Latent Image - Fall 1991

Mother/Daughter Rite

by Maureen O'Kicki
Simmons College

Feminist theory has attempted to define female sexuality outside Freud's blatantly sexist theories. Yet one vestige of Freud's theory remains intact: the ambivalent nature of the mother/daughter relationship. For Freud, the hostility between mothers and daughters seems inevitable due to the nature of the intensity of the relationship (and for the mother not giving her daughter a penis). In an effort to free women from such a deterministic view of their mothering role, some feminist theorists have fixed the responsibility for the relationship on the good or "bad" mother. The "good" mother allows the separation of her daughter and the formation of the daughters autonomous self. The "bad" mother does not allow for her daughter's differentiation; the needs and wants of the. mother become indistinguishable from the needs and wants of her daughter. Though the good/bad mother attempts to escape Freud's deterministic view of the mother/daughter relationship, the idealization inherent in the good mother makes escape impossible.

To truly escape the ambivalent mother/daughter relationship, it is necessary to deconstruct the social myth of the good/had mother by examining the mothering process in the context of the political, social and personal conditions that surround her. Such an examination is found in Nancy Chodorow’s Feminism and Psychoanalytic Theery. Chodorow explores the psychological impact of the asymmetrical organization of parenting where the mother is the primary caretaker. The process of differentiation and identification becomes problematic for both sexes, especially for the girl child who identifies exclusively with her mother.

Chodorow's description of the mothering process in today's society provides a means of understanding the visual depiction of the ambivalent nature of the mother/daughter relationship in Michele Citron's film Daughter Rite. Citron's film depicts the painful process of the narrator reconciling her ambivalent relationship with her mother. The film combines footage from home movies of a mother with her two daughters, accompanied by a voiceover with a docu-drama of two sisters' relationship with their mother. In describing their relationships with their mother, both narratives show that complaining about and separating oneself from a mother is, as the title of the film suggests, a "ritual" for daughters. However, the film moves beyond the familiar mother-blaming ritual by exposing the ritual as means of perpetuating the myth of the good/had mother which contributes to the ambivalent mother/daughter relationship. In the process of constructing the "had mother image for the viewer, Citron reveals the ways in which the daughters' perception of their mothers as well as the viewer's, are influenced by social constructs.

The first part of the film creates the image of the "bad" mother, a mother who is invasive, controlling, inconsiderate and selfish. In the opening scene of the two sisters, Stephanie, the younger sister, tells us about the birth of her child. Her mother's presence in the delivery room added to her pain and discomfort so she asked her husband to tell her mother not to come in until after birth, tier mother, she says, has never forgiven her for depriving her of her right as a mother Lobe present at the birth of the grandchild.

In the next scene of the two sisters, Maggie, the older sister, describes how her mother would read her diaries and mail and have no sense that she was doing something wrong. Invading her privacy was just like making her breakfast, buying her clothes and dressing her up. It was her right as a mother. The mother demanded a great deal of Maggie's life because she had nothing else in her life. Stephanie did not experience the same invasion of privacy because she let her mother read all her letters and diaries.

In the beginning of the voice-over, we learn that the narrator's mother is selling her home and moving to Hawaii in response to her husband moving out, She tells us that her mother is running away from her situation, that she is alone and overweight. The narrator is angry at her mother's dishonesty.

The narrator continues to tell us that she is disappointed and hurt that her mother is not stopping to see her first before she moves to Hawaii. Instead, the narrator drives six hours to spend two hours with her mother at the airport. The mother is breaking all ties and ending everything. The narrator feels that she has no home, no mother, and that "it is all over."

From these scenes, the viewer concludes that the rights of the mother conflicted with the needs and desires of her daughters. Any attempt from the daughters to resist their mother's control evoked anger from the mother. It is the daughters' sense that the mother's actions corresponded with her need to live vicariously through her daughters - "Mother did not have much of a life outside her children," Maggie says. This "reading" of the mother supports the "bad" mother theory which sees the mother as over identifying with her daughters as a substitute for her incomplete life.

Citron, in the following scenes, begins to reveal the contradictions in the daughter's reading of the mother. The third scene between the two sisters reflects what they just described experiencing with their mother: control Stephanie and Maggie prepare a fruit salad and from the beginning, it is clear that they have different ideas of what goes into a fruit salad. In the desire to make one salad, they include each other's preferences. Yet this compromise does not seem to please either one. In the end, Maggie eats an orange and Stephanie eats the whole salad. The tedious fruit salad scene shows the two sisters not recognizing each others wants or needs. The viewer's identification and/or sympathy with the daughters is disrupted since the daughters seem tube guilty of what they just complained about with their mother.

