II

Premature Social/Cultural Matricide

I shall not be discussing here the psychical consequences of the real death of the mother, but rather that of an imago which has been constituted in the child's mind, following maternal depression, brutally transforming a living object, which was a source of vitality for the child, into a distant figure, toneless, practically inanimate, deeply impregnating the cathexes of certain patients whom we have in analysis, and weighing on the destiny of their object-libidinal and narcissistic future.

--André Green, "The Dead Mother"

Dovetailing with Kristevan theory, Brookner's fiction presents female masochistic melancholia as predominantly a psychological problem--whose genesis can be traced to the [End Page 365] mother (Thing). Likewise, in Margaret Atwood (Lady Oracle) and Margaret Drabble (Jerusalem the Golden), wounds inflicted by the mother result in the heroine's fascination with self-destructive behavior. However, both of these novelists take into account specific social/cultural conditioning that leads the mother to mistreat her daughter, which is not to say that they abandon a psychological etiology. Neither Atwood nor Drabble falls into the trap that Jacqueline Rose describes of choosing between, and therefore polarizing, the social and the psychic--the mistake that Judith Butler accuses Kristeva of making (by privileging the psychic) and that, I think it is fair to say, Butler herself makes (at least, in Gender Trouble) by privileging the social. Avoiding a monolithic explanation that would render melancholia a simple reflection of either psychic or social conditions, Atwood's and Drabble's novels simultaneously point to the deep psychosexual impact of compassionless, contemptuous mothers on their daughters--lack of self-esteem that at times produces desire for punishment--and socioeconomic factors that can set such a cycle in motion, as well as make it turn vicious.

Lady Oracle (1976) begins after the mock death of its depressed heroine, who has feigned her own drowning to "start being another person entirely" (18). This is Joan's most extravagant act as an escape artist: "the real romance of [Joan's] life was . . . entering the embrace of bondage, slithering out again" (367)--only to reenter. For repeatedly in Lady Oracle, potential escape routes from Joan's mother turn out to be a widening of Frances's (her mother's, her beloved enemy's) net. Joan has unconsciously arranged it so that even revenge against her mother ends up pleasing her or at least preserving her dominance. Because Joan's love for her mother--"could she see I loved her? I loved her but the glass was between us, I would have to go through it. I longed to console her. . . . I would do what she wanted" (362)--is not reciprocated, Joan embeds Frances within herself so as not to lose her. In André Green's terms, she "nourish[es] the dead mother, to maintain her--perpetually embalmed" (1980, 162); in Joan's terms, "She'd never really let go of me because I had never let her go" (363). But the lack of reciprocity makes the [End Page 366] embedded object "a bad self." And so, following the logic of the depressive based on her identification with the maternal object, Joan reasons, "I am bad, I am nonexistent, I shall kill myself" (Kristeva 1989, 11)--which in a sense she does several times by cancelling, and then reproducing, her identity. The "maternal object having been introjected, the depressive or melancholy putting to death of the self is what follows, instead of matricide" (28).

That the modes by which Joan attempts to retaliate against Frances end up being self-destructive forms of allegiance to her, allowing the forbidding mother to thrive within the cowering daughter, is borne out in Lady Oracle by Joan's alimentary, sexual, and verbal appetites. Her mother's attitude toward her weight is initially presented as unforgiving. At thirteen, Joan is "eating steadily, doggedly, stubbornly, anything [she] can get. The war between [herself] and [her] mother is on in earnest; the disputed territory is [her] body" (Atwood 1976, 73). Otherwise making her miserable, Joan's considerable weight is her "refutation," her "victory" over her mother; and as such, it gives her "a morose pleasure" (78). In a fight with her mother one day, though, Joan is struck by the idea that Frances has determined even Joan's only weapon against her, when Frances asks, "'What have I done to make you behave like this?'" (94). Joan is annoyed that her mother appears to be "taking all the credit for herself," and thinks defensively, "surely I was behaving like this not because of anything she had done but because I wanted to" (94). Frances undermines Joan's agency originally by producing Joan's ostensibly rebellious reaction and then later by egging her on: at the end she tries to spoil Joan's diet by leaving cookies and pies around so that Joan realizes that "in a lesser way she had always done this" (136). It is after Joan's announcement that, upon losing eighteen more pounds, she is moving out--as if dissolving herself so that there will be nothing left for her mother to control, realizing now that the excess was created precisely as something to contain--that Frances stabs Joan in the arm with a paring knife. Then Joan acts "as if [she] herself had inflicted the wound" (137): for she is determined to blanket her mother's ferocity toward her, as well as fused with her mother-- [End Page 367] and so dedicated to self-annihilation. André Green's work on the psychically dead mother again seems applicable. He discusses mirror-identification with the object, "a mimicry, with the aim of continuing to possess the object (who one can no longer have) by becoming, not like it but, the object itself" (151). The subject conserves the "dead" mother through a kind of psychic cannibalism.

