It's Always in the Title: Gregory Maguire's SON OF A WITCH

[The first part of this article I posted on my Gather.com page last Wednesday.]

Like Monster-in-Law, the bad J-Lo movie whose title explicitly replaces "mother" with her more common image in American culture, as I discuss in my thesis, Gregory Maguire's novel Son of a Witch - the sequel to Wicked, which made a splash as a Broadway play - implicitly suggests another name for the title character Liir's mom. Yet when we start reading the book - the series began as a clever interpretation of The Wizard of Oz - we realize that Liir is not even certain that Elphaba, the Wicked Witch of the West, was indeed his biological mother, although he was apparently with her as long as he can remember from his childhood to her death. It is not until he joins the military (since he has nothing better to do and must eat and stay warm somehow) that he begins to criticize her as a mother (without still being certain of her actual maternity), partially in comparison with the stereotypically affectionate, good cook moms of the other soldiers - one of whom out of jealousy and spite he frames for a crime, the ramifications of which culminate in that soldier's suicide - but primarily because he feels his lack of education - in the traditional sense, yes, but even more in obedience (she herself was only obedient to herself, he notes), and most of all in how to be a man. Thus we hear the classic criticism of the single mother - the powerful single mother - from the character of a young man who was written by a man. Usually I find such illustrations penned by women.

But Maguire does make a point of indicating that the witch - frightening for her power to use words to make things happen, we learn (and what of that wouldn't be frightening for any patriarchal society?) - was not hated and/or feared by all - that she even had allies and was respected by those who, after her murder at the hands of the feckless Dorothy, seem mildly interested in revenge. Yet those are all outsiders, marginal to society and suspicious to the civilized, the law-abiding, the religious - with whom Liir has taken up by the time he begins to criticize his mother. Mainstream society is not kind to mothers, we see.

Elphaba was apparently not affectionate, not kind, not nurturing, not self-sacrificing, not involved - not maternal, Liir concludes, wondering if that alone might prove that she's not his mother - and further, she had green skin and a biting wit and enjoyed studying her spell-book late into the night. All inappropriate characteristics for an ideal mother. All she asked of Liir, we learn, was to keep himself safe. That alone might define an ideal mother from my own feminist perspective, though.

The interesting thing is that - at least at this point in the story, about halfway through the book - Liir is an ideal American man: handsome, independent, reserved, somewhat intelligent, basically obedient, mildly ambitious. In fact, single mothers have a tendency to produce that type, I've found. They appreciate women because they've seen their contributions in a situation in which none of it can be appropriated to a man, and they know how to work and take care of themselves because they've had to.

The Oedipus complex, on the other hand, can only arise when there's a man in a heterosexual relationship with a boy's mother to give the boy someone of whom to be jealous. (Or, as Hegel would have it, someone to Desire in hopes of fulfilling the boy's homoerotic Desire for recognition from the man.) Otherwise, the boy actually has his mother all to himself, as society idealizes. Granted, single mothers often work, but that keeps them from becoming as dependent on their children as the Bad Mother myth suggests - and really, despite the mothers most often demonized, it's only the stay-at-home moms who actually end up hurting their children (probably because they have no way to escape their postpartum depression and/or the endless, mindless drudgery of caring for young children). It's sadly ironic in retrospect that Mrs. McCann was celebrated as undeserving of losing a daughter because she's a stay-at-home mom (see my earlier post on the subject) - and yet now it appears as though she killed her daughter herself at the time.
[I'll directly explore Freud's take on the Oedipus complex someday soon, I'm sure. Now that I've finished Son of a Witch, though, I'll finish my discussion of this book:]

Liir got worse before he got better. In line with Maguire's allegory for the United States government (he actually indicated in an interview that one of his inspirations for this book was the Abu Ghraib incident), the military influence in Liir's life causes him to commit the one act that he regrets more than anything else in his life. Then he goes through a frustrating period of hopelessness in which he denies his connection to and shared plight with the rest of the world. (Sound familiar?)

