Read All About Love: Anatomy of an Unruly Emotion Online
Authors: Lisa Appignanesi
Proprietary and adoring, fathers’ relationships with their daughters can run far more smoothly than relationships with their sons, at least until adolescence brings other men on to the scene and they begin to have to consider their little girls as sexed women. The moment that girls leave home can prove a thorny rite of passage for them both. Indeed, fathers love their daughters so much that in order to replace them, they may seek out other younger, adoring women. This may well end by turning their daughters against them and propelling the girl at last into an identification with her spurned mother, a mother she may have violently rebelled against and hated during her early teenage years. Now bound up masochistically with her mother, the daughter may later repeat aspects of the family tangle in her own life.
Peter and Sophie’s story reveals some of these familial processes at work.
Peter grew up in a large Canadian family. He was the second-youngest of four boys, a defiant son of a stern, high-ranking clerical father and a mother committed to good works. Both parents expected best behaviour from their children. In the busy family, little enough attention was paid to him and he sought it out in a variety of alternative ways, bad and good, the first often reaping the reward of instant interest in the form of blame and discipline. Rebellious, always at loggerheads with paternal dicta, he became a fine public speaker, and in the late sixties a student leader. Though more radical than his father, he internalized the paternal rectitude. He needed to be good and he sought approval for his goodness in crowds and in individuals. Over the years he became a prominent and much respected figure in the world of NGOs and human rights.
Sophie was the elder of two daughters in a military family, where regular habits and a certain coldness of relations were the order of the thoroughly regimented day. Her father abandoned the family, without any articulated explanation, when she was seven. He returned when she was fourteen and, though it was never spoken of, everyone knew that he had set up with another woman during those missing years. Stiff-lipped, her mother grimly accepted him back, though never ceased to criticize and upbraid, often by her mere expression of sullen discontent.
A clever and pretty young woman, Sophie blossomed at university law school during the late sixties. She never, however, managed to keep her always serious boyfriends: two left her in turn and promptly married others. On the rebound, she consciously made herself over, changing her prim clothes for the velvets and bright colours of the day. It was then that she met Peter, the most popular man in her circle. Something meshed. They were in love. They set up house together and eventually had two daughters, Sophie working only part-time in order to tend to them.
An intriguing set of relations developed within the couple. According to Peter, who travelled a great deal for work reasons, Sophie from almost the beginning of their partnered life grew suspicious of him, habitually accusing him of engaging in affairs, of being a philanderer. Though he wasn’t at the outset, he became one. If recrimination was the name of the game, he half told himself, he might as well inhabit the persona he was given and reap its benefits. Much later, it became clear to him that he had needed the blame, the reproach, the constant allegations, the repeated diminishing of him, just as Sophie seemed to need his guilt and the repeated reasons for finding fault. She created a circle of haughty perfection around herself: it gave her the power to counter Peter’s power and popularity in the wider world. Despising that, she shored herself up.
And so it went on, with increasing rigidity and lessening satisfaction on both sides, until the children left for university. Then Peter fell in love with another woman, easier in her ways, comfortable in her body, happy to take pleasure in him and his achievements. This time he decided to leave his wife. He could no longer bear what had become the joyless trap he and Sophie had fallen into. But if there are fifty ways to leave your lover, there are few clean breaks. Sophie just wouldn’t allow their relationship to end, holding on to property and to the power that the potent tie of continuing blame and recrimination gave her. Almost in mirror image of her mother’s behaviour during her childhood, she now proceeded to turn the children against Peter, so that they too unleashed the full force of their scorn on him.
Both partners were in part repeating patterns of love and hate established in childhood. More aware of them now, Peter is struggling to break out, particularly pained at the way these patterns have also entangled his daughters.
Bobbie’s story is different. Ever alert to her New England family’s constraining paradoxes, secrecy and general coldness, she vowed not to repeat the maternal saga of rectitude and self-abnegation in the face of a loveless marriage. A feminist in the seventies, defiant, she lived her life to the full. Eventually settling into marriage, she had a daughter. It seemed to suit both partners for the father, who was freelance, to be the stay-at-home parent. When the marriage ran dry, Bobbie and her partner parted amicably, against her own mother’s vocal wishes. She still felt and was young, and she engaged in a series of intense, short-lived affairs, always telling at least part of the truth of them to her daughter Natasha, a bright and beautiful girl, who was herself by now adolescent and engaging in sexual encounters.
