Portrait of the Mother-Artist: Class and Creativity in Contemporary American Fiction

Portrait of the Mother-Artist

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Portrait of the MothercArtist Class and Creativity in Contemporary American Fiction

Nancy Gerber

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Library of Congress Cataloging4nJ’ublication Data Gerber, Nancy, 1956Portrait of the mother-artist : class and creativity in contemporary American fiction / Nancy Gerber. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 0-7391-0544-2 (alk. paper) 1. American fiction-20th century-History and criticism. 2. Mothers in literature. 3. Creation (Literary, artistic, etc.) 4. Creative ability in literature. 5. Mother and child in literature. 6. Social classes in literature. 7. Women artists in literature. 8. Creativity in literature. 9. Motherhood in literature. 10. Artists in literature. I. Title. PS374.M547 G47 2003 2002014323 813’.5@9352043 1 - d c 21 Printed in the United States of America

BTM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of

American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO 239.48- 1992.

For Bobby, Josh, and Adam

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Contents

Foreword by Andrea O’Reilly

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Acknowledgments

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Chapter 1

The Artist in the Mother and the Textual Possibilities of Creativity

Chapter 2

A Poet in the Kitchen: Gwendolyn Brooks’s M a d Martha

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Chapter 3

The Poet at the Crossroads: Breaking the Silence in Tillie Olsen’s “I Stand Here Ironing” and “Tell Me a Riddle”

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The Ghosts of History: Cynthia Ozick‘s The Shawl

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Rewriting the Marassa: Storytelling and Healing the Mother-Daughter Relationship in Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory

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Bibliography

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Credits

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Index

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About the Author

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Chapter 4 Chapter 5

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F O R E W O R D

Writing out of the Margins: Maternity, Marginality, and the Emergence of a Maternal Kunstlerroman

There is less censure now, and more support, for a woman who wants both to bring up a family and work as an artist. But it’s a small degree of improvement. The difficulty of trying to be responsible, hour after hour day after day, for maybe twenty years, for the well-being of children and the excellence of books, is immense: it involves an endless expense of energy and impossible weighing of competing priorities. And we don’t know much about the process, because writers who are mothers haven’t talked much about their motherhood-for fear of boasting? For fear of heing trapped in the Mom trap, discounted? Nor have they talked much about their writing as in a n y way connected with their parenting, since the heroic myth demands that the two jobs be considered utterly opposed and mutually destructive. -Ursula

K. Le Guin (174)

The advantage of motherhood for a woman artist is that it puts her in immediate and inescapable contact with the courses of life, death, beauty, growth, corruption. . . . If the woman artist has been trained to believe that the activities of motherhood are trivial, tangential to the main issues of life, irrelevant to the great themes of literature, she should untrain herself. The training is misogynist, it protects and perpetuates systems of thought and feeling which prefer violence and death to love and birth, and it is a lie. -Alicia

Ostriker (as quoted in Le Guin, 176)

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“The idea of maternal writing,” Emily Jeremiah notes in her recent article “Troublesome Practices: Mothering, Literature and Ethics,” “undermines one of the oppositions upon which motherhood in Western culture has traditionally rested, namely that between maternity and creativity, or ‘the binary system that conceives woman and writer, motherhood and authorhood, babies and books, as mutually exclusive”’ (Freidman 1987, 65-66). In so doing, Jeremiah continues, maternal writing “upsets other [. . .I oppositions, such as public/ private and mindbdy [; . . as well] [it] entails a publicizing of maternal experience, [. . .] subverts the traditional notion of the mother as an instinctual, purely corporeal being [and] challenge[s] dominant ideals of individuality and autonomy.” Maternal writing therefore, as it interrupts and deconstructs the normative script of maternity as private and silent, also disturbs and counters the received narrative of creativity, specifically the liberal humanist view of subjectivity and authorship.Jeremiah contends that, contrary to the liberal humanist view of creativity, writing, much like mothering, is based on relationality, reciprocity, and mutuality: “Reading and writing involve an imaginative engagement with others, a process which might strategically be linked to the idea of maternal thinking [; . . .] that is they constitute activities which produce and encourage a relational mode of subjectivity which might [. . .] help challenge and overcome Western capitalist models of individualism.”Jeremiah insists that this idea of relationality may be understood as subversive: “To posit reciprocity as an ideal is to challenge the notion of the rational autonomous subject dominant in modem capitalist societies-a fiction which fosters the marginalization of those who do not make the grade, the denial to these ‘failures’ any kind of state support, and the continuing fragmentation of community.” Mothering, therefore, as Jeremiah concludes, may be understood as not only “compatible”with art but more significantly as ‘‘conducive to it”; and this perspective, in turn, constitutes a “strategy of subversion,” an undoing of the hegemonic constructions of both mothering and writing. However, as Jeremiah asserts that mothering is advantageous to writing, mother writers have been marginalized and silenced. “Until recently, as Xllie Olsen has observed, ‘almost all distinguished literary achievement has come from childless women”’ (50). “The reasons for the widespread absence of creative achievement on the part of mothers,” Jeremiah argues, “are in part practical and financial” (3). Indeed, as early as 1929 Virginia Woolf wrote in A Room of One’s Om, “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction” (6). Likewise, writing has traditionally been viewed as an exclusive, if not biologically determined, male activity and achievement insofar as artistic creativity has been equated with paternity, and the pen regarded as a metaphorical penis. “In patriarchal Western culture,” as Gilbert and Gubar note, “the text’s author is a father, a progenitor, a procreator and

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aesthetic patriarch whose pen is an instrument of generative power like his penis” (6). Thus while mothering may be conducive to writing as Jeremiah speculates, sexist ideologies and practices have kept mothers from writing. I open this foreword to Portrait of the Mother-Artist: C h s and Creativity in Contemporary American Fiction with this paradoxical standpoint on mothering and writing because it provides a useful framework for understandingand appreciating Nancy Gerber’s innovative and illuminating reading of the mother as artist in contemporary women’s writing. As mothering, particularly in the relationality of maternal subjectivity, may foster or inspire creative expression, the work of mothering may simultaneously frustrate or inhibit the expression of this creativity. Gerbefs study further problematizes this paradox-maternity as both beneficial and detrimental to creativity-by exploring how the social location of the mother-artist shapes her experiences of mothering and its representation in narrative. “The dominant literary tradition which has focused on middle class experience as the norm,”Gerber argues, “has suggested that mothers cannot also be artists, since devotion to self-expression and devotion to children are conflicting demands that cannot be balanced.” However, the stories examined by Gerber, all of which “lie outside the domain of the middle class” insofar as the mothers are black, working class, or ‘coccupya liminal class position due to immigration and displacement,” develop “an alternate narrative of motherhood that addresses the specificitiesof race and social class and create a space in which to theorize mothers’ artistic creativity.” This new narrative, defined by Gerber, as one that is matricentric rather than patrifocal, [. .] “places the mother at the center of the story.” And while important differences exist between working class, black, and immigrant women’s maternal narratives, they share, as Gerber explores, an emphasis on maternal subjectivity and mother work as well as a critique of the hegemonic meanings of home, family, and domesticity. Black women’s stories of the mother-artist in particular, as examined by Gerber, are represented as counter matricentric narratives. Motherhood in a Western context, as numerous feminist theorists on motherhood have pointed out, is organized as a patriarchal institution that is deeply oppressive to women. “The predominant image of the mother in white Western society,”as Donna Bassin, Margaret Honey, and Meryle Mahrer Kaplan write, “[assumes mothers are] everbountiful, ever-giving, self-sacrificing . .not destroyed or overwhelmed by the demands of [their] child[ren]” (2-3). When white middle-class mothers write about motherhood, as Elizabeth Johnson explains, “they write about their own struggles for identity in the institution of motherhood” (33). Adrienne Rich wrote, in “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision”:

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[ g obe maternally with small children all day . . . requires a holding back, a putting-aside of that imaginative activity, and demands instead a kind of

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conservatism. . . . [T]o be a female human being trying to fulfil traditional female functions in a traditional way is in direct conflict with the subversive function of the imagination (43). In Of Woman Bom Rich wrote: Once in a while someone used to ask me, “Don’t you ever write poems about your children?“The male poets of my generation did write poems about their children-especially their daughters. For me, poetry was where I lived as noone’s mother, where I existed as myself (1986,31). Women in the dominant Anglo-American culture often experience the demands of work, in this instance writing or art more generally, in conflict with those of mothering because of the way this culture defines and positions the public sphere of work in opposition to the private/reproductive sphere of the home/family. Women, according to this maternal ideology, are categorized and regulated by what has been termed the “either-or dichotomy”: women must choose between work and motherhood. “The price for the middle class mother who would be an artist,” Gerber argues, ‘‘is high-she must forsake either her child or her creative work.’’ In contrast, most black women, as Gerber argues, have always worked in and outside the home and mothering itself is understood to be a public and political enterprise, particularly as it is conveyed in othermothering and community mothering. Nurturance and work are integrated-not oppositional-dimensions of their black women’s selves and lives. “Black women,” as Gerber observes, quoting Toni Morrison, “seem able to combine the nest and the adventure . . . they are both safe harbor and ship; they are both inn and trail. We don’t find the places, these roles, mutually exclusive.” In its interfacing of work and nurturance, foregrounding of the centrality of paid work in black women’s lives, emphasis upon the importance of homeplace and motherwork, particularly as conveyed in othermothering, black women’s maternal stories not only counter and subvert the dominant narrative of motherhood, they also, in so doing, clear out a literary space for the representation of the mother-artist figure. Gerber concludes her introduction with the observation, “My argument is not intended to suggest that it is ‘easier’ for working-class mothers to be artists, nor to imply that middle-class mothers cannot also be artists. Rather, I have sought to distinguish between middle-class and working-class gendered ideologies and class scripts in order to descrihe the emergence of the mother-artist figure in specific literary fictions.” Indeed, Gerher’s study is of crucial significance for feminist literary studies not only because it provides a rare examination of the role of class and race in determining women’s expe-

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riences of motherhood, and how such becomes represented in fiction, it also explains why, how, and in which ways the experience of motherhood at the margins of culture give rise to a distinct literary tradition, namely that of the mother-artist narrative. Finally, Gerber’s study describes and delineates the themes and features of this literary tradition and in so doing develops a rich and nuanced poetics of maternal creativity. The introduction to Portruit of the Mother-Artist details the concerns and characteristics of the mother-artist genre while subsequent chapters consider how they are developed in various marginalized women’s maternal narratives. Themes of the mother-artist tradition include both a narrative emphasis o n work-paid and unpaid-and a critique of the view held by some white middle-class feminists-most notably Simone de Beauvoir and Betty Friedan-that work is liberatory. For the mother-artists who do not work outside the home, the “domestic reverberates with drabness, isolation and anxiety,” while for mothers in paid labor, work is experienced simply as “a means to survive.” Another characteristic of the mother-artist is “their need for selfexpression and their ability to mother creatively”; likewise each motherartist “possesses a poetic imagination and a capacity to produce figurative language.” Mother-artist narratives also focus upon and are ardently engaged with the relations of mothers and daughters and the motherline; as well, they explore how mother-daughter attachment and conversely mother-daughter separation or mother loss direct and determine the woman’s maturation as an artist. Another characteristic of the mother-artist genre is a new and radical redefining of the meaning and experience of art and artistry: in these stories the home is positioned as a site for creativity, and the mothers use “ordinary, domestic materials as tools for creative expression.” These themes among others empower mother-artists and authorize them to, as Gerber poignantly concludes her introduction, “move out of the shadowy margins into the center of their own stories.” I opened the foreword with quotations by Ursula Le Guin and Alicia Ostriker that simultaneously lament the absence of writings o n motherhood and exult the possibilities and the affinities of mothering for writing and artistry more generally. “To have and bring up kids is to be about as immersed in life as one can he,” Le Guin writes, “but it does not always follow that one drowns. A lot of us can swim” (182). Gerber’s examination of the artist-mother demonstrates, to continue with Le Guin’s metaphor, that not only have many motherartists stayed afloat but they have done so “by swimming against the tide.” Or put more plainly, the mother-artists’ social marginality-in terms of race, class, ethnicity-is what enabled them, indeed empowered them, to create as mothers. In an early study of the young woman as writer, A Portrait of the Artist as u

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Young Woman (19831, Linda Huf argues that the female kunstlerroman differs from the male kunstlerroman in five important ways, the fifth being the female artist novel’s radicalistn. She explains: “While the artist hero is up against the banker and broker, the artist heroine is up against the wall” (10-11). I would suggest in conclusion that the maternal kunstlerroman-as Gerber so perceptively and passionately shows-is the truly radical, or more accurately transformative, narrative of female artistry in that the mother-artist courageously and imaginatively finds voice, and creates, in and through the very act that culture dictates should silence and efface her, namely her motherhood. Andrea O’Reilly

Works Cited

Bassin, Donna, Margaret Honey, and Meryle Mahrer Kaplan, eds. Representations of Motherhood. New Haven, CT:Yale University Press, 1994. Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1979. Huf, Linda. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman: The Writer as Heroine in American bterature. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1983. Jeremiah, Emily. “Troublesome Practices: Mothering, Literature and Ethics.” Journal of the Association for Research on Motherhood Vol. 4.2 (Fallminter 2002). Johnson, Elizabeth Bourque. “Mothers at Work: Representations of Maternal Practice in Literature.” Mothers and Daughters: Connection, Empowerment B Transformation. Ed. Andrea OReilly and Sharon Abbey. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 200 1. Le Guin, Ursula K. “The Fisherwoman’s Daughter.” Mother Reader: Essential Writings on Motherhood. Ed. Moyra Davey. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2001. Olsen, Tillie. Siknces. New York: Laurel Press, 1983. Ostriker, Alicia. “A Wild Surmise: Motherhood and Poetry.” Mother Reader: Essentiaf Writings on Motherhood.” Ed. Moyra Davey. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2001. Rich, Adrienne. “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Revision.” In O n Lies,Secrets, and Siknce. New York: W. W. Norton, 1979. . OfWoman Bum: Motherhood as Experknee and Institution. New York: W. W. Norton, 1986. Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. New York: Granada, 1978.

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Acknowledgments

I would like to express my gratitude to the following people who helped bring this book to life: Cheryl A. Wall, Chair of the Literatures in English department at Rutgers University, for many years of scholarly guidance, wisdom, and support; Frances Bartkowski, Director of the Women’s Studies department at Rutgers University-Newark, for friendship and for helping me name my book; Ahena P. A. Busia, Associate Professor, and Carol Smith, Professor, in the Literatures in English department, for important suggestions during the dissertation process; Andrea O’Reilly, founding Director of the Association for Research o n Mothering (ARM), at York University, Toronto, for her enthusiastic endorsement of this project; Marilyn Papayanis, for introducing me to ARM; Alicia Ostriker, Professor in the Literatures in English department at Rutgers University, for inspiring me to think seriously about mothers and mothering; and Virginia Tiger, Professor in the English department at Rutgers University-Newark, for encouraging me to pursue doctoral studies. Thanks to Serena Leigh Krombach, Executive Editor at Lexington Books, for her patience. I would also like to thank my dear friend, Ellen Sherman, for insisting, “Yes, Nancy, there is a mother-artist,” and A n n Bird, for listening. Last but not least, 1 would like to acknowledge the help of my family: my mother, Trudy Frankel, and my father, the late Charles Frankel, for their faith in me; my brother, Lawrence Frankel, for reminding me how to laugh; and my husband, Bobby, and my sons, Josh and Adam, for their love.

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CHAPTER

ONE

The Artist in the Mother and the Textual Possibilities of Creativity

The hook has somehow to be adapted to the body, and at a venture one would say that women’s books should be shorter, more concentrated, than those of men, and framed so that they do not need long hours of steady and uninterrupted work. For interruptions there will always be. -Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (1929)

. . . and everywhere mothers write stories of son and daughters this one will be fierce this one will he tender and they will sing terrifying, beautiful prophets for the world. -from

“M/Other,” by Rishma Dunlop,

RedefiningMotherhood (1998)

A woman writing thinks back through her mothers. -Virginia

Woolf, A Room of One’s Own ( 1929)

Picture a mother ironing her daughter’s dress. As she irons, she tells the story of her life: how she married young and bore a daughter; how her husband abandoned her and their baby because he could not find work, since this was I

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the Great Depression; how she found a factory job to support the two of them, leaving her no choice hut to relinquish her daughter’scare to indifferent neighbors. From time to time, she puts down the iron while she reflects on an especially painful memory, then picks it up again as she resumes her story. The iron functions as an instrument for the creation of her narrative: the rhythmic movement of iron across dress mimics the motion of pen over paper; the cessation of ironing coincides with the interruption of narrative flow. The iron, although limited as a writing tool by its rigidity and inflexibility, is a metaphor for the pen, as well as a symbol of poverty. In spite of these restrictions, the narrator is creating meaning and order out of her experience while she irons, although she does not see herself as a storyteller who is engaged in meaningful work. She is conscious only of the drudgery of her life and sees herself as a failure because she has been unahle to provide her daughter with the luxuries of middle-class life. This summary may sound familiar because it revisits the plot of “1 Stand Here Ironing,” by Tillie Olsen (1956). For such a short, compressed work of fiction, Olsen’s story is formally complex in its use of interior monologue and polyphonic discourse and in its representation of a protagonist who is both mother and artist. The unnamed mother in the narrative, who imagines herself speaking to an unknown listener-presumably a school guidance counselor or social worker who comes to inquire about helping her daughter siicceed at school-pursues a heroic quest to shape her experience. This nameless mother is the seeker who questions: “And when is there time to remember? . . . I will start and there will he an interruption and I will have to gather it all together again” (1). She is the artist who uses ordinary, domestic materials to give form to her experience-who, like Alice Walker’s mother, orders “the Universe in her own personal conception of Beauty” (231). She is the woman writer envisioned by Virginia Wtdf in A Room of One’s O w , whose text is shaped by constant interruption. She is the workingclass mother who worries that her middle-class audience, embodied in the figure of the interlocutor-that is, the school guidance counselor-will judge her as incompetent and lacking in mothering skills. This heroine, whom I call a mother-artist, has been rendered critically invisible as a result of her location in the domestic realm, an arena traditionally regarded as insignificant and uninteresting. The dominant Western literary tradition, which has focused on middle-class experience and ideology as the norm, has implied that mothers cannot also he artists, since devotion to self-expression and dedication to children are competing demands that cannot be balanced. The mother-artists studied in the chapters to follow are protagonists whose texts lie outside the middle-class domain. In the five fic-

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tions under discussion-Mad Mareha ( 1953), by Gwendolyn Brooks; “I Stand Here Ironing” (1956) and “Tell Me a Riddle” (1960),by Tillie Olsen; The Shawl (1989), by Cynthia Ozick (which includes the stories “Rosa” and “The Shawl”); and Breath, Eyes, Memory (1994), by Edwidge Danticatmother-artists are either working class-as in M a d Martha, “I Stand Here Ironing,” and “Tell Me a Riddle”+r occupy a liminal class position due to immigration, displacement, and exile, as in The Shawl and in Breath, Eyes, Memory. For the heroines of these fictions, domesticity signifies differently than in texts of the middle class. While the domestic serves a site for the enactment of sexism in both middle-class and working-class texts, domesticity does not provide leisure, privilege, financial security, or social status in the latter. In texts of the working class, male privilege is also different; fathers and husbands in middle-class texts are rewarded with power, prestige, and money in the public sphere of work; in black and working-class texts, fathers and husbands are often unempowered in the workplace. The men in these texts often lack opportunities for upward mobility or economic security. Nonetheless, husbands and fathers of both classes often assume the patriarchal role at home with wives and children. Mother-artist heroines in this study also bear a different relationship to work than heroines of middle-class texts. Several are forced by economic necessity to work outside the home, either in white peoples’ houses, like Maud Martha, or in factories, like the mother in “I Stand Here Ironing.” Those that do not work outside the home-Eva, of “Tell Me a Riddle”; Rosa, of The Shawl; or Sophie, of Breath, Eyes, Memory-are as oppressed by sexism as middle-class heroines, with the additional burden of worrying about how to pay the rent or feed the children. Issues of social class vary somewhat from one fiction to another, although in each fiction discussed, domesticity serves a site of the social critique of gender, race, and class inequalities. Maud Martha, the eponymous heroine of Brooks’s novel, is depicted as a housekeeper in the home of a wealthy white family, the Burns-Coopers.The white woman for whom she works presumes ownership of her African American maid, reprimanding her and reminding her of her inferior status by insisting that she use the back door. In “I Stand Here Ironing,” a mother’s work is described both within and outside the home, blurring the public/private axes around which middle-class experience has been organized. The oppressiveness of the mother’s working conditions in the factory-long hours, little pay-are emblematic of the poverty and isolation she experiences at home. The mother perpetually rushes to and from work in a panic. If she arrives late to work, she is docked. If she arrives late at home, she worries that she has neglected her child. Her vulnerability as a single mother is underscored when

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experts at a local clinic tell her that her daughter, Emily, is malnourished, implying that Emily also has not been adequately nurtured. They persuade her to send Emily away to a “nicer” home, that is, a sanitorium, where, according to the clinic staff, she will receive “better” care. Issues of work and family, public institutions and private necessity converge in this figure of the unmarried, working-class mother, who is vulnerable to multiple forces of exploitation and oppression. For mother-artists who do not work outside the home, the domestic often reverberates with drabness, loneliness, and worry. In “Tell Me a Riddle,” Eva speaks eloquently of her daily struggles-f begging the butcher for soup bones in order to have enough food to feed her seven children. In The Shawl and in Breath, Eyes, Memory, class positions shift as a result of migration, and the domestic becomes a space of isolation and alienation. In pre-war Poland, Rosa Lublin had been the daughter of a secular, upper middle-class Jewish family, a gifted young woman who had dreamed of becoming a scientist before the Nazi invasion. Penniless and homeless after the war, she moves to the United States and lives in an S.R.O. hotel in Miami, after an unsuccessful attempt at running an antiques shop in New York. In Breath, Eyes, Memory, Sophie’s family-a “family with dirt under [their] fingernails”-worked in the cane fields of Haiti, where Sophie’s grandfather died of sunstroke. After Sophie’s mother is raped by a soldier, one of Duvalier’s Macoutes, she flees Haiti for New York,leaving the infant Sophie in the care of an aunt. Martine sends money home from her job as a health care aide, which enables her family to live in a comfortable house in a village so that Sophie can go to school. The disjunction between the poverty of rural life in Haiti and urban life in New York is quite striking: Haitian life is rich in custom, language, ritual, and community-all of which nourish young Sophie in the absence of her mother. In New York, Sophie and her mother live in a tiny apartment, and Sophie discovers that her mother is lonely, overworked, and severely depressed. While Martine has helped her family in Haiti to live a more prosperous life, her suffering prevents her from enjoying the fruits of the prosperity she has helped create. Maud Martha’s living conditions in a tenement apartment are not luxurious in any way, yet she insists on establishing certain rituals--fruitcakes at Christmas, white tablecloths for birthdays and holidays-in order to preserve her dignity and self-worth, rupturing the stereotype that the unmonied are lazy and careless of their surroundings. Primarily, the mother-artist heroines in this study are artists in their need for self-expression. They seek creative outlets that simultaneously enable them to nurture themselves as well as their daughters. This characteristic finds textual expression in what I call maternal discourse. Non-linear and

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non-hierarchical, maternal discourse exemplifies the mother-artist’sability to express her subjectivity, while recognizing the daughter as separate, yet intimately connected. Moments after giving birth, Maud Martha is flooded with joy upon hearing “that part of Maud Martha Brown Phillips expressing itself with a voice of its o m ” (240, italics mine). These mother-artists share a capacity to identify with their own mothers’ sufferings, yet detach sufficiently so as not to reproduce this legacy in their daughters. The gendering of the child as female establishes a motherline, locating mother and daughter in a feminist genealogy of history and culture. The mother-daughter relationship, while crucial to these protagonists’ identities, does not restrict or confine their subject matter, which investigates motherhood and mothering, and also interrogates poverty, racism, exile, Anti-Semitism, genocide, and rape. While the fictions in this study range over diverse historical periodsfrom the 1950s to the present-and different genres, including short story, novella, and hildungsroinan-all are narratives of post-World War I1 America that explore themes of gender, race, ethnicity, maternal subjectivity, displacement, and the effects of class difference. Together these narratives signify the emergence of the mother as subject of her own story, as artist in her own right. As heroines of kunstlerroman, mother-artists embody possibilities of rewriting gender- and class-inflected scripts that have traditionally privileged (masculine) individual autonomy and (bourgeois) public achievement. As Rachel Blau DuPlessis has observed, Western constructions of the artist have encoded the Oedipal struggle of the son to annihilate the father. The son thus emerges as a single entity authorized to create himse1f.l The Oedipal model of authority and authorship is problematic, since it inscribes the silencing of women. Alternate paradigms may become available as feminist theorists and writers continue to investigate motherhood apart from middleclass ideologies that privilege androcentric models of creativity and construct mothers in patriarchal relation to husbands and fathers. The fictions studied trace a trajectory from within United States history-the Great Depression, racism-to European and Caribbean histories. M a d Martha, the earliest fiction in this study, represents the coming of age of a young, working-class African American woman in the mid-l950s, the era of Betty Friedan’s feminine mystique. The feminine mystique described by Friedan refers to the psychological depression experienced by educated, middle-class white women who were expected to submerge their own aspirations in order to remain at home with their children. According to Friedan, motherhood and marriage were the Janus-faced god responsible for women’s oppression. A woman’s entry into a man’s world, the world of paid work, would free her, so the argument went. Clearly, this particular con-

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struction of women’s subordination excluded young black women such as Maud Martha. Maud Martha does not view work as liberatory or meaningful; rather, it is a means to survive. Both her parents worked-her mother as a school teacher, her father as a janitor. Her own particular work experience is part of her education into racism. In the novella, racism and poverty are seen as oppressive, rather than motherhood, thus anticipating the work of black women writers such as bell hooks. Thirty years after the publication of Brooks’s novel, hooks writes that motherhood has not typically been viewed by black women as a serious obstacle to freedom: “Black women would not have said that motherhood prevented us from entering the world of paid work because we have always worked . . . in the fields, in the factories, in the laundries, in the homes of others (“Revolutionary Parenting,” 133). Lack of educational opportunities, availability of jobs-these are the issues that oppress black women, says hooks. In Olsen’s “I Stand Here Ironing,” the struggle of an impoverished white working-class mother during the Great Depression is given meaning. The narrative distinguishes between various kinds of work and their meaning, including paid work outside the home (the mother is a factory worker); domestic, household work; and maternal work, including care and nurturance. The mother’s work in the factory is not work that gives her fife meaning or sustains her spirit; on the contrary, work is a pitiless taskmaster in which her needs as a mother are subsumed by the demands of the marketplace, figured in images of clocks and linear time. Olsen’s story encodes the ways in which domestic work and maternal work have traditionally been conflated such that maternal work becomes invisible. Her heroic qualities as mother-artist are buried in the laundry basket. What the middle-class reader sees is the sheer drudgery of her housework, which, as Simone de Beauvoir reminds us, is mindless: it is “the torture of Sisyphus, with its endless repetition. . . . [it] provides no escape from immanence and little affirmation of individuality. . . . And under impoverished conditions no satisfaction is possible; the hovel remains a hovel: ‘nothing in the world can make it pretty”’ (451). Ekauvoir’s class biases-that the home should be clean and beautiful (preferahly as a result of another woman’s lahor), and that working-class homes are dirty and therefore shameful-inform her views of domestic work. Moreover, her construction of housework, as mindless, obscures the issue o f subjectivity-just who is it who is doing this work?M a d Martha, published in the same year as The Second Sex, subverts such constructions. Maud Martha’s apartment, in which she takes great pride, could hardly he called a hovel. Olsen’s “Tell Me a Riddle” and Ozick’s 7% Shawl engage the history of European anti-Semitism. Eva, of “Tell Me a Riddle,” is an activist sent to a

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Siberian prison for speaking out against Czarist repression. A Jewish woman who has abandoned religious obsewance in favor of Socialism, Eva is critical of all forms of oppression, including sexism in marriage. Anti-Semitism and the Holocaust are thematized in The Shawl, which represents a mother’s agony when her baby daughter is thrown against an electrified fence by a Nazi guard. Breath, Eyes, Memory, the most contemporary of the fictions studied, is the most explicitly feminist in its interrogation of artistic identity. While Tillie Olsen is a feminist mother and artist who paved the way for other women writers, her most acclaimed fiction was written just prior to the women’s movement and the emergence of feminist discourse. Sophie Caco, on the other hand, is a feminist daughter: she joins a multicultural women’s group in which women from many nations gather to heal themselves and each other from the wounds of rape, genital mutilation, and incest. Set during Duvalier’s bloody and repressive dictatorship, Danticat’s novel explores the violent rites of passage that mark Sophie’s coming of age: her education into the story of her mother’s rape, her witnessing of the murder of a group of student protestors, her return to a homeland where people live in constant fear of the Muoutes’ rifles.

