When conformity fails: 2 (Clara B. Jones)

When Conformity Fails: 2

Last evening I viewed The Hours for the second time in a decade. My daughter, ever sensitive to my motivations and limitations, sent me the novel diplomatically, without comment, several years ago. The story would fit the genre of “girls’ literature,” focused upon relationships and failed desires. The Hours uses Virginia Woolf’s book, Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf’s tortured marriage to her husband, Leonard, her insensitivity to the needs of children, and her ultimate suicide as the dramatic focus of two other women and their complex lives. One of the women in the narrative makes a serious suicide attempt, and her son, dying of AIDS, commits suicide as an adult. Perhaps it was inevitable that I identify with this mother who, rather than attempt suicide again, leaves her family to live a solitary life through old age, returning to the home of her son’s best friend, a female editor with whom he once had a love affair, after his death from the virus. I am reminded of a line in a popular song, “In the end, only kindness matters.”, and a late movie scene in which the editor’s college-age daughter briefly hugs the visiting mother is profoundly touching. The dead son, Richard’s, moniker for his mother had been “The Monster.” The disconnect between his perceptions, no doubt filtered through his feelings and what he experienced as a child, represent a primary message of the text—the disconnect between human beings, even in the most intimate of relationships. For many of those labeled “mentally ill” as adults, does this (perhaps inevitable) disconnect occur too early (or too traumatically) in development?*

Four additional perspectives are advanced in The Hours providing provocative and nuanced commentary on human relations. The first view, recurrent throughout the text and in every dyad, is that every relationship is comprised of one individual more dependent, more fragile, and more self-absorbed than the other. Some may “read” the novel and film as showing how these characteristics vary over time and context for each partner. However, I am particularly struck by the manner in which one individual in each relationship appears to stand out as the strong and silent survivor. Certainly this was true in my own marriage, divorce, and aftermath. I was prostrate with depression for a year after my husband left and did not begin to recover some degree of normalcy until another male came into my life. In my parents’ relationship, my already infirm father shrunk to invalid status after the sudden death of my mother. My late sister, a drug addict and social security disability recipient, as I was during the 1980s, and my brother, schizophrenic since a child and social security dependent, suffered even more after my mother’s death while the event seemed to free me to experience the most creative and productive years of my life.

The second view embedded in the text concerns homosexual impulses and partnerships, beginning with Virginia Woolf’s intense attraction for her sister (recall the open sexual experimentation of her Bloomsbury Group), The Monster’s shameless and seemingly spontaneous erotic gesture towards her distraught and barren friend (a woman isn’t a woman unless she has a child, she suffers), in addition to other overt and embedded themes and bonds. The strongest message, perhaps, is that same-sex pairings experience conflicts and dissonance similar to heterosexual ones and cannot be counted on to solve the male-female problem. Indeed, the Quattro of Virginia and Leonard Woolf—two homosexuals in love with and married to each other—is tortuous, Virginia in her lonely world of schizophrenia and Leonard in his futile, indeed, impossible, attempts to reason with her. It is sobering to think that the text’s author may be attempting to say that humans are inextricably locked in a web of self-absorption and loneliness.

As a third point of view, women are depicted as not needing men in The Hours. Although Streep’s character needs the ailing and highly exploitative Richard, with the help of her female partner, she recovers quickly from seeing him thrust himself out of his bedroom window to death. I do not “hear” the author saying that men are not more powerful, in general, than women, but that women need not live under the direct influence of that power—at least in the private realm. As a “man’s woman”, I have always needed men; however, I have rarely needed a lover in my life. I think that I value a man’s approval more than a woman’s; thus, I have often spurned female attention of many sorts—professional, maternal, sexual, and in friendship. I will never know the depth of female relationships depicted in The Hours; although, the text suggests that feminine women exist along some continuum of hysteria, even if outwardly or apparently cool (shades of Freud). Psychoanalytically, hysteria might be considered an anxious manifestation of sexuality and aggression towards the “other” whose presence arouses these strong feelings leading to irrational emotions, thoughts, and behaviors. I recall my mother yelling uncontrollably at my father who listened impotently, listlessly, almost without breath. One almost believed her attacks that she would die unless he followed regimens proscribed by her to create the idealized husband and family that never could occur. As my father’s confidante, I was bereft with sadness for this man who may always have kept alive the very beautiful woman he married in her early twenties and who may have blamed himself for what she had become.