Joan's attempts to find compensation for her unloving mother in an erotic attachment backfire by entangling her in abusive relationships that cement the masochistic position in which her mother placed her. Joan's mother warns her so adamantly about "lurking pervert[s]," "exhibitionists," and "bad men" (Atwood 1976, 54) that it seems plausible that Frances (ironically) instills in Joan a rebellious desire for them: "bad men," to whom Joan turns to thwart her mother, in turn imitate Frances in damaging Joan. As a girl walking to Brownies, Joan almost hopes "that the bad man would really come up out of the ravine . . . . Even my mother would be sorry" (62). But when the "daffodil man" actually emerges and unveils his flaccid flesh and Joan is later rescued either by the same or another (this time hatted) mysterious man, it is Joan who is in for two complementary doses of torture: fear of the men and violence from her enraged mother, who slaps her across the face, apparently for dallying.

Two of the men Joan hooks up with (the Polish Count and the Royal Porcupine) may as well be figures in her costume gothics (as an escape artist, she creates escapist art), centered on the ravishment of women by rapacious villain-heroes. The third (Arthur), whom she marries, actually turns up in her writing, his name occasionally slipping in metaleptically as a substitute for Lord Redmond, who is literally a Lady-killer. Two of Joan's lovers (the Count and Arthur) are tidy, methodical, dictatorial. Even the Royal Porcupine (drawn aesthetically to dead animals), whose fantastic qualities are meant to counter Arthur's sobriety, eventually becomes openly hostile to Joan. Revealing an ominous repetition compulsion, all three relationships sustain Joan's warped bond with her mother. In criticizing Joan's clothes and writing, making her exceedingly self-conscious, trying to make her feel like a village idiot, and [End Page 368] reaping pleasure from her defeats, Arthur especially seems to reembody Frances.

Joan knows that the pulp fiction she writes "exploit[s] the masses, corrupt[s] by distracting, and perpetuate[s] degrading stereotypes of women as helpless and persecuted" (34). Still, she needs her trashy prose to keep her mother near but under control: she longs "for the simplicity of that world, where . . . wounds were only ritual ones" (316). It is for this reason--aesthetic sublimation--that Charlotte (Joan's heroine) finds herself "wishing that his hand had remained on her throat just a moment longer" (144), that all the Lady Redmonds are excited by the deadly maze (there must be temptations, threats, wounds, albeit ritualized), and that Lady Oracle itself is a maze--Atwood's version of Kristeva's "poetic form" capable of transposing affect into rhythms and signs. Like the female masochism providing the subject matter of Joan's costume gothics, the polyphonic configuration of Atwood's novel--comprised of present time, various past times, gothic romances, dreams, daydreams, and spiritual visions--restores the maternal Thing, in discontinuous narrative form, capturing the "black sun's incandescence": "Together [Joan writes of her mother and herself] we would go down the corridor into the darkness" (362). Joan's/Atwood's plunge into the maternal abyss (the darkness at the end of the tunnel), enacted paradoxically for the sake of excavation in the form of representation, results in an aesthetic containment of female melancholia. Psychic disturbances must be transformed through "linguistic activity," Kristeva (1995) reiterates in New Maladies of the Soul, "into a form of sublimation or into an intellectual, interpretive, or transformational activity" (29).

