Suicides tell a story in their negative relief. Kate Chopin’s 1899 novel Awakeningabout a married woman who falls in love with a younger man, ends in suicide. Protagonist Edna Pontellier, heartbroken and desperate, swims in the Gulf of Mexico until her body tires and the water swallows her. The act is incredibly sad, but it also feels like it’s not about himself. Or rather, it expresses something about the act, the choice, the suicide that so often remains unclear: how difficult our world is to live in.
“Mary Bronstein”If I had legs I’d kick you“and that of Lynne Ramsay”Die my love” end with images similar to those of Chopin. In “If I Had Legs”, a film about a mother at the end of her nerves as she takes care of her child alone, Rose ByrneLinda from , runs into fiercely foaming waves in an effort to fade away, and in “Die My Love,” a film about a mother whose spirit collapses while caring for her newborn, Jennifer Laurent‘s Grace walks through velvety flames with all the quiet grace of a sleepwalker, killing herself. Water or fire, these suicides are too similar to be ignored. The stories in which Edna, Linda, and Grace are contained are certainly stories of individual suffering, but they also say something big and loud, scathing and renegade, about the world these women leave behind as they walk toward death: our world is a difficult world for mothers.
The stories of Chopin, Bronstein, and Ramsay are about women and mothers, especially women who are also mothers and who suffer from mental disorders. The films of Bronstein and Ramsay meddle with our traditional ideologies and narratives, with our familiar ways of defining good and evil. The traditional “other” is centered, becomes protagonist, and the traditional hero is revealed to be the monster. These stories are undeniably feminist because, following their female protagonists, they characterize the dominant societal structure as dehumanizing and disenfranchising, misogynistic because of its persistent refusal to see women as anything other than others, as objects. In the same breath, these stories express the need for change, for liberation from the current system.
Our traditional stories, cooked in the belly of patriarchy, often see the mother as linked to the home and preparing the subject to enter the world, outside the home; Often, the mother is authoritarian and staying with her all her life, at home, is shameful, horrible and aberrant. The films of Bronstein and Ramsay shake up tradition by allowing the woman who is also a mother to speak for herself. Subverting tradition, these works excavate the subjectivity of the mother and, in turn, reveal that patriarchy is the true formidable and destructive force, creator of the abject. What was generally considered negative becomes positive, while the typical good is now dehumanizing and demeaning.
These three stories are about an escape from patriarchy. For them, swimming in a body of water or walking in a burning forest is a freedom of the shackles of our traditional order, which has a flat understanding of motherhood. And in their symbolic movement towards the abyss, “If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You” and “Die My Love” also represent another type of mother, which also presages a way of being: the archaic mother, a creature who does not need men but rather a kind of unison, perhaps community. These films reveal how the archaic mother, through what appears to be a suicidal escape from the world, actually represents a desire for return to self, for humanization, ultimately revealing the poverty of our current way of life.
Chopin Awakening It’s not a horror story, but it is horrible. The story follows Edna Pontellier, the wife of a businessman, on vacation with her husband and two young sons in Grand Isle, a resort town on the Gulf of Mexico, when she experiences an existential and physical awakening. She meets and becomes friends with Robert, the twenty-five-year-old son of the station director.
Over the summer, the two men fall in love. Edna was resigned to her domestic fate until she met Robert. She takes care of her children because that’s what she should do, and she lives in friendship with her husband, who is wealthy and provides Edna with all the material comforts a woman would want.
Slowly but surely, over the course of this pivotal summer, Edna realizes her boredom as a wife, the utter lack of stimulation, and the crushing frustration of having become, like many women around her, accustomed to keeping her desires bottled up inside herself. She rekindles a lost passion for painting and recalls the joy that comes from romantic crushes, romantic love and physical intimacy. Aware of the desire to enjoy one’s mind and body and seeing how painful conformity to societal obligations is, Edna also becomes a feminist, recognizing that life as an obedient wife and mother is not all a woman should, or even can, submit to.
