Risking Difference: Identification, Race, and Community in Contemporary Fiction and Feminism

2 I Want You To Be Me

42 RISKING DIFFERENCE 42 Chapter 2 I Want You To Be Me Parent-Child Identification in D. H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow and Carolyn Kay Steedman’s Landscape for a Good Woman What are the family dynamics that prolong totalizing identifications between parent and child? In the texts under study in this chapter and the next—The Rainbow, Landscape for a Good Woman, and Beloved— it is the parent who requires that the child function as an extension of him- or herself, or, in Lacanian terms, as the object a that will complete the parent. The misdirection of parental desire and its devolution into demand maintains a primary identification between parent and child and prevents the child from establishing him- or herself as a separate subject of desire and language. In Lacan’s model, maternal desire is the crucial factor that forces a child to separate from its identification with the mother. Lacan’s emphasis differs from the Freudian account, where the baby experiences a primary identification with the mother—“either at one with her or striving to be at one with her” (Greenberg and Mitchell 161)—until the father intervenes; by laying claim to the mother, the father in Freud’s theory refutes the infant’s immediate and total possession of her and thus forces the child to enter into new relations of desire and identification. In Lacan’s model the father functions more as a reference point for the mother’s desire, while the key factor is that “maternal desire goes elsewhere,” forcing the child to confront “the traumatic ‘fact’ that it is not her immediate and sole object” (Shepherdson, Vital 126). In pointing elsewhere, maternal desire opens up the field of the I WANT YOU TO BE ME 43 Other beyond the infant and thus the possibility of other objects—for the child as well as the mother. The realization that maternal desire targets something beyond itself inaugurates desire in the child (a process I will shortly describe in more detail). The same realization propels the child into language. The fort-da parable, dear to Lacan, can serve as an example. When the mother goes away, the baby is compelled to create signifiers to fill the void of her absence—and little Ernst does, vocalizing for the first time the syllables “da” [here] and “fort” [away]. In other words, when the mother’s desire propels her away from the infant, he has to develop a substitute for her, a signifier that can serve in her absence. The fort-da illustrates the reduced role Lacan gives to the father, who is “present” in this anecdote only as the presumed destination of the mother’s desire. Lacan everywhere depreciates the role of the actual father and reduces him to “paternal metaphor”—the representative of language, of “the symbolic operation, the primordial metaphoric substitution, by which the symbolic order of difference and mediation is established” (Shepherdson, Vital 135). What serves as a wedge between mother and child is no longer the castrating father, but language—signifiers that mediate between persons, signifiers that establish difference and distance. The key term is then the desire of the mother. And when something goes wrong with maternal desire—when for some reason the mother’s desire no longer points the child toward the field of the Other— there will be effects not only on the desire of the child, but also on his or her language function. In The Rainbow, Landscape for a Good Woman, and Beloved, parental desire does not function properly as desire, but devolves into demand. (In The Rainbow, it is paternal desire that goes astray, but the father’s taking the place of the mother figure makes no material difference in the structure of parent-child relations that Lacan calls demand. For Lacan, the term “mother,” like the term “father,” designates a position in a structure—“a place and a function” (Rose, “Introduction” 39)—which does not necessarily coincide with a specific gender.)1 Whereas desire is indeterminate and always moving on—“in its essence, a constant search for something else” (Fink, Lacanian 90)—demand is unchanging. Parental desire in each of these texts becomes a demand for primary identification, for the conflation of self and other. And that substitution of demand for maternal desire affects each child’s capacity for desire and language. In The Rainbow, Ursula’s development of desire is blocked as a result of...