A Split Self

Mary identifies with her mother’s feelings of loathing, and also her attitude of indifference towards her father which is portrayed by Lessing in terms very close to Klein’s description of the primary paranoid-schizoid mechanism, in which the self first begins to build itself through a process of separation from the world and the mother, through the splitting mechanisms of projection and introjection. Otto Weininger argues that in projection, “the person projects aspects of the self onto another object (person)” so that the emergent self is “then experienced as being within the other” (3). Weininger explains further that the earliest form of “empathy” is formed here for in this process of projection the “projector may identify with the object who now contains these projected impulses and phantasies” (3). If it is hate projected on to another, “fear of retaliation and persecution may arise” (Weininger 3). However, if “persecutory fear is too strong,” the infant might depend too much on the idealised introjections of the object, and become “a shell for it” (Greenberg and Mitchell 184). When Mary’s mother dies, she feels “virtually alone in the world” since her father largely leaves her alone or ignores her (GS 36). Mary therefore feels, in turn, bitter towards him, and she

42

rejects and ignores him so that she feels “in some way to be avenging her mother’s sufferings” (GS 36). But Mary has also assimilated her mother’s anxiety concerning the maternal role. Her brother’s and sister’s deaths froze her mother’s heart; she remembers “her mother’s face at her children’s funeral—anguished, but as dry and as hard as a rock” (GS 40). This kind of harshness is similar to Martha C. Nussbaum’s explanation that a “mother’s anxiety” could “persecute and stifle her infant” (229) though the mother may appear contented on the surface. It would seem that intimate relations only remind her of her childhood home and the continuous need to comfort her mother’s misery and in effect to invert the mother-child role. This constant defensiveness means that Mary appears “impersonal,” with a sense of “stiffness” and “aloofness” with others (GS 38). She does not share her true feelings with friends or supposed intimates and indeed avoids “intimacies” especially appearing “feminine frigidity” in her relationships with men (GS 38). According to Michele Wender Zak’s explanation, her mother’s “indifference,” which “dismayed the child Mary” so much, “comes to be the defining quality of the adult Mary” (483). Klein also explains that for the young children, especially those “lack of happy and close contact with loved people,” they would “increase ambivalence, diminish trust and hope and confirm anxieties about inner annihilation and external persecution (Greenberg and Mitchell 150). Mary chooses to live in a girls’ club as an ideal family because she feels protected but does not need to negotiate the close intimacy of negative familial relations. Her reliance on a kind of distanced collective life stands in for intimacy and protects against the “ontological insecurity” which R. D. Laing proposes in The Divided Self as the mark of the individual who cannot “take the realness, aliveness, autonomy, and identity of himself and others for granted” (44). She cannot assume her own personality or emotion, nor can she identify with an inner self of her own or of others. Her emotional and intimate life effectively remains fixated at the moment of being a schoolgirl, when she feels most independent in her life and after she has rid herself of the bounds of the “childhood she hated to remember” when her father dies (GS 42). However, while she gradually overcomes the persecutory anxiety, she again faces pressure from society about its expectations towards a thirty-year-old (still unmarried) woman.

43

However, her fragile outer shell in her relationship with society, quickly breaks down when this society fails to recognise her. She is vulnerable to the effects of the gossip about and around her and is conscious of “that impalpable, but steel-strong pressure” to conform as a woman, to get married, even though her single life is actually most appropriate for her personality structure and the kinds of defence she has built (GS 41). Her failed relationship with an older man quickly turns into a scandal and destroys her fragile equilibrium so that afterwards, she resolves “to remodel herself into a socially acceptable image of a marriageable thirty-year-old woman” (Zak 486). In order to recover her feeling of security, Mary can only abide by societal rules and there is no place to escape to or from them. As Laing says of the individual suffering from “ontological insecurity”:

External events no longer affect him in the same way as they do others; it is not that they affect him less; on the contrary, frequently they affect him more… (T)he world of his experience comes to be one he can no longer share with other people. (Divided 44-45)

As Mary Ann Singleton states, “Mary therefore decides to escape from the city, which is perceived to have made her “psychically warped” (20).

Mary is doomed to follow her mother’s path because she does not know how to love. Both Mary and Dick choose the “illusion” of marriage; Mary has “false expectations of farm life” and Dick holds “unrealistic dreams about family” (Singleton 82). Mary’s “abstraction,” her phantasy of “getting close to nature” is based on her memory of going out for picnics at weekends before (GS 53). This hypothetical idea is like her marriage; she has “no idea of the life she had to live” (GS 62). Her marriage to Dick is a way of getting back to the false balance of her past life: to try to recover the good memories she once obtained. She chooses Dick, not out of love, but because she needs him to “restore her feeling of superiority to men, which was really, at the bottom, what she had been living from all these years” (GS 42). For Dick, a family is like the pictures on his wall: “a chocolate-box lady with a rose in her hand” and “a child of about six, torn off a calendar” (GS 55). Since Mary has only a very negative impression of marriage from her parents, she is

44

actually overwhelmed again by the nightmare of her negative memories. On the first night of her marriage, she was unable to bear the idea that “her father, from his grave, had sent out his will and forced her back into the kind of life he had made her mother lead” (GS 57). In the house of her husband, she was “back with her mother” and did what her mother did before; she tried to “contrive and patch and mend” the house endlessly as a substitute for satisfaction in the relationship. Her marriage inevitably follows a similar pattern to that of her parents and she develops the same feelings of anxiety that grew up between them.