At one point, Edna told a friend that “she would never sacrifice herself for her children, or for anyone.” That she “would gladly abandon that which is not essential; I would give my money, I would give my life for my children; but I would not give myself.” Her friend has difficulty understanding what Edna means. How can there be a difference between one’s life and oneself? What Edna means is her soul, the part of her that is her identity, that loves and longs, that cries when hurt and alone, that feels alone. What Edna means is that she is both a mother and a wife; she wants to keep her personality.
After Robert leaves Edna for the first time, knowing that their love is impossible, she tries to live her life. She began to paint and created a workshop in her husband’s house. Soon she discovers that this is unsatisfactory and moves into her own apartment. When Robert appears and then disappears a second time, Edna is defeated. Having always been an introspective person, she has also always been prone to melancholy, a side effect of feeling too much and too intensely.
When Robert leaves her a second time, because he knows that a real woman cannot divorce her husband, it is a sorrow that burns and blinds. It allowed Edna to wake up from the sleep in which she was lulled by the patriarchy, which had placed her in the role of wife and mother. Awakened to the delights of life, to the passion of love, when it is taken away from her with the finality of Robert’s departure, she is absolutely stunned; she becomes completely desperate. Freshly awakened to pleasure, she is also incredibly sensitive to pain.
The world becomes flat, revealing its cruelty. When she decided to live for herself shortly after waking up, she charted a hopeful path, but she had hope in a hopeless world; she was unaware of the steps her husband was secretly taking to regain control of his life; he had consulted a doctor who, condescendingly, told him to wait for Edna’s whims. Despite her own actions, the world would never let her live for her soul; Robert leaves because he could have no illusions, and when he finally does, Edna can no longer have any illusions.
Edna realizes that because Robert, her one true love, left her, she will ultimately become nothing more than a wife and mother. Despite her best efforts to enjoy life, the society around her, like Robert, will always see her first as a wife and mother and force her to fulfill this role. “There was no human being she wanted near her, except Robert; and she even realized that the day would come when he too, and the thought of him would disappear from her existence, leaving her alone. The children appeared before her as antagonists who had defeated her, who had overpowered her, and sought to drag her into soul slavery for the rest of her days. But she knew how to escape them.”
As she swims farther and farther out into the gulf, she thinks of her husband and children. “They were part of her life. But they didn’t need to think they could possess her, body and soul.” Edna commits suicide by swimming in the Gulf to keep her soul to herself, to reject the pain of loneliness that comes with conforming to patriarchal ideals of women. Edna commits suicide by swimming in the wide, full, empty water, in an attempt to remain in communion with herself.
In many of our traditional stories, female figures are abject figures, beings who represent the disorder or impurity of the body. They are the “other” from whom the subject of a story must stand out. It’s in The second sex where Simone de Beauvoir says that “otherness is the fundamental category of human thought”, that is, we are better able to delineate the limits of our identity when we delineate another. Our myths, the world, are full of dualities, but they are not moral in themselves. It is social realities and power negotiations that give moral meaning to the Me-Thou duality. In our patriarchal culture, white men have established themselves as subjects by viewing many groups as negative, the largest group being women. And because of the culture’s unyielding dampness, its ability to seep into our bones and across generations, women have come to view themselves not as subjects but as objects, others.
In The Monstrous-Feminine: cinema, feminism, psychoanalysisresearcher Barbara Creed explains how many monsters in our traditional horror stories are female. As such, they can be described as “monstrous-feminine”. These are figures who represent, to varying degrees, femininity or femininity, and whom the traditional male protagonist should destroy or repress. Creed explores an iteration of the monstrous feminine called the “archaic mother”, tracing its roots to the myths of our earliest civilizations, in which she initially appears as a life-giving force, and is transformed by phallocentric narratives into a negative force, a being that works against the energy of the male/hero, which is frightening and must be destroyed. The archaic mother, Creed says, is almost always the object, never the subject, of stories.