At the same time--moving beyond the parameters of Kristeva's theory of black sun, as well as Green's theory of the psychically encrypted dead mother--Lady Oracle looks into what catalyzes Joan's mother's cruelty toward her daughter, which in turn catalyzes Joan's attraction to harsh men. And its finding is, again, the cruelty of men or, culturally speaking, the patriarchal ideology of a fifties-style marriage and family. Joan's mother's "terrible anger" is expressed in the razorblade sharpness with which she cuts out of her photograph album [End Page 369] the faces of Joan's father and a "white-flannelled man" to whom she was "more or less engaged." Frances appears "young and pretty, laughing gaily . . . , clutching the arms of her headless men" (201). She only becomes a "monster" (70) after being incarcerated in the Delacourt "plastic-shrouded tomb from which there was no exit" (201). In "The Dead Mother," Green (1980) correspondingly illustrates the "brutal change of the maternal imago," before which "there is an authentic vitality present in the subject, which comes to a sudden halt, remaining seized from then on in the same place," by noting photos--only of "the young baby in the family album," which "show him to be gay, lively, interested, carrying much potentiality, whereas later snapshots show the loss of this initial happiness." In both cases, "love has been lost at one blow" (150)--Green concentrating on its loss for the child, Atwood on its loss for the mother.

Frances's monstrosity grows after she is pressured to marry a man who impregnated her, argues her out of an abortion, but then abandons her during the pregnancy as well as the child's (Joan's) first five years, for a military career. Joan even realizes the likelihood that her mother regards her "as a reproach" because Frances had nothing more to do with her life than redecorate her bedroom, throw insipid parties, take odd jobs: "She used to say that nobody appreciated her, and this was not paranoia. Nobody did appreciate her, even though she'd done the right thing, she had devoted her life to us, she had made her family her career as she had been told to do. . . . My mother would say that my father didn't love her, and I believed my mother" (200). While Green (1980) shows no interest in the social roots of the "dead" mother's behavior, again he makes a relevant point: that often the subject is "caught between a dead mother and an inaccessible father, . . . because he leaves the mother-child couple to cope . . . alone" (150). Unmistakably an absent man, Joan's father may even be a murderer (the text raises the possibility that he murdered Joan's mother, thus literalizing hypothetically the metaphor that he/men/the system "killed" her). Atwood gives the mother-daughter sadomasochistic cathexis a cultural footing: Joan cannot commit matricide--"For man and for woman the loss [End Page 370] of the mother is a biological and psychic necessity, the first step on the way to becoming autonomous" (Kristeva 1989, 27)--in a sense, since culture has beaten her to it.

Blaming the stunted growth of the daughter's subjectivity on the mother's patriarchal maternal role, Irigaray (1981), in "And the One Doesn't Stir without the Other," puts Atwood's ideas into lyrical theory. The daughter swallows ice with her mother's milk, becomes more captive the more she loves, feels engulfed, all because the frantic mother cannot afford to lose the sole proof of her life's worth. Irigaray's wise daughter comprehends that she too therefore risks being "abducted from [herself]. Immobilized in the reflection he expects of [her]" and "[t]rapped in a single function--mothering." Irigaray's moving last words capture a plea of all the female melancholics analyzed thus far: "what I wanted from you, Mother, was this: that in giving me life, you still remain alive" (66-67). This is the melancholic daughter's plea in part because once the mother becomes a "dead mother" the daughter is subject to a paralyzing entombment. For, again turning to Green (1980), the "essential characteristic of this [the child's] depression is that it takes place in the presence of the object, which is itself absorbed by a bereavement. The mother, for one reason or another, is depressed" (149). 7

Clara Maugham, in Jerusalem the Golden (1967), regrets that her mother joined the ranks of the living dead. Hence Drabble follows Brookner and Atwood in proposing a writing solution to the daughter's depression; also like Atwood, Drabble looks hard at the social/cultural roots of the mother's despair. She considers constraints of class: can a working-class daughter burdened by a "dead" mother afford to be blocked professionally, romantically, by a maternal encryptment? If not, what sort of delusory world must she, disavowing such entombment (too expensive a luxury), seek to enter?

