(Even Dora’s mother must be cured of home sometimes.)
So Dora leaves for a spa, but she travels there not with her mother, but her father. Dora’s mother already isn’t there. Throughout A Fragment, she is away (which is, in her case, at home). She is like Cinderella’s mother, like Snow White’s mother, like Bambi’s mother, like the mother of The Little Mermaid. These mothers are not needed in those stories, or it seems that their absence is needed. As “Dora” is not a story but a (case) history, Dora’s mother cannot, like them, be killed for the sake of the plot. But she is near absent from Freud’s analysis.
FREUD
The story of a mother’s love usually becomes a model for the daughter.
But Freud does not tell us the story of Dora’s mother’s love.
FREUD
I never met her mother.
Like Dora, like her father, and her mother, I sought the cure away from home, where the cause resided.
I do not know the story of my mother’s love. Perhaps I do not want to know it.
III
In 1909, Katherine Mansfield, a writer from New Zealand, arrived at a German hotel that adjoined a spa. Like its other inhabitants, she was there for a cure. From this visit came her first book of stories, In A German Pension.
The German Pension in the book is a “family hotel,” but it does not contain entire families. Every family is missing a member (usually the male member who, somehow, seldom needed to be cured). A family hotel can also refer to the family that runs it, not the family that stays there, the family that will provide a family atmosphere, which is so very unlike your own family, and who will adopt you, temporarily, into theirs, without any of your family’s inconveniences. Their son tends the bar; their daughter waits tables. The whole family is there to serve you.
To show the family away from home is to show it at its most powerful. That it exists outside its setting without splitting, crumbling, is to show something almost invincible. To become invincible it must harden. You see them sometimes, in hotel restaurants: parents and children with adjoining rooms; across the tables, faces that, over the years, have practiced love upon one another. A small family hotel was always the sort I could never afford. In a hotel the economics of family are laid bare. Only the rich stay in hotels as families, can afford to take members who cannot pay for themselves. Being rich enough to stay with each other, they find they have nowhere else to go.
I did not review family hotels.
It is a luxury not to think about family.
In the German Pension, all they can talk about is home.
“Germany,” the traveler boomed, “is the home of the family.”
“What is your husband’s favourite meat?” asked the widow. Katherine Mansfield’s narrator (avatar? — she is unnamed: let’s call her KM) cannot say. The widow says “You would not have kept house, as his wife, for a week without knowing that fact.”
Marriage is not what it contains, but its structure. It is not the nature of promises given; it is its bond. The contents of its bond are not set. They are no more than a set of family resemblances.
Does anything resemble a family?
Herr Rat likes to stay in family hotels without families.
HERR RAT
I have had all I wanted from women, without marriage.
Katherine Mansfield was married.
Herr K was married.
Frau K was married.
Dora’s dad was married.
None of them, it seems, to what they desired.
Desire was what took place outside marriage.
On the other hand:
Freud was married.
Dora was not married.
KM was not married.
Mae West was married, but she didn’t want anyone to know. She kept her marriage a secret. It wouldn’t do to tell what she desired. She and he made a home together, she said, “only for several weeks.”1
MAE WEST
Marriage is a great institution, but I’m not ready for an institution.2
No one in A Fragment questions that desire is not desirable. I am hardly surprised. A hotel is an institution in which there is nothing I could not be trained to desire.
IV
At the German Pension, KM’s enemies are often married—“successful businessmen,” and their wives, heavy as suitcases. Open them up and, inside, you’d find: offal, bread soup, sauerkraut, boys’ boots, cherry cake with cream, whalebone stays, hemorrhoids, and a little unattended dusty regret. Inside, the men, and the women are just the same. But “marriage certainly changed a woman more than it did a man,” says one of them, who keeps a photograph of his wife, single: “She doesn’t look like my wife — like the mother of my son.”
KM
I consider child-bearing the most ignominious of professions.
“Now I have had nine children and they are all alive, thank God,” says the fat German Pension guest.
In the German Pension, marriage ends in childbed — something to be frightened of for physical and mental reasons. Each child brings a portion of suffering, even unproblematic children, and this suffering must be distributed, fairly or unfairly (always, in Mansfield’s stories, unfairly). Pregnant women and mothers come to the spa by the German Pension. Their condition is a peculiar kind of illness.
FREUD
Once the child has become a woman and, in contradiction of the demands of her childhood, has married an inattentive man who suppresses her will, unstintingly exploits her work and expends neither affection nor money upon her, illness becomes the only weapon with which she can assert herself in life. It gives her the rest she craves. It forces the man to make sacrifices of money and care that he wouldn’t have made to the healthy woman.
The cure in the German Pension does not seem to work. Many of the guests return every year, leaving their marriages behind. What is it they want to be cured from?
V
Katherine Mansfield, like KM, her avatar, was pregnant by a man who was not her husband (her marriage was one of hasty convenience). Being with child, but not part of a family, her mother sent her to a spa hotel.
“With” child. Such a good, ambiguous phrase: with. Not dwelling, only staying a while. But no one gives birth in hotels. Or do they?
MOM
We walked in and I am telling you I was like, I am having this baby here. It was gorgeous.3
“Every woman deserves a birth like this,” said the journalist, a birth away from home, where there is no home work. “All of our crap isn’t there. There is no pile of bills on the desk. The dirty dishes aren’t in the sink. The laundry basket isn’t right there filled with towels we need to put away.” In the hotel where the mom gave birth, there are “Superior Accommodations,” there are “Deluxe Accommodations,” and there are “Club Accommodations.” Then it’s suite. It’s impossible to start any lower. The decor of the hotel is “both nostalgic and modern. A 42-inch HDTV, DVD player, MP3 port and complimentary Wi-Fi, fulfil your entertainment needs.” The velvet couch is “expertly placed,” and the room is “grounded only by chocolate carpeting.” In its largest suite, “One and a half baths ensures convenience while entertaining.” The Club Level is “100 % smoke free.”
FREUD
There’s no fire without smoke.
(Or did I get that wrong?)
Katherine Mansfield was pregnant in her German Pension, until she slipped while miscarrying a heavy suitcase, which she was trying to put on top of a wardrobe.
(I am not pregnant.)