1 |
In modern liberal societies such as the United States,
“citizens” are presumed to possess certain defining characteristics:
freedom, autonomy, the ability to act in their own interest and that of the
larger public, plus the capacity to take responsibility for those
actions. Powerful and enduring ideologies of motherhood prescribe an
identity for women that is almost the opposite. The “good mother” is
connected, nurturing, selfless: part of a dyad defined by dependency
and self-sacrifice. Accounts of women’s political identities and
possibilities for exercising power must grapple with the dilemma that these
opposing roles create for women. |
2 |
Popular films help express political culture and construct
it. They explore identities and ideologies for women to address the
dynamics of motherhood dilemmas. Film representations of women can help
us see how our society negotiates the overlapping or undercutting definitions
of motherhood, citizenship, and personhood. Based on Anna Quindlen’s
novel, the 1998 movie of One True Thing recognizes such a dichotomy in
the relationship between a traditionally “good mother,” Kate, and her
independent, career-minded daughter, Ellen. Especially in comparison to
the novel, this film helps specify how we juxtapose and problematize these
opposing identities. In the unsettled spaces between Ellen and
her mother, and between the film and the novel, there is room for more subtle
and sophisticated understandings of women’s identities: not as mutually
exclusive categories of citizens or persons versus mothers but as selves-in-relationship.
This can let us value the individual subjectivity of women along with the
connectivity we celebrate for mothers. |
|
Reason or Difference |
3 |
In modern cultures since the enlightenment, one of the
challenges for feminist political theory has been how to justify women’s
claims to equality. The modern tendency has been to categorize
realities into mutually exclusive dichotomies ― such as mind versus
body, reason versus emotion, public versus private, civilization or
technology versus nature ― and to value the first terms while
discounting the second. Women have commonly been identified with the
second, lesser terms. Seen as weaker and morally inferior, women have
had to argue for full personhood, as opposed to traditions that have treated
them as deficient or deformed by male standards for (truly) human
being. Yet enlightenment ideas about humanity, individuality, and
natural rights began to undermine western ideas about the inherent
inferiority of women. Feminist thinkers such as John Stuart Mill and
Mary Wollstonecraft held that the moral and intellectual capacities of women
might possibly be greater than previously suspected. Perhaps, the reasoning
has gone, as liberal theory is pushed further in service of equality, the
only way to know whether women (or blacks or other supposedly “inferior”
people) are capable of participating in intellectual or public life is to
allow them access and see how they perform. |
4 |
One realm where women began to demand equality of rights is
politics. The first wave of American feminism has been characterized by
its most visible and successful struggle: winning access to the
vote. Conventional accounts have the women’s suffrage movement in the
United States beginning in 1848 in Seneca Falls and concluding over 70 years
later with the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. During that
time, many of suffragists based their arguments on liberal, enlightenment
ideas about natural rights and the political equality of non-similar
persons. Women’s rights activists modeled the Seneca Falls Declaration
of Rights and Sentiments on that foundational document of liberal
enlightenment and democratic theory, Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence,
and demanded to exercise their own inalienable rights. Following
Wollstonecraft, they asserted that women ― as humans ― possess a
God-given rationality that makes them equally fit for decision making.
Reason, they argued, is not a gender-specific trait. This led women to
work for access to educational institutions as well. As notions of
citizenship expanded to include nearly all white males (not just property
owners), then African-American males, feminists insisted that women too
should be able to participate in politics. As persons endowed by their
Creator with inherent natural, and not governmentally-granted, rights and
reason, women too should be considered citizens with the right and
responsibility to take part in politics. |
5 |
Along with liberal, rights-based rhetoric, suffragists also
developed a rhetoric of maternal ability and duty to justify the women’s
movement into direct political participation. An ideology of
“republican motherhood” had helped create a role for women in politics as the
educators of future (male) citizens in civic virtue, and this was familiar to
eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Americans (Kerber 1980). It kept
women in their traditional ― private, domestic, compassionate ―
place in modern dichotomies, yet it hinted at room for them within the new
liberal-democratic paradigm for politics. |
6 |
Suffragists drew on this understanding of women’s proper role
as virtuous mothers and moral exemplars to justify their move into the voting
booth. They argued that women would be a much-needed good influence on
the corrupt and unsavory politics of city and state machines. The
purity of the Victorian “angel in the house” could counteract the narrow
self-interest and outright graft apparent in so much of American
politics. Suffragists often carried brooms in their parades to
symbolize the way their “natural” homemaking skills had prepared them to
“clean up” politics. |
7 |
Thus suffrage rhetoric was mixed. Some downplayed gender
difference by asserting women’s rights in terms of their (disembodied)
personhood and rationality. Others emphasized women’s femininity along
with the domestic and maternal experiences that could make them uniquely
valuable to the political process. This mixed message about women’s
identities and relations to politics led to many disagreements within the
suffrage movement. Perhaps the most famous clash was between the more
traditionally feminine NAWSA led by Carrie Chapman Catt and the more radical,
hunger-striking National Women’s Party headed by Alice Paul (Wheeler).
But the diversity of tactics and messages within the movement allowed it to
appeal on various grounds to a wide range of American women, helping it
become a mass movement that was eventually successful in pressuring the
political system to respond to its demands. |
8 |
While perhaps strategically useful, these differing conceptions
of gender identity can be theoretically problematic. The “difference
versus equality” dilemma and related debates over essentialism became even
more prominent in the second wave of American feminism. This has become
apparent in political arenas, among others. Questions have arisen over
what constitutes “women’s” issues and whether it is important to elect women
to political office. Do women govern “as women,” or do they represent
constituents in the same ways that as male representatives? Why?
And what might it mean to legislate “as a woman” ― especially when
race, class, religious, or other differences among women create
disagreement about what a “woman’s” point of view might actually be? |
9 |
Both strands of rhetoric about women’s identity have been
evident in the activism of the second wave. Such generalizations can be
oversimplified, but it is fair to say overall that “liberal” feminists have
continued in the enlightenment tradition of stressing that women are not
inferior to men, particularly when it comes to rationality, intellectual
ability, and moral responsibility. In downplaying women’s “difference”
from men, liberal feminists have been successful at dismantling many
discriminatory laws that prohibited women from gaining access to jobs,
education, sports teams, public accommodations, property ownership, and
credit. They have demanded equal pay for equal work and broken through
some professional glass ceilings. |
10 |
At the same time, “cultural” or “difference” feminists have
argued that it is a mistake for women to seek competition on a masculine
playing field. What is really needed is a revaluing of women’s traits
such as nurturing, emotion, compassion, connection to nature, and attention
to everyday tasks. They have rejected the enlightenment notion of
disembodied reason as what makes us truly human, focusing instead on embodied
and relational persons. They have argued for a “different voice” of
women in moral reasoning (Gilligan 1982) and the value of “maternal thinking”
in politics (Ruddick 1999; Elshtain 1981). In the legal arena, cultural
and difference feminists have created new concepts like “sexual harassment”
and “date rape” that depend on a specifically female point of view
rather than the standard “reasonable (male) person.” |
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Both understandings of women’s identity have been politically
important. Insisting that women are not some inferior sort of being but
are persons, just as men are, has enabled women to gain access to
greater power and resources. Acknowledging difference ―
particularly when it comes to issues of sexuality and reproduction ―
also has been important for women. It helps to create societies that
recognize the lived experiences of all their members rather than basing their
practices on norms that fit only half the population while unjustly ignoring
or penalizing the other half. But for feminists, the underlying dilemma
remains. To insist on personal equality is to take advantage of powerful
rhetoric. Yet to buy into disembodied equality is to ignore realities
of sex and gender difference that are still significant in our cultures and
still speak in some persuasive ways to women as well as men. Gender has
not (yet?) become an interesting but largely irrelevant characteristic, like
eye color; gender carries real and often determinative social meanings. |
12 |
On the other hand, positing any female “essence” ignores
important differences between women. Worse, it can be used against women,
to justify once again their exclusion from certain arenas like the pulpit,
the Citadel, or the Oval Office. Feminist theorists have begun to argue
that women need to reject the mutually exclusive dichotomy of “difference
versus equality,” just as they have rejected so many modern dichotomies
harmful to women. In a postmodern mode, they attempt instead to find
other frameworks that understand how gender identity is contextually and
diversely constructed. These would allow for multiple identities or fragmented
subjectivities that are performative and free but not misconceived as simply
chosen. For example, the well-known Signs exchange in 1997
between Felski and Braidotti drives in such directions. |
|
Motherhood Matters |
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Motherhood is an especially interesting site of contested
meaning for women’s identities. Pregnancy and childbirth are biological
markers of sexual difference. As Sharon Hays points out in The
Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood (1996), moreover, an ideology of
“intensive motherhood” has evolved as a foil to our reifying the competitive
pursuit of self-interest in public and professional settings. She
argues that we have raised the societal standards of motherhood to
unrealistic levels. Thus we hold individual mothers primarily
responsible for child-rearing practices that are increasingly child-centered,
expert-guided, emotionally absorbing, labor-intensive, and financially
expensive. She writes that our cultural ambivalence about competition
and self-interest have led to over-idealization of motherhood as the
opposite. This has the consequence that working mothers ―
expected to be ambitious and competitive in the workplace but nurturing and
selfless at home ― face impossible double-binds. |
14 |
Patrice DiQuinzio echoes this judgment in the title of her book
on The Impossibility of Motherhood (1999). Being a “mother” and
a “person” are incompatible identities in current social and political
contexts, dominated as they are by our ideology of individualism. She
argues that individualism conceives human subjectivity as “a set of
capacities, primarily reason, consciousness, or rational autonomy, which
enable rational, independent self-determination and action” (p. 7). For
these, the body is supposed to be merely instrumental. Thus this
subjectivity is fundamentally disembodied. It is also coherent, stable,
and singular. And it is the source of political action and entitlement. |
15 |
This is in stark contrast to what DiQuinzio calls the ideology
of “essential motherhood.” That conflates motherhood with
womanhood: making motherhood inevitable and natural for women. It
requires women’s “exclusive and selfless attention to and care of children
based on women’s psychological and emotional capacities for empathy, awareness
of the needs of others, and self-sacrifice” (p. xiii). Personhood or
subjectivity means a unified, self-interested, rational actor. But
motherhood, beginning with the blurred boundaries of the pregnant body,
neither stays wholly singular nor allows room to consider only oneself.
As a result, motherhood and subjectivity are inherently at odds with one
another in our current cultural conceptions. Yet by such a standard, if
women are mothers, they are not “citizens.” They are not autonomous
persons who can exercise political judgement. Mothering becomes
important for feminism because it encapsulates the “difference versus
equality” dilemma underlying so many issues. |
16 |
DiQuinzio rejects this dichotomy in favor of the “paradoxical
politics of motherhood.” These face the challenge of theorizing
embodied subjectivity. Rather than seeing minds and bodies as opposites
in competition for superiority, these maternal politics take seriously the
ways in which minds and bodies constitute themselves mutually. They
understand subjectivities as partial, fragmented, and sometimes
contradictory. They recognize how subjectivities continually redefine
or renegotiate themselves social relationships, some reciprocal and others
not. In these ways, “maternal embodied subjectivity” represents not “a deviant or failed subjectivity, but a paradigmatically human subjectivity,
[with] pregnancy as a crucially important instance of the embodied processes
of subject constitution in which all subjects continually participate. . .
. [It] represents the mother-child relationship, in which a mutual,
reciprocal, and ongoing constitution of subjectivity occurs, as a
paradigmatically human relationship” (p. 245). This helps women by
removing the false, forced choice between personhood (subjectivity, political
agency, etc.) and being a mother. It highlights the value of women’s
experiences (and feminist principles) for all persons. Learning from
postmodern criticisms of modern individualism, it creates a conception of
subjectivity that is more likely to prove realistic and useful. |
17 |
Yet an urgent question is how to get from philosophical
contemplation of such paradigms of identity to widespread political and
cultural transformation of them. After all, the power of both individualistic
and maternal ideologies comes less from any conscious articulation than from
their everyday domination of our cultural understandings and practices.
We just “know” what it means to be a good citizen ― or a good
mother. How do we construct and transmit such identities? |
18 |
One powerful way is through popular culture. As Annette
Kuhn notes, “the ideological ― a society’s representations of itself
within and for itself and the ways in which people live out and produce those
representations ― may be seen as a vital, pervasive and active element
in the constitution of social structures and formations” (1994, p. 4).
Representations in popular culture become, not mere entertainment, not
something beneath political inquiry, but important sites of political action. |
19 |
As scholars have emphasized for decades, film, television, and
other popular media not only reflect aspects of social life but help create
them. So feminists have reason to be concerned with representations of
women’s lives and identities in popular films. “If it is accepted that
‘the cultural’ may be subsumed within ideology,” along with economic
relations, says Kuhn, “then it becomes possible to argue that interventions
within culture have some independent potential to transform sex/gender
systems. In other words, ‘cultural struggle’ becomes a political
possibility” (p. 4). Analyzing representations of motherhood in
Hollywood films can become moments of feminist praxis. They can have
important political consequences because film representations often have
important practical implications for the everyday lives of American
women. The understandings of motherhood and personhood presented on the
silver screen are among the resources women use in constructing their own
identities. Nothing less than political power and action are at stake. |
|
Women’s Identities |
20 |
With these considerations in mind, let us turn to an analysis
of motherhood and women’s identities portrayed in the cinematic version of One
True Thing. When the film was released in 1998, previews and
advertisements marketed it as the latest in a long line of melodramas for
women. In particular, they promoted it as a mother-daughter
relationship film. Its predecessors in the genre would include Terms
of Endearment (1983) and Steel Magnolias (1989). Like them, One
True Thing has a plot that turns on the conflicted relationship between a
mother and her daughter. In all three films, the relationship reaches a
crisis occasioned by the terminal illness of one of the women. Such
films feature familial complications that echo continuing tensions in social
structures. Eventually their heart-wrenching events culminate in a
tear-jerking deathbed scene. Then the denouement dwells on how survivors
learn and make good come from the loss. |
21 |
Here the focus is on how One True Thing problematizes
maternal subjectivity. It tries to complicate and question the modern
archetype of the “good mother.” In its representations of motherhood
and daughterhood as resistance to the mother, it provides one possible
glimpse of an embodied maternal subjectivity. Thus the film is a
popular attempt to grope toward DiQuinzio’s “paradoxical politics of
motherhood.” In the gaps and contradictions between the original novel
and its screen translation, moreover, there are opportunities to see how this
maternal subjectivity remains difficult to imagine. These contrasts
help show where the choices between motherhood and personhood are still too
mutually exclusive in our cultural and political lexicons. |
22 |
Both the novel and the film begin by setting up a dichotomy
familiar to most audiences: a contrast between the domestic, selfless,
traditional wife and mother and the ambitious, independent, single career
woman. The film demonstrates this in one of its earliest scenes, not
present in the novel. The cosmopolitan daughter Ellen Gulden dashes out
of her busy Manhattan office, shoves her way through a crowded subway
platform, and boards a train for the “alternate universe” of the film.
Her destination is the idyllic suburban home of her childhood, where she is
headed for her father’s surprise birthday party. |
23 |
We have already learned in a voiceover that acquaintances have
described Ellen as cold, insensitive, condescending, with ambition as her
religion. The film demonstrates this visually with shots of her working
late at night in a deserted office, mixing packets of Kava with Coca-Cola in
her determination to stay awake and get ahead. Ellen herself admits, “I
was ambitious. I still am. My father taught me to work hard at
everything I do and I always have. . . . I was never close to my mother
growing up.” Arriving at home for the party, her brother asks Ellen why
she is not in costume, since the guests were to come dressed as their
favorite literary characters. (The father is a literature
professor.) An urban sophisticate clad all in black, Ellen replies,
“You know I can’t do costumes. It’s just so . . . .” “Human?” her
brother supplies. “ Mom!” Ellen retorts contemptuously. |
24 |
The contrast between mother and daughter becomes even sharper
when Kate Gulden emerges from the house. She calls out, “Yoohoo!
