Impossible Subjects? In Search of the Maternal Subject in Stories We Tell (Polley 2012) and The Arbor (Barnard 2010)

Abstract

In 1977 Adrienne Rich wrote, ‘It is hard to write about my own mother. Whatever I do write, it is my own story I am telling’. Two years later, Michelle’s Citron’s film Daughter Rite, struggled with the same problem. It was, she later wrote, a daughter’s film, ‘incapable of imagining the mother’s story’. The difficulty of imagining and conceptualizing a specifically maternal subject is an issue that has continued to preoccupy feminist scholarship, becoming in the past ten years once more an urgent political and theoretical topic. At the same time a number of female filmmakers have returned to the issues raised by Citron’s film, using techniques which, like hers, also ask us to question the relationship between narrative, memory, and the various forms through which their claims to truth are made. Here I discuss two: Stories We Tell (Polley, 2012) and The Arbor (Barnard 2010). Both concern quests to recover the mother as subject, very different from the nurturing and devouring figure of Citron’s film. Both manipulate and question footage that claims a direct, indexical relation to ‘truth’; both construct a story which employs techniques of narrative fiction, yet operate through processes which challenge the authority of such narratives. In this article I explore the two films, to ask how far they succeed in bringing the maternal subject into view, and in so doing successfully challenge conventional notions of what a subject is and can be.

Keywords:

• maternal subject
• women’s filmmaking
• feminist documentary
• memory
• motherhood
• subjectivity

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The term is taken from B. Ruby Rich’s introduction to the 2007 DVD of the film.

2 It is a criticism later echoed by Citron herself. ‘Daughter Rite is a story told exclusively from the daughter’s point of view’, she writes. ‘It is only the daughters who speak; everything we learn about the mother is filtered through their voices. At the time I made the film, I was incapable of imagining the mother’s story; I was still too angry at mine’ (1999: 59).

3 Although Williams and Rich claim (1981: 20) that it is the mother’s voice that closes the film, the words that she speaks, ‘Why do you have to say all this?’, function, paradoxically, to refuse speech. They are, moreover, doubly mediated: both a product of the daughter’s fantasy (‘I imagine my mother seeing this [and asking]’) and a quotation, from Deena Metzger’s ‘The Book of Hags’ (1976).

4 Both mothers (Diane Polley and Andrea Dunbar) die when their daughters are 11; both daughters are 29 when the film is made.

5 In this she does, however, fit within another ‘character-type’ of British social realism identified by Lovell: that of the feckless, irresponsible, usually unmarried mother, in whose disordered household ‘there is no … comfort, … the fire is unlit, the inhabitants come and go, and quarrel noisily’ (1990: 361).

6 We see the image, for example, when Michael reflects that ‘Like many marriages, perhaps most, this one had gone stale’, and again towards the end of the film when Sarah’s sister suggests: ‘I kind of think [Michael] was the one she really was in love with, and he just wasn’t an option’.

7 They all, says Joanne, ‘hightailed it’ from their marriages after hearing Diane’s story.

8 The phrase is that of Mary Jacobus, from an essay in which she asks how, as feminists, we can answer Virginia Woolf’s call to ‘think back through our mothers’. See Jacobus (1988: 103-5). For discussion of it in relation to 1970s feminist cinema see Thornham (2012: 189).

9 Though Johnson’s interesting reading of the film argues that this dislocation allows the film both to identify the bodies of women with place, suggesting that women, and particularly the deprived women of Bradford, are themselves ‘sites of social exclusion’ (2016: 285) and to give a voice, and hence subjectivity, to these women.

10 Anna Coatman comments on this: ‘It’s notable that in documentaries, news reports and photographs from the time, Dunbar always seems to be framed by a scuffed brick wall, or a dingy stairwell. Or else she’s drinking in a pub, or pushing a pram. This is not how other playwrights, artists or intellectuals tend to be shown’ (2018).