4 - Motherhood, Masochism, and Subjectivity in Ma: Ein Porträt

Summary

… literature has not provided us with enough stories written from the mother's point of view.

— Shirley Nelson Garner

ANDREAS-SALOMÉ thought very highly of motherhood as a vocation in life and pointed to her own childlessness as one of her only regrets. A recurring theme in her works, motherhood generally constitutes a positive way of being in the world, and motherly feelings toward the Other translate into a laudably intense empathy with that Other. Motherhood takes on ethical dimensions as a model for interpersonal relations, because it binds the self to the Other through love. In Das Haus (1904) motherliness dominates Anneliese's relationship to her husband from the last days of her first pregnancy: “Da, in einer linden Sommernacht, geschah es … wo ihr plötzlich, in einem inneren Wunder, dies Heiligste aufging: er, der neben dir ruht, ist dein Herr und doch nun auch dein Kind, — du, sein Weib, bist ihm nun doch auch Mutter” (211; And then one soft summer night, it happened … suddenly, in what felt like an inner miracle, the holiest of realizations occurred to her: the man sleeping beside you is your master and yet also your child — you, his wife, are now also a mother to him). This combination of caring and self-subordinating sentiment represents Anneliese's first genuine realization of her femininity. A boyish, independent girl devoted to playing her piano before marriage, Anneliese loses sight of everything but her duties as a wife and a mother in this night.