The archaic mother is mythological; she is distinct from what Creed calls “the pre-Oedipal mother,” the mother figure we know because she is the mother in the typical patriarchal family constellation – she is the bossy one who worries about her children, she is the mother in “Psycho.” The archaic mother exists completely outside of society, outside of the patriarchal family constellation. She is the creature that lays the eggs in “Alien,” a being never represented but signified by caves, viscera and a destiny. She is an abyssal source of all life, the original womb, and as such the archaic mother is both full and empty, and does not need men at all to stay alive and procreate. As the singular source of all life, the archaic mother terrifies uncertain men.
The archaic mother is not inherently bad or negative. But in patriarchal horror stories, the archaic mother becomes negative because of her power: her ability to exist and have meaning without men, to be powerful through and in herself. The sea The pre-Oedipal, on the other hand, draws much of its meaning from its relationship with the father, which signifies a lack in relation to the father’s phallus, which is in the world as a force for advancement. Creed says that “as part of patriarchal signifying practices” or the visual and verbal language of dominant culture, “particularly the horror film, [the archaic mother] is reconstructed and re-presented as a negative figure, associated with the fear of the generative mother seen only as the abyss, the all-encompassing black hole that threatens to reabsorb what it once generated.
“The archaic mother is present in all horror films in the form of the darkness of extinction – of death,” Creed writes. The archaic mother, always being in the process of giving birth and always threatening to reincorporate what she gives birth to, inspires both desires and fears. “The desire to return to the original unity of things, to return to the mother/womb, is above all a desire for undifferentiation. » Life within the patriarchal order is “discontinuity and separation”, while death, swallowed by a black whore. the, is “continuity and non-differentiation”, and thus to desire or be attracted by death is to desire “to return to the state of original unity with the mother”.
In the typical horror film, the character is saved when the monster is named and destroyed, when the threat of being eaten by the abyss or the character heading toward its destruction is thwarted. Edna’s happy ending would have been a rescue from the abyss, a return to order in her society; Edna’s happy ending would be a distancing from the unity of the devouring archaic mother.
But what if the archaic mother was framed in a positive way? What if we imagined a world where unity is better than separation? What would become of the archaic mother in a feminist film that uses its visual vocabulary to criticize patriarchy? “The fear of losing oneself and losing one’s boundaries is even more acute in a society that values boundaries over continuity and separation over identity,” Creed writes.
The society we live in, and the society that is taken for granted in many of our stories, is patriarchal and capitalist, and it values atomic lives and nuclear families. In many feminist films and stories (like Awakening“If I Had Legs I’d Kick You” and “Die My Love”), this mainstream is criticized.
These inherently feminist stories interweave with the values of traditional stories, particularly horror stories, and see a movement away from patriarchal society toward the archaic mother as a reappropriation of life. Edna’s swim into the abyss, as desperate as it may be, is a stand against an unhealthy life under patriarchy.
Suicide in Awakening is a last attempt to escape the chains of patriarchy, to save the soul from suffocating isolation. Horror films have taught us to fear the archaic mother, but what if films close to the genre, these “psychological thrillers”, offered us a new way of looking at her, of seeing her as the protective, safe and communal being that she can be in her positive iteration?
Rose Byrne’s Linda, in “If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You”, commits a similar act to Edna’s at the end of the film. Linda works as a psychotherapist and is also a full-time mother. Her daughter needs constant attention because she suffers from a gastrointestinal disorder; at night, she must be connected to a machine that feeds her through a tube inserted above her navel.
Linda’s husband is never home – he’s a navy captain – but he calls her often, his voice an endless drone on the phone as he asks to be updated on their daughter’s condition without offering any meaningful help. Linda is actually a single mother. Their daughter must gain a certain amount of weight if she is to be weaned off the feeding tube, but this proves difficult for the girl, meaning Linda is constantly awake, caring for the child day and night while working full time.