It is only when he starts to follow Elphaba's example that he stops failing at every task to which he sets out - and angering Maguire's readers (or me at least!) with his stubborn self-absorbed careless inaction - and begins to succeed. Even after death, we learn, Elphaba is keeping alive many people's - and animals' - hopes for freedom from tyranny, whether as a symbol, through remembrance of her actions while she lived, or through those whom she knew in her life.

Despite that glowing recommendation, Liir still appears to follow the typical path of the son of a Monster Mother: He cannot feel the way that he thinks that he should toward an attractive woman who might care for him in return. His body reacts as it should to bring about reproduction, but he cannot ever consciously follow through on that impulse. Instead, [Spoiler Alert!] he experiments in homosexuality with a man that he met in the military - in accordance with the typical homoerotic relationships that arise in such situations - and seems to be more sure of that identity in himself than anything else.

Now don't get me wrong: I'm not equating having a homosexual son with being a bad mother. I'm getting to the point, in fact, where I think that raising a child who so clearly does not fulfill societal expectations would be the foremost indicator for me of success as a parent in this society. But I am seeing, over and over again, stories in which that first equation is being made. Perhaps Maguire only means it here as a further indicator of the damage that war can cause to those forced to participate in it, in a long line of similar texts including, for instance, Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises - and indeed, the inability to function sexually is a common and documented effect of combat. Ultimately all that is certain, though, is that Liir himself does not feel entirely satisfied with his sexuality at the end of this story, and so neither does the reader - and thus we're left with that negative impression to apply where we will.

International Literature: SHALIMAR THE CLOWN by Salman Rushdie and ON BEAUTY by Zadie Smith

I recently finished an unabridged audio version of Salman Rushdie's Shalimar the Clown, wonderfully read by Aasif Mandvi, which was my second Rushdie book. Between it and my first, Midnight's Children, I'm getting a sense of Rushdie's style: chronologically fluid, satirical, politically aware, epic, occasionally fantastical. Both books follow fictional characters through lives positioned, like Forrest Gump's, in places such as the former Bombay, Kashmir, and Los Angeles at significant moments in recent history. In Shalimar, that includes the German occupation of France during WWII, the Rodney King fiasco(s), various acts of extremist Islamic terrorism, and the destruction of the tolerant people and the beautiful land of Kashmir at the hands of India, Pakistan, and those terrorists. There are many far more in-depth reviews of his book available online - most of them somewhat critical of the book, which perspective I don't share. For my part, about the whole book, I will simply say that I loved it. I also love Rushdie's style, which reading two of his books has helped me better understand, and I will read more of his work as soon as I can. (I met him once, but that's a story for another time.)

My particular purpose in this post is to discuss my feminist perspective on certain aspects of the book. There is a moment in Shalimar in which the title character's mother, Firdaus Noman, blames herself for her son's anger, which begins when he learns that his wife has cuckolded him - although it should be noted that he had very early indicated to his beautiful Hindu future wife, Bhoomi/Boonyi Kaul, that he would be violent if he ever had reason to be jealous - and results in his murder, first as a terrorist and then as a vengeful husband, of countless victims across the globe. (By the way, I'm not giving anything away that you can't learn in either the most standard online review or the first few chapters.) Firdaus, however, tells herself, on recognizing her son's anger, that she would never be quarrelsome again. Yet another of her sons, Anees Noman, is essentially a hero in a brief but incredibly emotional part of this book - and even without that it's clear that what becomes of Shalimar (nee Noman Sher Noman) has little to do with his mother.

Rushdie demonstrates his awareness - and, I think, his disapproval - of the world's mother- and woman-blaming tendencies in this way in this book. Of course the adulterous Boonyi - and the consistently adulterous Max Ophuls (who, interestingly enough, shares his name with a real person) - deserve blame for their dishonesty in those choices in this book. But the magnitude of events for which she is blamed - and, ultimately, punished - is way out of scope in terms of her error.

