LUX MONTIS Vol. III No. I January 2015
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LUX MONTIS Vol. III No. I January 2015 AN ANALYSIS OF THE MOTHER- DAUGHTER RELATIONSHIP IN DORRIS LESSING’S MARTHA QUEST Dr Soumya Jose Assistant Professor in English, ( English Division I), School of Social Sciences and Languages Vellore Institute of Technology University, Vellore. Tamilnadu 632014 e.mail: [email protected] Dr. Sony Jalarajan Raj Assistant Professor, Faculty of Fine Arts & Communication, MacEwan University 7-166C City Centre Campus 10700 104 Avenue NW, Edmonton, AB T5J 4S2 , Canada e.mail: [email protected] ABSTRACT Mother-daughter relationship is the most symbiotic of all human relationships. The influence that a mother wields on her daughter can be either positive or negative. Mothers need to involve in the personal life of a female child till she attains puberty and thereafter should provide a personal space for her daughter where she can develop her personality. The over-concern of a mother for her daughter can be detrimental to her daughter’s life. The stifling maternal love can spoil a grown up daughter’s life. This chapter attempts to analyze Dorris Lessing’s Martha Quest in the light of the Greek mythological story of Demeter and Persephone. INTRODUCTION Demeter and Persephone’s relationship can be defined as mirroring relationship as Demeter does not want Persephone to have an identity beyond that of being a daughter. The stifling affection that Demeter has for her daughter makes her forget that Persephone is an individual a different identity. Demeter wishes to see a mirror image of her in Persephone. The trope of mirroring mothers has appeared in different genres of literature and ‘night Mother, by the acclaimed American playwright, Marsha Norman, portrays such a mirroring mother-daughter relationship that leads to the death of the protagonist, Jessie. Theories on mother-daughter relationship The psycho analysts of the twentieth century became instrumental in foregrounding the 1 LUX MONTIS Vol. III No. I January 2015 concept of mirroring with regard to relationship. There are models of mirroring mothers and daughters in Ancient Greece, as well as advice writing that supported the mother–daughter mirroring model in seventeenth century France. The writings that give this trope the title “mirroring” were published by Francois De Grenaille is 1639. Michelle Farrell explains his model: Thus the mother’s responsibility is to display herself to her daughter, and to elicit from her the desired reflection of herself. Hence she, the mother, apprehends herself in the image she succeeds in projecting onto the daughter, her mirror. Social identity of both mother and daughter, then is reciprocally deferred onto the other and leaves them equally dependent on each other for their sense of self. (97) Far from inventing this model of motherhood, Grenaille was articulating a model long present in the Western consciousness, which continues to be a strong one for mothers and daughters to this day. Over time, this model has developed into an ideology that frequently finds its way into representations, including dramatic performance. Blurring Identities and Mirroring Relationship: The basic characteristic of mirroring mother-daughter relationships is interrelated subjectivities. Mother and daughter often become intensely identified with one another, sometimes to the point where they have little or no appreciable boundary between selves. The classical myth that serves as a paradigm of this model is the myth of Demeter and Persephone, a myth from Ancient Greece that was eventually transformed into an annual performance known as the Eleusinian mysteries. The myth tells the story of Demeter and her daughter Persephone. With the consent of Zeus, Hades, king of the underworld, seizes Persephone against her will and drags her to his domain to suffer rape and enforced marriage. Demeter’s response to her separation from Persephone is “insatiable anger” and “terrible and brutal grief” (Foley 6). In her sorrow, Demeter wanders to Eleusis, the site of the later rites that would commemorate this reunion of mother and daughter. Demeter then blights the earth, preventing all crops from growing until she is reunited with her child. The gods are forced to comply with Demeter’s demands, and the two women are brought together, with the caveat that Persephone must return for a portion of each year to her husband in the underworld, during which time her mother will again prevent the fertility of the earth. In the lyric epic that recounts this myth, the reunion of the two women is a touching scene of emotional and physical intimacy: Then all day long, their minds at one, they soothed each other’s heart and soul in many ways, embracing fondly, and their spirits abandoned grief, as they gave and received joy between them. (Foley 24) This description of the reunion of Demeter and Persephone shows how the ideal relationship of mother and daughter was a dyad. Though they are two bodies, when together, the women form an interdependent subject, “their minds at one”. The Hymn describes the bond of mother and daughter as so intense and intimate that they effectively form a single entity. 