Negotiating with Conventional Mother-Daughter Relationships Using Jungian Archetypes

By Chandrakala Ghosh

This paper has a Tumblr post as its central premise. Maintaining anonymity behind a vague username, the creator of the post (@honeytuesday) writes: “Mothers and daughters exist as wretched mirror images of one another: I am all you could have been and you are all I might be.” The relationship between a mother and her (girl) child has been a significant topic of discourse, which has often transcended temporal boundaries. The year 1902 saw the inclusion of this Mother figure as one the archetypes in the theories formulated by Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung. However, the archetype that Jung explored did not retain a unidimensional understanding of this Mother figure. The usual and most widely accepted paradigm of the selfless and self-effacing mother, almost likened to that of a theological ‘Mother Goddess’ (Virgin Mary or Durga-Kaali, for example) was rendered insufficient and incorrect by Jung as he introduced a bifurcation in the Mother figure. Jung’s mother archetype is in the form of a diptych, with two opposing factions that come together to actualize this dichotomy – the Devouring and Nurturing counterparts – or the yin and yang that lies at the heart of every Mother figure. The Mother is at once portrayed to be simultaneously caring and destructive, nourishing and ruinous. It is this archetype that has been explored in this paper through the course of Linda Gray Sexton’s memoir, Searching for Mercy Street: A Journey Back to My Mother, Anne Sexton, where she has elaborated on the relationship that she shared with her mother, poet Anne Sexton. Simultaneously, the truth of the introductory Tumblr-ian premise has also been upheld through this paper.

While the positive aspect of Jung’s Mother archetype (also termed as the positive complex) – the Nurturing half – is said to include associated qualities of “maternal solicitude, sympathy, the magic authority of the female, the wisdom and spiritual exaltation that transcend any reason, any helpful instinct or impulse, all that is benign, all that cherishes and sustains, that fosters growth and fertility” (Jung 14), its negative counterpart (also, the negative complex) – the Devouring half – “may connote anything secret, hidden, dark; the abyss, the world of the dead, anything that devours, seduces, and poisons, that is terrifying and inescapable like fate” (14-15). Further, the negative mother-complex in daughters has manifested itself in the following ways: hypertrophy of maternal element, or the intensification of feminine, especially maternal instincts; overdevelopment of Eros, accompanied with jealousy of the mother and a simultaneous wish to out-do her; identity with mother, where the child has no separate identity from the mother, and they exist as mirror images of each other; and, resistance to the mother.

Although Jung has bifurcated his archetypal complex of the mother, upon introspection of the two extremes, a predecessor that might have birthed the diptych emerges. In between the two extremes exists the first unacknowledged stage of the Mother archetype – the Devoured Mother. This is what existed primarily, the woman under the command of the lord of the house, the affection-starved mother who primarily lived in the kitchen, which perhaps was the only room in her house that she could call her own. Unable to speak up even when she sees something wrong happening in front of her as she is intricately dependent upon the man, taking care of the children relentlessly, the Devoured Mother manifested itself into two extremities after succumbing to the collective unconscious that had been crafting it for centuries. The Devoured Mother doesn’t reach any stage of fulfilment herself; she lives an incomplete life before passing to the inevitable next stage, the stage where she becomes the Devouring Mother herself.

The Mother figure, with all her faults and flawlessness, has been explored by Sexton. “Mother,” writes Linda Gray Sexton in her memoir Searching for Mercy Street: A Journey Back to my Mother, Anne Sexton, “I have improved upon your recipes for spaghetti sauce and for mothering” (312). Written twenty years after her mother’s suicide, this memoir of simultaneously mourning and celebrating her mother delves into both the sides of Anne Sexton, the poet and the mother, and shows how inextricably bonded the two are in reality. The Anne Sexton that her daughter paints through her words can be the ultimate elucidation of what Jung considered the Devouring Mother archetype to embody. Although it is fair to note, all the sides of the mother-complex exist as the various patterns inside a kaleidoscope: at every turn, a different pattern catches the eye with either more or a smaller number of miracles drops.

Sexton begins by portraying an uncensored account of her mother, much to the dismay of her family and relatives, who would later go on to send aggressive letters to her as well as the publisher, condemning the publicizing of such deep, dark secrets of the family, while simultaneously ruining the reputation of one of the greatest confessional poets that America had birthed:

My story as a daughter and my mother’s story as a mother begin in a Boston suburb, back in the 1950s, when I was exiled from my childhood home to make room for someone else: Mother’s mental illness, which lived among us like a fifth person. (29)

Sexton deconstructed the idea of the perfect mother that patriarchy, through centuries of strategic manipulation, had imposed upon the second sex, by making motherhood and attending to the domesticity of life the only activities that provide some sense of fulfilment to the woman. Instead, she paints the picture of a mother who is more occupied with her mental issues and does not go gaga over the compulsion of mothering children. The idea that Adrienne Rich had introduced in her 1976 book, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution, about the act of motherhood being an instinctive process and not at all gender-specific (which was also manipulatively propagated by the phallocentric society) is reinstated in this memoir through the narration of various childhood instances in which Linda Sexton claimed that she was ‘mothered’ better by her father than her mother, in turn subverting the binaries that had restrained both the sexes.

