Working through maternal ambivalence: the wake-up call of Chanson douce

ABSTRACT

This article examines Leïla Slimani’s 2016 international bestseller Chanson douce through the prism of the work’s portrayal of maternal ambivalence. Such ambivalence is analyzed in relation to the two working mothers represented in the text, Myriam and the nanny Louise, and contextualized within socio-historical, literary and psychoanalytical parameters. The article draws on a wide range of theoretical and ‘applied’ readings of maternal ambivalence, ranging from the writings of Simone de Beauvoir to Rozsika Parker, to suggest that the institution of motherhood continues to be a protected, idolized space that, as Adrienne Rich maintained almost forty years ago, has little in common with the actual experience of motherhood. A close reading of Slimani’s text suggests the need for a more measured response, both readerly and social, to the portrayal of supposedly monstrous maternal conduct. By creating a much-needed literary space that allows for the discussion of some of the less socially approved components and feelings of motherhood, Chanson douce dialogues with other current international cultural representations of maternal ambivalence—whether Elena Ferrante’s The Lost Daughter and its recent filmic version, or Eliane Glaser’s Motherhood. It thereby promotes a more considered, contextualized understanding of the many and often contradictory experiences that make up mothering.

Résumé

Cet article analyse le bestseller international de Leïla Slimani, Chanson douce (2016), à travers le prisme de la représentation de l’ambivalence maternelle. Nous examinons cette ambivalence à partir de l’étude de deux personnages, Myriam et la ”nounou” Louise, deux mères qui travaillent, et la contextualisons selon des paramètres socio-historiques, littéraires et psychanalytiques. En nous appuyant sur un grand nombre d’écrits théoriques et ”appliqués” sur l’ambivalence maternelle, de Simone de Beauvoir à Rozsika Parker, nous nous efforçons de montrer que l’institution de la maternité continue à imposer sa vision normative et idéalisée qui, comme Adrienne Rich l’a soutenu il y a presque quarante ans, a très peu de points communs avec l’expérience de la maternité vécue par les femmes. Une lecture détaillée du roman de Leïla Slimani nous invite à concevoir une approche plus mesurée, de la part des lecteurs comme de la société, des conduites maternelles jugées monstrueuses. Grâce à la création d’un espace littéraire propre au traitement de certains éléments et sentiments liés à la maternité, peu acceptables socialement, Chanson douce initie un dialogue avec d’autres représentations actuelles et internationales de l’ambivalence maternelle, qu’il s’agisse de L’Enfant perdue d’Elena Ferrante, et de sa version cinématographique récente, ou de La Maternité d’Eliane Glaser. Ainsi, le livre de Leïla Slimani permet une compréhension plus nuancée et plus complexe des expériences diverses, et souvent contradictoires, dont est formée la maternité.

The following article seeks to humanize the ‘monstrous’ through its examination of the paradigms of mothering represented in Leïla Slimani’s Chanson douce and the abnormal maternal performances the text portrays.¹ Like the work itself, I am less interested in the opening act of infanticide than in examining the socio-political pressures brought to bear on women who are deemed ‘mad’ or ‘bad’ mothers; in other words, women trapped by—and subsequently within—the institution(alization) of motherhood, yet who experience neither the personal épanouissement nor other-facing maternal altruism presented as its quasi-physiological postpartum side effects. Or, at least, not all the time. I am interested in the maternal ambivalence that characterizes the experiences of mothering portrayed in the work, and the work’s consequent desire to disrupt the binarized paradigms of the good or bad mother and to replace them with a co-existent dyad: most mothers, the text and this article argue, are both.² That ambivalence is firmly anchored in the situation of the mothering figure in the text: Chanson douce points up the centrality not of biology but of class and the resultant social alienation in inflecting our experiences of working motherhood, and thus of choice—or lack thereof—in shaping how individual women respond to having children.³ In Le Deuxième Sexe II, Simone de Beauvoir remarks: ‘Il n’y a pas de mère “dénaturée” puisque l’amour maternel n’a rien de naturel: mais, précisément à cause de cela, il y a de mauvaises mères’ (Beauvoir 1949, 386). The philosopher Elisabeth Badinter supports this position in her seminal work L’Amour en plus, although she comments that, in recent discourse, the term maternal instinct tends to be replaced with the more humanizing—and fickle—maternal love.⁴ Badinter’s historical overview of the perception of maternal love from the seventeenth century to the present day in France reminds us of the relative recentness (the end of the eighteenth century) and, ultimately, manmade origins, of the belief that love is a prerequisite of all marital and familial relations. In contrast, Chanson douce acknowledges the multifarious forms that motherhood as experience can take, many of which transgress our rigidly prescriptive (institutionalized) understanding of good mothering.⁵

Chanson douce forms part of a selection of contemporary Francophone texts that speaks out against or at least nuances dominant discourses of idealized mothering. Such texts illustrate the ideological constraints to which motherhood is subject and seek to redefine them, whether through their depiction of ‘mad’ mothers (Leïla Marouane’s Le Châtiment des hypocrites [2001]) or ‘bad’ mothers (Florence Emptaz’s Fête des mères [2009]). Others, such as Véronique Olmi’s Bord de mer (2001), Laurence Tardieu’s Le Jugement de Léa (2004) or Marie Ndiaye, La Vengeance m’appartient (2021) go further and relate instances of infanticide, the definitive evidence of ‘bad’ mothering in society’s eyes. Recent critical texts also challenge the restrictive behavioural paradigms that dictate ‘good’ mothering, including Gill Rye’s important study on French and Francophone Narratives of Mothering that argues, ‘mothering, as both theory and practice, is currently being contested and interrogated across a number of different fields of inquiry’ (Rye 2009, 16).⁶ The publication of Stéphanie Thomas’s Mal de mères (2021), a collection of ten témoignages of maternal regret further signals a sea change, particularly in its examination of the later stages in mother-child relations, rather than the usual post-partum period. An interest in expanding notions of acceptable maternal conduct is also visible internationally in theoretical texts such as Orna Donath’s Regretting Motherhood (2017), fictional works like Elena Ferrante’s The Lost Daughter (2008, 2021) and its recent cinematic version, as well as in more popular, journalistic texts, as exemplified by Eliane Glaser’s Motherhood (2021).