Mother-Artists at Work Poetic imagination and a capacity to produce figurative language are defining chardcteristics of mother-artists. Maud Martha works in metaphor: she thinks of dandelions as “jewels for everyday”; her back yard is a “patched green dress”; evening walks along city streets are “night hikes [where] everything was moody, odd, deliciously threatening” (144,251). Eva also works in metaphor; on a cross-country journey, she imagines the airplane on which she is a passenger as a “steerage ship of memory,” an image that evokes the passage of Eastern European Jews fleeing persecution. Sophie Caco is another poet at the crossroads of motherhood and culture. Her poetry appears as freestanding verse within the text and also resonates in the lyrical, framing first person voice of the larger narrative. In addition, mother-artists demonstrate an ability to create using ordinary, domestic materials. Maud Martha organizes rituals around birthdays and holidays to carry on the traditions of her mother and to endow family life with meaning. In “I Stand Here Ironing,” the narrator “writes” her text with the iron, a metaphor for the pen and the inscription of class. Eva accepts a gift of a pan del muerto, the bread of the dead, in the shape of a little MexicanAmerican girl who has just died. Eva studies the details made by the mother’s hand-the dimples in the knees, the hollow in the throat-and announces

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that the pan is a work of art (100). In allying herself with this anonymous mother-artist, Eva enacts a global feminism that transcends national and cultural boundaries. In The Shawl, the mantle that once cradled and hid Rosa’s daughter becomes the central symbol of the narrative, a garment at once maternal and sacred in its potential for conjuring the ghost of Rosa’s dead daughter. Sophie Caco creates a palette of reds and yellows from images of clothing and from the natural world in order to represent her passage from girlhood to womanhood. These particular mother-artists are distinguished by their desire to shape their texts; they are storytellers who wish to record the specificities of their struggle, thereby creating a legacy for their daughters. Maud Martha invents a fairy tale to comfort Paulette, who has been rebuffed by a racist Santa Claus who refuses to look at the child because she is black. Maud Martha’s fablethat Santa Claus loves all children-figures as her longest speech in the novel; like all fairy tales, it is more magical than realistic, which seems appropriate under the circumstances, since children often require magic when the truth is too much to bear. In “I Stand Here Ironing,” the mother is highly involved in ordering her text, in spite of persistent self-doubt:“What do I mean? What did I start to gather together, to try and make coherent” (10). In “Tell Me a Riddle,” Eva transmits her story through fragments of speech and song for her granddaughter and husband to decipher. Rosa Lublin, a “madwoman in the attic,” writes magnificent letters, belles lettres, to Magda, the daughter she has lost, in an attempt to bear witness to the destruction of Eastern European Jewry. In Breath, Eyes, Memory, Sophie’s text frames her story as well as interpolated narratives recounted by other mothers, including her own mother, aunt, and grandmother, a strategy that reaffirms the continuing significance of the oral tradition in literature of the African diaspora. As witnesses and survivors, mother-artists are situated within, rather than marginal to, history. Their testimonies provide a vehicle for the critique of patriarchy and patriarchal institutions of motherhood. Too, their texts provide a blueprint for what social theorist Sara Ruddick calls “maternal thinking,” an epistemology that theorizes mothering as a position grounded in the simultaneous recognition and acceptance of difference between self/(m)other. Maternal thinking extends the boundaries of the individual mother-child relation to include a more global understanding of the intersections of gender, race, and class differences. Maud Martha, for example, is represented as a community grbt (storyteller) who embodies the story of the black community in Chicago’s South Side.’ Eva’s text reflects a lifetime of social critique; an orator in czarist Russia and impoverished mother in America, her text joins the political with the personal. Sophie Caco seeks to ex-

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tricate herself from the twin legacies of rape and “testing,” a ritualized patriarchal custom in which a mother determines, by inserting a finger inside her daughter’s private parts, whether or not she is a virgin.

Mother-Artists, Mother Loss, and the Motherline The figure of the mother-artist represents the possibility for social change, since mothering is reproduced through daughters who become mothers. The writing of a new chapter in the motherline is contingent upon the mother’s ability to recognize the daughter as intimately connected to her, yet also separate from her, rupturing the paradigm that the mother is always overidentified with her daughter. In The Reproduction of Mothering, Nancy Chodorow observed that mothers and daughters do not entirely sever the attachment formed during the pre-Oedipal period. Feminist investigation of this developmental periodwhich is associated with touch and with non-symbolic language such as humming, babble, and cooing-has proved fruitful for literary analysis. However, Chodorow’s argument tends to construct a mother who cannot sufficiently separate from her daughter, creating an endless cycle of mother-daughter enmeshment. Since mothers experience their daughters as more like and continuous with themselves, Chodorow says, daughters tend to remain part of the dyadic primary mother-child relationship: T h i s means that a girl continues to experience herself involved in issues of merging and separation, and in an attachment characterized by primary identification and the fusion of identification and object choice” (166). Chodorow suggests that mother-daughter attachment can be disrupted via identification with masculine authority. This paradigm implicitly pathologizes the mother-daughter relationship and also assumes white, middle-class heter~normativity.~ As Andrea O’Reilly has observed, “Chodorow’s motherinvolved, father-absent family is quite specifically a white, urban, middle class family structure of the first world” (“Across the Divide,” RM, 73). O’Reilly notes that in the received narrative of the mother-daughter relationship, the mother is positioned as the epitome of oppression and an implicit threat to the daughter’s developing autonomy. However, this narrative obscures the mother’s own entrapment within patriarchal structures, enabling the daughter and the larger culture to blame the mother for the daughter’s failure to develop an autonomous identity (73). As Adrienne Rich argues in Of Woman Born, patriarchy divides mothers and daughters from each other such that “the loss of the daughter to the mother, the mother to the daughter is the essential female tragedy. We acknowledge Lear, Hamlet, and

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Oedipus, but there is no presently enduring recognition of mother-daughter rapture and passion” (237). In addition to issues of separation, autonomy, and connection in the mother-daughter dyad, questions of mothers’ access to discourse and language are complicated within feminist theory. Some feminists suggest that, since language and discourse are themselves artifacts of the patriarchy, women cannot represent themselves as women in symbolic language.“ In the essay “Stabat Mater,” Julia Kristeva experiments with a dual-voiced maternal discourse, in which she juxtaposes the semiotic-the fluid, heterogeneous, pre-discursive “voice” of the pre-Oedipal period-against the symbolic-the formal, homogeneous, rational language of later human development. Marianne Hirsch has also questioned the discursive representation of maternal subjectivity: “[The mother’s] representation is controlled by her object status, but her discourse, when voiced, moves her from object to subject. But, as long as she speaks as a mother, she must always remain the object in her child’s process of subject-formation; she is never fully a subject” (12). Hirsch appears to revise this stance, however, by examining women-centered myths, such as the story of Demeter and Persephone, available to women writers in creating alternate mother-daughter plots. She also notes that “feminists are in the process of inventing new theories and new fictions that . . . might act out the mother’s contradictory double position” (198). The dualistic quality of the mother’s subjectivity envisions the blurring of the binary between self and other, since the mother embodies the possibility of simultaneously holding onto two selves. The work of psychoanalyst Jessica Benjamin also offers promise for alternate theories of maternal discourse. While Benjamin states that no psychological theory has adequately articulated the mother’s independent existence, her theory of intersubjectivity and mutual recognition in the mother-child relationship grants the mother a subjectivity of her own: “The idea of mutual recognition is crucial to the intersuhjective view; it implies that we have a need to see the other as a separate person who is like us yet distinct. This means that the child has a need to see the mother, too, as an independent subject, not simply as the ‘external world’ or an adjunct of his ego” (23). Contemporary feminist maternal theorists have resisted the pathologizing of mother-daughter attachment as abnormal and have moved toward theorizing the relationship as one characterized by fluctuations of separation and connection. For mother-artists, this simultaneous recognition of difference and mutuality enables a rewriting of the mother-daughter script. Artistry comes from mothering daughters who will be freer to write their own stories. The mother-artist’s wish for a different future for her daughter

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is perhaps best expressed at the end of “I Stand Here Ironing”; the mother pleads: “Only help her to know . . . that she is more than the dress on the ironing board, helpless before the iron” (12). In effect, the mother offers a prayer of sorts, that her daughter will write a different story than her mother, one less bound by poverty and self-doubt, in which she will set her own seal rather than suffer the iron’s inscription upon her. In “Tell Me a Riddle,” the mother-artist’s legacy skips a generation and is passed on to the granddaughter, Jeannie. A nurse who tends Eva on her deathbed, Jeannie is encouraged by her grandmother to leave her profession of caregiving and nurture her own aspirations by enrolling in art school. In The Shawl, where the motherline has been ruptured by the daughter’s death, the task of rebirth falls to the mother-artist, Rosa, who must resist madness and class prejudice in order to create her own future. Although feminist work has envisioned possibilities for healthy motherdaughter connections, the confusion of boundaries between mother and daughter occurs in instances where the mother is emotionally damaged, as is the case in Breath, Eyes, Memory. The trope representing entanglement in this narrative is the Marassa, who are the twins of Haitian vohu. When Sophie’s mother, Martine, becomes pregnant with another baby, Martine suffers a kind of post-traumatic stress reaction in which she believes she is once again being raped. Sophie begins to suffer from nightmares and wonders whether they are hers or her mother’s (193). She imagines that she is her mother’ twin, her Marassa, and that her fate is intimately connected to Martine’s. Sophie’s task is to undo this dangerous kinship without rejecting her mother in the process. She refuses the custom of “testing” so that her daughter, Brigitte, will not have to repeat the pain that she and Martine have suffered: “It was up to me to make sure that my daughter never slept with ghosts, never lived with nightmares” (203). Sophie’s artistry comes from her ability to tell Martine’s story, a story she has swallowed as mother’s milk, but to reframe it so that she does not relive it. Often mother-artists lack a mother who can nurture their artistic creativity. The mother-artists in this study are daughters of mothers who are absent, psychologically damaged, or emotionally distant. In the two Olsen stories, there is no mother to the mother-artist, an absence that creates a pervasive sense of longing. In The Shawl, the mother-artist’s mother is distant and emotionally unavailable; in Breath, Eyes, Memory,she is psychologically unstable. In these two fictions, the mother-artist forms a connection to her grandmother, a bond that skips a generation but is nonetheless an important link in the motherline, an ancestral female history that is in danger of being lost or forgotten. In The Shawl, Rosa recalls with great fondness the Yiddish lullabies her grandmother

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once sang to her. Yet Rosa’s mother despised mameloshn, the “mother tongue,” which she saw as the language of uneducated Jewish peasants. In Breath, Eyes, Memory, a nurturing connection develops between Sophie and Ife, her grandmother, who is known in her village as the “tale master.” A landowner and community storyteller, Ife is a powerful woman. She divides her property equally among her heirs, enabling Sophie to inherit a place in her motherland as well as the role of tale master. The trope of desire in mother-artists’ texts ruptures notions of hegemonic heteronormativity. Desire is figured in the mother-artist’s relationship to language, through which the mother-artist gives birth to herself. Language passionately affects Maud Martha; words have the power to make her fling her arms rapturously toward the sky (143). Eva’s passion is music; at a concert, she turns off her hearing aid so that she can listen to the sounds of “childrenchants, mother-croons, singing of the chained love serenades, Beethoven storms” (97). Mother-daughter passion is explored in M u d Martha, The Shawl, and Breath, Eyes, Memory, which represent childbirth and emotional intimacy as verging on the erotic.

MiddleXlass Mothers and Domesticity In the imaginative and critical literature of white, middle-class motherhood, the mother as artist is a figure that is barely visible. I n nineteenth-century women’s texts, the proper form for women was embodied discursively in the Cult of True Womanhood, an ideology that called for renunciation, devotion to home and family, and sexual and moral purity. The conflict for fictional heroines between a narrative ending in marriage and motherhood or a future of accomplishment is explored in numerous novels, among them Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1869). Jo March, a writer and the most spirited and ambitious of the four March sisters, marries Professor Bhaer, a much older man, who disapproves of her work. Together they found a school for boys so that Jo can channel her creative energy into mothering the next generation of young men. The dilemma for middle-class heroines is also explored in Sarah Orne Jewett’s A Country Doctor (1884), where the protagonist, whose name is Nan Prince (note the tension of gendered expectations encoded in her first name--“Nan,” meaning “to serve”-and last), rejects marriage to an eligible young bachelor in order to pursue her childhood dream of studying medicine, so that she can become a doctor, like her father. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892), in which a young woman writer goes slowly mad after giving birth, inscribes middle-class fears that motherhood will be compromised by artistic expression. Indeed, the price

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for the middle-class mother who would be a n artist is h i g h - s h e must forsake either her child or her work. By the turn of the century, with the availability of choices such as birth control, fixma1 education, and travel, middle-class women writers began to represent marriage as a n institution designed to suppress female autonomy and motherhood as oppressive. In novels such as Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth (1905), upper middle-class heroines seek, often unsuccessfully, to fashion new scripts of sexual and personal freedom. Yet Wharton’s Lily Bart finds a rare moment of comfort in Nettie Struther’s kitchen as she cradles Nettie’s baby. In spite of radical re-visionings of gender a t the turn of the century, the ideology of the Cult of True Womanhood and its prescription for motherly self-sacrifice found its way into the work of early twentieth-century feminist theorists and writers. In “Professions for Women,” Virginia Woolf describes a phantasmagoric figure she calls the Angel in the House, a woman remarkably maternal, who must be destroyed so that Woolf will be liberated: The Angel in the House . . . used to come between me and my paper when I was writing. It was she who bothered me and wasted my time and so tormented me that at last I killed her. She was intensely sympathetic. She was immensely charming. She was utterly unselfish. She excelled in the difficult arts of family life. If there was chicken, she took the leg; if there was a draught she sat in it. In short, she was so constituted that she never had a mind or wish of her own, but preferred to sympathize always with the minds and wishes of others

(285-86).5

In Woolf‘s vision, the paradigmatic New Woman is Lily Briscoe, the artist/ surrogate daughter of To the Lighrhuse (1927), who embodies the daughterly struggle to connect the feminine/Mother with the masculinepather, thus completing the Oedipal triangle. While mothers are powerful figures in Woolf‘s fiction, their agency and creativity is confined to managing romantic relationships and hosting elegant parties. Their celibate daughters-Lily Briscoe, Elizabeth Dalloway-will receive the keys to the masculine kingdoms of vocation and artistic achievement through their refusal to become like their mothers and their renunciation of motherhood.6 Freudian theory has also influenced middle-class constructions of mothering and motherhood. Freud’s privileging of masculinity constructed maternal subjectivity as essentially selfless; mothers so crave the penis/phallus that their greatest satisfaction comes from giving birth to a son: “A mother can transfer to a son the ambition which she had been obliged to suppress in herself, and she can expect from him the satisfaction of all that has been left

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over in her of her masculinity complex” (“Femininity,” 133). The Freudian account of mothering informs the writing of Simone de Beauvoir, the unhappy daughter of a demanding mother, whose achievement was eclipsed by the “genius” o f her companion, Jean-Paul Same. Writing in The Second Sex (1953), Beauvoir is scathing on the subject of mothers: The transcendence of the artisan, of the man of action, contains the element of subjectivity, hut in the mother-to-be the antithesis of subject and object ceases to exist, she and the child with which she is swollen make up together an equivocal pair overwhelmed by life . . the mother is almost always a discontented woman: sexually she is frigid or unsatisfied; socially she feels herself inferior to man; she has no independent grasp on the world or on the future (495, 513).

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Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, published in the same year as Brooks’s M a d

Martha, envisions artistic creativity as the privilege of m e n - o r of women who appropriate the masculine signature by being “unlike” other women who give birth through their wombs rather than their pens.

Other Voices, Other Stories Black women writers, as well as theorists of Working-class motherhood, have developed alternate narratives of motherhood that address the specificities of race and social class differences, creating a space in which to theorize mothers’ artistic creativity. These writers destabilize the construction of families as white, heterosexual, middle class, and male dominated. A different narrative of motherhood emerges, one that is matricentric rather than patrifocal, which places the mother at the center of her own story. While black feminist theorists and feminist theorists of class do not necessarily share alliances with one another, their work has mapped how constructions of home, family, and domesticity shape women’s experiences of motherhood and work. One of the themes that resonates in the writings of black women is the constant presence and necessity of work-work in fields, in factories, in other people’s homes. This focus on work elides the middle-classdistinction between the private and public spheres, a dichotomy that does not describe black women’s lives (Collins, 58). The division between a private, non-economic household and a public, political economy perpetuates the sexist notion of “work” as a male domain and “home”as a female domain, writes Patricia Hill Collins (58). Toni Morrison also describes the boundary crossings between home and work that resonate for black women: “Black women seem able to combine the nest and the adventure. . . . they are both safe harbor and ship; they are both inn

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and trail. We don’t find these places, these roles, mutually exclusive” (Heil-

brun, 61). Black women writers recuperate women’s emotional and mothering

work through the positioning of mothers as guides, role models, and teachers (hooks, “Homeplace,” 134). As Wanda Bernard notes, “Black mothers have been charged with the responsibility of providing education, and social and political awareness, in addition to love, nurturance, socialization, and values to their children, and the children in their communities” (47).The mother‘s resistance to racism and sexism provides a model for the daughter, who learns from her valuable “habits of survival”: the importance of hard work, shared responsibility, self-definition, and social activism through church or volunteer groups (Ekmard, 48). Black women theorize motherhood in a cultural and historical context of communal responsibility. Patrica Hill Collins uses the term “motherwork” to designate the efforts of black women to ensure the survival of both the family and the black community (59). She identifies an Afrocentric tradition of “othermothers,” women who mother not only their biological children but also the children in their extended family networks and in the larger community (67). Her account removes mothering from the narrow confines of biology, thereby enlarging the definition of “mother” to include any woman who participates in the care, nurturing, and raising of children. Collins’s argument interrogates the middle-class notion that children are private property rather than human beings who participate in the fabric of community life. In revising the dominant narrative of motherhood, black women writers have also redefined constructions of home. bell hooks defines women’s labor to include emotional and maternal work in the home, work that is unpaid and undervalued. For bell hooks, her grandmother’s house was a place of shelter, comfort, and safety from the faces of white people who stared at her with hatred. She uses the term “homeplace” to designate the personal and political significance of what takes place within black people’s houses-the restoration of dignity and integrity denied and damaged by encounters with racism in the white world outside (“Homeplace,” 42). Gwendolyn Brooks also explores this relationship between homeplace and self-worth in her poem, “still do I keep my look, my identity . .”: “Each body has its pose. No other stock / That is irrevocable, perpetual / And its to keep. In castle or in shack. /With rags or robes. Through good, nothing or ill” (Blacks,65). While hooks and others acknowledge that sexism has solely delegated to women the task of creating and sustaining a caring environment, they affirm the contributions of black women and “othermothers” who have nurtured and sustained the bodies and spirits of children, provided models of survival and resistance, and passed along their stories of struggle and survival.

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Another theme in writings by black women is the role of mothers as artists and the representation of home as a site for creative self-expression. In Alice Walker’s essay, “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens,” Walker enlarges the definition of art and the female artist by describing her own mother as a storyteller, a producer of inventive language who provided inspiration for Walker’s writing. Walker counters the Western privileging of aesthetics over functionality, insisting that art can be created from everyday, vernacular materials and may be functional as well as beautiful. An artist may he selftaught, she writes-even a mother. Walker refuses to privilege her own writing over her mother’s creativity in non-dominant, domestic forms, such as gardening. As Cheryl Wall observes, “Walker expands the universe of those entitled to be called artists; in the process she collapses the distance between her world and work and her mother’s’’ (6).7 Walker’s analysis provides a poetics for the mother-artist-no longer is art is envisioned as a god demanding complete devotion, self-sacrifice, and isolation. In Walker’s motherline, women are responsible for the transmission of artistic creativity and cultural knowledge from one generation to the next: “And so our mothers and grandmothers have, more often than not anonymously, handed on the creative spark, the seed of the flower they themselves never hoped to see: or like a sealed letter they could not plainly read” (240). Walker’s poetics of maternal creativity are illustrated through the image of a quilt made from scraps and rags by an unknown woman, which is on display in the Smithsonian Institution. She ohserves, “Though it follows no known pattern of quilt-making, it is ohviously the work of a person of powerful imagination and deep spiritual feeling. . . . If we could locate this ‘anonymous’ black woman, she would turn out to be one of our grandmothers-an artist who left her mark in the only materials she could afford” (239). Walker’s discussion of the quilt is significant because it erases distinctions between “high” and “folk” art (the former the product of formally trained artists, the latter the work of those who are self-taught), between the aesthetic and the functional, and between provenance (recognized by a formal institution) and anonymity. Patricia Bell-Scott and Beverly Guy-Sheftall also employ the quilt as metaphor for art that is useful as well as artistically complex. In their discussion, the quilt is a symbol of black women’s creative labor, since slave women who picked cotton during the day would return to their quarters at night to stitch textiles for white families, saving the discarded scraps of material for their own families. They describe quilting as a symbol of the mother-daughter relationship and part of the motherline: “Bonds were strengthened when a mother taught her daughter to quilt; the mother imparted skills, techniques, and

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aesthetic design principles . . [forging] a bond essential to the survival of the family, and by extension, the community” (2). The theme of mothers’ language as inspiration for their daughters also resonates in the work of black women writers. In the essay, “From the Poets in the Kitchen,” Paule Marshall descrihes how the “freewheeling, wide-ranging, exuberant talk” of her mother and her mother’s friends inspired her to become a writer. As with Walker, the mother is the source of the daughter’s creativity: “[These] were women in whom the need for self-expression was strong, and since language was the only vehicle readily available to them they made of it an art form” (6). In Marshall’s Brown Girl,Brownstones (1959), the mother, Silla, makes her voice heard at home-through stories and conversation that echo the cadences of her homeland, Barhados. The daughter, Selina, listens in wonder: “The words were living things to her. She sensed them bestriding the air and charging the room with strong colors. She wondered at the mother’s power with words. It was never like this with Selina” (71). Ironically, Selina, who writes poetry, decides to pursue her interest in dancing, an ending that resonates with Olsen’s “I Stand Here Ironing.” Both daughters choose the body-Emily is a gifted mime-rather than the voice, as a vehicle for self-expression. Theorists of working-class motherhood have theorized mothering and motherhood in relation to work, education, and leisure, relationships that diverge widely from those of middle-class women. Working-class mothers may o r may not work outside the home, but their relationship to work within the home, both in terms of mothering and housework, is vastly different from middle-class accounts. British feminists Valerie Walkerdine and Helen Lucey provide a detailed analysis of the differences between middle-classand working-class mothering in Democracy in the Kitchen. Walkerdine and Lucey describe how workingclass mothering has been demonized in relation to the bourgeois, idealized narrative of mothering. In this narrative, mothers are constructed as guardians of the nation, who, in creating a democratic environment within the home, help to socialize children to take their place as future citizens. This training in democratic values begins with the mother as the child’s first teacher. Every encounter between mother and child provides the mother with a “teachable moment.” If the mother is baking, the child can be taught about weights and measures. If the mother goes to the grocery store, the child can learn how to count change and be taught the value of money. The implication of this narrative is that working-class mothers, who have neither the time, leisure, or financial resources to devote to this kind of education, cannot produce equally responsible, well-prepared children.

