Suicides tell a story in their negative relief. Kate Chopin’s 1899 novel The Awakening, about a married woman who falls in love with a younger man, ends with a suicide. Protagonist Edna Pontellier, heartbroken and hopeless, swims out into the Gulf of Mexico until her body tires and the water swallows her up. The act is impossibly sad, but it also feels as if it’s not about itself. Or rather, it expresses something about the act, choice, of suicide that so often remains out of focus: how hard our world is to live in.
Mary Bronstein’s “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You” and Lynne Ramsay’s “Die My Love” end with images similar to Chopin’s. In “If I Had Legs,” a film about a mother at her wits’ end as she looks after her child alone, Rose Byrne’s Linda runs into ferociously foaming waves in an effort to erase herself, and in “Die My Love,” a film about a mother whose wits unravel as she looks after her newborn, Jennifer Lawrence’s Grace walks into velvety flames with all the leisurely grace of a sleepwalker, killing herself. Water or fire, these suicides are too similar to ignore. 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: ours is a difficult world for mothers.
Chopin’s, Bronstein’s, and Ramsay’s stories are about women, and they’re about mothers, specifically women who are also mothers and mentally unwell. Bronstein’s and Ramsay’s films meddle with our traditional ideologies and narratives, our familiar ways of framing the good and the bad. The traditional “other” is centered, made a protagonist, and the traditional hero is revealed to be the monster. These stories are undeniably feminist because, as they follow their women protagonists, they name the prevailing societal structure as dehumanizing and disenfranchising, as misogynistic for its persistent refusal to see women as anything but the other, as objects. In the same breath, these stories express the need for change, for liberation from the current system.
Our traditional stories, baked in patriarchy’s belly, often see the mother as tied to the home and preparing the subject to enter the world, outside of the home; often, the mother is overbearing, and to remain with her all one’s life, in the home, is shameful, horrific, and aberrant. Bronstein’s and Ramsay’s films challenge tradition by allowing the woman who is also a mother to speak for herself. Turning tradition on its head, these works excavate the mother’s subjectivity and, in turn, reveal patriarchy to be the actual fearsome and destructive, abject-making force. What has typically been seen as negative becomes positive, while the typical good is now dehumanizing and debasing.
These three stories are about an escape from patriarchy. In them, swimming into a body of water, or walking into a burning forest, is a freedom from the shackles of our traditional order, which has a flat understanding of motherhood. And in their symbolic movement into the abyss, “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You” and “Die My Love” depict another kind of mother, too, one who also portends a way of being: the archaic mother, a creature who does not need men but rather a sort of unison, maybe community. These films reveal how the archaic mother, through what seems like a suicidal escape from the world, actually represents a desire to return to the self, for humanization, ultimately revealing the poverty of our current way of life.
Die My Love (MUBI)
Chopin’s The Awakening is not a horror story, but it is horrifying. The story follows Edna Pontellier, the wife of a businessman, who is on vacation with her husband and two infant sons on Grand Isle, a resort on the Gulf of Mexico, when she experiences an existential and physical awakening. She meets and forms a friendship with Robert, the twenty-five-year-old son of the woman who runs the resort.
Over the course of the summer, the two fall in love. Edna has resigned herself to her domestic fate until she meets Robert. She takes care of her children because it is what she ought to do, and she lives amicably with her husband, who is rich and provides Edna with all the material comforts any wife would want.
Slowly but surely over the course of this pivotal summer, Edna is awakened to her boredom as a wife, the utter lack of stimulation, and the overwhelming frustration of having become, like many women around her, used to keeping her desires locked within. She rekindles a lost passion for painting and recalls the joy that romantic crushes, romantic love, and physical intimacy lead to. Realizing a desire to enjoy her mind and body and seeing how painful conformity to societal obligations really is, Edna also becomes a feminist, recognizing that life as an obedient wife and mother is not all a woman ought to, or even can, consign herself to.