Despite its huge commercial success, Chanson douce has been the subject of relatively limited critical attention. The two analyses that intersect most closely with my own are Lorenza Starace’s article (2019) on the uneasy disruption of readerly expectations and the inherent ambivalence that characterize Slimani’s postcolonial literary paradigms and authorial positions, and Julie Rodgers’ study (2020) of the darker side of care-giving in Chanson douce, focusing on the oppressive situation typically experienced by the care-giver and the lack of (self)care they experience. This article combines both these approaches to examine the ambivalence that characterizes working mothers’ experiences in Chanson douce; it advocates for the disaggregation of the ontological mother from the ethical maternal, before looking at the representation of the material and social situations of working mothers and how these inflect the practices and perceptions of mothering in Chanson douce. Throughout, it recognizes maternal ambivalence as a valid constituent of mothering.

Working motherhood

As a paid-up employee whose value resides in the labour she provides within the household, Louise the nanny can be seen to symbolize the unnaturalness of a mother’s relationship with her children as well as the ‘full-time job’ of motherhood. A mother’s role vis-à-vis young children involves little publicly recognized skill or personal stimulation, consisting mainly of repetitious domestic tasks. Louise’s role embodies the quintessentially maternal with its focus on children, caring and the private domain, yet originates in economic rather than ‘biological’ reasons; she is ‘like a mother’ to Mila and Adam, not their mother. Lisa Guenther argues for the benefits of differentiation between the ethical and the ontological in relation to mothering: ‘To become like a maternal body even when you are one is to admit a gap between mothering as an ethical practice and the mother as a fixed ontological or biological identity’ (Guenther 2006, 140; original emphasis). This key distinction uncouples the biological act of giving birth/genetic lineage from an instinctive predisposition to care for and protect infants: mothering is not a natural activity readily accessible to and assumed by all mothers. Myriam, the other working mother in Chanson douce—it is easy to forget that Louise too is a working mother—initially uses motherhood as an excuse to embody a type of Beauvoirean immanence or ‘ontological’ maternal body—getting pregnant with Adam ‘accidentally’ when Mila is only 18 months old. However, she quickly tires of the intellectual and physical stagnation it represents for her, and sinks into a form of postpartum depression, a mode of depression, according to Barbara Almond, ‘often related to ambivalence about the baby, to feeling overwhelmed, to being too judgemental about not living up to one’s expectations of maternal behavior and feeling’ (Almond 2010, 124). Myriam feels her sense of self is cannibalized by her children—it is they, not Louise, who are portrayed as the monstrous Other(s) in the following quotation—yet she is unable to share with her husband Paul the frustration, at times the hatred, she feels both towards them and her situation:

Les caprices de Mila l’insupportaient, les premiers babillements d’Adam lui étaient indifférents. Elle ressentait chaque jour un peu plus le besoin de marcher seule, et avait envie de hurler comme une folle dans la rue. “Ils me dévorent vivante”, se disait-elle parfois, (19–20).⁷

The predominant characteristics of her life as a mother centre on loneliness, guilt at feeling unfulfilled without a professional life—which further fuels her isolation—and nostalgia for the woman she once was. Paul seems not to notice: ‘Sa femme paraissait s’épanouir dans cette maternité animale. Cette vie de cocon, loin du monde et des autres, les protégeait de tout’ (18; emphasis added). Paul is an immature hedonist—Myriam’s third child—who does not want his own life to change after having children. Myriam acknowledges the boredom inherent in the daily demands of motherhood, yet, following the employment of Louise, her own mauvaise foi and relief at being able to return to a successful professional life encourage her to accept as reality the domestic dreamscape magically brought to life by this Mary Poppins figure: ‘Louise suscite et comble les fantasmes de famille idéale que Myriam a honte de nourrir’ (35).⁸ Myriam tries to be ‘like a maternal body’, yet, incapable of only being a maternal body, allows herself to be seduced by the vision of familial contentment that Louise enables; the lure of this seduction is reinforced by those around her, such as her friend Emma, who posts self-satisfied pictures of her ideal family life on social media, despite being miserable and suffering from anorexia. The economic and time pressures on Myriam as a working mother lead her to avoid focusing on certain aspects of Louise’s personality and of the employer/employee relations that make her feel uncomfortable in order to carry out her own working commitments. Chanson douce points up the performative aspects of successful (working) motherhood, the pressure to adhere to the social script of the good, contented mother, that aggravates the abyss between so many women’s personal and public experiences of mothering. As Suzanne Gervais observes: ‘Chanson douce est une réflexion sur la violence de la pression pesant sur ces mères qui souhaitent s’épanouir ailleurs qu’au foyer’ (Gervais 2016).⁹

Myriam perceives a return to work as a means of connecting with her former self, a self that has been occluded by the social expectations of motherhood. The multifaceted positions she occupied before motherhood have been replaced by a monochrome maternal monolith. Being a mother colours how she is perceived by her colleagues and her husband, despite her desire to reconnect with her pre-maternal individuality and sexual identity. Her body is not a woman’s body but a mother’s body: ‘[l]orsqu’il [Paul] la pénètre, c’est dans son ventre de mère qu’il entre, son ventre lourd’ (44); her maternal identity—like the creeping encroachment of the octopuses that invade Louise’s apartment in the film of Chanson douce—is usurping her private sense of self.¹⁰ In Le Parfum des fleurs la nuit, Slimani acknowledges the tension between this need to espouse the cultural imperatives of ‘good’ mothering on one hand and to maintain a personal space unrelated to mothering on the other, pointing up the contamination of personal needs and desires by public expectations: ‘Dans tous mes romans, les mères nourrissent, à un moment ou à un autre, de manière fugace et honteuse, le désir d’abandonner leurs enfants. Elles ont toutes la nostalgie de la femme qu’elles ont été avant d’être la mère de quelqu’un’ (Slimani 2021, 80). For Slimani too, this appears to be the case. She frequently portrays writing as a drive that surpasses all else—indeed, writing is portrayed as a physiological ‘instinct’ that needs to be satisfied far more than any maternal impulses. With reference to the multiple unsolicited comments Slimani receives about her good fortune in being able to reconcile her professional life as a writer with her role as a mother who works from home, she replies: ‘Ben non, en fait, je ne vais pas profiter de lui [her son], je vais écrire. Et puis, il y a même des moments où je pourrais être avec lui, mais je prendrai tout de même une nounou pour le garder parce que j’ai envie d’écrire’ (Slimani 2018, 46).¹¹ Slimani believes that giving voice to this Beauvoirean rejection of collusion with the self-abnegating maternal ideal of patriarchy is pivotal to women’s renegotiation of acceptable models of (working) motherhood.

