The perfect, self-loathing, enmeshing mother — the Avril devouring-mother dynamic
echoes
From: Suicide as a Sort of Present
- Early text: the impeccable-outside / loathing-inside mother:
"The more loathsome the child was, the more loving the mother required
herself to be." [mid]; the enmeshment: "there existed only a very tiny and
indistinct separation in the mother’s mind between her own identity and
that of her small child" — "The child appeared in a sense to be the
mother’s own reflection in a diminishing and deeply flawed mirror." [mid];
the transmission and the son's enactment: "the mother took all that was
imperfect in him deep into herself and bore it all and thus absolved him,
redeemed and renewed him, even as she added to her own inner fund of
loathing"; "And so the son—desperate, as are all children, to repay the
perfect love we may expect only of mothers—expressed it all for her."
[close]
- IJ echo: IJ's Avril — the outwardly perfect, boundlessly accommodating,
impossibly high-standard mother whose smothering (paired with JOI's
remoteness) is read as the sons' damage (the archive's
avril-devouring-mother crux); the enmeshment and over-closeness
that the avril-orin material also touches; and the Incandenza suicides
(JOI's; the family's self-destruction pattern) as the discharge of
unbearable interior pressure. The fable strips the dynamic to its skeleton:
perfect maternal love as the conduit of maternal self-hatred, the son
suiciding to repay it.
- Weight: shared-preoccupation (oeuvre-scoped)