Consuming love: Edna O'Brien's "A Rose in the Heart of New York."

Studies in Short Fiction, Summer, 1996 by Frances M. Malpezzi

Nearly 20 years ago, Adrienne Rich in Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution lamented the paucity of material exploring the mother-daughter relationship:

This cathexis between mother and daughter--essential, distorted,

misused--is the great unwritten story. Probably there is nothing in

human nature more resonant with charges than the flow of energy between

two biologically alike bodies, one of which has lain in amniotic bliss

inside the other, one of which has labored to give birth to the other.

The materials arc here for the deepest mutuality and the most painful

estrangement. (225-26)

Even the most cursory survey of the subject suggests the way in which interest in the mother-daughter relationship has accelerated since Rich's pronouncement. Five years after the publication of Rich's Of Woman Born, Marianne Hirsch, in a review essay, noted:

Since Rich demonstrated the absence of the mother-daughter relationship

from theology, art, sociology, and psychoanalysis, and its centrality

in women's lives, many voices have come to fill this gap, to create

speech and meaning where there has been silence and absence. In fact,

five years since the publication of Rich's book have seen a

proliferation of writings that have both documented the relationship

from its most personal resonances to its most abstract implications and

uncovered a variety of precedents for their inquiry. (201)

Clearly, the story is no longer an unwritten one; rather, it has become the focus of analytical works in a variety of disciplines. Fictional renderings of the relationship also prevail. One that vividly encapsulates both the deep mutuality and painful estrangement Rich saw as the basic materials of the story is Edna O'Brien's "A Rose in the Heart of New York," a short story relatively contemporary with Rich's Of Woman Born. First published in the New Yorker in May 1978 and then included in the 1979 collection A Rose in in the Heart and Other Stories (an American version of Mrs. Reinhard and Other Stories, 1978) and the 1984 A Fanatic Heart: Selected Stories of Edna O'Brien, O'Brien's story begins with the daughter's birth and takes us through the process of bonding, separation, a failed attempt at reconciliation, and ultimately the mother's death and its emotional ramifications for the daughter. O'Brien leaves her characters nameless, emphasizing their roles as mother, as daughter, rather than creating unique individuals. Moreover, she handles the narrative time in such a way that she highlights the major stages in the life cycle of a woman. In this distillation of a mother-daughter relationship, food is a major motif Physical hunger--either sated, denied, or unsatisfied--manifests the emotional and psychological needs of both women.

The story begins in Ireland on a cold December night as the mother, attended by a midwife, experiences labor pains. The mother bemoans not only her immediate pain, which she describes as "a knife, a dagger, a hell on earth" (376) but her general lot as woman. She has given birth on three previous occasions; only one child has survived. In the cold room she recollects the sexual experiences that have culminated in these events. Her thoughts give us an early glimpse of her relationship to her husband as she recalls the way "she had been prized apart, again and again, with not a word to her, not a little endearment, only rammed through and told to open up" (376). The early section of the story is appropriately dominated by the smell of apples beginning to rot, decay which sharply contrasts with the occasion of new life about to enter the world but which well represents the soured marital relationship as well as the death to which the woman has twice given birth: "Her womb was sick unto death" (376). While the fruit suggests the woman's fecundity, its rotting odor reminds us of a fallen world in which life and death are closely allied, in which woman was condemned to feel pain in the creation of new life, and in which even the most intimate relationships are mutable, tainted, and replete with failed communication. As a reminder of mortality, the rotting apples foreshadow the short story's elaboration of the severed mother-daughter relationship and the mother's death.

The mother's first reaction to the child, the "mewing pierce of screwed-up, inert, dark-purple misery" (378), is negative and antagonistic. She is not proud of the child, has no choice of a name as she looks at the "ugliest face that had ever seen the light of day" (379). Feeling her own life a "vast disappointment" (379), the mother at this point regards the child as reminder of her unpleasant sexual experiences and the painful birthing process.

Change, however, soon transpires as the mother comes to "idolize" the docile child (379). Notably, food is the bonding agent that produces their mutual attachment:

The food was what united them, eating off the same plate, using the

same spoon, watching one another's chews, feeling the food as it went