However, stepmother-demonization is also very present at times in this book, and Rushdie does not do anything that would cause or allow readers to question that. Max's wife, Margaret "Peggy/The Grey Rat" Rhodes, we learn, is (and always has been) frigid and barren - and also understandably bitter over her husband's incessant philandering. Impelled to some extent by a prophetic (and thus self-fulfilling) dream, Peggy connives to compel Boonyi into giving up her daughter, whom Peggy takes to America to raise by herself. When the inevitable questions arise, she lies to her "adopted" daughter as much as she can about the child's own origins, thus keeping her from her birth mother and almost entirely from her (thus beloved) father. Perhaps to some extent driven by those questions, Peggy ultimately becomes disinterested in the child, who as a teenager acts out in almost every imaginable way. It is only after Max's murder, when the daughter, India Rhodes (later Ophuls, nee Kashmira Noman) has already learned of her birth mother's identity, that Peggy tells her daughter a little of the truth - and provides a photo of Boonyi during her brief period of obesity. It is the only photo of her natural mother that India ever sees. The portrait of the stereotypical stepmother/single mother/nontraditional mother - from the barrenness and frigidity to the conniving, hateful, controlling, lying, unloving behavior related to "her" child, all of which is usually used to indicate unwomanliness and unfemininity - is unmistakable and disappointing.

By chance, the next long audiobook that I'm "reading" - and also vastly enjoying! - is Zadie Smith's On Beauty. I think that I read part of her White Teeth before, but I don't remember whether I ever finished it. Both Shalimar and Beauty feature interracial and adulterous relationships and are set both in and outside of the U.S. The days of "outsiders" not understanding the States are over: You'd never know that Smith and Rushdie weren't American citizens by the way that they seem to "get" the nuances of our culture. Rushdie has, of course, lived in the States, but Smith, it seems, hasn't. Beauty is not postmodernist, like Rushdie's work, though; for instance, so far it's proceeded in chronological order. Intriguingly, it does seem to be a modern take on the themes of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? which my mom and I saw, starring Kathleen Turner, in London last May. Academia, relationships, disappointment - it's all there.

There's a mother-son moment in the play, too: As I noted in my blog after first seeing it last summer, in Virginia Woolf, the wife expresses her awareness of the controlling mother/screwed up son ideology, even though neither is actually relevant to the woman's life, since she doesn't actually have a son. I'm only maybe a third of the way into Smith's book, but I've already found a mother-son moment here too: one of the main characters, Kiki Belsey, congratulates herself for producing "a young black man of intelligence and sensibility" - although she was then "mildly annoyed" to find that hers was not the only young Black man at the free Mozart concert (pt.1 ch.7). Smith goes on:

Undeterred, Kiki continues her imaginary speech to the imaginary Guild of Black American Mothers: And there's no big secret, not at all. You just need to have faith, I guess. And you need to counter the dismal self-image that Black men receive as their birthright from America - that's essential. And I don't know, get involved in after-school activities, have books around the house, and sure, have a little money, and a house with outdoor--

Despite the Belsey family's determined liberalism, they are not, as you can see, free from unfortunate biases. They are most of them a little racist toward Black people darker than the half-White Belsey children. Kiki is clearly a little classist. Jerome, the boy of whom Kiki was feeling so proud above, seems to take his mother's side when his father neglects her, but her daughter Zora blames Kiki for Howard Belsey's affair more than Zora blames Howard himself, citing Kiki's weight and non-intellectualism - and thus turning off a smart, handsome, talented young Black man who otherwise might have been interested in her. It's an interesting family portrait so far.

Incidentally, I'm apparently not the first to notice the connections between Shalimar and Beauty. Barnes & Noble Online lists On Beauty as the book most frequently purchased by those buying Shalimar the Clown.

My Professional Perspective on a Book I Didn't Want to Write About This Way

I finished another book today: The Last Assassin (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2006), by Barry Eisler, my latest favorite fun-reading author (which is a very very very small group, by the way). Assassin is Eisler's latest book but one (Requiem for an Assassin, which I got signed while he was in town earlier this month). I was eager to read the new one, but I quickly realized that I'd missed the book between it and the one chronologically right before Last Assassin (Rain Fall, which was actually my introduction to Eisler's work) - and that's why I've just finished that missing link. Are you thoroughly confused? Amazingly enough, I'm not. I haven't even lost track of any of the protagonist John Rain's or the other characters' histories, even though I read them all in reverse chronological order (which was actually kind of cool too, and that's why I know that I'd love to read a prequel as Eisler indicated that he was considering writing at the book signing). [Too many gerunds!]

