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Toibin - New ways to kill your mother: writers and their families

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In a brilliant, nuanced and wholly original collection of essays, the novelist and critic Colm TOibIn explores the relationships of writers to their families and their work. From Jane Austens aunts to Tennessee Williamss mentally ill sister, the impact of intimate family dynamics can be seen in many of literatures greatest works. TOibIn, celebrated both for his award-winning fiction and his provocative book reviews and essays, and currently the Mellon Professor in the Humanities at Columbia, traces and interprets those intriguing, eccentric, often twisted family ties in New Ways to Kill Your Mother. Through the relationship between W.B. Yeats and his father, Thomas Mann and his children, and J.M. Synge and his mother, TOibIn examines a world of relations, richly comic or savage in its implications. In Roddy Doyles writing on his parents, TOibIn perceives an Ireland reinvented. From the dreams and nightmares of John Cheevers journals, TOibIn illuminates this darkly comic misanthrope and his relationship to his wife and his children. Educating an intellectual woman, Cheever remarked, is like letting a rattlesnake into the house. Acutely perceptive and imbued with rare tenderness and wit, New Ways to Kill Your Mother is a fascinating look at writers most influential bonds and a secret key to understanding and enjoying their work.

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By the same author FICTION The South The Heather Blazing The Story of the - photo 1

By the same author

FICTION

The South

The Heather Blazing

The Story of the Night

The Blackwater Lightship

The Master

Mothers and Sons

Brooklyn

The Empty Family

NON-FICTION

Bad Blood: A Walk Along the Irish Border

Homage to Barcelona

The Sign of the Cross: Travels in Catholic Europe

Love in a Dark Time: Gay Lives from Wilde to Almodvar

Lady Gregorys Toothbrush

All a Novelist Needs: Essays on Henry James

PLAYS

Beauty in a Broken Place

Testament

Copyright 2012 by Colm Tibn Emblem is an imprint of McClelland Stewart Ltd - photo 2

Copyright 2012 by Colm Tibn

Emblem is an imprint of McClelland & Stewart Ltd.
Emblem and colophon are registered trademarks of McClelland & Stewart Ltd.

All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency is an infringement of the copyright law.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Tibn, Colm, 1955
New ways to kill your mother : writers & their families / Colm Tibn.

eISBN: 978-0-7710-8442-3

1. Families in literature. 2. Literature, Modern History and criticism. I. Title.

PN56.F3T65 2012 809.933525 C2011-907968-2

We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and that of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporations Ontario Book Initiative. We further acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program.

McClelland & Stewart Ltd.
75 Sherbourne Street
Toronto, Ontario
M 5 A 2 P 9
www.mcclelland.com

v3.1

For Andrew OHagan

Contents
Jane Austen, Henry James and the Death of the Mother

In November 1894 Henry James set down in his notebooks a sketch for the novel that became The Wings of the Dove, which was published eight years later. He wrote about a possible heroine who was dying but in love with life. She is equally pathetic in her doom and in her horror of it. If she only could live just a little; just a little more just a little longer. In his outline James also had in his mind a young man who wishes he could make her taste of happiness, give her something that it breaks her heart to go without having known. That something can only be of course the chance to love and be loved. James also noted as a possibility the position of another woman to whom the man was otherwise attached and committed It appears inevitably, or necessarily, preliminary that his encounter with the tragic girl shall be through the other woman. He also saw the reason why the young man and the woman to whom he was committed could not marry. They are obliged to wait He has no income and she no fortune, or there is some insurmountable opposition on the part of her father. Her father, her family, have reasons for disliking the young man.

This idea, then, of the dying young woman and the penniless young man on one side and, on the other, of father, family and young woman with no fortune circled in Jamess fertile mind. There was no moment, it seemed, in which the second young woman would have a mother; it was her father, her family that would oppose the marriage; over the next five or six years James would work out the form this opposition would take, and who exactly her family would be.

In her book Novel Relations, Ruth Perry looked at the makeup of the family in the early years of the novel. Despite the emphasis, she wrote, on marriage and motherhood in late eighteenth-century society, mothers in novels of the period are notoriously absent dead or otherwise missing. Just when motherhood was becoming central to the definition of femininity, when the modern conception of the all-nurturing, tender, soothing, ministering mother was being consolidated in English culture, she was being represented in fiction as a memory rather than as an active present reality.

In nineteenth and early twentieth-century fiction, the family is often broken or disturbed or exposed, and the heroine is often alone, or strangely controlled and managed. If the heroine and the narrative itself are seeking completion in her marriage, then the journey there involves either the searching for figures outside the immediate family for support, or the breaking free from members of the family who seek to confine or dictate. In creating the new family upon marriage, the heroine needs to redefine her own family or usurp its power. In attempting to dramatize this, the novelist will use a series of tricks or systems almost naturally available to Jane Austen and the novelists who came after her; they could use shadowy or absent mothers and shining or manipulative aunts. The novel in English over the nineteenth century is filled with parents whose influence must be evaded or erased to be replaced by figures who operate either literally or figuratively as aunts, both kind and mean, both well-intentioned and duplicitous, both rescuing and destroying. The novel is a form ripe for orphans, or for those whose orphanhood will be all the more powerful for being figurative, or open to the suggestion, both sweet and sour, of surrogate parents.

It is easy to attribute the absence of mothers in novels of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to the large numbers of women who died in childbirth, as high as 10 per cent in the eighteenth century. The first wives of three of Jane Austens brothers died in childbirth, for example, leaving motherless children. But this explanation is too easy. If it had suited novelists to fill their books with living mothers Jane Austens mother outlived her, for example then they would have done so. In Novel Relations Ruth Perry takes the view that all the motherless heroines in the eighteenth-century novel and all the play with substitutions may derive from a new necessity in an age of intensifying individualism. This necessity involved separating from the mother, or destroying her, and replacing her with a mother-figure of choice. This mother, Perry writes, who is also a stranger may thus enable the heroines independent moral existence.

Thus mothers get in the way in fiction; they take up the space that is better filled by indecision, by hope, by the slow growth of a personality, and by something more interesting and important as the novel itself developed. This was the idea of solitude, the idea that a key scene in a novel occurs when the heroine is alone, with no one to protect her, no one to confide in, no one to advise her, and no possibility of this. Thus her thoughts move inward, offering a drama not between generations, or between opinions, but within a wounded, deceived or conflicted self. The novel traces the mind at work, the mind in silence. The presence of a mother would be a breach of the essential privacy of the emerging self, of the sense of singleness and integrity, of an uncertain moral consciousness, of a pure and floating individuality on which the novel comes to depend. The conspiracy in the novel is thus not between a mother and her daughter, but rather between the protagonist and the reader.

Jane Austens last three novels have motherless heroines. Austen, however, does not allow this to appear as loss, or does not let this expose the heroine, or take up much of her time. Rather it increases her sense of self, it allows her personality to appear more intensely in the narrative as though slowly filling space that had been quietly and slyly left for that purpose.

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