Clara's very name signifies the poisoned state Mrs. Maugham was in at the time of Clara's birth, since it was bestowed maliciously ("Mrs. Maugham did not like the name any more than Clara") as penance for Clara's "existence and her sex" (9). Mrs. Maugham continues to punish Clara in resenting Clara's academic achievements, disallowing her [End Page 371] daughter pleasure and emotion, and refusing to acknowledge Clara's beauty; guided by "many fixed and rigid rules" (53), she induces guilt and fear. Clara sums up the double bind that Mrs. Maugham has put her in when her mother offers a concession, a visit to Paris: "By letting me go, she is merely increasing her power, for she is outmartyring my martyrdom. I die from loss, or I die from guilt, and either way I die" (70). During and after college, Clara imagines her mother sucking her back to Northam, dragging at her sleeves and hems. Her visits home are infantilizing: they "reduce her to exactly the same stage of trembling, silent, frustrated anxiety that she had endured throughout her childhood" (97).

Clara nevertheless in the end evades the melancholia that her hopeless mother's overbearing treatment primes her to suffer. In part through her own recognition of, and delight in, her surprising physical beauty, as well as the charms of high culture (hymns, literature, academic life, travel, the Denhams), and the pursuit of men (mainly Gabriel Denham, married, inaccessible) who enable her to advance socially and culturally, Clara bypasses the melancholic's slough of despond. Clara "wished to feel herself attached to the world" (197); putting up a hard fight, she refuses to "live a living death," to have wounded flesh, "bleeding or cadaverized" (Kristeva 1989, 4). Such a morbid scenario is represented in Jerusalem the Golden by a nightmare Clara has of dying, thus collapsing Clara and her mother (who is at the time of the dream hospitalized with a fatal cancer) and playing out the melancholic's wish for union with the death-bearing mother. But, in actuality, Clara wills "herself to survive, because she did not have it in her to die" (239). Here would appear to be a Kristevan success story.

Yet (again) Jerusalem the Golden is by no means oblivious to the self-destruction that Clara seems bound to enact. Her dream of dying represents the melancholic's plunge not taken, but the melancholic's plunge is taken by Phillipa (Gabriel's wife), as if the novel were a dream and Phillipa a displacement of Clara. Burdened by an at times overpowering malaise, Phillipa finds herself, and can be found, weeping just about anywhere. Neurotically fastidious about some things, she is undiscriminating, as well as dangerously passive, in the face of [End Page 372] her suffering. She suffers equally from injustice and a broken nail: "she was so deeply wounded that pain came to her simply, as itself" (167). Regarding herself as a maimed member of a female line (Phillipa imagines her wounds reborn in, and reborne by, a daughter), as incommunicably distressed, Phillipa (rather than Clara) inherits Mrs. Maugham's deadness of tone: Mrs. Maugham greets Clara's announcement that she plans "to do French" with a grunt, "Suit yourself" (54), just as Phillipa, when faced with Gabriel's Parisian business trip, scarcely responds, "Go if you want . . . . It's all the same to me" (189). As if to underscore a cultural transmission of female suffering, the text again connects Mrs. Maugham and Phillipa when, in Paris, Clara grieves over her mother's ravaged life, and Gabriel drinks her tears in empathy, "for he too felt the weight of those empty, rolling, joyless years, years without hope and without pleasure, for they were his own wife's years unrolling there in Clara's eyes, and rolling down her face" (201).