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Dernocrucy in the Kitchen is a response to earlier work by British sociologists who attempted to account for the “different but equal” child-rearing practices of working-class families. Walkerdine and Lucey argue that middle-class and working-class families are grossly unequal (8). While they note that middleclass women are oppressed within their households, they raise their children in accordance with what they believe are scientific truths (derived from developmental psychology, the sciences, and other discourses) that render them powerful in their belief in their moral superiority. These women often become members of caring professions in which they regulate working-class mothers, who are seen as frightening, rigid, and pathological (9). Indeed, this very conflict, between the “good” middle-class mother who knows the proper way to raise a child and the “had” working-class mother who is neglectful, is pivotal to reading Olsen’s “I Stand Here Ironing.” Tillie Olsen, a working-class mother, writer, and feminist, writes with great poignancy about why mothers cannot also be artists: In motherhood, as it is structured, the circumstances for sustained creation are almost impossible. Not because the capacities to create no longer exist, or the need . . . but the need cannot be first. It can have at best only part self, part time. . . .Motherhood means being instantly interruptible,responsive, responsible. The very fact that these are needs of love, not duty, that one feels them as one’s self, that there is no one else to be responsible for these needs, gives them primacy (Silences, 33). Interestingly, Tillie Olsen completed her most critically acclaimed stories while raising four children. She describes returning from her day job as a transcriber in a dairy equipment company, completing the household tasks of feeding the children and helping with homework, then staying up late hours into the night, writing fiction. In Siknces, Tillie Olsen describes with envy and longing the working conditions available to male writers: privacy, solitude, exclusion from domestic chores. She does not acknowledge her own achievement, both as a writer and as a mother, writing instead that almost no mothers have created enduring literature so far, thus exempting herself from a field in which most feminist critics have not hesitated to place her (19). Alice Walker claims Tillie Olsen as a mentor, calling her “a writer of such generosity and and honesty, she literally saves lives” (14). In Silences, Olsen describes the many barriers to writing and self-expression. In addition to censorship and the marginalization of the voices of black people, women, and the working class, she includes motherhood as another kind of silencing. Children clamor and work dies, never to be reborn, laments Olsen, citing her inability to complete her novel of the coal mines, Yonnondio, begun in the

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1930s. Yet her most lauded short fiction speaks of the struggles of mothers to be heard, enduring reminders of mothers as artists.

Emerging Voices When Virginia Woolf described the body of the book as a metaphor for women’s lives, which are marked by frequent interruption, she was most likely not considering the maternal kunstlerroman and the different form of mothers’ texts. A poetics of disruption characterizes these texts, which rupture linear time in favor of the fluidity of memory. Of the five fictions studied, only Breath, Eyes, Memory is a novel; the others wander between short story, novella, and linked stories, as in The Shawl. However, mothers’ stories are emerging scripts-open to innovations in form and structure as mothers discover their own voices. The fictions under investigation do nor romanticize motherhood, nor do they idealize the mother-daughter relationship. Mother-artists are not represented as endlessly nurturing; rather, they are heroines who frequently experience guilt, despair, shame, and anger. These protagonists have survived the indignities of racism, the devastation of murder, the dehumanization of poverty, and the humiliation of body and spirit. Yet their texts speak of hope for the future, in the form of new stories for their daughters. As Rachel Blau DuPlessis notes, women writers create the role of the artist by making her imaginatively depict and try to change the life in which she is also immersed (101). Thus, the mother-artist represents liberatory possibilities-the potential for invention rather than repetition! My argument is not intended to suggest that it is “easier” for working-class mothers to be artists, nor to imply that middle-class mothers cannot also be artists. Rather, I have sought to distinguish between middle-class and workingclass gendered ideologies and scripts in order to describe the emergence of the mother-artist figure in particular literary fictions. While I have described a specific paradigm in relationship to these fictions, the model is intended to be flexible rather than restrictive-to create a critical space for the emergence of maternal subjectivity and mothers’ voices. Black women writers and theorists of working-class motherhood have been developing theoretical models that demonstrate the extent to which Western constructions of motherhood are influenced by middle-class patriarchal ideologies. As feminist maternal theorists continue to create new paradigms, possibilities for maternal creativity and maternal discourse will continue to emerge. Sara Ruddick notes, “Maternal voices have been drowned by professional theory, ideologies of motherhood, sexist arrogance, and childhood fantasy. . . . Alternately silenced and

20 v ChapterOne edging toward speech, mothers’ voices are not the voices as they are, but as they are becoming” (40).As mothers continue to speak and write from their complex position of intersubjectivity, mothers as artists will move out of the shadowy margins into the center of their o w n stories.

Notes 1. In Writing Beyond the Ending, Rachel Blau DuPlessis underscores how the “genius theory” of the artist is grounded in bourgeois ideology: the artist is an individual who is unique, gifted, and set apart from the community (85). Such ideology is problematic for mothers involved in the care of children, since their duality ruptures the notion of the individual genius who works in isolation. The bourgeois construction of the artist also conflicts with Afrocentric models, which place the artist within the community rather than apart from it. 2. Mary Helen Washington borrows the term from Robert Stepto’s Frmn Behind the Veil: A Study of Afro-American Narrative. Chicago: University of Illinois Press,

1979. 3. Shirley Nelson Garner observes that the tendency of psychoanalytic theory to

portray separation rather than attachment as a normal human striving is a limitation arising from placing male concerns before female concerns; “female thought tends to allow more of a commingling of boundaries between subject and object in contrast to the linearity and dichotomous reasoning commonly associated with male thought” (85). 4. See, for instance, Margaret Homans, who questions the adequacy of language for the representation of women’s experiences. She writes, “women writers [such as Monique Wittig] may invent a separate language outside our present discourse in order for women to be heard, even to exist” (187). Homans argues that in Sub, “Nel’s referentless cry closes the novel with an image of women’s language that radically questions the compatibility of genuine female self-expression and the use of ordinary discourse’’ (194). Homans aligns herself with French feminist theorists who “understand language to be a male construct whose operation depends on women’s silence and absence, so that when women write they do not represent themselves as women” (186). 5. 1 am indebted to Alicia Ostriker for this observation. 6. Adrienne Rich refers to this syndrome of being afraid of being like one’s mother as “matrophobia” (235). 7. Rachel Blau DuPlessis notes that in twentieth-century works by women writers, the mother is often represented as an artist who works in unconventional media, and is therefore not recognized as an artist: “by entering and expressing herself in some more dominant art form (poem, not garden; painting, not cuisine; novel, not parlor piano playing, the daughter can make prominent the work both have achieved” (94). DuPlessis refers to this as re-parenting, noting that a woman’s role in the twentieth century comes to be associated not with marriage and motherhood but

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the filial completion of the thwarted parent’s task. This analysis refers primarily to middle-class women. 8. Susheila Nasta notes that motherhood “is a major concern in contemporary women’s literature . . . the unwritten stories, for instance, that are just beginning to be told as a result of women’s struggles to become all that they can be” (xix). The mother-daughter relationship as a metaphor for women’s struggle to speak is an interesting paradigm.

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A Poet in the Kitchen: Gwendolyn Brooks’s M a d Martha

1 grew up among poets. Now they didn’t look like poets-whatever that breed is supposed to look like. Nothing about them suggested that poetry was their calling. They were just a group of ordinary housewives and mothers. . . . Nor did they do what poets are supposed to do-spend their days in an attic room writing verses. Rather, their day was spent “scrubbing floor.”

-Paule Marshall, “The Making of a Writer: From the Poets in the Kitchen” (1983)

M a d Martha, Gwendolyn Brooks’s only published novel, is an extended prosepoem that explores a young girl’s coming of age on Chicago’s South Side. The

eponymous protagonist is a poet who becomes a mother and finds that motherhood does not limit or silence her creativity. Rather, she discovers within herself the power to speak out against those who would silence her. In a series of almost dream-like vignettes, Brooks frames domesticity as a site of cultural and artistic production and re-imagines domestic materials as suitable tools for the creation of art. In its multiple innovative narrative strategies, including the representation of a heroic figure who is empowered, rather than silenced, by motherhood; the mapping of the consciousness of an ordinary black woman; and the envisioning of a woman as the spokesperson for the history of a people, the novel charts new directions for the female kunstlerroman. Like Janie Crawford o f Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), Maud Martha finds ways to transcend a suffocating marriage.

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Janie Crawford’s adventures cover a great deal of ground-from the remote countryside to the town where Joe Starks is mayor, to the Everglades and back to town-while Maud Martha’s adventures take place within the Chicago neighborhood known as Bronzeville. Maud Martha lacks Janie’s mobility (which is greatly enhanced by a large inheritance after Joe Starks’s death). Both heroines encounter sexism within the hlack community and intersections of racism and sexism in the white world. Like Janie, Maud Martha is engaged in an heroic quest for meaning, embodied in her question, “What, what, am I to do with all of this life?” (320).’ Maud Martha might possibly be the first heroine whose artistic aspirations do not end in childbirth but rather renew themselves in motherhood. Maud Martha’s gifts as poet and artist are announced in the opening lines of the novel: What she liked was candy buttons, and hooks, and painted music (deep blue, or delicate silver) and the west sky, so altering, viewed from the steps of the back porch; and dandelions. She would have liked a lotus, or China asters or the Japanese Iris, or meadow lilies-yes, she would have liked meadow lilies, because the very word made her breathe more deeply, and either fling her arms or want to fling her arms, depending on who was by, rapturously tip to whatever was watching in the sky. But dandelions were what she chiefly saw. Yellow jewels for everyday, studding the patched green dress of her back yard. She liked their demure prettiness second to their everydayness; for in that latter quality she thought she saw a picture of herself, and it was comforting to find that what was common could also be a flower (144).

This passage establishes Maud Martha’s artistic credentials: a strong and vivid imagination; a love of words (“painted music” is a figure fur poetry); the association of desire with language (words make her breathe more deeply or fling her arms in rapture); a gift for metaphor (dandelions are yellow jewels; her back yard, a dress). She is attracted to her own inner world, rejecting the fame and success garnered by performers on stage: “She was going to keep herself to herself. She did not want fame. She did not want to be a ‘star.’ To create-a role, a poem, picture, music, a rapture in stone: great. But not for her. What she wanted was to donate to the world a good Maud Martha. That was the offering, the bit of art, that could not come from any other. She would polish and hone that” (164). To create one’s self is an artistic act; the kind of self-exploration to which Maud Martha refers is an affirmation of the artist’s prerogative. There has been some debate about whether the poetry and expressiveness in the text are the author’s rather than the protagonist’s.2Since the point of

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view often shifts from omniscient to indirect third person, there are moments when we are “within” the consciousnessof Maud Martha. In other words, the poetry in the text is her creation. These shifts in the narrative voice are subtle, dislocating the power of the omniscient narrator and emphasizing interiority. The effect of this dislocation is twofold: it equalizes authority between Maud Martha and the omniscient narrator, and it destabilizes omniscience, creating a space for other voices to be heard. For example, one night Maud Martha has a nightmare about a gorilla trapped in a cage on a train. Terrified that the gorilla will escape, she cries out in her sleep: In the deep deep night she had waked, just a little, and had called “Mama.” Mania had said, “Shut up!” The little girl did not mind being told harshly to shut up when her mother wanted it quiet so that she [mother] and Daddy could love each other. Because she was very very happy that their quarrel was over and that they would once again be nice. Even though while the loud hate or silent cold was going on, Mama was so terribly sweet and good to her (152). Phrases such as “the little girl” establish the existence and location of an omniscient narrator “outside” Maud Martha. But within this very sentence the narrative voice shifts, and “Daddy”establishes that we are now “inside”Maud Martha. Although the voice remains third person, it is no longer clear who is speaking; apparently it is Maud Martha, since the rhetoric changes from the sophistication of the omniscient narrator to the childlike musings of the young protagonist. This strategy of shifting the narrative voice not only enables us to read the poetry in the text as Maud Martha’s but also privileges the inner life of an ordinary young girl. The strategy of structuring the text around Maud Martha’s rich interior life is reminiscent of Hurston in Their Eyes Were Watching God. Although Brooks’s novel appears to conform to the traditional chronological pattern of the bildungsroman, in that it begins in childhood and ends when the heroine is a young woman, it ruptures linear plot sequences through a thematic layering of vignettes, or “ordinary moments” of domestic life, narrated through the heroine’s consciousness ( 220).3 This “aesthetic of the ordinary” is significant because it establishes both the theme and structure of the novel. Paule Marshall has framed the cultural context for such an aesthetic, observing that, “In her daily life Maud functions as an artist. In that way the novel carries on the African tradition that the ordinary rituals of everyday life must be made into art” (Washington, Signs, 179). The narrative device of structuring a text around ordinary moments in a woman’s life also recalls Virginia Woolf‘s Mrs. Dullowuy. Woolf

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centers this novel around one day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, an upper middle-class woman with a privileged social position. Maud Martha is poor, without social privilege, leisure, or political connections. Yet Brooks’s novel compels us to read her life seriously because her consciousness is so central to the text’s structure. While Mrs. Dalloeuay is often read by feminist critics as a novel about the loss of a nurturing, pastoral female world in an urban culture governed by men, “culture” is defined as masculine, in opposition to a fluid sexuality that is coded as feminine. In M a d Martha, such getidered hierarchies and oppositions operate differently, since black men do not govern urban culture and black women do not receive social status or wealth through marriage. While the mobility of both Clarissa Dalloway and Maud Martha is severely restricted, Maud Martha does not return to a household of flowers and servants; rather, she is a servant. In novels about the middle class, gender is often organized according to a separation of public versus private space; in novels about black and working-class women, the social organization of gender is different: heroines often find themselves working in domestic spaces for middle-class white women, complicating the boundary between the private and public spheres. Maud Martha’s poetic imagination reveals this aesthetic of the ordinary, since, through her use of figurative language, everyday objects and people are transformed into art. She cherishes her back yard flowers, which others call weeds, and is inspired to salvage whatever beauty she can find amidst the city’s decay. Evening walks along urban streets become night hikes, where “everything was moody, odd, deliciously threatening” (251). When it seems as though her father will not be ahle to get an extension for their mortgage, Maud Martha imagines the possible loss of the house in terms of the vivid imagery evoked by the night sky: “She felt that the little line of white, somewhat ridged with smoked purple, and all that cream-shot saffron, would never drift across any western sky except that in back of this house. The rain would drum with as sweet a dullness nowhere but here” (172). The house is not important to her as a symbol of property but as a place of color and light. Maud Martha knows the old house sorely needs repair, with its cracked walls and ceiling, pipes loud and ugly, furniture weary and sagging. Helen, the older, “prettier” sister because of her lighter skin, calls their home a “hulk of rotten wood” (180). As an artist, Maud Martha transforms the ordinary house into the extraordinary; the mundane becomes beautiful, even transcendent. Even as a child, Maud Martha’s poetic sensibilities are always at work. When her grandmother is dying, Maud Martha is impressed by the hushed majesty of death and imagines that her grandmother is a queen about to en-

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ter a mysterious, inaccessible realm (154). This chapter, “Death of Grandmother,” establishes Maud Martha’s code of moral outrage, in which the domestic merges with the political. The “death of grandmother” vignette is an exploration of the inhumanity with which the ill and elderly are treated. An old woman, a patient at the hospital where Maud Martha has gone to visit her grandmother, tugs on Maud Martha’s dress and begs her to ask the nurse for a bedpan. Maud Martha finds a nurse, who replies, “Well, she can keep on wanting. That’s all they do, day long, night long-whine for the bedpan. We can’t give them the bedpan every two minutes. Just forget it, Miss” (156). Maud Martha, who is only a child, does not have the authority to override the nurse. Nonetheless, her sense of justice is outraged by the woman’s callousness. Fiercely protective of her family, Maud Martha strikes out against a group of boys who are about to beat up her brother, hitting them over the head with a porch chair and screaming, ‘Y‘ leave my brother alone!” ( 178). This scene provides an example of resistance; as a moment of female rebellion, it anticipates Sula’s slicing of her finger when she and Nel are bullied by a group of young boys in Toni Morrison’s Sula. In contrast, Maud Martha’s retaliation is effective without being self-destructive. Maud Martha’s ear is finely tuned to the subtleties of language. She rejects the “rational, critical, and intellectually aloof discourse” of David McKemster, a boyfriend (272).4 McKemster, who is looking to escape from Bronzeville, wants a pedigree: good books, a well-furnished apartment, a pure-bred dog (188).The people of Bronzeville depress him: “What did they know of Aristotle?” ( 187). Maud Martha rejects McKemster’s materialism and his sense of the community as a place of cultural impoverishment. Refusing his sterile language, she is drawn to the rich aesthetic imagery of domestic life: “pumpkins yellowly burning, polished apples in a water-green bowl” (249). Too, Maud Martha’s use of images from the world of the home-traditionally seen as women’s domain-interrogates the notion that artistic creativity and domesticity exist in opposition to one another. Domestic language and imagery are also strategies that reveal the ways in which the home and domesticity can serve as a metaphor for social and political critique. When Maud Martha releases a kitchen mouse from its trap, she urges it to return to its home and family. This small scene blurs the boundary between the domestic and public spheres, and embodies maternal thinking: “A life had blundered its way into her power and it had been hers to preserve or destroy. She had not destroyed” (213). The act of cleaning a chicken serves as an occasion for reflections on the scourges of war: “But if the chicken were a man!-cold man with no head or feet” (295). These examples of what Sara Ruddick calls maternal thinking demonstrate how the

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construction of binary oppositions-between humans and animals, us and them, self and other-perpetuates a cycle of violence: “And yet the chicken was a sort of person, a respectable individual, with its own kind of dignity. The difference was in the knowing. What was unreal to you, you could deal with violently” (295). While Maud Martha’s politics precede black struggle for civil and human rights, her voice demands a rethinking of racist constructions of white superiority. A witness to the struggles of her neighbors, Maud Martha inherits the legacy of slave narrators who chronicled not only their own oppression but also that of fellow slaves. Although her position as a black woman renders her invisible to the eyes of the dominant culture, Maud Martha bears witness to the stories of black people living with racism in Chicago’s South Side during the early postwar years. In the chapter “kitchenette folks,” which follows shortly after the birth of her daughter, Paulette, she introduces the specificities of these stories: of Clement Lewy, a young boy whose mother works from dawn to dusk as a housemaid; Richard, a truck driver whose wages are steadily reduced until he abandons his family because he can no longer support them; and Mrs. Teenie Thompson, who worked as a housemaid for a family who expected her to love them. In a discussion of this pivotal chapter, Mary Helen Washington, drawing on Robert Stepto’s analysis of slave narratives in From Behind the Veil, calls Maud Martha “a community griot . . ‘the articulate kinsman,’ that special figure (heretoforealways male) whose quest for freedom in the most oppressive of conditions is the greatest example of heroism in Afro-American letters” (Signs, 179).By framing the stories of her neighbors, Maud Martha also establishes her place in the motherline of history and culture. Maud Martha’s critique of militarism also positions her as a witness. She reflects on the destruction of human life during the Second World War, mouming “the smashed corpses lying in strict composure, in that hush infallible and sincere” (321 ). This image of death, both eloquent and horrifying, resonates with many of Brooks‘s antiwar poems: “Many friends have sent flowers, clubs have been kind / with sprays, / Wreaths. The flowers provide a kind of heat. Sick / Thick odor-loveliness winds nicely about the shape of mourning, / A dainty horror” (“the funeral,”Blacks, 26). The flower as a signifier of everyday beauty becomes politicized when Maud Martha imagines it in an antiwar context: “it was doubtful whether the ridiculousness of man would ever completely succeed in destroying the world-or, in fact, the basic equanimity of the least and commonest flower: for would not its kind come up again in the spring?”(321). When Maud Martha becomes a mother, she discovers within herself the capacity for active resistance. In contrast to the self-effacing mother of

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Freudian theory, which constructs motherhood as the death of selfhood, Maud Martha is empowered rather than diminished by motherhood. Her text progresses from a gradual muting of childhood indignation, to a kind of reluctant acceptance of disappointment in marriage, to outright expression of anger. Paulette’s birth occurs midway through the narrative, bisecting the body of the text and mimicking the process of childbirth. The birth of Paulette is also the moment when Maud Martha’s desire for self-expression, resonant in childhood but muted in adolescence, renews itself. Such regeneration is at odds with dominant constructions of motherhood. The birth scene also ruptures the silences that traditionally surround representations of childbirth. Fear and anger are explicit: “DON’T YOU GO OUT OF HERE AND LEAVE ME ALONE! Damn. Damn!” (234). There are uncontrollable screams: “[Paul] had no idea she could scream that kind of screaming. It was awful. How lucky he was that he had been born a man. How lucky he was that he had been born a man!” (236). There is the intensity of the physical experience: “Maud Martha kept asking, ‘Has the head come?’Presently she felt as though her whole body were having a bowel movement” (238).Even more remarkable is the representation of Maud Martha giving birth to herself. She gives birth entirely unassisted. The doctor arrives after the baby is born. Although a neighbor and Maud Martha’s mother are present, the only assistance they can offer is the draping of a sheet to cover her during the birth. Artistic and psychological rebirth are induced without the presence of a nurturing mother. Belva Brown at first refuses to look at the baby, saying, “See Maudie, see how brave 1 was? The baby is born, and I didn’t get nervous or faint or anything.” This leads Maud Martha to reflect, with characteristic irony, “Now isn’t that nice. . . . Here I’ve had the baby, and she thinks I should praise her for having stood up there and looked on” (238-39). The birth scene represents Belva as timid, critical, and self-centered, in marked contrast to her daughter. When she finally looks at her newborn granddaughter she exclaims in surprise, “Well, she’s a little beauty, isn’t she. she had not expected a handsome child,” revealing her anxiety that Maud Martha is not as “pretty” as Helen (240). Maud Martha’s acceptance of her mother’s limitations eventually lead to a kind of truce between the two. In ‘‘Mother comes to call,” Belva comes bearing gifts of fruits and sweets. She gives Maud Martha the lone pear she has brought, because “it was not a very good one,” a gesture signifying that Belva Brown expects her daughter to acquiesce in the traditional feminine role of self-denial and renunciation. When Maud offers her mother a plate of homemade gingerbread, her mother says, “Not enough cinnamon in this but very good.” When her mother tells

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her that Helen does not like to visit because Maud Martha’s poverty depresses her, Maud Martha asserts that, unlike Helen, she does not value people or objects because of their status: “I have a husband, a nice little girl, and a clean home of my own” (309). Belva Brown is disappointed that Paul does not earn more money and approves of Helen’s forthcoming marriage to a much older man-their family doctor-who will be able to offer her a large house and plenty of money. When Maud Martha points out to her mother that she did not sell herself in marriage the way Helen will, Belva Brown abruptly changes the subject. The tension between the two eventually is diffused when Maud Martha hints that she has always felt less worthy than Helen. Then Belva Brown softens, saying, “You’ve always been wonderful, dear” (311). This scene between the two women inscribes the struggle of the adult daughter, who is now also a mother, to maintain autonomy yet remain connected to her mother. In contrast to Belva’s dependence on Maud Martha for approval, the baby seems delightfully self-sufficient: The doctor brought the baby and laid it in the bed beside Maud Martha. Shortly before she had heard it in the kitchen-a bright delight had flooded through her upon first hearing that part of Maud Martha Brown Phillips expressing itself with a voice of its own (italics mine). But now the baby was quiet and returned its mother’s stare with one that seemed equally curious and mystified but perfectly cool and undisturbed (241).

The text establishes that mother and daughter-Maud

Martha and Paulette-are intimately connected but ultimately separate: the baby has a voice and gaze of its own. This is a moment of radical difference in the mother-daughter relationship; Maud Martha has not reproduced the way in which she was mothered-where she was seen as an extension of her mother-nor is she in danger of losing her identity. Her empowerment is underscored through a symbolic re-naming; she has become Maud Martha Brown Phillips, an accretion, rather than a diminishment, of authority. Motherhood confers physical strength and endurance, traditionally gendered masculine by the dominant culture: Maud Martha’s thoughts did not dwell long on the fact of the baby. There would be all her life long for that. She preferred to think, now, about how well she felt. Had she ever in her life felt so well? She felt well enough to get up. She folded her arms triumphantly across her chest, as another young woman, her neighbor to the rear, came in. “Hello, Mrs. Barkdale!” she hailed. “Did you hear the news? I just had a baby, and I feel strong enough to go out and shovel coal!” (240).

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Indeed, in Maud Martha’s declaration there are echoes of Sojourner Truth‘s famous interrogation of race and gender: “I could work as much and eat as much as a man-when I could get it-and bear the lash as well! And ain’t I a woman? And I have borne thirteen children, and seen most of them sold off to slavery . . . and ain’t I a woman!” In her declaration of independence, Maud Martha takes her place in the motherline as a woman who will nurture resilience in her daughters. In the chapters following the birth of Paulette, Maud Martha’s text inscribes the search for a maternal discourse for the voice of the mother as artist. This search is shaped by four encounters with r a ~ i s m The . ~ first encounter takes place in a beauty shop, where Maud Martha overhears a white saleswoman say to the shop owner that she, the saleswoman, “works like a nigger” (281). At first Maud Martha doesn’t believe her ears. Then she decides that if the saleswoman had said such a thing, the shop owner, Sonia Johnson, wouldn’t let her get away with it. When she asks if she had heard correctly, Sonia replies in the affirmative. Maud Martha says nothing, although she silently rebels against Sonia’s assessment that it is better to agree with white people than to risk their anger by talking back. The second encounter takes place in a millinery shop, where the white saleswoman silently thinks she does not want to cater “to these nigger women who try on every hat in the shop.” She is so condescending that Maud Martha decides not to buy a hat and leaves (297-99). This gesture of leaving, as a strategy of self-protection, is repeated in an even more dramatic way in the third encounter, which takes place in the chapter “at the Bums-Coopers.” Maud Martha has gone to work for this family as a domestic in order to help make ends meet, since Paul is struggling on minimal wages as a grocery clerk. Her first day on the job is also her last, since Mrs. Burns-Cooper tells Maud Martha to use the back door and her mother-in-law complains at dinner that the potatoes Maud Martha has served are too thick. These insults are preceded by an encounter in the kitchen, where ME. Bums-Cooper regales Maud Martha, who is slicing potatoes, with stories about her brilliant debut, the imported lace on her lingerie, and her brother’s expensive Stradivarius. With humor, Maud Martha wonders whether she should tell Mrs. Burns-Cooper about her collection of fancy pink satin bras (303).Maud Martha decides she will never return, even though the wages are gcmd and she knows that Mrs. Burns-Cooper will not understand why she has quit: One walked out from that almost perfect wall, spitting at the firing squad. What difference did it make whether the firing squad understood or did not understand the manner of one’s retaliation or why one had to retaliate?Why,

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one was a human being. One wore clean nightgowns. One loved one’s baby. the evening, in the winOne drank cocoa by the fire-or the gas range-ome tertime (305).

