82. The Polarizing Ambiguities of Motherhood in Books

Note: Transcripts are generated using human transcribers, and may contain errors. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting in print.

AMY: Hey, everybody! Welcome to another Lost Ladies of Lit mini episode! I’m Amy Helmes.

KIM: And I’m Kim Askew. Last week we had the privilege of speaking to Hilma Wolitzer about her wonderful short story collection Today a Woman Went Mad in the Supermarket, and this idea of writing that speaks honestly about the experience of being a wife and mother really got us thinking.

AMY: Yeah, and there were actually a few moments of discussion with Wolitzer that we didn’t have space to include last week but that really speaks to this. Let’s roll some of that audio.

HILMA: “And somebody, and now I’m blocking another name, who said, “If women ever told the truth about their lives the world would shatter.” and women telling these truths, the world isn’t shattering. People are listening and accepting it. Rachel Cusk’s book about Motherhood – I love that book. It starts out about childbirth, but it’s not really about childbirth. It’s about raising this stranger who demands all your time and all your attention and how your life is altered by this. And it goes on and on and on, as you said. It’s never ending. Which is also wonderful.”

AMY: So that quote she initially referenced is actually from a lost lady of lit. Her name is Murial Rukeyser, if I’m saying that correctly, and she wrote:  “What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open.” That’s from a poem she published in 1968, so kind of around the time Wolitzer’s stories were first being published, in fact.

KIM: Yeah, and it’s so perfect that she brought that up in relation to Rachel Cusk’s memoir about motherhood (that book is called A Life’s Work) because it basically does just that. It told the truth about her life and, in some sense, at least to the critical world and the people who were paying attention to it, split apart in some ways. Cusk’s book is beautiful, and funny and smart and it doesn’t pull any punches when it comes to describing how hard childrearing can be--how much it can take from you on all levels, physical, emotional, and career-wise. But also how wonderful and amazing it is at the same time. She wrote it when her children were very young, so she was in that super exhausting, particularly alienating period of motherhood, if you know what I’m talking about.

AMY: Oh, yeah, I remember.

KIM:  The book came out in 2001 and it made a lot of people angry. One reviewer wrote: "If everyone were to read this book," it said, "the propagation of the human race would virtually cease, which would be a shame." That reviewer was a woman, by the way! 

AMY: Oh my gosh. I was going to say, maybe a bit of hyperbole there. Come on.

KIM: Yeah. And so, because a few years later after she’d kind of processed all this sort of outrage that she didn’t expect (or she said she didn’t) she wrote a piece in The Guardian about it, basically saying how floored she was by people’s response to her book. This was before, you know, people were really talking so much about the ambiguities of being a mom. (You know, we’ll talk about that later, but I think people are talking about that more.) The backlash Cusk felt actually made her feel hugely ashamed and guilty at first, -- not for anything she’d actually done to her children, but for not being 100% beatific about motherhood! She finally realized that she’d basically effed with people’s ideal by writing this book, and in reality there’s a huge spectrum of the experience of motherhood, and it’s going to differ from person to person. The book was really ahead of its time.

AMY: I don’t think I realized that she had written the book that long ago.

KIM: Yeah.

AMY: I’ve never read it, so now I’m really intrigued.

KIM: I think you would love all of her books. I’ve already talked to you about her most recent one, which I can loan to you, but yeah, she’s great. She writes fiction that’s sort of auto-fiction-ish, and this was a memoir…

AMY: So yeah, and this kind of ties into the movie The Lost Daughter that we referenced in last week’s episode as well. I can’t remember where it was from, Kim,  but you’d sent me an article around the time the movie came out and the writer of the piece sort of argued that, you know, oh everybody thinks this movie is so shocking and surprising because it’s touching on a taboo topic about motherhood, a non-perfect mother who abandons her kids, but there are a lot of mothers in literature, if you look back across the years. This idea of the “unnatural” mother. And so I thought that could be something we could talk about today.

KIM: Yeah. Even Lady Macbeth, like, she’s not a mother, but there’s a lot of speculation based on some of the things she says about motherhood that she had maybe miscarried or something like that. So we’re talking Shakespeare…Grendel…

AMY: Right!

KIM: Yeah, so I mean, we’re talking way, way, way back. Anyway, we’ll have to try to find that article somewhere and link to it in the show notes.