Although a full account of Phillipa's distress is never offered (for all we know, she suffers from loss of the maternal Thing grounded in her biological mother), it is the woundedness of Phillipa's maternal body that is flaunted. Her "body was covered with scars, the blue-white scars of childbearing. And she had been stitched and sewn. She had been too narrow, and they had remade her badly" (170). Drabble's erasure of Phillipa's past leaves us to concentrate on her scars as the sign of entrapment, to reinvoke Irigaray, "in a single function--mothering." The text likewise features Mrs. Maugham's metamorphosis from sanguine to sour at the moment of marriage. Clara's premarital mother appears in a photograph smiling bravely, gaily, radiantly "with hope and intimacy," whereas her face has been seized with "rigid misery" by the time of the wedding photos. Mrs. Maugham's premarital exercise books are full of prose that seems to burst passionately into verse--"O let us seek a brighter world / Where darkness plays no part" (227)--as if on a semiotic/symbolic seesaw, gracefully poised. But married life yanks the poetry out of Mrs. Maugham's expressions. On the day of her husband's funeral, Mrs. Maugham herself condemns her marriage, uttering (of course tearlessly) to Clara nothing else but a stark: "Well, he's gone [End Page 373] and I can't say I'm sorry" (35). Kristeva's other jouissance liquifies "the melancholy object blocking the psychic and bodily interior" especially when the partner effecting it gives "the major gift [that the mother] was never able to offer: a new life" (Kristeva 1989, 78). "Within feminine fantasy," Kristeva theorizes, "such a jouissance assumes a triumph over the death-bearing mother, in order for the interior to become a source of rewards while eventually becoming a source of biological life, childbearing, and motherhood" (79). But such theoretical antidotes to melancholia in Mrs. Maugham's case look like contributing causes: rather than assuage melancholia, wifedom and motherhood seem to produce it.

Drabble (like Atwood) contributes to the theory of melancholia that the "inadequate" mother herself was no doubt in pain and that therefore what the daughter is invited to enclose within herself, and reproduce as herself, is not only the mother-as-punisher but also the mother-as-punished. Moreover, if female woe is imagined to begin with marriage and childbirth, then the most intimate female connections are between mothers and other mothers (as the linkage of Mrs. Maugham and Phillipa demonstrates), in which roles all generations of women may receive, as if genetically, the female/maternal curse. But, on this model, it is also the case that they may not: insofar as biographical contingencies rather than biological or psychological exigencies are at the root of melancholy, mothers and daughters can be cheerful.

Jerusalem the Golden (alive to this possibility) makes a point of not indicting marriage or motherhood categorically: Denham fecundity is enviable. While Mrs. Maugham's refrigerator lacks milk, Mrs. Denham--a famous novelist and so liberated from Irigaray's single function of mothering--likes to hear a baby suck. The difference can be understood as a matter of class. The Denham children disport themselves "in classy sunhats on the beaches of southern Europe" (128), while Clara grows up amid "insidious industrial grime" (123). Love itself--between Candida and Sebastian Denham, between parents and children, and among siblings--flourishes, on the thrilling brink of incest, under the aegis of money. Clara learns from the Denhams that love is a socioeconomic production, as is its [End Page 374] opposite. She announces to Gabriel that she is "all nerve," "hard," that "there is no love in [her] . . . . [For S]he had not been taught to love, she had lacked those expensive, private lessons" (193). The implication is that the daughter's masochism/melancholia can be averted by social and economic stability, especially when the mother--exceeding her maternal role, though by no means abandoning it--contributes to that foundation. Yet, in bringing the question of class to bear on the subject of female masochism/melancholia, Jerusalem the Golden also seems to imply that, if the possibility of liberation from melancholy is a function of the degree to which a woman can sidestep the implications of the mother's pain, then the working class may have its advantages. In light of Clara's eventual entry into the world of desire--founded on her repudiation of death, her refusal to allow the melancholy Thing (which certainly surrounds and threatens to suffocate her) spoil her pleasure--melancholia begins to look like a bourgeois extravagance, one that an ambitious working-class girl cannot afford, a kind of consumerism in the realm of the psychic. Sokolsky (1994) exemplifies this idea of melancholia as an elitest luxury: Anne Elliot's "deprecatory stance," in Persuasion, "arises from a sense of exclusivity that makes her own social exclusion a point of pride. The melancholy that distinguishes Anne in the first part of the novel derives partly from the isolation of being a rare bit of psychic goods. Her refinement of sensibility, her capacity for exquisite sensation, the tenacity of her attachments, all price her out of the emotional market" (132). It is not of course that all bourgeois women must be melancholic (Candida Denham is not) or that working-class women cannot be (Mrs. Maugham seems depressed). It is, rather, that the bourgeois family is apt to be a place where melancholy (a function of assumed entitlement) may flourish: if her mother is absent or cruel, the bourgeois daughter has the leisure to shop for substitutes.

