first love, the mother.
Thanks in large part to the 18th-century writings of Jean-Jacques
Rousseau, who attributed to mothers the supreme mission of civilizing
the young (and thereby weaving the moral fabric of society itself),
a cult of idealized motherhood began to take hold in the late 1700’s.
Most bourgeois women embraced this exalted function, whose features
hardened in the 19th century and became enshrined in the Napoleonic
Code’s infamous article: “A wife owes obedience to her
husband.” It took until the early 20th century for healthy
and positive representations of the mother-daughter relation to
appear in French literature. The wonderful writer Colette painted
many admiring portraits of her mother, Sido, most compellingly in
her novel, The Break of Day. The book is Colette’s hymn to
her mother’s talent and strength. Like Demeter, Sido’s
domain is nature. Though she hasbeen dead for many years, she bequeaths
her reverance for living things to her daughter and remains a creative
model for her. Further, like Persephone, the fictional Colette holds
fast to her primary love object, her mother, even while she engages
with men. There is one other important parallel: in the end, Colette
returns to her mother. Though less literal than Persephone’s
8-month stays with Demeter, Colette’s return takes the form
of her reenacting her mother’s life choices, similar to the
Princess of Clèves. Like Sido, the aging Colette opts to
spend her last years in productive solitude. Like her mother, she
devotes her energies to observing the creatures around her, writing
fiction from her own vision of the world. In this sense Colette,
like Sido, becomes a creative foremother for future generations
of women artists. Finally, by writing this novel, the daughter gives
life to the mother – Colette closes the circle and gives birth
to Sido.
There is a novel from the French-speaking world which, more than
any other, pushes against the damaging assumptions of the core western
myths of Oedipus and Electra. Simone Schwarz-Bart’s The Bridge
of Beyond, published in 1972, is a glorious and painful saga of
generations of Guadeloupian women. Written from outside of the European
tradition, the story itself takes on the power of a founding Caribbean
legend. In Guadeloupe, as in other Antillean islands, slavery was
the crucible in which families were destroyed and from which they
re-emerged newly-configured: since men were forcibly taken or driven
away, it was women who forged and sustained family and community
ties. In the novel, the young heroine, Télumé, is
raised by her grandmother, Toussine – the mother-daughter bond
is thereby expanded, and the western nuclear family model is contested.
Toussine and her close friend, Man Cia, a healer and sorceress,
bequeath to Télumé the essential legacy that has kept
Guadeloupian women alive for centuries: the gift of storytelling.
As Toussine puts it: “With just one word, youcan keep a person
from breaking.” Through their poetic evocations of both the
horrors of slavery and the joy of love, all of Télumé’s
“mothers” weave her into the cultural web of female imaginativeness
and survival.
The concepts “mother” and “daughter” have always
encompassed multiple contradictions. They have functioned as vehicles
for opposing views of women’s rights, women’s roles, and
women’s education, and it is here that I would like to end
my remarks by evoking Mount Holyoke. The theorists and authors I
have discussed this evening open the mother-daughter relationship
to include bonds with metaphorical and creative precursors. These
connections across time and place make for rich “inter-textualities”
between women’s stories. That is, we can read in the plots
of our own lives references, implicit or explicit, to those of inspiring
women who preceded us. As with literal mothers and daughters, young
women both accept and reject certain features of their predecessors’
narratives; this process brings them anxiety as well as exhilaration.
The experiences of Mount Holyoke alumnae and faculty have been echoed
in those of succeeding generations of students; by writing, experimenting,
painting, inventing, dancing, teaching, nurturing, talented young
women connect imaginatively to their College foremothers. In that
sense, the women – and, one could argue, the men – we
honor this evening are models of “maternal” inventiveness
and generosity. I hope that, as thinking, reading, and writing daughters,
we will continue to acknowledge the legacy of all our mothers.
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