To support my argument that mother characters are crucial in Wilde’s writing, I turn to Nancy Chodorow’s theory about women’s mothering7. Nancy Chodorow wrote her book The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of
Gender in 1978 to discuss women’s mothering. She thinks feminists rarely analyze
mothering despite its profound influence in family structure (3), also in “relations between the sexes, and sexual inequality both inside the family and in the nonfamilial world” (3). She considers that providing a theoretical account about women having primary responsibility for child care in families is very important. “Being a mother, then, is not only bearing a child—it is being a person who socializes and nurtures. It is being a primary parent or caretaker” (11). Being a mother means one has the responsibility to teach children the mental and physical aspects of life so they can survive. Thus, the role of a mother is very important, and Nancy Chodorow analyzes in detail about the mother’s familial functions in the family. Chodorow’s analysis is
7 In Nancy Chodorow’s book The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender, she uses the word “mother” as a verb to illustrate that women not only bear children, but also take care of the children mentally and physically. She writes: “Women mother” (3) and “women’s mothering” (13) in her book.
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useful to better understand the position of women in the family and in the society.
Furthermore, she points out the significant relations of women’s mothering in connection with the society which most sociological theorists have ignored:
Women’s mothering is central to the sexual division of labor. Women’s maternal role has profound effects on women’s lives, on ideology about women, on the reproduction of masculinity and sexual inequality, and on the reproduction of particular forms of labor power. (11)
Chodorow not only provides mother-child relationships in her book but also delicately separates the cases of girls and boys. She thinks girls and boys have different points of view due to different developments regarding preoedipal and oedipal complex.
Chodorow states that “[w]omen, as mothers, produce daughters with mothering capacities and the desire to mother” (7). Women will create a new circle of mother reproduction in the growth. The mothering capacities and the needs are built into and will also grow out of the mother-daughter relationship itself. Yet, by contrast, “women as mothers (and men as not-mothers) produce sons whose nurturant capacities and needs have been systematically curtailed and repressed.” As a result, men will be prepared “for their less affective later family role, and for primary participation in the impersonal extra-familial world of work and public life” (7).
Chodorow’s concept provides careful details about how women are “trained” to be mothers, how they interact with their children, and how they help their children to adapt the society. She also strengthens the fact that women mother to explain that women and men are biologically different and will not experience the same growth process. In addition, children will have different attitudes towards their mothers in different families. Chodorow also defines the idea of parenting:
A concern with parenting, then, must direct attention beyond behavior. This is because parenting is not simply a set of behaviors, but participation in an
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interpersonal, diffuse, affective relationship. Parenting is an eminently psychological role in a way that many other roles and activities are not.
“Good-enough mothering” (“good-enough” to socialize a nonpsychotic child) requires certain relational capacities which are embedded in personality and a sense of self-in-relationship. (33)
Chodorow not only claims the essence of parenting, but also considers that good mothering has something to do with a mother’s capacities to relate with people. A mother needs to be sensitive in order to help a child to be socialized. When a woman becomes a mother, she begins to care for a particular child, and the process of mothering includes gratification and frustration for both the child and the mother.
“Emotionally, the child’s primary love for its mother, characterized by naïve egoism, must usually give way to a different kind of love, which recognizes her as a separate person with separate interests” (72). A child wants to remain as one with the mother, but then discovers that the mother has a separated interest. Therefore, the child will learn to deal with this loss, and learn to search for another object to occupy his or her desire. Mothers have an overwhelming significance to children’s psychological development, “in their sense of self, and in their basic relational stance. It reveals that becoming a person is the same thing as becoming a person in relationship and in social context” (76). In short, being a person is related to every other relationship that one encounters in society.
The growing process of an individual may affect personality and how he/she interacts with other people as these characteristics may be formed at a young age.
