[In the following essay, Sullivan examines how French portrays strained family relationships in Her Mother's Daughter.]

The title of Marilyn French's novel signals her view of the complex and mysterious tie that binds mothers and daughters. For French, a woman is, for better or worse, eternally her mother's daughter and, as the proverbial phrase itself seems wryly to suggest, the resemblance is likely to be for worse, not better. But French's novel—part fiction, part social history—holds out, in its unsparing examination of mother-daughter conflicts through several generations in one typical American family, the possibility that the apparently irresistible impulse that drives a daughter to repeat her mother's mistakes is not, in fact, irresistible—the cycle of repetition can be arrested, if only a woman will face up to, and speak out about, the conflicting emotions motherhood engenders in her. It is the conspiracy of silence, the refusal to acknowledge the frustration and even anger that women experience in the face of overwhelming demands on them, that locks them into the negative cycle of repetition. What Her Mother's Daughter demonstrates is that even the woman whose mother is lodged painfully in her heart like a splinter “that cannot be extracted”¹ can—by breaking the silence about her feelings—at least keep from becoming a splinter in her own daughter's heart.

The difficulty in breaking the silence, as French's protagonist Anastasia Stevens finds, is that silence is not always easy to recognize for what it is. Her grandmother Frances, for example, seems to Anastasia and her sister Joy the essence of the warmly loving “babushka,” the Polish Grandma, but to their mother Belle, the daughter on whom Frances depended most in their early years of struggle, she seems remote and uncaring. Watching Frances with Belle, Anastasia says, “I know she loved her. … But Bella never knew it” (70). And Belle, hungry for her silent mother's words of affection, grew into a woman incapable of expressing affection, even to the adoring husband and children who tried to break through her wall of silence. Comparing herself with Frances and Belle, Anastasia prides herself on being able to communicate, as they could not. She may not be dutifully domestic as they were, but at least she's emotionally there for her children—or, as she puts it in one of her imagined dialogues with Belle: “I know you would have managed somehow to cook a good meal for them, but you wouldn't have talked to them!” (437). And, after all, didn't even Belle, after witnessing a particularly furious argument between Anastasia and her teen-aged daughter, Arden, admit to a kind of envy of their openness with each other? “Oh, I wish I could have talked to my mother like that!” (18) she had said tearfully. How is it then, Anastasia wonders, that she now finds herself—middle-aged, at the height of professional success—feeling miserably lonely, distanced from those children with whom she had communicated so well, and sinking into the same kind of chronic depression in which her mother has lived her life.

For her mother and grandmother both, battered by their struggle to survive, there was some excuse for their distrust of emotional engagement. But Anastasia has no such excuse: unlike the immigrant Frances, bewildered by a social system that could take her children from her, and the young Bella, deprived of childhood by the need to help her mother, she's had economic security and the freedom to choose the life she wants. What she finally comes to see, however—after a painful process of introspection—is that she does indeed have an excuse for feeling battered, too; because security and freedom don't inure a woman against the insatiable emotional demands of motherhood, that job so thankless and impossible and irresistible. That ineluctable need to sacrifice oneself for one's child would always—regardless of a woman's economic or social situation—clash with the instinctive urge to preserve her sense of self. Refusing to acknowledge the power of these contrary impulses in herself—refusing to break the silence—is what has brought Anastasia to her “black hole” (660) of depression.

Trying to puzzle it all out, she looks to her early years with Belle, who lives in silence. On the surface, at least, “silence” hardly seems to describe Belle's mode of suffering. She's like those “midge mothers,” insects who “sacrifice themselves entirely for their young” (4) but, as Anastasia ruefully notes, the midge young are luckier than she herself was, because they at least “never have to hear about it” (4). Anastasia had to hear about it, over and over. Belle's memories of a solitary childhood and the overwork and neglect that have left their marks on her still—her hearing dimmed, her heart “flawed” (12). “Listening over and over” (20), eagerly at first (“Tell me about when you were little, Mommy” [16]) and then guiltily—for adding to her mother's burdens—to those heard rending tales that all began the same way (“My father died when I was nine years old” [48]) Anastasia fell into the role—like Belle with Frances—of the “chosen one,” appointed to “become a midge mother in return” (20), to mother her own mother. Brooding over their shared knowledge—Belle “would never tell these things to anyone else” (20)—Anastasia looked desperately into the memories for “something buried, something hidden, something I could discover if I persisted that would make all the difference” (16). But the unspoken message in them is not Help me to live again, but simply a bleak warning: “Nothing, nothing you can do can console me for the loss of my life” (14). And, Anastasia admits, “I heard it … I understood” (14).