Domestic relations

The majority of Chanson douce takes place within the confines of the flat of the upwardly mobile Massé couple. This domestic (dis)location acts as a form of spatial pressure cooker for both Myriam the mother and, as the work draws to its conclusion, for Louise the nanny, a monde à part that becomes increasingly cut off from the rest of society. As Slimani remarks in Le Parfum des fleurs la nuit: ‘La question féminine est une question spatiale. On ne peut comprendre la domination dont les femmes sont l’objet sans en étudier la géographie, sans prendre la mesure de la contrainte qui est imposée à leur corps par le vêtement, par les lieux, par le regard des autres’ (Slimani 2018, 81). In Chanson douce, Slimani reminds us of the fundamental politicization of the domestic everyday, a term viewed as synonymous with the mundane and uneventful. She presents it as an Hegelian arena in which there is a constant battle for domination, where women especially are obliged to excel in so many mutually exclusive domains that the master-slave dialectic can also take the form of an internal struggle for self-expression and fulfilment over societal expectations of maternal and domestic roles. The master-slave antinomy has particular resonance for the relationship of employer and nanny. As Geneviève Fraisse remarks in Service ou servitude: ‘Être au service d’autrui désigne une subordination, mais aussi une aliénation de sa liberté. C’est ainsi que les domestiques hommes furent exclus de la citoyenneté à la Révolution française. Dépendants de leur maître, ils n’étaient pas libres d’être des sujets politiques’ (Fraisse 2021, 8). Being a nanny is one of the few jobs where ‘service’ remains at an exclusively individual level and is located within the private domain—similar jobs would be domestic cleaners or carers for the elderly—and this partly explains the economic and political hegemonies that govern this employer-employee relationship,¹² as well as the general social and mediatic invisibility of the nanny figure—and the fundamental isolation that typifies her position. With reference to the nanny subject, Susan Scheftel asks the question: ‘Is there something that keeps it hovering under the radar, a kind of devalued preoedipal downstairs juxtaposed against the more privileged oedipal upstairs and its fairly limited/inevitable cast of characters?’ (Scheftel 2016, 254). Louise is in a perpetually othering situation, in which she sometimes plays the other mother to Adam and Mila, sometimes the other child to Myriam and Paul (the ‘devalued preoedipal’); she accesses the Massé at their most intimate yet can never be anything more than a usurper, a subaltern Other.¹³

Chanson douce presents a Sartrean-like huis clos of three adults, who are interconnected yet isolated. Slimani accurately illustrates the daily choreography of claustrophobic domestic life, as each character strives to gain the upper hand over the other, and over the disparate demands made on the self; the work points up the self-deception and unhealthily mutual dependence that characterize the trio’s relationship. This choreography becomes tacitly combative between Louise and Myriam, in that the former is instrumentalized as a means of production judged by her output and degree of circumspection. Like the servant in classical French drama, Louise is described as acting ‘en coulisses, discrète et puissante’ (59)—she is all-seeing and controlling the action off-stage: whatever her ‘inferior’ position in the household, she exerts disproportionate control over events.¹⁴ Indeed, the setting of the Massé apartment resembles a theatre staging in its oppressive ‘unity of place’—it is there that all the main action happens—, in Louise’s constant wearing of her ‘col Claudine’ costume and in the fact we rarely get to see behind the nanny façade.¹⁵ Myriam at times behaves like a child when Louise is around, abdicating responsibility, avoiding any challenge to Louise’s authority and letting her take over the running of the home: ‘Louise est là, tenant à bout de bras cet édifice fragile. Myriam accepte de se faire materner’ (59). This striking image points up the role-switching among the characters inhabiting this infernal huis clos of dysfunctional denial, as Louise mothers Myriam, who mothers the eternally immature Paul, who ‘mothers’ Louise, as in the scene where he teaches her to swim. It is partly out of a profound gratitude to Louise who has liberated Myriam from many of the travails of motherhood, combined with a social discomfort at employing a nanny in the first place—and her sheer exhaustion as a working mother—that Myriam relinquishes domestic control to Louise. And Louise, like every proud mother, basks in the professional and material success of her surrogate children, Paul and Myriam, success that she has helped facilitate.

The paradoxical mastery of the subaltern within this relational triad culminates in Louise’s Medea-type refusal to relinquish control of Mila and Adam: in short, if she cannot have the children, no one else will. She carries out the ultimate act of severance between m/other and child, giving literal form to the termination of her role. In ‘Reliance, or Maternal Eroticism’, Julia Kristeva writes: ‘Neonaticide and infanticide do not give death: they are the work of possession’ (Kristeva 2014, 79; original emphasis).¹⁶ Louise views the Massé as her ticket to social acceptance and happiness, and wants to press the pause button on their life together, to freeze the status quo and entrap them in a form of existential snow globe in which the same actions and routines would be performed ad infinitum: ‘Elle voudrait les retenir, s’accrocher à eux, gratter de ses ongles le sol en pierre. Elle voudrait les mettre sous cloche, comme deux danseurs figés et souriants, collés au socle d’une boîte à musique’ (81).¹⁷ The murder of the children symbolizes the most traumatic means of arresting their progress and independence, without which she ceases to have employment and be needed—and while the ultimate act of possession and expression of her freedom, it is also the ultimate expression of her powerlessness, as well as perfectly encapsulating maternal ambivalence in that she ‘lovingly’ runs a toy-filled bath before murdering them.¹⁸ By its repetition of the proper subject noun ‘Louise’ at the beginning of a series of actions—as opposed to ‘la nounou’, the text’s final paragraph highlights that the façade has cracked and the ‘real’ Louise is revealed, one who is filled with self-hatred—‘“Je serai punie de ne pas savoir aimer”’ (213)—and whose auditory hallucinations urge her to commit murder in order to find some form of relief.