At one point, Edna tells a friend that “she would never sacrifice herself for her children, or for anyone.” That she would willingly “give up the unessential; I would give my money, I would give my life for my children; but I wouldn’t give myself.” Her friend has a hard time understanding what Edna means. How can there be a difference between one’s life and one’s self? What Edna means is her soul, the part of her that is her identity, that loves and yearns, that weeps when hurt and lonely, that feels alone. What Edna means is that she is both a mother and a wife; she wants to keep her personhood.
After Robert leaves Edna for the first time, knowing their love is impossible, she tries to live a life for herself. She begins painting, creating a workshop in her husband’s house. Soon, she finds that this isn’t satisfactory and moves into an apartment all her own. When Robert appears and then disappears for the second time, Edna is unmade. Having always been an introspective person, she has also always been prone to melancholy, the side effect of feeling too much and too intensely.
When Robert leaves her the second time, because he knows that a proper woman cannot divorce her husband, it’s a heartbreak that sears and blinds. He prompted Edna’s awakening from the slumber she was lulled into by patriarchy, which slotted her in the role of wife and mother. Awakened to the deliciousness of life, the passion of love, when it is taken from her with the finality of Robert’s leaving, she is absolutely stunned; she becomes utterly hopeless. Newly awakened to pleasure, she is also incredibly sensitive to pain.
The world becomes flat, revealing its cruelty. When she decided to live for herself soon after being awakened, she forged a hopeful path, but was hopeful in a hopeless world; she didn’t know of the measures her husband was secretly taking to regain control of her life; he had consulted a doctor, who, patronizingly, told him to wait Edna’s whims out. Despite her own action, the world would never let her live for her soul; Robert leaves because he could not delude himself, and when he finally does, Edna cannot delude herself any longer.
Edna realizes that because Robert, her one true love, has left her, she will ultimately be made into only a wife and mother. Despite all her efforts to enjoy her life, the society around her, like Robert, will always see her first as a wife and mother and force her to fulfill that role. “There was no human being whom she wanted near her except Robert; and she even realized that the day would come when he, too, and the thought of him would melt out of her existence, leaving her alone. The children appeared before her like antagonists who had overcome her, who had overpowered and sought to drag her into the soul’s slavery for the rest of her days. But she knew a way to elude them.”
As she is swimming farther and farther into the gulf, she thinks of her husband and children again. “They were a part of her life. But they need not have thought that they could possess her, body and soul.” Edna commits suicide by swimming into the Gulf as a way to keep her soul to herself, as a way to reject the pain of the loneliness of conformity to patriarchal ideals for women. Edna commits suicide by swimming into the wide, full, and empty water, in an effort to keep herself in communion with herself.
Die My Love (MUBI)
In many of our traditional narratives, female figures are abject figures, beings who represent the disorder or uncleanness of the body. They are the “other” whom the subject of a story ought to distance themself from. It is in The Second Sex where Simone de Beauvoir says that “alterity is the fundamental category of human thought,” that is, we are better able to draw the lines around our identity when we delineate another. Our myths, the world rife with dualities, but they aren’t in themselves moral. It is social realities and power negotiations that bake moral meaning into the Me-You duality. In our patriarchal culture, white men have established themselves as subjects by deeming many groups as negative others, the largest group being women. And because of the unshakeable humidity of culture, its ability to seep into our bones and across generations, women have come to see ourselves not as subjects but as objects, as the other.
In The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis, scholar Barbara Creed explains how many monsters in our traditional horror stories are feminine. As such, they can be described as the “monstrous-feminine.” These are figures who represent, to various degrees, femininity or womanhood, and who the traditional masculine protagonist ought to destroy or quell. Creed explores one iteration of the monstrous-feminine called the “archaic mother,” tracing her roots back to the myths of our earliest civilizations, in which she appears initially as a life-giving force, and is turned by phallocentric narratives into a negative force, a being that works against male/the hero’s energy, that is fearsome and needs to be destroyed. The archaic mother, Creed says, is nearly always the object, never the subject, of narratives.