For Belle, language is untrustworthy and, to communicate her feelings, really unnecessary. Even in pouring out her woes, Anastasia notices, Belle skirts some incidents, breaks off—whenever the subject turns to those years of relative independence, before marriage and children thrust her back into servitude again. Reading “the silences and pauses” (27), Anastasia grasps “what the omissions in conversation meant” (27), that her mother is, quite simply, “furious” (27)—furious not only at the fate that marred her childhood but also at herself for having “surrendered to the ordinary” (159), instead of using her talents and drive to achieve something. And silence is a way to express her anger. The power of language was Anastasia's earliest discovery—to get what you wanted, “you spoke!” (172) and everyone responded—but her mother got what she wanted, it seems, by not speaking. “Silence. No one spoke … Mommy was silent” (181); “Mommy wasn't speaking to us. She often stopped speaking …” (92); we lived “for months, perhaps, in a silent house in which no one ever raised their voice and no one ever smiled” (282)—the memories of Belle refusing to speak are more vivid, and painful, for Anastasia than all Belle's tales of woe. When she pictures the family—herself, her sister Joy, their father—“sitting there in silence, all I want to do is cry” (231), she says, to “let out” all their grief, to break that silence. But Belle will never change; she would rather live out her life “locked into silence” (684) than risk being hurt again; for her, “language is part of silence, and breaks it only to deceive” (684). And so she will end her days—by choice—marooned on her porch as on a desert island, idly watching the birds whose songs she cannot hear (“Her hearing aid is turned off” [684]).

Grieved as she is by her mother's choice of silence, as shield and weapon against the world, Anastasia can understand only too well why the choice seemed natural to Belle. She had learned it as a child from her own mother. Frances expressed pain and anger by withholding herself, her love, her words. “Momma had fallen into a deep silence. She never spoke to Bella except to send her on errands. … They never spoke, the mother and the daughter” (57-58), but colluded in their silence. Bella “does not tell Momma she has been left back. Nor will Momma ever ask” (64). Later, a discreet silence became a way for Belle to protect her new-found independence; given a raise at work, she simply “did not tell Momma” (114) but pocketed the money for herself. And no wonder that Belle can so brusquely reject the childish offering of a handmade gift (“What do I want this junk for?” [93]) when that was the way her own love-offering of wildflowers had been received by Frances (“Oh, what do I want with a bunch of weeds!” [88]). Here is the cycle of generations in full force, every woman being her mother's daughter, in the worst way. As Anastasia bitterly concludes: “It doesn't matter what you do or how you try: the same things happen, over and over and over and over. There is no escape” (232).

Once, she had mistakenly thought it possible, by sheer will, to cut the “bloody cord” (322) connecting her to Belle. “I would not, would not, would not have a life like hers!” she promised herself grimly, “I would be happy!” (149). But even though she changes her name, from her mother's choice to the more dashing “Stacey,” and her life-style, from middle-class respectability to bohemian free spirit, she's soon trapped—just as Belle had been—by an unplanned pregnancy, into surrendering to the ordinary, in the form of pinched suburban domesticity. All that's left of her revolt is to cover up her frustration with a relentless cheerfulness, to be “her mother's opposite” in manner if not in essence. If Belle wept for months after Anastasia's birth, then Anastasia will weep not at all (“I didn't cry, I didn't utter a sound” [164]); if Belle rehearsed her injuries over and over, then Anastasia will bury her disappointments and confusion under a facade of nonchalance—easy enough to do, she thinks, because “I had no one to talk to” (163) and because no one, mother or husband or sister, cared to look beyond the facade. So natural is this withdrawal into silence that she never notices how it encompasses even that one part of her life where she enjoys some sense of control over fate—her burgeoning career as a photographer. Holding back the pictures she's taken of mothers with babies because they show “inappropriate” maternal images of anger or dismay, concealing from her editor the fact that she has children for fear of losing a choice assignment, she finds, without ever quite thinking about it, an infinite variety of ways to practice the “tight, silent withdrawal” (258) of a Frances or a Belle.