The reproduction of (non)mothering

Louise’s desire to remain with Myriam and Paul could also be read as a manifestation of the psychologist John Bowlby’s attachment theory. Bowlby argues that disruptions to maternal attachment can produce seriously harmful consequences for the child and that when children are frightened, they will seek proximity with their primary caregiver in order to receive both comfort and care; he also argues for a theory of transgenerational influence or transmission of behaviour paradigms: ‘While attachment behaviour is shown especially strongly during childhood when it is directed towards parent figures, it none the less continues to be active during adult life when it is usually directed towards some active and dominant figure, often a relative but sometimes an employer’ (Bowlby 1989, 106). Louise knows that she will have to sever ties with the Massé if they do not have another child, and feels ‘at home’ in their flat, arriving earlier and earlier and often staying the night; her own studio is described as ‘une parenthèse’ (193) in her existence. It appears that Louise has never experienced nurturing parent-child bonds herself. Interestingly, given her profession, Bowlby suggests that adults who have not been the recipients of parental care in childhood have ‘found that the only affectional bond available is one in which [they] must always be the care-giver and that the only care [they] can ever receive is the care [they] give[s] [themselves]’ (Bowlby 1989, 164).

Louise’s occasionally sadistic relationship with Mila and Adam and her own daughter may be read as a form of subconscious revenge for her own mistreatment in the past or a re-enactment of the destructive patterns of her own experience of neglectful early parenting. Equally and concurrently, given the different mother-child roles she has to play, the text positions Louise in a metaphorical phase of arrested development where she hopes to experience some of the pleasures of childhood she herself was denied, or, more negatively, where ‘the parent is in a present-tense state of mind that reflects past-tense experience of unresolved childhood distress, i.e. the abusing parent actually feels like a child and sees the child as a peer or adult who is being difficult’ (Adshead and Williams 2019, 141).¹⁹ Her childhood is described as cold and grey, interspersed with nightmarish visions of drowning children (77); we learn that she has no memory of anyone ever cooking her a meal simply to please her or make her feel better (139). Her adulthood has fared little better economically: she lives in a bedsit in the banlieue, burdened with inherited debt and petrified of an old age marked by poverty and ever greater disenfranchisement. There are also multiple, if fleeting, references to her being hospitalized for mental illness—(195; 206; 226)—informing the reader that Louise was treated for a ‘[m]élancholie délirante’ (158), the medical characteristics of which are ‘hallucinations typiquement auditives’ and acute anxiety/fear, both episodic symptoms accompanied by an increased risk of suicide.²⁰

Louise has been horribly exploited by her previous employers and her own experience of motherhood is shown to be inherently linked to profound feelings of alienation and degradation: when Louise announces her pregnancy to her employer, Monsieur Franck, he remarks that people like her should not be allowed to reproduce (110). Her child, Stéphanie, is subsequently born out of an exhausted indifference in that Louise overslept and missed her appointment at the abortionist’s, which may also account for her pronounced somniphobia: she is loath to be late or to lose control through falling asleep.²¹ In a verbatim echo of the text’s infamous opening sentence—‘Le bébé est mort’—Louise’s indifference towards her own daughter is reflected in the disengaged conditional: ‘Stéphanie pourrait être morte’ (108). And this is a further reason why society—and many readers—may consider Louise monstrous: she does not appear to love her daughter and would rather clean someone else’s house than spend time interacting with her. She is happy to play with Mila and Adam in her paid role as nanny, but, exactly like Myriam—and, as we have seen, at times Slimani—is uninterested in engaging in creative play with her own child.²² Stéphanie is portrayed as too big, too visible, too clumsy for Louise’s liking; she embodies the indiscreet, uncouth social background from which Louise is trying to escape through both her employment by the Massé and her own perfectly tailored appearance and discretion.

The absence of ‘good enough parenting’ in Louise’s childhood could also have led to the development of what D.W. Winnicott refers to as a ‘false self’ (Winnicott 1960, 145), a performative façade lacking in spontaneity and empathy—Sartrean ‘play-acting’ under the gaze of the other—so concerned with pre-empting and then complying with others’ expectations of her conduct that any notion of the components of an authentic self are defensively kept hidden in order to protect against further trauma and disappointment. The Massé give her positive reinforcement and reassurance about her value, and the thought of that ceasing is inconceivable for Louise and provokes a pathological sense of separation anxiety—aside from the social ‘distinction’ that being their nanny represents for her. The Massé constitute her sole source of emotional gratification, a source all the more vital given she does not wish to relive what she surely experiences as her past trauma of abandonment at the hands of her previous employers, the Rouvier.²³ What is clear in Bowlby’s writing is the importance of affection and social connectedness in fuelling an individual’s sense of security. Bowlby remarks that ‘one of the major effects of mother-child separation is a great intensification of the conflict of ambivalence’ (Bowlby 1989, 19) on the part of the child/Louise, and this is never more clearly expressed than in Louise’s murder of Mila and Adam a short time after she was desperately hoping to encourage Paul and Myriam to have more children; it could be read as a manifestation of vengeful omnipotence as the bona fide children are killed by the ‘abnormal’ ersatz child. As Olivia Laing puts it in The Lonely City, ‘isolation leads to a decline in social sophistication, which in itself elicits further episodes of rejection’ (Laing 2016, 149). This mirrors Louise’s descent into a form of aphasic psychosis;²⁴ she ceases communicating with adults and loses her grip on the reality principle, inhabiting a nightmarish world of fantasies.²⁵ There is a sense that Louise’s hypervigilance and brittleness are defence mechanisms that bear the hallmark of the socially excluded, yet also serve as alarm bells to mainstream society and ‘other’ her, further reinforcing her marginalization and isolation.

