Reading Peter Handke's newly reprinted memoir of his mother's suicide, I was more arrested by the author's steely, emotionless tone than I was by the horrific circumstances of his mother's death by poisoning. I was expecting a poetic, elegiac recollection of Handke's mother, perhaps a tribute to her maternity, her authenticity or whatever in the ultimate sense makes a woman memorable. We are taught to believe that a mother's love is all important, the essence of the relationship between mother and son a unique experience, inspiring, as it should, all sorts of choices in the man as he grows older as well as an assortment of leanings - toward religion, for instance, or learning or perhaps the arts. We think of mothers as exemplifying the Jungian concept of the "anima" in the man - that elusive image of the perfect woman which the maturing male formulates from his experience with his mother and seeks out in other females as part of his search for the woman he once knew intimately and still recalls with idealistic yearnings.Having read and thoroughly enjoyed Jeffrey Euginides' "The Virgin Suicides" about a family of gifted, beautiful female siblings who ultimately killed themselves, I should have been wary of this book, knowing it was Euginides whose efforts revitalized it; and indeed as I read the memoir I realized that the theme of Handke's book is similar to Euginides' in that both authors depict the fifties as a time of moral, spiritual and emotional suppression of women. Handke's account of his mother's death is simply one more reminder of how oppressive the fifties really were to the souls of all women, not just gorgeous, gifted teenagers, as Euginides' masterpiece portrays some of the era's hapless victims. That this death occurred in Austria makes plain that the post-War era was destructive to women all over the world - reflective of a global malaise, not just an American aberration, as one might conclude after reading Euginides' book.
For me, Handke's book suggests that the old ways of keeping women in their place were indeed widespread and every bit as destructive as some of us guessed when we were young and told to remain in our place - silent and pleasing to men. Alas, we were not permitted to be "unpleasant." Had we been allowed to be candid, perhaps we would have grown up less angry, less depressed and more confident. Yet it was not in the cards. Women were at the mercy of their unforgiving fertile bodies and thus dependent upon men for their rights as human beings. If a woman was lucky, she married the exception: a man who allowed her full emotional expression without consequences or caveats. Alas, few women were so fortunate, and the result was an epidemic of nervous breakdowns, alcoholism and valium dependency, screwed up children and workaholic and philandering men - none of these desirable rewards for a generation of women suddenly freed from the laborious demands of domesticity to express themselves in ways unheard of before. Yet deprived of meaningful professional opportunity and intimidated by men's expectations, many women retreated into their own guarded, depressed and ultimately psychotic worlds, thereby emotionally abandoning their children, their homes and their clueless husbands.
For Handke's mother the fifties were the apotheosis of personal subjugation. Compute the psychological effects of her Holocaust experience, and one recognizes that her life symbolized the marginalized position of most women of her time. She bore a child out of wedlock, she exuded a manic, hyper-energized, optimistic personality that was out of sync with the ruthlessly serious social atmosphere of the times. The father of her child was a Nazi; she subsequently married a man she didn't love for the purpose of security and mothered other children, confined, as she was, to a decrepit house with the stench of poverty and despair. Her periodic bouts with depression and female disease further defined her as unconventional during a period of gross conventionality.
As Handke points out, "For a woman to be born into such surroundings was in itself deadly." The surroundings the author describes are those of extreme penury, exemplified by his mother's father having lost his entire savings more than once due to the inflation of the times. "Staying home was a woman's place," Handke reminds the reader. Outside the home environment and the broader world as a whole were the province of the male while the woman was confined to the house and the drudgery implicit in motherhood and domesticity. Because there were no suitable options, his mother flees her family home as a young woman and becomes involved with a married German Army official; because of her illegitimate status of an unwed mother, she eventually marries a sergeant, "hoping he will die in the War," only to find him repulsive later when he returns to her. Thus, she experiences the penalties of being female as well as the female codified stages of the times: "Tired/Exhausted/Sick/Dying/Dead." Oppressed by the limits of her existence, she describes the resulting claustrophobia. The rain comes to symbolize her depression at the lack of novelty in her life. When she fled her hopeless destiny as a young woman, it is understandable that she would see in the Nazi years a release from the humdrum of female existence. Instead of the mundane lack of novelty in her family life then, she experiences in the heady days of World War 11 a sense of promise and deliverance from monotony. After all, she was still young, and at that point she possessed hope in the future.
