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  • Maternal Love/Maternal Violence: Inventing Ethics in Toni Morrison’s A Mercy
  • Naomi Morgenstern (bio)

I always think of the sacrifice from the Bible. If God came to Sarah and told her, “Give me your only son, your only one, your beloved, Isaac,” she will tell him, “Give me a break,” not to say “Fuck off.” She will not collaborate with it, not a chance in the world. And Abraham immediately collaborated.

—David Grossman (qtd. in Packer)

There is nothing foreordained about maternal response.

—Sara Ruddick (xi)

Many critics have written about the failure of psychoanalytic theory to address maternal subjectivity adequately, even as it relies on the person of the mother as the ground for the emergence of every figure (a kind of ground zero). Barbara Johnson, for example, has deftly analyzed how the attempt to move away from idealizing maternity repeats, rather than departs from, the violence of idealization. D. W. Winnicott tells us that what every child needs is a good-enough mother, who is usually, although not necessarily, the child’s biological mother: “Naturally, the infant’s own mother is more likely to be good enough than some other person, since this active adaptation demands an easy and unresented preoccupation with the one infant; in fact, success in infant care depends on the fact of devotion, not on cleverness or intellectual enlightenment” (10). This devoted mother, in Winnicott’s account, strategically fails her growing infant, relieving this subject coming into being of the delusion of its omnipotence. In a complex play of relation and the possibility of relation, the child comes to realize that it does not control the other and thus that there is an other. She is ushered into a vulnerable yet survivable state of subjecthood. Too good a mother, argues Winnicott, would be no good at all. “The ‘good-enough mother,’” Johnson writes in response, “is the new ‘good mother’; the former ‘good mother’ has now become ‘bad’” (85).

Johnson, at once attuned to the possibilities of Winnicott’s account and to the tyranny and endurance of a particular fantasy of the maternal, explores the way in [End Page 7] which every perceived failure of any particular mother merely does the work of sustaining an uninhabitable ideal: “The child thus gets to believe in the possibility that deprivation is not necessary but contingent, a function of the sins of this particular mother and not of the process of becoming human itself” (85). But if psychoanalytic theory sometimes appears symptomatically to fall short of theorizing maternal subjectivity—perhaps participating in the fantasy it would also analyze (the mother as the perfectly adequate other)—an abundance of literary texts contemplate this nexus of concerns. In this regard, literature seems to be a necessary supplement to psychoanalytic theory.

Toni Morrison offers her readers numerous provocative and complex accounts of the mother-child bond. One need only recall the stark example of Eva Peace in Sula (1973), who kills her adult son, setting him on fire in his bed after he loses himself in drug addiction. In words few readers will forget, she asks her daughter, “Is? My baby? Burning?” (48). But Morrison’s accounts of maternal psychopathology, affect, and conflict, or the lack thereof, also engage crucially with ethical discourse. Eva, for example, is able to kill her son precisely because she accepts absolute or sovereign responsibility for his life. Here, Derek Attridge’s provisional distinction between “responsibility to” and “responsibility for” may prove helpful. To respond to the other is to recognize the other as a different and complete subject, a fellow sovereign center of consciousness. To take responsibility for the other is, on the other hand, to risk a kind of ethical violence both to the other and to the self: “Responsibility for the other involves assuming the other’s needs, being willing to be called to account for the other, surrendering one’s goals and desires in deference to the other’s. (Exactly to whom we are responsible or answerable in this situation is one of the questions I shall have to leave unaddressed)” (27). How presumptuous, one might conclude. Certainly, one cannot presume more than when one takes another’s life. The...

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