Slimani is concerned throughout her publications with the cultural and discursive capital that money and social distinction can buy: Louise does not know how to interact with others and is in awe of Paul’s facility in doing so; she is incapable of judging the artistic merit of her former employer Monsieur Franck’s paintings; she has never listened to music; yet she does know that she possesses insufficient knowledge or education to keep the children entertained beyond a very young age—and they know it too (211).²⁶ She is shown to be de-humanized, brutalized, by her position, her social isolation and by the way others view her, but it is clearly not Slimani’s intention to portray her as a monster.²⁷ Louise finds no form of, or outlet for, self-expression with others in this work except through violence; she represents the silenced Bourdieusian (1979) ‘classe dominée’ par excellence.²⁸ It is also worth noting that Louise is a single mother in an economically precarious profession—that of carer—with no support network of her own.²⁹

Before the infanticide, Louise occasionally crosses the boundary into (minor) sadism as when she ties Mila’s hair too tightly (37), tells her dark fairytales (39), or never reveals her hiding-place when playing hide-and-seek with the children despite their visible distress (50–51); there is also a more disturbing episode in which she beats her daughter Stéphanie (182–3).³⁰ In her work Torn in Two: The Experience of Maternal Ambivalence, Rozsika Parker provides a summary of these moments of infraction for which many mothers seek inner absolution, whether these be:

fleeting (or not so fleeting) feelings of hatred for a child that can grip a mother, the moment of recoil from a much-loved body, the desire to abandon, to smash the untouched plate of food in a toddler’s face, to yank a child’s arm while crossing the road, scrub too hard with a facecloth, change the lock against an adolescent, or the fantasy of hurling a howling baby out of the window. (Parker 2010, 5)

These or similar instances of ‘maternal ambivalence’ or maternal micro-aggressions, are, I would argue, familiar to most mothers and carers, but cannot be confessed for fear of, at best, the social stigma attached to being a ‘bad’ mother, at worst, the loss of caring responsibilities, whether professional or personal. Slimani’s text suggests that if we continue to deny the many forms that mothering takes and the negative, at times violent, emotions to which it gives rise, and to diminish the importance of social context and status in the act of mothering, we will continue to see mothering as an unassailable ideal rather than the experience of real women—and children.³¹ In this sense, the aberrant mother is viewed as monstrous by society when she is merely human, but is unable to give voice to her limitations, leading her to internalize them and often resulting in depression, whether mild in the case of Myriam or severe in the case of Louise.³² In the recent volume, Mothers Accused and Abused, Angela Foster signals that ‘[w]hen motherhood is idealised there is a societal reluctance to face the reality of harmful mothering; consequently those who blatantly fail to live up to the ideal are viewed as individual aberrations, vilified and marginalised’, before adding that women accused of harmful mothering are ‘women who, almost without exception, were abused during their own childhoods’ (Foster 2019, 1; emphasis added).

Conclusion

Slimani’s representation of Louise does not obviously seek to ‘invoke […] understanding and even empathy’, to use Kathryn Robson’s terms when describing the readerly response to ‘bad’ mothers in narratives of maternal filicide (Robson 2019, 73). Rather, her characterization in Chanson douce discourages the reader from making any straightforward judgements—we never know ‘why’ Louise murdered two children—but posits a plurality of perspectives in this text that confounds the possibility of readerly identification with Louise. We are given a sketchy familial and socio-political background with which to (partly) contextualize her actions; Louise’s own story is incomplete with various chapters and characters occluded, either through her lacking the language to recount it or her belief that her past lacks the ‘significant’ material that would make it interesting. As she remarks to Myriam—and the reader—in a rare decisive comment: ‘Vous ne devriez pas chercher à tout comprendre. Les enfants, c’est comme les adultes. Il n’y a rien à comprendre’ (127).

Rather than a grotesque version of a mad, bad mother, Louise is depicted as a disenfranchised, effaced shadow of a human being; she inhabits the coulisses, rather than being a lead actor in society. Chanson douce is not principally about infanticide, but about the unhealthily interdependent and dishonest lives working mothers from all social strata are forced to lead, it is about their inability to act on feelings of malaise because their working lives and childcare arrangements hang by a thread and they may possess neither the time nor financial resources to confront and rectify the situation. The work subtly draws attention to those occasions when we do not pay sufficient heed to our own inner voices and are passively swept along through implicit or explicit peer pressure, whether familial, professional or social. Chanson douce also condemns the prejudiced hegemonic judgements we impose on others who do not resemble us; the book’s mise-en-abyme trial within a trial holds up social disenfranchisement and neglect as suspects in the case of infanticide.³³ This book gives us a continuing vortex of short perspectives on others via a panoply of characters—like Mila on the carousel, we only ever catch fleeting glances or are exposed to incomplete portraits of individuals.

Slimani’s corpus gives voice to those whose stories are not commonly represented in literature, whether Adèle the sex addict in Dans le jardin de l’ogre, ordinary Moroccan women in Sexe et mensonges or embattled mothers in Chanson douce: while Louise cannot find the words to speak about herself to her bourgeois employers (150), Slimani represents the oblique complexities of her situation. As the narrative voice remarks in the first chapter with reference to Louise: ‘L’autre aussi, il a fallu la sauver. Avec autant de professionnalisme, avec objectivité’ (14).³⁴ The text repeatedly portrays Louise as too shy to interact with other adults—whether strangers on the metro (32), or guests at Paul and Myriam’s dinner party (65–6)—and as paralyzed when under the gaze of the other (38).³⁵ If Louise’s husband Jacques decrees that her life experiences as a carer should remain hidden and are of interest to no one, Chanson douce proves otherwise:

Il pensait que ces histoires ne sont pas bonnes à être racontées. Elles devraient être vécues à l’abri du monde, nous n’en devrions rien savoir, de ces histoires de bébés ou de vieillards. Ce sont de mauvais moments à passer, des âges de servitude et des répétitions des mêmes gestes. (99)