The archaic mother is mythological; she is distinct from what Creed calls “the pre-Oedipal mother,” the maternal figure we’re familiar with because she is the mother in the typical patriarchal family constellation—she is the overbearing one who fusses over her kids, she is the mother in “Psycho.” The archaic mother exists totally outside of society, outside of the patriarchal family constellation. She is the creature who lays the eggs in “Alien,” a being never depicted but signified by caverns, viscera, and doom. She is an abyssal source of all life, the originating womb, and as such, the archaic mother is both full and empty, and does not need men at all to remain alive and to procreate. As the singular source of all life, the archaic mother terrifies insecure men.
The archaic mother is not intrinsically evil or negative. But in patriarchal horror stories, the archaic mother becomes a negative because of her power: her ability to exist and have meaning without men, to be powerful by and in herself. The pre-Oedipal mother, meanwhile, derives much of her meaning from her relationship to the father, signifying a lack in contrast to the father’s phallus, which is in the world as a forward-moving force. Creed says that “within patriarchal signifying practices,” or the visual and verbal language of mainstream culture, “particularly the horror film, [the archaic mother] is reconstructed and re-presented as a negative figure, one associated with the dread of the generative mother seen only as the abyss, the all-incorporating black hole which threatens to reabsorb what it once birthed.”
Die My Love (MUBI)
“The archaic mother is present in all horror films as the blackness of extinction — death,” Creed writes. The archaic mother, a being always giving birth and always threatening to reincorporate what she gives birth to, inspires both desires and fears. “The desire to return to the original oneness of things, to return to the mother/womb, is primarily a desire for non-differentiation.” Life within the patriarchal order is “discontinuity and separateness,” while death, to be swallowed by a black hole, is “continuity and non-differentiation,” and so to desire or be attracted to death is to desire “to return to the state of original oneness 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 of the character moving toward their destruction is thwarted. Edna’s happy ending would have been rescue from the abyss, a return to the order of her society; Edna’s happy ending would be a movement away from the oneness of the all-consuming archaic mother.
But what if the archaic mother was framed positively? What if we imagine a world where unity is more worthwhile than separateness? What would become of the archaic mother in a feminist film that uses its visual vocabulary to criticize patriarchy? “Fear of losing oneself and one’s boundaries is made more acute in a society which values boundaries over continuity, and separateness over sameness,” 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 (such as The Awakening, “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You”, and “Die My Love”), this mainstream is criticized.
These inherently feminist stories meddle with the values of traditional stories, specifically horror stories, and see a movement away from patriarchal society and toward the archaic mother as a reclamation of life. Edna’s swim into the abyss, desperate as it is, is a stand against an unhealthy life under patriarchy.
Suicide in The Awakening is a final attempt to escape patriarchy’s shackles, to save the soul from deadening isolation. We have been trained by horror films to fear the archaic mother, but what if genre-adjacent films, these “psychological thrillers,” offer us a new way to look at her, seeing her for the protective, safe, and communal being she can be in her positive iteration?
If I Had Legs I’d Kick You (A24)
Rose Byrne’s Linda, in “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You,” commits an act similar to Edna’s at the film’s end. Linda works as a psychotherapist and is also a full-time mother. Her daughter needs constant attention because she has a gastrointestinal disorder; at night, she needs to be plugged into a machine that nourishes her through a tube fed into the spot above her belly button.
Linda’s husband is never home—he is a naval captain—but he calls her often, his voice an endless drone over the phone as he asks to stay updated on their daughter’s condition without offering any meaningful help. Linda is effectively a single mother. Their daughter needs to gain a certain amount of weight if she is to be weaned off the tube, but this proves tough for the girl, meaning that Linda is awake constantly, attending to the child day and night while also working a full-time job.