Things go from hectic to terrible when the roof on Linda’s apartment collapses and she has to move into a beach motel with her daughter. The whir of the feeding machine keeps her awake and Linda spends her nights while her daughter sleeps, getting drunk or high. Linda barely sleeps and her apartment refuses to be repaired; the hole where the ceiling should be a vast chasm taunting Linda.
Towards the end of the film, at the end of her tether, exhausted, Linda removes the feeding tube from her daughter’s stomach. A doctor told him it would be easy, and apparently it is. But when her husband suddenly appears, he sees what Linda has done, and Linda, stunned and panicked, runs to the beach and throws herself into the high, foaming waves, trying to drown herself again and again. But the sea continues to wash it back onto the shore. Linda eventually passes out and wakes up to see her daughter sitting on top of her. “I’ll be better,” Linda said before the screen faded to black.
This film is an anxiety-inducing assault. The lens moves closer to Byrne’s face, almost never going beyond his shoulders. We feel every tension in Linda’s facial muscles, the weight of every sound and the intensity of every bright light. We feel his exhaustion, we feel his desire to sleep, and in his air which continues to crumble, we feel his desire to scream, to flee his duties. This is why the ending, when she says “I will be better,” always breaks me – it renews a promise made in her marriage contract to better adhere to the rules of patriarchy, of the symbolic order. It is a promise that hopes for the same thing.
In “Die My Love”, Jennifer Lawrence plays Grace, a young woman moved by her boyfriend Jackson (Robert Pattinson) from New York in a small house in an equally small town in rural Montana. Grace is pregnant and gives birth to a boy. At first, she thinks that this move is only temporary, but she gradually realizes that this is not the case. The house belonged to Jackson’s uncle who, Grace learns, committed suicide there. Grace reluctantly moves into the house; she doesn’t seem to have any other choice. She is a writer, but no longer knows how to write.
Jackson travels for work; his job is not specified, but it is very clear that he has affairs with various women while he is away. Grace knows this and suggests to Jackson that she knows this. The two stopped having sex after their baby was born. Jackson leaves Grace home alone to take care of the house and their baby, and Grace, bored, lonely and sexually unsatisfied, becomes increasingly ill.
We don’t expose too much of Grace’s mental state, but we do see it on her body. As Grace, Lawrence is completely and fully in her body, crawling like a wolf, screaming, running and jumping – she desperately needs someone to see her, to recognize her, to love her, but no one is there. Truly alone and unhappy, she, at the end of the film, gets naked, like Edna before entering the water, and walks into the forest that she set on fire with the pages of her diary, killing herself.
Linda and Grace both embody in their personalities beings who are deeply and viscerally dissatisfied with patriarchal society. The stories of the two women, like that of Edna, through their intense subjectivity, highlight the brutality of today’s world. In Linda’s story, we see the enormous and impossible work imposed on women who are mothers. We see the small violences inflicted on them every day when we ignore their cries for help and support, when we ignore the blatant way they are so obviously unraveling under pressure as heavy as towering waves.
As she becomes more and more herself, Edna’s husband sometimes wonders if she is not suffering from a slight mental imbalance. He could clearly see that she was not herself. In other words, he could not see that she was becoming herself and that she was daily shedding this fictitious self that we assume as a garment with which to appear before the world. Linda is not allowed to take off the maternity clothing except at night when her daughter is sleeping. She always bounces back into place in the morning, even if she’s wobbling behind her mask, falling asleep and about to tip over.
Grace, meanwhile, has completely lost her mask, even potentially getting lost (because she can’t write, because she won’t be seen), but no one, least of all Jackson, seems to care. When in Awakening, Edna’s husband goes to see the doctor, he makes her understand that his big point of concern, or the biggest sign of Edna’s illness, is the fact that she is “letting the household get fucked up.” […] She has some sort of idea in her head regarding the eternal rights of women. The doctor takes Edna’s husband’s concerns quite seriously. But ultimately prescribes inaction: “The mood will pass, I assure you. It may take a month, two, three months – maybe more, but it will pass; have patience.
