In a culture that equated womanhood with motherhood,
Edith Wharton imagined women who stood outside or
openly resisted the script. Lily Bart in
The House of Mirth refused the marriages
that would have offered her a future as a mother.
Ellen Olenska in The Age of Innocence
accepted her exile from the conventional path with
dignity. Undine Spragg in
The Custom of the Country treated
motherhood as an obstacle to ambition, and Kate
Clephane in The Mother’s Recompense left
her daughter behind in order to escape a
suffocating marriage. Rather than casting these
women as tragic or deviant, Wharton made them
complex, desirable, and disruptive.
At the same time, Wharton’s personal writings,
especially The Life Apart (her love diary),
present us with a countercurrent. A longing to be
chosen, desired, and securely loved by a man, to
express herself in love and be sustained there,
“like other women,” she wrote. Her fiction over and
over reflects this tension: the pull toward autonomy
alongside the ache for recognition and the sanctuary
of an intimate, domestic bond.
Wharton’s autobiography and diary are silent on
motherhood. Her archive cannot tell us whether, in
the kind of loving and fulfilling marriage she
longed for but never found with Teddy Wharton, she
might have had children. Without knowing whether
Wharton’s childlessness was a choice, we risk
reading her silences as statements she never made.
The possibility that Wharton’s experience was
shaped by circumstances such as infertility or
sexual incompatibility matters because it prevents
us from treating Wharton, or her heroines, as
oversimplified emblems of childfreedom or reducing
her feminism to a rejection of motherhood.
Wharton’s life and fiction illuminate the lived
spectrum of non-motherhood, from the private grief
of involuntary childlessness, which she may have
experienced, to the complicated freedom of
deliberate refusals of motherhood. Women without
children live within the complexity of that
spectrum.
Wharton’s treatment of nonmotherhood is radical
because it is ambivalent. She breaks with the
assumption that childlessness equals failure
without reducing women’s desires to a binary.
Wharton died almost a century ago, but her heroines,
and her own heart, still speak with urgency. They
remind us that the experience of choosing, refusing,
or losing motherhood is profoundly complex, and
that defiance, desire, and loss can and do coexist.
Simone Weil wrote that “the beautiful is that which
we cannot wish to change.” What happens when love is
given to a child purely, without a desire or need
for change? This is the love that sees what is
beautiful and recognizes it as already whole, and
cherishes it for that reason.
I’m thinking about Christ as an image of wholeness.
I often walk through the nearby Stations of the
Cross garden and stop to leave a flower at the
fourteenth and final station. The fourteenth station
is the paradox at the heart of the mystery of
Christ. Whole because broken. Sacred because human.
Wholeness not as perfection, or the absence of
fragmentation, but as the mirroring of love without
a wish for change—not simply out of a lack of desire
for change, but because of a love which cannot wish
for anything other than ourselves exactly as we
are.
Ann Ulanov wrote that “the Christian doctrine of
atonement points to our finding the mystery of our
being reflected back to us in the figure of Jesus
Christ. He reaches across our broken-apart-being
into our counterfeit lives to reestablish us at the
core where we find God’s being-at-one with us.” Can
psychotherapy do this? I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe it
can show us the way there, even if it cannot,
ultimately, see us through to the end.
In his old age Jung said that he knew less and less
than ever before. If tolerance for uncertainty is
indicative of psychological health, as I believe it
is, then perhaps Paul’s words to the Colossians
point us in a generative direction: “For you died,
and your life is now hidden with Christ in God.” We
are hidden, even to ourselves. And in the same
moment we are not. Not if we gaze at God as Henry
Miller described the Pacific Ocean at Big
Sur—“Nature smiling at herself in the mirror of
eternity”—and receive the reflection of our own
wholeness, hidden in the center of our brokenness.
According to Melanie Klein, our ability to
mourn well, to experience grief without
becoming captive to depressive and paranoid
defenses, without freezing our capacity to
feel, depends on the tenor of the
inner objects, that cast of
characters—primarily the mother—which inhabit
our psyches and guide our testing of reality in
the midst of loss. So much depends on how we
envision the inner smile of the mother object,
particularly how we as infants and children
took in and formed that smile in response to and alongside
of the reality of our external mothers.
Whether
that smile beams like the sun or reveals itself
through clouds in unpredictable weather, or is
not a smile at all but a sneer, is determined
by our ability to overcome the loss of the good
mother, that is, the nurturance and security of
the breast. And to reconcile that loss with the
imperfect actuality of the flesh and blood
mother, to mourn in a way which preserves,
enlarges, revisions, and locates the warmth of
the good mother within.
Kafka wrote that “a book must be the axe for the
frozen sea within us.” We could take a similar view
here and say that the good internal object is the axe
for the frozen sea within us.
As a little girl, I developed an image of a web of
love covering the whole earth, a web that never
stops recreating itself and which invisibly
supports everything. And in my own heart, a
bottomless well, a spring of love, that could be
tapped at any time and would never expire. If only
they knew about the bottomless spring of love in
their own hearts! (Then they wouldn’t hurt me.) If
only they knew about the web of love connecting
everything! (Then they would understand what
they’re doing wrong.)
We must pay attention to formulations of love that unilaterally embrace the idyllic. When love becomes a
defense, it ceases to be love and becomes a weapon
we wield in order to prevent pain. Not only can we
attribute any hurt we receive from others to their
failure to love, most importantly we can remain
innocent. We can be the little girls who are only
capable of love, who only know love, who are injured
because other people don’t know how to
love. But the truth is we are all capable of inflicting pain,
of betraying love. As Harry Gunthrip
put it, we fear to part with our bad internal
objects — those people who have hurt us — because
as long as they are hurting us, we are still
the innocents. We can still hope to be saved.
When we let these objects go, we become our
own rescuers. In this surrender, we find our real freedom to love, be loved, and know love.
