The Mother of Sorrows: Stories of absence and heroism
We’ve been talking and thinking intensely about the topic of motherhood for well over a year—and more speculatively for much longer than that. Back in December, Polly became a mother for the first time and since then, as well as through the months of pregnancy, we’ve been thinking about expectations, subjective experience, big societal stories of motherhood, literary mothers, mothers on film, family stories and how they were forming, shaping and subverting the unfolding particular drama taking place within a body, a family, a network of relationships, and itself contributing another node to the constellations of stories of motherhood into which all existing and future mothers will think, feel, and act. We’ve been recording these conversations and, further down the line, hope to create a podcast episode examining these stories.
As we explore our way through these stories, many maternal roads lead back to Rome, and the uber-mother of our fractured somewhat Christian culture, Mary mother of Jesus: Blessed Virgin, Virgin Mary; Mary meek and mild; Hail Mary full of Grace, Queen of Heaven; Holy Mary, Mother of God; Loving Mother; Mother of Mercy; Mother of Good Counsel; Mother of Sorrows... and onwards. One pole of the story of our paranoid-schizoid approach to the construct of woman, the Madonna of the Madonna-Whore complex. The most highly coveted role in the school nativity, subject of thousands upon thousands of the artworks making up the western visual canon. A line of contestation between Protestantism and both the Catholic and Orthodox churches, as well as a bridge between those Christian traditions which revere her and Islam, where Maryam mother of Isa has her own book of the Qu’ran. This character of the imagination has served a multitude of narrative purposes but persists in the secular imagination as the mother of us all and the model of motherhood to be venerated, revered or contested.
There is a curious contradiction at the heart of this model. If the Madonna is the model of submission and sacrifice, she is also an image of the thwarting of this project. Within this inherited story of the submission of the mother, submission is necessarily purposeful: it is the price paid for the success of the child, gladly and self-sacrificingly offered up. The Madonna becomes a mirror of God himself who is known by his absence (as in the RS Thomas poem In Church, curiously first published in his 1966 collection Pieta); she voluntarily absents herself to make the manifestation of the Son possible, and as such becomes the model of mothers everywhere, effaced for the success of the child.
But in that case, the Madonna is at heart a failed mother: the effacement does not forgo the most terrible maternal fate of outliving her child, encapsulated in the image of the Pieta, a cruel inversion of the image of mother cradling and nourishing her child (though arguably, of course, there is fairly swift compensation for this within the Gospel narratives in the form of the resurrection). Prior to this, she is (albeit lovingly) disowned by her dying son, who bequeaths her as chattel to the care of the apostle John and is not heard of again within the Biblical narratives. Earlier still, she is disowned rather less lovingly, in the name of creating a spiritual family. Despite the centrality of other women within the resurrection narratives, this Mary is absent from them. The incidents which comprise so many of the artistic depictions of Mary (her assumption and coronation as Queen of Heaven, the mythic stories of her childhood with her own non-Biblical mother ‘St Anne’, stories of the childhood of Jesus, any incident outside of the nativity narrative and the incidents linked above) are not drawn from the Biblical text but from the rich, allusive traditions which have filled in this absence.
That a mother is first and foremost—within our storied, cultured understanding—an absence is not so surprising. That she should be a figure of self-sacrifice, also, fits prevailing cultural inheritances. That she should be a failed sacrifice, and so a failed mother, is curious.
One of the most immediate understandings that emerges from this brief survey is that stories—in the sense with which this project is concerned—are not about what actually happened, or even fidelity to fictionalised or self-serving source material. The constellation of cultural stories which surround Mary have relatively little to do with either the biblical narratives or the mother of the historical Jesus. A written story is a somewhat fixed entity—albeit one whose meaning can change radically as the world into which it continues to exist changes—whereas a cultural narrative is a slippery and mutable thing. And this is born out by the fact we all have a somewhat tangible sense of the storied tone of the Madonna, even in these largely biblically illiterate times.
