Atlantis Vol. 9 No. 2 Spring/Printemps 1984 10-22 The Daughter as Escape Artist Sue Ann Johnston University of British Columbia We shall not cease from exploration Yet novels by comtemporary women writers And the end of all our exploring show that walking out the door is no guarantee Will be to arrive where we started of freedom. Like Martha Quest, fictional daugh• And know the place for the first time. ters seek escape from the mother and the con• stricting life she represents. They rebel against T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets, V the mother's way of life, often violating her taboos through sexual activity or leaving home We have long been accustomed to reading physically "in hope that emotional separation about male protagonists who long to escape the will follow."3 They do not go far, however, constraints of civilization and "light out for the before they realize not that they cannot go home Territory,"1 but increasingly in twentieth cen• again, but that they have never left. In novels by tury women's novels, we see heroines who leave Margaret Drabble, Margaret Atwood, and Anne home, hoping to create themselves anew. In a Tyler, the heroines' escape from the mother discussion of Margaret Atwood's Lady Oracle, becomes a search for her that is also a search for Clara Thomas reports that "Women students the self. In Jerusalem the Golden (1967), Lady recognize themselves in Joan with the compre• Oracle (1977), and Earthly Possessions (1977), hension that to 'escape,' to leave home, is a basic journeys symbolize flight from the mother— impulse for women, mirrored in countless her• into the arms of a man with whom separation oines' stories, just as for men the complementary and attachment conflicts are re-experienced. impulse is signified in Odysseus' dogged voyage Before they can become individuals with capac• towards home. "2 The distinction, I would argue, ity for mature dependence,4 these heroines face is hardly this clear: even Odysseus takes the most the awesome task of emerging from an overly roundabout route imaginable back to Ithaca, close identification with their mothers. never missing any booty or amorous adventures which thrust themselves on his attention. For In all three novels, daughters struggle with both male and female writers, the journey away self-hatred, craving the love denied them by from home can easily merge with the journey mothers who appear cold and withholding. toward home. The emphasis, however, may be They continually seek self-affirmation, yet fear different; for the sons of Telemakhos, urged to exposing inner selves they do not feel, at bottom, leave home sometimes before they are ready, the to be lovable. Clara Maugham relies on men to impulse in ascendancy may be a homeward one; give her value in other peoples' eyes; Joan Foster for women, traditionally encouraged to stay at fears that her husband will discover her "true home, the driving impulse may be toward self" embodied in her past; Charlotte longs to freedom—physical, spiritual, psychological. escape a husband's "judging gaze... that widened at learning who I really was."5 These heroines hunger for love, but their sense of self is so nebu• twentieth-century daughter's desire for "libera• lous and unsure they cannot trust the love that tion," all three authors point toward possible comes. avenues of feminine growth, self-knowledge, and integration. They can, however, learn a measure of self- love through surrogate mothers upon whom I. Jerusalem the Golden they model themselves. They are attracted to qualities they find lacking in their own mothers— In her study of Margaret Drabble's fiction, personal autonomy, tolerance, warmth. Even Ellen Cronan Rose shows how Drabble, like when they are primarily fantasy figures, as in Arnold Bennett, dramatizes the claims of the Earthly Possessions, these surrogate mothers can past. In her biography of Bennett, Drabble suggest a range of possibilities. writes: With an ideal mother, it is also easier to be an The girl in Jerusalem the Golden like Ben• ideal daughter. Just as these daughters see their nett's first hero [Richard Larch, in A Man mothers as inadequate, they also perceive an From the North], is obsessed with escape, absurd distance between what is expected of and she too is enraptured by trains and them as daughters and how they experience hotels and travelling: she feels she has "a themselves. Humor, a legitmate response to rightful place upon the departure plat• absurdity, seems a survival tactic for all three form" of her home town.6 heroines, helping them to separate the creative, perceiving self from her role enactments. Their Yet the strength of this impulse to escape testifies rueful humor may be an antidote for the kind of to the strength of internal constraints. Freedom, madness other fictional daughters experience Drabble shows us, may be less an