Reproduced by Sabinet Gateway under licence granted by the Publisher (dated 2009).
The Politics of Mother-hatred in
Elleke Boehmer's Screens Against The Sky
Eva Hunter
On the outside back cover of the Penguin edition of Elleke Boehmer's
Screens Against the Sky, Wendy Woods (whose husband Donald was Steve
Biko's ally) is quoted as saying that this "closely focused account of a stifling
relationship between a mother and daughter in white middle-class South
Africa" will give its readers "a beautifully authentic insight into a society
turned in on itself in the face of black deprivation."} But, the ignorant woman
who is the protagonist's mother has a subjectivity so cramped that she seems
an extreme, rather than a representative, manifestation of what the white
housebound female can become. Does such a character merit the burden of
the novel's animosity? Further, Boehmer's novel, published in 1990,
appeared at a time when South African feminist critics had begun to note
the growth of maternal discourses in writing by black women who were
articulating feminist goals. Is this matrophobic novel not regressive, out of
touch both with developments in South Africa and with recent changes in
attitudes towards mothering and motherhood in Western feminist writing?
I will discuss these two critical problems raised by Screens in the context of
other feminist South African texts, assessing Boehmer's intervention and its
challenges and implications.
Screens is another in a line of novels of education, all markedly autobiographical, all with implications for feminism, written by white Southern
African women. Predecessors to Boehmer'S novel include: Doris Lessing's
Martha Quest (1952) and A Proper Marriage (1965), Nadine Gordimer's
The Lying Days (1953), Jillian Becker's The Virgins (1976), Carolyn
Slaughter's Dreams of the Kalahari (1981), Menan du Plessis's A State of
Fear (1983), Lynn Freed's Home Ground (1986), and E. M. Macphail's
Phoebe and Nio (1987). A way of understanding the journey traced in such
works is as a response, within imperial-colonial culture, to the unsettled
nature of the frontier mentality. Such novels are a kind of border fiction, in
which to explore possibilities lying beyond the moral and social (and,
English in Africa 23 No. I (May 1996)
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106
EVA HUNTER
frequently, geographical) boundaries that orthodox racist policies would
have the writers honour.
A decision all these writers and their protagonists must make, once the
point of acknowledging one's complicity in racist society has been reached,
is whether to embrace the possibility of achieving, and justifying, a sense of
locatedness, or not. Boehmer envisages no possibility of belonging for
Annemarie Rudolph, and perhaps it is not coincidental that the author
herself voluntarily left the subcontinent. But then, so have Lessing, Becker,
Slaughter, and Freed. What distinguishes Screens from the other novels of
education I have mentioned is the fact that never has a female adolescent
been so betrayed as is Annemarie Rudolph by those close to her, especially
by her mother. Macphail's Phoebe and Nio rely on the advice of Phoebe's
tough, practical, and wise (even if racist) Gran. Freed's adolescent mocks
her fallible parents, but she also loves them. In Gordimer's Lying Days,
Helen's parents may be selfish and obtuse, but their faults seem motes when
set alongside Sylvie Rudolph's machinations. Sylvie Rudolph is, in fact, the
most appalling mother produced by a Southern African white woman writer.
Even May Quest's sins pale by comparison: Martha's mother encouraged
her daughter to sleep; Sylvie gives her daughter Valium. Martha was free
to wander through the veld; Sylvie discourages her daughter not only from
going to university, but even from going out at all.
I suggest that the phenomena of maternal betrayal and Annemarie's
failure to find any sort of satisfactory South African identity are linked: so
attenuated is the experience of the white female, and so strong is her dislike
of herself and her role model, her mother, that all that remains for
Annemarie to do is to leave the country, as Boehmer herself has done. The
'position' of white South African women has, however, never been so
hopeless and compromised that self-expulsion has ever been the sole option.
Beyond the pages of Screens there are many white women who have worked
for and with black South Africans, some at the cost of their lives (Ruth First),
others to suffer exile (Ray Alexander), yet others to defy harrassment by
security police in order to reveal the truth (Janet Cherry). Besides the
well-known instances, there are hundreds of other women, who remain
unknown (and,largely, unsung), who have, often without financial security,
worked devotedly in such fields as education, literacy programmes, advice
offices.
Boehmer's Bad Mother has her cultural origins outside South Africa, in
feminist thought of the United States and Europe. The Western feminist
writer and critic has, typically, spoken as a daughter (often a rebellious
daughter) or a sister. Absent, silenced or dead mothers feature in the careers
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ELLEKE BOEHMER'S SCREENS AGA/NSTTHE SKY
107
of many nineteenth-century characters fabricated by women writers with
feminist ideals, of whom Jane Eyre and Gwendolen Harleth are two of the
best-known. In the second half of this century, Lessing, for one, has
notably augmented the matrophobic legacy of Western feminism.
Lessing's early works were set in this subcontinent; Boehmer uses an extract
from The Golden Notebook as one of the two epigraphs to Screens Against
the Sky, and has said she is "comfortable" with the idea of Lessing as a
"precursor." Possibly Lessing has influenced Boehmer's matrophobic
depiction of the mother-daughter relationship in Screens. 2
Carolyn G. Heilbrun said in 1987 that, while the "oedipal drama,
certainly since Freud but perhaps ever since the inheritance of property first
passed from father to son," had been "the primary, controHing plot" in
literature about the 'Western' family, another plot was present but obscured
from view, even when written about (as in Virginia Woolf's To the
Lighthouse); this plot traced the "mother-daughter struggle," a struggle that
involves "the love," as Heilbrun pointed out, "that threatens, not murder, as
between father and son, but engulfment" (12). Boehmer has Sylvie threaten
her daughter with, precisely. engulfment. Sylvie is happiest when
Annemarie mirrors her own behaviour exactly, as when the two of them
bake cakes or sit knitting together in front ofthe TV set. After her husband's
death Sylvie tells Annemarie '''You are my life'" (32). She feeds her
daughter cakes, fudge, "rich and milky treats," "viscous messes"; "Around
the time of [Annemarie's] first menstruation," her mother feeds her
"egg-nog, big mugfuls that would slip down in one glutinous swallow" (24).
The girl is compelled to become bulimic in order to maintain control over
her body size. (Boehmer is excellent at conveying nausea: for Annemarie,
lipstick is "red fat" [155].)
However, since the 1980s, attitudes toward textual representations of the
mother in British and American feminist fiction and theory have begun to
change. So, in a collection of poems called In the Gold of Flesh (1990),
American and British women celebrate metaphorical (that is, creative) and
biological birth and motherhood, and Michele Roberts (half-English,
half-French), in Flesh and Blood (1994), her most recent novel, creates a
protagonist who, having symbolically 'killed' her mother as Bad Mother by
shedding emotional attachment to her, moves toward a climax in which,
simultaneously, she integrates her early memories of her mother, who, as
her Good Mother, was her "paradise garden" and she begins to sing a "love
song" for her own (as yet unborn) daughter. The cycle of destructiveness is
shattered.
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108
EV A HUNTER
Meanwhile, in this country, black women have been shaping their sense
of identity in positive fictional and autobiographical form, through
discourses that incorporate the maternal. This these black women have done
in the face, on the one hand, of resistance rhetoric that glorifies black women
as mothers only to marginalise them from important power structures, and,
on the other, of the apartheid state's depredations upon the black family and
upon black self-esteem. