Adrienne Rich
The Anger of a Child
Adrienne Rich (b. 1929) has been an
activist in the women’s movement, and her attitudes are reflected in her
poetry, literary criticism, and essays on patriarchy in our culture. Her
publications include A Change of World
(1951), Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law
(1963), and The Will to Change
(1971). The following excerpt appears in her book Of Woman Born (1976). It reflects her ambivalence toward her
parents and “old, smoldering patches of deep-burning anger.”
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t is hard to write about my mother.
Whatever I do write, it is my story I am telling, my version of the past. If
she were to tell her own story other landscapes would be revealed. But in my
landscape or hers, there would be old, smoldering patches of deep-burning
anger. Before her marriage, she had trained seriously for years both as a
concert pianist and a composer. Born in a southern town, mothered by a strong,
frustrated woman, she had won a scholarship to study with the director at the
Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore, and by teaching at girls’ schools had earned
her way to further study in New York, Paris, and Vienna. From the age of
sixteen, she had been a young belle, who could have married at any time, but
she also possessed unusual talent, determination, and independence for her time
and place. She read¾and reads¾widely and wrote¾as her journals from my childhood and
her letters of today reveal¾with grace and pungency.
She
married my father after a ten years’ engagement during which he finished his
medical training and began to establish himself in academic medicine. Once
married, she gave up the possibility of a concert career, though for some years
she went on composing, and she is still a skilled and dedicated pianist. My
father, brilliant, ambitious, possessed by his own drive, assumed that she
would give her life over to the enhancement of his. She would manage his
household with the formality and grace becoming to a medical professor’s wife,
though on a limited budget; she would “keep up” her music, though there was no
question of letting her composing and practice conflict with her duties as a
wife and mother. She was supposed to bear him two children, a boy and a girl.
She had to keep her household books to the last penny¾I still can see the big blue-gray ledgers, inscribed in her clear,
strong hand; she marketed by streetcar, and later, when they could afford a
car, she drove my father to and from his laboratory or lectures, often awaiting
him for hours. She raised two children, and taught us all our lessons,
including music. (Neither of us was sent to school until the fourth grade.) I
am sure that she was made to feel responsible for all our imperfections.
My
father, like the transcendentalist Bronson Alcott,[1] believed that he (or
rather, his wife) could raise children according to his unique moral and
intellectual plan, thus proving to the world the values of enlightened,
unorthodox child-rearing. I believe that my mother, like Abigail Alcott, at
first genuinely and enthusiastically embraced the experiment, and only later
found that in carrying out my father’s intense, perfectionist program, she was
in conflict with her deep instincts as a mother. Like Abigail Alcott, too, she
must have found that while ideas might be unfolded by her husband, their daily,
hourly practice was going to be up to her. (“ ‘Mr. A. aids me in general principles,
but nobody can aid me in detail,’ she mourned. . . . Moreover her husbands
views kept her constantly wondering if she were doing a good job. ‘Am I doing
what is right? Am I doing enough? Am I doing too much?’ “ The appearance of
“temper” and “will” in Louisa, the second Alcott daughter, was blamed by her
father on her inheritance from her mother.) Under the institution of
motherhood, the mother is the first to blame if theory proves unworkable in
practice, or if anything whatsoever goes wrong. But even earlier, my mother had
failed at one part of the plan: she had not produced a son.
For
years, I felt my mother had chosen my father over me, had sacrificed me to his
needs and theories. When my first child was born, I was barely in communication
with my parents. I had been fighting my father for my right to an emotional
life and a selfhood beyond his needs and theories. We were all at a draw.