2 LUX MONTIS Vol. III No. I January 2015 Though it could be said that the myth shows a mother with an unusually high dependence on her daughter for self-identification, it also shows love between women as nurturing and powerful. The Hymn refrains from judging Demeter as a hysterical mother, incapable of letting go of her daughter, as later depictions of mother–daughter separation would. The Hymn recognizes a fashion that seems at times rather modern, that a mother’s love can be a powerful force, worthy of respect, as commented by Marianne Hirsch: The ‘Hymn to Demeter’ does grant voice and legitimacy not only to the daughter’s but also to the mother’s story. Nowhere, for example, does the poem question Demeter’s right to be angry. Zeus’s compromise and the Elusian mysteries which celebrate the cyclic reunion of mother and daughter do recognize the needs of the mother as well as those of the child (36). Though the separation of Demeter and Persephone seems tragic and unnecessary, to the ancients it would have been clear that the two women would have had to separate at some point. The tragedy of Demeter, her separation from her beloved daughter, is a theme many women of both ancient and modern times can identify with, as marriage leads the daughter away from home and the intimacy of the mother–daughter relationship. The universality of this loss had led Adrienne Rich to write, “The loss of the daughter to the mother, the mother to the daughter, is the essential female tragedy” (237). Another formal feature of the Demeter-Persephone myth, which has come to be associated with feminist poetics, is the cycle. Linear time is often associated with male–centered representations and writings, whereas the cycles are thought to be more indicative of the female cycle of menstruation, as well as the cycle of daughter becoming mother who has a daughter in her turn. Persephone’s path of living in the underworld and on the earth is an endless cycle: “Loss is presented as inevitable, part of the natural sequence of growth, but, since time is cyclical, mother–daughter reunion forms part of the cycle” (Hirsch 5). Cycles with in the story were echoed in the creation of the ritual performances at Eleusis, which occurred cyclically every year. Such cycles find their way to the dramas that include this trope through the use of repetition, in particular the mother’s life being repeated by the daughter. The togetherness of mother and daughter in this myth is shown here in a positive light. In their state of symbiosis, Demeter and Persephone experience a jouissance of love and intimacy. Their separation would not have had the impact of tragedy if such jouissance had not existed, for the division would not have felt like their destruction of something so purely loving. The bond is shown in this myth as so attractive and sensual that it seems unlikely the two women would ever have willingly separated, thus, the separation is devastating. Hirsch comments on this feature of myth: Demeter and Persephone’s tale is told from the perspective of a bereaved Demeter, searching for her daughter, mourning her departure, and effecting her return through her own divine power. A breech caused by rape and death is undone by the mother’s power to fulfill a mutual desire for connection (5). This connection is always temporary, for Demeter and Persephone would have lived with the knowledge that one day their union would be disrupted by Persephone’s marriage and child-bearing, 3 LUX MONTIS Vol. III No. I January 2015 and in the time that followed their initial division, the two would have known that each time they were reunited, it was only to be parted again. This initial parting, however, is where the impact of tragedy is greatest, and where Demeter displays the power of maternal anger: “Maternal anger, maternal responses to the process of mother-child separation, to the loss of a child, are represented as terribly threatening in this story” (Hirsch 37). This “terribly threatening” anger, which cannot help but be a source of anxiety for the patriarchy, is seen by Rich as a source of women’s power: Each daughter, even in the millennia before Christ, must have longed for a mother whose love for her and whose power were so great as to undo rape and bring her back from death. And every mother must have longed for the power of Demeter, the efficacy of her anger, the reconciliation with her lost self. (240) The power of this maternal anger is not, however, enough to entirely assuage maternal guilt, which is a universal feature of motherhood, according to Rich: “The institution of motherhood finds all mothers more or less guilty of having failed their children” (223).