The working-class daughter frantically tries to flee. Shunning a "final, exhausting, bleeding martyrdom" (98), Clara plans to enter "a bright and peopled world," a neverending metonymic chain of "amusement" (239). Jerusalem the Golden evolves from a preoedipal phase based on denial of the [End Page 375] negation of the maternal Thing--chapters two through four loop back into Clara's past, disrupting chronology at the outset, as do Clara's periodic reflections on her Northam past--to an anti-oedipal opening up of the realms of desire. Clara leaps from a feeling of maternal suffocation to an insistence upon nonabsorption by the death/loss on which any progress would (psychoanalytically) seem to depend. (Adam Phillips [1995] sums up the general idea I have in mind here: "In Freud's view, we become what we cannot have, and we desire [and punish] what we are compelled to disown" [184].) Instead, the text presents the desire expressed in the last few pages of Jerusalem the Golden as emphatically not triggered by pain or lack of satisfaction, but as a simple desire to desire. Clara comes to realize that "desire was in every way preferable to possession" (188), as if it is a matter of easy choice, as if desire and possession bore no--even inverse--relation to one another. Clara at the very end refuses to acknowledge her losses even as she assumes somehow that she will become a desiring subject.

Clara's subjective break is ostensibly problem-free. Upon leaving Gabriel, she feels "strangely . . . light: weightless, almost . . . a whole moral inheritance of doubt had dropped away from her." She sits on the bus "with a kind of placid blankness" (218), nonchalant about what will happen to her, nonchalant specifically about illness: "she did not at all care if she was going to be sick all over the bus. It was all the same to her" (219). (Clara vomits throughout the book after intense pleasurable experiences with one Denham or another, as if physically striving to make room in her psychic body for something other than Mrs. Maugham.) Upon leaving her mother, Clara glides into a postmodern Deleuzean technological open space. Entering a world of "pure multiplicity . . . irreducible to any sort of unity" (Deleuze 1977, 42), Clara prefers a "wide road," "lanes of traffic," "headlights," "speed," "movement," "glassy institutions where [she and Gabriel] would eat eggs and chips and put coins in fruit machines and idly, gratuitously drink cups of nasty coffee, for the sake of it, for the sake of amusement, and all the lights in the surrounding dark" (239) to sitting at her dying mother's hospital bedside or mourning [End Page 376] her eternally. Clara refuses to feel guilty, to be "harnessed to the yoke of daddy-mommy," to play the role of the melancholic whose "abject desire to be loved, . . . whimpering at not being loved enough, at not being 'understood'" (Deleuze 1977, 269) mocks. As if reacting to Black Sun, Deleuze attacks the "sniveling desire to have been loved," what he calls "sick desire," which must be castrated twice: "once in the family, in the familial scene, with the knitting mother; another time in an asepticized clinic in the psychoanalytic scene" (334). Similarly iconoclastic, Clara attempts to sweep aside the "mommy spider web" (Deleuze 1977, 112).

Is Drabble (then) a Deleuzean? In fact, I think that Drabble is as worried about Clara's plunge into postmodern glitter as Kristeva would be--and as much as she would be worried about a plunge into a maternal abyss. Clara's realization that "desire was in every way preferable to possession" (188) might seem healthily liberating if the possession referred to were her mother's overpossession of her. But if it refers to her ability to cathect her libido onto anything else, besides that mother, whether the object be an activity or a person, Clara would seem to be in trouble, i.e., acting out a liberation that (like so many of Joan's attempts at freedom in Lady Oracle) only reveals the grip of the maternal Thing after all. It is no accident that the one relationship Clara develops is with an inaccessible married man. Despite her cool air, Clara knows, and admits, that she is still in the clutches of her past and only acting ("acting out"?) otherwise: "I can't be free, but there's no reason why I shouldn't be thought to be free, is there?" (237). Or, as she discloses to Gabriel in their Parisian hotel bed, where she attempts to act on her Kristevan drive to obtain through a man "a view of other things [other jouissance], a sensation of other ways of being[;] she wished to feel herself attached to the world" (197): "I am chased, I am pursued, I run and run, but I will never get away, the apple does not fall far from the tree" (193).

