All About Love: Anatomy of an Unruly Emotion (48 page)

It matters little what gender, male or female, generates the parental limits, but evidently they need to come from somewhere. This, too, is part of parental love.

So, too, is the fraught task of keeping in touch with children if separation or divorce takes place. In the period of enmity and high emotion that accompanies divorce, children become trapped in each parent’s contesting and hateful view of the other, often dragging along a sense that somehow they, once so important, are the cause of the fray. There are no simple rules here, except to repeat that the child isn’t at fault, and for both parents to carry on recognizing and acknowledging what it is he or she feels, which may be quite contrary to what they themselves experience. The psychoanalyst Enid Balint writes of the importance of this recognition: it is what gives the child a sense of his own reality. And it is another aspect of parental love, far more crucial than spirited weekends with ever guilty absentee fathers or, indeed, mothers. Without it, children’s thinking or feeling is never joined up with what they live, and a false sense of themselves comes into being, covering over a core emptiness.

Love’s Crucible

Each in our own idiosyncratic way, we learn to love in the family. Though it can sometimes provide a sentimental idyll, the family is also the site of tempestuous drama. All shades of love from bright to dark are there. It’s a school in intimacy and power, hierarchy and democracy, passion and ambivalence.

The ancient myths shine a dazzling Mediterranean light on the powerful subterranean emotions that hurtle through life in the family. Like tragedy and opera, they enact the passions on a grand scale. If Oedipus still speaks to us–and not only in Freud’s interpretation–it is because his story embodies the turbulence of family relations. Consider: fathers want sons, as Laius, King of Thebes, so desperately does–even though in some versions his desires are homosexual. But the arrival of sons also signals the death of the father and a new lover for the mother. So Laius sends his infant son Oedipus, destined to displace him, out to die on a mountaintop. But the generational fate, time’s deadly arrow, can’t be stopped. Unbeknown to him, Oedipus, now caught up in the conflicts of adoption, leaves his adoptive family: in a scuffle over pre-eminence on a country road, he kills the man who is his blood father. As if to underline that this father-murder is part of the human condition, Oedipus then proceeds to solve the riddle of the sphinx: ‘What is the creature that walks on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon, and three in the evening?’ To which swollen-footed Oedipus answers, ‘Man’. We may be the same creatures throughout, but at different points in our lives, we get about in different ways, first on all fours, then upright, then with the help of a stick.

The doors to Thebes open to him, Oedipus is presented with and married to Jocasta, the mother he originally lost when she succumbed to paternal wish, and becomes her lover/husband. When the gamut of cross-generational sins–old against young and young against old–finally comes to light after much resistance, Jocasta hangs herself, and Oedipus puts out his own eyes, a punishment which no longer allows him to see the havoc he has helped to engender. He is then utterly dependent on his daughter and half-sister, Antigone, who in that sense displaces Jocasta. Antigone provides him with a metaphorical third leg and loyally guides him through the years to Colonnus, where he will die.

First, however, he learns that his two sons, to whom he has granted the throne of Thebes to occupy in yearly rotation, have risen against each other. Legacies ever generate jealousy and turmoil. Asked by his brother-in-law/uncle Creon, to bless Eteocles in single succession, Oedipus refuses. Both sons, Eteocles and Polynices, have been negligent towards him, he deems. The warring brothers thus slaughter each other in a battle for single inheritance. Creon, who has stepped in as King, allows only Eteocles official burial, since Polynices was effectively a rebel against the law of the land, having raised help from a foreign power.

Enter ever loyal Antigone, upholder of family honour and kinship ties above any contractual duty of citizenship to the state, keener than ever, we might say, given her family’s taints, to uphold that honour. Polynices, too, must be appropriately buried. She asks her sister Ismene for help, but Ismene refuses: she isn’t as brave as her sister, she says. So Antigone carries out the burial rites alone. She is caught and condemned to be interred alive. Now, Ismene, in retrospective loyalty to her sister, tells Creon that she too is guilty of this ‘illegal’ burial. Meanwhile, Creon’s son, betrothed to Antigone, pleads for her life to his father, is refused, and when he learns that Antigone has hanged herself he, too, commits suicide. Creon’s wife, learning of her son’s death, does the same.

This is, we might say, family dysfunction on a grand scale. Equalling it are the passions in Shakespeare’s tragedies: the sins of fathers or mothers rebound on their children. Hamlet avenges his ghostly father, replacing him in rank jealousy of Gertrude, a mother sexualized through her marriage to the one-time King’s brother. His thoughts poisoned by his mother’s sexuality, Hamlet turns on Ophelia. His actions lead to her death, his mother’s and his own.

Such patterns find their partial equivalents in so-called honour killings today in which daughters (and mothers), who stand in for paternal and familial reputation but count for little in their own right, are expendable in the purification of family virtue.

King Lear unleashes tragedy by partitioning his territory in response to public and competitive testimonials of love from his daughters–an exchange of money for love, one might say. While the elder two, Goneril and Regan, greedy and worldly, know how to flatter, the youngest, his favourite Cordelia, is tongue-tied. She simply can’t traduce the intimate nature of her feeling in a public contest: her love is more ‘ponderous’ than her tongue: it weighs too heavily for easy speech. Heaving her heart into her mouth is an impossibility; all she can say, her words echoing marriage vows in a scene in which her future husband is present, is ‘I love your Majesty/According to my bond, nor more nor less.’

When Lear, insatiable in his demand, asks for more, she responds in judicious fashion that his claim on her is inappropriate. He is asking for more than natural affection can give.