Occasionally a faint echo penetrates the wall of silence she's erected, as when she catches herself cutting off Arden's latest literary enthusiasm; her impatient dismissal (“sentimental slop!” [92]) sounds, to her own ears, a little too close for comfort to the style of Frances and Bella. But it takes a truly major shock wave—the breakup of her second marriage—to bring the wall tumbling down. This marriage, so different from her first, was all openness and freedom, its rules allowing her to pursue her by-now high-powered career and even the occasional extramarital fling, with no questions asked, in return for supporting Toni in his writing career. But the neat arrangement founders, unexpectedly, on the rock of Anastasia's silence. He would have accepted as her right, Toni complains, the separate bank account, “if only you'd told me about it” (555). Caution and concealment, however, are such ingrained habits in Anastasia that she never gave a thought to Toni's right to know. His response to the discovery is to go off on his own; hers is—as Belle's had been when feeling betrayed—to settle into “a permanent state of woundedness” (596). Terrible as is this black hole of depression, even more terrible for Anastasia is to see how thoroughly, despite all her determination to do otherwise, she has followed in her mother's footsteps. “I am just like her,” she realizes, “I am being transformed into her, clutching my pearl of inconsolability” (660).

That the one person who takes on the task of consoling her is her daughter only underscores for Anastasia how completely she is herself her mother's daughter. Franny, her youngest and most vulnerable child, assumes the role Anastasia had played to Bella, and Bella to Frances, of “the chosen one,” sharer of her mother's burdens. This ironical turn of the cycle crystallizes for Anastasia all the complexities of the mother-daughter connection. For Franny was to have been not her child, but Toni's; it had been his idea that they have a child and he, not Anastasia, was to take responsibility for raising her. But the mere possibility that Toni might now try to take Franny away with him is devastating: “This late child, this burden, this baby I had not raised completely as I had the others, this almost unwanted young life in the house: I could not have borne losing her” (592). Almost as devastating is the realization of what she has been doing to Franny, the good listener, whose hearing is as acute as her own in picking up a mother's unspoken messages. For Franny has clearly heard what she did not even know she was transmitting: that she is “angry … tense … all coiled up inside ready to explode … like Gramma” (634). The only consolation is that for Franny there was, what she never had, someone else to turn to with her worry. To Franny's account of confiding in friends, Anastasia says, “I wish kids had done that when I was a kid,” and hears the echo of Belle's wistful words: “I wish I could have talked to my mother like that” (636).

Being able to talk about her feelings—to break the silence—can help Franny avert the black hole of depression that threatened to swallow her mother as it had her grandmother, and the simple act of speaking out, finally, about what has been consuming her is the first step in Anastasia's healing process as well. Sparing Franny her lamentations, she finds a sounding board in Clara, her clear-sighted friend (as her name suggests) who is a feminist scornful of the notion that a woman should feel guilty for being unhappy: “everyone,” she insists, “has the right to feel bad about the things that happen to them, the right to complain and even cry about them” (437). The alternative is to stay “imprisoned in repetition” (661), endlessly repeating, from one generation to the next, the pattern of internalizing anger to the point of despair. To survive, Clara preaches and Anastasia agrees, a woman has to “unchoose” (660) the sadness she inherits, by breaking the silence about it.

One thing this means is learning to recognize all the guises that silence can take: rationalization, evasion, role-playing, lying. The well-intentioned deception, like inventing stories for her mother about her popularity (“this was a lie I frequently used because it seemed to make her happy” [25]) can too easily turn into self-deception, Anastasia acknowledges, like her denial of her mother's disappointment in her; she could not let herself know how Belle felt because “it would have destroyed me. I wasn't lying to anyone but myself” (149). Even her hiding of the mother-baby photographs that violated the sentimental images of serene motherhood was a kind of lie; no longer will she censor her photographs of women in all their variety of honest emotions, however unwelcome they may be in some quarters. To do so would be telling a lie “just like men's lies” about what women feel (624). Particularly insidious are the temptations to lie out of kindness, to keep the silence for the sake of keeping peace—concealing her friendship with Clara, for example, just to avoid offending Arden, or yielding to Clara's demands for emotional intimacy just out of gratitude. And she has to learn to put aside her flattering self-image as “cheerful Nellie, Pollyanna, laughing, cracking jokes” (273), always there for her children (”You weren't there … you were somewhere else!” Arden remembers [273]), always the good listener (hadn't Belle said, enviously, “You always had wonderful hearing, Anastasia” [15])—and yet here is her son denying it: “You never listen when I talk” (650). The most difficult act of honesty of all is to accept the bleak truth that, though she may yet be able to cease to be a splinter in her children's hearts, Belle will never cease to be a splinter in her heart. Her mother, locked in silence, has nothing left to give Anastasia, beyond the occasional flicker of pride in some achievement, and this, inadequate as it is, simply “has to be enough” (686).

In her own case, this arduous process of “unchoosing” silence disproves at least, the even bleaker theory that “there was no escape” from the inherited pattern of behavior. And, had she but heeded them, there were signs all along that behavior repeated in succeeding generations need not always be imprisoning. Anastasia's childish fantasies of punishing the teacher who had humiliated her mother reappear, unexpectedly, when Arden—even in the full bloom of adolescent rebelliousness—fiercely answers a critic who failed to appreciate her mother's work. The daughter's protective impulse is, it seems, something that doesn't need to be taught. And how is it, Anastasia wonders, as she plays at shaping soap lather figures for her children, that Belle had thought of doing that with her and Joy: “For surely no one had ever played it with her” (259). And then too there is Joy, also very much her mother's daughter, who has nevertheless managed to give the kind of loving mothering to her children that Belle never gave to her; where did that gift come from? Even Belle's envious reaction to the fight between Anastasia and Arden—”Oh, how I wish I could have talked to my mother like that!”—reflected a dim apprehension, however unrealized in action, that being able to express passionate feelings is better than being “locked into silence.”

Breaking the silence. In a sense this is what Marilyn French is doing in this unsentimental but ultimately optimistic novel. She is breaking the silence, for women in general, about the deep ambivalence they have to feel when taking on what is, as French says, “the hardest job in the world”—motherhood. And she is also breaking the silence for one particular woman who could not, or would not, articulate her own anger and pain. Essentially, this novel is, though spanning four generations, Belle's story: Frances remains, in her “foreignness” (9) and helplessness, a background figure; Arden is still an unfinished identity; Anastasia takes on, in the variety and intensity of her personal and professional options, an almost allegorical quality, as if she stands for all the strains in contemporary feminism. But Belle seems drawn from real life, firmly anchored in a recognizable time and place, and rendered with such sharp particularly that she dominates our imagination, as she does Anastasia's, from first page to last. Certainly, French encourages us to note parallels between the fictional Belle and her own mother in such touches as the novel's dedication (“For my mother Isabelle, 1904-1986”), which points to the similarity in name and dates, and in the inclusion of photographs from French's own family album. And, even though other photographs taken from public collections, and the titles of the first two sections of the novel (“The Children in the Mill” and “The Children in the Garden”) suggest that the book's characters represent types, from struggling immigrant to assimilated professional, of twentieth-century American historical currents, still, the personal and autobiographical dimensions loom large. The third and concluding section of the novel is entitled “Arrangement in Grey and Black” and accompanied by a reproduction of Whistler's portrait of similar title—“Arrangement in Black and Gray: The Artist's Mother.” This is surely an invitation to consider Belle as a portrait of the author's mother. At any rate, Whistler's painting, which was to an earlier age the icon of serene motherhood, takes on a radically different meaning in the context of Belle's story. Here the woman appears solitary, unreachable, both awesome and pathetic in her self-absorption, turned away resolutely from the viewer—“locked in silence,” it seems.

In French's portrait, we feel the weight—and the terrible waste—of that withdrawal into silence, but we also feel that French has succeeded in doing what Anastasia wanted to do: to live her mother's life over again with such imaginative sympathy that she gives Belle the voice she lacked, so that we do know her in the round and, like her daughter, can understand and accept her, “flawed heart” (12) and all. She does it by recording Belle's thoughts with a kind of high-fidelity clarity, just as Anastasia—with her “wonderful hearing”—listens to music. Unlike her father, who never heard the music on his phonograph, but only the sound—every distortion, scratch, imperfection, was a cry for his attention”—Anastasia “heard only the music, and filled in or ignored distortions” (129). The novel's authority comes ultimately from this sense of its getting beneath surface facts of a woman's life, beyond the distortions of personality and habit, to the felt experience—the pure music—of what it is to be, in her time and place, a daughter and a mother. If the novel never answers the question about motherhood—indeed declares it unanswerable—(“Why do we go on doing it?” [608]), it does point the way to understanding how we can, each of us, insure that being our mother's daughter can be for the better and not the worse.

Note

1. Marilyn French, Her Mother's Daughter (New York: Summit, 1987), 646. Page numbers for subsequent quotations from this novel are cited in parentheses in the text.