replacement mothers and intergenerational lesbian love in Carol (2015)
Todd Haynes’ maternal melodrama Carol (2015) invites a pre-oedipal reading of the intergenerational romance between a shop girl and divorced older woman. Carol situates lesbian desire in the maternal melodrama, a genre that has historically centered around motherhood, homosocial relationships between women and the hegemonic family unit (Byars 1991, 8; White 1999, 94). The maternal metaphors and mother/ daughter dyads that propel these narratives lend themselves to psychoanalytic readings. Carol is no different, as maternal and prelingual libidinal investments underscore the film’s love story. In a narrative laden with pre-oedipal drives, Carol becomes somewhat of a surrogate mother and “mentor” to Therese, who mirrors her as a replacement daughter and “student” (White 2015, 10-11). Symbols of girlhood are eroticized in scenes of lesbian intimacy that indulge in mother-daughter play. Whereas mirrors are reflections of Jacques Lacan’s mirror stage and the blurring of boundaries between daughter and lover. The possibilities of intergenerational lesbian love carved out in Anne Sexton’s poem Rapunzel move beyond pre-oedipal paradigms. Yet when read against Carol’s ending, whether Therese outgrows the infantile stage or inevitably returns to her pre-oedipal bliss is left ambiguous. Carol therefore offers “a maternal homoerotic fantasy” for spectators that does not shy away from perverse configurations of lesbian desire (Bradbury-Rance 2022, 130).
The surrogate mother figure in Carol has its lineage in the maternal melodrama. A subgenre of the women’s pictures produced by Hollywood between the 1930s-1950s, the maternal melodrama carved out a homosocial space for women in the mass-produced consumer culture (White 1999, 97). These films typically centred around women, domesticity, and the hegemonic family structure (Bradbury-Rance 2022, 135). Scholars have identified “a woman’s search for the mother” as the crux of the maternal melodrama, alongside a mother’s longing for the object of the (lost) child and the pre-oedipal fusional figure (De Laurentis 1994, 136; Kaplan 1992, 70). Carol invokes such conventions in melodramatic form through the character of Carol Aird (Cate Blanchett) and her reminiscence of Bette Davis’ surrogate mother figure in Now Voyager (Irving Rapper, 1945). Although Carol situates its lesbian romance in a closeted past, the central mother-daughter dyads in these maternal melodramas tended to flirt with possibilities of lesbian desire (White 1999, 98). Scholars have since sought to fill in the “untheorizable gaps” of a genre where women could “be something else besides a mother” (Scheman 1988, 89; White 1999, 98). The maternal metaphor would go on to become a staple in post-war lesbian fiction. Most notably in the 1952 lesbian pulp novel that Carol was adapted from, Patricia Highsmith’s The Price of Salt. At the time of the novel’s release, lesbian pathology was believed to have stemmed from a girl’s dysfunctional relationship to either an overbearing or absent mother (James 2018, 297). The maternal melodrama also positioned motherhood in direct opposition to female sexuality, with its heroines torn between romantic and paternal love (White 1999, 100). What emerged was the figure of the sacrificial mother in films such Stella Dallas (King Vidor, 1937) and Mildred Pierce (Michael Curtiz, 1945) where devoted mothers sacrificed relationships with their daughters for either her or their ‘own good’ (Williams 1984, 3). Like its generic predecessors, Carol’s forbidden romance comes at the expense of the mother-daughter relationship it sought to substitute. When Carol refuses to spend Christmas with her husband, Harge invokes a morality clause that equates Carol’s homosexuality with parental negligence (O’Brien 2017, 123). Carol is forced to make the ultimate maternal sacrifice; by refusing to “live against my own grain” she loses custody of her daughter. Carol invokes the maternal melodramas of the classic Hollywood period by staging maternal scenarios that not only revise the female oedipal fantasy but are a covert for lesbianism.
