In fact, to some extent, Joan’s mother goes through a phase of bewilderment and anxiety about subjectivity similar to that experienced by Joan. In addition to playing her domestic roles, she searches for her position by taking one or two jobs, but none of them lasts long (63). Prior to becoming a good wife and mother, she has once engaged with someone else. Analogous to Joan’s fleeing from home, she offends her parents and also runs away from home at the age of sixteen, and later works as a
Huang 51 waitress. With these fragments of information pieced together, it seems that Joan’s mother, before endeavoring to be a “normal” woman, struggles to stick to her own self, which nevertheless results in a situation too difficult for her to handle. Feeling frustrated, she turns to do her utmost to fit into the role assigned by the patriarchal society. She starts with her appearance. Joan describes her mother thus: “Her hands were delicate and long-fingered, with red nails, her hair carefully arranged” (85). She allows no deviance from the paradigm. Her decoration of the living room also
explicitly demonstrates her desperation to be “normal”; as Joan describes it, “My mother didn’t want her living rooms to be different from everyone else’s, or even much better. She wanted them to be acceptable, the same as everybody else’s” (66).
With the same motive, she makes her daughter become a member of the Brownies where all “were supposed to try to be the same” (50). Besides, in order to keep everything perfect, she is even unwilling to hold her daughter’s hands so as to keep her gloves clean. She is living in, as Joan concludes, “this plastic-shrouded tomb from which there was no exit” (129).
The conflict further comes from the former desire to affirm her individuality since it has not disappeared but keeps on irritating her continuously. Consequently, while pretending to read a book about child psychology, she is actually reading “The
Fox, a historical novel about the Borgias” (66).
27 Gothic novels offer her a temporary exit from the suffocating demand of being a paradigm according to patriarchal values.The upset of Joan’s mother represents the age-long problem—whether women have to return to the domestic territory ultimately after their journey of searching themselves, as those Gothic heroines have gone through. Do women have to repress themselves in
27 The Borgias are historical figures— a Spanish royal family in the Renaissance. They are thought to be the “history’s first criminal family,” and the forerunner to the Italian Mafia. There are many accusations against the Borgia family, including incest, adultery, murder and scandal (see
http://royalwomen.tripod.com/id30.html). Stories about the Borgias are a common motif in popular films and fiction. For the list of related works, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borgias.
Huang 52 order to live up to the social expectations?
Pursuing the happiness of social myth, Joan’s mother succumbs to the patriarchal ideology but finds it depressing. On account of the resembling struggle that both Joan’s mother and Joan experience, Joan’s success in defying her mother is not a true victory over the patriarchy ideology; on the contrary, it marks her loss. Her obesity even makes herself hate her own body and find it grotesque and horrible, as well as longing for love from her mother or recognition from others:
On my side, much as I would have welcomed the chance to embarrass her, strangers were different, they saw my obesity as an unfortunate handicap, like a hump or a club foot, rather than refutation, the victory it was, and watching myself reflected in their eyes shook my confidence. It was only in relation to my mother that I derived a morose pleasure; in relation to everyone else, including my father, it made me miserable. (70)
Joan confesses that she eats not only to defy her mother but “from panic” as well (74).
Obviously, obesity is neither the way to a happy ending nor an alterative exit from the restriction of dominant ideology.
Contrasting with Joan’s and her mother’s vexation, Aunt Lou (Louisa K.
Delacourt) seems to be exempted from all those tensions. While Joan’s mother is reluctant to touch Joan, Aunt Lou allows Joan to rest her forehead on her neck when they are chatting. For a long time, Joan regards Aunt Lou as her mother. Aunt Lou is tall and heavy, like Joan, but opposite to the figure of Joan’s mother, and is conflicting with patriarchal expectations. Nor does the standard of her partner conform to the norm. Her husband is said to be a handsome gambler but has left her; yet afterward she has a lover, Robert. The most paradoxical part is her philosophy— “You can’t always choose your life, but you can learn to accept” (84). Neither taking violent protests like Joan nor catering to social expectations, Aunt Lou seems to be
Huang 53 comfortable with her life style and appearance but her refusal to visit the fattest woman/ Fat Lady of the Freak Show in Canadian National Exhibition discloses her ambivalent feeling of herself. Perhaps owing to such regret, she makes a will to help Joan out of her predicament: she leaves Joan two thousand dollars but whether Joan can get it or not is contingent upon whether she can lose one hundred pounds.
Aunt Lou’s legacy is actually not obedience to the dominant gender construction but an opportunity for Joan to be emancipated from her obesity which is based on hate and revenge to defying against her mother. However, there is risk attached to this liberty. Is Joan able to preserve her true self after converting herself into the norm in terms of the dominant gender expectations? Faced with the problem directly, she is now obliged to cope with more complicated situations. For instance, after she successfully loses weight, she cannot ignore the male gaze on the street any more:
“Strange men, whose gaze had previously slid over and around me as though I wasn’t there, began to look at me from truck-cab windows and construction sites; a
speculative look, like a dog eyeing a fire hydrant” (119). Once Joan endeavors to become a “normal” woman, she will find that “being normal” creates new problems which will not solve the problems of her relationship with her mother, either..
It is the slender Joan, not the fat Joan, that her mother is incapable of tolerating.
Joan comments: “While I grew thinner, she herself became distraught and uncertain”
(119). She doesn’t even want to see Joan, telling her that “the sight of you makes me sick” (119). Joan’s struggle and change probably remind her of her analogous past;
her contradictory reaction to her daughter’s transformation could thus imply her uncertainty of her belief in the patriarchal ideology. However, Joan does not understand what leads to her mother’s rage at that moment. Instead of feeling delighted by her mother’s distress, she gets confused and would rather see her being pleased. At last, her mother collapses; she tries to kill Joan, sticking the paring knife
Huang 54 into Joan’s arm, as a result of which Joan flees from home.