“In “My Monster/My Self” Barbara Johnson suggests that the issues of mothering and the woman writer can be explored through the meaning of autobiography (“My Mother/My Self”). Taking the work of Nancy Friday, Dorothy Dinnerstein and Mary Shelley as her starting point, she investigates the relationship between the desire to write and the desire to give birth to oneself. In the case of autobiography, she asks, is one always involved in symbolically killing the mother? Does the desire to give birth to a self, to write one’s own story, amount to an inevitable search for identity that culminates in the mother’s death (through separation)? These are important questions, for they force us to consider the manner in which women experience their maternal bond through writing. And yet they remain disturbingly Oedipal in both their formulation and inflection.”
I am reminded here,when reading this quote, of a work entitled “Stranded Objects: Memory, Mourning, and Film in Post War Germany” by Eric L. Santner which discussed and analyized films produced by the offspring of Nazi German children. In this book I hear the echos of “My Monster/My Self” except to say that it more closely resembles “My Father/My Self.”
After the fall of Nazi Germany, many of the children who survived Nazi Germany went on to write autobiographies that allowed them closure and release from the guilt of the atrocities committed by their parents during the Holocaust. Some produced films that allowed them creative expression regarding the war and which helped them to play a positive role in its understanding.
Funny writing should be a way humans can heal their pain, and too, writing also assists in the grieving process, mourning the loss of their German parents’ actions, as many of these parents were simply emotionally unavailable to their childrens needs. Many focused and were pre-occupied with orderliness and cleanliness. As a result, less time was spent connecting to children emotionally in play, and more time was spent on appearances. Many of these former Nazi parents were still alive but these children rejected them, foreclosing contact with them completely.
Writing is a form of maternity in that symbolism can be allocated to the work produced. The sacred act of motherhood; a recreation that may allow one to fulfill the primordial maternal office. There, too, may be a tension involved that once the work is completed, ie: the birthing process done, a release or relief from the tension, from something much bigger and more profound can in effect “re-create” a life.
Considering the metaphor in Plato’s cave and the movement away from the darkness in to the lit opening which is symbolic of the birthing process, one can readily make the identification. For me, this can also symbolize the second narcissistic phase of human life spoken of by Eric Erikson, adolescence and young adulthood where one is asked to discover their identity through academic achievement. It is during this phase the same movement; freeing the shackles, bodily movement away from the metaphorical mother (the cave), journeying towards the lit opening, emergence into the light of day, into one’s own pursuits, ultimately toward adult achievement and self-sufficiency.
Helene Cixous’ Mother’s White Ink
Helene Cixous’s writings are littered with references to the mother and her body, and for this reason they are a good place to mention.
“Her work shows how speech that has become disconnected from the body is a speech devoid of the body’s gestures and breath. She seeks to undo this repression by resuscitating the censored body in writing. The mother, she argues, has a memory of such writing. Through the labour of child/self birth, the mother regains her censored body and breath. Her special relation to breathing allows the mother to write her body [in singular possession], to inscribe it in, what Cixous’s terms, her “mother’s milk”. The breast acts as a privileged topos of female expression: “a woman is never far from ‘mother’…..There is always within her at least a little of that good mother’s milk. She writes in white ink.”
“The pre-Oedipal terrain of the mother’s body is the privileged site of the mother-daughter bond. For Cixous, the daughter learns her pre-verbal language here, her mother tongue. The mother’s discourse is a language of voice and body, a maternal song. Cixous celebrates voice as a pre-symbolic fusion of body and breathe, a continuum that refuses the division and separation of the father’s speech. The Voice songs from a time before law, before the symbolic took one’s breath away and reappropriated it into language under it’s authority of separation.”
“Cixous’s argues that language and writing find their own expression in pregnancy, which is experienced as a series of rhythms and exchanges. It is a metamorphosis that blurs the distinction between self and other, between writer and text. Pregnancy is experienced as contradictory terrain, where pleasure and reality embrace. It is the irreplaceable experience of those moments of stress, of the body’s crises, of that work that goes on peacefully for a long time only to burst out in that surpassing movement, that time of child birth. Like the desire to write, the desire to give birth is a desire to live self from within, a desire for the swollen belly, for language, for blood. Both writing and birth are depicted as continuous processes, as metaphors for bringing forth and delivering.” Much like Plato’s Cave.
Proclivities' Principle Wisdom 