The theme of incest invades The Hours in Woolf’s passionate relationship with her sister and Meryl Streep’s character’s touching relationship with her daughter. The scene of the latter two women lying on the mother’s bed together reminded me of the day, when 15, lying with my own mother in her bedroom, when she sexually solicited me in a very overt manner before I quickly sat up, jumped from the mattress, and left the room. Streep’s character also leaves the bedroom abruptly to answer a doorbell (intrusions to intimacy, always intrusions), just as her daughter reaches for an apparently innocent and needed hug. Innocent or no, the scene reminds us that we all have physical needs and that we are expected to define and to maintain boundaries. My own children, especially my sons, do not think that I have always respected the physical boundaries appropriate to motherhood. Reinforcing this view is a memory evoking both shame and guilt. I visited my children one weekend at a household overcrowded with their father’s large and extended family. My daughter slept in a loft and invited me to share her space. The caring solicitation touched me deeply, and I quickly fell asleep after a sensuous wave, losing the opportunity for something deeper, and more important, an intimate conversation with my daughter and her life, her dreams, her challenges, her emotional and other needs.

Domesticity strikes a friend of mine as the major theme of The Hours. Indeed, the arrangements of the text’s couples are worth exploring as possible statements of the tenuousness but, also, the tenacity of human desires. Richard’s mother “chose life” by an intensely selfish act, recognizing her own limitations in addition to her repulsion for the traditional and, in her case, emotionally sterile marriage in which she was embedded. Richard’s father is depicted as an unobjectionable man committed to the well-being of his family; yet, seductively beckoning his pregnant, silently weeping wife to bed, I could not help but think, “Men have no clue.”

I was a “stay at home mom” for seven years, some of these in Upstate NY, and many moments, hours, days were satisfying. My “type” was Earth Mother, not a hippie, but one who tended her own herb and vegetable gardens, baked bread, foraged for wild foods, sang folk songs, canned her own jams and jellies, created her own recipes. My family, because of the good sense of my ex-husband, spent many hours in the woods, and, had he not introduced me to wilderness, I probably would not have made a career of fieldwork and the study of animal behavior. Domesticity for me, however, had a very dark side, as it did for Richard’s mother. For many years, I was a “rager”**, exhibiting outbursts that my children have told me were frightening, causing my oldest son to have nightmares. Sometimes, I would begin and abruptly stop yelling, lowering my voice to a whisper. However, at other times, my vocalizations were volcanic, demonstrating the severe stress of everyday life as a mother and wife. Sometimes, being in the presence of my children so overwhelmed me that I felt their energy and demands would certainly kill me. I compensated by locking myself in the bathroom or by taking college classes as an excuse to leave them in another’s care. Once, on such an occasion, my youngest son’s arm was dislocated by a babysitter. On another occasion, my daughter broke her foot and I was nowhere to be found. Such experiences only increased my anxieties, and I was often desperate to find a profession or way of being at which I felt competent.

*There are no easy answers to why some are more resilient than others. Further, I have met many people whose experiences were much more traumatic than mine. As an aside, never have I wished to be someone else [“My one regret in life is that I was not born someone else.” Woody Allen :-)]

**For whatever reason, I do not think I raged at my children after my husband and I separated—certainly not during or after my children and I lived in to Costa Rica in 1976...not certain why this is the case. This comment is in no way intended as a rationalization or to transfer blame for my behavior. One trait that generally characterizes me is that I “own” my own behavior. Related to this, I do not generally personalize others' behavior or words. For this reason, perhaps, many events that perturb other women, including, WOC, simply, didn't bother me very much.

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summa cum laude

Your therapist said she wanted you dead, but mother rarely treated you badly. She made a lot of mistakes like neurons misfiring or father getting lost in the forest. Lobelia grew out of oak trees, and howler monkeys walked across a land bridge while jaguars bred in dry season watching toucans feeding insects to their young. You are a woman with army ants crawling in your hair. You are a woman who rode to Cañas on a bus with 5 campesinos and a lizard salesman traveling to Santa Rosa before father baked paca and rice for mother who bought tortillas at the cantina, circuits alive and hot as tarmac in Summer—black and viscous as lake silt. Father hid in mother's closet—her silks touching his cheeks, her scent seductive like Inga flowers—xanthous as her skin at dawn when gray sunlight reminded him of the last time he felt joy.

You build fembots.

Life is unfair and unstable.

Coloreds speak Danish.

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Paris (1985)

"My greatest regret in life is that I was not born someone else." Woody Allen

Oksana Boyko's cost analysis showed AI

is efficient since growth depends on

psychic shifts (and global stability) though

a wave of terrorism has raised alarm. Inflation

is part of the game, but progress can't

be made with martial zeal alone. The

web of proxy power depends on fembots,

and you are determined to expose 

false claims, but there is a chance of system

failure and loss of ice on Earth. You know

there is no free lunch, and French corporations

reap rewards of Europe's markets while Barbara

makes boredom sculptures and text art displayed

in Sean's gallery ruling symbolically and

materially, showing you that fear controls both the

marginalized and elite. You have always been

drawn to men who are sensible and fearless,

using their frontal lobes to negotiate deals, so

you know that morality is an overlay

preventing exposure to the toxic effects of dendrobatids.