Maud Martha’s use of the third person voice, rather than the first, suggests that she rejects Mrs. Bums-Cooper’s racist views in a way that acknowledges and anticipates the shared struggle for black civil rights. Mary Helen Washington has noted that the job at the Burns-Coopers’house brings Maud Martha into contact with the kind of humiliation Paul endures daily, thus exposing her to the harsh realities of racism in the workplace (“Plain, Black,” 283). However, Maud Martha has already encountered the multiple effects of racism at home, where her mother and her husband prefer light-skinned women. The encounters in the millinery shop and at the Burns-Coopers, which end in gestures of resistance, culminate in an encounter in a department store, to which Maud Martha has taken Paulette to meet Santa Claus. Santa is very attentive to the waiting children until it is Paulette’s turn, when suddenly he is unable to see mother and child-a scene that may anticipateToni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, where Pecola visits a neighborhnod candy store only to learn that she is invisible to the shopkeeper (42). Maud Martha is annoyed that Santa is ignoring her daughter and says, “Mister, my little girl is talking to you” (315). Santa continues to ignore Paulette, while Maud Martha is insistent, repeating, “Mister.” Eventually, he turns toward Paulette but will not speak to her while she lists the toys she wants for Christmas. Later, after Maud Martha has pulled her away, Paulette asks her mother why Santa did not like her. Maud Martha makes her longest speech in the entire text, inventing a story whose message is that Santa loves all children: Listen, child. People don’t have to kiss you to show they like you. Now you know Santa Claus liked you. What have I been telling you? Santa Claus loves every child, and on the night before Christmas he brings them swell presents. Don’t you remember, when you told Santa Claus you wanted the ball and bear and tricycle and doll he said “Um-hm?”That meant he’s going to bring you all those. You watch and see. Christmas’ll be here in a few days. You’ll wake up Christmas morning and find them and then you’ll know Santa Claus loved you

too (317).

This story invented by Maud Martha embodies maternal discourse by bringing into conjunction the terms “mother” and “artist.” Maud Martha desires to reassure Paulette that she is worthy of love. There is no language available to Maud Martha that would enable her to explain the man’s racist behavior without frightening or confusing her young child. So she does what mothers

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have done for centuries: she invents a fairy tale that she knows is inadequate, based as it is on a false promise, but which the child finds reassuring. The story Maud Martha tells Paulette exemplifies how a mother’s voice can sound in fiction-reassuring, strong, loving-and how the mother-artist transforms maternal experience into creative expression. Undoubtedly, Maud Martha has also been hurt by this episode, but she does what she can to ensure that her daughter will not doubt her own self-worth. The fact that Maud Martha does not say that Santa Claw loves only white children does not diminish the heroism of her voice; indeed, it shows that she is protective of her child. While the language of political struggle is not yet available to Maud Martha, there is nonetheless a maternal voice that struggles simultaneously to be heard--“Hey, mister!”-and to comfort--“Santa Claus loves you, too.” The encounter with Santa Claus fills Maud Martha with rage-a fury that is at once the fury of one individual mother and all mothers outraged by inhumanity. M a d Martha explores the inadequacies of the conventional marriage plot to represent female growth. As a child, Maud Martha’s dearest wish is the wish of all children-the desire to be loved and cherished (144).As a young woman, she projects this desire on to Paul Phillips, whom she marries, even as she recognizes that the two are not well suited: “But in the end I’ll hook him admirer of the gay life, spiffy clothes, beautiful yellow girls, natural hair, smooth cars, jewels, night clubs, cocktail lounges, class” (197).The shiny trappings of materialism do not impress Maud Martha, who, unlike Paul, does not aspire to be a “social somebody” (221). Since marriage is the social script that is traditionally offered to women, Maud Martha accepts Paul’s proposal because she wants to have children, although she is aware that she will have to tolerate his preference for light-skinned women. The dance at the Foxy Cats Club is emblematic of the disjunctions between Paul’s desire, which revolves around objects valued by the larger culture, and Maud Martha’s desire, which is solely hers. Paul’s desire to be a member of the exclusive Foxy Cats-a select group of twenty men who wear expensive clothing and enjoy spending money-is emblematic of his materialism; his identity and self-esteem are measured by the acquisition of valuahle objects. Maud Martha’s desire is ordered through her perceptions, which are not given a social or material value. At the ball, she finds herself aroused by “the drowsy lights . . the body perfumes, natural and superimposed; the sensuous heaviness of the wine-colored draperies at the many windows; the music, now steamy and slow, now as clear and fragile as glass, now raging, passionate, now moaning and thickly gray” (225). Maud Martha allows herself the freedom to experience the ball erotically, on her own terms; Paul, on

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the other hand, is only interested in what the dominant culture sees as desirable, embodied in this scene in the shape of the red-haired, fair-skinned Maella. When another man approaches Maud Martha and tells her she’s a “real babe,” she finds herself thinking about a snowball bush in her parent’s back yard, with flowers “beautiful, fat, and startlingly white” (229). Memories of this bush, which sickened and ceased to flower as she matured, symbolize the death of childhood fantasies of romantic love, as the older Maud Martha observes the disjunction between the flowering of adolescent sexual fantasy and the sexual dance performed by grown men and women. The scene at the Foxy Cats ball, where Maud Martha is the subject of her desire, stands in marked contrast to a later moment in the novella where female desire is commodified and objectified. Paul has taken Maud Martha to the 011 Club in order to impress her with how much his friends know about good wine, good food, and good clothing. The 01 1 Club is decorated with paintings of naked women in a jungle, a trope that exploits and objectifies black female sexuality. Maud Martha finds the murals offensive and degrading. Maud Martha does not have a socially acceptable script in which to represent her sexual desire. Her fantasies have been shaped by traditional gender arrangements in marriage. When she rebels against renting a basement apartment, which Paul endorses because it is less expensive (so that he will have more spending money for clothing), she wonders if she is inadequate, a failure as a wife: Was her attitude uncooperative?Should she be wanting to sacrifice more, for the sake of her man? A procession of pioneer women strode down her imagination. . . women who would toil eminently, to improve the lot of their men. Women who cooked. She thought of herself, dying for her man. It was a heautiful thought (ZOO).

While at times Maud Martha is preoccupied by dreams of self-sacrifice, she does not succumb to them: the newlyweds do not rent a basement apartment. Nonetheless, the marriage hardly lives up to the ideal embodied in her neighbors’ marriage. Mr. and Mrs. Coopie Whitestripe (note the irony of the surname) remind her of Romeo and Juliet. When she sees the Whitestripes on their balcony with their arms around each other, she sighs to Paul, “It is such a beautiful story” (263). Her internalization of the courtship and romance plots reveals the inadequacy of these narratives. At night, she reads OfHumn Bondage, Somerset Maugham’s 1915 novel about a young doctor hopelessly in love with an indifferent waitress, a plot that simultaneously produces a longing for romantic enthrallment while denying its fulfillment.

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Paul, on the other hand, reads a how-to manual called Sex in the Married Life which is equally non-instructive. The scene of the married couple in bed

reading their respective books is a wonderful example of Brooks’s comic genius. Paul’s attempts at lovemaking are so crude that Maud Martha returns to her novel and Paul falls asleep. When it comes to self-sacrifice, the story of pioneer women dying for their husbands is no longer beautiful: Maud Martha resents Paul’s expectation that she serve him and his friends on Christmas eve, while he believes that this is his patriarchal privilege: “She was his wife, and he was the head of the family, and on Christmas night the least he could do, by God, and would do, by God, was stand his friends a good mug of beer. And to heck with, in fact, to hell with, her fruitcakes and coffees. Put Paulette to bed” (246). In contrast to Paul’s philistinism, Maud Martha insists on preserving the rituals and traditions of her childhood-fruitcake and coffee at Christmas, pink and white cakes at birthdays, a dinner table spread with a white cloth (249). Paul is critical of her belief in family rituals, believing them to be a waste of time and money. Maud Martha, however, desires order, form, and shape: “What she had wanted was a solid. She had wanted shimmering form; warm, but hard as stone and as difficult to break. She had wanted to shape, for their use, for hers, for little Paulette’s, a set of falterless customs” (244). Here again is the mother-artist designing a legacy for her daughter as part of the motherline. How does a mother-artist like Maud Martha survive in the face of racism and poverty? Her gifted imagination, rich interior life, and courage provide her with the internal resources necessary for resistance. As a mother, she struggles to articulate the duality of maternal subjectivity, enabling her to express her individuality while nurturing her child. In her search for order and meaning, Maud Martha seeks to create lasting personal rituals around family occasions, such as birthdays and holidays, events that structure the cycle of domestic life. While the novella recalls some of the narrative strategies employed by Virginia Woolf in Mrs. Dalbway-in its represention of the consciousness and interior life of an ordinary women-differences of class and race emerge as Maud Martha struggles to combat racism in shops, kitchens, and department stores, sites of privilege for Mrs. Dalloway. The boundaries between the domestic and public spheres are blurred as both become sites o f . survival and struggle against racism and poverty. At the end of the novella, Maud Martha is pregnant. The narrative differentiates between creativity and procreativity as independent, separate acts, establishing that the protagonist is a mother-artist who is capable of both. In this way, the novel anticipates Alice Walker’s deconstruction of

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the childbirth metaphor in literature, which likens the creative process of writing t o childbirth. Walker insists on the difference, describing herself as “a woman who had written books, conceived in her head, and who had also engendered at least one human being in her body” (378). Like the “least and commonest flower,” Maud Martha survives war, divorce, evictions, jilting, and taxes. An outspoken mother-artist, Maud Martha is persistent in her search for beauty and heroic in her quest for “habits of survival” for psyche and spirit, in spite of the boundaries that poverty and racism threaten to impose.

Notes 1. Hortense Spillers notes that Maud Martha is not a woman warrior: “the big, bumbling immensities of the romantic and epic imagination-Rebellion, Bravery, Courage, Triumph40 not touch her identity in any remote way’’ (251). I see her identity as characterized by quiet acts of rebellion, bravery, and triumph, which point to the way in which the epic and heroic plot is associated with masculinity in the Western literary imagination. Barbara Christian notes that Maud Martha’s strength ‘(isa quiet one, rooted in a keen sensitivity that both appreciates and critiques her family and culture. . . . [the] emphasis on the black girl in the community is a prefiguring of black women’s novels of the sixties and seventies, which looked at the relationship between the role of woman in society and the racism that embattled the black community” (131). 2. Mary Helen Washington questions why Brooks, in her “autobiographical novel,” does not allow Maud Martha the same kind of control over her life and creative expression that she experienced as a writer (Abel et al., 248). Spillcrs sees Maud Martha as an artist of “profoundly active poetic sensibility” in a “world of marvelous color, of infinite allure” (259). Rachel Blau DuPlessis has observed that the figure of the female artist encodes the conflict between any empowered woman and the barriers to her achievement, which, to my mind, constructs the figure of the female artist as simultaneous symbol of female potential and of the dominant culture’s resistance to female expression (84). 3. Mary Helen Washington notes that “few critics could pictiire the questing figure, the powerful articulate voice in the tradition as a plain, dark-skinned housewife living in a kitchenette apartment on the south side of Chicago” (“Darkened Eye,” 32). 4. In Brooks’s autobiography, Report from Part One (Broadside Press, 1972), Brooks states her commitment to the tangibility and accessibility of language: “1 think the poet, if he (sic) wants to speak to anyone, is constrained to do something with words so that they will ‘mean something,’will be something that a reader may touch” ( 148). 5. Marianne Hirsch identifies, in texts by African American women writers, a discourse that “might be able to reverse the erasure of the mother and the daughterly

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act of ‘speakingfor her’ and to create the conditions in which mother and daughter would each be able to speak for themselves and for one another. . . . [for these writers] fathers, brothers, and husbands occupy a less prominent place” in relation to the maternal tradition of the past” (16). See also O’Reilly, “Across the Divide,” who notes, like Hirsch, the rupture of Oedipal patterns and plots.

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CHAPTER

THREE

The Poet at the Crossroads: Breaking the Silence in Tillie Olsen’s “I Stand Here Ironing” and “Tell Me a Riddle”

My belief is that this poet who never wrote a word and was buried at the crossroads still lives. She lives in you and in me, and in many other women who are not here tonight, for they are washing up the dishes and putting the children to bed.

-Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own ( 1929) Genius of a sort must have existed among [women], as it existed among the working classes, but certainly it never got itself onto paper. -Virginia

Woolf, A Room of O n e ’ s Own (1929)

One of the defining qualities of mother-artists in contemporary American fiction is the desire to be heard. Tillie Olsen’s “I Stand Here Ironing” (1956) and “Tell Me a Riddle” (1960) are two fictions in which mother-artists search for a narrative form, but find it difficult to make themselves heard. The unnamed mother who narrates ‘‘I Stand Here Ironing“ is a single, workingclass woman who has internalized the prejudices of middle-class professionals who see the working classes as dirty, irresponsible, unintelligent, and inferior. Structured as an interior monologue, the narrative represents the mother’s imaginative attempt to tell her story to a school guidance counselor who is likely to judge her incompetent and inadequate. In “Tell Me a Riddle,” Eva, a sixty-nine-year-old grandmother, has lapsed into angry silence over the years in response to the gendered inequalities in her marriage. The narrative’s ending represents Eva’s heroic struggle to reclaim her 39

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voice and remind herself, her husband, and her granddaughter of her lifelong commitment to human equality and social justice. Both texts use psychological memory as a narrative strategy that ruptures the linearity of plot and chronological time, inscribing modernist techniques on the motherartist’s text. Set during the impoverished years of the Great Depression, “I Stand Here Ironing” is a narrative of struggle, poverty, exhaustion, despair, and isolation from a community of nurturing women. The central conflict pivots around the narrator’s assumption that her story will not seem credible to her audience, embodied in the imagined presence of a school guidance counselor, This presence threatens the narrator’s authority by implying that she may not be a “good enough” mother; the narrator imagines the guidance counselor saying to her, “I wish you would manage the time to come in and talk with me about your daughter. I’m sure you can help me understand her. She’s a youngster who needs help and whom I’m deeply interested in helping” (1). Constance Coiner has argued that, since the entire story takes place inside the mind of the narrator, it is not certain whether the story ever passes from the silence of the mother’s mind to the ear of the counselor for whom it is being rehearsed.’ Although the monologue is not spoken aloud, its rehearsal constitutes the first step in the narrator’s effort to create order and coherence from her experience. Through the juxtaposition of the mother’s voice against that of the guidance counselor, the narrative problematizes the relationship between gender and middle-class authority. In effect, the mother must serve as her own authenticating narrator, since she does not have access to middleclass voices that can represent her. Although the narrator is not aware of herself as a storyteller, she is nonetheless engaged in a heroic quest to give order and coherence to her text. Her desire for form is embodied in the questions she asks: “and when is there time to remember, to sift, to weigh, to estimate, to total? I will start and there will be an interruption and I will have to gather it all together again” (1). She asks, “Why do I put that first? I do not even know if it matters, o r if it explains anything” (2). Her repeated emphasis on disjuncture and fragmentation engages Virginia Woolf’s poetics of interruption, which is grounded in the assumption that women’s texts, like women’s lives, are subject to ruptures and discontinuities. Woolf‘s argument might be extended to theorize a different form for the mother-artist’s text. An important theme of the narrative is the mother’s memories of being unable to offer Emily a middle-class storybook childhood. Her earliest recollections of Emily’s infancy are informed by her sense of isolation from friends or family with whom to share her passion for her daughter: “She was a beau-

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tiful baby. The first and only one of our five that was beautiful at birth” (2). Since the other four children to whom the narrator refers are the offspring of the narrator’s second marriage, Emily must adapt to being the only child in the family with a different biological father, a father who abandoned her and her mother during the Depression (the second husband is a soldier in the Second World War). Emily’s issues of abandonment will therefore be more intense than those of her siblings and will create a greater sense of inadequacy in her mother, who blames herself for failing to provide her daughter with the luxuries other children can afford: “We were poor and could not afford for her the soil of easy growth. I was a young mother, I was a distracted mother” (12). Adrienne Rich describes the guilt mothers feel about their inability to meet idealized standards of motherhood: The physical and psychic weight on the woman with children is by far the heaviest of social burdens. Love and anger can exist concurrently;anger at the conditionsof motherhood can become translated into anger at the child, along with the fear that we are not “loving”;grief for all we cannot do for our children in a society so inadequate to meet human needs becomes translated into guilt and self-laceration . . . the mother’s very character, her status as a woman, are in question if she has “failed” her children (Of Woman Born, 52). The mother-artist in Olsen’s fiction is haunted by the specter of her failure as a mother; she worries that she is not “good enough.”l The protagonist blames herself for leaving Emily with apathetic neighbors while she went to work, of not having enough money to buy her new clothes, of being unable to pay for acting lessons. n e narrator’s limited resources do not warrant blame, nor self-condemnation. Her response reflects the internalization of dominant middle-class scripts of motherhood that are inadequate in the face of bound economic conditions. The gaze of the dominant middle class, which has the power to name, judge, and define, is encoded in the image of the “seeingeye,” a reference that appears to anticipate Toni Morrison’s “bluest eye” in her novel by that name. In Olsen’s story, mother and daughter measure themselves against the seeing eyes of the dominant culture and find themselves deficient. Emily frets that she is “thin and dark and foreign-lookingat a time when every little girl was supposed to look or thought she should look a chubby blond replica of Shirley Temple” (7). The advice of so-called experts compounds the mother’s sense of inadequacy: “I nursed her. They feel that’s important nowadays. with all the fierce rigidity of first motherhood, I did like the books then said. Though her cries battered me to trembling and my breasts ached with swollenness, I waited till the clock decreed” (2). The tyranny of patriarchal time is juxtaposed against the

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narrator’s sense of internal time-fluid rather than linear, self-defined rather than institutionally driven. The oppressiveness of patriarchal structures is inscribed in images of clocks, which symbolize the separation of mother and child in a culture indifferent to their needs. The narrator punches a time clock at the factory where she works (where she will be docked if she is a few minutes late); the clock frightens Emily with its loud ticking while her mother is in the hospital. While the narrator’s existence is dominated by the demands of linear time, she is oppressed by the scarcity of mother-time: there is not enough time for rest and contemplation at the end of the day; there is not enough time to address Emily’s complex emotional needs. The organization of the narrative around the fluidity of memory constitutes the narrator’s attempt to structure her text according to her own sense of authority-fragile though it may be-in opposition to the authority of middle-class arbiters. Memories of enforced separations from Emily are painfully revisited and explored several times in the narrative. The narrator’s anguish at havi,ng to send Emily away twice-first to her husband’s relatives when she was a toddler, later to an institution when she was seven or eight-is written between the lines of the story she tells: “It took a long time to raise the money for her fare back. Then she got chicken pox and I had to wait longer. When she finally came, I hardly knew her, walking quick and nervous like her father, looking like her father, thin, and dressed in shoddy red that yellowed her skin. . . . All that baby loveliness gone” (3). When doctors at a local clinic examine Emily several years later, they persuade the narrator to send Emily away once again, this time to a “home” (that is, an institution) in the country where “she can have the kind of food and care [the mother] can’t manage for her” (5). The arrogance of these professionals blinds them to the narrator’s financial straits and powerlessness. To accuse her of being unahle to feed and care for Emily is tantamount to accusing her of a fundamental inability to nurture and to mother. Too, Emily is alternately portrayed as “skeleton thin,’’ or possessed of a voracious appetite, possible references to the eating disorders of anorexia and bulimia as sites of struggle between mother and daughter (7, Emily’s stay at the convalescent home is a nightmarish example of the power of the “seeing eyes” of the dominant culture to name, define, and control. The “home” is a series of chalet-style cottages (a gesture, no doubt, to the Swiss sanitariums where the wealthy went to recuperate from TB or nervous disorders). There is a disconcerting irony in the middle-class attempt to domesticate illness. The children are simultaneously infantilized and puri-

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fied: both boys and girls wear white suits or dresses with gigantic red bows. On visiting days, they are not allowed to touch their parents but must stand on the cottage balconies, shrieking down while their parents shriek up to them in an effort to make themselves heard (6).One day the mother realizes that Emily’s friend, a little girl with whom she liked to hold hands, is gone; she was moved to “Rose Cottage,” a name that invokes the bucolic English countryside but masks a place of isolation and deprivation. Emily shouts an explanation to her mother: “They don’t like you to love anyone here” (6). Letter-writing provides another example of the power of the middle class to control and regulate discourse. Emily is not allowed to keep the letters her mother writes to her. Letters, like children, are seen as property of the institution; they are read to Emily but she is not allowed to touch them or keep them. She is treated like a prisoner in the very place to which her mother has sent her for care and recovery. Meanwhile, the mother’s desire to nurture her daughter through language is thwarted by the authorities, who explain, with apparent goodwill, “We simply do not have room for children to keep any personal possessions,” as though letters are now synonymous with private property (6). By designating these tokens of affection as property to be appropriated and controlled by others, the institution has adopted prison tactics, imprisoning both mother and child inside walls of silence. The letters to Emily are symbolic of the conjunction between the terms “mother” and “artist.” They signify a moment where the mother nurtures the daughter through writing and language. Such maternal discourse has no place in a patriarchal order that devalues mothers and maternal authority. Emblematic of the paradoxical ability of language to simultaneously disrupt and express the primary union with the mother, the mother’s letters also authorize the mother as subject, rather than object, of discourse and representation. Emily’s letters are also judged; she writes to her mother that she is eager to receive a star for exemplary writing, although she never gets one (6). The seizing of the letters by the institution exemplifies Adrienne Rich‘s observation about the power of patriarchy to divide mothers and daughters. This rupture threatens the development of healthy daughters, who imagine that they should repudiate their connection to their mothers. Maternal discourse is predicated on the mother’s ability to acknowledge the daughter’s existence as an independent subject. In spite of the narrator’s overwhelming desire to bond with Emily, she is keenly aware that she is not Emily, that Emily is an autonomous individual. This representation subverts the theory of the mother as always overidentified with her child. The narrator imagines herself asking the school guidance counselor, “You think that because I am her mother . . . that you could use me as a key? She has lived

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for nineteen years. There is all that life that has happened outside of me, beyond me” (1). The narrator of “I Stand Here Ironing,” like Maud Martha, envisions the independent existence of her daughter, repudiating the paradigm of maternal overidentification. Clearly the narrator hopes that Emily will not repeat her own story: “she runs up the stairs two at a time with her light graceful step, and I know she is happy tonight” (11). Maternal discourse, then, is emblematic of the mother’s ability to express an independent subjectivity while sustaining the mother-daughter bond: it expresses the simultaneity of separateness and connectedness in the mother-daughter bond. Maternal discourse is also thematized in the mother’s ability to recognize and nurture Emily’s desire for artistic expression. When Emily is ill, the narrator brings her boxes of beads, shells, and pebbles to sort and order according to her own aesthetic vision. When Emily recounts the day’s events at school, the mother encourages her to enter her school amateur show, where she wins first prize. When she performs at a local high school, the mother is amazed and impressed by the spell her daughter casts over the audience. When the mother asks herself whether this is really her daughter, she reveals the paradoxical nature of mothering: the recognition that the child-who is so much a part of one’s identity-has an identity and aspirations that are uniquely her own. The oscillations and fluctuations of memory are bound together by the mother’s ironing, her aggressive act. The iron is traditionally read as emblematic of the worst kind of drudgery and toil-the kind of mindless, numbing housework of which Olsen herself is highly critical-not only because it is unsatisfying and exhausting, but because it threatens to impede creativity. Paradoxically, ironing also gives form to the mother-artist’s text. The narrator is not only telling the story of her experience while she irons hut with the iron itself, which, like the writer’s pen, is constantly in motion, back and forth. The ironing frames the story and gives it momentum: “I stand here ironing, and what you asked me moves tormented back and forth with the iron” (1). The metaphor of the iron as pen is reaffirmed at the end of the story, when the narrator pleads for a new script for her daughter: “Only help her to know-help her make it so there is cause for her to know-that she is more than this dress on the ironing board, helpless before the iron” (12). The narrator is inscribing her story of struggle while expressing the hope that her daughter will be freer to write a different script. If the iron symbolizes the pen, and the ironing hoard the paper, then the dress is the story. For the mother, Emily must wear a different dress-a different story. The narrative does not specify whose dress the mother is ironing, hers or Emily’s. Nonetheless, the mother would not want Emily to wear

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this particular dress, which is symbolic of the narrator’s oppression. The narrator imagines that Emily will set her seal, an image that evokes the iron as well as the pen, connecting the mother and the daughter in a shared artistry. Ironically, Emily is a talented mime who performs on stage-although she is visible and public in ways that the mother is not, she is silent. Emily’s decision to use her body, rather than her voice, as an artistic medium enacts a trope that resonates for many women artists in fiction. In Paule Marshall’s Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959), for instance, the daughter Selina decides to become a dancer although she had once dreamed of being a poet. Ehth Olsen’s and Marshall’s fictions were published in the 1950s, the era that preceded the women’s movement and a period of social conservatism. Emily recognizes the omnipresence of the iron, although she does not understand its role: “‘Aren’t you ever going to finish the ironing, Mother? Whistler painted his mother in a rocker. I’d have to paint mine standing over an ironing board”’ (11). But the mother cannot stop ironing, for that would he to stop writing. Why write with the iron rather than the pen?The childbirth metaphor for creativity in the dominant literary tradition has dictated that men write with phallic pens, while women produce children with their wombs. This metaphor is so entrenched in the Western cultural imagination that the mother-artist almost appears to be a theoretical impossibility. Despite the pessimism Olsen reveals in Silences about the woman writer’s ability to combine motherhood and art, she nonetheless represents, in ‘‘I Stand Here Ironing,” a portrait of an artistic mother. In her effort to give form and shape to her story, this mother seeks a venue for self-expression, and she attempts to speak in spite of considerable risk. As a working-class mother, she risks condemnation by the middle classes who will judge her unworthy and inadequate. Despite such obstacles, which are intended to silence her, she persists in her search for order and meaning. Too, she strives to let Emily steer her own course without abandoning her. The mother’s devotion, her struggle, her courage, and her anguish have inspired several generations of women readers engaged in their own struggles for self-definition. Truly, this motherartist has set her own seal.