Natasha’s father had remarried and proceeded to have other children who, she felt, had displaced her in his affections. Her beloved grandmother, who had helped look after her in her childhood, had died when she was fifteen. When her grandfather followed, Natasha began to develop an eating disorder: food, that bearer of mother-love, had grown tainted and she would have none of it. Once bubbly, she became austere, pure, as squeamish about female sexuality as her grandmother had been. She would, it seemed, neither compete with her mother in the sexuality stakes nor take in food, which had become as ambivalently dangerous as her mother. The latter now, paradoxically, gave up everything to tend to Natasha. Defiantly ill, Natasha had all the love and attention she both wanted and rejected. She was, she felt, the only adult in the family, while once again being a small child.
And finally, Marion. She had grown up in London, one of two children of an academic father and an artistic mother. When Marion was thirteen her mother, whom she describes as flaky and all over the place, upped and left the family to pursue her talents and a bohemian lifestyle. She also became a vociferous lesbian. In rebellion, Marion pursued fatherly ideals. She grew into a studious young woman and diligently followed a scientific path, making a name for herself in her chosen field. She left the UK for the US, where she married and had a child, bringing him up with textbook correctness; while ambitiously, though always with an unhappy edge of nervousness, making her way up the professional hierarchy. Just after her mother, with whom she maintained distant and disapproving relations, died, Marion left her husband and child. Despite the radicalism of the act, she blossomed, suddenly growing beautiful. Her loves were now other women.
A cautionary note. There are many ways of telling such stories other than by focusing on family patterns internalized in childhood and perpetuated with variations through generations. But our post-Freudian twenty-first century, with the Christian narrative at its helm and abetted by countless writers and novelists, has an (auto)biographical impetus. It is through such individual narratives of the percolations of love and lack in the family, and perhaps redemption in the setting-up of new ones, that we largely make meaning of our lives. But if the telling of stories can give the early underpinnings of life a deterministic weight, there is no absolute necessity to this, any more than there is to hereditarian or genetic discourses or explanations based on physiology or chemistry. People do break through and out. With a little self-awareness, they make new patterns out of old.
Siblings
The horizontal line in families is as formative of our loves and hates as the vertical one. The passions of children for their siblings run deep: the Egyptian myths of Isis and Osiris with their tales of murderous rivalry as well as incestuous love provide a world of early paradigms alongside the biblical stories of Jacob and Esau, Cain and Abel.
First-borns, certainly early on, can loathe the baby who arrives to displace their pre-eminence. Writing to Freud, Carl Gustav Jung reported a conversation with his four-year-old daughter, Agathli, on the evening before his son’s birth. ‘I asked her what she would say if the stork brought her a little brother. “Then I shall kill it,” she said quick as lightning with an embarrassed, sly expression, and would not let herself be pinned down to this theme.’
My own family lore has it that just after I was born, my brother tried to smother me with a pillow, so intense was his loathing for this squalling creature who had usurped his centrality in the family. No particular monster, he was only enacting the passion St Augustine had so astutely observed and which finds so many instances in police annals. A friend’s four-year-old daughter, when her little sister was born, was so palpably troubled that she did her best to imitate the newcomer who had stolen her place at mother’s breast and lap. She lost her considerable grasp of language and lolled about sucking her thumb, only regaining age-appropriate speech when her sister began to speak. Another friend’s child decided to give her loathed and crying sibling a good shaking. Translating into the real a gesture she often performed with her doll, she shook her and heaved her out of her high-chair, concussing her in the process.