Overall, I liked this new book. I cried three times, which is unusual for this genre, I'm sure (Rain is a "contract killer," as described on the book jacket). Eisler experiments with different voices in this book as well, switching from omniscient to Rain's perspective to that of a female lead, Delilah, and back again, and it's never unclear as to whose head we're inside at those moments. Rain demonstrates a lot of personal growth in this book too, which is pretty new for him and another demonstration of Eisler's expanding authorly skills. The (almost always - see below) delicious bites of Eisler's politics offered here and there still made me smile. His vocabulary will still send some people running for a dictionary, which also makes me smile. [Jessica, you're an elitist!] He remains an incredible author.

[Please forgive me, Barry....]

But Last Assassin was a little rocky going at first because it created some consistency questions in my mind. With persistence on my part, they resolved themselves, with one minor exception, which is what I discuss below. Besides that, a major one, which I already mentioned to Eisler in an e-mail yesterday, even though it's probably not news to him (nor is it likely all that important to him now, since Requiem came out on the NYT Bestseller List and all), was an error in the second chapter that changed a name from Delilah's history (Dov) to that of another main character (Dox) - and repeated the error thrice on those couple of pages - thus creating a historical romantic relationship that I knew had never happened (and that would have perplexed the hell out of a new reader of the series, since it kept me going for a while too). Once I resolved that in my mind, my concerns cleared up significantly.

What remained, though, was a characteristic of Delilah, who is Rain's latest love interest, that I don't remember Eisler introducing in the previous books: her "periodic pouts and petulance," as first mentioned on p.26 (just a couple of pages after that other issue, by the way, which really increased the parallel universe feeling for me). This "inconsistency," as I'm calling it, may actually be more of a significant issue than I've indicated so far, though, since I got the sense from this book, more than from any of the earlier ones, that it was written more with Eisler's fans than with potential new readers in mind, as some of Rain's backstory wasn't even explained until the very end of this book, and some of it, though relevant to aspects of this story, not at all.

Eisler clearly tries to make this new aspect of Delilah acceptable throughout this book, and it is certainly a consistent part of her character here. She is certainly somewhat justified in feeling the way that she does, too, and Eisler takes pains to show us that via her own justifications to herself, as well as her own self-criticism for allowing him to make her "sulk and pout like a schoolgirl" (93) [Blecch!] - all of which make her a very believable character, since I've had the same kinds of conversations with myself before too. As usual, Eisler does do an excellent job with the characterizations in this book. But I still feel that she is only being portrayed that way because she's female. It's a fact that everyone who's ever betrayed Rain in any of these books is female, although as he gets older he's rejecting them less wholeheartedly for it.

An obvious example is Midori, another love interest of Rain's who plays a big part in this story because she is mothering their love child - a boy named Koichiro. As soon as I learned about that, at the end of the previous book, I felt a pang somewhere in my brain. A single working mother to a son: That sounds like homework! And indeed, there's a little of that here - hence this post. But Eisler is male, so - in accordance with the patterns that I've seen everywhere else - while he demonstrates awareness of the monster mother myth of which I wrote for my thesis, he is clearly less concerned about it than female writers and mothers to sons themselves always are. Rain refers to it first: "Maybe you should think about what something like that [an absent father] would cost him," he says to Midori (56).

Rain himself grew up with an absent father, who died when he was eight years old. Rain considers that situation: "His loss and subsequent absence were the first and perhaps most significant of the scars that shaped what I became" - which, of course, is a killer (214). That statement alone makes Rain another of the countless examples present in Western fiction and mythology of men gone "bad" who were raised by single mothers. Eisler has rarely had Rain blame his own family for that, though. Rather, he usually blames his other "father," his country, which effectively betrayed him while he served in Vietnam - although even that's not entirely true, since it was only the evil ambition of one person who really brought about the events that contributed most to the original circumstances that led to who Rain is today. Thus the fact that Rain is now blaming his home situation for it - a mother is not enough to keep a boy from becoming a "bad guy," in other words - is even more indication of the power of that myth. Even though Rain knows that it hasn't been true in his own life, now that he's worried about his own son, he's falling back on those myths, perhaps because of his sense that the issue of a father's presence in a son's life is more controllable than corruption in government and war.

