49 pages • 1 hour read
Are You My Mother?: A Comic Drama
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Chapter 4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 4 Summary: “Mind”
In 2002, Alison dreams of her college dorm room. There is evidence of a dead body previously in the room. She tries contacting campus police, but the extension for campus police, “18”, doesn’t work. Alison tells Amy about the dream and she believes the dead body is Alison’s father. In therapy, Alison talks to Carol about her financial and creative stress.
Alison fights with her mother over Norah Vincent, a libertarian lesbian columnist who criticizes abortion and LGBTQ activism. Alison’s parents are largely apolitical, but Helen has protested Roe v. Wade. Helen provides Bruce’s letters from his Army years for use in Fun Home. Some are surprisingly romantic, but others seem unusually self-abrasive. Helen mentions his disapproval of her pregnancy, and Alison considers whether Bruce is talking around an abortion request. The box also includes four of Helen’s poems, including include two timid sonnets.
Alison recounts her mother’s emotional unavailability at night, referring to her state as a “plexiglass dome” (129). Alison shares this need for isolation. As a child, she creates secluded offices for herself and draws enclosed habitats like a bug’s mound. She compares this to Dr. Seuss’s Sleep Book, which depicts a womb-shaped building where a character works without intrusion. Winnicott explains this behavior as the infant depending on their mind in the mother’s absence. The mind opposes the body and projects a False Self.
At seven years old, Alison draws a picture of a doctor examining a little girl’s genitalia, calling it “Doctor Cleaning a Little Girl’s Tee-Tee Place” (143). Initially thrilled at her creativity, Alison ends up hiding behind a door after Helen discovers it. This incident occurs shortly before she stops kissing Alison goodnight even though she still coddles and prays with her brothers.
After eight years of therapy, Alison stops seeing Jocelyn when she moves to Vermont. She returns to Minnesota a decade later for a university speech, staying with Eloise and Chris. Alison visits Jocelyn and they resume their talks without a hitch. The visit occurs shortly after Alison begins seeing Carol, and she discovers that both therapists are training in psychoanalysis at the same time. Miller notes that the trainees she studies all have emotionally insecure parents they care for in exchange for love.
Carol believes that the real purpose for Alison’s childhood diary is to avoid emotional overload, and that her mother is complicit in maintaining it. Alison questions the diagnosis at first, but eventually understands that she attaches herself to her work as she would a person. She sees the irony of writing a book about this.
Alison remembers overhearing her mother sobbing behind a closed door when she was five years old—a demonstration of a Gifted Child’s emphatic perception. Winnicott explores this subject in “The Piggle,” a case history about a girl experiencing nightmares about a “babacar” after her sibling’s birth. Winnicott plays with the girl while taking note of everything she says. Eventually, he diagnoses that the babacar is her mother’s womb.
At first, Alison blames her homosexuality for her self-consciousness, but now credits it for forcing her mind and body to come together again. She shares a letter from Helen, written shortly after her coming out, that reinforces this idea. Alison also mentions a rare time when Helen tries to call her. Helen wants to tell her about divorcing Bruce but cannot reach her due to an old phone number. Dismayed, the daughter imagines a phone ringing in an empty room.
Chapter 4 Analysis
Upon waking from the dorm room dream, Alison associates the number 18 with the Hebrew word for living, chai. This reflects Alison’s stressful financial situation as she must finish Fun Home in order to live. The dream is also a bookend to the end of the chapter, as Helen calls a nonresponding number repeatedly in her time of need.
The Norah Vincent argument demonstrates political differences between Alison and Helen: Helen supports Vincent’s anti-abortion views, while Alison recognizes her intelligence but calls her a token gay “opportunist” (124). However, Bechdel mentions that abortion isn’t one of her primary issues and remembers respecting Helen for attending the protest.
Another dispute is how Helen stops kissing her daughter goodnight at age seven, seemingly after discovering the sexually graphic picture of the doctor examining a little girl. Alison feels a wave of creativity while drawing the picture, expressing both power and vulnerability, but calls herself a “little pervert” to Jocelyn for creating it (145). The song playing when Alison leaves the bathroom is the theme song to Green Acres, a sitcom where a couple moves to the farm against the wife’s wishes. This perhaps references Helen’s own decision to abandon her creative desires in order to be a wife and mother. Helen decides not to bring up the picture again, another example of the unidyllic family life that leads her to tune out reality.
The family’s nighttime prayer is the “Lord’s Prayer” and not “Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep,” which includes the plea for God to accept their soul should they die while asleep. Bechdel compares her desire for a kiss goodnight to Virginia Woolf and her mother, whose caretaking and work leaves her emotionally drained.
In a double-paged spread, Bechdel recreates the building in Dr. Seuss’s Sleep Book next to the letter from Bruce that implies his desire for an abortion. The book’s structure takes the form of a news report about a yawn that causes a domino effect, and the house contains the machine that counts how many fall asleep. This scene reflects Alison’s mentality: Dreams are a part of sleep, and recording a count is like keeping a diary. Alison also compares it to her own office, separate from the world but still absorbing information (Seuss, Dr. Dr. Seuss’s Sleep Book. Random House, 1962). This is not the only association between Are You My Mother? and children’s literature: The title is the same as a P.D. Eastman book about a hatchling in search of its mother (Thurman, Judith. “Drawn from Life.” The New Yorker. 4 April 2012 https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/04/23/drawn-from-life).
Bechdel comments that Seuss’s plexiglass resembles a uterus and juxtaposes it with Winnicott’s writings about how an underdeveloped infant will focus on its own mental functioning to the point that it no longer needs the mother. Bechdel calls this “a fantasy of self-sufficiency” (134). As she contemplates the pathological division between the psyche (consciousness) and the soma (body), she draws a comparison to the childhood disabled game by depicting herself losing body parts until she is just a head.
Chapter 4 also draws a more distinct comparison between Jocelyn and Carol. While Carol has more credentials, Alison notes that she hates retreading ground that she already covered with Jocelyn and is excited to speak to her old therapist again. The author also considers whether she wants the two to compete for her attention or if she can be her own therapist. But that is impossible. Alison is in denial when Carol tells her that her diaries were an attempt to ward off information overload. Alison cannot be her mother’s therapist either.
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