Thus, Edna’s husband waits, like a parent waiting for his child to recover from his tantrum, for his wife to return to her gender role. And his expectation is exactly like Jackson’s. Throughout “Die My Love,” as Grace refuses to hide her deep and abiding sadness, people keep telling her that what she feels will pass. At parties, acquaintances tell her how horrible they know postpartum depression is, but they hope it goes away after a while. When Grace asks for a specific deadline, people laugh.
Grace tries to find herself in her body as she gets lost during her move to Montana, but even though she acts strangely, no one seems to see or care about her, and she gets lost again. People immediately expect Grace to be sick but also to get better, and in the whirlwind of hypotheses and expectations, the flight of masks of good femininity and motherhood – the disorder of shouldfuture well-being and gender roles: the person themselves is lost, even ignored. All we see of Grace is her role as mother; no one seems to see her in her place, a lonely soul.
“Mental illness is only destigmatized when it presents itself in a socially acceptable way. » writing Sheila O’Malley in her review of the film. Mental illness is seen as a broken leg, a physical injury, an illness with a time limit and a cure. New mothers are allowed to feel sick and given sympathy, provided their condition improves. If a mother feels unwell as her child grows, or if she becomes stranger and stranger, she becomes a problem.
The problem with treating mental illness like a physical injury is that we ignore the pain a person is feeling. right awaygoing so far as to perpetuate it with our expectations. As the protagonist of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1892 short story Yellow wallpaper (who is hired by her husband because she makes art and doesn’t do housework), the more Grace is told that motherhood is difficult and that new mothers often get sick, the more Grace examines her folly. Yellow wallpaperThe protagonist of is Grace Reversed: a woman who is asked to rest so that she can then become a housewife; She is told to be a mother and do her housewife duties so that she can improve herself mentally.
But in the present, says Suzanne Scanlon in Committed: Sense and madness, “The narrator responds to the diagnosis she requested. She has become the perfect patient.” At the end of the story, Perkins Gilman’s narrator appears as a terrifying figure, peeling the wallpaper from her walls and “crawling, a baby at last, triumphant in her identification with madness.” Grace, too, becomes the quintessential sick mother, writhing in pain, but no one seems to care. It will be over soon, they say.
Edna’s story and Yellow wallpaper were written during the “women’s problem”, a time in history when the patriarchy had to deal with the fact that many women did not want to stay at home and be just housewives or just mothers. The desire to be a whole person, to exist outside of expected gender roles, became a mark of discomfort, and any woman who overstepped the boundaries risked being institutionalized or taken home. Whenever Grace leaves Jackson’s family’s house, he always brings her back, silently.
The institution of medicine has taught us that all ailments of the body improve; there is a cure for everything, capitalism sells. Everyone waits for Grace to get better, and while they wait, they don’t see the pain she’s feeling, and so Grace feels sicker and sicker in an effort for anyone to take note of her pain. Isolated, without connections, bored and lacking a safe place, New York, perhaps, cannot work; she is trapped as a housewife, a role she hates, and so she goes mad, she becomes Gilman’s groveling narrator, destroying her lovely cage: herself physically and literally her home.
When Grace takes the baby and spends an entire day wandering the forest with him, hiding from the search party that eventually begins looking for her, Jackson tells his mother that they just have to wait. She will get better. He still doesn’t try to make a meaningful connection with Grace.
Grace doesn’t get any better. At one point, she literally claws and tears the wallpaper off the bathroom walls, destroying the room with her shredded fingers. Jackson still doesn’t say anything. It wasn’t until she smashed her face through a mirror on their wedding night that Jackson had her committed to a mental institution. But he still doesn’t say anything, he doesn’t speak to her. Grace says Jackson doesn’t see her, that she’s there, but he doesn’t really see her, and she’s right. Jackson only sees who he hopes she will be in the future, not her as she is now, sad and alone and wanting his love. He does not see his soul before him; he does not see that she is gradually being suffocated by the life he has imposed on her.
