She the Mother: Destruction and Construction of the Mother in "Nothing Holds Back the Night"
The Mother. The creator of life, the constructor, the healer, and the protectress. A body that becomes our first home. How does one even begin to comprehend a concept like that of the mother? One of such enormity and vastness? This is the task Delphine de Vigan sets off to do in her novel, "Nothing Holds Back the Night." De Vigan recounts her mother's life in an attempt to find closure after her mother's suicide. In this devastating yet captivating novel, the author constructs a portrait of motherhood and daughterhood and in doing so uncovers the tragic past that her family can't seem to escape. Side by side with De Vigan's novel, I will try to explore the meaning of the mother in art and literature. Why is this figure one of such relevance? Why is she, the mother, so paramount?
This novel begins with the end. Delphine finds her mother's body. Lucile is laying face down in a pool of her own blood. She's been dead for a few days. This is the catalyst for the detective-like research she does of her mother's life, attempting to breach the distance between her mother and herself. She conducts various interviews with her mother's siblings, finds recording tapes where her grandfather narrated his life, she looks back at pictures, documents, and much more. De Vigan learns that her mother was quiet, reserved, beautiful and her father's favorite. She also learns that Lucile was exposed to the "possibility of death [...] just before she turned eight." A summer holiday where her littler brother, Antonin, falls down a well and dies. This lingers in her mind, her psychology forever changed. This is her first foundational event. "Something had happened, she realised. Something that could not be fixed." Lucile begins to understand at an early age that the irreparable can occur at any given moment. Antonin's death is the first of several fault lines that will soon fracture her.
Years after Antonin's death, Jean Marc, Lucile's adoptive brother, dies while performing autoerotic asphyxiation. Lucile and her sibling are kept in the dark in the details of Jean Marc's death, but the kids soon deduct that it must have been a product of suicide. This has become a pattern in the family, and one that, unbeknown to them, will continue later on in their lives. Suicide has become part of their familial fabric. Lucile is left to consider the act and aspects of suicide throughout her adult life, which will later culminate in her own untimely death. But her depression and bipolarity was a product of something else, a shameful and sinister secret.
And then, like dozens of authors before me, I attempted to write my mother."
- Delphine de Vigan, "Nothing Holds Back the Night"
The Destruction of the Mother
The father. Georges was the real domineering presence in the Poirier household. De Vigan alludes to his dominant physicality all throughout the book. One of the first instances of Georges' pathology is in the first part of the book. De Vigan describes the way Georges looks at his daughter, Lucile. "Lucile had intrigued him since she was very young. [...] Lucile, more than the others, had a connection with him. And Georges could not stop looking at her in fascination." The patriarch of the family holds a prominent role. While Liane, the mother, is described very much as just being that, a mother, a maternal woman. Georges is an autocratic presence on the kids, getting angry when his children begin to go out at night with friends, wearing provocative clothing, going through teenage loves, and essentially anything that has to do with growing up. Especially when it came to Lucile. As it is described, "he couldn't bear Lucile spending time out of the house without knowing where she was or who she was with, her tight trousers, her lipstick, her eye-rolling or disapproving silences." These narrations describing the father's relationship with his kids, especially his daughters, send a chill down the reader’s spine. Georges was a man who knew no limits, he liked all sorts of women, cheated on his wife with many, and never took no for an answer.
Lucile is only thirty-two when she writes a letter. She sends it to her parents and siblings. She even delivers a copy to her daughters. This letter changes everything. It says the following:
"We are off to our house in the country. I am with my lover, we are with my father.[…] That night I can’t sleep, I feel hunted […] I get up for a pee, my father is watching me, he gives me a sleeping pill and he drags me into his bed. He raped me while I was asleep, I was sixteen, I have said it."
The letter is like a bomb thrown in the face of everyone in the family. Nevertheless, it produces no visible reaction from anyone. No one confirms or denies Lucile's accusations, no one takes sides. Everyone picks the side of silence because shame prevents them from taking a stance. Talking about it is giving the statement reality, making it evident, but if they don't talk about it then the possibility of it never having taken place is feasible.