In a classic Slimani syntactical move, this quotation comprises an interesting switch in tenses and insertion of the first-person plural to move from the particular to the general and to implicate the reader. Slimani disturbs our preconceptions about the uninteresting everyday and those invisible others whom we never see going about their mundane, low-paid tasks; those who suffer from chronic loneliness and inhabit the marginalized world of the dispossessed, and of motherhood. In Le Deuxième Sexe II, Simone de Beauvoir intimates that it is not the act of infanticide per se that is shocking, but the fact it does not happen more frequently, given the extensive nature of maternal ambivalence (Beauvoir 1949, 372). As Kathryn Robson remarks:

[F]ilicide generates the possibility of empathy (for mothers who might otherwise be culturally invisible), not by giving a voice to these mothers, but by allowing their social or emotional alienation to become belatedly visible and audible. Yet they become narratable only when it is too late’ (Robson 2019, 91)

Slimani’s writing endeavours to use literature to reveal and normalize actual experiences of mothering rather than abstract ideals, experiences that reflect the profound ambivalences of mothering that remain unspoken—not because they are unspeakable but because society does not want to listen.³⁶ As readers, we can see (aspects of) ourselves, or our mothers, in the ‘bad’ maternal paradigms portrayed in Chanson douce—it is in these interstitial moments of recognition that the disturbing power of this text resides, in the sense of disturbing our willed self- and social blindness about motherhood, in its pushing to extremes these maternal ambivalences and tensions culminating in the terrible murder of two children. Not unlike Annie Ernaux’s writing, Slimani’s corpus is characterized by a drive to dismantle certain social taboos, and to promote an experience-infused intellectual engagement with key aspects of female sexuality and evolution. In Torn in Two, Parker comments:

[T]he conflict between love and hate actually spurs mothers on to struggle to understand and know their baby. In other words, the suffering of ambivalence can promote thought – and the capacity to think about the baby and child is arguably the single most important aspect of mothering (Parker 2010, 8-9).

It does not constitute a failure to acknowledge the complexity and contradictions of motherhood—or if it does, we need to redefine ‘failure’ as likely to promote a more productive, ethical engagement with the self and the other. If the putative components of ‘good’ mothering (devotion; warmth; instinctive bonding; maternal love) have remained remarkably constant and unchallenged—even throughout the historical vagaries of feminism—that is surely because the grand narrative normalizing and sanctifying the figure of the ‘natural’ mother has brooked no dissent. As a fictional narrative and contextualization of maternal ambivalence in relation to two demographically disparate working mothers, Chanson douce also serves to ‘promote thought’ at the level of the social and cultural, and thus constitutes a welcome mediator between the dichotomized perception of mothering as idealized institution and actual experience.

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Notes

1. A look at reviews published on Chanson douce reveals the frequency with which the term ‘monstrous’ is associated with Louise the nanny, who murders the two Massé children in her care, and also the mother Myriam, who leaves her children with Louise when she returns to work (2018). See, for example, https://fictionwritersreview.com/review/the-monstrous-complicity-of-leila-slimanis-the-perfect-nanny or Leïla Slimani and me: On the Beauty of Simplicity in Literature (moroccoworldnews.com), the latter of which remarks that ‘estrangement, alienation and self-loathing can transform us into monsters’ (2018). The reference to ‘wake-up call’ in the title of my article echoes the wording of Eva Wiseman’s (2018) Guardian review of Chanson douce, 28 January 2018.

2. I do not mean that there is a dilution of positive and negative emotional reactions into a neutered hybrid but that both can exist concurrently, whether in Chanson douce or extra-textually. There is a limited corpus of ‘classic’ psychoanalytic accounts that recognizes the role played by maternal ambivalence, such as Melanie Klein’s ‘Love, Guilt and Reparation’—Klein (1998) also, of course, deals with infant ambivalence towards the good/bad mother; Helene Deutsch’s (1945) Psychology of Women; or John Bowlby’s (1989) The Making and Breaking of Affectional Bonds. These tend to focus on mothering for the damage it may have inflicted on adult psychology, either retroactively in that the mother’s relationship with her child is a reflection/sublimation of her own relationship with her mother, or where the child as an adult is analyzed in light of the earlier mother-child relationship. What is less in evidence is a focus on the mother qua mother during the act of mothering. D.W. Winnicott (1949) does focus on ‘good enough mothering’, which allows mothers to be less than perfect and recognizes that they may feel anger or hatred towards their children on occasion, but he still places emphasis on the existence of ‘natural’ mother love and on mothers not having to overthink childrearing. See ‘Hate in the Countertransference’ in particular.

3. Slimani has published four works of fiction: Dans le jardin de l’ogre (2014), Chanson douce (2016) and, most recently, the second text, Regardez-nous danser (2022), in the familial trilogy that started with Le Pays des autres (2020). She has published one work of non-fiction, Sexe et mensonges: la vie sexuelle au Maroc (2017a) which is also accompanied by a graphic novel, Paroles d’honneur (2017), with illustrations by Laetitia Coryn. The same year, she published a politically-oriented collection of six short texts, Le Diable est dans les détails (2017b). In 2018, she published a short interview with Eric Fottorino, in which she discusses the act of writing and the role of literature in her life, Comment j’écris. Her recent essay, Le Parfum des fleurs la nuit (2021), constitutes a series of reflections on myriad subjects—writing, travel, identity—provoked by Slimani’s experience of spending the night alone in the Punta della Dogana art museum in Venice.

4. It was the denial of a maternal instinct in both Beauvoir’s writing and Slimani’s interviews following the publication of Chanson douce that first drew my attention to the similarities between both writers’ position on women’s supposed predisposition to motherhood—and the fact that little had changed by way of societal expectations of ‘natural’ motherhood, and reactions to its possible non-existence, in the interim seventy plus years. In the podcast La Poudre, Slimani comments: ‘Je suis totalement contre l’idée d’enfermer les mères ni dans un instinct maternel ni dans un bonheur, voilà, qui viendrait de je ne sais quelle hormone ridicule’ [36.44–36.53], La Poudre, Épisode 4, Leïla Slimani. This statement is met with nervous laughter on the part of the host, Lauren Bastide (2017).