In Carol, Therese becomes the quasi-daughter of her lover to replace the lost object of desire. According to Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory, the mother is the founding object of desire. The child must accept that it has lost the immediacy of the “maternal thing” (mother) and seek out substitute objects of desire (Simmons 2021, 33). Unlike Therese in the novel who is abandoned by her mother and orphaned, the Therese in the film adaptation is given minimal backstory without mention of her family, she is a blank slate. It ought to be noted that in comparison to the original novel, the mother-daughter erotics in Carol are softened. In the film adaption, Rindy and Therese are no longer sinister doubles in competition for Carol’s maternal love, but are, instead, substitutes for one another (James 2018, 267 & 302). That being said, Carol does not shy away from the women’s age-gap and even draws further attention to it through how the characters are costumed and symbolic mise-en-scene. As Patricia White has observed, there is a distinctly childlike quality to Therese’s tartan pinafores, Tam o’ Shanter hats and hooded coats (2015, 14). When Therese first visits Carol’s house and serves tea, she is scripted to the role of daughter. Therese’s French bob haircut down to the navy-blue shade of tartan pinafores she wears mirrors the haircut and cardigan worn by Rindy. However, Therese’s infantilization is not limited to her costuming, and is again established when the two first meet at the department store, where instead of Carol purchasing a doll, she substitutes it for Therese. From the get-go, the women’s flirtation is centred around Carol’s daughter, in which Carol even asks Therese “what toy did you want at this age?”. Whilst working in the department store Therese is seen surrounded by dolls and shielded by glass, framing her as a doll in the cabinet. When she and Carol lock eyes, Therese is framed in a mid-shot behind the desk with the dolls and a sign that reads “Mommy’s Baby”. When Carol teaches Therese how to apply makeup and beckons her towards a first kiss, Therese not only becomes a replacement daughter but a doll (Bradbury-Rance 2022, 130). Therefore, symbols of girlhood and maternal bonding are eroticized in Carol, much like the intimate scenes that are framed as mother-daughter play.
The recurring mirror motifs in Carol not only symbolize doubling but Lacan’s mirror stage. Mirrored scenes and reflective surfaces frame Therese as Carol’s romantic substitution for Rindy. When Therese first meets Carol and the department store, she shows her a photograph of her daughter Rindy, a six-year-old girl with a bob haircut and pinafore dress who physically resembles Therese. In a later scene, Carol comes across a photo of Therese (at her daughter’s age) on the wall of Therese’s apartment, where the photographic similarity between her lover and child reminds Carol of her absent daughter. The boundaries between daughter and lover are again, blurred, in two scenes where Therese and Rindy’s face is obscured. The composition of a close-up shot that positions Carol in the right corner of the frame as she picks up her “special girl” and kisses her forehead is replicated in a later scene with Therese. When Carol comforts Therese in bed after they are discovered, her position on the right side of the frame alongside the obstruction of Therese’s face makes her indistinguishable from Rindy as the two embrace. The final parallel that can be drawn between Carol’s daughter and lover is when Carol brushes Rindy’s hair in her bureau mirror whilst she sits on her lap. A scene that is then mirrored on New Year’s Eve when Carol runs her hands through Therese’s hair, who is seated at a mirror before they consummate their love in Waterloo. Mirrors have the dual function of symbolizing Therese’s transition over the course of the narrative. Lacan’s mirror stage represents a child’s transition between the pre-Oedipal and phallic phases. According to Lacan, a child clings to the mother in the world of the imaginary, until they come into their own subjectivity and become aware of the mother’s separateness from itself. However, even in adulthood, the child never forgets the world of the imaginary and continues to unconsciously desire the illusory oneness with the mother (Kaplan 1992, 30; Bihlmeyer 2019, 236). This mirror stage comes to fruition towards the end of the narrative when Therese is at a party alone, smoking in the bathroom with her back turned towards the mirror. Having rejected Carol earlier that night, Therese is on the precipice of a turning point in the narrative. Torn between whether to return to her previous life in the symbolic binary order or to reconcile with Carol and return to the prelingual self-identification stage (Bihlmeyer 2019, 236). This Lacanian reading of the film would suggest that by returning to Carol, Therese is engulfed by the mother. Historically in lesbian fiction, mirrors have also served as a convention to signify the doubling of lovers attracted to sameness. A trope that harks back to the pathologization of lesbianism by Freud who linked homosexuality to narcissism and autoeroticism (Jenzen 2013, 347). In fiction’s lesbian lore, the more childlike partner in a lesbian relationship, wishes to become or impersonate the other (De Laurentis 1994, 117). However, when the women have sex in Carol and Carol sees Therese’s naked body for the first time, she resists narcissistic identification by announcing that she “never looked like that”. Instead, the choreography of the love scene underscores Carol’s maternal authority and dominance in guiding their sexual encounter, not their doubling (Bihlmeyer 2019, 232). Therefore, Carol riffs on mirror tropes that frame lesbian lovers as doubles, displacing it onto the daughter/ lover dyad and Lacan’s mirror stage.