There she is, there’s my girl,” while embracing the reluctant Ellen in an
exuberant hug. Kate is in full costume, wearing a frilly gingham dress,
yarn pigtails, and ruby slippers as Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz.
The outfit makes her look girlish and unsophisticated; and when she asks
Ellen to guess her character, the daughter begins to sing, “If I only had a
brain . . . .” This song from the movie musical is the gist of Ellen’s
assessment of her mother. She surveys the birthday feast spread out on
many counters in the huge, well-tended kitchen and remarks dryly, “This must
have taken you days.” Her mother hesitates then replies, “Oh.
Well, thank you,” even though Ellen’s tone of voice was more amazed (that
anyone would waste so much time cooking) than complimentary. |
25 |
When a guest asks Ellen her character for the party, she
saucily replies, “Lizzie Borden ― took an ax, gave her mother forty
whacks.” In the kitchen, she picks up a knife and starts slicing a loaf
of bread, but she is obviously out of her element. Her mother watches
her with distress, first diplomatically handing her a bread knife (to replace
the large paring knife she’s inadvertently hacking away at the loaf with),
then suggesting that she “saw it, back and forth” as Ellen continues to
mangle the loaf. Ellen glares at her but then slices her finger, and
Kate offers a home remedy for the bleeding that involves a brown paper
bag. When Ellen ducks to escape her mother’s hug and attention, she
clumsily knocks a plate to the floor. Ellen could not be more out of
place, but Kate simply tells her to save the shattered pieces for one of her
craft projects. When Kate sails out of the kitchen to answer the door,
calling “Hello! There’s no place like home!” (alluding to her Dorothy
costume), Ellen mutters a heartfelt, “ Thank God.” |
26 |
Though Ellen clearly does not want to identify with her mother
or her mother’s domestic world, she idolizes her father. When her
mother compliments her on her latest magazine piece, she dismisses it as “not
a big deal.” What she really wants to know is, “Do you think Dad read
it?” Her mother’s praise is discounted, but when she finally gets her
father alone later in the evening, his approval of her work is all that she
craves. She is crushed by his criticism that her writing is
“overemotional” and needs to be “more muscular.” It is the opinion of
the father that is powerful and valuable here. When George Gulden comes
through the door of the house, everyone yells “Surprise!” Kate hangs on
his arm, clapping and giggling. In contrast, Ellen stares at him
adoringly from across the room, remembering a similar scene from her girlhood
when one of his classes gave him a standing ovation; she clearly holds him in
that same kind of heroic awe. Both father and daughter consider
themselves highly intellectual, sneering at the costumed party guests who
“seem to get all their literature from Disney.” From their
conversation, we learn that he was also a magazine writer when he was in his
twenties and that he has won a National Book Award. His daughter’s
choice of career and her attitudes indicate that she aspires to be like him
― and not at all like her mother. |
27 |
Ellen loves the public, professional world of her career
― her father’s world. But it is in the opposite world of home
― of maternal domesticity ― that she comes to care for her
mother, diagnosed with cancer. Her father demands that she quit her job
in the city to tend her mother, and resentfully Ellen complies. When
she wonders why he cannot take a sabbatical or hire a nurse to care for Kate,
he asserts the demands on his career but dismisses the impact that leaving
New York will have on Ellen’s. “You can freelance from here. . .
. your mother didn’t get a nurse when you had the chicken pox! Your
mother needs you, Ellen. Jesus Christ, you’ve got a Harvard
education, but where is your heart?” Ellen is about to
enter the classic double-bind, the expectation of both individual
subjectivity and maternal care-taking. Her father has trained her to
excel academically, but now he expects her to be nurture more or less
maternally. |
28 |
The next shots show Ellen resigning from her job, subletting
her apartment, and getting on the train to leave the city. She yields
to her father’s wishes; but as she stands for a long time outside the large,
storybook house of her youth, silently gathering the strength to go inside,
we sense her reluctance. She has not come home because she wants to,
but because she is bending to her father’s will. Despite her ambition
and independence, she lacks the ability to separate from him and make her
own, adult choices. Ellen may resist being her mother’s daughter, with
its resonance for Nancy Chodorow’s “reproduction of mothering” cycle for
women’s identities (1978); but she is still her father’s. This implies
that simply rejecting domesticity or emotion, the stereotypically “feminine,”
in favor of individualist and masculinist values of rationality, competition,
and career success does not dissolve the double bind for women’s
identities. The dilemma of subjectivity is too complicated to dispel it
by simply choosing to emulate the father rather than the mother. |
29 |
Ellen’s anger and disgust at taking over her mother’s role in
keeping the household running for her father reinforces the contrasts between
Ellen and Kate. Shortly after Ellen returns, her father asks her to write
the forward to his latest book. She is flattered and immediately
agrees; but she is confused and deflated when, along with the manuscript, he
also hands her his shirts to be laundered and mended, as if these are both
tasks for which she is equally suited. She complains repeatedly about
her father’s lack of participation in any of the household chores.