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In “Tell Me a Riddle” (1960), Eva, the protagonist, is a mother-artist who longs to frame the story of her life and to give form and shape to its fiagmented and hidden desires. A sixty-nine-year-old grandmother who is dying of terminal cancer, Eva rememberS her impassioned commitment as a young activist in Czarist Russia to the ideals of human equality and social justice. While Eva is often described by feminist critics as a character whose bitterness

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and resentment have driven her to a life of silence and anger-of which the cancer is a symbol-she has not been named as an artist. Critics have tended to focus on her silences and resentment rather than on the barriers that have made it difficult for her to speak. Indeed, the movement in Eva’s text is away from silence toward speech, with a narrative ending in which Eva reclaims the radical voice of her girlhood, affirming her identity as a mother and an artist! The narrative opens with the voices of Eva’s children, who, like the chorus in a Greek tragedy, attempt to formulate a moral lesson around their mother’s resistance to their father, David. Against her wishes, and supported by his children, he wants to sell their house and move into a home run by his Socialist lodge: “Poor Ma. Poor Dad. . . . They never had very much; at least in old age they should be happy” (63). Eva’s children are unable to see Eva’s need for solitude. The children’s understanding of their parents’ lives is limited by their acceptance of traditional gender roles in marriage. True believers in the feminine mystique, they have internalized the myth of 1950s middleclass domesticity. According to this myth, mothers must put everyone else’s needs before their own, and Eva’s children agree: “This [move] does offer an outlet for Dad,” said Paul [a son]. “And economic peace of mind isn’t to be sneezed at either. I could use a little of that myself‘ (76). However, Paul doesn’t even mention his mother. Eva resists the proposed move to the cooperative home, named, ironically, T h e Haven.” She wants to remain in the sanctuary of her own home, which represents, for her, a place for contemplation and reflection-“being able at last to live within, and not move to the rhythms of others, as life had forced her to: denying; removing; isolating; taking the children one by one; then deafening, half-blinding-and at last, presenting her with solitude. And in it she had won to a reconciled peace” (69). Eva claims this solitude as her due after years of raising her children in poverty: “She would not exchange her solitude for anything. Never again to be forced to move to the rhythms of others” (68). Virginia Woolf has argued in A Room of One’s Own that a woman must have privacy, intellectual freedom, and money (five hundred pounds, to be precise) in order to be an artist, a paradigm that excludes working-class women (52). Eva’s children are adults who have entered the middle classes, releasing her from the burden of financial worries; she finally has the freedom to pursue her own interests-reading, tending her garden, listening to music, and “living within” (68). At the age of sixty-nine-typically, for men, the age of retirement-Eva is pursuing her creative rebirth. The house she shares with David has evolved from a site of struggle into Eva’s room of her own. Truly a haven, the house provides a refuge from the petty social duties her husband enjoys but which she finds tiresome and enervating.

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The house has acquired iconic significancefor Eva in ways that it could not when her children were small. As a young mother-artist, Eva was not free to explore her creativity. She recalls, “without softness, that young wife, who in the deep night hours while she nursed the current baby, and perhaps held another on her lap, would try to stay awake for the only time there was to read” (57). EvaS clarity of vision contrasts with her daughter Vivi’s idealized nostalgia: “I remember how beautiful my mother seemed nursing my brother, and the milk just flows” (87). Eva rejects such sentimentality, which romanticizes mothers as madonnas who have no needs of their own. Interestingly, it is precisely at the moment of fusion between mother and child when David, returning late from a meeting, is aroused by the intimacy of the nursing scene and says to Eva, “I’ll put the baby to bed, and you-put the book away, don’t read, don’t read” (67). This scene evokes many competing demands: the need for self-expression; the need to preserve and sustain children; and the fulfillment of erotic desire, which resonates in Eva’s recollection that that particular “don’t read, don’t read” had been the most beguiling of all (67).5One can’t help but wonder what it would have meant to Eva had David been more available to help with the children, or had his advances not been made during the only time she had for self-exploration, or had he not discouraged the political work in which she was once passionately involved. Virginia Woolf, writing about the problem of disruption in women’s lives, recognized that the different shape of women’s experience will produce alternate narrative forms: “The book has somehow to be adapted to the body, and at a venture one would say that women’s books should be shorter, more concentrated, than those of men, and framed so that they do not need long hours of steady and uninterrupted work” (78). Woolf‘s theory of creativity envisions a space for Eva and other mother-artists, who must somehow balance the need for self-expression against the demands and interruptions of children. Following Woolf‘s argument, the mother-artist’s text will have another form, a form marked by ruptures, gaps, fluctuations, and silences. Olsen’s “I Stand Here Ironing” and “Tell Me a Riddle” exemplify this difference: short, compressed chonicles of motherhood, which, in spite of their brevity, are highly complex both structurally and thematically. While the problem of interruption makes it difficult for Eva to express herself while raising children, it is not the only barrier she encounters. Unequal gender arrangements in marriage also contribute to the silencing of Eva’s voice; while David attends political rallies and meetings, Eva does not even have the opportunity to join their Socialist reading circle: “And forty years ago, when the children were morsels and there was a [reading] Circle, did you stay home with them once so I could go? Even once? You trained me

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well” (66). The imprisonment Eva experiences in marriage resonates with her experience as a prisoner in a Siberian jail, to which she was exiled because of her radical speeches. During this year of exile, she was forbidden t o speak. In Eva’s text, the prison of gender inequality and the prison in Czarist Russia both speak of oppression. Reading, which provides moments of pleasure and self-communion, are especially significant in Eva’s text. As a young girl, Eva was illiterate. Literacy was a social privilege accorded to the aristocracy, not to poor Jewish peasants living in shtetls. Eva learned how to read from a noblewoman named Lisa in a friendship that trangressed boundaries of religion and social class. Eva says to her son: Have I told you of Lisa who taught me to read? Of the high-born she was, but noble in herself. I was sixteen; they beat me; my father heat me so I would not go to her. At night, past dogs that howled, terrible dogs, my son, in the snows of winter to the road, I to ride in her carriage like a lady, to books. To her, life was holy, knowledge was holy, and she taught me to read. They hung her ( 103). Constance Coiner has observed that Jeannie, the granddaughter who takes care of Eva o n her deathbed, is destined to carry on her grandmother’s legacy because she reminds Eva of Lisa (277). Another barrier t o Eva’s desire for self-expression, in addition to David’s inability t o renounce the patriarchal role in marriage, is the devaluation of mothers’ work to sustain the family, both physically and emotionally. David, who identifies with the dominant culture, does not recognize Eva’s contributions to family life. Her untold hours of feeding, shopping, cooking, and cleaning are invisible and unrewarded: From those years she had had to manage, old humiliations and terrors rose up, lived again. . . The children’s needings; that grocer’s face or this merchant’s wife she had had to beg credit from when credit was a disgrace; the scenery of the long blocks walked around when she could not pay; school coming, and the desperate going over the old to see what could yet be remade; the soups of meat bones begged “for-the-dog”one winter (67).

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As in “I Stand Here Ironing,” domesticity takes o n a different shape under poverty: it becomes the site of a daily struggle for survival. The invisibility of Eva’s struggle as a working-class mother raises important questions about how maternal authority is constructed along class lines. In Democracy in the Kitchen, British sociologists Helen Lucey and Valerie Walkerdine observe that both middle-class and working-class mothers suffer frotn low self-esteem

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as a result of the patriarchal devaluation of motherhood. However, middleclass mothers are rewarded by the social and cultural ideology that motherwork contributes to the building of democracy; mothers are recognized for raising future citizens who will build the nation and perpetuate the democratic way of life. Working-class mothers, who are seen by the middle classes as lazy and irresponsible, receive no such gratification or reward for their motherwork; according to middle-class ideology, their children will not be prepared to contribute to democratic ideals and goals because they will lack the proper social and educational background. Eva has internalized the devaluation of her role as a working-class mother to such a degree that she cannot reflect on it with any satisfaction. She is not aware of her susceptibilityto middle-class idealizations of the maternal role. While she is afraid to hold her infant grandson on her lap, afraid to be engulfed by the “warm flesh that had claims and nuzzled away all else,” she is not aware of the extent to which this sensation is exploited by class differences as well as the gendered division of labor in childrearing. Maternal attachment is intensified by the unavailability of other resources, such as community or extended kinship networks, with whom to share the demands and responsibilities of childrearing. In Western culture, mothering is mast often done in isolation, which places tremendous emotional pressure on mothers. Eva castigates herself as an unnatural grandmother for being unable to cradle her grandson; what she is running away from is not the memory of warm flesh, hut rather the memory of engulfment, of feeling that there was no one with whom to share her role as nurturer. Eva’s text interrogates the complicated relationship among motherhood, language, and discourse. Some feminist critics have questioned the possibility of voicing maternal discourse, given that maternal identity is grounded in a dual subjectivity of self (mother as subject) and other (mother as object of the child’s development). As in “I Stand Here Ironing,” maternal discourse resonates but is muted by poverty, exhaustion, and patriarchal gender arrangements. To paraphrase bell hooks: “It’s not that mothers have nothing to say; it’s that they have had no say.” Eva was not always wary of language;as a young woman, she was quite ready to take the consequencesof her outspokenness. Over the years she has become suspicious of spoken language as she has witnessed its abuse and misuse. She says to David, “NOmore crushers of people, pushers, hypocrites around me. No more in my house. You go to them if you like. . . . All my life around babblers. Enough!” (73). Silence has been imposed upon her by patriarchy, embodied in David, who calls her “Mrs. Word Miser” (64).However, Eva has an arsenal of language at her command. When David mocks her desire to stay in their own home, calling her such names as “Mrs. Live Alone and Like It” and “Mrs. Free

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As A Bird,” she responds with a string of curses in the rich idiom of Yiddish,

her mother tongue: “After him she sobbed curses he had not heard in years. Grow, oh shall you grow like an onion, with your head in the ground. Like the hide of a drum shall you be, beaten in life, beaten in death. Oh shall you be like a chandelier, to hang, and to burn” (74). Because Olsen omits the quotation marks around Eva’s words, her remarks appear as interior monologue rather than spoken as dialogue; the reader, like David, has difficulty hearing Eva’s voice. Cheryl Walls analysis is instructive; she notes that “the monologue has become a device to represent the inability of women to ‘talk back’ outside the home as well as the refusal of men to engage in dialogue within it” (I 1). The stniggle surrounding gendered issues of language and power also resonates in other gestures: David turns up the volume on the television rather than listen to Eva’s concerns about moving; Eva turns down the volume on her hearing aid to tune out David’s verbal assaults. The title o f Eva’s text, “tell me a riddle,” is thus ironic: David is the grandparent who aniuses the grandchildren with parables and jokes; when Eva is asked by a grandson to tell him a riddle, she answers that she doesn’t know any (86).This diffidence masks her rich connection to language, her ability to work in metaphor and memory. Eva cannot respond to the child’s request for entertainment through verbal word play because she herself is seeking answers to riddle of life’s indecipherability. Eva’s text is a chronicle fragmented by memory, a modernist strategy that ruptures chronological time and linear plot. The narrative privileges female consciousness and psyche over external social structures? One of the metaphors for the layering of memory is the layering of the earth‘s crust. When Richard, her grandson, shows her his rock collection, his act is the catalyst for a flow of rich recollections and associations:

Of stones (repeating Richard) there are three kinds: earth’s fire jetting; rack of layered centuries; crucibled new out of the old. . . . But there was that other-

frozen to black glass, never to transform or hold the fossil memory. . . . There was an ancient man who fought to heights a great rock that crashed back down eternally-ternal labor, freedom, labor. . . (stone will perish, but the word remain). And you, David, who with a stone slew, screaming: Lord, take my heart of stone and give me flesh. Who was screaming! Why was she hack in the common room of the prison, the sun motes dancing in the shafts of light, and the informer being brought in (90). This passage is paradigmatic of the way that Eva uses memory as an art form. What begins as a personal encounter with her grandson and his rock collection becomes the occasion for reflections on the exploitation of the working class. The grandchildren’s screaming reminds her of her own experiences in prison.

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Memory integrates Eva’s fragmented identity. Eva is described as a “memoried wraith”; she is the embodiment of historical memory. The airplane on which she travels across the country is a “steerage ship of memory,” an image that evokes the crossing of Eastern European Jews to the New World. She is described by David as “all bones and a swollen belly,” an image that refers to the Nazi concentration camp victims (91).Her imagination transforms memory and enables her to connect personal to biblical and political discourses. She associates her own personal loss-the death of her son during World World 11-with Hitler’s atrocities: “Tell Sammy’s boy, he who flies, tell him to go to Stuttgart and see where Davy has no grave. And what? And what? where millions have no graves-save air” (104). In her death throes, Eva remembers a history of injustice and recites a litany of protest and outrage that associates the enslavement of black people with the genocide of European Jews: “Even in reality (swallow) life’s lack of it Skweships deathtrains clubs eee-

...

nough” (103). In Eva’s text, music and song are metaphors for voice and language. In song, Eva is free to voice her passion. O n e evening David is awakened by

Eva’s singing; she is singing a Russian love song from their youth: “This is a private concert?” he asks her. “I can breathe now,” she replies (75). In Los Angeles, where she has come to live out her final days, she and David attend a concert: So it is that she sits in the wind of the singing, among the thousand various faces of age. She had turned off her hearing aid at m e they came into the auditon’um--as she would have wished to turn off sight. One by one they streamed by and imprinted on her-and though the savage Zest of their singing came voiceiessiy soft and distant, the faces still roared-the faces densemxi the air-chorded into children-chants, mother-croons, singing of the chained love serenades, Beethoven storms, mad Lucia’s scream drunken joy-songs, keens for the dead, work-singing (96-97).

T h e experience of attending a choral concert is imagined figuratively and poetically: songs of work and love are transformed into Beethoven’s symphonies and a mother’s lullabies. Moreover, Eva claims community with these elderly men and women whom she sees as kin. She joins her chanting to theirs, her passion to theirs. In a daring flight of imagination inspired by memory, she is reminded of her girlhood in Russia: while from floor to balcony to dome a bare-footed sore-covered little girl threaded the sound-thronged tumult, danced at her ecstasy of grimace to flutes that scratched at a cross-roads vikge wedding. yes, faces became sound, and the sound became faces; and faces and sound became weight-pushed, pressed (97).

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The narrative strategies used-the italicization, the shifting as the narrative voice moves in and out of Eva’s consciousness, the rupturing of logical syntax-reveal Eva’s search to bring the fragments of her experience into coherence. Eva’s search for a narrative form with which to tell her fragmented story is most amply documented in the scenes in which she is dying. In the final scenes of death, she voices aloud, for the first time, the passion of her youth, her enduring commitment to justice and freedom for all peoples: “Lift high banner of reason (tatter of an oratorS voice) justice freedom light Humankind lifeworthy capacities Seeks (blur of shudder) belong human beings” ( 110). The use of italics in these and other passages contributes to the illusion that Eva is not speaking aloud-that she is only imagining that she has spoken. As Constance Coiner has observed, Eva’s embodiment of heteroglossia-of multiple voices and multiple subject positions-threatens to result in the equivalence of silence (265). But, as Coiner also notes, Olsen disrupts readers’ passivity and demands that they share in the burden of completing her story (275). Coiner’s reading may also help to account for why women continue to be so moved by the narrative. Eva’s prophetic vision appears at the end of the narrative, crystallized by memories of her girlhood in Russia. In order to revisit her childhood, Eva passes through successive stages of consciousness in which she repeats the impassioned beliefs which guided her activism: “These things shall be, a loftier racelthan e’er the world hath known shall riselwith &me offreedom in their souls/and light of knowledge in their eyes” (110). This Socialist anthem, which Eva sings to David, and which is also the epigraph to the novella, reflects her radical vision of a future of freedom for all oppressed peoples. Moreover, Eva reclaims this vision and her voice in the name of motherhood. Her love for her children transcends the individual and proprietary and becomes part of a global concern, embodying what Sara Ruddick has named “maternal thinking.” David becomes distraught that Eva’s vision will exclude him. He has misunderstood Eva’s transformation from grandmother and wife to prophet and seer-in this transformation, the personal and political are merged, and so their lives together as companions have not been obliterated. Eva recalls her days of struggle as a mother: “Paul, Sammy, don’t fight. Hannah, have I ten hands? How can 1 give it Clara, how can I give it if I don’t have?” ( 1 14). As images of motherhood fluctuate against irnages of political struggle, Eva claims her dual identity as mother and artist, an artist of memory (107). While David wishes to retrieve their past and to recast it in sentimental terms, he, too, is transformed by Eva’s suffering,

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and in their moment of reconciliation, the personal becomes the political for him, as well: And instantly he left the mute old woman poring over the Book of Martyrs;went past treading at the sewing machine, singing with the children; past the girl in her wrinkled prison dress, hiding her hair with scarred hands, lifting to him her awkward, shamed, imploring eyes of love; and took her in his arms, dear, personal, fleshed, in all the heavy passion he had loved to rouse from her (114). During this moment of ecstasy, David realizes that the mother-the woman at the sewing machine-and the activist-the girl in the prison dress-have always been one and the same. Eva’s relationship to her granddaughter, Jeannie, inscribes the significance of the motherline in mother-artists’ texts. Jeannie, a nurse, has come to tend Eva on her deathbed. As Eva’s defenses slip away, she is finally free to be herself in the haven of Jeannie’s presence. Jeannie is the only family member who is not frightened by Eva’s illness; when Eva refuses to be moved to a hospital, Jeannie moves into her room to preside over her care; she notes “the pure overwhelming joy from being with her grandmother; the peace, the serenity that breathed” (107). Jeannie gives Eva a pan del mwm-the bread of the dead-in the shape of a little girl who has just passed away. In admiring the detail of the pan, the dimples in the knees, “like art,” Eva claims communion with another mother-artist, in a feminist gesture that transcends boundaries of nationality, culture, and religion (100). Eva bequeathes her wisdom, her passion, her love-“and every life shall be a song” ( 111). One by one, Eva’s children come to say their farewells; Clara, her oldest, with bitterness-“pay me back, Mother. . .for all you took from me . . . the hands I needed to be for you, the heaviness, the responsibility”-Lenny, with regret for what was never spoken between them (108). As the granddaughter, Jeannie is free from the older generations’ expectations and disappointments; for her, Eva is a queen, who becomes regal and transfigured. The image of Jeannie’s sketchpad, with its drawings of Eva in her final moments, seems to imply that Jeannie will leave nursing and pursue her dream of becoming an artist, thus perpetuating her grandmother’s legacy. This feminist ending inscribes a wider range of choices for the next generation of daughters. Death releases Eva from the silence and resentment she has harbored, the cancer that has eaten away at her. At last, David understands that hidden within her are memories of their commitment to Socialism and their hopes and dreams for a better future: “and it seemed to him that for seventy years

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she had hidden a tape recorder, infinitely microscopic, within her . . . trapping every song, every melody, every word read, heard, and spoken” (109). The image of the hidden recorder and the tapes coiled inside Eva are images that refer to the barriers that inhibit maternal discourse. Clearly Eva had been internally recording this discourse for many years; sadly, she is only able to voice it on her deathbed. Although Eva says that she knows no riddles, the narrative implies that she knows many, but has no answers. She has no solution to the probletn of oppression, the riddle of why human beings persecute one another. She has no solution to the problem of gender inequality, of why men are favored over women. She has no solution to the mystery of death, of why, in her dying moments, she is able to release the knowledge stored within her during her lifetime, nor can she answer why, at these final moments, she and David finally release their passion for one another-now, when it is too late. Eva’s death confirms her as a mother-artist-but she was always creating a palette of memory no one else could see. Jeannie has the final say in the narrative. She is the one who offers comfort and hope to the bereaved: “Grandaddy don’t cry. . . . On the last day, she said she would go back to when she first heard music, a little girl on the road of the village where she was horn. . . It is a wedding and they dance” ( 116). While Eva’s artistic aspirations were misshapen by a patriarchal social order that rewards mothers’ silences, her text implies that women of the next generation will have more choices-they will be freer to claim the right to create themselves. As a narrative published in 1960, on the cusp of the women’s movement, “Tell Me a Riddle” anticipates a feminist discourse of self-definition and rebirth, thereby locating feminism as a mother figure to its developing daughters.

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Notes 1. In Playing and Reality (1971), D. W. Winnicott describes the “good enough” mother as one who meets the developing infant’s needs. He sees the infant’s biological mother as the one most likely to do this, since llsuccess in infant care depends on devotion, not on clevernessor intellectual enlightenment” (10). While reassuring, Winnicott’s message does not address the sense of inadequacy many mothers experience. 2. Joanne Frye reads the narrative as silent and unspoken: “In its pretense of silent occupation to accompany the physical occupation of ironing, it creates the impression of literal transcription of a mother’s thought process in the isolation of performing household tasks” (287). 3. See Erika Duncan, “The Hungry Jewish Mother” in Davidson and Broner

(1980).

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4. Jean Pfaelzer addresses Eva’s ultimate recovery of her voice in an anti-Kristevan reading: “Eva’s rediscovery of a radical subjectivity through the recovery of her speaking identity challenges the view that a woman’s speech fixes her in either a ‘womanly’ or an ‘alienated’ position” (2). 5. Jean Pfaelzer argues that the narrative rescripts the romance plot; it begins where the domestic novel used to end, in marriage: “It questions whether a husband, motherhood and family compensate for the atrophy of a woman’s voice. Through the rediscovery of her political voice, Eva rediscovers her capacity to love” (2). 6. Jean Pfaelzer also reads the narrative as modernist: “[It] is discontinous, with movements back and forth in time, in and out of omniscience and internal dialogue, the perspective deliberately disjointed. Olsen scripts Eva’s voyage to identity through gaps, fractured discourse, written intervals, and disassembled points of view” (11).

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The Ghosts of History: Cynthia Ozick’s The Shawl

Oh for a cloth, child, to wrap myself when it’s flashing with helmets, when the rosy floe bursts, when snowdrift sifts your father’s bones, hooves crushing . . . the Song of the Cedar. . . A shawl, just a thin little shawl, so I keep by my side, now you’re learning to weep, this anguish, this world that will never turn green, my child, for your child! Autumn bled all away, mother, snow burned me through: I sought out my heart so it might weep, I found-oh the summer’s breath, it was like you. Then came my tears. I wove the shawl. Celan, from “Black Flakes” (1943)

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Cynthia Ozick‘s The Shawl explores the theme of intergenerational continuity and the imperative of creating links in the motherline--stories to be passed down from one generation of women to the next. A Holocaust fiction, The Shawl addresses the themes of rupture and loss, specifically the loss of the daughter to the mother. In revisiting the ancient myth of Demeter and Persephone, The Shawl places the story of loss in the context of the Nazi destruction of European Jewish family life. Just as Demeter is paralyzed by grief by the violent and unexpected separation from Persephone, so,too, is Rosa Lublin, protagonist of “The Shawl”and “Rosa” (originally published separately in The New Yorker and later together in a single volume). To fill the void left by her daughter Magda’s 57

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death, Rosa takes up pen and paper and becomes a writer. Magda’s death resonates with other ruptures in the narrative, including loss of family, home, language, community, nation, and history. The impulse toward record keeping and documenting a lost way of life distinguish Rosa as a mother-artist. Described as a “madwoman and a scavenger,” she lives alone in a single-room occupancy hotel in Miami. Her chamber is littered with letters written on scraps of paper she has scavenged from the hotel: old stationery she finds in the lobby; blank billing paper she cadges from the receptionist; envelopes she rescues from the trash-her favorite finds, because the surface yields “the fresh face of a new letter” when laid out in a square (14). Outside the refuge of her room, the Florida streets “are a furnace, the sun an executioner,” images of the death camps. To escape this spectral landscape, Rosa stays inside her room and writes letters to Stella, her niece, and to Magda. Thus her room is sitnultaneously a sanctuary-since in it she can safely communicate with her lost past-as well as a prison-for she is lonely, penniless, and verging on madness. While the image of a woman writing alone in a garrett evokes other literary heroines, such as Harriet Jacobs, these attics are hardly the room of one’s own envisioned by Virginia Woolf in her feminist treatise on female creativity. These particular rooms are spaces of oppression rather than privacy, leisure, and autonomy. If the mother-artist’s creativity is related to the integrity of the motherdaughter bond, the untimely and tragic destruction of that bond will have a devastating impact on the mother-artist’s psychic health and on the kind of art she will produce.’ Writing letters to a dead daughter is one of the strategieswith which Rosa maintains a precarious hold on her sanity, yet it is also the kind of art associated with madness. Exile, persecution, and displacement have contributed to Rosa’s derangement;she wishes to bear witness, yet she is invisihle. Another of Rosa’s creative strategies for survival is the invention of an imaginary future for Magda, who will never reach womanhood. Rosa imagines potential scripts for her daughter: Magda as a beautiful, successful doctor, married to another doctor, living in a large house in Mamaroneck (35). This script not only encodes Rosa’s desire for her daughter’s intellectual achievement and financial success, but also enables Rosa to live out her own thwarted dreams of becoming a chemist (35). In another script imagining intellectual ambition, Rosa envisions Magda as a professor of Greek philosophy at Columbia University (39). She even sees her daughter as an artist: “[Rosa] would have given everything to set her before an easel, to see whether she could paint in watercolors; or to have her seize a violin, or a chess queen” (65). While mothers often dream of futures for their daughters, Rosa’s dreams can never reach any satisfying conclusion. The rupture must be filled by imagination, desire, and memory.

