The Legitimate Truth

It seems that Bechdel’s novel Are You My Mother? is about getting to the truth. She uses a myriad of devices to legitimize herself as a reliable narrator, and to validate her experiences as a child. The two techniques I plan to focus on are her treatment of dialogue and her use of outside sources like Donald Winnicott and Virginia Woolf.

Some critics say the moment dialogue enters a piece of non-fiction; it becomes fiction because it is impossible to remember every conversation you’ve ever had. Bechdel uses a variety of techniques to prove to the reader she is telling the truth, the entire truth. For instance, she legitimizes all her dialogue with her mother by showing herself transcribing their phone conversations. She explains, “I must confess that I have taken to transcribing what she says. I don’t think she knows I’m doing it, which makes it a bit unethical” (11). In a way, Bechdel is aligning herself with the reader here by telling us that she is going behind her mother’s back to get the truth.

Bechdel also avoids loosing legitimacy by using little to no dialogue in her flashbacks. There is one line of dialogue in the flashback of Alison leaving for college: “See ya!” (219). The flashback of her mother in the theater has dialogue bubbles of her singing and reciting lines, which also avoids the issue of trying to recall the exact conversation (218). I thought Bechdel’s treatment of the dialogue when her mother is recalling the beginning of her arachnophobia was interesting because the text is in information boxes with quotes around the words her mother is saying in the present (276). It isn’t until the third to last page that Bechdel finally feels confident enough with the reader to admit, “I don’t remember the particulars of our play. I’m inventing this dialogue wholesale” (287).

I felt the Gestalt of Are You My Mother? was not so much a recollection of her relationship with her mother, but a journey through her struggle to see things, “from both sides of the couch – just what it is that psychoanalysts do for their patients” (21). Although she studies Jung, Freud, and Miller, she chooses to focus on Donald Winnicott, a British psychoanalyst pediatrician. Bechdel goes through Winnicott’s theories while unpacking her past relationships depicting how they relate to one another. Winnicott’s theory of The Good-enough Mother is depicted as the focal point of pages 60-61 because it stands out as the only solid colored frame, consists only of text, and is placed in ‘confrontational’ center when applied to the rule of thirds. Around this text block are images of Alison as a baby, her mother, her father, and Winnicott with his therapist. It is as if these images and text are thrown into a blender on this page, mixing Bechdel’s story with Winnicott’s (60-61).

Bechdel blends her family with the Ramsays from Virginia Woolf’s novel, The Lighthouse (256). Here she melds the two families together by talking about the Ramsey’s in the information blocks of text, and filling the rest of the frames with a flashback of Alison’s parents fighting. However, she keeps the narratives separate by writing the text from Woolf in script and not integrating it into the image frames. Here Woolf is given her own page of text, and there are no depictions of herself or the Ramseys, unlike the previous page spread I referenced above where Winnicott is depicted twice (60-61).

Are You My Mother? and The Imposter’s Daughter were about legitimizing the main character’s experiences as children; Sandell did this by researching her father’s past and Bechdel used Winnicott’s psychoanalytic theories. Ultimately, both characters are able to let their mother / father go; Bechdel, “destroyed my mother, and she has survived my destruction” (285). Sandell got healthy herself, which enabled her to let go of her father. Bechdel took us on her journey of legitimization that lead her to the realization that, “She (her mother) has given me a way out” (289). Bechdel’s quest for the truth through dialogue, flashbacks, psychoanalytic texts, and Woolf’s writing was confusing at times, but ultimately enlightening.

~Margaret~