After cooking Thanksgiving dinner for the entire family, for which she gets
little appreciation, she asks her mother, “How do you do this? All day,
every day in this house and no one notices? Doesn’t that drive you
crazy?” Kate looks genuinely surprised and replies, “This is my family,
Ellie. These are the people I love. Maybe it’s time for you to
start thinking about going back to New York, to your writing, all the things
that you like to do.” |
30 |
Ellen does not go back to the city, however, as her mother’s
health fails more rapidly. During the illness, we see Ellen begin to
re-evaluate her mother’s life. Her initial disdain of Kate’s culinary
skills becomes admiration after she volunteers to cook lunch for the
“Minnies,” the women’s group of community volunteers to which her mother
belongs: “Show me how. It can’t be that hard.” The bright,
shining kitchen becomes a chaotic mess of eggshells and spilled flour.
Every pot and pan is in use. The cake comes out lopsided, the chicken
burned; and the scene culminates in a spectacular grease fire. Ellen
begins to have some appreciation for her mother’s talents and skills. Much
later we see her easily cooking the Thanksgiving turkey and even reorganizing
the kitchen while baking her brother a pie: quite a change from her
initial ineptitude and contempt. |
31 |
Ellen begins to see that there is more to her mother than the
simple June Cleaver image that meets the eye. Frustrated that they have
wasted an entire afternoon driving around aimlessly and singing along to the
radio with one of her mother’s friends, she discovers that Kate has been
quite purposeful. The friend is suffering from severe depression, and
it has been Kate’s turn to get her out of the house and cheer her up.
Ellen reluctantly takes part in the Minnies Halloween carnival, only to
discover that she actually enjoys it. At first, she spends all her free
time trying to write a story for her former magazine; but we later see her
working on her mother’s craft projects instead. At one point, an
exhausted Ellen tells her visiting boyfriend, Jordan, “I am just tired, very
tired. Being my mother is very tiring.” Having not seen Ellen
since she left New York, still the hard-driving and scornful career woman, he
replies, “Come on, there is nobody more different from their mother than
you.” The change in Ellen is obvious when, instead of agreeing
gratefully, she screams angrily back, “That is the stupidest thing that you
have ever said!” |
32 |
Unfortunately the film simplifies this transition between
emulating her father’s values to her mother’s, making it a simple switch of
loyalties. Plotwise this occurs when Ellen learns of her father’s
marital infidelities. Suddenly the idol has feet of clay. She
begins to sympathize more with her mother and to suspect her father’s
motives, going so far as to accuse him of not encouraging her mother to seek
treatment earlier because he didn’t want his life disrupted. The limits
of his genius appear in his writer’s block, his recourse to alcohol, and his
tiresome repetition of the same writing anecdotes. A few times, the film
resists painting him as the villain, showing moments of true passion and
affection between George and Kate. Yet too often, it devolves into
presenting another oversimplified dichotomy: cold, heartless
masculinity (George) versus mindless, nurturing maternity (Kate). Then
the only question is which choice is right? By the film’s logic, the
maternal, selfless values of Kate seem superior. Is this a defeat for
feminist empowerment, for women’s attempt to claim subjectivity? |
33 |
It is true that Kate has made sacrifices. She, too, knows
about her husband’s failings. After Ellen finds out about her father’s
affairs and becomes increasingly hostile toward him, her mother confronts her
about her rage: |
|
There is nothing you know about your father that I don’t
know, too ― and understand better. You make concessions when
you’re married a long time that you don’t believe you’ll ever make when
you’re beginning. . . . you look at your husband, and he’s not the
person you used to think he was, but he’s your life. The house and the
children and so much of what you do are built around him and your life, too,
your history. If you take him out, it’s like cutting his face out of
all the pictures: there’s a big hole, and it’s ugly. It would
ruin everything. It’s more than love, it’s more important than
love. . . . It’s so much easier to be happy, to learn to love what you
have ― and you have so much, my love ― instead of always yearning
for what you’re missing or what you imagine you’re missing. It’s so
much more peaceful.
|
|
Kate’s compromises are not made blindly or unthinkingly,
and Ellen realizes that she has underestimated her mother’s insight and
strength. As Quindlen has Ellen elaborate in the novel, “I’d taken a
laundry list of all the things she’d done and, more important to me, all the
things she’d never done, and turned them into my mother, when they were no
more my mother than his lectures on the women of Dickens were my
father. . . . Our parents are never people to us, never” (1994, p.
171). |
34 |
It is in recognizing this subjectivity of each of her parents,
but especially of her mother, that Ellen begins to grow up and claim her
own. She realizes that she has seen her mother in the way that
DiQuinzio’s ideology of “essential motherhood” encourages our culture to view
mothers: as objects, existing instrumentally to nurture, support, and
selflessly sacrifice themselves for another, the constant background against
which another’s subjectivity can develop. “We’d made her simpler all
her life, simpler than her real self. We’d made her what we needed her
to be. We’d made her ours, our one true thing” (p. 276). |
35 |
An inherent aspect of subjectivity is its complexity:
that it can be comprehended only in part by another. In the film, this
ultimate unknowability of another person is communicated via the mystery
surrounding Kate’s death. An autopsy reveals that she has died of an
overdose of morphine. As her cancer became more debilitating and she
became more helpless, she asked both her husband and her daughter to help her
end her own life. We even see Ellen crushing up the pills, considering
it, then sweeping them into the trash; and we can appreciate the irony of her
no longer having any desire to get rid of her mother, but wanting to hang on
to their relationship for as long as possible. |
36 |
Later Ellen finds the empty pill bottle in the garbage and
suspects that her father has fed them to Kate. But in the film’s final
scene, George finds Ellen planting bulbs at her mother’s gravesite. He
tells her how much he admires her courage in helping Kate take her own
life. Ellen is stunned. Apparently Kate herself somehow had the
strength to do what neither of George nor Ellen could. This shocking
discovery causes Ellen once more to re-evaluate her understanding of who her
mother was. Yet in the film, it is George, not Ellen, who gives the
“one true thing” speech. Coming from the wayward but repentant
husband, it sounds more like a tribute to the saintly wife and mother, affirming
her identity as the touchstone of the family, than a recognition of the
unplumbed depths of her subjectivity. The film’s ending seems in this
respect almost to subvert the novel’s meaning, by reifying Kate as
too-good-to-be-true, the “one true thing,” rather than as a complex, flawed,
valuable person. |
37 |
The film also undermines the quest for maternal subjectivity in
another scene where it differs from the novel. After Ellen returns
home, her mother suggests that they have a book club, and they choose three
novels to read together. The first is Jane Austen’s Pride and
Prejudice (1987). In the film, the two discuss the book while
having a picnic in the park, and the visual contrast between Ellen and Kate
is as stark as the character contrast that they discuss between Austen’s
Elizabeth and Jane Bennett. Ellen is dressed in her usual black,
including a leather jacket, and serious-looking glasses with dark rims.
