The Mother Complex
Copyright © 1998 by Timeless Hemingway
Apart from the discovery of the three psychic zones of the mind, the id, ego and
superego, the most famous Freudian theory is the Oedipus complex. Freud explains the
origins of the complex in his book, The Ego and the Id:
… the boy deals with his father by identifying himself with him. For a time these two
relationships [the child's devotion to his mother and identification with his father] proceed
side by side, until the boy's sexual wishes in regard to his mother become more intense
and his father is perceived as an obstacle to them; from this the Oedipus complex
originates.1
Psychologists are particularly interested in how a boy's hatred for his mother affects his
gender identification. In The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the
Sociology of Gender, Nancy Chodorow describes a general truth of both Oedipal and
gender identification: "A boy, in order to feel himself adequately masculine, must
distinguish and differentiate himself from others in a way that a girl need not—must
categorize himself as someone apart. Moreover, he defines masculinity negatively as
that which is not feminine and/or connected to women, rather than positively."3
Chodorow also finds that boys and girls experience gender identification differently
based on their "personal relationship with their object of identification" (175). Citing the
research of Mitscherlich, Slater, Winch, and Lynn,4 she states, "boys develop a
positional identification with aspects of the masculine role. For them, the tie between
affective processes and role learning is broken" (175). A girl, on the other hand, "can
develop a personal identification with her mother, because she has a real relationship
with her that grows out of their early primary tie. She learns what it is to be womanlike in
the context of this personal identification with her mother" (175).
Like many boys in the embryonic stage of their Oedipal crisis (which Freud situated
around age five), Ernest Hemingway struggled through the process of gender
identification. His difficulties appear to have been perpetuated by the peculiar genderoriented behavior of his parents. Kenneth Lynn has described Dr. Clarence Edmonds
Hemingway as a "marvelous marksmen with both shotgun and rifle, an accomplished
fisherman, a master of every technique for surviving in a wilderness."5 Dr. Hemingway's
separation from emasculating feminine forces and his passionate pursuit of the frontier
life characterized him as a "muscular Christian," a vision of masculinity widely upheld by
a nineteenth-century society and strongly influenced by literature of the day, notably
Tom Hughes's Tom Brown's School Days at Rugby.
Clarence tried to instill similar "muscular Christian" values in his son Ernest. He
instructed the boy in the precise arts of fishing and shooting and brought him along on
hunting expeditions in the Michigan woods. Here, Clarence educated the young and
naturally inquisitive Ernest on "such recognized culinary delights as venison, quail,
partridge, dove, duck, turtle meat, frogs' legs, and various kinds of fish" (Lynn 35) and
also trained him to detect "which berries and grasses were edible and which were not"
(Lynn 35). Hemingway's recollections of the boyhood adventures he shared with his
father, "Up in Michigan," are vividly recreated in his literature through the fictional guise
of Nick Adams.
As Ernest Hemingway matured both intellectually and socially, he was forced to accept
another side of his father's "muscular Christianity," one no longer exemplifying masculine
individualism, but rather devoted service as both a husband and father:
When Ed was courting the rather reluctant Grace, he promised that she would never
have to do housework and kept his word. He always prepared the children's breakfast
and served Grace in bed. He bought the groceries, did most of the cooking, took care of
the laundry and managed the servants despite his medical responsibilities.6
Whether a remnant of his strict matriarchal upbringing or simply a lack of cojones7
Clarence Hemingway allowed himself to be dominated by his wife. Though they seem to
have shared the responsibility for raising their children, Grace was more the
disciplinarian8 and almost exploitative of her husband's leniency, rarely seeking his
approval in her childrearing experiments. Not that Clarence would have offered much
resistance. He was especially nonchalant about her dressing their first-born son in girls'
clothing.9 Volcanoes of critical speculation have erupted among scholars regarding this
incident, leading many to believe that Grace Hemingway was guilty of feminizing her
son.10
In Hemingway's Quarrel with Androgyny, Mark Spilka provides the most persuasive
evidence to refute the popular theory of Hemingway's feminization. Spilka believes
Hemingway was engendered by a mother who had the most androgynous of intentions:
Her twinship experiments, in which she tried to match Ernest with his sister Marcelline,
his elder by a year, have long been misunderstood as attempts to feminize or sissify her
son after the popular notion of Fauntleroy. But androgynous dollhood comes closer to
her apparent intention. Ernest and Marcelline were her twin Dutch dollies, boy and girl,
and the Dutch length of their hair and their matching dresses were androgynous
features.11
Spilka also cites Halifax of Dinah Craik's John Halifax, Gentleman as another influential
literary character. His moralistic superiority, family-inclined nature and Christian
devoutness personified additional androgynous features Grace Hemingway believed to
be specifically tailored for her son.