De Beauvoir describes the type of man Jackson finds himself in The second sex: a modern liberal man who respects women as equals in the abstract and ignores or nullifies any concrete or material inequality he sees. “But as soon as he comes up against her, the situation is reversed,” explains de Beauvoir. “He will apply the concrete theme of inequality and will even allow himself to disavow abstract equality.” De Beauvoir gives the prescient example of a man who believes his wife is noble because she stays at home and does all the housework, but who, during arguments, says, “You couldn’t make a living without me.” »
Jackson thinks his wife is his equal in the abstract, which is why he always brings up in his arguments the fact that she doesn’t write, that she should take her writing more seriously, but in the same breath he also yells at her for not doing housework. He ignores her practical reality as a full-time housewife, leaving her with little precious time for creative activity.
The doctors don’t help Grace because they can’t help her; they can only calm her down momentarily so she can function under the patriarchy without causing too much trouble. Grace is certainly a little calmer once she is freed, and Jackson smiles, but Grace is the same, sad and alone, wanting to be seen. And so Grace enters a burning forest, her maw warm as a respite.
Everyone refuses to help Linda and Grace in a meaningful way, in a way that sees or acknowledges their souls. Many do not believe what kind of help would be helpful to these two women, because patriarchal capitalism requires a woman to do the work of raising a child alone, without help, separated.
But this kind of separation, which we see in Linda and Grace’s loneliness, can destroy a person even as they live and breathe. We see this in Grace’s self-destructive acts, how habitual and easy they become: she throws her head into the mirror without a moment’s hesitation; we see it in the way she screams in a flashback to the wedding party that feels like a hallucination, she screams in the party hall while everyone around her is happy, or while they have disappeared, leaving her behind to moan. We see in Grace what it’s like to scream for help with no one answering because they all expect you to stop soon.
Linda runs into the waves after her husband looks up from his daughter, unplugged from the tube, and says, “What have you done?” He doesn’t see the despair she’s trapped in, as if she’s caged; he only sees the act of unplugging without proper supervision. He does not see her, but only the one act that was verboten. Linda acted inappropriately and he saw it. It’s as if she herself were in difficulty, as if she were a child confronted with the father who disciplines her, and she was fleeing this patriarchal figure. She runs in the waves and no one chases her.
Before Grace enters the forest and sets it on fire, she says “Enough” to Jackson. He doesn’t pursue her, even though what she said is so clearly disturbing, so clearly suggestive of a soul on the verge of self-destruction. He remains seated, as if he knows she will return. But she doesn’t come back. Why would she return to a partner who only sees her as a diagnosis or a mother, not for who she really is?
The water in the cases of Edna and Linda, as well as the flaming forest in the case of Grace, adapt very easily to the visual rhythms of the archaic mother. The bodies of water and the forest are all gaping and full, womb-like, self-contained, capable of giving birth, nourishing, warming, and carrying away life, as they do for Edna and Grace. All three are clearly fleeing patriarchal forces that wish to stifle their individualities, even as they demand that they suffer as atoms within the nuclear family, which is subjugation not to humanity but to rigid, rigid roles. These women enter the water or the forest to escape the backbreaking law and order of patriarchy, which promises individuality but actually imposes adherence to a singular type.
Everyone refuses to see these women and so chooses to flee into a space that, we have been taught, represents a loss of the boundaries we know, that represents everything that orderly and rigorous patriarchy is not. But maybe it’s a good thing to lose the boundaries we know, because maybe our boundaries are incurable. I think these women want the embrace of another, of the unity that rocks them, because you can’t be rocked if you don’t see them first. I think they want to feel like they don’t belong to the patriarchy.