Kate is wearing a flowered blouse and dark red, embroidered sweater, while
her blond hair is prettily curled: the epitome of femininity.
Kate objects to the way that Austen “makes the sweet and domestic” sister
play “second fiddle to Elizabeth, the outspoken and smart one.” As
Ellen keeps trying to interrupt, unsuccessfully attempting an edgewise word,
Kate goes on, “There’s another book that does it too. Little Women.
Yes, the writer sister, she puts her in opposition to the one who has babies
― Meg.” |
38 |
At this point, the film cuts abruptly to another setting.
But in the novel, this scene is much longer and involves a real exchange
between mother and daughter. Ellen learns that her mother is more
educated than she had suspected, familiar with many classics of literature.
Kate insists that “women writers of all people should know better than to
pigeonhole women, put them in little groups, the smart one, the sweet one”
― making it clear that her objection is not merely to the valuing of
the “smart” one over the “sweet” one, but to the dichotomization
itself (Quindlen 1994, p. 42). When Ellen says that Jane and Elizabeth
are perhaps mere prototypes of women, equal in their admiration for one
another, Kate disagrees: “No, they’re real enough, both of them, Jane
and Elizabeth. Jane admires Elizabeth, and Elizabeth admires herself”
(p. 42). Later, after Kate’s death, Ellen thinks, my father “did
what so many men do: he divided women into groups . . . the woman of
the mind and the one of the heart. Elizabeth and Jane Bennett. I
had the misfortune to be designated the heartless one, my mother the mindless
one. It was a disservice to us both but, on balance, I think she got
the better deal” (p. 281). |
39 |
The novel insists that women have minds and hearts. To make women choose between reason and emotion, private and
public, selfhood and motherhood is a destructive mistake. The character
of Kate, in the film but even more in the novel, demonstrates what a
connected selfhood, an embodied maternal subjectivity, might be. She is
not completely passive or dependent; she makes deliberate choices about when
and how to assert herself, and when not. |
40 |
Throughout the film, we see Kate making the choice to
smooth over conflict in the family by gently changing the subject or offering
some cheery observance unrelated to the issue at hand. During
Thanksgiving dinner, for example, the mood grows tense when George is
offended by another writer’s comments about his novel. Kate defuses the
situation by looking around the table at the feast Ellen has prepared (but
her father not even acknowledged let alone complimented) and remarking, “This
all looks wonderful, dear. Could you pass the mashed potatoes?”
Initially Ellen would have been frustrated or dismissive of her mother’s
tactic. She would have viewed it as an inability to hold her own in an
argument, debate the logic of different positions, or, most importantly,
triumph over another person in a battle of wits. It takes her most of
the film to realize that her mother’s strategy may have indicated a position
of strength, not weakness. |
41 |
The film also shows Kate’s maternal power ― and her
struggle with its loss and limits ― as her health begins to seriously
deteriorate. One afternoon, after Kate has been forced into a
wheelchair most of the time, she is in the kitchen to direct Ellen in baking
a pie. As Kate tries to maneuver around the kitchen, she grows
increasingly frustrated from her inability to reach the oven or do any baking
tasks she so recently took for granted. When she tries to tell Ellen
where to find a pie plate, only to have Ellen reply that she has moved it in
her own reorganization of the kitchen, Kate angrily grabs the plate and
smashes it onto the floor. She wheels out of the kitchen sobbing,
furious at how her body is betraying her and changing her life. She
fumes, “It’s my kitchen. I’m still the mother. I’m still the
mother here.” Being the mother has been for Kate a position of action,
power, and freedom ― as well as compromise, deferral, and accommodation. |
42 |
Kate’s intelligence, wisdom, and fierce strength ― even
the courage and autonomy to decide when her life would end ― do not
come at the cost of surrendering her compassion, warmth, and
domesticity. All these intertwine. And Ellen, who begins by
valuing the life of the mind as the be-all and end-all of existence, shifts
allegiance somewhat as she spends more time with her mother. During one
argument, her father snarls, “Have you lost your mind?” And she shouts
back defiantly, “Maybe!” By this time, for her, that is no longer an
utter defeat. |
43 |
In the end, Ellen refuses to choose just one side of the
dichotomy: the young woman who plants bulbs and smells “the lilacs
under the soil” just as her mother did is the same young woman who returns to
New York and resumes a high-powered career in journalism. She forgives
her father his failings, but no longer romanticizes him. She claims her
own subjectivity, but not on individualistic terms: she is a person for
whom both the head and the heart are necessary and for whom both knowledge
and love have been costly. |
|
What Counts |
44 |
Theorizing mother-daughter relationships may be important for
feminism in a larger, metaphorical sense. The second wave of feminism
often used the language of “sisterhood,” but explicitly rejected “living our
mothers’ lives.” Second-wave feminists imagined these to be the lives
of quiet desperation and oppression evoked by Betty Friedan in The
Feminine Mystique (1964). As second-wave theorizing flourished