5. In her work Of Woman Born, Adrienne Rich famously differentiates between motherhood as institution and motherhood as experience, and highlights the need to recognize and represent the ‘concrete and particular experiences of women’ (Rich 1995, ix).

6. In both these works, as in Chanson douce, maternal solitude figures prominently. For further examples of critical works dealing with ambivalent mothering, see Loïc Bourdeau’s Horrible Mothers (2019).

7. As Sara Ruddick puts it in Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace: ‘a single typical day can encompass fury, infatuation, boredom, and simple dislike’ (Ruddick 1989, 70).

8. Like Mary Poppins, Louise seems devoid of any sentimentality, particularly in relation to her own daughter. Equally, like the Banks, her employers, the Massé, know nothing of her private life. The narrator too appears to occupy the same ignorant, if not indifferent, position, as highlighted by a description of the unpacked boxes in Louise’s bedsit: ‘Ils contiennent peut-être les quelques objets qui pourraient donner vie à ce studio sans âme’ (31; emphasis added).

9. As Barbara Almond remarks: ‘Conflict between the needs of the mother and the needs of the infant and child is the major source of maternal ambivalence’ (Almond 2010, 229). I do not have the space here to discuss the multiple critiques of the ‘neoliberal’ intensification of mothering the book is said to represent, but find it remarkable that working mothers (not fathers) continue to be vilified as selfish and exploitative for providing paid childcare for their children when no realistic alternatives exist. Such condemnation is illustrative of the same tension between idealized institution and actual experience that characterizes motherhood as a whole.

10. The film Chanson douce (2019) offers a nice push back to this sense of bodily dispossession associated with mothering in that Louise, played by Karin Viard, appears naked in one invented scene, a departure justified by Viard as an attempt to show the viewer that Louise is a human being with her own bodily needs and desires (Vavasseur, 2019). See Karin Viard, diabolique nanny dans le film «Chanson douce»—Le Parisien.

11. In what may appear to be a relatively mundane remark in an interview with Sam Baker (2019) that originally appeared in The Pool, Slimani is courageous enough—and courage is required to espouse this position publicly—to state her preference for reading or watching Netflix alone over playing Lego with her son: ‘Sometimes I am bored with my son when he asks me to play Lego. I don’t want to play Lego! If I’m home and I just have an hour or two and I just want to read a book or go on Netflix, I don’t want to play Lego!’ Leïla Slimani: ‘It’s important to say how it feels to be a woman in a woman’s body’, 14 June 2019, original emphasis.

12. Until the recent COVID-19 pandemic, the world of work has been strongly disassociated from the private domain in post-industrial societies, with the exception of child-rearing and housework which have never been considered ‘proper jobs’.

13. The idealization of biological motherhood has also found its conventional narrative counterpart in the ‘wicked’ stepmother or indeed the nanny as maternal ersatz, who can only ever be a diluted form of the perfection embodied by the ‘real’ mother. It is surely our inability to accept the existence of maternal ambivalence that partly accounts for the projection of mothering into such binarized paradigmatic figures.

14. The theatre analogy is used at the text’s conclusion following the double murder, a tragedy that would befit any Racinian drama. In the investigative mise-en-scène of the murder, the police officer Nina Dorval, we are told, ‘frappera les trois coups’ (227). This article is arguing that the culmination of the drama is very much not a deus ex machina form of narrative resolution but one for which there is clear textual evidence.

15. Louise is perceived as a function, a reliable clockwork doll, not a human being. Indeed when Louise fails to turn up to work, the Massé do not contemplate that her absence may be due to illness. Fraisse acknowledges the unique exclusivity of this type of domestic contractual relationship: ‘le contrat entre maître et domestique n’a pas d’ouverture (à la difference des autres contrats de travail) sur le monde social’ (Fraisse 2021, 65). This closure explains why Myriam cannot believe it is Louise she sees at night in Paris, since Louise only exists for Myriam in her role as nanny (218).

16. Louise’s desire for physical possession of the children is also experienced by Henri Rouvier, a previous guard in her care, who interprets Louise’s kiss, which occasionally morphs into a form of biting, as ‘son désir de le posséder tout entier’ (166). The infanticide in Chanson douce can further be viewed as a reversion to a form of the willed primary narcissism of infant development on the part of Louise, in her inability or refusal to recognize that her subjective vision does not correspond to objective reality.

17. In Le Parfum des fleurs la nuit, Slimani uses a similar image with reference to her own children: ‘Il m’arrive de rêver que j’enferme mes enfants sous un bocal de verre qui les protégerait de tout, qui les rendrait invincibles, inaccessibles aux drames et aux dangers’ (Slimani 2021, 50). The glass screen occurs elsewhere in the work as a metaphor for the existent but invisible social distanciation and impenetrability of bourgeois materialism, whether in Louise’s window-shopping in Paris by night (89), or Myriam’s observing Louise through her car window when the family happen to see her unexpectedly (217–218).

18. As Sarah Lachance Adams remarks: ‘If the mother loses her sense of herself as an individual, then she will develop a need for the child to depend on her in order to maintain her identity’ (Lachance Adams 2014, 180). Or as Adrienne Rich puts it: ‘[I]t is not enough to let our children go; we need selves of our own to return to’ (Rich 1995, 37).

19. See ‘The Mother in Mind’, Gwen Adshead and Anna Williams in Mothers Accused and Abused (Adshead and Williams 2019, 141). Louise is often referred to as childlike in both stature and approach (48), and has an ability to relate to children at their level both physically, by getting down on her hands and knees, and mentally, in her participation in role-playing and stories. This necessary switching from maternal authority figure responsible for her guards one minute to being a carefree and playful peer of the children the next is a fundamental component of mothering and one that may further fuel maternal ambivalence. Her designation by both the Massé and the narrative voice as ‘la nounou’, along with an absence of surname, further infantilises her.

20. As this article remarks, Louise is privy to such hallucinations at the text’s conclusion (213). Further information on ‘mélancholie délirante’ can be found at https://www.fondationpierredeniker.org/uploads/factSheets/ad4322a80c3ea52f0d11495fe7db3953d83a203b.pdf.