Although aggrieved and traumatized about having to forego her place at her family’s table for a permanent houseguest that she couldn’t see (her mother’s depression) and live with her uptight grandparents who cared more about outward appearances and physical demeanours, Sexton, like many other children belonging to a dysfunctional family, began acting her own mother from a young age. Although she had her moments of weakness during dark nights like any average seven eight nine-year-old while she lay in bed and discoursed with God: “If I am very good tomorrow could you please make my mommy better?” (36) Linda Sexton grew up to simultaneously resemble (identity with the mother) and abhor (resistance to the mother) simultaneously.

The mother archetype in Anne Sexton, based on the memoir, devours her daughter entirely. After remaining absent from her life for long stretches during her formative years (the absences which Linda Sexton claimed defined her more than her being present), she began asserting her presence sporadically through little games she had designed to play with her daughter: “This morning is like many others: Mother wants to ‘play nine’. Playing nine means that I – the real nine-year old – slide up in the bed and she slides down, puts her head on my chest while I pat her head. ‘Now you be the Mommy,’ she says, ‘and I’m your little girl’” (36).

What mother Sexton failed to take into consideration was nine-year-old daughter Sexton’s little chest could not bear the burden that her thirty-four year old body came with. Despite repeated sobbing attempts of her daughter to turn back to thirty-four, Mother Sexton continued suffocating her daughter (literally and metaphorically) because “[…] being nine feels so good” (37). Her own childhood trauma (which can be said to birth the Devoured mother version of herself) manifested itself in her desperate attempts to seek the solace of her childhood now, the solace that was lacking from her own parents. However, in attempting to do so, she put herself in her daughter’s mouth and began to suffocate her. She feeds on her daughter herself excessively, as if desperately trying to create an image that was more her than an independent individual, in her child. Although herself a woman directed by her own whims and wishes, Mother Sexton might have wanted to create a likeness of her in her daughter, an action that though initially followed by Daughter Sexton was rejected vehemently in the course of her adulthood.

The imitation of the mother figure manifested itself when Daughter Sexton took to writing, just like her mother. Although unlike her mother, she took to writing prose (although initially she, too, had begun with writing verse). It is almost as if even in the process of being related to her mother, she kept on trying in her own ways to not be entirely consumed by her. The art of writing became a family identity for Anne Sexton, and consciously or subconsciously she passed on this facet of her identity to her daughter, who began experimenting with the metaphorical sword. Being an example of the negative mother-complex, daughter Sexton started out writing by being well aware of the overbearing truth that hung like a spectre in their house: that no matter how good or bad she writes, she would always be compared to her mother. She was not aware of what would happen if the daughter ‘chooses’ to make her mark in the same field as her mother. So she began like every amateur writer begins, like how her mother had also began decades ago: by writing about her pain. Exhibiting the primary phase of the Jungian negative mother-daughter complex, a continued mirror-stage where the fall into the Symbolic Order has not occurred, a sense of individual consciousness has not plagued the mind, Daughter Sexton turned to that aspect of the world that Mother Sexton ruled over: her creativity, to ensure a path to reach that world. The upper hand that Mother Sexton possessed over her daughter with respect to creativity subconsciously compelled the daughter to identify with the mother, in turn crippling her individual identity. When she stood in front of the typewriter, it was said to be her personal project of “being Anne”, though as dissimilar as possible. Soon this develops into what Jung defines as a parasitic relationship, where even though she was trying to find a voice for her own, she could not leave her mother behind. Mother Sexton was her muse, and Daughter Sexton lived under a fear of being abandoned by words and language if she let go of this parasitic relationship that she had built around her mother.