Jerusalem the Golden finally has us wondering whether the working-class heroine forced to bypass melancholic indulgence--itself paradoxically a relief since a certain freedom from melancholia appears to inhere in an elaboration of the [End Page 377] illness--does not risk "soullessness," as she speeds headlong into a postmodern world, uninterested in psychic wounds, and therefore in treating them. "In the wake of psychiatric medicines, aerobics, and media zapping, does the soul exist?" is a provocative question with which Kristeva opens New Maladies of the Soul. Kristeva (1995) condemns "today's men and women--who are stress-ridden and eager to achieve, to spend money, have fun, and die--[who] dispense with representation of their experience that we call psychic life. Actions and their imminent abandonment have replaced the interpretation of meaning" (3, 7). Read as a reflection of these sentiments, Jerusalem the Golden is a text that deliberately ends with a mindless repudiation of all attachment to the maternal Thing, seeking emergence without immersion, a fending off, a resistance, without any trace of acceptance, and thus achieving lightness of being. In linking Mrs. Maugham and Phillipa, Drabble points to a cultural transmission of female melancholia that finds its way to expression; in presenting Clara as an evader of such pain, Drabble points to the working-class daughter's worse predicament of being unable to register, articulate, and thereby ease, her suffering. Social constraints are shown to contribute to the production of psychic pain and then (enhancing the cruelty) to bar its expression, making the prospect of becoming a desiring-machine all the more untherapeutically ineluctable.

For it seems likely that so long as Clara refuses to face her loss, her mother/maternal Thing will only lodge itself more deeply beneath Clara's performance of autonomy. Even theatricality, as Butler (1995) proposes, may be enabled by what it disavows and embeds: "one might ask . . . after the disavowal that occasions the performance and which performance might be said to enact, where performance engages 'acting out' in the psychoanalytic sense. . . . [I]t may be that performance . . . is essentially related to the problem of unacknowledged loss. . . . [P]erformance allegorizes a loss it cannot grieve, allegorizes the incorporative fantasy of melancholia whereby an object is phantasmatically taken in or on as a way of refusing to let it go" (164). [End Page 378]

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By drawing out the socioeconomic emphases in Atwood and Drabble, I have by no means meant to dismiss Kristeva's psychoanalytic approach to melancholia, or its narrative correlatives. One of my primary aims in presenting all three analyses has been to extend Kristeva's conception of female melancholia by locating its aestheticization in more women writers than just Duras. In Lady Oracle and Jerusalem the Golden, socioeconomic factors do not cancel psychoanalytic explanations of the daughter's melancholic addiction to the mother but provide an emendation that leads us to acknowledge a co-production. Causation is ultimately overdetermined: neither the cultural construction of the family or of maternity nor a psychological etiology is isolated, or ever ought to be, as the sole cause of melancholic womanly woe. Just as psychoanalytic and literary texts in this essay are interimplicated, so are psychic and social etiologies.