The lesbian relationship in Carol also lends itself to a pre-oedipal reading, one that echoes the configurations of intergenerational lesbian love in Anne Sexton’s poem Repunzal. Sigmund Freud’s pre-Oedipal theory pertains to the first stages of psychosexual development that take place before the development of the Oedipus complex during the phallic stage. The girl represses her love for her mother as her castration initiates the Oedipus complexes transference to the father. According to Freud, if this stage fails, the possibility of an intersubjective relationship between psychologically mature adults is improbable. The mother remains a crucial figure in the adult woman’s life through her determination of the nature and character of her daughters’ relationships (Hirsch 1989, 99). However, feminists like poet Adrienne Rich have gone on to criticize psychoanalysis for its patriarchal premises that refuse to envision relationships between women outside the heteropatriarchy (Williams 1984, 10). Like Rich, Anne Saxton’s 1971 poem Rapunzel looks at lesbianism in relation to the mother/ daughter dyad (FitzGerald 1990, 58).
A woman
Who love a woman
Is forever young.
The mentor
And the student
Feed off each other.
---
They lived happily as you might expect
Proving that mother-me-do
Can be outgrown,
---
In Sexton’s poem, heterosexuality is unable to triumph over the underlying pre-Oedipal drives and instead displaces the heterosexual love/ father figure at the helm of Freud’s psychosexual development model onto the mother (FitzGerald 1990, 64). What follows is the transformation of the infantile state of mutual dependency (“mentor” and “student”) into a more complex relationship between mature adults (FitzGerald 1990, 59). This makes Sexton’s writings on the complex passage towards mature lesbian love reminiscent of the transformation Therese undergoes over the course of Carol’s Bildungsroman narrative.[1] Carol initially assumes the role of mentor and by extension, mother to Therese.[2] The difference in the couple’s age and class are not shone away from in the film, not to mention Carol’s lesbian past (with Abby) and Therese’s naiveté which culminates in a phone call to Carol where she declares “I want to ask you things”. When Carol abandons Therese in Waterloo after they physically consummate their love, she leaves her with a letter that reads “I release you”. It is only when Therese outgrows the libidinal object of the mother that she can undergo maturation, or as, Carol puts “thrive” and “blossom”. At first glance, Therese seemingly returns to the surrogate mother at the end of the film. In a narrative where “everything comes full circle”, the return to the pre-Oedipal is visually conveyed through the brooch that Carol wears on her first restaurant date with Therese. A grapevine that is later doubled, forming a circle on Carol’s tweed blazer in the final dinner scene that replays where the film began. However, after Therese’s metamorphosis, a shift in Carol and Therese’s mentor/ student dynamic can be felt, one that not only equalizes but evolves their relationship into an intersubjective one shared between mature adults. Therefore, whilst Therese acts out the infantile fantasy of the devouring mother in her relationship with Carol, whether she outgrows or inevitably returns to a state of pre-Oedipal bliss (via the surrogate mother) is left ambiguous by the film’s ending (FitzGerald 1990, 55).
In Carol Haynes taps into a perverse facet of lesbian desire; the intergenerational pre-oedipal fantasy of having “something else besides a mother” (White 2015, 14). In typical maternal melodrama fashion, the sacrificial mother evicts her own daughter from the narrative “for Rindy’s sake” only to substitute her absence with an infantile lover. Scenes of lesbian intimacy are underscored with mother-daughter play, where material objects associated with girlhood like dolls, hairbrushes and makeup become eroticized. Whereas mirrors come to reflect the blurring of boundaries and Therese’s navigation of Lacan’s mirror stage in regard to her relationship. The film’s ambiguous ending leaves us to ponder whether Therese can finally embark on a mature lesbian relationship with Carol, having outgrown her pre-oedipal drives, or is the mother-daughter dyad bound to “come full circle”?
