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 6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 6 Summary: “Mirror”
While waiting to talk to Helen about Fun Home, Alison reads from Miller’s The Drama of the Gifted Child about how the first child becomes a Cathected Object, which the mother controls. That night, Alison dreams of Helen rehearsing for a play in front of a large mirror in their old home, but she is allergic to her corset’s decorations. As Alison wakes up, she remembers three words: “drive,” “thwart,” and “laden” (207).
During a book tour, a fan shows Alison a cast photo of Helen from The Miser, leading to a story about how she nearly faints on stage due to her corset. That same season, Helen plays Madame Armfeldt in A Little Night Music, a play where a daughter admires her mother’s acting. Alison is in awe of her mother’s performance, particularly her solo of “Liaisons”, but is oblivious to the similarities in the play’s mother-daughter relationship.
Helen obsesses over her makeup and tells a young Alison she looks pale. Alison sneaks her blush away and comments on how it makes her look like “a real child” (214). She also begins retouching school photographs with a crayon and later on, receives a black and white photograph of her doing karate with pink retouching ink on her cheeks.
Freud writes that narcissism results from a person affixing themselves to their own ego rather than someone else, which results in a Cathexis, or libidinal investment, on their perception of a person rather than the actual person. According to Freud, women and homosexual men tend to have a narcissistic type of love. Alison notes that Helen names her after a Middle English poem about an obsessive love. A year into their sessions, Jocelyn rejects the negative portrayal Alison has of herself as a child and calls her “adorable” (217).
According to Winnicott, maternal mirroring evolves as a person pursues romance, but Alison fears commitment. Her time with Eloise begins as an open relationship, and she waits a year before saying “I love you.” After Eloise returns from Nicaragua, they fall into a pattern: Alison cheats on Eloise and confesses out of guilt. Eloise also cheats on her and criticizes Alison’s unstable lifestyle. They make up, have sex, and cheat again.
Meanwhile, Alison quits her job in order to focus on being a cartoonist. She asks her mother for a loan of $1,500 to help cover a couple months. Helen ends up giving Alison a total of $5,200 over a period of nine months. During a call, Alison forces Helen to listen about her cartooning. Helen tries to change the subject before complaining that hearing about Alison’s cartoons makes her uncomfortable. When Helen asks why she doesn’t understand her, Alison hangs up the phone and cries over her dependence on someone who cannot offer what she wants. Alison doesn’t regret this decision. She links this to a story of her as a baby climbing up a mirrored hall stand on the staircase. When the stand crashes, Helen thinks the baby is dead and hides in the bathroom. After discovering that Alison is fine, Bruce yells at Helen.
Alison credits her creative ability to her mother’s bold acting decisions, even if it doesn’t earn her approval. Years later, Alison and Amy sneak into a performance of The Royal Family, where Helen plays the matriarch. Helen outshines the other actors and is glad to see Alison afterwards.
Alison and Helen agree to see a revival of A Little Night Music in New York City. However, Helen initially suggests bringing Bob along, and Alison complains that they always need excuses to spend time together. The day itself is cordial, and Alison cries when Madame Armfeldt dies at the end of the play. She notes that watching a play about acting with her mother is the closest she’s ever felt to Helen. She remembers that the foyer in her family home includes opposing mirrors that create infinite reflections, implying that she is both victim and cause of her stagnation.
Chapter 6 Analysis
During the dress dream, Helen recites her lines to the mirror rather than to Alison, echoing the concept of Cathecting, where the child acts as an object for their mother’s narcissism. Upon hearing the three words as she awakes, Alison tosses “laden” aside as a joke but wonders “whose drive had been thwarted? And by whom” (208)? By the chapter’s end, she finds an answer: She is both the culprit and victim due to her self-sabotaging nature, symbolized by the infinite reflections of the two mirrors.
According to Winnicott’s “Mirror-role of Mother and Family in Child Development,” the mother’s face represents the first mirror that a child has. The paper includes a case study about a woman who could not function without makeup—a habit that Helen shares. Winnicott theorizes that this is the result of mothers instilling a negative perception in their daughters in a repeating process. When discussing her staircase accident, Bechdel mentions Jacques Lacan’s “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of ‘I,’” stating that mirrors help children identify that they are separate from the world. While Lacan sees the reflection as an illusionary ideal, Winnicott considers it an aid to separate the child’s authentic self from the mother. However, the baby will withdraw their needs if the mother’s needs are evident, like when Bruce yells at Helen.
Chapter 6 also focuses on Helen’s post-marriage acting. In A Little Night Music, Fredricka lives with her grandmother, Madame Armfeldt, while the mother, Desiree, pursues a foundering acting career. Bechdel includes lyrics to two songs, “The Glamorous Life” and “Liaisons,” that have parallels to the Bechdels. In the ironic “The Glamorous Life,” Fredricka admires her absent mother just as teenage Alison gushes over her mom’s performance despite her emotional absence at home. (Sondheim, Stephen. Lyric to “The Glamorous Life.” Genius. https://genius.com/Stephen-sondheim-the-glamorous-life-lyrics. Accessed 7/9/2020).
“Liaisons” is Madame Armfeldt’s solo, where she reminisces over her golden age of courtesan relationships and laments the new generation of lovers. Bechdel depicts Helen struggling to learn the lyrics at the piano, and the author acknowledges that as a teenager she couldn’t recognize the song’s “insights into mortality and desire” (212). The song ends with the madame singing that she named the daughter Desiree because she wanted to put all her desire into her, just as Helen names Alison after a Middle English love poem. (Sondheim, Stephen. Lyrics to “Liaisons.” Genius. https://genius.com/Stephen-sondheim-liaisons-lyrics. Accessed 7/9/2020).
Helen’s time at the mirror suggests that she must prepare for her daily life as she does for her acting roles. Bechdel refers to Freud on this discussion, but considers his views on women and homosexual men “odd contortions” (215). Freud theorizes that people have a fixed amount of libido that they can invest into their parents and other relationships. Bechdel juxtaposes this insight with Jocelyn telling her that she’s adorable, demonstrating how Alison is cathecting to her therapist to the detriment of Eloise.
The revelations about Eloise put their relationship in a new context. Up until this point, it is only known that Eloise cheats on Alison. In reality, the combination of physical distance and short periods of passion is a key feature of the relationship, and Alison is even unclear what “I love you” means (221). The hole in their relationship is not only about the affair, but also about Alison’s inability to commit.
Alison hanging up the phone on Helen serves as the climax to Are You My Mother? After spending much of her life seeking her mother’s approval, Alison realizes that she can neither grow as an artist nor become her own person if she conforms herself to her mother’s expectations. Hanging up is an act of anger and independence, but she also recognizes that her mother is a victim of her own lifelong struggles.
At the same time, Bechdel questions the idea that this is a climax by depicting herself taking the reference photo for the scene. She isn’t an actor, but all authors present a version of themselves to the reader, and the non-linear narrative allows Bechdel to rearrange events to her needs. Because of this, the mother in the mirror dream also represents Alison’s writer personality, as Amy represents her dreaming self in Chapter 2. The decision to follow this with the mostly successful Broadway trip demonstrates how the relationship improves afterwards: She connects with her mother even if through a play about actors.