Lucile doesn't know it yet, but that was the beginning of her destruction.
"She was walking ahead of me. I looked at her back, how frail and fragile and broken she looked. She turned round and smiled at me. Lucile had become a tiny little thing - breakable, glued together, patched up - irreparable, in truth. Of all the images I have of my mother, this is surely the most painful."
- Delphine de Vigan, "Nothing Holds Back the Night"
A year after she wrote and delivered that letter, she suffers her first manic episode. This sets off a new way of life for Lucile and for her two daughters. Violence, medications, and endless hospitalizations. Relations between Lucile and Delphine (her eldest daughter) are forever ruined, changed, and closed to being forever severed. The trauma that affected one goes down through generations of women. Liane's suffering to Lucile's, and her to Delphine. Liane is the axis that supports her children and grandchildren, yet we will never know if she was conscious of her husband’s abuse. Did she consent with her silence? Or did her candour prevent her from facing the reality and protecting her daughter?
Mother Stands for Comfort
Demeter and Persephone, the original mother and daughter. This myth has stood the test of time. It is remembered better than most because Demeter's wrath is universal. Her love for her daughter Persephone and the anger her rape produces on Demeter have a cosmic maternal power to it. Liane and Lucile are as such. One could argue; however, that they are much more sinister version of the greek goddesses. We have Lucile as Persephone - raped by family. Persephone's rape is aided by her father Zeus. In Lucile's case, her rape is aided by Liane - the mother's silence along with her willingness to turn a blind eye. Then we have Liane as an anti-Demeter. She is very much like the goddess given that she is extremely maternal and fertile, she does bear eight children after all. Motherhood seems to give meaning to her life. Because while Georges works far from home and entertains himself with other women, Liane is at home with the children. They are her main focus. Nevertheless, she is an anti-Demeter in the sense that she seems to have no wrath and feels no sense of justice for her daughter. Her silence and choice to ignore her husband's antics led to Lucile never being able to return from the underworld, or in this case, her manic state. Spring, the season of rebirth and the possibility of a healthy Lucile, is practically impossible now.
"The story of Demeter and Persephone gives priority to one role, namely, that of the mother, over the daughter. Yet, its fabric importantly suggests that daughter and mother are one and that their experiences both reciprocate and replicate each other." (Ellen Handler Splitz). This replication of mother and daughter relations is very much indeed a theme in the book. Lucile has an estranged relationship with Delphine. Lucile does not embrace Delphine until after she turns ten. This lack of touch might be born from the attention of a father / grandfather who was just too close, whose touch was harmful and excessive. Lucian freud said that, when painting his mother, he could only spend close time with her and he could only closely study her once he'd "stopped caring". Much like Freud, De Vigan's study of her mother are driven by affects. The affects that constructed and destroyed her mother throughout her life. Like, for example, the damage that was done by her father's assault in addition to the even more insidious trauma of speaking a secret long kept only to have to swallow it back down. In pursuing the foundational events which formed "an indelible imprint," the loss of her mother in the present day to suicide is intertwined with Delphine's loss of a maternal figure during childhood. De Vigan seeks not only to recover the figure of Lucile as a mother but also one of Lucile as a person who moved through life, and endured life, with cracks running through her.
Frederic Leighton, The Return of Persephone, 1891
The Destruction of the Father
"The Destruction of the Father" (1974) by Louise Bourgeois. This is one of the artist’s pieces in which she conveys her profound interest in the field of psychoanalysis. The Destruction of the Father examines Bourgeois's feelings toward her father, the piece takes him apart and displays him for the audience to see. Much like Georges Poirier, Bourgeois’s father was very dominating and not trustworthy. At the centre of this installation, there is a piece which resembles both a bed and a table. Both are places where the artist felt feelings of betrayal and suffering respectively. If one views this as a bed, it is a disgusting and corroded one; influenced by her father’s infidelity to her mother in the bed they shared. The father here is being destroyed by what he did in that bed - adultery. The view of this as a table suggests that the artist would eat her own father because of her anger for what he did, but the consummation of her father is also a way of keeping him close to her and restraining him from committing any other acts of betrayal towards their family. The father is destroyed for what he has done in the bed.