Things go from hectic to terrible when Linda’s apartment’s roof collapses, and she has to move into a motel on the beach with her daughter. The feeding machine’s whirr keeps her awake, and Linda spends her nights while her daughter is sleeping, getting drunk or high. Linda hardly sleeps, and her apartment refuses to get fixed; the hole where the ceiling ought to be a vast chasm taunting Linda.
Near the film’s end, at her wits’ end, tired out of her mind, Linda removes the feeding tube from her daughter’s belly. A doctor told her it would be easy, and it apparently is. But when her husband suddenly appears, he sees what Linda has done, and Linda, in a stunned panic, runs to the beach and throws herself into the tall foaming waves, trying to drown herself, again and again. But the sea keeps spitting her back onto the shore. Linda eventually passes out and awakens to see her daughter sitting over her. “I’ll be better,” Linda says before the screen turns black.
This film is an anxiety-inducing onslaught. The lens hews closely to Byrne’s face, hardly ever going wider than past her shoulders. We feel every strain of Linda’s facial muscles, the weight of every sound, and the sear of every bright light. We feel her exhaustion, we feel her desire to sleep, and in her steadily crumbling demeanor, we feel her desire to scream, to run away from her duties. Which is why the ending, when she says “I’ll be better,” always breaks me—she renews a promise made with her marriage contract to better adhere to patriarchy’s, the symbolic order’s rules. It’s a promise that hopes for more of the same.
Die My Love (MUBI)
In “Die My Love,” Jennifer Lawrence plays Grace, a young woman who is moved by her boyfriend Jackson (Robert Pattinson) from New York to a small home in a similarly small town in rural Montana. Grace is pregnant and gives birth to a boy. Initially, she believes that the move is only temporary, but it slowly dawns on her that it isn’t. The house belonged to Jackson’s uncle, who, Grace learns, committed suicide in it. Grace reluctantly makes a home in the house; she seems not to have any other choice. She is a writer, but can’t write anymore.
Jackson travels for work; his job isn’t specified, but it is made abundantly clear that he is having affairs with various women while he is away. Grace knows and suggests to Jackson that she knows. The two stopped having sex after the birth of their baby. Jackson leaves Grace at home alone to look after the house and their baby, and Grace, bored and lonely and sexually unfulfilled, becomes increasingly unwell.
We don’t get too much in the way of exposition for Grace’s mental state, but we do see it on her body. As Grace, Lawrence is completely and fully in her body, creeping and crawling like a wolf, screaming and running and skipping—she’s desperate for somebody to see her, to acknowledge her, to love her, but nobody is around. Truly alone and unhappy, she, at the film’s end, gets naked, like Edna before she enters the water, and walks into the forest that she has set on fire with the pages of her diary, killing herself.
Both Linda and Grace embody in their personhood beings deeply and viscerally dissatisfied with patriarchal society. Both women’s stories, like Edna’s, through their intense subjectivity, cast in stark relief how brutal the world is right now. In Linda’s story, we see the enormous and impossible labour placed upon women who are mothers. We see the little violences done to them every day when we ignore their pleas for help and support, when we ignore the blatant ways in which they are so obviously unravelling under pressure as heavy as towering waves.
As she becomes more and more herself, Edna’s husband sometimes wonders whether she is not growing a little unbalanced mentally. He could see plainly that she was not herself. That is, he could not see that she was becoming herself and daily casting aside that fictitious self which we assume like a garment with which to appear before the world.” Linda is not allowed to cast off the garment of motherhood, save for at night, when her daughter is asleep. She always snaps back into place by morning, even as she is teetering behind her mask, nodding off and about to topple over.
