49 pages • 1 hour read
Alison BechdelAre You My Mother?: A Comic Drama
Nonfiction | Graphic Novel/Book | Adult | Published in 2012A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapter 2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 2 Summary: “Transitional Objects”
While writing Fun Home, Alison reads Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams and dreams of her girlfriend at the time, Amy, asleep on a lawn and wrapped underneath a blanket. She tries to warn Amy about a spider on her blanket. The blanket turns into a quilt with a perfect spiderweb on top. As Amy begins to speak, Alison interrupts her by stating that irrational behavior proves that humans are rational beings.
Alison’s interest in Freud arises from a session with Carol about a Catholic mass she visits with Amy on a lark only to experience an anxiety attack and leave while avoiding a sick woman. A row of costumed children in the pew in front of her remind Alison of a newspaper clipping of her childhood Christmas pageant. Alison remarks to Carol about feeling different from the other kids. After the session, she reads Freud’s Psychopathy of Everyday Life, highlighting an example where Freud accidentally breaks an inkwell cover shortly after his sister criticizes it. Later, she walks into a plank of wood that is secured to the roof of her car. The injury between her eyes reminds her of her early self-editing habits. She would cross out “I” and people’s names in her diary to “ward off evil” (49), which leads to her mother taking over writing duties. Freud attributes this behavior to suppressed cruelty.
Alison enters therapy due to a sudden lack of interest in life. In their first session, Alison denies Jocelyn’s suggestion that she is angry at her father for committing suicide. She develops a strong attachment to Jocelyn, wanting the therapist to be her mother and visiting her house during late-night dog walks. Alison also buys Alice Miller’s The Drama of the Gifted Child, which covers how emotionally responsive children assume the role of mother to narcissistic parents. Her new fixations foreshadow the end of Alison’s romance with Eloise, a brash activist and mechanic.
Miller’s book also introduces Alison to Winnicott, who she initially assumes is a woman based on the maternal and nurturing aspects of his ideas. Winnicott’s primary contribution to psychoanalysis is 1951’s “Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena.” Initially, children believe that they control everything around them, and the transitional object breaks this mindset. For Alison, this is her childhood teddy bear, Mr. Beezum.
“Beezum” is similar to “bosom,” and Alison recalls stories of her mother struggling to breastfeed her, an experience she shares with Winnicott. Alison warns that he can have reductive conclusions about infant memories, yet this can be the reason for his discoveries. Another one of Winnicott’s ideas is the Good-Enough Mother—an imperfect parent who still adapts to the baby’s needs. In turn, the baby learns to account for any adaptation failure.
Alison also tells Jocelyn that she is always the one who calls Helen, and that Helen rarely asks about Alison’s life likely due to her sexuality. She wonders if she is writing Fun Home out of anger towards her mother. A week after the plank accident, a tree branch strikes Alison’s cornea during a winter hike, temporarily blinding it and delaying her work.
Are You My Mother? remains incomplete 16 months after its restart. In a phone call, Helen complains about inaccuracies in books by Joyce Carol Oates books, including the memoir A Widow’s Story. She dismisses Alison’s idea of compiling her own memoirs.
The spider dream leads to a therapeutic breakthrough. During this period, Alison’s income dwindles and she feels her creativity is being annihilated by other gay and lesbian cartoonists and writers. Carol says this is a type of Reaction Formation, which occurs in households where talented people fight each other for superiority. Bechdel compares this concept to the Christian belief in Original Sin. Her sessions with Jocelyn lead to both a dream where her dad abandons her at a picnic and a suggestion that she is angry at her mother.
Chapter 2 Analysis
Chapter 2 focuses on the origins of Bechdel’s therapy sessions and her interest in psychoanalysis. Bechdel interprets the spider’s web dream using Freud’s method of free association. Amy represents Alison herself dreaming. The spider’s web is her unconscious. Her fear of the spider turns into admiration, representing her desire to remove the judgmental aspects of her working process. The web has eleven sections—a spiritually ominous number and the age when Helen first helps write Alison’s diaries.
Alison’s church visit conjures an anxiety attack that leaves her fighting back tears both in the church and in therapy. Carol suggests that this is Compromise Formation: The ego suppresses an unconscious desire to express pain, which leads to a compromise of anxiety.
Bechdel shares not only the writings of psychoanalysis leaders, but also how she discovers them. She mentions how Freud’s theories are out of favor, how she finds unintentionally finds Miller’s work, and how she originally thinks that Winnicott is a woman. Miller’s 1979 book is relatively new at the time Alison buys it.
Transitional objects help the child separate from the mother. Alison’s childhood object is Mr. Beezum, but other people serve that role as she becomes an adult. One is Eloise, whose uses the nickname of “Beezum” and is the opposite in personality to both Alison and her mother. Bechdel implies that her mental health journey worsens her relationship with Eloise, but later chapters reveal a more complicated situation.
Bechdel’s conflict with her mother starts when she fails to gain weight as an infant and Helen stops breastfeeding her. The panels depict Helen’s hostile conditions: living with Bruce’s parents in a funeral home, receiving orders from Bruce to “keep that brat quiet,” and hearing from the doctor that she’s, “just not a good cow” (60-1). Helen tries multiple tricks to improve her milk production, but their effectiveness is either debatable, like maintaining a strict feeding schedule, or negative in hindsight, like drinking alcohol. Bechdel calls this a collective failure as Helen could not nurture her daughter and Alison could not help her succeed.
Alison considers whether she is angry at her parents as Helen dominates conversations but hides personal stories that may lead to an understanding. Bechdel questions her reasons for writing Fun Home and compares her eye injury to Oedipus gouging out his eyes after unknowingly sleeping with his mother.
While Alison denies feeling angry about Bruce’s suicide, the dream where he abandons her at a picnic contradicts this as it ends with Alison rehearsing a furious speech. The final panel is a comforting scene of her mother writing her diary with Mr. Beezum in the background, and Bechdel suggests that being angry at her mother would be “much more elusive” (75). The chapter begins with a simple answer to the difficult question of whether humans are rational and ends with a difficult answer to a simple question of whether Alison hates her parents.