AMY: Yeah, if we can figure it out, we’ll link to it.

KIM: But to your point, on the one hand in literature, you have characters like Marmee from Little Women: She’s basically perfect. She’s caring, nurturing, selfless. As a young kid, you know, reading about Marmee and other characters like that, I really wanted that, but it’s not realistic, I don’t think. So yeah, let’s talk about some literary mothers who don’t necessarily live up to that ideal, or mothers who are driven to desperation (or even abandon their children) like Leda in Lost Daughter.

AMY: So in terms of books we’ve already discussed on this podcast, the first character that comes to mind for me is Kate Comstock from A Girl of the Limberlost. That character is a mother who is emotionally abusive — like shockingly so, right? I think we both felt that way when we were reading that book. And then you can drift over even to Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love, you know? That main character, Linda Radlett, basically abandons her daughter at birth and lets her in-laws go ahead and raise the child. And even at birth, Linda tells her cousin Fanny that the baby’s so ugly “it’s kinder not to look.” It’s hard not to be shocked by that.

KIM: Yeah, can you imagine if someone said that now? Then there’s Mrs. Bennett from Pride & Prejudice. Though she’s not a villain, per se, she is selfish in that she makes everything about herself. She’s also just super annoying. Definitely not a “Marmee,” but you know, she has her own reasons for why she kind of acts that way I could argue. 

AMY: Yeah, not sympathetic in an entirely different way.

KIM: Yeah, you have to think about it. You’re like, oh yeah, her husband is actually kind of annoying, and she does have to marry off all those daughters to save them from poverty, because the house is going to be taken over by someone else. Anyway.

AMY: Definitely not a “Marmee.” (I’m thinking Caroline from the Little House books, too. She was pretty perfect, as well.) But getting back to our mothers today, we have characters like Emma Bovary and Anna Karenina who also abandoned their children for their lovers. That’s always a tough one to wrap your brain around. And I kind of took issue with that aspect, actually, of The Lost Daughter. I didn’t love — I mean, spoiler alert for anyone who hasn’t seen that…

KIM: You probably already know by now.

AMY: Yeah, I imagine by this point… the Oscars are probably done by the time this comes out. But I didn’t love Leda’s decision to leave the family, the fact that it was wrapped up in her attraction to that lechy professor. That made me feel a lot less sympathy for her. 

KIM: Yeah, I agree. Adulterous women equal bad mothers is basically the timeworn line of thinking there. But the same thinking doesn’t automatically apply to men. There’s a double standard there, don’t you think? The men sort of, they did just kind of leave and start whatever new life they were going to start.

AMY: Paging Charles Dickens!

KIM: Exactly. And even through the Eighties. I mean, I think there’s more of an idea now of equal partnership than there was even a couple of decades ago.

AMY: Yeah, but when talking about Anna Karenina, though, I think a big crux of that story is like, “Oh my gosh, she’s choosing Vronsky over her son!” But you do feel a lot of her angst at being separated from her little boy, because she’s absolutely obsessed with him in that novel. With Emma Bovary, I think it’s a little bit different, and actually, to get a little “meta” for a second here, I found an essay that Elena Ferrante wrote (and we’ll link to it in our show notes). But she wrote about reading Madame Bovary and how Emma’s attitude toward her children basically cut her, Ferrante, to the core, especially when Emma says of her daughter, “It’s strange how ugly this child is.” And Ferrante wonders if that’s a phrase a woman could ever really say. She thought only a man without children could think up a line like that because it’s so cruel.

KIM: Yeah, it’s very cold.

AMY: Yeah, but as we just mentioned, Nancy Mitford had her character say something very similar about her newborn. But I think Ferrante makes a good point that both Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary were both characters written by men, so that does kind of complicate things even more when we’re looking at this topic.

KIM: It also does call to mind that anecdote about Daisy Fellowes not recognizing her own children in the park.

AMY: But at least she thought they were lovely.

KIM: Yeah, that’s true.

AMY: If you’re not going to recognize your own kids, at least think they’re cute kids.

KIM: Yeah. But to your point, it’s interesting that men wrote both those characters and were able to sort of have them say those things about their children and leave them for men.

AMY: There’s another character, though, that was written by a woman author, who also abandons her children after taking a lover. I’m not going to say any more in terms of storyline, but the character is named Edna Pontellier from Kate Chopin’s The Awakening. 