Handke emphasizes that in those days "a girl's future was a joke," but the times offered hope and so Handke's mother strove to believe in the future. The woman remained indefatigable in her optimism, her manic search for variety and a future beyond the dismal consolations of her times. As "Sorrow" notes, "Women were not supposed to have a life of their own, and so his mother is emotionally "starved" as fifties women were, as the adolescent protagonists of Euginides' "Virgin Suicides" indeed were. In her misery Handke's mother aborts herself and subsequently becomes sexless. She had a "miserable life," Handke affirms. "She became nothing." His unspoken sorrow is just that. Even such a positive woman would in the end submit to the tyranny of the times.
Nor was she the only family member who suffered during those hard years. Her husband endured TB; her son had paralyzing headaches as he detached himself emotionally from his mother in order to survive. In those days, people didn't consider the possibility of mental illness in a peculiarly acting female. A woman wasn't allowed to be spontaneous in her behavior. Rigid social norms controlled her every move. Although his mother believed in happiness and earnestly sought it, Handke points out "happiness was not for her." She took to smoking because it was frivolous and wasn't condoned by the rigid moral code. She forged on, giving for Christmas presents only the barest of necessities because that was all the family could afford. She ate the last scrap of food left after a meal, delicately, as if that was enough to sustain her. In every way, she sacrificed her own needs to the demands of a tyrannical social order until she could do it no more. Her husband spent money on drink and a girlfriend, but such options were not hers. Instead she drank coffee at the local pub and endured his beatings. In all her efforts, she kept up appearances. She "adopted the penance of a united family," ignoring her red, chafed hands, her hunger, her physical pain. She cried quietly and in private until she discovered the outlet of reading which came to define her and legitimized her as well. She became a socialist. In the end, she had repressed her feelings so long that she had nothing to say. She had been silenced.
When at last debilitating headaches kept her captive to a dark room, she claimed "I'm not human anymore." Reduced to an automaton, she acknowledges "the idiocy of her life." Every sight becomes a torment; she loses all sense of time and place. At the last she can't even talk. "I can't talk; don't torture me," she tells her son. Handke observes, "Mere existence had become a torture to her."
The crushing defeat of not being able to express oneself fully and honestly is the worst experience of all. It denies a woman her very identity and the cathartic release of emotion. That her joyful, unbridled, naïve enthusiasm should be derided and quelled was the biggest injustice of all, for what it did was to devalue exuberance and optimism, the very coping mechanisms one needs to endure suffering, thereby forcing her into premature dementia. To be quelled in one's self-expression is to be marginalized, to be vulnerable, alas to be female in those unforgiving times. Seeing the Jews herded into lorries must have seemed analogous to the victim-hood she realized she would eventually endure. As Handke notes, the gymnasium was the last meaningful experience of females before they were mired in domestic rituals that were stultifying and dehumanizing.
It is obvious why Euginides championed this book; it has many thematic similarities to his own. However, Handke's prose is not melodic; his approach is not fluid, but disjointed. His objective and seemingly heartless discussion of his mother begs the question as to why he wrote the book. Perhaps he felt expunged of guilt for her death by addressing his mother's pathetic situation, her marginalized, psychotic existence. Perhaps he felt the need to justify his own detachment in the face of her suffering by chronicling the dispassionate nature of the times. Whatever his purpose, the book is not on the same level as Euginides' novel and as such reveals more about the author and the times than it does about the woman herself. The son's feelings for his mother lacked a true appreciation of her dilemma as well as a corresponding compassion for the downtrodden under whatever guise. Understated? Yes, but compassionate? I don't think so.
Marjorie Meyerle
Colorado Writer
Author of "Bread of Shame"
― xyzzzz__, Tuesday, 30 September 2014 10:51 (nine years ago) link