Even though I was raised a Roman Catholic (my somewhat unconventionally Catholic parents broadly each took broadly to the liberation theology and charismatic tendencies respectively, neither of which have particularly strong Marian traditions—and this discussion concerns those for whom the Madonna persists, but not as a devotional figure) as a child of the 1980s ‘Madonna’ evoked the image of the material girl long before it became associated with Mary, mother of Jesus. Is there something in the absence which licenses this sort of symbolic openness? In the way that a gnomic Dylan song, with the barn doors of its imagery wide open allows for the experience, imagination and neuroses of the listener to rush through and inhabit, so a figure as recognisable and yet ill defined as Mary can be whatever the listener wishes to make her? What is true of Jesus—capable of appearing to his contemporary disciples as authoritarian, revolutionary, mystic, human teacher, muscular rabbi, liberationist, and more, licensing and animating in turn a range politics running from Trump’s evangelical base in the southern US to radicals of South America—is true of his mother: the myth persists because of its vagueness and its ability to provide chaotic material which our pattern-finding minds can assemble according to the stories with which we encounter it.
Perhaps stories of this uber-mother resonate because there is a kinship between motherhood (as a cultural story) and stories themselves: both are most successful when—and because—they are emptied out, absented, vacant, ready to be inhabited, pregnantly or even parasitically, by the projections of culture. They are fundamentally unreal: divorced from the diverse material experience of motherhood, but also shaping of it, creating expectations into which reality acts. We live in a time when, once again, motherhood is venerated and rejected, this time because of its difficulty, in an era when suffering is elevated to moral significance in and of itself, but so the experience of suffering is expected, experienced and celebrated, even as it is resented and embraced simultaneously.
The cultural figure of the Madonna can encapsulate our bipolar relationship with the individual in an era of the self personified: motherhood returns as the ultimate sacrifice because, we suppose, it effaces the individual woman, yet the claim persists that it also fulfils her essential ‘womanly’ purpose, thereby exposing the category of ‘woman’ as a story rather than a concrete reality. Within this framework motherhood does not create but endorses the essential emptiness of ‘woman’ (or, indeed, man) as a category. Our categories are stories all the way down. The Madonna does not need a whore to be dualistic.
Conversely, perhaps the story of the persistence of the Madonna as a cultural story, and the complex and contradictory veneration and despising of ‘empty’ motherhood is a symbol of this moment of thwarted heroism. Heroism as a virtue is deeply troubling to the contradictions of our current moment and exists at the febrile tension points of our culture.
The sacrificial hero simultaneously both forms and undermines our category of the individual. A hero is an individual—a culture or a collective cannot really be heroic—and yet the action or actions which confer heroism necessarily involve sacrifice, which we might understand as the simultaneous negation of that individual.
Heroism exists on yet another deconstructed dualism: it is both exceptional and ordinary. The desire for it, to be heroic, is widespread and a usefully ambiguous way of responding to the neoliberal tyranny of the construct of the individual. While some would read that desire as in-built and essential, we would read it as produced by both stories and an experimental evolution, though it is no less useful for being historicised.
At this moment in history and culture—somewhat post-feminist, not-yet apocalyptically anti-natalist, despite the efforts of some online pseudo-leftists—motherhood remains the primary mode of heroism within our culture for women. Heroism has become a problem for neoliberalism’s veneration of the individual, because of the necessary effacement of the individual that it entails. But unless we choose the end of the species as a way of ending neoliberalism, motherhood and parenthood more broadly will continue. The other gendered pole of parenting has always been, technically and culturally, more disposable: the contribution of a father can, literally, be ‘complete’ even if it lasts for an ejaculatory few seconds. The storied forms of fatherhood as heroism—bread-winner, protector, authoritarian—has become both outmoded and coded as toxic, with good reason, but without an adequate restorying or reconfiguring. The cost of this can be read in the phenomenon of the so-called ‘incel’ violence and the suffering that it represents; the charge that masculinity—the traditional story of maleness—is inherently toxic; the exponential rise in ‘deaths of despair’ among working-class men. The corollaries to these questions come thick and fast: we live in a patriarchy, why should we care about the wellbeing of the male ‘winners’ of our system? Furthermore, we live in a world where men are over-represented among the powerful heroes of our culture, why should a discussion which begins with the Madonna as a rare model of womenhood within our culture track back to a question of role-models for men?
