Many mothers attest to never having suffered a temper until having children. Something about the biological agitation and emotional intensity of motherhood unleashes in many women a heretofore unknown propensity for rage. One who has not felt rage cannot understand what it is to fall into an unhinged, primal state of disorder, a seeming total loss of control of one’s faculties. To be consumed by anger is to see oneself behaving in extraordinarily uncivil ways, berating, bellowing, and all around making a fool of oneself.
While at the same time they are experiencing bouts of seemingly irrepressible wrath, new mothers may understandably try to measure themselves against the ideal vision of motherhood that each of us harbors somewhere in our heart of hearts. The result is painful. One’s own behavior echoes in memory and is hideously mimicked by young toddlers parading one’s faults and failings with horrifying accuracy. The vision of the mother one might have imagined one would be is laughably far off, seemingly unattainable.
One such vision comes in the figure Marmee in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. Marmee is an advocate of cheerfulness, gently guiding her daughters from afar and allowing the natural consequences of their youthful overenthusiasm and laxity serve as the corrective on their journey to maturity. A steady and comforting presence, Marmee works harder than anyone in her husband’s absence while he serves as a chaplain in the Civil War. She must work to keep the family afloat, yet she seems like the last person you’d find complaining.
Alcott’s life and family, which served as the basis for much of her fiction, are interpreted in the blandest of feel-good terms in recent years. Instead of viewing the struggle and sacrifice, we are tempted to categorize Christian heroism as a non-specific niceness. When viewed through this lens, the cosmic struggle is ignored and the path of virtue forged by the characters goes unnoticed. Marmee is not simply born calm and cheerful but chooses to live each moment striving for the peace that exceeds all understanding. This more interesting and inspiring inner struggle is revealed through Marmee’s conversation with her spirited second daughter Jo.
After Jo returns from the ill-fated skating outing that sent Amy through the ice, Jo blames herself for the accident and tells her mother: “It’s my dreadful temper! I try to cure it; I think I have, and then it breaks out worse than ever. O mother, what shall I do? what shall I do?” Like the new mother sent into a blind rage by the obstinate whining of a tired two-year-old, Jo is in a state of despair. Seeing herself as she is, she does not see the path to being the person she wants to be.
Marmee responds, “Watch and pray, dear; never get tired of trying; and never think it is impossible to conquer your fault.”
Assuming that Marmee in her quiet and reassuring calm cannot imagine what it is to be angry, Jo says, “You don’t know, you can’t guess how bad it is! It seems as if I could do anything when I’m in a passion; I get so savage, I could hurt any one, and enjoy it. I’m afraid I shall do something dreadful some day, and spoil my life, and make everybody hate me. O mother, help me, do help me!”
Here Marmee reveals her inner turmoil, so well hidden from her self-centered children. She says, “I will, my child, I will. Don’t cry so bitterly, but remember this day, and resolve, with all your soul, that you will never know another like it. Jo, dear, we all have our temptations, some far greater than yours, and it often takes us all our lives to conquer them. You think your temper is the worst in the world; but mine used to be just like it.”
“Yours, mother? Why, you are never angry!” Jo is taken out of herself and her fixation on her guilt and unhappiness by the sheer surprise of learning that her mother has been angry.
Marmee replies, “I’ve been trying to cure it for forty years, and have only succeeded in controlling it. I am angry nearly every day of my life, Jo; but I have learned not to show it; and I still hope to learn not to feel it, though it may take me another forty years to do so.”
Jo is moved from despair to hope by coming to understand that behind the calm exterior, her mother has dealt and continues to deal with painful and turbulent emotion. Alcott writes, “The patience and the humility of the face she loved so well was a better lesson to Jo than the wisest lecture, the sharpest reproof. She felt comforted at once by the sympathy and confidence given her; the knowledge that her mother had a fault like hers, and tried to mend it, made her own easier to bear and strengthened her resolution to cure it; though forty years seemed rather a long time to watch and pray, to a girl of fifteen.”
Here, Jo begins to piece together the complexity of her mother’s life. Young adults reach the stage of beginning to wonder just how their parents paid the bills and stayed married and got along in life, suddenly reevaluating their childhood from the adult’s perspective. Jo asks, “Mother, are you angry when you fold your lips tight together, and go out of the room sometimes, when Aunt March scolds, or people worry you?”
“Yes, I’ve learned to check the hasty words that rise to my lips; and when I feel that they mean to break out against my will, I just go away a minute, and give myself a little shake, for being so weak and wicked,” answered Mrs. March, with a sigh and a smile, as she smoothed and fastened up Jo’s dishevelled hair.
Marmee’s response is seen by many in the post-modern era as “repressing” her anger, as though anger is necessarily justified and worthy of being experienced in its full and destructive force. People are tempted to view Marmee’s anger as the embodiment of social justice conscientiousness. Whether or not anger is justified, anger alone will not bring justice because of how destructive it is.
A mother is that nurturing presence, the one who cares for a person when no one else will. Though we almost all have stories of mothers who were impatient, at times selfish and inattentive, we all have some image of a mother who is fundamentally unselfish, patient, and never moved to anger. This image of a mother who never raises her voice, never resorts to a harsh word, is not inspiring at a distance. The idea of such a woman induces near total despair in a mother undisciplined in her own emotions. Marmee as an object induces despair; Marmee as a person offers hope.
This insight reveals one of the key features of virtue in the March family; the development of virtue takes place in relationship. As Marmee guides Jo, so Mr. March has been her guide. When Jo asks who helped her, Marmee says, “Your father, Jo. He never loses patience,—never doubts or complains,—but always hopes, and works and waits so cheerfully, that one is ashamed to do otherwise before him. He helped and comforted me, and showed me that I must try to practise all the virtues I would have my little girls possess, for I was their example. It was easier to try for your sakes than for my own; a startled or surprised look from one of you, when I spoke sharply, rebuked me more than any words could have done; and the love, respect, and confidence of my children was the sweetest reward I could receive for my efforts to be the woman I would have them copy.”
In order to progress in virtue, we must cast off the cold comfort of despair. When hope takes root, we begin to believe that we really can change. Not in grand and dramatic fashion, but in slow and steady ways, inspired by the superior character of those in authority over us and held accountable by those in our care.
1 comment
Comments are closed.