Especially given the compound roots of such severe malaise, all the women writers examined here question the efficacy of romantic heterosexual relationships, marriage, childbirth, and motherhood as routes to symbolic life. In Black Sun, Kristeva (1989) recommends giving birth as a counterdepressant. In "Stabat Mater," she extols the masochistic jouissance of that experience: "My body is no longer mine, it doubles up, suffers, bleeds, catches cold, puts its teeth in, slobbers, coughs, is covered with pimples, and it laughs"; "a mother is always branded by pain, she yields to it"; "motherhood destines us to a demented jouissance that is answered, by chance, by the nursling's laughter in the sunny waters of the ocean" (167, 179). The "opaque joy" that Kristeva feels while caring for her infant, in fact, "roots" her in her mother's bed: "Alone: she, I, and he" (172)! So, we are left to ask, how does becoming a maternal body (which plops the daughter back into the mother's bed) counter addiction to the mother's (maternal) body, or serve, as Butler (1990) words it, as "a defense against libidinal chaos" (86)? How can maternity (source of masochistic jouissance, or the pleasure of the damned, outside the terms of the law) assuage melancholia, itself imbricated with masochism? If Kristeva's masochistic passion [End Page 379] for pain is offered as a homeopathic cure for the melancholic addiction to pain, Brookner, Atwood, and Drabble (as well as Austen) warn that the melancholic addiction is apt to begin in the "père-version" (ironically Kristeva's own pun [1989, 183]) of the masochistic/melancholic passion, in the administration of the so-called cure. Opting instead for an artistic homeopathic solution, they spin out aestheticizations of melancholia that communicate this very point. Simultaneously holding onto while articulating in language the maternal Thing, a "writing cure" (these writers propose) is preferable to male domination--the very appeal of which clinches the idea that, as the narrator of Austen's Emma perceptively asserts, "Where the wound [has] been given, there must the cure be found if anywhere" (Austen 1816, 97).

Cure through writing (if writing were possible) might even be more achievable than through "talking," for as Butler (1995) comments, psychoanalysis itself can turn out for the melancholic to be a quicksand of incomplete mourning, in which mourning is sacralized: "It is as if psychoanalysis as a practice risks becoming afflicted with the very suffering it seeks to know. The resolution of grief becomes itself unthinkable in the situation in which our various losses become the condition for psychoanalysis as the practice of interminable mourning" (190). (Especially in light of Freud's speculation in The Ego and the Id that the process of relinquishing the object is rendered possible by introjection, that "this identification is the sole condition under which the id can give up its objects," it is easy to imagine that psychoanalysis treating the melancholic might become interminably "necessary" [24].) 8 Yet if mourning is sacralized in writing, the very fact of the writing nevertheless provides an automatic passageway into the symbolic order. By making their heroines writers who put their relationship to pain into language, Brookner and Atwood amplify this point.

Such entry into the symbolic of course entails only a partial decathexis from the "inadequate" maternal object; in fact it makes her palatable, even forgivable. Through writing, the less than perfect mother, no matter how cruel, may be duplicated (as she needs to be, since the melancholic daughter's entry into the symbolic must somehow simultaneously restore the mother--"Where the wound [has] been given, there must [End Page 380] the cure be found if anywhere") without the reinfliction of abuse. Hence, as the inscription on the Palais de Chaillot, in Jerusalem the Golden, reads: "the artist's well-loved pain strengthens him [/her]" (Drabble 1967, 202). In addition, the sources of the mother's own despair and/or anger may be taken into account, so that she may therefore be held onto, instead of abjected, with diminished daughterly resentment, creating a healthy space (a "feminine symbolic"?) between asymbolia and the patriarchal symbolic arena, as well as a useful shield against the patriarchal symbolic. (For why should the depressive daughter wish to become a full-fledged member of the very club that ostracized and degraded her mother and in turn at least co-produced in the first place the daughter's psychic trouble?) Desertion, new wounds, inflicted vengefully, against the already wounded mother, only make female melancholic matters worse: if maternal wounds (a sense of cultural devaluation, if not something more particular or personal) are responsible for maternal resentment toward or neglect of the daughter, then supplementing them only enhances the vicious cycle. Such duplication of destruction--one abandonment enacted to punish another--implies the mimetically depressing collapse of feminist cultural critique and sympathetic bonds (of forgiveness) among women.

Kristeva (1989) is in a sense one step ahead of me here, having located in melancholic art a "psychic organization of forgiveness" that assists the artist in bypassing complacency through "a subliminary hold over the lost Thing." Perhaps forgiveness for the neglectful mother becomes a real possibility because melancholic art can bestow forgiveness on the suffering daughter, by "removing the guilt from revenge, or humiliation from [a] narcissistic wound, which underlies depressed people's despair" (97). The aestheticization of the daughter's pain, then, sets in motion two waves of compassion, or rather, since the daughter's self-forgiveness is both cause and consequence of her forgiveness of the mother, an inflow and outflow, in a cycle of forgiveness that is not vicious.