escape from the when they step outside themselves for a long, past than a clear-eyed confrontation of it. In a hard look—recall Martha Quest in Four-Gated discussion of Jerusalem the Golden, Lee Edwards City or Esther Greenwood in The Bell Jar. If points out what Drabble adds to traditional sto• Joan Foster can laugh at the picture of herself as ries outlining women's quest for independence: unloved mothball daughter on a stage full of butterflies, perhaps she can gain the love (from ...the vital perception that any attempt by the audience, from us) which she forfeits by not such a character to shape a future into living up to her mother's expectations. Humor, which she can then move must be accom• then, may be a reply to absurdity, the mis-match panied by an equal motion back into the between expectations and reality. character's own past. This past, this net• work of parental expectations and social Clara Maugham, Joan Foster, and Charlotte customs, cannot simply be annihilated, but Emory all attempt to deal with ambivalence must instead be re-perceived in order that, through violent rejection of their mothers and through understanding, it may lose its their past. Yet in their journeys—to London and power to strangle.7 Paris, to Europe, to the American South—these heroines discover that they cannot escape the Growing up in the grimy industrial town of mother who is so deeply internalized. They must Northam, England, Clara Maugham bends her eventually trace their way back home, not to the will upon escape. Yet, even after she manages to omnipotent mother of infancy, but to a figure of leave Northam on a scholarship, she feels con• pathos and vulnerability—in other words, a strained by duty to return home on vacations; daughter, a self. While exploring the roots of the because she is still unseparated from her mother, she lives in terror that she will not summon the Paris, land of sweet, forbidden fruit, loses energy to leave again. Her hatred of Northam is a much of its symbolic importance with Mrs. mask for her fear. Maugham's surprising concession. If Paris is permissible, Clara must find other testing ground ...She hated her home town with such vio• for her independence. Montmartre, because for• lence that when she returned each vacation bidden, becomes her Paris to which she deter• from university, she would shake and trem• mines to escape alone at night. The adolescent ble with an ashamed and feverish fear. She sexual experimentation she experiences there hated it, and she was afraid of it, because serves to fix this adventure as a gesture of rebel• she doubted her power to escape; even after lion. Unconsciously, she expects punishment two years in London, she still thought that and is exhilarated to realize that "she had dared, her brain might go or that her nerve might and she had not been struck dead for it" (p. 83). snap, and that she would be compelled to The successful violation of taboo helps her to return, feebly, defeated, to her mother's feel separate. house.8 Even as a young women in London, she con• She fears the power of her mother, whose tinually needs to reaffirm her separateness. The judgements can deflate her sense of worth, large Denham family attracts her because it deflecting her from her struggle for autonomy. represents the antithesis of her own—open, affectionate, tolerant, rather than closed, cold, At home, Clara so much expects a blank, stony and rigid. Repeatedly, she contrasts this surro• indifference from her mother that she is deeply gate family with her own, speculating on what shaken when it shows "hidden chinks and her mother would think. faults" (p. 66). When Mrs. Maugham unexpect• edly grants Clara permission to go on a school Clara often found herself wondering trip to Paris, Clara is dismayed. If she can see her what her mother would think. Such wonder mother as uniformly cold, she can better brace never prevented her from any course of herself against the current of her mother's will. action—on the contrary, she sometimes feared it impelled her—but nevertheless, Because the truth was that this evidence of when drunk or naked, thoughts of her care and tenderness was harder to bear than mother would fill her mind. And with the any neglect, for it threw into question the Denhams, these thoughts pressed upon her whole basis of their lives together. Perhaps intolerably, (p. 145). there was hope, perhaps all was not harsh antipathy, perhaps a better daughter might The qualities she admires in the Denhams are have found a way to soften such a mother. those which draw her farther from her mother And if all were not lost, what effort, what and her lower middle class background; thus strain, what retraced miles, what recrimi• there is a sense in which the Denhams represent nations, what intolerable forgivenesses were both a betrayal of her origins and an idealized not to be undergone? (p.