Die My Love (MUBI)
Grace, meanwhile, has completely shed her mask, even potentially lost herself (because she can’t write, because she won’t be seen), but nobody, least of all Jackson, seems to care. When in The Awakening, Edna’s husband goes to see the doctor, he makes it clear that his great point of concern, or the greatest marker of Edna’s illness, is the fact that she “lets the housekeeping go to the dickens. […] She’s got some sort of notion in her head concerning the eternal rights of women.” The doctor takes Edna’s husband’s concerns seriously enough. But ultimately prescribes inaction: “The mood will pass, I assure you. It may take a month, two, three months — possibly longer, but it will pass; have patience.”
And so Edna’s husband waits, like a parent waiting for his child to get over her tantrum, for his wife to slide back into her gender role. And his waiting is just like Jackson’s waiting. Throughout “Die My Love,” as Grace refuses to mask her deep and abiding sadness, people keep telling her that what she is feeling will pass. Acquaintances at parties tell her how horrible they know post-partum depression to be, but hopefully offer that it goes away after a while. When Grace asks for a specific time frame, people laugh.
Grace tries to find herself in her body as she loses herself in the move to Montana, but even as she acts strangely, no one seems to see or care about her, and she gets lost again. People at once expect Grace to be unwell yet also to get better, and in the whirl of assumptions and expectations, the volley of masks of good womanhood and motherhood—the mess of oughts, future wellness, and gender roles—the person herself is lost, even ignored. All anyone ever sees of Grace is her role as mother; nobody seems to see her for her, a lonely soul.
“Mental illness is de-stigmatized only when it presents in socially acceptable ways,” writes Sheila O’Malley in her review of the film. Mental illness is seen to be like a broken leg, like a physical wound, an ailment with a timeframe, with a cure. New mothers are allowed to be unwell, are afforded sympathy, only on the condition that they get better. If a mother does not get well as her child gets older, or she becomes more and more strange, she becomes a problem.
The thing about treating mental illness like a physical wound is that we ignore the pain a person is in right now, going so far as to perpetuate it with our expectations. Like the protagonist in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1892 short story The Yellow Wallpaper (who is committed by her husband because she makes art and doesn’t do household work), the more Grace is told that motherhood is tough and that new mothers often become unwell, the more Grace leans into her madness. The Yellow Wallpaper’s protagonist is Grace inverted: a woman told to rest so she can then become a housewife; she is told to be a mother and do her housewife duties so she can get better mentally.
But in the present, says Suzanne Scanlon in Committed: On Meaning and Madwomen, “The narrator is living up to the diagnosis she asked for. She has become the perfect patient.” By the story’s end, Perkins Gilman’s narrator cuts a terrifying figure, peeling the wallpaper off her walls and “crawling around, an infant at last, triumphant in her identification with madness.” Grace, too, becomes the unwell mother par excellence, writhing in pain, but nobody seems to care. It’ll be over soon, they say.
Edna’s story and The Yellow Wallpaper were written during the “woman problem,” a moment in history when patriarchy had to deal with the fact that many women did not want to stay home and be just housewives or just mothers. A desire to be a full person, to exist outside of expected gender roles, became a mark of unwellness, and any woman who stepped out of line was at risk of being institutionalized or of being brought back to the home. Every time 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 get better; there’s a cure for everything, capitalism sells. Everyone is waiting for Grace to get better, and as they wait, they don’t see the pain she is in, and so Grace becomes more and more unwell in an effort to have anyone take notice of her pain. Isolated, without her own connections, bored, and lacking a safe place, New York, maybe, she cannot work; she is trapped as a housewife, a role she abhors, and so she becomes crazy, she becomes Gilman’s creeping narrator, destroying her pretty cage: herself physically, and her home literally.
Die My Love (MUBI)
When Grace takes the baby and spends an entire day wandering through the forest with him, hiding from the search party that eventually begins looking for her, Jackson tells his mother they just need to wait it out. She will get better. He still doesn’t try to forge any meaningful connection with Grace.