Vain, tyrannical, incapable of giving up the power he so ostensibly seeks to shed, Lear avoids his favourite’s plea, abdicates love, throne, and eventually reason. He disowns her. Perhaps he thinks her suitors won’t have her without her dowry and she’ll remain all his. When the King of France is moved to take her just for herself, Lear proclaims to Cordelia: ‘Better thou hadst not been born than not to have pleased me better.’ His private love has turned to public hate, and his curses on her will fall on many heads, his own amongst them. Casting out Cordelia, Lear too becomes an outcast, a poor naked wretch on a blasted heath. The insatiability of his love brings on her death.

If murderous passions within the family are now mostly not enacted on a grand scale–though the sordid, abusive and traumatizing instances of parent and vulnerable child incest provide their demotic underside–it’s clear that emotions in the family run the whole gamut from love to hate, and all the affection, kindness, pride, envy, jealousy and grief in between. These emotions also hurtle across the generations. How our parents behave towards one another and towards siblings and ourselves, as well as what they say–inevitably not quite in keeping with what they do–impacts on the love patterns, the conscious and unconscious wishes, that we then proceed to enact in a variety of ways. Growing up, the child identifies with parts of one or t’other parent–absent or present–rebels against the identification, yet often holding on to it in some way, then finds it revivified at one moment or another in life’s ever variegated journey. His status amongst his siblings, his loves and rivalries, play into these patterns.

In his memoir
My Lives
(2005), Edmund White evokes that shaping trajectory through family life. His mother, Delilah Mae Teddlie, had lost her own father when she was still a child, and thought that this had instilled in her ‘a floating, but permanent dread, of being abandoned by a man, a crucial man, or just by men, men in general’. Her husband left her for his mistress when little Edmund was just seven, though the marriage had endured for twenty-two years. She then took a post as a state psychologist testing children who were ‘very bright or very slow’, work she had long been training for. She also tested Edmund and his sister frequently, detecting in her son ‘signs of a great soul and highly advanced spirituality’. A larger-than-life character, who the children later determined bore a kinship to Tennessee Williams’s Blanche Du Bois, she was prone to rages, fits of weeping and self-dramatizing. She also loved her bourbon and her extravagant clothes, and was always on the lookout for the right man. Young Edmund was her most constant one, and would daily tie her girth into a gargantuan girdle and act as her reader on long car journeys–‘hopeful, deep books, that would sometimes cause her to look dreamy’. She hoped and feared for a ‘strange destiny’ for her son, giving him Nijinsky’s
Life
when he was nine or ten.

Having grown up during the fifties when homosexuality was seen as an aberration to be cured, young Edmund continued to be obsessed by men and drawn to betraying them. Somewhere in his reading of and visits to a variety of analysts, he came across the theory that

His father was a man who, though privately eccentric, even violent, ‘wanted to appear, if not actually be, irreproachable’, so despite his view of psychoanalysis as a form of ‘soak-the-rich charlatanism’, he paid for the teenage Edmund to see an analyst. Needless to say, his sexual orientation didn’t change: it was society, rather than him, that needed to, and eventually did.

Neither, for many years, did his
ways
of loving change–or not altogether–though he had in part internalized a childhood moment of homophobia. Like his mother, who suffered from self-loathing and was prone to make drunken, coquettish demands, ‘I alternate between low self-esteem and a prickly sense of my own importance.’ Like her, he sobs for long periods when a lover leaves him. And like her, he is always ‘pursuing one man or another’, though his love affairs last longer.

More tales from family life

Amy, by contrast, grew up with parents who were enmeshed in that unusual constellation, a lifelong love affair with each other. In her narrative, she and her sister hardly count: they are barely visible witnesses to their parents’ ever manifested ardour. Always holding hands, their first allegiance is to each other and is palpably physical. So she and her sister form a parallel, secondary universe and find their succour in one another. They play, they chat, they imagine, they shore each other up, they wonder at their parents’ indifference to them. If neither girl becomes the apple of her father’s eye or mother’s favourite, they’re not unhappy. They often think of their parents as ‘simple’, as their children, rather than the other way round. When she grows up, a rebellious Amy is interested only in intellectual love. She marries a mathematician. Sex is unimportant. When she and her husband have a daughter, unlike her parents she is devoted to her child. Yet soon she is quite happy to leave her for long periods in the care of others. And when she travels for work reasons, her closest links are with other women. Sometimes these are sexualized, particularly after she and her husband divorce. It is with other women in her circle of friends that she finds her strongest bonds. They give her the kind of attentiveness her childhood relationship with her sister helped to put in place.

When Paula, twenty-six, describes her childhood, it is also a narrative of parents in love, herself on the outside looking in, bringing them her accomplishments which in the course of time grew considerable. Her mother, once an actress, was and continues to be by Paula’s own account rivetingly beautiful, flirtatious, ever the centre of male attention, including her adoring husband’s. Paula, an only child, joined her father in that adoration. In a sense she made the choice of not competing with her mother in the womanly stakes. Instead, she opted for her father. He became her companion, her pal, her fellow spirit, the person with whom she discussed life, interests, books: together they treated her mother as the incarnation of the feminine. Growing into adolescence, Paula actively rebelled against her mother’s wiles, her mantra that a woman must hold back and play hard to get, her sexualized conception of womanhood. She felt plain, ill at ease in her female skin. She wore boyish clothes, had cropped hair. She shunned flirtation and sexualized play. She didn’t know how to engage with boys, except as friends; though she participated in a number of the kind of casual sexual encounters that tend to characterize the urban young, she never fell in love. She was a self-avowed feminist. Yet her father remained the measure for her of what a man, indeed what a human being, should be. He was the most important person in her life, and she sensed that when she was paid attention by boys of her own age he felt eclipsed, displaced. When she recently at last fell in love, it was with a young man she clashed swords with intellectually. But she continues to worry that she has somehow betrayed her father, let him down. She still hasn’t introduced her new love to her parents.