during the 1970s and ’80s, feminists celebrated the ability to make choices
and access opportunities unavailable to their mothers’ generation. But
as time has continued to pass, many of these same feminists have had children
of their own. They are now mothers as well as rebellious daughters or
powerful sisters. They have begun to seek ways to define the movement
do not simply react against the previous generation of women, but create
continuity and extend possibilities to their daughters. |
45 |
The need for women is to make sense of their own maternal
identities in terms of their feminist beliefs. Even in public spheres,
as opposed to the directly familial, women have faced this dilemma. In
corporations and academia, older and younger women struggle with mentoring
relationships and what feminism can mean across generations. What do we
owe to one another? Are we simply in competition with one another to
see who can achieve the most? Has the third wave of feminism been
developing in contrast or even opposition to the agenda of the second wave? |
46 |
Feminists have been addressing these issues. Generations:
Academic Feminists in Dialogue (Looser 1997) is an early collection of
essays that confront such questions. Diane Elam writes there that “the
development of generational conflict, of disrespectful daughters and
oppressive mothers, is not a wholly new phenomenon. . . . What is
perhaps new is how crucial the question of power within feminism has
become” (p. 67). In the same book, Rebecca Dakin Quinn insists that we
need to go beyond “simply killing our mothers and committing violence against
our sisters in the name of institutional recognition, advancement, and power”
(p. 177). She argues that feminism has been successful in criticizing
patriarchal oppression but has gotten stuck somewhere between a utopian
vision of female solidarity and fragmented paralysis due to the differences
between women. Perhaps this revisits the “difference versus equality”
dilemma? “Competition, compartmentalization, and commodification appear
to have carried the day, for want of an alternative model of doing
business. Mothers and daughters stand divided: how long until we
are conquered?” (p. 177). It is simplistic and short-sighted to treat
mothers as traditional, old-fashioned, and limited to the private sphere
while urging daughters into the public sphere of work and masculine
values. That preserves a mistaken dichotomy. |
47 |
The opening shots of One True Thing express this choice
neatly. In a black-and-white flashback to her childhood, Ellen
remembers a car trip with her family. At one point, this serious little
girl announces, “I have to go to the bathroom.” Her father looks
annoyed and snaps, “Can’t you hold it?” Ellen, not wanting to displease
him, looks down at the floor then crosses her legs and vows, “Yes, I
can. . . . I’ll practice ‘mind over matter.’” Her father, the
epitome of cold logic and disembodied rationality, says, “Atta girl.”
Her mother, knitting in the front seat, seems to doubt the feasibility of
this plan, murmuring, “Mmmmm, I don’t know . . . .” As if to distract
the little girl and somehow make this denial of a physical need more bearable,
she looks out the window and exclaims, “Look at the baby cows, Ellie!”
From the back seat, Ellen remarks primly, “I’m reading, Mom. And
baby cows are calves.” |
48 |
Later in the film, after her relationships to father and mother
have changed, Ellen remembers this scene, including her mother’s quiet
reply: “That’s right, Ellie. Baby cows are calves.”
The first memory highlights how she identifies with her cerebral and
demanding father. It also suggests her unquestioning acceptance of
“mind over matter,” valuing mind over body, and her father’s reason over her
mother’s emotion. At a pivotal moment in the film, the second flashback
offers a different message. |
49 |
During the whole time she has been caring for her mother, Ellen
has been working on a story about a Senator involved in a scandal. She
calls sources and pursues interviews, believing that this story can somehow
salvage the journalism career she has left behind. Eventually the
disgraced Senator gives a press conference, but Ellen cannot get back to New
York City in time to cover it. Frustrated but determined, she waits
outside his hotel until he emerges, then pretends to be an old college
classmate who recognizes him and strikes up a friendly conversation.
Ellen lies, telling him she needs a ride to the airport so she can get home
for her daughter’s birthday party, and he kindly offers to share his
limousine. |
50 |
(This is not the first time she has deceived and played on
others’ emotions to get information for the story. Earlier we see her
phoning a hospital to say that she is a close friend of the Senator in order
to learn when he will be released from drug rehabilitation. It is telling
that, when her mother overhears this conversation, Kate shows immediate
concern and wants to know which of Ellen’s friends is in trouble. Ellen
simply rolls her eyes, puts one hand over the mouthpiece, and answers, “It’s
kind of a work thing, Mom.” In honest confusion, Kate replies,
“Oh. I thought you said it was a friend.”) |
51 |
Ellen jumps at the chance to get a scoop from the unwitting
Senator, and we see her eagerly lapping up quotes and encouraging his
confidences as they ride through Manhattan. When he muses, “I don’t
know what happened. . . you try and you try to get ahead, and then
―” Ellen nods understandingly and murmurs, “You just ― lose
yourself.” He continues, “You wake up, and your life is a
disaster. I just hope I can make it up to my wife and kids.