Grace doesn’t get better. At one point, she quite literally claws at and rips the wallpaper off the walls in the bathroom, destroying the room with her shredded fingers. Jackson still says nothing. It is only when she smashes her face through a mirror on their wedding night that Jackson has her committed to a psychiatric facility. But he still doesn’t say anything, he doesn’t talk to her. Grace says that Jackson doesn’t see her, that she is right there, but he doesn’t really see her, and she’s right. Jackson sees only who he hopes she will be in the future, not her as she is now, sad and lonely and wanting his love. He doesn’t see her soul before him; he doesn’t see that she is slowly being snuffed out by the life he has imposed upon her.
De Beauvoir describes the type of man Jackson is in The Second Sex: a modern liberal sort of man who respects women as equals in the abstract and ignores or writes off any concrete or material inequality he sees. “But as soon as he clashes with her, the situation is reversed,” de Beauvoir says. “He will apply the concrete inequality theme and will even allow himself to disavow abstract equality.” De Beauvoir gives a prescient example of a man who believes that his wife is noble because she stays home and does all the housework, but during arguments says, “You wouldn’t be able to earn a living without me.”
Jackson believes his wife is his equal in the abstract, which is why he always brings up in arguments that she is not writing, that she should take her writing more seriously, but in the same breath, he also yells at her for not doing the housework. He ignores her concrete reality as a full-time housewife, leaving her with precious little time for creative activity.
The doctors don’t help Grace because they can’t help her; they can only momentarily calm her so she can function under patriarchy without causing too much trouble. Grace is certainly a bit calmer once she is released, and Jackson is smiling, but Grace is the same, sad and lonely, desiring to be seen. And so Grace walks into a burning forest, its warm maw like a respite.
Everyone refuses to help Linda and Grace in any meaningful way, in a way that sees or acknowledges their souls. Many don’t believe in the kind of help that might be useful to these two women because patriarchal capitalism needs for a woman to do the work of raising a child alone, without help, separate.
But this kind of separateness, we see in Linda’s and in Grace’s loneliness, can destroy a person even as they live and breathe. We see it in Grace’s acts of self destruction, how habitual, 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 wail her head off. We see in Grace what it feels like to scream for help and not have anyone answer, because they all expect that you will stop soon.
If I Had Legs I’d Kick You (A24)
Linda runs into the waves after her husband looks up from his daughter, unplugged from the tube, and says, “What did you do?” He doesn’t see the hopelessness within which she has been trapped, as though she were caged; he sees only the act of unplugging without proper supervision. He doesn’t see her, but only the one act that was verboten. Linda acted out of line, and he saw it. It’s like she herself is in trouble, like she is a child being confronted by the disciplining father, and she runs away from this patriarchal figure. She runs into the waves, and no one comes after her.
Before Grace walks into the forest and sets it alight, she says “Enough” to Jackson. He doesn’t go after her, even though what she has said is so clearly disturbing, so clearly suggestive of a soul about to self-destruct. He just sits, as if knowing she will come back. But she doesn’t come back. Why would she come back to a partner who only sees her as either a diagnosis or a mother, not for who she really is?
Both the water in Edna’s and Linda’s cases, and the fiery forest in Grace’s case, very easily map onto the visual rhythms of the archaic mother. The bodies of water and the forest are all three of them gaping and full, womb-like, self-sustaining, able to give birth, to nurture and warm, and to take away life, as they do to Edna’s and Grace’s. The three are so evidently on the run from patriarchal forces that wish to snuff out their individualities, even as they demand that they suffer as atoms within the nuclear family, which is a subjugation not to humanity but to stiff and rigid roles. These women enter the water or forest to escape the gruelling law and order of patriarchy, which promises individuality but really foists adherence to a singular type.
Everyone refuses to see these women, and so they choose to abscond to a space that we have been taught depicts a loss of the boundaries that we know, that stands for everything that ordered and rigorous patriarchy is not. But maybe it’s a good thing to lose the boundaries we know, because maybe our boundaries are incurably diseased. I think these women want the embrace of another, of the oneness that cradles, because you can’t be cradled if you are not seen first. I believe they want to feel like they don’t belong to the patriarchy.