Also, an individual’s relationship with his or her mother will also influence the development in the psychological layer as oedipal identification works in different stages. “A girl’s oedipal identification with her mother, for instance, is continuous with her earliest primary identification (and also in the context of her early
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dependence and attachment)” (174). While the boy’s oedipal crisis “is supposed to enable him to shift in favor of an identification with his father. He gives up, in addition to his oedipal and preoedipal attachment to his mother, his primary identification with her” (174). Therefore, when a boy attempts to develop masculine gender identification and to learn the masculine role, he turns to his father:
This positional identification occurs both psychologically and sociologically.
Psychologically, as is clear from descriptions of the masculine Oedipus complex, boys appropriate those specific components of the masculinity of their father that they fear will be otherwise used against them, but do not as much identify diffusely with him as a person. Sociologically, boys in father-absent and normally father-remote families develop a sense of what it is to be masculine through identification with cultural images of masculinity and men chosen as masculine models. (176)
Chodorow’s theory helps elaborate Wilde’s characters in the plays: Mrs. Erlynne and Lady Windermere as mother and daughter, and Mrs. Arbuthnot and Gerald as mother and son. Chodorow’s perspectives not only deal with mother-child relationships, but also analyze how children react to their mother’s love and care.
In the 1949, Simone de Beauvoir wrote The Second Sex and she discussed that a mother “is divided against herself” (490) in her work. The mother’s “natural tendency can well be to have the baby whose birth she is undertaking to prevent; even if she has no positive desire for maternity, she still feels uneasy about the dubious act she is engaged in” (490). Simone de Beauvoir points out that mother will devote her life to the child, because “[the] child is in possession of no values, he can bestow none, with him the woman remains alone; she expects no return for what she gives, it is for her to justify it herself” (513). Simone de Beauvoir also thinks that as the child grows older,
“he enters a world of interests and values from which his mother is excluded; often
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enough he scorns her on the account” (516) and then the boy would be proud of his
“masculine prerogatives, laughs at order from a woman” (516). But when the mother still tries to join his life and to help him, the boy would begin to reject her assistance.
Therefore, the mother needs to cope with the inner conflicts because she would have high expectation for her son to be a hero in the future, but still treat him like a baby.
Barbara Katz Rothman defines in Recreating Motherhood that the old definition regarded motherhood as a status. Therefore, “[w]omen were mothers. Mothering was not something women did, it was something women were” (7). However, mothering is not just an activity, such as service or work. Rothman continues that “the intimate, joyous, terrifying, life-affirming experience that is motherhood” (7); therefore, we cannot reduce the function of motherhood as labor. Rothman states that “[h]aving a child is a lot like owning something. It’s more complicated than the sense of possession of a pretty little object, a vase or a painting” (46). Mothers want the opportunity to be a part and participate in the lives of their children, and to help them when they grow. Regardless of whether the child is facing a good time or a bad time, mothers want to be there “psychologically, physically, financially for a kid who needs them” (46).
Beside the theories of mother/mothering, in order to analyze the behaviors of Mrs. Erlynne and Mrs. Arbuthnot, it is impossible to ignore the ideas of individualism.
Crittenden points out in Beyond Individualism: Reconstituting the Liberal Self that a condition to have autonomy is that “individuals do not need and are not expected to accept the principles or values of others” (77) because it is an “invigorating freedom”
and the person may choose his own way of life “independent of any relationships—personal, social, societal—that he does not choose to enter voluntarily.” In addition, because he is autonomous, “he is free of his sodality and is no longer defined by his relationships in or to it. Now he possesses relationships and a
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self to share, if he chooses, in them.” And then the society “becomes the background to the rights and interests of individuals” (77). Crittenden claims that each person has his or her “own goals and interests and enters into contractual relationships to pursue and achieve those goals and interests,” while obligations are “established by freely contracting with others, a method, as Kant pointed out, that enables each person to make himself reciprocally a means to another’s ends without violating either person’s freedom” (77). With the concepts above, I hope to establish and stretch the structure of the research in detail with more clues to analyze the mother characters in Wilde’s plays.