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As a mother-artist, Rosa transmutes Magda’s absence into a presence. The letters she writes to Magda are interpolated within the larger narrative. Rosa believes she can conjure Magda’s spirit into life through the magic of the shawl, which once cradled her daughter. While these letters signify her psychological and artistic creativity, they also involve her in an elaborate fiction, which is both dangerous and necessary: that Magda is still alive. Without the dream of Magda’s existence, Rosa would become truly insane. The disjunction between the “truth))of history and the “lies” of fiction is an important theme in the narrative. To survive, Rosa must cling to the fiction that Magda is not dead; this fiction is so urgent that to call it a lie hardly speaks to the complexities of Rosa’s situation. Her precarious maneuvering between truth, history, memory, and imagination brings her into conflict with Stella, the niece who controls Rosa’s money and has the authority to place her in a mental institution (34). For Rosa, what is most threatening about Stella is her desire to forget Magda and to bury the past. In one of her letters to Magda, Rosa writes, “Stella says I make a relic of you. She has no heart. It would shock you if I told you even one of the horrible games I’m made to play with her. To soothe her dementia, to keep her quiet, I pretend you died. Yes! It’s true! There’s nothing, however crazy, I wouldn’t say to tie up her tongue” (42). Taking advantage of the American talent for self-invention, Stella tries to obliterate her history as a Holocaust survivor: “Stella, an ordinary American, indistinguishable! No one could guess what hell she had crawled out of until she opened her mouth and up coiled the smoke of accent” (33). Unlike Stella, Rosa cannot erase the past. By telling the story of the camps over and over again to customers who came to her shop, she attempts to enact the role of witness. In one of her letters to Magda, she writes: “When I had my store I used to ‘meet the public,’ and I wanted to tell everybody-not only our story but other stories as well. Nobody knew anything. This amazed me, that nobody remembered what happened only a little while ago. They didn’t remember because they didn’t know” (66). The name “Magda” may refer to the Hebrew word m&, or storyteller. Magda’s death leaves her without a story and without a voice; thus, Rosa becomes the voice for the daughter in an effort to close the gap in the motherline, a voice muffled by the absence of an audience for the story she wants to tell. Sara Horowitz observes: “The survivor testifies, but no one believes, understands or pays attention. . .overwhelmed by painful memories and the formidable work of testimony, the survivor remains silent” (48).The indifferenceof her audience drives Rosa to destroy her shop, an antiques store specializing in mirrors. The image of the mirror functions ironically: these mirrors belong to Rosa; she wants her customers to see her, to see what she has seen, to understand what she has suffered. But the mirrors reflect nothing of

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the past, nothing of what has happened, so Rosa smashes them to pieces. Thus Rosa abandons oral testimony in favor of written. By writing letters to Magda, Rosa claims the writer’s prerogative to invent and to embellish. As a writer, Rosa is concerned about issues of truth and authenticity, while insisting on Magda’s existence. In one of the letters to Magda, Rosa writes, “To you all these accounts [of the past] must have the ring of pure legend. Even Stella, who can remember, refuses. She calls me a parable-maker. She was always jealous of you. She has a strain of dementia, and resists you and all other reality” (41). Rosa’s perception that others accuse her of inventing tales is accurate. In the wake of the Holocaust, the pressure to forget, hide, and bury the past was enormous. However, it is the writer’s imperative to record and observe: What a curiosity it was to hold a pen-nothing but a small pointed stick , after all, oozing its hieroglyphic puddles. . A lock that is removed from the tongue. Otherwise the tongue is chained to the teeth and the palate. . . . all at once this cleanliness, this capacity, this power to make history, to tell, to explain. To retrieve, to reprieve! To lie (44).

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The letters, rich in detail about her family life, her youth in Warsaw, her girlhood dreams and aspirations, recreate a lost culture. While there is a historical context for Rosa’s story, its truth cannot be verified, for everyone she once knew is dead. This presents her with a dilemma: will her story, which is the truth, be believed when everyone around her says that she tells lies? The relationship between motherhood and art, between procreation and creativity, is explored in Rosa’s text. Rosa reflects that motherhood is “the power to create another human being, to be the instrument of such a mystery, to pass on a whole genetic system” (41).Writing also signifies powerthe power to inscribe history. The duality Rosa imagines between writing and motherhood-between production and reproduction-stems from the association, in the dominant culture, of writing with male subjectivity. If male writers conceive of their writing as giving birth with a phallic pen, then women can only hope to appropriate the masculine signature by being “like” men-that is, by not bearing children. Balzac, for instance, often referred to his writing practice in maternal terms: “To pass from execution, to produce, to bring the idea to birth, to put it nightly to sleep surfeited, to kiss it in the mornings with the hungry heart of a mother . . . and yet not revolt against the trials of this agitated life” (Olsen, Silences, 12). The childbirth metaphor for writing has bedeviled women, for it creates the illusion that the Western literary tradition has been fathered by the masculine pen, as Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar have argued in The Madwoman in the Attic.

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Evidently, Rosa has struggled with the dominant ideology inscribing the difficulties of comhining motherhood and art. As a child of the middle class, she imbibed traditional constructions of gender; that masculinity is associated with intellectual achievement, and femininity, with irrationality and emotion. In her girlhood ambition to become a chemist, she aspired to be like her father, a successful banker whose study, lined with books in Polish, German, French, and Latin, was a place of learning and intellectual seriousness. Although Rosa’s mother was a poet, the text implies that the mother’s achievement was less than the father’s. The father is a logical man, a learned Polish patriot with the “instincts of a natural nobleman” (40). The mother’s poetry is written in “short lines, like heated telegrams,” and is published in “shy literary periodicals” (21). Too,the mother receives less attention in Rosa’s recollections than the father, although Rosa remembers the “curve of the legs of her mother’s bureau,” and also the “strict leather smell of her father’s desk” (21). In Rosa’s account, the father emerges as the more impressive figure, while the mother recedes in ghost-like fashion, a distant figure who fails to provide Rosa with either memories of nurturance or artistic inspiration. While Rosa tends to associate motherhood with emotion and fatherhood with intellectuality, she nonetheless claims for herself the role of the writing mother. Through her letters, she will perpetuate a motherline that has been broken by the death of her daughter, who was also intimately connected to writing. Magda is described as “scribbling on such pitiful little bent shins”; she swayed on “pencil legs” (7-8). But Magda is also mute. Even though she is nearly two years old, she does not speak; Rosa worries that “Magda was defective, without a voice: perhaps she was deaf; there might be something amiss with her intelligence; Magda was dumb” (7). Magda’s muteness protects her from the SS guards; her silence keeps her safe. Had Rosa not been able to hide her, first in her shawl, and later under her bed, she would have been sent to the gas chamber. But Magda’s association with story and storytelling is complicated and troubling, since clearly muteness and death imply that her story (to paraphrase from Toni Morrison’s Beloved) is not one to be passed on. Is Ozick implying that there can be no literary work with the Holocaust as its subject, thus calling her own project as a fiction writer into question?Is she implying that Magda, as the illegitimate daughter of a Jewish mother and a Catholic father, is a product of intermarriage whose heritage should not be passed on? Or, rather, is Ozick attempting to fill the void left by the death of mothers’ voices in the camps, since mothers were among the first groups to be systematicallyexterminated? The legitimacy of the figure of the mother-artist converges in the shawl as a symbol of motherhood and of writing. The shawl is simultaneously a maternal object, a ritual object, and an artistic object, and in these multiple

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associations becomes associated with power on several textual levels. In its insistence on the maternal as a site of spirituality, artistic creativity, and intellectual authority, the narrative rewrites traditional gendered scripts of Jewish religious observance, a tradition with which Ozick is quite familiar. Indeed, Ozick‘s positioning of herself as the bearer of the mantle of Isaac Bashevis Singer might account for her treatment of the relationship between motherhood and art. The shawl is a maternal object that symbolizes the mother-daughter relationship. During the long march to the camps, the shawl was Magda’s cradle: “[Rosa] looked into Magda’s face through a gap in the shawl: a squirrel in a nest, safe, no one could reach her inside the little house of the shawl’s windings” (4).The shawl is also magical: after Rosa’s breasts dry up while marching (because she is starving for food and water), the shawl somehow sustains Magda, who sucks on its fringes: “She sucked and sucked, flooding the threads with wetness. The shawl’s good flavor, milk of linen” ( 5 ) .As an object of orality, the shawl becomes the mother/breast. As Magda once nursed Rosa/the shawl, Rosa drinks Magda/the shawl: when Magda is killed by an SS guard, who hurls her against an electrified fence, Rosa stuffs the shawl into her mouth and “drank Magda’s shawl until it dried” (10). The very first word Magda utters is “Maaaa . . . aaa,” which is actually not a cry for “mama,” as it appears to be, but a cry for the shawl, which has been stolen by Rosa’s niece, Stella.2 A powerful object, the shawl identifies food, love, and comfort and replaces Rosa. Through the shawl, Rosa and Magda are connected to each other, to writing, and to silence, since Rosa also becomes mute after she wrecks her antiques store. Since the act of writing conjures Magda’s ghost, I conjecture that Magda also would have been a writer, had she lived.3 As a maternal object, the shawl has tremendous value. Stella, out of jealousy, steals the shawl from Magda, not only to keep herself warm (since prisoners were always in danger of freezing to death), but to wrap herself in its powers of love and protection; Stella herself is a motherless child who desires a mother. The loss of the shawl/mother leads to Magda’s death. One day, Magda wanders out of her hiding place in the barracks: Magda was grieving for the loss of her shawl, (Rosa] saw that Magda was going to die. A tide of commands hammered in Rosa’s nipples: Fetch, get, bring! But she did not know which to go after first, Magda or the shawl. If she jumped out into the arena to snatch Magda up, the howling would not stop, because Magda still would not have the shawl; but if she ran back into the barracks to find the shawl, and if she found it, and if she came after Magda holding it and

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shaking it, then she would get Magda back, Magda would put the shawl in her mouth and turn dumb again (8). The impossibility of choices facing Rosa recalls Sethe and Toni Morrison’s Beloved, who is also unable to fulfill her role as mother-protectress once Schoolteacher discovers her whereabouts. Rosa decides to run for the shawl, but by the time she returns with it, it is too late. An SS guard has seized Magda, and Rosa watches in horror as he throws her against the camp’s electrified fence. When Rosa stuffs the shawl into her mouth to stifle her “wolf‘s screech,” she has appropriated the shawl as breast. The image of the wolf is significant in its association with the cunning predator of Grirnm’s fairy tales.“ In Europe, the wolf is an object of fear, and the “wolf‘s screech” must be silenced or Rosa will also die at the Nazis’ hands. Nonetheless, the howl of a mother’s anguish, too devastating to be expressed, appears as linguistic absence-a wordless cry-evoking the paradoxical nature of poetic language, which simultaneously opens up expressive possibilities and frames the formlessness of emotion. While the shawl may be likened to D. W. Winnicott’s transitional objectan object that compensates for the loss of the mother-it is also a kind of taL lit, the prayer shawl worn traditionally by Jewish men? According to Jewish law, women are formally excused from the commandment of prayer; yet, the shawl, with its fringes and its association with the Divine (in that it is both life-giving and death-dealing), recalls the tallit. If the shawl is read as a tallit, Rosa’s text becomes a mother’s prayer for redemption. In associating the shawl with the tallit, Ozick appropriates a traditionally masculine garment and casts it as a sacred object for use by women. The shawl is also an artistic object, in its association with writing, and as inspiration for Rosa’s letters to Magda. Rosa must order the chaos in her room/mind before opening the package that contains the magical shawl. Although ultimately the package turns out to be a disappointment because it contains a hook, its arrival reveals the state of excitement and anticipation associated with this garment: “The box with the shawl would be the last thing [to open]. Stella’s letter she pushed under the bed next to the telephone. She tidied all around. Everything had to be nice when the box was opened’’ (34). The shawl has the power to bring Magda to life. When finally the shawl arrives and Rosa removes it from its box, Magda appears: The whole room was full of Magda: she was like a butterfly, in this corner and in that corner, all at once. Rosa waited to see what age Magda was going to be:

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how nice, a girl of sixteen; girls in their bloom move so swiftly that their blouses and skirts balloon; they are always butterflies at sixteen (64). Susanne Klingenstein has remarked on the association of the shawl with motherhood and with literary creativity, rewriting a prose section using the enjambements of poetry: “Magda’s shawl/Magda’s swaddling cloth/Magda’s shroud,” observing that Rosa, like her mother, is a poet (164). In Rosa’s text, childhood is imagined as a time of hope and possibility. When the ghost of Magda “comes to life” as a young girl, it is as a young girl of sixteen, on the verge of womanhood. This is precisely the moment in Rosa’s life when her own family was shattered and her childhood dreams and aspirations were destroyed. When Rosa describes the tall house in Warsaw, with its four floors and attic, the building comes to life on the page: “you could touch the top of the house by sticking your arm far out its window; it was like pulling the whole green ribhon of summer indoors,” she writes (66). In the concentration camp, Rosa describes the fence (the electrified fence against which Magda is thrown) which separates her from “green meadows speckled with dandelions and deep-colored violets [and] innocent tiger lilies, tall, lifting their orange bonnets” (8). This far-away world evokes the landscape of childhood-yet what Rosa is describing is a very ordinary landscape now hopelessly out of reach. Rosa’s writing is contrasted with the sterility of the “lying theories” of Dr. James W. Tree. Dr. Tree is working on a scientific study, funded hy the Minew Foundation of the Kansas-Iowa Institute for Humanitarian Context, on the theory of Repressed Animation. Rosa is contemptuous: “Humanitarian Context, what did it mean? An excitement over other people’s sufferings. They let their mouths water up” (21). Dr. Tree’s study threatens to turn Rosa into an object of scientific inquiry, whereas Rosa wishes to be understood as a human being. In the letters she writes to Magda, she expresses her outrage; she also burns Dr. Tree’s letter: “Burn, Dr. Tree, burn up with your Repressed Animation! The world is full of Trees! The world is full of fire! Everything, everything is on fire! Florida is burning!” (39). These images of smoke and fire evoke the concentration camps. In Florida, the sun is “killing” (16). Here, people “are shells like herself, already fried from the sun” (17). Rosa’s text inscribes a thematics of language, social class, and exile. Rosa writes to Magda in Polish, which allows her to reconnect with her parents and her childhood. For Rosa, Polish is the language of high culture, in contrast to Yiddish, a folk language spoken by Jewish peasants. Rosa’s parents despised the sound of Yiddish, yet Rosa can still hear the melodies of the Yiddish lullabies her grandmother once sang: “Unter Reysls oige-eleshteyt u klorvuys

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tsigek’-“under Rosa’s cradle there’s a clear-white little goat” ( 19).6For Rosa, Polish is the language of cultivation, civilization, beauty, art, and history; Yiddish is the language of the uneducated poor. As the language of the shtetl (Jewish ghetto), Yiddish was often scorned by affluent, secular families like Rosa’s, who considered themselves Poles rather than Jews: “My father was never a Zionist. He used to call himself a ‘Pole by right.’ The Jews, he said, didn’t put a thousand years of brains and blood into Polish soil in order to have to prove themselves to anyone” (40). The kind of nationalistic pride voiced by Rosa’s father was common among European Jews when Hitler came to power; many refused to leave their homes until it was too late, holding fast to their conviction that a nation whose language they loved would never turn against them. After the war, Rosa continues to retain her prejudices against Jews from the peasant classes. Rosa tells Persky, the Jewish-American man who befriends her: “I read only Polish. I don’t like to read in English. For literature you need a mother tongue” (57). Ironically, the Yiddish word for Yiddish is “mamebshn,”which means mother tongue. In rejecting Yiddish, Rosa distances herself from Persky, who reminds her of the Lower East Side. She writes, “Can you imagine a family like us . with teeming Mockowiczes and Rabinowiczes and Perskys and Finkelsteins, with all their bad-smelling grandfathers and their hordes of feeble children” (102). Rosa is outraged by the possibility of being likened to people who did not appreciate the superiority of her father or the delicacy of her mother (102). The narrative also questions the relationship between gender and social class. Even after all the horrors Rosa has witnessed, she continues to associate masculinity with intellectual superiority: “In Florida the men were of higher quality than the women. They knew a little more of the world, they read newspapers, they lived for international affairs. But the women only recited meals they used to cook in their old lives. . Mainly the women thought about their hair” (17). The local delicatessen, Kollins Kosher, is a paradise of the maternal kitchen, serving “ambrosia and nostalgia” (23). However, Rosa’s bias-that men are intellectually superior to womenbecomes problematic when she actually meets a man from a social class she regards as inferior. When Persky tells Rosa that he was born in Warsaw, she tells him that his Warsaw isn’t hers: “this fellow with his false teeth and his dewlaps and his rakehell reddish toupee bought God knows where Warsaw! What did he know? (21). Rosa’s friendship with Persky is her education into the intersections between gender and class. When Rosa finally recognizes that Persky is her only true friend, she rejects social snobbery and finally crosses class lines. Her friendship with Persky, “who’s used to crazy

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women”-his wife is in an asylum-enables her to leave behind her shattered past and re-enter the world of the living. When Persky comes to visit Rosa, the world of the living intrudes on the ghosts of the past: Magda disappears, and Rosa reclaims the present. Rosa must abandon the fiction of Magda in order to claim her own rebirth, just as Sethe must exorcise Beloved’s ghost in order to survive.7 Rosa’s text demonstrates the mother-artist’sability to use language as a tool for survival. The shawl, a maternal garment in its association with cradling and protection, is emblematic of how the mother-artist adapts the domestic in the service of her art. The Shawl also presents a reworking of the traditional gender roles with which Rosa was familiar. In prewar Poland, the association of masculinity with rationality and intellectual superiority, embodied in the figure of Rosa’s father, provided his daughter with a way of understanding and mapping her world. Following the devastation of the Holocaust, such gendered scripts no longer seem applicable. Masculine authority was revered and glorified by the Nazis to such an extreme that their victims (like the black slaves in the Antebellum South) were completely de-sexed. While Rosa strives to maintain her gender and class biases following the war, she learns that she can no longer maintain such rigid distinctions between men and women, between the bourgeoisie and the working class. Persky guides her away from the past into the present, enabling her to claim a future.

Notes 1. Susanne Klingenstein quotes a letter written to her by Cynthia Ozick, in which Ozick insists that The Shawl is not about mothers and daughters: “Mothers-anddaughters is NOT my theme, here or elsewhere. I have no biological themes; I am uninterested in biology” (172). I have two responses: why assume the mother-daughter relationship is biological when feminist scholarship demonstrates otherwise, and wasn’t it D. H. Lawrence who reminded us to trust the tale, not the teller? 2. Susanne Klingenstein describes the shawl as an umbilical cord that connects Rosa and Magda and substitutes for speech. 3. According to Hana Wirth-Nesher, “Magda becomes for [Rosa] the self that was stolen from her, the self that she might have become” (3 17). 4. In her memoir of her experience as a hidden child during the Holocaust, Sophia Richman writes that her mother told her a wolf lived in their attic to keep the young girl from discovering that her father had escaped from a Nazi camp and was hiding there: “The wolf, a commonly feared creature in those parts of Eastern Europe, was the perfect threat to keep a young child from exploring” (45). 5. See Andrew Gordon for a more complete discussion of the shawl as transitional object.

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6. Hana Wirth-Nesher notes that the weaving in the text of many languagesYiddish, Polish, immigrant English, and standard English-creates a “babel of languages” that helps Ozick, as a Jewish writer, circumvent the problem that “invented fictional worlds are forms of idolatry, reenactments of paganism” (3 13). 7. There are numerous intertextualities between Beloved and The Shawl. Both texts represent the powerlessness of mothers to protect children under oppression; in both texts, the slain daughter reappears as a ghost. Susanne Klingenstein notes that both mothers are driven by a need to articulate the past, because “the unspoken past drives one crazy” (167).

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Rewriting the Murussu: Storytelling and Healing in the Mother-Daughter Relationship in Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory But more than therapy, that freewheeling, wide-ranging, exuberant talk functioned as an outlet for the tremendous creative energy [my mother and her friends] possessed. They were women in whom the need for self-expressionwas strong, and since language was the only vehicle readily available to them they made of it an art form that-in keeping with the African tradition in which art and life are one-was an integral part of their lives.

-Paule

Marshall, “From the Poets in the Kitchen” (1983)

Edwidge Danticat’s first novel, Breath, Eyes, Memory (1994) is a bildungsroman set in Haiti and New York. It is the painful and beautifully told story of the impact of sexual violation o n the mother-daughter relationship, the legacy of patriarchal violence against women, and how this legacy is internalized as self-hatred and passed down from one generation to the next. The novel thematizes the transformative potential of narrative and storytelling among four generations of Haitian women, artists in a motherline of culture and history. The novel is narrated in the first-person voice of Sophie Caco, a daughter, a mother, and a n artist. Sophie occupies a complicated position: she is simultaneously a daughter of her mother, and a mother to her daughter. According to psychoanalytic theory, narrative creates the possibility for the writing of new scripts. Through the telling of her story, Sophie learns to establish psychological boundaries between herself and her mother, Martine, who was raped as a young girl of sixteen. In attempting to forge a connection to her mother, Sophie has internalized Martine’s fear and self-loathing, the twin legacies of her mother’s rape. The symbol of this mother-daughter entanglement 69

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and enmeshment is the figure of the Marassa, the twins of Haitian uodou. Both mother and daughter see each other as Marassa, the other’s twin. Sophie’s task as an artist is to disengage as Martine’s Marassa in order to be able to assert an identity that is simultaneously autonomous from, yet connected to, her mother. As narrator of Breath, Eyes, Memory, Sophie’s voice shapes the text; she embodies “the doubled female voice of woman-poet-author and womanspeaking subject.” The first-person voice also signifies the continuing importance of the oral tradition in literature of the African diaspora.’ In cultures where the oral tradition is the primary locus of collective consciousness, stories told from one generation to the next not only transfer wisdom but are a mechanism of survival: “Language,song, and stories have been the means by which enslaved peoples have maintained a sense of culture as they have been denied access to their roots” (Chancy, 74). Sophie’s text also frames stories told by several generations of mothers-Martine, Tante Atie, and Grandma Ife. First-person narratives, these interpolated stories testify to the vitality of the oral tradition and the significance of the motherline in black women’s texts. The stringing of Sophie’s wedding ring along a thread while singing a song about mothers signifies the fluctuations between separation and connection that characterize the mother-daughter relationship. The thread is the thread of narrative; the ring, like the pen in “I Stand Here Ironing,” takes up the thread and moves it along, while the source and endpoint for the narrative process is the mother. In framing mothers’ voices, Sophie situates herself at the critical juncture of both the literary and the oral traditions; she is a writing mother who mothers storytelling and orality. One of the ways in which Sophie transforms her text is through an “aesthetics of coior.” Sophie’s last name, Caco, is the name of a scarlet bird, “a bird so crimson, it makes the reddest hibiscus or the brightest flame trees seem white” (150). The cacos were also African slaves who successfully resisted slavery during the Haitian war for independence; a Caco is named as one who rebels and survives. Sophie employs the color red to sipify violence and bloodshed, the passage from girlhood to womanhood, and female independence and authority. She chooses a red suit in which to bury her mother, because she wants Martine to look like “a Jezebel, a hot-blooded Erzulie” (227). In dressing her mother as Erzulie, the V O ~ Ugoddess who rules men’s sexual desires, Sophie rehels against the patriarchal control of women’s bodies and female sexuality. Haitian women sometimes fear Erzulie’s power over men, but in the narrative, Sophie reclaims for women their right to sexuality free of violation. Images in the early chapters of the novel are described in yellowsthe yellows of daffodils, Martine’s favorite flower-but the yellow of inno-

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cence shifts to red as Sophie moves from girlhood to womanhood and into the full meaning of her name, Caco. Like the phoenix of ancient Egyptian mythology, Sophie rises out of a legacy of violence: she is the offspring of her mother’s rape. The rape serves as a symbol for all forms of sexual violence experienced by women under patriarchy. Sophie experiences her mother’s “testing” as a form of rape; testing, a custom sanctioned by the patriarchy and perpetuated by women, imitates and perpetuates women’s subordination. Haitian girls are “tested” by their mothers, who insert a finger inside their daughters’ genitals, to ensure their chastity in order that they do not bring shame upon their families: a husband who “discovers’’that his bride is not pure may return her to her parents, and the girl will never be able to marry. To rebel against testing, Sophie induces a kind of self-rape, in which she takes her mother’s pestle and ruptures her own hymen, from which she nearly bleeds to death. This scene stands in marked contrast to a scene in Audre Lorde’s &mi, in which Lorde uses the pestle to establish an erotic connection to her mother. In Breath, Eyes, Memory, the pestle, while still associated with the mother, becomes an instrument of brutalization. Ironically, Sophie’s rupturing of her hymen generates the possibility of rebirth, since it puts an end to the testing (Martine does not know that the rupture is self-induced). For both Martine and Sophie, the testing is intimately connected with rape. Martine tells Sophie that her mother, Grandma Ife, stopped testing her when she was young, since the rape put an end to the question of virginity. Sophie enacts her own rape so that Martine will stop testing her. Sophie is represented as an artist before the onset of motherhood. She shares with Maud Martha an imaginative sensibility, a gift for metaphor, and a passion for the natural world. For Maud Martha, the very word “meadow lilies” makes her want to fling her arms skyward (144). The opening chapters of Danticatb novel, set in Haiti, establish Sophie’s artistic credentials. She writes poetry for her Tante Atie, who is Sophie’s first mother. After the rape, Martine, who experiences a mental breakdown, flees to the United States to find work and to try to create a new life for herself. She leaves her infant daughter in the care of Atie, her sister. The bond between Atie and Sophie evokes Jessica Benjamin’s trope of mutuality in the mother-daughter relationship. Atie mothers Sophie with unconditional love, and Sophie mothers Atie in return. She says that she wishes she could teach Atie to read and write (Atie says she is too old to learn). Sophie’s poems to Atie are love songs, lyrical and naive; she is, after all, only twelve: “My mother is a daffodil, / limber and strong as one./My mother is a daffodil,/but in the wind, iron strong” (29). Atie, however, does not wish to supplant Martine in Sophie’s

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affections. She tries to shift Sophie’s maternal attachment toward Martine, telling her that daffodils are Martine’s favorite flowers: Tante Atie told me that my mother loved daffodils because they grew in a place that they were not supposed to. They were really European flowers, French buds and stems, meant for colder climates. A long time ago, a French woman had brought them to Croix-des-Rosets and planted them there. A strain of daffodils had grown that could withstand the heat, but they were the color of pumpkins and golden summer squash, as though they had acquired a bronze tinge from the skin of the natives who had adopted them (2 1 ).

