49 pages • 1 hour read
Are You My Mother?: A Comic Drama
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Chapter 3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 3 Summary: “True and False Self”
After reading a section on the mother archetype in Carl Jung’s Four Archetypes, Alison dreams of Carol visiting her office, massaging her, and leaving with a torn pair of pants for mending. In therapy, Alison considers the dream as healing, while Carol questions the role reversal and suggests that she is writing Fun Home as a way to heal her mother. Both Jung’s book and Winnicott’s “Ego Distortion in Terms of True and False Self” discuss how patients project feelings about one person to another in an act known as Transference.
While raising her children, Helen often watches the television adaptation of The Forsyte Saga, a series of books by John Galsworthy detailing the lives of members of a wealthy family in Victorian England. Alison notices that Helen gives more emotional support to her two younger brothers and tries to rectify this by displaying more polite behavior, such as calling her “mother” and apologizing on any occasion. One night, Helen directly asks her daughter if she loves her. Alison carefully says “Yes,” though in hindsight “no sincerity or alacrity on my part would have sufficed” (87).
Alison respects the clear guidelines of Catholic doctrine and the elation that communion provides. Both her maternal grandparents die around the time of her communion, and she compares her communion photo with Helen’s, noting that they share uncomfortable physical and emotional similarities.
Growing up in England during World War II, Helen moves to the countryside as part of Operation Pied Piper, a government evacuation program designed to keep children safe from German aerial bombings of cities. Winnicott consults on the program, but later regrets separating children from their parents. The program influences his postwar work on the True Self, a person’s real personality and source of creativity, and the False Self, a defensive mechanism originating from rejected spontaneity. According to Winnicott, delinquency is a healthy trait, and compliance is unhealthy.
A young Helen breaks her necklace while imitating a movie scene. As she grows up, she becomes a theater actress and costume designer, playing character roles and hanging out with comedian Dom Deluise. However, she abandons her career to have a family. She earns a teaching degree in Cleveland, meets Bruce while performing The Taming of the Shrew, spends two years in New York City, and returns home to marry him. Referencing Winnicott, Alison believes her father’s dismissiveness influences Helen’s inability to accept her daughter and that his suicide comes from an inability to express his True Self.
Transference often occurs in therapy as patients develop a dependence on their therapists as they fill missing needs. Alison experiences this with Jocelyn, who gradually breaks through emotional defenses until Alison cries openly during one session. They talk about Alison’s views on God and her need for recognition. In different sessions, Jocelyn skirts ethics by hugging Alison and sharing a personal story about her mother’s death.
When Alison tells her mother about therapy, Helen reveals she experienced depression and took medication, first after her parents’ death and later when she learned that a fellow costume designer was a lesbian. Helen also reveals that the history of depression extended to Alison’s maternal grandmother, and Bechdel recalls having occasional feelings of deep sadness that almost always occur at church.
After starting therapy, Alison’s depression is replaced with anxiety and her relationship with Eloise worsens. After Eloise tells her about an attraction to a mutual friend, Chris, they decide to watch Hope and Glory, a film about Operation Pied Piper and Alison starts to cry as she recalls a childhood memory of watching The Sound of Music. After a professional trip, Alison learns that Eloise has slept with Chris. They try to reconcile with make-up sex, but Alison stops and kicks a hole in the wall. That night, Alison sleeps with her teddy bear.
Chapter 3 Analysis
The massage and pants-mending dream reflects Bechdel’s desire for her therapists to fix her emotional wounds, as this is followed by images of Helen patching her childhood clothing. This is juxtaposed with Jung’s mother archetype, where discrepancies between the excepted traits and the actual mother lead to neuroticism in children. Jung believes that therapists must separate these projections from reality.
Discussion of Helen’s premarital life is used to explain Winnicott’s theories on the True Self and the False Self. Children in Helen’s situation were unable to understand Operation Pied Piper’s purpose, leading them to become compliant in hopes of reuniting with their parents and more vulnerable upon their deaths. Alison’s therapy sessions allow her to cry during Hope and Glory, a film about the operation. The Sound of Music is also a movie about children fleeing Nazi aggression. While a young Alison is transfixed by “erotic” feelings for the vivacious Maria (112), her Austrian grandfather cries over “Edelweiss,” a love song and an elegy for a lost country. The connection between the movie and Alison’s onset of depression in 1987 suggests that it, like the Christmas pageant, reminds her of lost innocence (Gaber, Megan. “‘Edelweiss:’ An American Song for a Global Dystopia.” The Atlantic. 23 Nov. 2015. https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/11/edelweiss-an-american-song-for-an-american-dystopia/417285/.)
Actors assume the role of someone else for the sake of an audience’s approval. Winnicott believes that fame-seeking actors exhibit a False Self, but Bechdel counters that her mother doesn’t need adoration and prefers character roles. The role of wife and mother is different, however, as Helen’s childhood, gender norms, and Catholic upbringing influence her into abandoning an unconventional lifestyle and becoming a traditional housewife. She would find no replacement for that approval in the Bechdel house.
The Forsyte Saga is a 1967 BBC family drama pitting love and independence against upper-class stability and Victorian morality. When Helen asks Alison if she loves her in a full-page panel, a scene from the show plays in the background where the idealistic painter Jolyon tells his father he wants to divorce his wife and marry his mistress, Helene. The father responds by saying he will cut him off for neglecting family duties. The show and Alison’s methodical explanation of her response elevates Helen’s question into a defining relationship moment (Martin, Andrew. “The Sunday Post: The Forsyte Saga.” BBC Genome Blog. 8 Jan. 2017. https://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/genome/entries/c78c9256-2c82-4fcd-bda9-90f56b616e6b).
After telling Helen she is thinking of starting therapy, Alison learns of her family’s battles with depression. Bechdel links this to both Winnicott’s own need to help his mother and her sadness during church services, which symbolize the Gifted Child absorbing her mother’s feelings of powerlessness. In addition, church confessionals serve as proto-therapy sessions as Alison feels elation after each visit.
The Jocelyn sessions highlight the benefits of therapy, the time spent, and all the stages of its progress. In an extended sequence lasting five pages, Bechdel demonstrates the passage of a year through an exterior plant growing, wilting, and re-growing through the seasons. In a series of three wordless panels, Alison also explains her belief in God as a cosmic force rather than a singular being, something that Jocelyn considers a sign of a turbulent family life. While the sessions help calm Alison and allow her to return to a normal life, she becomes dependent on Jocelyn and filters her thoughts around her as she has with Helen.
As Alison focuses on Jocelyn and her professional life, her relationship with Eloise reaches a breaking point. Although the two try to patch things up through honest conversation, dates, and make-up sex, Alison boils over and kicks a hole into the wall of their house. She spends the next night sleeping with her original “Beezum,” the teddy bear. The toy calms her down, but she notes how its foot has damage from her intentionally leaving it outside 50 years ago. She relates it to Miller’s views on how children cannot develop their own structure if their False Selves serve that need to their parents.
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