Incidentally, that is what she ends up doing. After her mother’s suicide, a drop in her sales, and more negative comments than positive about her new manuscripts, Daughter Sexton comes to the realization that all these years she had been implicitly writing about her life ‘with her mother.’ The figure that was supposed to bring her warmth crippled her individuality and left her creatively dry. This eventually led to the enactment of the final phase of the Jungian complex: the abhorrence and resistance to the mother. In Daughter Sexton’s life, this trajectory of this phase is more vivid in her journey as a mother than a poet. Growing up with an almost-absentee mother one-half of the time and an overbearing, suffocating mother the other half, daughter Sexton had vowed to become a mother of her own choice and right, which would certainly be nothing like Mother Sexton: “She hasn’t been a good mother, I thought, not the kind of mother I would be – and yet I wanted to share my mothering with her” (296). However, during her initial years of motherhood, now-Mother Sexton suffered from what she called an “overabundance of love” (164) – all of the backlog love that she never received from her mother, which she had grown in herself and stored carefully for the day she was to become a mother. By now, a paradigmatic repetition comes into knowledge – the circle of grief perpetuates in almost a similar way, irrespective of the generational difference. Ironically, in an attempt to not be like her mother, to consciously resist her mother, Linda Sexton, too, began her journey in motherhood by suffocating her child(ren), this time with love. A surprising reversal happens in the intergenerational cycle of action where two mothers engage in a binary discourse towards mothering – through an abundance of hate and love respectively. Upon this realization, daughter Sexton begins a process of active resistance to the mother she never wanted to become like by exorcising her out of her life. In order to become a separate and individual mother (and poet), she has to consciously expel the spirit of her overbearing and relentless mother, stronger dead than alive, that haunts both her Conscious, Sub-Conscious and Unconscious, and this expulsion she meticulously works towards. In this mother-daughter dyad, the Jungian mother-complex witnesses a circular trajectory: from the hypertrophic presence of the maternal element to an identity entirely dependent upon the mother, to ultimately the creation of a woman whose subjectivities were shaped by her, and whose mother continued to live on for her through the words both of them had authored. Daughter Sexton turns her relationship with her Devouring mother into dog-eared pages of some books that one takes off shelves during one holiday, but never really gets to those pages because life gets in between. In forgiving and understanding their mother, the next generation comes closer to the Nurturing counterpart of the archetype as they look forward to their own chance at mothering.

Grief is the continuation of a mother, any mother. When the foetus is expelled from the body, perhaps the grief latches on to it as  a way of the mother saying: this is how it feels to me; does it feel the same to you? Sometimes, the child answers back, although a lot of years would pass between the mother posing the question and the child understanding it enough to respond to it. But when the child does respond, as in this case, the child realizes through all the pain and grief and trauma that had accumulated in their mother through years – be it her own or a hand-me-down from her mother(s) – she still rose. She rose, as if to say that a war may have birthed her, but her child would be birthed by beauty. This realization-turned-assertion will be voiced by the child once they have made peace with their share of grief. Unfortunately, not all children have this realization: they are not bound to. The generation that doesn’t realize this, hands its grief to their children, neatly packed, and continues the multi-generational cycle of trauma. Somewhere, this cycle of grief might end, and the mother archetype might be left with only its ‘nurturing’ counterpart. Or not. Grief might again plague the most intimate bond that this world of ours has witnessed; it might continue ceaselessly with its presence, with a mother attempting her best at mothering and a child, growing up and reassuring her after twenty or thirty years, that she did as best she could, despite herself and because of herself, simultaneously. Perhaps in another life and in another world we would come to witness the bond between a mother and her child to not begin with the language of loss, but in that life and world, memoirs would not be written to their mothers containing all the unsaid things that never found courage to leave the child’s lips: all conversations would have been complete and accounted for in one lifetime. What would that world be like? 

Photo Source: Here

Works Cited

Gandhi, Nighat M. Alternative Realities: Love in the Lives of Muslim Women. Tranquebar, 2013.

Jung, Carl Gustav. Four Archetypes: Mother, Rebirth, Spirit, Trickster. Translated by Richard Francis Carrington Hull, Routledge, 2003.

Nobel Prize. Nobel Banquet speech by Kazuo Ishiguro, Nobel Prize in Literature 2017. Kazuo Ishiguro’s speech at the Nobel Banquet at City Hall, Stockholm on 10 December, 2017. 2017. YouTube, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NRWMiHlhcew&ab_channel=NobelPrize. Accessed 30 March 2023.

Rich, Adrienne. Of Woman Born : Motherhood As Experience and Institution. Norton, 1995.

Sexton, Linda Gray. Searching for Mercy Street: My Journey Back to My Mother, Anne Sexton. Counterpoint Press, 2011.

Bio:
Chandrakala Ghosh (she/her) completed her MA in English Literature from St. Xavier’s College (Autonomous), Kolkata in May 2023, and finished First Class second. She has presented papers in international and national conferences and workshops organized by institutions like Jadavpur University, University of Calcutta, and Lady Brabourne College. Her interests include gender studies, postcolonialism, poetry and Indian theatre studies.

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