“The children grabbed him [the father] and put him on the table. And he became the food. They took him apart, dismembered him. Ate him up. And so he was liquidated…the same way he liquidated his children.”
- Louise Bourgeois, The Destruction of the Father (1974)
The destruction of the father in "Nothing Holds Back the Night" is kickstarted with Lucile's confessional letter to her family. Ignored by everyone but her own daughter, Delphine's detective work impulses her to find answers related to Lucile's accusations against her own father. She finds that Lucile was not the only woman who suffered from Georges' abuse. First in the form of Lucile, then Camille, and then Justine, one of Lucile's siblings (plus countless other women who came before and after). And just like that, the image of Georges completely crumbles under the reader’s eyes, and Lucile emerges from the ashes like a phoenix reborn. Victorious, she becomes the hero of the novel. She got justice in the form of art, in the form of literature. Even more beautifully still, this is justice granted to her by her eldest daughter. They had a tumultuous relationship, Lucile passed down heaps of generational trauma through the walls of her womb. Years of estrangement, fights, depression, admission to hospitals, consumption of medication, stopping the consumption of medication, marriages, divorces, old apartments, new apartments, manic episodes, depressive episodes, and much more. These two women, mother and daughter, found their own salvation and amends in the power of the word.
The Construction of the Mother
Above is Maman. Louise Bourgeois' sculpture is so massive, so monumental, that it can only be exhibited outdoors or in enclosed spaces of the industrial scale. She is an ode to the turbulent relationship that Bourgeois shared with her mother. The steel giant was created to express the complexity of the relationship between parents and their children. She represents an ambiguous image, because, behind the threatening front, there is a feeling of protection against forces of evil. The viewers always encounter Maman from below, from the perspective of a child looking up; and just like an expectant mother, this spider was designed to hold eggs in the area of the belly. Maman represents a mother who is universal - powerful and terrifying, beautiful and, without eyes to look or a head to think, curiously indifferent. To put it in Elizabeth Manchester's words, "Maman may be read as referring to more than one possible maternal figure: the artist, her mother, a mythological or archetypal mother and a symbol of motherhood."
"The friend (the spider – why the spider?) because my best friend was my mother and she was deliberate, clever, patient, soothing, reasonable, dainty, subtle, indispensable, neat, and as useful as a spider.
I shall never tire of representing her."
- Louise Bourgeois
Like Bourgeois' Maman, Lucile metamorphoses into a universal figure for motherhood. Read by millions, understood, loved, admired, captivating - within the pages of this novel one can find a mother who tried in spite of her mental instability. She was a fighter and a protector, like Demeter. De Vigan's portrayal of her mother inspires compassion. This is the portrait of a mother, and of a woman, inside a "paper coffin", to put it in De Vigan's words. A paper coffin built of the most beautifully chosen words, inscribed with pain and tenderness.
The mother is a figure of such complexity and greatness that she is almost impossible to pin down. She takes the forms of novels, moulded words, goddesses, spiders and so much more in the immensity of representations of motherhood. In "Nothing Holds Back the Night", De Vigan reconstructs a fascinating woman: in spite of her fragility, she is solid, she is attractive yet unstable; the courage and sincerity that define her make Lucile into an unforgettable character.
Art and literature and life itself are a portrait of the mother. Everything and everyone who has the ability to bring something to life, whether it be a character in a novel, a giant steel spider, or a meat-and-bone child, is a mother. The most universal concept in the whole world is the mother because nothing is without one.
Louise Bourgeois's Maman (1999) at the Long Museum in Shanghai