KIM: English majors out there will probably have read this.

AMY: Yes. Chopin wrote at one point in the novel, “In short, Edna Pontellier was not a mother-woman.The mother-women seemed to prevail that summer at Grand Isle. It was easy to know them, fluttering about with extended, protecting wings when any harm, real or imaginary, threatened their precious brood. They were women who idolized their children, worshiped their husbands, and esteemed it a holy privilege to efface themselves as individuals and grow wings as ministering angels.”  I feel like I saw you have an “a-ha” moment there, Kim.

KIM: I had a moment while you were reading that, because “protecting wings” made me think of the opposite of that, which is moths, and the terrible mother who sacrifices her daughter in Moths [by Oudia] which is another book that we did on Lost Ladies of Lit maybe a year ago or something like that.

AMY: Oh, she was a terrible mother!

KIM: And she was written by a woman.

AMY: Yes, okay.

KIM: It’s been a long time since I read The Awakening. Maybe high school or college. I probably should re-read it, though. It’s making me want to re-read it. 

AMY: Yeah, for sure. But that idea of maternal instinct not necessarily coming naturally to all women is an interesting one, and it reminds me of the book Motherhood by Sheila Heti. I actually just recently read this for the first time. She’s kind of weighing the idea of whether or not to have children, and she actually uses a sort of coin-toss system (like her own version of a Magic Eight Ball) to help her parse through all of these philosophical questions about whether it would be wise or not for her to procreate, basically. It’s a really interesting premise in that sense. relating to being a mother and what you give up or gain in the process. And it’s also a book that I think would appeal to mothers and non-mothers alike, because she kind of just takes you through all of the questions about what being a mother means and what you either give up or gain when you have children.

KIM: Yeah, it sounds like since she was using that way of doing it, it almost could have fallen either way, so somebody who decided not to have children might also appreciate the book just as well.

AMY: Oh, exactly. I mean, I don’t want to give away the ending, but a decision is made by the end. But yeah, I think it’s a book that would appeal to almost anybody. I really enjoyed it. I just lent it to you, Kim, so it’s on your reading list.

KIM: Yeah, I can’t wait to read it. I’ve been wanting to read it. When you think about some of these classic characters from literature like Emma Bovary or Anna Karenina… Anna Karenin… (Oh my god, I can’t even say Anna Karenina) …women who felt like they had no recourse, you realize that times have changed so much. Today women not only have so much more agency but I think there’s also the freedom to vent and discuss these things that didn’t necessarily exist for earlier generations. And as we talked about, I mean, this is fairly recent.

AMY: Yeah, Yeah. It’s actually also making me think of the novel Mrs. Bridge by a man named Evan S. Connell. Hilma Wolitzer actually turned us on to this novel because\ it’s a favorite of hers and she even references it in her story collection. It’s about a prim-and-proper white, upper-middle-class housewife in Kansas City. She leads this very conventional life that’s all politeness and pleasantries and she doesn’t want to ruffle any feathers. He writes the whole novel in these little vignettes, so in that sense it almost reminds me a little bit of E.M. Delafield’s Diary of a Provincial Lady which was our second “lost lady” that we ever covered. So one of these little vignettes that he does is called “Guest Towels” and she basically almost has a coronary because she puts out the nice, brand-new guest towels that nobody’s supposed to use when company comes over, and her son actually deigns to use them. It’s hilarious. And there are so many hilarious moments in the book, but there are so many heartbreaking moments, because she is the way she is, you know? So she’ll do anything, she’ll go above and beyond to avoid having a confrontation with somebody.

KIM: I’m familiar with that.

AMY: Yeah, so it’s very painful and it’s awkward and hilarious, but it’s just this sort of saga, and it covers more than 20 years in her life as a wife and mom. Very bittersweet, in a way. So I would recommend that one.

KIM: Yeah. Oh, I was going to mention The Fifth Child by Doris Lessing, which is another one I haven’t read since high school or college, but I read it in a gothic class, and it’s actually about a woman who’s pregnant. It’s almost like a thriller, a psychological thriller. And the baby is essentially a monster inside her who’s eating her up from the inside, and like, out of control and huge and it’s completely crazy and gross and everything. And I think, you know, it’s obviously a metaphor for having a child and all that gets strained in the process of childbirth and child-rearing and everything. So I want to re-read that one again, too.