21. Loss of sleep or interrupted sleep is also a sign of melancholic depression.

22. Echoing Slimani’s comment about playing quoted earlier, this maternal dislike of play seems very common. In a reference to Rosalind Coward’s (1992) work, Our Treacherous Hearts, Parker remarks: ‘Surprisingly, perhaps, many of her interviewees simply did not want to play—though they felt they should. Anything was preferable to trying to play. Even cooking and cleaning presented greater attraction’ (Parker 2010, 225).

23. Chanson douce repeatedly stresses the built-in obsolescence that characterizes the nanny profession.

24. Her heart too is described as encased behind a rigid exterior and she feels incapable of loving anyone (213). Chanson douce portrays Louise as struggling to make and maintain meaningful affective bonds with others, which may be due to the disruption of such bonds in her own dysfunctional childhood.

25. It could be argued that her isolation is aggravated by her race—she is one of the very few white French nannies in the neighbourhood—and her age, albeit that she is shown to fuel such isolation by her perceived sense of superiority over the other nannies. Kiley Reid’s Such a Fun Age (2020) offers some interesting points of comparison with Chanson douce in that it relates a mother-carer relationship, principally and sympathetically from the perspective of the black sitter, Emira. While it too switches focus and pronouns fluidly, portrays the liberal (white) employer as endeavouring to instigate a non-hegemonic relationship with her black employee—like Myriam, Alix Chamberlain hides her expensive purchases and is acutely aware of Emira as a financially precarious employee while knowing nothing of her personal life—the novel is underpinned by an unpleasant anti-mothering, or anti-use-of-private-childcare, sentiment that portrays Alix Chamberlain as an uninterested and neglectful mother. The recent surreal horror film, Nanny (2022), directed by Nikyatu Jusu, also focuses on a black nanny’s alienation in working for a wealthy, white New York couple, while trying to save up enough money to bring her son over from Senegal.

26. As Beauvoir remarks when commenting on the mockery to which mothers are often subject due to their intellectual limitations: ‘elle exige que ses devoirs [de son enfant] soient faits, mais elle ne saurait résoudre les problèmes qu’il a à traiter, traduire ce texte latin; elle ne peut pas le “suivre”’ (Beauvoir 1949, 377).

27. Chanson douce explicitly reminds the reader of the terrible sacrifices (particularly non-French) nannies have to make, whether missing the death of loved ones in their home country or sending money to ill children who do not recognize them on their return (199–200).

28. See, in particular, La Distinction. Interestingly, the work portrays Louise as talking incessantly during her marriage to Jacques, to whom she felt equal, perhaps even superior. Their relationship was also characterized by sexual violence, which she is portrayed as liking, indicating the normalization of physical violence for Louise in intimate relationships.

29. Louise is 25 years old and, we are given to presume, single when she conceives Stéphanie, so Jacques is not her biological father. As Beauvoir discusses in Le Deuxième Sexe II, motherhood per se is not viewed as sacred in society’s eyes, but motherhood within marriage. Her widowed status while still comparatively young no doubt further exacerbates Louise’s sense of precariousness.

30. According to Barbara Almond’s clinical categorization, Louise could be considered a woman who externalizes her maternal ambivalence: ‘Viewing their angry and disturbed feelings as the child’s fault, they [these women] feel rage more than guilt, and they don’t hold their feelings inside. They express them in aggressive behaviors, and they see their inner problems as residing in their children’ (Almond 2010, 105).

31. This is, of course, not to diminish the horror of Louise’s actions towards Stéphanie—and subsequently towards Adam and Mila—but to seek to provide some context for them. Louise is a single mother, working to create a perfect family for someone else, whose own needs remain invisible to society as a whole.

32. Eliane Glaser’s recent Motherhood: A Manifesto (2021) represents a sustained deconstruction of the unattainable perfectionism with which contemporary mothers are confronted. And she is clear to point out that it is contemporary mothers. Ironically, mothers in the past were given more support after giving birth with the ‘lying in’ period, were less encouraged to breastfeed, etc. Motherhood as iconic institution, she argues, is one of the last totemic untouchables.

33. In L’Amour en plus, Badinter makes clear the link between infanticide and social deprivation: ‘Il faut cependant insister sur le fait que ces différentes sortes d’infanticide furent le propre des femmes les plus pauvres de la société. On ne dira jamais assez l’importance du facteur économique dans ces pratiques meurtrières’ (Badinter 1980, 86). Chanson douce echoes the trial analogy when Louise has to defend Stéphanie’s conduct or, rather, as the text makes clear, her own conduct as a ‘mauvaise mère’, in front of an educational ‘tribunal’ (180). As Rich remarks: ‘Instead of recognizing the institutional violence of patriarchal motherhood, society labels those women who finally erupt in violence as psychopathological’ (Rich 1995, 263).

34. It is important to note that Myriam is a lawyer who is used to defending the socially disenfranchised, which may make her more reluctant to judge Louise’s conduct negatively. As she tells one of her defendants, who, pre-empting Louise’s act, kills two vulnerable people with no obvious motive, ‘“Nous devons prouver que, vous aussi, vous êtes une victime”’ (175).

35. Myriam too feels unable to speak frankly to those around her, whether her husband, her friend Emma whose lack of empathy for nannies who have to leave their children in their home country Myriam finds offensive, the school teacher who reproaches her her selfish professional life and blames Mila’s poor scholarly results on it, her mother-in-law who is completely unsupportive despite having been a working mother herself, or indeed Louise, who she is frightened will take revenge on the children. Motherhood is presented as a rigidly normative state, so governed by social pressure to conform and mothers’ guilt at not performing sufficiently well in the eyes of the other that it is permeated by silence and mauvaise foi.

36. In her work, The Mother Knot, Jane Lazarre remarks on the prevalence of such ambivalence: ‘The only thing which seems to me to be eternal and natural in motherhood is ambivalence and its manifestation in the ever ongoing cycles of separation and unification with our children’ (Lazarre 1987, xxii).