Freud never theorized sibling relations. But in his paper, ‘A Childhood Recollection’, he focuses on a passage in Goethe’s memoir where the latter describes his pleasure at breaking the family crockery at the instigation of friends. Freud is convinced that for the incident to feature in Goethe’s memory, it must be linked to other matter that is screened from his view. Through a patient who had experience of the same rebellious behaviour, but timed with the birth of a sibling, Freud postulates that this might have been the case for Goethe, too. Dr Eduard Hitschmann gave Freud a list of Goethe’s siblings, together with notes:
Goethe, too, as a little boy, saw a younger brother die without regret. At least, according to Bettina Brentano his mother gave the following account: ‘It struck her as very extraordinary that he shed no tears at the death of his younger brother Jakob who was his playfellow; he seemed on the contrary to feel annoyance at the grief of his parents and sisters. When, later on, his mother asked the young rebel if he had not been fond of his brother, he ran into his room and brought out from under the bed a heap of papers on which lessons and little stories were written, saying that he had done all this to teach his brother.’
Throwing the crockery out on the street, smashing it, was for Goethe, as it was for Freud’s patient, Freud concludes, a magical act which gave violent expression to his wish to get rid of the little interloper.
Pondering the tumult that the arrival of a new baby created in a sibling, Freud observed that the child grudged the ‘unwanted intruder and rival’ all the aspects of maternal care:
It feels that it has been dethroned, despoiled, prejudiced in its rights; it casts a jealous hatred upon the new baby and develops a grievance against the faithless mother which often finds expression in a disagreeable change in its behaviour. It becomes ‘naughty’, perhaps, irritable and disobedient and goes back on the advances it has made towards controlling its excretions. All of this has been very long familiar and is accepted as self-evident; but we rarely form a correct idea of the strength of these jealous impulses, of the tenacity with which they persist and of the magnitude of their influence on later development. Especially as this jealousy is constantly receiving fresh nourishment in the later years of childhood and the whole shock is repeated with the birth of each new brother or sister. Nor does it make much difference if the child happens to remain the mother’s preferred favourite. A child’s demands for love are immoderate, they make exclusive claims and tolerate no sharing.
Yet, in time, many children do make accommodations and learn to love their siblings. The way love unfurls depends on any number of contingencies: from their own place in the family hierarchy to the new arrival’s nature and, indeed, to the parents’ absence and presence, as well as their actions and discourse about the children. Much of this complex nest of processes then shapes the child’s relations with the rest of the world.
The early feminist sociologist Harriet Martineau, the sixth of eight children, was a frail child in a family of rambunctious boys and a scolding elder sister. When a baby sister was born, she recounts in her
Autobiographical Memoir
(1877), she resolved that ‘she would never want for the tenderness which I had never found’. Her little sister became a new life to her, on whom she could lavish love. Forty years on, she still remembered ‘lifting her out of her little crib, at a fortnight old, and the passionate fondness she felt for her, which has ever since “been unlike anything else”’. The child became ‘a pursuit’, as well as an ‘attachment’: through her, Martineau felt, as she told a young woman at the time, she could ‘see the growth of a human mind from the very beginning’.
Simone de Beauvoir, after a first jealous phase, accommodated herself well to the fair and pretty sister, two-and-a-half years younger, whom the family nicknamed ‘Poupette’ or little doll. She convinced herself, with her parents’ help, that the advantages of being older were many. She had her own room, a big bed, and it was she who accompanied her mother when she went to visit her father doing military service. Ever aware of rankings, little Simone thought of Poupette as ‘secondary’, almost a superfluous being who was always, at school and at home, being compared unfavourably to her own pre-eminence. But her sister also provided an exemplary and docile playmate, one who was ever ready to take orders from Simone, and in their secret imaginary play would enact whatever role was allotted to her. Nearly a half-century on in her
Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter
(1959), de Beauvoir writes that she owes her sister a great debt: that of helping her ‘externalize many of my dreams in play’. Poupette also saved her ‘daily life from silence’. Through her, de Beauvoir took on the habit of wanting to communicate with people, a habit that stood her in good stead in her later teaching and writing life. In Poupette’s presence, too, words took on meaning, but not the gravity of deeds, which words with parents did. Recounting the day’s incidents and emotions to one another, ‘they took on an added interest and importance’. One could speculate that de Beauvoir’s later relationship with Sartre, grounded in the way they regularly ‘sifted’ each other’s experiences and ideas, had its origins in sisterly ways.