Reading Are You My Mother was an acutely profound experience for me. Bechdel's cyclical and spiraling narration and the similarities between her mother and my own, caused a perhaps hyper empathetic reaction. The cerebral and the emotional cyclically merge and divide, as she brings us intimately into her relationships with Donald Winnicott, Virginia Woolf, and Alicia Miller. All of these fictional relationships become transitional objects, they provide comfort with theory, bridging the gap between Bechdel's psychic conception of her maternal relationship and the external reality of the relationship.
Anxiety is a central theme in Are You My Mother. Anxiety is a survival mechanism in the brain that signals danger. This danger signal causes a reaction that is often referred to as "fight or flight." For people with heightened anxiety, normal or non-threatening situations may be perceived as dangerous or at the very least difficult to predict, eliciting a fight or flight response. Bechdel regularly chooses flight, or avoidance, often anticipating an uncomfortable, anxiety-provoking situation and attempting to prevent it before it even happens. In both Fun Home and Are You My Mother we see that Bechdel is a severely anxious child this is particularly evident in her childhood diary where she obsessively signs over her words with a symbol that means "I think," as a precautionary measure against writing an untruth which could lead to punishment or alienation. Bechdel explains this compulsion as "an attempt to ward off evil from the people I was writing about... By far the most heavily obliterated word is 'I'" (49).
Bechdel uses the framework provided by Winnicott, Woolf, Freud, and Miller to reclaim her "I." We see an example of this on page 55. The perspective is straight forward and the light in the frame illuminates only Bechdel, as if she is watching herself as an omniscient being. Books and her teddy bear, the literal transitional object of her childhood, rest directly above her head, emphasizing their importance. These objects represent stability as they are constant, unchanging, and reliable. Bechdel cannot betray the books as she might a person; she does not need to "ward of evil"/anxiety when it comes to these literary relationships unlike her real relationships where people are impermanent. This impermanence and unpredictability in her external relationships seems to cause Bechdel to constantly to "obliterate the I" out of fear of upsetting those in her life and become unlovable.
The fear of being unlovable and abandoned causes Bechdel to seek her birth mother as well as mother figures in her relationships, upholding the title Are You My Mother? At the end of the memoir, on page 286, we see Bechdel as a child playing "the cripple game" with her mother. The "cripple game" is a metaphor for Bechdel's anxiety. Bechdel is lying on the floor, her mother says "Alison, get off the floor!" to which she responds "I can't, I'm crippled!" Bechdel cites this "as the moment my mother taught me to write," signifying the transcendent nature of writing as the precise pathway out of fear, as an infallible mechanism to understand and make meaning.
I love the concept of "comfort with theory," although I don't know if that kind of meaning-making legitimately works for the narrator in the end. Bechdel's writing, I would argue, frees her from her parents in a way. She is resigned to the fact that she and her mother will never have the relationship that she pines for. I just don't know if immersing herself in all that theory actually improves her ability to cope, or whether Bechdel is merely clinging to the only resolution she can make sense of.
ReplyDeleteThe point about the crippled game as a metaphor for anxiety makes a lot of sense (even though I hadn't thought of it!), as if to say literally crippled by things she doesn't want to face for fear of the result. But, could their game also be representative of another aspect of their relationship- constantly playing along, content with the smallest moments of connection? To me, it seemed as though little girl Allison relished those games with her mother, maybe even because she was aware of anxiety as long ago as that (maybe anxiety that her mother didn't love her as much as her brothers, and those games might be the only thing that was only between them?)
ReplyDeletei LOVE that you chose to discuss anxiety in the book. alison is truly fighting many, many demons from childhood and feels pressured to do her family justice through her book, but mostly doing justice for herself. on page 45 she elaborates on this, when she's sitting with Carol describing her church dream, and Carol classifies her anxiety as "compromise formation": "your unconscious wants to express the pain you feel about your own lost innocence. but your ego wants to keep it repressed...so the compromise is anxiety." WHOA. when i read that, i had to put the book down! so much of her life is revolving around running away from or disguising so much of her own pain, instead of facing it. writing these books shows that she's surpassed her own ability to face it! but...it still feels present and unsettled. hm.
ReplyDeletethe crippled game is so bizarre and that her mother assists her in playing it leads to all kind of questions--you get the sense that they didn't touch much--when the mirror falls, the father holds her.
ReplyDeleteAnna, the anxiety is like invisible thick syrup all over the words and ideas in the book--good theme for a post-- great contribution
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I appreciate your observations on the fight or flight response--I had not made that connection. It makes sense in this context that Bechdel had so much difficulty dealing with her emotions and relationships--when you realize she almost always chose flight over fight.
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