Vivian Gornick’s Mothers & Daughters
What if I become my mother?
Before I was born, my mother worked outside the home.
She went to an all-women’s college, graduated with honors, and embarked upon a decade-long career in advertising, the final stretch of which was spent as the president of an agency she founded herself.
My mother’s company turned a profit in its first year, and she persisted in success even after my older brother came along, balancing work and motherhood, doing feedings during client calls and stepping over the Legos that littered her rented office.
But when she found out she was pregnant with me, she sold the business to become a full-time mom, and so this older version of her has always been a stranger to me, a doppelganger who shares my mother’s shape but not her essence.
I have never known my mother as this separate being, wheeling and dealing and selling campaign ideas.
She became detectable only in the way that dark matter is, through the gravitational force it exerts on other things.
For most of my life, her distinctness from me has felt theoretical rather than real, the way a character in a book seems as if they must be trapped within its covers while the book is on the shelf.
When I was a child, my mother wasn’t a person in the world, she was a woman at home: her life drew meaning from its relational standing—she was a mother, a wife, a connective tissue who tied the rest of us together at the cost of being invisible as herself. She became detectable only in the way that dark matter is, through the gravitational force it exerts on other things.
It is because of her that I fear motherhood. It is because of her that I value it.
In families like mine, it’s not difficult for “mother” to become synonymous with “home.” When this happens, it can come to seem that launching oneself into the world means breaking away from one’s mother. Eventually, an interest in selfhood starts to look coterminous with a rejection of motherhood in its entirety.
It’s not surprising, I suppose, that I should worry that being a full person is incompatible with being a mother: in the narrative I have of my own mother’s life, her tenure as a person appears to end with me.
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In an article entitled “The World and Our Mothers,” published in the New York Times just two weeks before I was born (December 1987), critic and memoirist Vivian Gornick writes powerfully on the topic of our mothers and ourselves, using the lens of literature to illuminate the contours of this primary relationship. Analyzing the work of D.H. Lawrence, Radclyffe Hall, May Sinclair, and Virginia Woolf, Gornick proposes that in the twenty-first century literature has taken a “quantum leap” by shifting its metaphors: formerly, “our idea of the struggle to be in the world [took] its character from the conflict between fathers and sons”; now, it focuses on mothers and daughters, taking as its hinge the daughter’s struggle to separate from her mother.
Gornick writes:
“In the matter of wanting the world, the deeper truth is we are divided against ourselves. We are at once both attracted and repelled. We advance on the world, we shrink from the world, we desire the world, we fear the world. . . . Most of us spend our lives poised between aggression and hesitation.”
If this is the central conflict of life—or at least one important way of representing what it means to be alive—then, Gornick suggests, it’s the relationship between mothers and daughters—shot through with indecision and guilt-ridden rebellion—“that is the crucial one in the matter of the divided self.”
In other words, the story of how we become people in the world is also the story of how we leave our mothers behind, and there’s real horror buried here, especially for daughters, whom the world does not conspire to co-opt. Indeed, the world is often happy to leave us behind; it has no interest in saving us from the atrophy of staying home.
Gornick’s idea is a profound one, made all the more so by the contours of her personal life. Her memoir Fierce Attachments, which the New York Times named “The Best Memoir of the Past 50 Years,” deals with her own struggle to break free of her mother, who she describes in the book as, “all over me, inside and out. . . . I drew her into me with every breath I took. I drowsed in her etherizing atmosphere.” Ultimately, she succeeded. Today she is a childless, single woman who supports herself with writing. As an interviewer for The New Yorker put it, “what Gornick turned out to be . . . is a phenomenon of the twentieth century, a creature who didn’t exist in the Bronx of her youth, where women were wives, widows, or wives- and widows-to-be.”
Reading her work and interviews, it’s not difficult to imagine Gornick’s childlessness as intentional, a conscious step taken to safeguard her selfhood. In “The World and Our Mothers,” she describes Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse as a seminal example of the mother-daughter paradigm, depicting the drama between Mrs. Ramsay and Lily Briscoe as dealing with the question of:
“[W]hether to be in the world or to become one’s mother; whether to supply sympathy to men, the makers of the world, or to make the world within oneself; whether to be odd, lonely, unmarried; an artist.”
There’s a strong duality here—Gornick’s reading does not perpetuate the delusion that women can “have it all.” The “odd woman,” a term Gornick has used to describe herself, and which is borrowed from George Gissing’s 1893 novel of early feminism, is also “lonely,” and “unmarried.” The artist “makes the world within” herself; she does not become the skeleton of other people’s lives.
The skeleton, of course, is essential. But it is also hidden from sight.
When I read Gornick, I tell myself that today’s reality isn’t quite that stark. It’s not so very Victorian as it once was: our mothers are out in the world, they are people and parents. They need not scheme to keep their children home, because the home is no longer their sole domain. It’s possible, especially now, to be both a mother and an artist. Many women are.
But still I am haunted by Gornick’s construction, by the stoic separateness of that final semi-colon. In her phrase seems to lie the entire question: “whether to be odd, lonely, unmarried; an artist.”