Emerging from the fear, exhaustion, and alienation of my first childbirth, I
could not admit even to myself that I wanted my mother, let alone tell her how
much I wanted her. When she visited me in the hospital neither of us could
uncoil the obscure lashings of feeling that darkened the room, the tangled
thread running backward to where she had labored for three days to give birth
to me, and I was not a son. Now, twenty-six years later, I lay in a contagious
hospital with my allergy, my skin covered with a mysterious rash, my lips and
eyelids swollen, my body bruised and sutured, and, in a cot beside my bed,
slept the perfect, golden, male child I had brought forth. How could I have
interpreted her feelings when I could not begin to decipher my own? My body had
spoken all too eloquently, but it was, medically, just my body. I wanted her to
mother me again, to hold my baby in her arms as she had once held me; but that
baby was also a gauntlet flung down: my
son. Part of me longed to offer him for her blessing; part of me wanted to
hold him up as a badge of victory in our tragic, unnecessary rivalry as women.
But
I was only at the beginning. I know now as I could not possibly know then, that
among the tangle of feelings between us, in that crucial yet unreal meeting,
was her guilt. Soon I would begin to understand the full weight of maternal
guilt, that daily, nightly, hourly, Am I
doing what is right? Am I doing enough? Am I doing too much? The
institution of motherhood finds all mothers more or less guilty of having
failed their children; and my mother, in particular, had been expected to help
create, according to my father’s plan, a perfect daughter. This “perfect”
daughter, though gratifyingly precocious, had early been given to tics and
tantrums, had become permanently lame from arthritis at twenty-two; she had
finally resisted her father’s Victorian paternalism, his seductive charm and
controlling cruelty, had married a divorced graduate student, had begun to
write “modern,” “obscure,” “pessimistic” poetry, lacking the fluent sweetness
of Tennyson,[2]
had had the final temerity to get pregnant and bring a living baby into the
world. She had ceased to be the demure and precocious child or the poetic,
seducible adolescent. Something, in my father’s view, had gone terribly wrong.
I can imagine that whatever else my mother felt (and I know that part of her was mutely on my side) she also was made
to feel blame. Beneath the “numbness” that she has since told me she
experienced at that time, I can imagine the guilt of every mother, because I
have known it myself.
But
I did not know it yet. And it is difficult for me to write of my mother now,
because I have known it too well. I struggle to describe what it felt like to
be her daughter, but I find myself divided, slipping under her skin; a part of
me identified too much with her. I know deep reservoirs of anger toward her
still exist: the anger of a four-year-old locked in the closet (my father’s
orders, but my mother carried them out) for childish misbehavior; the anger of
a six-year-old kept too long at piano practice (again, at his insistence, but
it was she who gave the lessons) till I developed a series of facial tics. (As
a mother I know what a child’s facial tic is¾a lancet of guilt and pain running through one’s own body.) And I
still feel the anger of a daughter, pregnant, wanting my mother desperately and
feeling she had gone over to the enemy.
And
I know there must be deep reservoirs of anger in her; every mother has known
overwhelming, unacceptable anger at her children. When I think of the
conditions under which my mother became a mother, the impossible expectations,
my father’s distaste for pregnant women, his hatred of all that he could not
control, my anger at her dissolves into grief and anger for her, and then dissolves back again into anger at her: the
ancient, unpurged anger of the child.
My
mother lives today as an independent woman, which she always meant to be. She
is a much-loved, much-admired grandmother, an explorer in new realms; she lives
in the present and future, not the past. I no longer have fantasies¾they are the unhealed child’s fantasies, I think¾of some infinitely healing conversation with her, in which we could
show all our wounds, transcend the pain we have shared as mother and daughter,
say everything at last. But in writing these pages, I am admitting, at least,
how important her existence is and has been for me.
Suggestions for Discussion
1. What is the tone of Rich’s portrait of her father? With what details
does it become apparent?
2. With what details does the author convey her anger at her mother?
3. How does the author feel about the relationship of her father and
mother?
4. How did Rich recognize her mother’s guilt?
5. Account for the author’s ambivalence toward her mother.
6. The author concedes that she is writing her “version of the past”
and that her mother might tell her story differently. Provide some of the
details in her mother’s story if told by her.
Suggestions for Writing
1. Write on your views of enlightened child rearing.
2. Recall an episode in your childhood in which you felt anger at your
parents.
3. Develop your version of the mother’s story.
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