That's a significant point: Instead of blaming single mothers and/or absent fathers for children gone awry, why not blame the system in which all of that takes place? I'll quote my e-mail signature again:

It is dangerous fantasy to believe that if 'they' can be identified and labeled, and then treated or punished, the nation will be somehow purified, made safer for the rest of us.... When in fact we need to examine poverty, racism, the paucity of meaningful work at a living wage, the lack of access to day care, antifeminism, and a host of other problems, let us not be diverted by 'bad' mothers. (Molly Ladd-Taylor and Lauri Umansky, "Bad Mothers": The Politics of Blame in Twentieth-Century America pp.22,23)

Meanwhile, what makes Delilah's "petulance" frustrating to me is that otherwise there is little differentiation between her and Rain and Dox, all of whom are essentially in the same line of work - and that portrayal is significant considering that Delilah's usual role in such work is as a seductress, which rarely involves actual killing - only information-gathering, as the reader learns in the previous book. That fact in and of itself could merit criticism, since it does separate her from the men with whom she works, but Eisler doesn't explicitly separate her in his treatment of her - he even has Rain describe her as "that man inside tonight" (241) a couple of times in the book, for better or for worse - so I'm not going to do that to him.

It's also a mark in Eisler's favor that he acknowledges the existence of abortion as an option in this book. He still fails to have his character use it, though, as Slate notes is common in the rare works within mainstream pop culture that acknowledge the legality of abortion these days. (But I have to note: What about Cider House Rules? What about Vera Drake?) OK, it's a plot point, but this line of Midori's internal dialogue is just inflammatory:

The thought that she had nearly gone through with an abortion was enough to make her feel sick, as though she had once in a moment of weakness contemplated murdering her child. She would never have thought it possible, but she defined herself as this little boy's mother more than she had defined herself as anything else before.

Blecch again, several times over. Abortion makes one sick? A woman who contemplates abortion is only "in a moment of weakness"? Women who have abortions are baby-killers? The mother-identity supersedes all other aspects of women's selves? I considered aborting my son, and I don't feel "sick" looking back on it now. In fact, it recently occurred to me that the better decision would have been to abort him, as my mom begged me to do. I really can't explain why I chose as I did. Rebellion? Hormones? Exposure to anti-abortion rhetoric? I don't know.

By the way, does that make my loving, intelligent mom like "the mother character [who] is explicitly positioned as a moral monster, a 'hissable villain'" in the movie Knocked Up, as also discussed in that Slate article? Here's more on that problem from another woman's blog:

The mom was presented as a castrating bitchTM who callously told her daughter that she only had one choice, and that the baby would be a nuisance--so the allegedly pro-choice person is actually anti-choice. When she described a family member who had an abortion and then had a 'real baby' years later, the detached way she spoke made members of my audience audibly gasp. They were gasping at the cruelty of the pro-abortion position. [emphasis in original]

If anything, though, it was my privilege, as an informed, well-educated White woman with highly educated, upper-middle-class parents that ultimately got me by - not our supposedly baby-loving society. I'm in a definite minority in terms of the breadth of my opportunities, throughout my life. And I also haven't found my identity as a mother more true or real than anything else - again, probably largely because of my opportunities (and determination) to be more than that, thanks to feminism. (That's only fair to my son too!) But Midori is a famous jazz pianist, so surely she has had some such opportunities too. Yet, Eisler writes, she's more a mother than anything else. Again, unnecessary. His self-definition as a conservative finally reared its ugly head, I guess. :-(

I can't end on this note. The only excuse that I can find to redeem Eisler for what he did to Delilah – even going so far as having her act the part of a thoughtless, plotting, cruelly jealous lover at one point as well (125) – is that in this book, he does it to Rain too. Last Assassin is the book where we see what happens to these characters when they can't help but have to operate in situations that are really untenably personal.

I can't write off what he did to Midori, though. At least she's unlikely to be very present in the next story so that I can go back to reading for fun.