The “state of unity with the mother” that the archaic mother represents could also be considered a community; this reading can be viable if we recognize that the autonomy promised by the symbolic order is a lie, that we live under the yoke of patriarchy and that we are not truly free to set our own rules or our own lives. We live in a discontinuity and separation that hurts because it is forced and distributed unequally. A few are extremely autonomous and form a collective, while others have their work and movements intensely monitored and controlled to curb collectivization.
A walk in the void is a desire for people to see you; it’s an attempt to say that you need help, that you need others. A Walk in the Void reframes psychic death (the black screen), directing it away from a loss of ego towards a kind of warmth and life. What’s frightening about these films is the loneliness of atomization, the endless, deafening work of conforming to order, form, and genre. Under such destructive order, the way the water moves around you, the way the flames lick your skin, is as much and perhaps as meaningful as a touch, as a look that is not accusatory but sees.
This does not mean that suicide is the answer, but it does mean that our current way of life is so lonely, nasty, even brutal, that it drives us to seek warmth in self-annihilation. I would like to argue that these women’s races, represented through a positive iteration of the archaic mother, are a kind of critique of patriarchy. To describe a walk with the archaic mother is to animate a desire to freedom of the dehumanizing rigor of patriarchy.
If the archaic mother is a loss of patriarchal boundaries and continuity, if the archaic mother is union, and you have characters escaping from that, instead of away from it, and the heterosexual world is what they’re fleeing from, then that’s as scathing an indictment of our current way of life as possible. What does it mean that the archaic mother is reframed not as the abject, but as that which liberates, allows a moment to be seen and a moment of peace, a moment without meaning, without respite? What does it say about the suffocating nature of our current way of life? Isn’t this akin to the death of the soul? Rendered singular and lonely, desperate and broken, and often senseless, this movement toward the archaic mother is both a symptom of patriarchy and also a condemnation of it.
It’s in The second sex Here again, de Beauvoir says that remaining frozen, not fighting and remaining complacent, within a system that objects and oppresses you, is “an absolute evil.” We should always choose ourselves, says de Beauvoir, eerily echoing Edna’s thoughts. “But what singularly defines the woman’s situation is that being, like all humans, an autonomous freedom, she discovers and chooses herself in a world where men force her to assume herself as Other: we try to freeze her as an object and doom her to immanence. [the repetitive domestic realm]since its transcendence will forever be transcended by another essential and sovereign consciousness [that is, men].
“The drama of woman lies in this conflict between the fundamental claim of every subject, which always poses itself as essential, and the demands of a situation which constitutes it as inessential. » We all want to be seen, but patriarchy considers that only certain people deserve to be recognized as subjects.
The desire for subjectivity does not relegate men to oppression either, because, let us remember, seeing the other as another is not also seeing them as bad. And a system th oppressive would only reproduce the societies that Edna, Linda and Grace flee. What is needed here is a global change, a way of life that is conducive to life itself, a way of life that honors the soul of each person, where everyone can make the choice to choose themselves and grow together, without remaining in stultifying conditions, in immanence, in stasis like Linda, working in her impossible world to be incredibly better.
I’m not recommending that Edna, Linda, or Grace meet the archaic mother, but I understand it. The embrace of the archaic mother is much more welcoming than a life where we try to fit into an assigned gender role, where we sacrifice our artistic passions, where we constantly try to be better even if we are broken up, where we are alone and sad. These three women, estranged from the community and deprived of love and understanding, unable to express themselves or having no time to express themselves, feel like they have only two choices: stasis or flight. Their versions of escapism feel like self-destruction because they are a destruction of femininity under patriarchy, but we would be doing these women a disservice if we viewed these acts in a vacuum. We must see the negative relief in their actions.
AwakeningThe working title of was “A Solitary Soul”, the same soul that Edna takes with her to the Gulf. Edna, Linda and Grace choose to join the archaic mother; they choose for themselves, for better or for worse. What they are abandoning is a world whose fragility we now see more clearly and whose fragility we are all the more capable of rebuilding.