AMY: I’ve never read that. Okay. But yeah, like you said, we can now kind of have more honest conversations here about motherhood and say things you couldn’t say outright in previous generations, like, you know, “I’m having a bad day,” even. I think it’s why Dorothy Canfield Fisher’s book The Homemaker, which we also did an episode on, previously, that was such a big deal and had everybody talking when it came out in the, I think it was the Thirties, right?. Like speaking of horror, this wasn’t even a horror novel, but yeah, people took it that way. But yeah, just being able to vent now, being able to talk about it, almost helps kind of dissipate some of that angst, you know? Like it kind of solves the problem in a lot of ways. One of the most unhelpful things you can say to a frazzled mom…

KIM: Oh my god, what is it? I probably have heard it.

AMY: I mean, I know it’s always said with the best of intentions, but when people (usually from an older generation will say something like, “They grow up in a blink of an eye” or “It’ll all be gone in a flash”.... “Before you know it, they won’t be around anymore.”) And I know that it’s true. What they’re saying is dead-on and it’s a good point, but right now, in this moment, I just need to vent, you know what I mean? And so suddenly now I’m not just having a bad day or frazzled, but now you’re making me sad, too.

KIM: You’re sad and guilty! Like, “I’m not appreciating every single second.” And it’s the worst feeling, and you already feel that as a mom anyway. Because you do know every second they’re growing up and growing away from you. Totally. That is the worst thing.

AMY: And it’s just not helpful. It’s like telling somebody that had a terrible day at work, like, “Well, one day you’re going to be retired, you know.” And it’s like, “Guess what? That day is a decade or more from now. So I’ll worry about that in a little bit, but right here, today, I just needed somebody to listen to me for one second.” And like you said, it’s almost like by saying that they’re putting a lid on your emotions, because there’s no comeback to that other than like, “Oh, yeah, you’re right. I guess I’ll shut up. I guess I’ll just sit silently.”

KIM: I should be appreciating it all. And you know, be the perfect mom. It brings back the whole “perfect mom” idea. Like you’re not supposed to be frazzled, you’re supposed to be like Mother Earth every second and that’s just impossible. Oh my gosh, you can tell I have a three-year-old.

AMY: Who’s about to walk into the bedroom at any moment because she didn’t want to go to bed tonight. So yeah, I vow not to say that to younger mothers when I’m older, but footnote: I probably will, because at that point I’ll be feeling nostalgic. And I do understand why people say that.

KIM: Yeah, I already do say it, but you know, not in that moment. So I’ll try to remember not to say it in that moment.

AMY: Yeah, just say, “Is there anything I can do to help?

KIM: Yes, exactly. Or “It is hard. It’s hard for everyone.”

AMY: This episode is making me think of that Calgon commercial… remember that? Calgon, take me away!” When the mom is like flipping out: “The dog! The washing machine! The kids!”

KIM: And you know, there was no way in hell she actually did get a bath. I mean, come on. It Was the Eighties or something. There was no way she got a bath, because I can barely get one now and I have less responsibility than that. Poor Eighties Woman!

AMY: Clearly a dude wrote that ad, because then it cuts to her actually taking a bath and it’s like a porn movie…. Saxophone music and dimmed lighting. No. Nobody’s getting that.

KIM: Yeah, totally.

AMY: I will never forget that commercial. That one always sticks with me.

KIM: And it does make me want to go take a bath right now.

AMY: Alright. Well, maybe we should sign off now. Maybe you can fit one in.

KIM: Okay, that’s all for this episode, tune in next week when we’ll be diving into another great book by a woman author you might never have heard of before. And we’re excited about our guest for next week. He’s blogger, podcaster and PhD Simon Thomas. He’s an expert on women authors from the first half of the 20th century in particular. And he’ll be joining us to talk about one of his favorites with us: Dorothy Evelyn Smith. Her novel O the Brave Music calls to mind A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.

AMY: We love Simon. He’s such a nice guy, right?

KIM: Yeah, he is.

AMY: Our theme song was written and performed by Jennie Malone and our logo was designed by Harriet Grant. Lost Ladies of Lit is produced by Amy Helmes and Kim Askew.