The “state of oneness with the mother” that the archaic mother represents could also be seen as community; this reading can be viable if we recognize that the autonomy that the symbolic order promises is a lie, we live under the yoke of patriarchy, and aren’t really free to make our own rules or our own lives. We live in a discontinuity and separateness that hurts because it is forced and doled out in unequal measure. A few are egregiously autonomous and form a collective, while others have their work and movements intensely surveilled and controlled to curb collectivization.
A walk into the void is a desire for people to see you; it is an attempt to say that you need help, that you need other people. A walk into the void reframes psychic death (the black screen), orienting it away from a loss of the ego and toward a sort of warmth and life. The fearsome in these films is the loneliness of atomization, the endless, deadening labour of conforming to order, form, and gender. Under such a destructive order, the way the water moves around you, the way the flames lick your skin, feels as much and maybe as meaningful as a touch, as a glance that is not accusatory but that is seeing.
This isn’t to say that suicide is the answer, but this is to say that our current way of life is so solitary, nasty, even brutish, that it has us searching for warmth within self-annihilation. I would like to maintain that these women’s running, depicted through a positive iteration of the archaic mother, is a kind of criticism of patriarchy. To depict a walk into the archaic mother is to animate a desire for freedom from 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 to it, as opposed to away from it, and the straight world is what they are running from, then this is an upbraiding as scathing as it gets for our current way of life. What does it mean that the archaic mother is reframed as not the abject, but as that which frees, allows a moment of being seen and a moment of peace, of a moment without meaning-making, respite? What does it say about how deadening our current way of life is? Is it not akin to soul death? Made singular and solitary, hopeless and broken, and oftentimes insane, this move toward the archaic mother is at once a symptom of patriarchy and also a condemnation of it.
If I Had Legs I’d Kick You (A24)
It is in The Second Sex again where de Beauvoir says that remaining frozen, not struggling and remaining complacent, within a system that objectifies and oppresses you is “an absolute evil.” We ought to always choose ourselves, de Beauvoir says, strangely echoing Edna’s thoughts. “But what singularly defines the situation of woman 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: an attempt is made to freeze her as an object and doom her to immanence [the repetitive domestic realm], since her transcendence will be forever transcended by another essential and sovereign consciousness [that is, men].
“Woman’s drama lies in this conflict between the fundamental claim of every subject, which always posits itself as essential, and the demands of a situation that constitutes her as inessential.” We all want to be seen, but patriarchy deems only certain people worthy of being acknowledged as subjects.
A desire for subjectivity does not also relegate men to oppression, because, remember, to see another as another is not also to see them as bad. And an oppressive system would just replicate the societies Edna, Linda, and Grace are running from. What is needed here is wholesale change, a way of life that is conducive to life itself, a way of life that honours everyone’s souls, where everyone can make the choice to choose themselves and grow together, not remain within stultifying conditions, within immanence, in stasis like Linda, working within her impossible world to be impossibly better.
I don’t recommend Edna’s, Linda’s, or Grace’s running into the archaic mother, but I do understand it. The archaic mother’s embrace feels so much more welcoming when compared to a life of trying to fit into an assigned gender role, of sacrificing your artistic passions, of trying to endlessly be better even though you’re breaking, of loneliness and sadness. These three women, removed from community and denied love and understanding, not allowed to or able to or given the time to express themselves, feel as though they have only two choices: stasis or escape. Their versions of escape look like self-destruction because they are a destruction of womanhood under patriarchy, but we would do these women a disservice if we consider these acts in a vacuum. We need to see the negative relief in their acts.
The Awakening’s working title was “A Solitary Soul,” the same soul Edna takes into the Gulf with her. Edna, Linda, and Grace choose to walk into the archaic mother; they choose themselves, for better or for worse. What they walk away from is a world whose brokenness we now see more clearly and are all the more able to rebuild.
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