In the fourth scene, Maggie is angry at her mother for her financial situation. The mother does not manage her money well and then turns to Maggie for assistance. Stephanie is sympathetic to the mother and has given the mother a loan because she knows that the mother will pay her back. The older sister wishes she had that mother: a mother who will nut be manipulative, who will pay back the money if she says she will, who is able to ask for money directly, not through hints and guilt trips.

The difference accounts of the experience of the same mother exposes the daughters' subjective view of their mother. The viewer's identification with the daughters is questioned by the conflicting images of the same mother. However, any doubts that the viewer has about the "bad" mother label disappears when Stephanie tells us about her mother's boyfriend raping her. When the mother finds her in her bedroom, the mother refuses to acknowledge the rape and turns away from Stephanie and describes what she had for dinner.

The audience, like Stephanie, is stunned at the mother's response. How could any mother who loves her daughter fail not to comfort her daughter? What kind of mother is she to allow her fifteen year old daughter to feel like a "bad" girl after she has been attacked? At this point in the film, the interweaving of both narratives has created an ambivalent mother/daughter relationship. The "bad" mother label seems fixed in the viewer's mind. But the narrator of the voice-over does not allow the viewer to participate in the ritual mother- blaming.

The footage from the home movies shows a mother playing with her daughters, dressing them up, giving them birthday parties, being in a parade of baby carriages adorned with carnations - in sum, presenting the image of a good mother. Yet the graininess of the film coupled with the stilted frames suggests a different interpretation of these images. The "good" mother image is accompanied by the narrator's fears of not only becoming like her mother but her fears of motherhood itself in which she sees the mother as representing anger so it comes out in manipulative ways; confusing strengths and power with control; prying; potting others first and then hating them for it; sneaking food from the refrigerator when she thinks no one is looking; saying one thing and meaning another; being helpless; hating her life but being scared to change it. Yet the daughter's expectations of the mother contribute to this version of motherhood.

The mother is maternal and sexless. (Stephanie and Maggie are shocked to find in their mother's vanity Beyond the Valley of the Dolls). The mother is sacrificial and puts her needs and wants aside for others. (The narrator is angry at her mother for not stopping to see her on the way to Hawaii). The mother has no needs of her own. (Stephanie's mother wanting to he present at the birth of her grandchild was an intrusion). In sum, the mother was once a beautiful, happy young woman but because of her weaknesses and fears, she becomes an overweight, depressed and lonely old woman.

Where do the mother's weaknesses and fear come from? The narrator tells us that her fears and weaknesses came from her mother who totally controlled her, who did not love her the way that the narrator wanted, who was not who she wanted her to be, and who taught her to be weak. After assigning blame to her mother, the narrator begins to understand the legacy of her mother and the function of the sacrificial act.

In the final scene, the mother visits the narrator after two years. Instead of being angry, the narrator is full of love and sadness for her mother. She has not performed the sacrificial act of giving control to her mother and has not taken the "injection" which would consent to her powerlessness. The structure of the film becomes similar to the process of the child's differentiation from the mother as described by Chodorow.

Initially, the child is undifferentiated from the mother and the world at large. (At the beginning of the film, the narrator fears becoming like her mother.) Gradually, the child perceives the self as distinct or separate from the object (mother) and perceives the object subjectively; that is the object becomes what "the child desires, not what the desired is." (The narrator wants her mother to he happy, strong and powerful, not overweight, indecisive, and weak.) Finally, the child perceives the object objectively; that is, the mother is a separate being with the needs and wants of the child. (The narrator sees her mother as a person whose life did not go as she had planned.) (Chodorow. pp. 102-106).

The goal for both the daughter and the viewer becomes separation, not only separation from the mother, but from the institution of motherhood which ascribes mythic expectations of the mother without empowering her socially, politically or personally. In Chodorow's analysis, the absence of the lather leads to exclusive maternal responsibility and the over-identification between mother and child. This "absence of the father" is reflected in the film where men are only mentioned as deserting fathers, rapists and ex-husbands. Chodorow believes that it is necessary for the father to have equal responsibility in child rearing to prevent over- identification with the mother and child as well as to maintain the affective ties that the boy child developed with his mother. Chodorow's emphasis is also on the necessity of the mother to have a "valued role and recognized spheres of legitimate control." (Chodorow, p. 65).

The final scene is a blank screen and the narrator says:

The narrator of the film, unlike her mother, discovers that her sense of powerlessness stems from blaming her mother for not giving her what the mother does not have. The mother-blaming ritual perpetuates the illusion that if daughters had a good mother their lives would be different. Both the viewer and the daughter are challenged to look beyond the mother and more at themselves.

WORK CITED

Chodorow, Nancy. Feminism and Psychoanalysis (New Haven; Yale University Press, 1989)