While popular literature of the time period played a substantial role in influencing Grace
Hemingway's androgynous childrearing practices, her unusual conceptions of
motherhood had familial origins as well. Caroline Hall had taught her daughter to be the
creator of her own success and took every opportunity to encourage the girl's ambitious
pursuits, reminding her that "there is no use any woman getting into the kitchen if she
can help it."12 Due to her family's considerable affluence and lifelong dependence on
hired help, Grace never had to acquaint herself with a kitchen or burdensome domestic
chores.
Shortly after her mother's death in 1895, Grace traveled to New York to begin her
training as an opera singer. About this time, she'd begun to reevaluate her relationship
with Clarence Hemingway, the gracious and handsome doctor who assisted Mrs. Hall in
the months prior to her death. It now seemed inevitable that Grace decide between her
aspirations to be an opera singer or mother. She chose the latter and married Dr.
Hemingway in 1896. As folklore goes, Grace declined an invitation to sing at a gala
honoring Queen Victoria, for the engagement conflicted with the date of her marriage. 13
Though Grace Hemingway ultimately chose to marry and raise a family, her dreams of
professional acclaim lingered. Having strongly identified with her father as a young girl,
admiring his success as a businessman and desiring a similar level of success for
herself, Grace's "personal identification with her mother," to use Chodorow's phrase,
never thoroughly developed. By continually emphasizing self-sufficience and abstinence
from domestic duties, Caroline Hall merely complemented the attributes of her husband.
Whether she was as persistent in familiarizing her daughter with nineteenth-century
feminine ideals remains questionable.14
In raising her son Ernest androgynously, Grace Hemingway may have been
compensating for the lack of symmetry in the gender roles of her own parents. The
abnormal identification she enjoyed with her father could have evolved into the more
abnormal wish-fulfillment she played out through her son. The insightful Spilka notes:
What Grace wanted for her son Ernest, then, was very much what she wanted for
herself; and when she twinned him with his older sister, Marcelline, and began
experimenting with their hairstyles, first Dutch-length in infancy, then close-cut when
Ernest began school and received his first boy's haircut, she was telling her firstborn son
something about the gender she favored in creating such twinships. (332)
Hemingway would flirt with similar wish-fulfillments later in his own life. Rather than
displacing his fantasies upon a vulnerable child, he skillfully implanted them deep within
the psyches of his fictional characters.
As a result of being raised by essentially dually gendered parents, Ernest Hemingway
was never able to attach himself to a singular model of femininity or masculinity. In this
respect, his sense of gender confusion reflected the gender confusion of his parents.
When she was not exercising authoritative control over her husband, Grace Hemingway
was a loving mother who reminded her son (after he had written a letter home joking
about getting married), "It was only yesterday that you were Mother's little yellow headed
laddie, and used to hug me and call me 'Silkey Sockey.' "15 When he was not teaching
his son the manly leisures of hunting and shooting, molding him "as the frontier scout he
had always wanted to be himself,"16 Clarence Hemingway subsided into his submissive
role as husband.
Considering the gender reversals of his parents, one might theorize that Ernest
Hemingway's Oedipal crisis was also reversed. As he observes his mother's domination
of his father, he begins to question his father's masculinity. He believes that his mother
has castrated his father, thus symbolizing her as the authority figure. For this reason and
not the reason of genital disparities, as Freud attests, Hemingway develops feelings of
hatred towards his mother, which are intensified by the fact that she never assigned him
a specific gender because of the androgynous approach she'd taken in constructing his
identity.
The distinction between sex and gender is crucial and must be clarified in order to better
understand Hemingway's "mother complex." I use these terms narrowly: sex refers to
that which is physically defined through our genes and sexual organs; gender refers to
that which is socially defined through our parents and other agents of society. As a child,
Hemingway is capable of discerning the sexual differences between himself and his
mother. His sense of gender, however, might have been confused. Having never been
socially defined by his parents, never nurtured exclusively as a masculine or feminine
entity, his gendered identity remains unconceptualized. A gender-confused boy grows
into a gender-confused man, who devotes the remainder of his life to the pursuit of his
own sense of self, an "idealized self," one defined neither by his parents nor by society.
Freud believed that "most of our actions are motivated by psychological forces over
which we have very limited control. He demonstrated that, like the iceberg, the human
mind is structured so that its great weight and density lie beneath the surface." 17 The
resemblance of this analogy to Hemingway's famous remarks concerning his style of
writing is obvious. By obsessively controlling his style of writing, Hemingway controls the
psychological forces that dictate his thinking, the thinking of his characters and the
thinking of his readers.