That’s all that counts. All that counts.” Ellen agrees, “You’re
right. They’re the ones who love you. That’s what counts.” |
52 |
Suddenly the obsequious nods stop, and she falls silent.
Conflicting emotions flash across her face. She swallows hard and seems
to realize that perhaps she actually believes what she has just said.
Could it be true that she has in some way “lost herself” instead of making a
success of her life? Could it be that “what counts” is nurturing and protecting
relationships with “the ones who love you?” Could it be that emotional
connection can be even more valuable than ambition, career success,
publishing a novel, or always being “right” about the facts? |
53 |
That is when the camera cuts from Ellen’s face inside the dark
car to the black-and-white scene which opened the film. As in the
present, Ellen is riding in the back seat of a car. In this second
remembering, she sees her mother more fully, not just in peripheral
vision. In tight close-up, we see along with Ellen the pearl stud
nestled in her mother’s ear lobe and the blonde curls flipped up along the
nape of her neck: the epitome of 1950s feminine iconography. The
camera cuts to Kate’s hands, busily knitting what looks like a baby’s cap or
a child’s sweater. She is not reading, like Ellen or George, who reads
passages aloud from the New York Times while he drives. She
isn’t drilling the children on some bit of knowledge, like their
father. She isn’t arguing with them or correcting them about a fact, as
Ellen corrects her mother about the baby cows. Rather than thinking,
talking, or engaging in some cerebral activity, Kate is doing.
She is silently but industriously creating something useful, something
beautiful, something warm. She is, as always, trying to keep the family
knit together, close and in harmony rather than conflict. |
54 |
As Ellen re-assesses this memory, she seems to recognize her
mother’s effort to distract her as the insightful and compassionate gesture it
was, instead of some naïve delight at spotting the cows. She is able to
notice, and focus on, her mother’s ultra-femininity without dismissing it as
totally useless or lacking value. She is able to question, suddenly,
her assumption that the activity of the mind is always superior to the needs
of the body and the workings of the heart. Kate knew what baby cows
were called; but she did not need to assert her intellectual standing.
Instead she could affirm her daughter’s precocious answer with a smile then
add a rueful nod. Perhaps she wondered if Ellen would ever take her
nose out of her book to look at, and love, the world around her.
Perhaps she sighed because she hoped that Ellen’s brilliance would not keep
her from wanting always to be right rather than sometimes happy or
supportive. |
55 |
It is important to notice that Kate did not discourage or
dismiss Ellen’s intellect in this scene. She accepted and encouraged
it. But her actions indicated that she refused to live or evaluate life
on the terms that George and later Ellen accepted as valid: mind over
body, reason over emotion, ambition over contentment, public over private,
winning over caring. As Anna Quindlen writes in the novel, “We had so
misunderstood her, this woman who had made us who we were while we barely
noticed it. . . . while I would never be my mother nor have her life,
the lesson she had left me was that is was possible to love and care for a
man and still have at your core a strength so great you never even needed to put
it on display” (1994, pp. 285 and 288). |
56 |
George is famous within the family for reminding them that
“less is more,” a saying that reflects his philosophy of writing but also his
emotional distance. Kate instead tells Ellen, “I don’t agree. To
me, more is more.” This philosophy of abundance ― from the
physical luxuriance of chintz and cushions and cinnamon toast at every turn
to the more ephemeral overflow of Kate’s laughter, generosity to friends and
neighbors, and love for her family ― begins to gain credibility for
Ellen. As she ends up saying at her mother’s funeral, “I never knew I
could miss anyone so much” (italics added). |
57 |
This is a turning point for Ellen. Her perspectives have
changed for her parents and her own life. We know this because the next
scene has Ellen call her editor and tell him that she never got to talk to
the senator at all. Clearly her “win at all costs” mentality, in which
getting the story was a game of wits she was ruthlessly determined to win,
with no thought for ethics or harms, has begun to shift. She does not
abandon her ambition or intellect, but she has come to respect her mother’s
priorities. This means revaluing her own relationships, feelings, even
knowledge. |
58 |
The epilogue to the novel indicates this even more strongly
than does the film. In the film, Ellen gone back to journalism ―
albeit as a softer “feature writer” for The Village Voice. In
the novel, she has switched careers completely to become an adolescent
psychiatrist. This new vocation seems to fuse her father’s ambition and
intellect, so necessary for medical school, with the values she has learned
from her mother: compassion, the ability to listen, respect for others,
and humility in the face of their subjectivity. |
59 |
One True Thing highlights the possibility for women to
escape the double bind of equality versus difference, masculine individualism
versus feminine essentialism. It does so at one of our most problematic
sites: motherhood. It suggests some of the ways that women can
refuse to base their identities on cultural dichotomies, even as it shows the
difficulties for such resistance. It demonstrates how subjectivity is
discursive, continually being reconstituted in relationships, and how it is
never completely coherent or knowable by another. In the end, it
suggests, we are each a mystery. By illuminating some of the complexity
and mystery of this one mother and her daughter, One True Thing offers
a glimpse of the possibilities of maternal subjectivity. |
|
© Linda Beail, 2005. |
|
References |
|
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|
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|
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|
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|
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|
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|
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|
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|
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|
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|
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