To take these responses in turn, we all need to care about these problems, not just out of human decency in that they represent intense and desperate suffering, but because the overcorrection to this de-masculinisation of culture (which of our contemporary collective virtues are ‘masculine’?) has been unsurprisingly represented by a politics of the hyper-masculine in characters like Trump and Bolsonaro. The threat they represent to us all does not need repeating—and will be fuelled, not solved, by telling the men who vote for them out of economic and cultural desperation that they are possessed of male privilege, even as they succumb to opiate addiction and turn to suicide. In terms of the question of representation, if the Madonna is the female hero of our Christian culture—distinguished by the ordinary heroism of motherhood—then Christ is the male hero—distinguished by supernatural powers over life and death. One leads to productive imitation, the other to a sadistic cultural quietism:
[W]hy do not Europeans and Americans frankly abandon Christianity as not fitting our times? [… P]eople who are firm believers in Christ as the great love, the self-sacrificing God, can turn this belief, in an alienated way, into the experience that it is Jesus who loves for them. Jesus thus becomes an idol; the belief in him becomes the substitute for one’s own act of loving. In a simple, unconscious formula: “Christ does all the loving for us; we can go on in the pattern of the Greek hero, yet we are saved because the alienated ‘faith’ in Christ is a substitute for the imitation of Christ.” That Christian belief is also a cheap cover for one’s own rapaciousness attitude goes without saying. […] Our professed belief in love anaesthetises us to some degree against the pain of the unconscious feeling of guilt for being entirely without love.
—Erich Fromm, To Have or To Be
In trying to account for the persistence of the heavily-storied cultural curio of the Madonna, we have stumbled into the costs—for both women and men—of a gendered division of our stories of how heroism is accessible. While more psychologically sophisticated and productively ethically ambiguous, the costs of the persistence of the storied model of the Madonna are obvious and well-rehearsed: relative absence from public life; a wider absenting from the benefits of the self; an economic short-falling; victimhood to violence. But in outliving widespread Christian observance, the Madonna continues to offer a means by which the contradictions of the self can be wrestled with.
This is an urgent task—and perhaps finding an de-gendered and post-religious form of reapproaching heroism will bring collective benefits in a language with which we can more widely identify. In the meantime, it is unsurprising that it is a Catholic woman of the Left (somewhat unusual within the contemporary online Left for her progressive embrace of the role of mother) who has perhaps most effectively identified the deficit of opportunities and language of heroism and its place in understanding the all-too-material effects of our blunter culture wars. Writing on twitter about the conflicted responses to the 2019 film Joker, journalist Elizabeth Bruenig wrote:
I think a lot of the angry/dismissive reviews sort of misconstrue what the void at the heart of the lonely, disaffected (usually though not always) white male is. They assume he issue is aggrieved fury resulting from frustrated entitlement — e.g., "tfw no gf," no automatic status or power (these are usually presumed to have been guaranteed to all white men in the past, though this analysis totally ignores class.) But I tend to think the issue is actually a lack of opportunities for heroism. I think all people naturally want to be heroic; they do this in all kinds of ways, making personal sacrifices for others, maintaining difficult moral regimens, joining social/political movements. For the lonely, isolated, downwardly-mobile male, the sense is that all the usual opportunities for heroism (supporting a family, achieving things for one's community, fighting in a meaningful conflict, etc) have been foreclosed by various material/cultural shifts. So the victory of the Joker in Joker is literally that he is the hero. That's it, he has achieved heroism. He's an agent in history, causing things, achieving things, at least mounting some kind of meager defense of his own dignity. […] I understand if someone doesn't sympathize with that, and I further grant that all kinds of horrible things arise from frustrated attempts at heroism, but I think that's a problem for society to solve, not the individual. i.e., the answer isn't "get over it, loser." I also think the habit of going: "oh boo hoo a male victim how sad poor baby" is not remotely different than calling men pussies for crying in public […] and the people who do the former usually detest the latter.
As a storytelling task, we can leave the Madonna behind but still seek out cultural forms of heroism which can be universally fulfilling responses to the material challenges of now. They need to help negotiate the challenges of the storied inheritance of the ambiguous self more productively than those outmoded forms we have received. If the self is an illusion then reckoning with it will always occupy the ambiguous space which the Madonna points up, even if we need not retreat to the destructive certainties of the past.