Reference list:
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Bihlmeyer, Jaime. 2019. Hollywood’s (m)Other Aperture : Pre-Oedipal Mothers, FEMININITY, and the Movies. Cambridge Scholars Publisher. https://research.ebsco.com/linkprocessor/plink?id=be179e82-7d59-3a49-97e6-3853da379fbe.
Bradbury-Rance, Clara. 2022. Lesbian Cinema after Queer Theory / Clara Bradbury-Rance. Edinburgh University Press. https://research.ebsco.com/linkprocessor/plink?id=4a21dd2f-f7df-37a5-9e7d-338efaf92ed3.
Byars, Jackie. 1991. All That Hollywood Allows: Re-Reading Gender in 1950s Melodrama / Jackie Byars. University of North Carolina Press. https://research.ebsco.com/linkprocessor/plink?id=e5d36dda-9bba-3aa9-bacd-5a376de8d742.
Daigle, Allain. 2017. “Of Love and Longing: Queer Nostalgia in Carol.” Queer Studies in Media & Popular Culture 2 (2): 199–211. Doi:10.1386/qsmpc.2.2.199_1.
De Lauretis, Teresa. 1994. The Practice of Love : Lesbian Sexuality and Perverse Desire / Teresa de Lauretis. Indiana University Press. https://research.ebsco.com/linkprocessor/plink?id=563a0e28-a0f3-31d9-a60f-26081c100c9a.
FitzGerald, M. 1990. “Using Sexton to Read Freud: The Pre-Oedipal Phase and the Etiology of Lesbianism in Sexton’s ‘Rapunzel.’” Journal of Homosexuality 19 (4): 55–65. doi:10.1300/J082v19n04_04.
Freud, Sigmund. 1962. The Ego and the Id / Sigmund Freud ; Translated by Joan Riviere. Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis. https://research.ebsco.com/linkprocessor/plink?id=fa75ce1d-89be-3aff-a94b-ea28b3ffb791.
Hirsch, Marianne. 1989. The Mother/Daughter Plot: Narrative, Psychoanalysis, Feminism / Marianne Hirsch. Indiana University Press. https://research.ebsco.com/linkprocessor/plink?id=e6c3a867-a48d-3ded-9d27-116de30e756c.
James, Jenny M. 2018. “Maternal Failures, Queer Futures: Reading The Price of Salt (1952) and Carol (2015) against Their Grain.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 24 (2–3): 291–314. doi:10.1215/10642684-4324825.
Kaplan, E. Ann. 1992. Motherhood and Representation : The Mother in Popular Culture and Melodrama / E. Ann Kaplan. Routledge. https://research.ebsco.com/linkprocessor/plink?id=aa67764c-f76a-38f3-9b90-7e8bce9ba201.
Lacan, Jacques. 2020. Écrits : A Selection / Jacques Lacan. Routledge. https://research.ebsco.com/linkprocessor/plink?id=87be13d0-1a87-3258-a2d8-0cf3dd6fbbf3.
O’Brien, Gabrielle. 2017. “Looking for a Way out: Reimagining the Gaze in ‘Carol.’” Screen Education, no. 86 (September): 122. https://research.ebsco.com/linkprocessor/plink?id=e6ddb569-3c43-3ed7-b635-8c8e9f13de69.
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Filmography:
Carol. 2015. Directed by Todd Haynes. London, United Kingdom: Number 9 Films. DVD.
Mildred Pierce. 1945. Directed by Michael Curtiz. Los Angeles, California: Warner Bros. DVD.
Now, Voyager. 1942. Directed by Irving Rapper. Los Angeles, California: Warner Bros. DVD.
Stella Dallas. 1937. Directed by King Vidor. United States: Samuel Goldwyn Productions. DVD.
[1] Bildungsroman or the “novel of formation” is a literary genre that follows the psychological, spiritual and moral enlightenment of a protagonist. According to Sarah Graham’s book on the history of the genre, The Price of Salt “does carefully establish itself with the form of the Bildungsroman” (2019, 251) as the narrative centres around Therese coming to terms with her desires which are treated as pre-existing condition, rather than a “becoming in the face of social forces” (2019, 251).
[2] Price of Salt author Patricia Highsmith’s journals reveal an acute awareness of her incestuous attachment to her own mother and its consequences for her sexuality.