In this allegory about colonialism, the daffodils are a metaphor for the transplanted African slaves, whose resilience enables them to adapt and survive. It is also an allegory about exile: Martine, like the French flowers she loves, has been transplanted from her native soil to another climate. But Martine, unlike the daffodils, cannot thrive in New York; she is uprooted after the rape but has suffered too much psychic damage to thrive. In the aesthetics of color, the yellow daffodils signify idyllic childhood, whereas womanhood is colored by red, not only of female blood, but also the blood shed by Duvaher’s Macoutes. Atie reaches over and touches Sophie’s yellow dress, saying, “Everything you own is yellow . . wildflower yellow, like dandelions, sunflowers.” Yellow changes to red as Sophie leaves Croix-des-Rosets: “A red dust rose between me and the only life that I had ever known. There were no children playing, no leaves flying about. No daffodils” (31). When Sophie leaves for New York, Atie is seen standing beneath a red flamboyant tree. For Sophie, Atie represents the mother of the pre-Oedipal period, the mother of limitless love. Atie engages in two quintessentially maternal activities: storytelling and nurturance. Her stories have the tnagic of fairy tales: “Tante Atie had always seen to it that I heard a story, especially when 1 could not sleep at night. . . .She would rock my body on her lap as she told me of fishermen and mermaids bravely falling in love” ( 1 10).Atie is also associated with a nurturing community, represented during the konbit, a potluck supper that is open to all who wish to attend, regardless of whether or not they can bring food to share (12). At the konbit, Sophie is told that her mother has sent for her to come to New York. The fact that this knowledge reaches her at a communal gathering underscores the magnitude of her loss, for not only must she leave Atie, her first mother, but also Haiti, her motherland.2 Until this point, Sophie has led a sheltered existence. She has been protected from the details of her birth; she has not witnessed scenes of violence. Her understanding of social class differences is limited. Although

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Atie has been careful to teach Sophie about Martine’s sacrifices-that the money Martine sends from New York enables Atie and Sophie to live in a house near Sophie’s school4ophie is too young to comprehend or to appreciate the tact that Martine’s money enables them to live a better life than most: Tante Atie said that we were lucky to live in a house as big as ours, with a living rooin to receive our guests, plus a room for the two of us to sleep in. Tante Atie said that only people living on New York money or people with professions, like Monsieur Augustin, could afford to live in a house where they did not have to share a yard with a pack of other people. The others had to live in huts, shacks, or one-room houses that, sometimes, they had to build themselves ( 1 1).

Issues of social class become especially marked as Sophie matures. In the airport terminal, the twelve-year-old Sophie observes the paintings overhead of “men and women pulling carts and selling rice and beans to make some money” (35). This perception contrasts with Sophie’s more mature interpretation upon her return to Haiti after seven years. Now her rhetoric is ironic as she describes paintings of “Haitian men and women selling beans, pulling carts, and looking very happy at their toil” (178). This description inscribes an awareness of class and national identity, since now the men and women are “Haitian”; before, they were not. In New York Sophie learns to appreciate how hard Martine has worked to help her family. Martine holds two jobs-a day job at a nursing home and an evening job as an aide to a stroke patient. Sophie pities her exhausted mother: “I am sorry you work so hard. I never realized you did so much” (58). Martine replies, “Life is no vacation. If you get your education, there are things you won’t have to do” (58). Education was not a possibility for Martine, who once worked next to Atie in the cane fields. Education for women is an important theme in the novel. Sophie is the first one in her family to have the opportunity to finish school. Martine and Atie were forced to drop their studies in order to work in the cane fields. Their dreams and ambitions could never be fulfilled: “We always dreamt of becoming important women. We were going to be the first women doctors from my mother’s village. We would not stop at being doctors either. We were going to be engineers too” (43). However, Martine projects onto Sophie her own thwarted aspirations. When Marc, Martine’s boyfriend, a lawyer from Haiti, asks Sophie about her future plans, Martine says that Sophie will become a doctor (56). Later, when Sophie tells her lover, Joseph, that she is going to be a doctor, she adds that her mother says it is important to have a doctor in the

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family. When Joseph presses her to think for herself, Sophie thinks of herself in the third person, as if she were describing someone else, “Sophie wasn’t really sure. I had never really dared to dream on my own” (72). Marc represents for Martine the possibility of upward mobility. She tells Sophie: “In Haiti, it would not be possible for someone like Marc to love someone like me. He is from a very upstanding family. His grandfather was a French man” (59). Martine disapproves of Joseph because he is much older than Sophie and a musician rather than a middle-class professional. Sophie has lied to her mother, saying initially that she was not involved with Joseph but rather with a son of the Leogane Napoleons who is studying to become a doctor. At first Martine is pleased:

She said that in Haiti if your mother was a coal seller and you became a doctor, people would still look down on you knowing where you came from. But in America, they like success stories. The worse off you were, the higher your praise. Henry’s mother had sold coal in Haiti, but now her son was going to be a doctor. Henry’s was a success story (80).

Sophie’s marriage to a doctor will ensure her financial and social success and reduce Martine’s emotional and financial burdens. Like marriage, language is an index of social class and the struggle to successfully assimilate into a new culture. Sophie simultaneously inhabits several tongues: Creole, French, and English. In New York, her mother sends her to a Catholic school where all the lessons, except for English composition and literature, are taught in French. Sophie hates the Maranatha Bilingual Institution: “It was as if I had never left Haiti. . . . Outside the school, we were ‘the Frenchies,’ cringing in our mock-Catholic-school uniforms as the students from the public school across the street called us ‘boat people’ and ‘stinking Haitians”’ (66).Sophie adopts English as her primary language although she maintains her fluency in Creole. While Creole is primarily a spoken rather than a written tongue, Sophie’s text, written in standard English, creates a space for the rhythms and sounds of Creole. Creole words, such as “mwin aussi,” are interspersed throughout the text. Others find their way into Sophie’s expressive language. For instance, when Joseph takes Sophie for a drive, she says, “I felt like I was high enough to wash my hair in a cloud and have a star in my mouth,” metaphors that echo the rhythms of Creole in Atie’s speech (75). When Sophie returns to Haiti after her sevenyear absence, the bus driver compliments her on her flawless Creole. Creole is the hidden language of Sophie’s text, the language that connects her to her grandmother Ife and the ancestors of the African diaspora.

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The meeting of mother and daughter in New York marks Sophie’s education into the intersections of gender, class, and sexual violence. From Martine, Sophie learns the truth about her birth: “The details are too much. . But it happened like this. A man grabbed me from the side of the road, pulled me into a cane field, and put you in my body. I was still a young girl then, just barely older than you” (61). The harsh truth of this story starkly contrasts with the fairy tale Atie used to tell Sophie in Croix-des-Rosets: “One time I asked [Atie] how it was that I was born with a mother and no father. She told me the story of a little girl who was born out of the petals of roses, water from the stream, and a chunk of the sky. That little girl, she said was me” (47). On Martine’s night table there is a photograph of Sophie as a young child, which reminds her of the photograph of her mother on Atie’s nightstand. This picture used to give the young Sophie nightmares about her mother, who chases her and tries to capture her and imprison her inside the picture frame. When Sophie looks at the photograph on her mother’s night table, she does not identify with the image of herself:

..

1 had never seen an infant picture of myself, but somehow I knew that it was me. Who else could it have been? I looked for traces in the child, a feature that was my mother’s but still mine too. It was the first time in my life that 1 noticed that I looked like no one in my famify. Not my mother. Not my Tante Atie. 1 did not look like them when 1 was a baby and I did not look like them now (45).

Sophie’s inability to recognize herself in the photograph is evidence of a developing fragmentation in her identity. When she looks in the bathroom mirror during her first night in New York, she also does not recognize herself: “I looked at my red eyes in the mirror while splashing cold water over my face. New eyes seemed to be looking back at me. A new face altogether’’ (49). Sophie’s growing loss of identity is compounded by the fact she now believes she is the cause of her mother’s unhappiness. As she becomes more and more identified with Martine, she also identifies herself as her mother’s rapist. Martine even tells her that she Iooks like her father: “I did not know this man. I never saw his face. He had it covered when he did this to me. But now when I look at your face I think it is true what they say. A child out of wedlock always looks like its father” (61). Sophie’s developing womanhood represents a threat to Martine. Her coming of age releases Martine’s rage at the violent abduction of her girlhood. She projects her outrage at the nameless, faceless abductor onto her daughter through the rite of testing. Although the text is not explicit, it suggests

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that Martine might have abandoned this custom had she been psychologically stable, since she hated it. Without access to any healing rituals, she loses herself in what is familiar, even though despised. While Martine tests Sophie, inserting a finger inside her daughter’s vagina to see if she is a virgin, she tells Sophie the story of the Marassas:

The Marassas were two inseparable lovers. They were the same person, duplicated in two. . . . When you love someone, you want him to be closer to you than your Marassa. Closer than your shadow. You want him to be your soul. . . . The love between a mother and daughter is deeper than the sea. You would leave me for an old man who you didn’t know the year before. You and I we could be like Marassas. You are giving up a lifetime with me. Do you understand? (85). The trope of the Marassa signifies a blurring of mother-daughter boundaries and erases Sophie’s s~bjectivity.~ Martine unconsciously punishes her daughter by reenacting the scene of the rape. Sophie’s position as Marussa becomes even more entrenched when Martine becomes pregnant. This midlife pregnancy leads to a second mental breakdown, as Martine imagines that this child, although fathered by Marc, is an offspring of rape. Sophie’s guilt at having caused her mother so much pain becomes dangerous to her own well-being: After Joseph and I got married, all through the first year 1 had suicidal thoughts. Some nights I woke up in a cold sweat wondering if my mother’s anxiety was somehow hereditary or if it was something that I had “caught” from living with her. Her nightmares had somehow become my own, so much so that I would wake up some mornings wondering if we hadn’t both spent the night dreaming about the same thing: a man with no face, pounding a life into a helpless young girl (193).

Sophie imagines herself becoming mother to her mother when Martine turns to her for comfort and advice on whether she should have an abortion: “Finally, as an adult I had a chance to console my mother. , . . I was holding and fighting off that man. . . Finally I had her approval. I was safe. . . We were now more than friends. We were twins, in spirit. Marassas” (200). This dangerous kinship leads Martine to confess to Sophie that she had tried to abort her by drinking poisonous herbs given to her by Ife: “When I was carrying you, you were brave. . . . you wanted to live. You wanted to taste salt, as my mother would say. You were going to kill me before I killed you” (191). Such a confession is emblematic of Martine’s psychological instability, since she

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cannot even imagine how it will affect Sophie to hear so plainly that her mother tried to do away with her. In becoming her mother’s twin, Sophie has internalized her mother’s anger through various modes of self-punishment. As Marassa, she thinks of herself as her mother’s mirror image, replicating Martine’s suffering. In addition to enacting her own rape with the pestle, she struggles with bulimia. Martine admits to Sophie that when she first arrived in New York looking for work, she was overwhelmed by the volume and variety of foods available to her. She stuffed herself, she tells Sophie, afraid she wouldn’t be fed enough: “When 1 just came to this country I gained sixty pounds my first year. . . All the things that only the rich eat in Haiti, everyone could eat them here, dirt cheap” ( 179). Sophie sees Martine’s obsessiveness as mirroring her own compulsion to binge and purge, although Martine’s overeating is the immigrant’s response to a culture in which food, once scarce, is now plentiful. Sophie’s bulimia, I would argue, is related to her struggle to alternately embrace and reject the role of Marassa, bingeing being the way to bring Martine inside her, as it were-purging, the way of getting rid of her.” The trope of food, traditionally associated in psychoanalytic discourse with love, comfort, and nurturance, signifies both richness and deprivation. The konbit, the communal potluck supper to which all are welcome, is a symbol of the African diaspora, in which the community assumes a maternal function, providing tools for survival. Sophie receives the news that she must leave Haiti during the konbit, signifying the rupture of the mothering community. When Sophie returns to Haiti, she decides to prepare a traditional meal of rice, black beans, and herring sauce. The nutritiousness of Haitian cuisine, with its emphasis on fresh fruits, vegetables, and grains, is juxtaposed against the emptiness of the meals she eats in NewYork-frozen dinners and canned goods-where quickness and efficiency of preparation are valued. The meal she prepares for her aunt and grandmother meets with Ife’s approval, who notes that she has not forgotten her heritage. The dinner becomes a kind of offering to honor Ife, the ancestor. Sophie’s development as an artist is accomplished on the narrative level, through the transformative power of storytelling. In establishing an adult relationship with Ife, who is the village griot, or storyteller, Sophie inherits Ife’s wisdom and power; she also educates Ife about the damage caused by testing. Sophie’s text frames a variety of interpolated stories that inscribe the major themes of the narrative: sexual violence, the conflict between familial obligation and the search for autonomy, the binding powers of love. In introjecting Martine’s story of rape, Sophie is in danger of losing her identity and becoming her mother’s Marassa. In externalizing Martine’s story through the

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telling of it, Sophie comes to understand and forgive her mother, to see herself as separate from her mother, and to envision a different future for her own daughter, Brigitte. Grandma Ife is a wise woman and a healer. She is also a property owner who inherited a parcel of land following the death of her husband, who died of sunstroke in the cane fields. Her name invokes the African diaspora, since Ife was the name of a major cultural center in Nigeria. As the site of the beginning of civilization, according to Yoruba legend, the name Ife signifies creator, source of creativity, the motherline. Ife has authority and power that her daughters do not share; her power derives in part from her status as an elder and also from the fact that she is a storyteller, a “tale master”:

“Krik?” called my grandmother. “Kruk!”answered the boys.

Their voices rang like a chorus, aiding my grandmother’s entry into her tale. “Xm, tim,” she called. “Bwa chech,” they answered. “Tale master, tell us your tale.” “The tale is not a tale unless I tefl. Let the words bring wings to our feet” (123). Ife’s role as storyteller establishes a powerful connection with Sophie, who, as narrator, is also a storyteller and tale master. Grandma Ife is also a seer. One night, she tells Sophie she hears a young girl, ?i Alice, going home after a rendezvous with her lover. Sophie strains her eyes but sees nothing. In spite of her considerable powers of second sight, Grandma Ife does not possess insight about the destructivenessof testing and the secondary status of women. When Grandma Ife and Sophie see a lamp being lit on a hillside, Ife says that a baby is about to be born; if it is a boy, the lantern will stay lit and the father will sit watch all night. If it is a girl, she says, “the midwife will cut the child’s cord and go home. Only the mother will be left in the darkness to hold her child. There will be no lamps, no candles, no more light” (146). Ironically, Sophie sees and understands more about women’s oppression than her grandmother, who does not question the custom of testing: “From the time a girl begins to menstruate to the time you turn her over to her husband, the mother is responsible for her purity. If I give a soiled daughter to her husband, he can shame my family, speak evil of me, even bring her back to me” (156). During this exchange, wisdom is passed from granddaughter to grandmother. When Sophie tells Ife that the testing was the most horrible thing that ever happened to her, that she cannot be intimate with her husband without being flooded by memories of the testing, that she feels no pleasure-only the sensation that she is doing something evil-Ife finally understands the psychic damage inflicted by this ritual of pa-

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triarchy. In a gesture of healing and reconciliation, she gives Sophie the gift of a statue of Erzulie, saying to her, “My heart, it weeps like a river for the pain we have caused you” (157). Storytelling performs cultural as well as maternal functions, recreating ties to Africa-the lost motherland-and strengthening the tie between mothers and daughters. Storytelling both establishes and reproduces the maternal bond, creating cross-generational connections. The narrative art of storytelling empowers Sophie to rewrite the mother-daughter script from one dominated by violation and loss to one marked by reconciliation and autonomy. Two of the interpolated stories are told by Sophie. The first one is about a woman who could not stop bleeding and who bled all the time, from her arms, face, and chest-so much so that her clothing was soaked in blood. She consults the goddess Erzulie, who asks her what life form she would like to become. In answer to the woman’s wish, Erzulie changes her into a butterfly so that the wmnan will never bleed again (8). This story is simultaneously about Sophie and about Martine. Sophie is the woman who cannot stop bleeding internally, who suffers from perpetual guilt that, as a daughter of rape, she is a constant reminder to Martine of her pain. In appropriating red as the color of sexual violence-the violence inflicted by men upon women and the violence women inflict upon each other in the name of patriarchySophie inflicts a kind of self-rape with her mother’s pestle, from which she nearly bleeds to death. Martine also cannot stop bleeding from the rape; she experiences excruciating nightmares in which the rape is reenacted night after night. The other interpolated story told by Sophie is another story of female bloodying. This story is about a wealthy man who buys the whitest sheets he can find for his wedding night. However, his bride does not bleed during their coupling. The man takes a knife and cuts the young woman between the legs so that he can hang a bloody sheet in the courtyard the next day, thereby defending his name and honor. The bride does not stop bleeding from the wounds he has inflicted and dies from them (155). With this story of the bloody sheets, Sophie reshapes the patriarchal text.’ The theme here is that the premium placed on female chastity is dangerous and that testing, like the wound inflicted by the irate husband, is lethal to women. In telling this story, Sophie distances herself from the young bride who died at the hands of her husband. Sophie resists patriarchal claims to women’s bodies, claiming her legacy as a caco, a rebel and survivor. Ife’s interpolated story is the longest in the narrative. Ife tells the story of a lark who gives a young girl the gift of some pomegranates to tempt her away from her family. He tells her he wishes her to meet a king who must have the

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heart of a young girl or else he will die. The girl says she left her heart at home and must return to get it. So the lark takes her home and the girl runs back to the safety of her village, tricking the bird who waits forever for her return (124-25). This story, like the larger narrative chat frames it, inscribes the conflict between female autonomy and filial duty. It also explicates the narrowness of choices available to young women. The girl’s only choices are marriage to a man who will eat her heart out or sanctuary with her family, leaving her no room to grow. The pomegranate seeds are symbolic of seduction-according to Greek mythology, Hades offered Persephone pomegranate seeds in the underworld; by eating them, she was forced to remain with him, away from her mother, Demeter, for six months a year. While the girl’s ruse is successful in Ife’s tale, since she outwits the king and his representative, she has also lost her freedom. Ife’s message in telling this story appears to be that it is dangerous to leave home. She has already lost a daughter and granddaughter to the outside world; only Atie has remained in the nest. The story’s power derives from the disjunction between Ife’s and Sophie’s interpretation of its meaning. Ife believes it is better to remain within the safety of home and family than to succumb to the dangers of the erotic. Sophie sees the girl’s return home as a kind of suicide, since her future is now sealed. The movement of the larger, framing narrative is toward a kind of synthesis of these two opposing interpretations, whereby Ife comes to appreciate the daughter’s need for autonomy and Sophie learns to balance the pull of home with her need for freedom. Ife’s story is also significant in that it thematizes her relationship to Atie and her desire to keep her daughters at home. Atie, as the eldest daughter, is expected to repress her own desires in order to stay home and take care of her mother. While Ife tells Sophie that she wishes Atie would go to New York and join Martine, Sophie observes that Ife never says this to Atie. Ife does not approve of Atie’s wish to learn to read and write, nor of Atie’s friendship with Louise, a local woman who is teaching her, and with whom Atie is in love. Ife spits in the dirt as they pass Louise’s shack, telling Sophie that she and Atie do not get along. As an unmarried woman, Atie has no status and no future. From Atie, Sophie learns about the narrowness of traditional gender roles for women. Atie cannot imagine foregoing any of the duties she has been assigned in order to do something for herself: According to Atie, each finger had a purpose. It was the way she had been taught to prepare herself to become a woman. Mothering. Boiling. Loving. Baking. Nursing. Frying. Healing. Washing. Ironing. Scrubbing. It wasn’t her fault, she said. Her ten fingers had been named for her even hefore she was

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born. Sometimes, she even wished she had six fingers on each hand so she could have two for herself (151).

Before her separation from Atie, Sophie was too young to appreciate the difficulies of Atie’s position. Now that she is a young woman, Sophie can learn from Atie’s example as an artist. Under Louise’s tutelage, Atie has learned how to read and write; she also keeps a notebook where she translates poetry and writes original verse. She, much more than Martine, is a role model for Sophie. As Sophie’s mentor and surrogate mother, she represents a potential threat to Ife and the oral tradition. In a gesture of independence, Atie decides to register her name, along with the rest of the family, in the town archives, a gesture that symbolizes her decision to write herself into history. Grandma Ife opposes this bold act because she feels it subverts the oral tradition: “If a woman is worth remembering, there is no need to have her name carved in letters” (128). Atie does not abandon or denounce the oral tradition, but she nonetheless acknowledges the power of literacy and education in terms of writing a different future for her family. Atie’s action inspires Grandma Ife to rewrite her will and include Sophie and Brigitte in the inheritance of her parcel of land, signifying that Sophie and Brigitte are among the brave women of Haiti (to whom the novel is dedicated), who will perpetuate the traditions of Haitian culture. Sophie’s disentanglement from Martine and the stranglehold of Marassa is aided by her relationship with Ife, by the transformative power of storytelling, and by the awareness she gains in becoming a mother herself. After giving birth to Brigitte, Sophie understands the magnitude of the journey she must undertake so that Brigitte will not suffer the psychic pain she and Martine have experienced as daughters of rape and genital testing. Sophie’s rebirth is associated with the power of the goddess Erzulie. As a child, Sophie had envisioned that her mother was Erzulie: “the lavish Virgin Mother the healer of all women and the desire of all men. She had gorgeous dresses in satin, silk, and lace, necklaces, pendants, earrings, bracelets, anklets” (59). For Sophie the child, Erzulie’s attraction emanated from her status as an object of desire. As a mature woman, Sophie envisions Erzulie as a symbol of female subjectivity: to be Erzulie is to love one’s self and one’s body. By dressing Martine in red, Erzulie’s color, at her mother’s burial, Sophie claims Erzulie’s power for women. Erzulie signifies women’s ability to be in charge of their sexuality. Erzulie also figures in the sexual phobia support group that Sophie joins. In this gathering, women from many nations share stories of rape, incest, genital mutilation, and other forms of sexual violation, enacting a kind of global feminism that transcends boundaries of language, culture, and social class. Group

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members create various rituals to promote healing; for her ritual, Sophie builds an altar to Erzulie and bums a piece of paper with her mother’s name:

I didn’t feel guilty about burning my mother’s name anymore. I knew my hurt and hers were links in a long chain and if she hurt me, it was because she was hurt, too. It was up to me to avoid my turn in the fire. It was up to me to make sure that my daughter never slept with ghosts, never lived with nightmares, and never had her name burnt up in the flames (203). This conflagration signifies an erasure of the Marassa, rather than a rejection of Martine. Through this gesture, Sophie not only liberates herself but also liberates Brigitte, her daughter. In her refusal to reproduce her mother’s pain and suffering, Sophie’s rewrites the mother-daughter script, thereby rupturing a paradigm that pathologizes the mother-daughter relationship as one in which both parties are hopelessly chained to each other’s psyches and the past. Thus, the motherline not only carries and reproduces the seeds of wisdom from one generation to the next, but also reveals how feminist awareness can be an agent of social and psychological transformation. The story of the rape is the master narrative that Sophie must leam to resist. As a symbol of patriarchy, the rape is related to the testing, which serves to guarantee the daughter’s status as an object of value and exchange in marriage. As the daughter who is also a mother, Sophie is invested in ending this custom. She has already educated her grandmother about the damage the testing inflicts. She also educates Martine, who comes to understand its brutality and its relationship to rape as another act of violation. She says to Sophie, “I did it {thetesting] because my mother had done it to me . . . the two greatest pains of my life are very much related. The one good thing about being raped was that it made the testing stop. The testing and the rape. I live both every day” (170). The process of telling and retelling establishes a connection between mother and daughter in which both subjectivities may be heard. By identifying with Martine as both mother and daughter-positions that Sophie herself cxcupies-Sophie is able to understand and forgive Martine and recreate herself? The story of the rape is told and retold until finally the mother-artist fills in the picture. Narrated first by Atie as a fairy tale, and later by Martine as a sketch, the details are left blank until Sophie describes them: My father may have been a Macoute. He was a stranger who, when my mother was sixteen years old, grabbed her on her way back from school. He dragged her into the cane fields, and pinned her down on the ground. He had a black bandanna over his face so she never saw anything but his hair, which was the color of eggplants. He kept pounding her until she was too stunned to make a

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sound. When it was done, he made her keep her face in the dirt, threatening to shoot her if she looked up. For months she was afraid that he would creep out of the night and kill her in her sleep (139).

In telling the truth of what happened to her mother, Sophie claims the rape as her heritage and names it in ways her mother cannot. At the same time, she acknowledges and understands the tremendous pain her mother has suffered. In doing so, she begins the slow, difficult process of separating from Martine as her Marassa and forgiving Martine for the suffering inflicted on her through testing. Sadly, Martine is too damaged to free herself from the story of rape. During the second pregnancy, she becomes psychotic and stabs herself in the belly. She is the woman who is transformed by Erzulie into a butterfly, the woman who cannot stop bleeing. Martine is free only in death. Sophie is a mother-artist who rewrites the relationship between herself and Martine in which she has been scripted as her mother’s Marassa, her twin. In narrating the story, Sophie claims storytelling as a tool for healing her sense of fragmentation. Her journey has been facilitated by creating a connection to other mother figures in the text-her grandmother, her aunt, the goddess Erzulie, and her own mother-in order to understand how the legacy of gender and class-a legacy that has included rape, lack of education, labor in the cane fields-has shaped three generations of women in her family. Through the beauty of figurative language, which, from the first Mother’s Day card Sophie ever writes, is a language of and for mothers, Sophie sets herself free and creates the possiblity of freedom for her daughter. Sophie also creates an aesthetics of color to order her text. In claiming red as her color, Sophie names herself as a survivor of violence in its many forms. Breath, Eyes, Memory is a kunstlerroman in which the heroine, like the heroines in many of the female-authored slave narratives and novels of the African diaspora, is a mother and a survivor. Sophie learns that she draws strength from her connection to Haiti and the female-centered traditions that have nourished her. Motherhood in Danticat’s text generates the possibility of a female subjectivity where women claim the right to tell their own stories and to liberate themselves from the violence inflicted by both men and women under patriarchy. One of the brave women of Haiti, S p h i e will tell a different story to her daughters so that they will truly know what it is to be free.

Notes 1. Carole Boyce Davies and Elaine Savory Fido note that the first-person narraautobiographical mode of

tive predominates in novels by Caribbean women-the

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narration is “particularly suited to the woman’s introspective journey” (5). Myriam Chancy observes: “Given that women have too few avenues for self-expression in Haiti, a discussion of [the first-person] approach is crucial to a thorough analysis of texts which formulate distinct images of Haitian women’s lived lives. The fictional is therefore a conduit for a historical narrative that is elsewhere denied existence” (6). 2. Veve Clark uses the trope of the Marassa to invoke a way of reading that reaches beyond binary oppositions. Clark‘s essay may be found in Hortense Spillers, ed., Comparative American Identities. I use the term Marassa in a psychological context, to invoke merging and enmeshment. 3. Andrea O’Reilly maps the importance of this dynamic in Jazz, when Violet finally understands her mother’s pain and forgives her (African-American Review, 37 1). 4. Bridget Jones notes in her introduction to The Bridge of Beyond, by Simone Schwart-Bart (Heinemann, 1982), that Caribbean writers trace a loss of an innocent vision of Caribbean experience in order to become conscious of it in terms of a metropolitan language and view of life (iv). This transition from innocence to experience also marks the trajectory of the bildungsromane. 5. In Of Woman Born, Adrienne Rich describes the sharing of experience between mother and daughter as “knowledge that is subliminal, subversive, preverbal: the knowledge between two alike bodies, one of which has spent nine months inside the other” (220). This description underscores the intensity and intimacy of the motherdaughter bond. However, in Sophie’s text, the shared knowledge of rape and testing threatens to destroy both women. 6. This particular narrative resonates with Isak Dinesen’s short story, “The Blank Page,” about a convent where nuns manufacture linen so fine that it is used for the bridal sheets of the royalty. After the wedding night, the sheet is hung in the courtyard to attest to the bride’s virginity; it is then returned to the convent, where the stained piece is hung and framed in a gallery. Visiting female pilgrims to the gallery are most fascinated by the framed canvas which displays a snow-white sheet. According to Susan Gubar, the story inscribes the metaphor of the pen-as-penis, writing on the virgin page; Dinesen’s story “can & used to illustrate how woman’s image of herself as text has affected her attitudes toward her physicality and how these attitudes shape the metaphors through which she imagines her creativity’’ (295).

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Goldenberg, Myrna. “‘From a World Beyond’: Women in the Holocaust.” Feminist Studies 22.3 (Fall 1996): 667-87. Gordon, Andrew. “Cynthia Ozick‘s ‘The Shawl’ and the Transitional Object.” Literature and Psrchology 20.1,2 (1994): 1-9. Gubar, Susan. ‘“The Blank Page’ and the Issues of Female Creativity.” Critical Inquiry 9 (Winter 1981): 243-63. Heilbrun, Carolyn G. Writing a Woman’s Life. New York: Norton, 1988. Henderson, Mae Gwendolyn. “Speaking in Tongues: Dialogics, Dialectics, and the Black Woman Writer’s Literary Tradition.” Wall, 16-37. Hirsch, Marianne. The Mother/Daughter Plot: Nawative, Psychoanalysis, Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989. Homans, Margaret. “‘Her Very Own Howl’: The Ambiguities of Representation in Recent Women’s Fiction.” Signs 9.2 (1983): 186-205. hooks, bell. “Revolutionary Parenting.” In Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center. Boston: South End Press, 1984. . “Homeplace: a site of resistance.” In Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics. Boston: South End Press, 1990. Horowitz, Sarah. Voicing the Void: Muteness andMemory in Holocaust Fiction. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997. Hurston, Zora Neale. Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica (1938). New York: Harperperennnial, 1990. James, Stanlie M., and Abena P. A. Busia, eds. Them’&g Black Feminisms: The Visionary Pragmutism of Black Women. New York: Routledge, 1993. letter, Alexis, Annelise Orleck, and Diana Taylor, eds. The Politics of Motherhood: Activist Voices fiom Left to Right. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1997. Kauvar, Elaine M. Cynthia O&k’s Fiction: Tradition and Invention. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993. Klingenstein, Susanne. “Destructive Intimacy: The Shoah between Mother and Daughter in Fictions by Cynthia Ozick, Norma Rosen, and Rebecca Goldstein.” Studies in American Jewish Literature 11.2 (1992): 162-73. Kristeva, Julia. “Stabat Mater” (1976). In Tales of h e . New York: Columbia University Press, 1987. Le Guin, Ursula K. “The Hand that Rocks the Cradle Writes the Book.” New York Xmes Book Review 22 Jan. 1989, 1. Lidoff, Joan. “Virginia Woolf‘s Feminine Sentence: The Mother-Daughter World of To the Lighthouse.” Literature and Psychology 32.3 (1986): 43-59. Lowinsky, Naomi. “Mother of Mothers, Daughter of Daughters: Reflections on the Motherline.” OReilly and Abbey, 227-35. Marshall, Paule. “The Making of a Writer: From the Poets in the Kitchen.” In Reenu and Other Stories. New York: Feminist Press, 1983. McKay, Nellie Y. “The Autobiographiesof Zora Neale Hurston and Gwendolyn Brooks: Alternate Versions of the Black Female Self.” Braxton and McLaughlin, 264-81. Nasta, Susheila, ed. Motherlands: Black Women’s Writing fiom Africa, the Caribbean, and South Asia. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992.

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Olsen, Tillie. Silences (1965). New York: Delta, 1989. Tell Me a Riddle. New York: Delta, 1989. O’Reilly, Andrea. “Across the Divide.” Abbey and O’Reilly, 69-91. -. “In Search of My Mother’s Garden, 1 Found My Own: Mother- Love, Healing, and Identity in Toni Morrison’s Jazz.” African-American Review 30.3 (1996): 367-79. O’Reilly, Andrea, and Sharon Abbey, eds. Mothers and Daughters: Connection, Emgauerment, and Transfmation. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000. Ostriker, Alicia S. Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women’s Poetry in America. Boston: Beacon, 1986. -. Writing Like a Woman. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1983. Ozick, Cynthia. The Shwl. New York: Knopf, 1989. Pfefferkom, Eli, and David H. Hirsch. Afterword to Auschwitz: True Tales from a Grotesque Land, by Sara Nomberg-Przytyk.Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985. Pfaelzer, Jean. “Tillie Olsen’s ‘Tell Me a Riddle’: The Dialectics of Silence.” Frontiers 15.2 (1994): 1-22. Rich, Adrienne. Ofwoman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution. New York: Norton, 1976. Richman, Sophia. A Wolf in the Attic. The Legacy ofa Hidden Child of the Holocaust. Binghamton, NY: Haworth, 2002. Ruddick, Sara. “Making Connections Between Parenting and Peace.” Journal of the Association fur Research on Motherhood 3.2 (Fall/Winter 2001): 7-20. Rtiddick, Sara. M a t e d Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace. Boston: Beacon, 1989. Spillers, Hortense J. ‘“An Order of Constancy’: Notes on Brooks and the Feminine.” Gates, 244-71. Walker, Alice. In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose. New York: Harcourt, 1983. Walkerdine, Valerie, and Helen Lucey. Democracy in the Kitchen: Reguhting Mothers and Socialising Daughters. London: Virago, 1989. Wall, Cheryl A., ed. Changing Our Own Words: Essays on Criticism, Theory, and Writing by Black Women. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1989. Washington, Mary Helen. “‘The Darkened Eye Restored’: Notes Toward a Literary History of Black Women.” Gates, 30-43. Rev. of Black Women Novelists: The Deveelopment of a Trudition, 1892-1976, by Barbara Christian. Signs 8.1 (August 1982): 177-82. Winnicott, D.W. Phying and Reality. New York: Routledge, 1971. Wirth-Nesher, Hana. “The Languages of Memory: Cynthia Ozick‘s The Shawl.” Multilingual America: Transnationalism, Ethnicity and the Languages of American Literature. Ed. Werner Sollors. New York: New York University Press, 1998. Woolf, Virginia. Moments of Being. New York: Harvest/HDJ, 1985. . “Professionsfor Women.” In The Death of the Moth and Other Essays. New York: Harcourt, 1942. -. A Room of One’s Own (1929). New York: Harvest/HBJ, 1989.

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Credits

Excerpt from “The Fisherwoman’s Daughter,”Dancing at the Edge of the World by Ursula K. Le Guin. Copyright 0 1988 by Ursula K. Le Guin. Used by permission of Grove/Atlantic, Inc. Excerpt from “A Wild Surmise,” Writing Like a Woman by Alicia Ostriker. Copyright 0 1983 by the University of Michigan. Used by permission of the University of Michigan Press. Excerpt from “M/Other,” by Rishma Dunlop, Redefining Motherhood: Changing Identities and Patterns, edited by Sharon Abbey and Andrea OReilly. Copyright 0 1998 by Sharon Abbey and Andrea O’Reilly. Used by permission of Sumach Press. Excerpts from “The Making of a Writer: From the Poets in the Kitchen,” Reena and Other Stories by Paule Marshall. Copyright 0 1983 by The Feminist Press. Used by permission of The Feminist Press. Excerpts from M a d Martha by Gwendolyn Brooks. Used by permission of the Estate of Gwendolyn Brooks. Excerpts from “I Stand Here Ironing” and “Tell Me a Riddle,” TeU Me a Riddie by Tillie Olsen, introduction by John Leonard. Copyright 0 1956, 1957, 1960, 1961. Used by permission of Dell Publishing, a division of Random House, Inc. 89

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Credits

Excerpt from “Black Flakes,” Selected Poem and Prose of Paul C e h n by Paul Celan, translated by John Felstiner. Copyright 0 2001 by John Felstiner. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. Excerpts from The S h w l by Cynthia Ozick. Copyright 0 1980,1983 by Cynthia Ozick. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. Excerpts from Breath, Eyes, Memory by Edwidge Danticat. Copyright 01994 by Edwidge Danticat. Used by permission of Soho Press, Inc. Portions of chapter five are reprinted from “Binding the Narrative Thread: Storytelling and the Mother-Daughter Relationship in Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory” by Nancy Gerber, Journal of the Association of Research on Mothering 2.2 (Fallminter 2000): 188-99.

Index

abandonment, 41 absent mothers, longing for, 11 aesthetics: of color, 70, 83; of the ordinary, 7, 16, 25-27; privileged over functionality, 16 Alcott, Louisa May, Little Women,12 allegories, 72 anorexia, 42 anti-Semitism, European history of, 7 articulate kinsman (griot), 28, 77 artistic creativity. See creativity artists: defined, 16; genius theory of, 20nl; needs of, 46 authority, Oedipal model of, 5 authorship: liberal humanist view of, x; Oedipal model of, 5 autonomy: vs. filial duty, 80

binary oppositions, 28 binge and purge, 42,77 black women: integrating mothering and work, xii; oppression of, 6; themes in the writings of, 14-17 “The Blank Page” (Dinesen), 84116 The Bluest Eye (Morrison), 32 boundaries between subject and object,

20x13

bread of the dead (pan del muerto) , 7-8,

53

Breath, Eyes, Memgr (Danticat), 3 4 ,

7411-12,69-83

Brooks, Gwendolyn, 15; M a d Martha,

3-5,8,23-36 Brown Girl,Brownstones (Marshall), 17, 45 bulimia, 42, 77

Bassin, Donna, xi, xiv Beauvoir, Simone de, The Second Sex, 6,

Caco, meaning of, 70-7 1 cancer as a symbol, 46 childbirth metaphor, 29,36,45,60 childhood, 64, 72 childiess women, literary achievements of, x children, as property, 15

14

&Il-Scott, Patricia, 16-17 Beloved (Morrison), 63 Benjamin, Jessica, 10, 62 Bernard, Wanda, 15 bildungsromane, 69, 84n4

91

92

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Index

Chodorow, Nancy, The Rep~oductiunof Mothering, 9 choruses, 46, 78 Coiner, Constance, 40, 48, 52 Collins, Patricia Hill, 14-15 colonialism, 72 color, aesthetics of, 70,83 communal responsibility, 15 community: lack of, x, 27,49; nurturance of, xii, 72 consciousness, 50, 52 A Country Doctor (Jewett), 12 creativity: and domesticity, 16, 27, 61; finding a space for, 47, 58-59; liberal humanist view of, x; and middle-class mothers, 2; of motherartists, 16, 60; vs. procreativity, x-xi, 14, 35,60 Creole, 74 Cult of True Womanhood, 12-13 cultural traditions, perpetuation of, 81 daffodil metaphor, 7 1-72 Danticat, Edwidge: Breath, Eyes, Memmy, 3-4, 7-8, 11-12,69433 Demeter myth, 57,80 Democracy in the Kitchen (Walkerdine and Lucey), 17-18,48-49 democratic values, 17 desire, 12; erotic, 33-34,47,81 Dinesen, Isak, “The Blank Page,” 84n6 discourse, maternal, 4-5,43-44; muting of, 49-50,54 disruption, poetics of, 2, 18-19,40,47 domesticity: and creativity, 16, 27, 61; as insignificant and uninteresting, 2; of middle-class mothers, 12-14; of working-class mothers, 3-4,48 domestic materials, 7, 16, 25-27 DuPlessis, Rachel Blau, 5, 19 education, 73, 81 empowerment of motherhood, 29-30

equality, 45 Erzulie, 70, 81, 83 exile, 64, 72 failure as a mother, 40-42 fairy tales, 33 female kunstlerroman, xiv female sexuality, 70-71, 82 feminine mystique, 5,46 femininity associated with irrationality and emotion, 61 feminism: global, 8, 81; as a mother figure, 54 feminist awareness, 82 figurative language. See imagery filial duty vs. autonomy, 81) first-person voice, 69-70, 83-84nl folk art vs. high art, 16 food, emotional associations with, 77 freedom, 52,80 Freudian theories of motherhood, 13 Friedan, Betty, 5 “From the Poets in the Kitchen” (Marshall), 17 functionality privileged over aesthetics, 16 future, imaginary, 58 gender: middle-class constructs of, 40, 61; social organization of, 26, 65-66 gender inequality: and language, 50; in marriage, 39, 46-49; rewriting traditional gendered scripts, 62, 79; and traditional roles, 80 genital mutilation, 7, 81 Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar: The Madwoman in the Attic, xiv, 60 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins: “The Yellow Wallpaper,” 12 global feminism, 8 , 8 1 griot (articulate kinsman), 28, 77 Gubar, Susan. See Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar

Index c+-euw-- 93 guilt, 75-76, 79 Guy-Sheftall, Beverly, 16-17

interpolated stories, 79-80 interruptions of motherhood, 2, 18-19,

heteroglossia, 52 high art vs. folk art, 16 Hirsch, Marianne, 10 history: recreation of, 60; truth of, 59; writing one’s self into, 8,81 Holocaust survivors, testimony of, 59-60 home as a sanctuary, 46-47 homeplace, 15 Honey, Margaret, xi, xiv hooks, bell, 6, 15,49 Horowitz, Sara, 59 The House of Mirth (Wharton), 13 housework, 6 Huf, Linda, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman, xiii-xiv Hurston, Zora Neale, Their Eyes Were Watching God, 23-25

intersubjectivity, 10 irons as metaphorical pens, 2,7,44-45 isolation, 40,49 “I Stand Here Ironing” (Olsen), 2-3, 6, 8,11,39-45 Jeremiah, Emily, “Troublesome Practices: Mothering, Literature and Ethics,” x, xiv Jewett, Sarah Orne, A Country Doctor, 12 Johnson, Elizabeth, xi, xiv

identity: loss of, 75, 77; national, 65, 72 imagery, 26; childbirth metaphor, 29, 36,45,60; daffodil metaphor, 71-72; earth‘s crust metaphor, 50; irons as metaphorical pens, 2, 7,44-45; language metaphors, 5 1; of mirrors, 59-60; pens as metaphorical penises, x-xi, 60; of pestles, 71; quilts as metaphors for art, 16-17; of smoke and fire, 64;symbolism of cancer, 46; symbolism of clocks, 42; symbolism of shawls, 8, 59, 61-64; voice metaphors, 51; of wolves, 63, 66n4 imaginary future, 58 imprisonment, 43, 48, 58 incest, 7,81 individualism, x inhumanity, 27,33 insanity as a space for creativity, 58-59 “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens” (Walker), 16

language, 27,36n4,49-50,66,74; as an artifact of patriarchy, 10, 20114; associated with desire, 24,33; figurative (see imagery); as inspiration, 17; mother-artist’s desire for, 10; poetic, paradoxical nature of, 63; use of mother tongues, 12, 50,6+45,67n6 Le Guin, Ursula, xiii-xiv letters, 8 letter writing, 58-60 linear plots, 50 literacy, 48, 81 literary achievements of childless women, x literary traditions, juncture with oral traditions, 81 Little Women (Alcott), 12 Lorde, Audre: &mi, 71 loss as a theme, 57-59 Lucey, Helen. See Walkerdine, Valerie, and Helen Lucey

40,47

Kaplan, Meryle Mahrer, xi, xiv Klingenstein, Susanne, 64 Kristeva, Julia, “Stabat Mater,” 10 kunstlerroman, female, xiii-xiv, 19, 23,

83

94

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Index

The Madwornan in the Attic (Gilbert and Gubar), x-xi, xiv, 60 mggd (storyteller), 59 male privilege and social class, 3,65 male writers, 60 Marassa (twins of Haitian vodou), 11, 7677,84n2; disengagement of, 70,

81-82 marginalization of mother-artists, x, xiii, 18 marriage, gender inequality in, 39,4&-49 marriage plots, 33-34 Marshall, Paule, 25; Brown Girl, Broumstones, 17,45; “From the Poets in the Kitchen,” 17 masculinity associated with intellectual superiority, 61, 65 materialism, 33 maternal discourse, 4-5,4344; muting of, 49-50,54 maternal overidentification, 44 maternal subjectivity, xi, 10, 13, 35 maternal thinking, 8,27-28, 52 maternal writing, x maternity. See procreativity matrophobia, 20n6 M a d Martha (Brooks), 3-58, 23-36 Maugham, Somerset: Of H u m n Bondage, 34 memories, fragmented, 50-52 memories, psychological, 40,42 metaphors. See imagery middle-class authority, 40, 61 middle-class mothering vs. working-class mothering, 17-19,3943,45,48--49 middle-class mothers: and creativity, 2; and domesticity, 12-14; patriarchal oppression of, xi, 5 militarism, critique of, 28 mirror imagery, 59-60 monologues, interior, 2, 50 moral outrage, 27, 33 Morrison, Toni, xii, 14,41; Beloved, 63;

The Bluest Eye, 32; Sula, 27 mother-artists, 7-9; artistic creativity of, 16,60; desire to be heard, 39, 58-61; dual identity of, 52; literary space for, xii-xiii, 4, 19; marginalization of, x, xiii, 18; as protagonists, 2, 44-45 mother-daughter relations, 9-1 2, 29-30, 44, 78; boundaries between, 11, 69-70, 76; divided by patriarchal institutions, 9,43,69; impact of sexual violence on, 69, 71; loss of daughters, 57-59; mutuality in, 71; rewriting, 82-83 motherhood, xi-xii, 13-14; dominant middle-class narrative of, 15; empowerment of, 29-30; idealized standards of, 40-41 mother-infant relationships, 62 mothering, 6; as conducive to art, x, 23-24; middle-class vs. working-class, 17-19,3943,45,48-49; reproduced in daughters, 9; and work, xii motherline: carrying on a grandmother’s legacy, 48, 53-54, 78; establishment of, 5,9,35; of history and culture, 28,3 1,69-70; repairing links in, 11-12, 57, 59, 61; transformation of, 82 mothers: good enough, 54nl; longing for absent, 11; patriarchal institutions devaluing, 43,48-49; romanticization of, 47 mother-time, scarcity of, 42 mother tongues, 12, 50, 64-65,67n6 motherwork, 15 Mrs. Dalloway (Woolf), 25-26, 35 music, 51 muteness, 61 mutual recognition, 62 myths, women-centered, 10, 57, 80 narrative strategies, 47; first-person voice, 69-70,83-84nl; interior

Index monologues, 50; interpolated stories, 79-80; letter writing, 58-60; memories, fragmented, 50-52; memories, psychohgicd, 40,42 narratives, transformative potential of, 69,77-79,81,83 nightmares, 25 Oedipal triangles, 5, 13 Of Human Bondage (Maugham), 34 Of Woman Born (Rich), xii, 9 Olsen, Tillie, x, xiv; “I Stand Here Iron-

ing,” 2-3,6,8, 11,39-45; Silences, 18; “Tell Me a Riddle,” 3-4, 6-8, 11, 45-54; Yonnondio, 18 oppression: freedom from, 52,80; of motherhood, 13; of patriarchal institutions, xi, 5,48, 78-79; of poverty, 6; of racism, 6; of sexism, 3, 78 oral traditions, 8; juncture with literary traditions, 70, 8 1 the ordinary, aesthetics of, 7, 16, 25-27 O’Reilly, Andrea, 9 Ostriker, Alicia, xiii, xiv othermothering, xii, 15 overidentification, 44 Ozick, Cynthia, The Shawl, 3-4, 6-8, 11,5766

pan del muerto (bread of the dead), 7-8,

53

passage from girlhood to womanhood, 8 patriarchal institutions: critique of, 8; devaluing mothers, 43, 48-49; dividing mothers and daughters, 9, 43, 69; oppression of middle-class mothers, xi, 5; oppression of women, 48, 78-79; rebellion against, 70-71, 79, 83 patriarchy, rape as a symbol of, 82 pens, metaphors for, x-xi, 2, 7 , 4 4 4 5 6 0 Persephone myth, 57,80 pestle imagery, 71

-

95

phallic pens, x-xi, 45, 60 plots: linear, 25; marriage, 33-34 poetic imagination, xiii, 7, 24, 26 poetic language: paradoxical nature of,

63

poetics of disruption, 2, 18-19,40,47 points of view, shifting, 24-25 Polish, 64-65 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman (Huf), xiii-xiv potluck supper (kunbit), 72,77 poverty: influencing domesticity, 48; as oppressive, 6 prayer shawl (talk),63 pre-Oedipal period, 9-10, 72 procreativity vs. creativity, x-xi, 14,35,

60

“Professionsfor Women” (Woolf), 13 prophetic visions, 52 prose-poems, 23 psychological transformation, 82 publiclprivate dichotomy, xii, 14, 26-27, 35; blurring of, 3 , 8 , 52 quilts as metaphors for art, 16-17 race determining women’s experiences of motherhood, xi-xii racism, 15, 24, 28; defenses against, 8, 3 1-33; as oppressive, 6 rape, 7,9,69-71, 71,81; re-enacted, 75-76, 79; self-rape, 79; as a symbol of partiarchy, 82 reading, 48 rebellion against patriarchal institutions, 7 6 7 1 , 79,83 rebirth, 29,46, 66, 81 reciprocity, x red, significance of, 70, 72, 79 relationality, x-xi renunciation of motherhood, 13 The Reproduction of Mothering (Chodorow), 9

96

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Index

rewriting: mother-daughter relationships, 82-83; traditional gendered scripts, 62, 79. See &o writing Rich, Adrienne, xiv, 41,43; “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision,” xi-xii; Of Womun Born, xii, 9 riddles, 54 rituals, 4, 35; for healing, 81-82 role models, 81 romantic love, 34 A Room of One’s O m (Woolf), x, 2,

46-47

Ruddick, Sara, 8, 19, 27-28, 52

The Second Sex (Beauvoir), 6, 14 seduction, 80

seeing eye, 41 self-exploration, 24 self-expression, xiii, 17, 18 self-sacrifice, 29, 34-35 self-worth, 15 sexism, xi, 3, 15, 24, 78 sexual violation. See rape sexuality of women, 70-7 1,81 sexual violence. See rape The Shawl (Ozick), 3 4 , 6 4 3 , 11,57-66 shawls, symbolism of, 8,59, 61-64 silence, 49-50 Silences (Olsen), 18 single mothers, vulnerability of, 3-4 slave narrators, 28 smoke imagery, 64 social classes: changes in, 4, 64, 66; determining women’s experiences of motherhood, xii, 2-3; differences between, 72-74; keeping mothers from writing, xi; and male privilege, 3,65 social justice, 45, 52 solitude, 46 songs, 51

“Stahat Mater” (Kristeva), 10 storieslstorytelling, 8, 40, 59-61, 70, 72;

of the lark, 79-80; of mothers, 1-2, 5; of racism, 28; transformative power of, 33,69, 77-79,81-83. See also griot, mu& subjectivity, x, 54; maternal, xi, 10, 13,

35 Sub (Morrison), 27

survival, creative strategies for, 58 symbolism: of cancer. 46; of clocks, 42; of rape as patriarchy, 82; of shawls, 8, 59,61-64

tallit (prayer shawl), 63 “Tell Me a Riddle” (Olsen), 3-4,6-8, 11,45-54 testimony, oral vs. written, 59-60 testing for virginity, 9, 11, 71, 77,81; psychic damage of, 78-79,82; as rape, 75-76

Their Eyes Were Watching God (Hurston), 23-25 time: chronological, 50; narrator’s sense of, 41-42

To the Lighthouse (Woolf), 13

traditions, 35 transitional objects, 63 “Troublesome Practices: Mothering, Literature and Ethics” (Jeremiah), x truth, 60; of history vs. fiction, 59 twins of Haitian oodou (Marassa), 11, 76-77, 84n2; disengagement of, 70, 81-82 values, democratic, 17 vernacular materials, 7, 16, 25-27 violence: binary oppositions perpetuating, 28; liberation from, 83. See also rape voice, metaphors for, 5 1

Index Walker, Alice, 2, 18; “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens,” 16 Walkerdine, Valerie, and Helen Lucey, Democracy in the Kitchen, 17-18, 48-49 Wall, Cheryl, 16, 50 Washington, Mary Helen, 28 Wharton, Edith, The House of Mirth, 13 “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision” (Rich), xi-xii Winnicott, D. W., 63 wolf imagery, 63,66114 women-centered myths, 10,57,80 Woolf, Virginia, xiv, 19,40, To the Lighthouse, 13; Mrs. Dabway, 25-26,35; “Professions for Women,” 13; A Room of One’s Own, x, 2,46-47

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97

work, xiii; in conflict with mothering, xii; in the home, 6, 15; as liberatory, xiii, 6; outside the home, 3, 5-6, 14 working-class mothering vs. middleclass mothering, 17-19,39-43,45, 48-49 writing: barriers to, xi, 18; letters, 58-60; as a male activity, x-xi; maternal, x; one’s self into history, 8, 81. See also rewriting “The Yellow Wallpaper” (Gilman), 12 Yiddish, 64-65 Yonnondio (Olsen), 18

%mi (Lorde), 7 1

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About the Author

Nancy Gerber holds a doctorate in Literatures in English from Rutgers University. She teaches in the Women’s and Gender Studies Department at Rutgers University, Newark and resides in Montclair, New Jersey. Currently she is at work on a study of women’s concentration camp narratives, tentatively titled “Tasting Ashes: Women’s Voices of the Holocaust.”

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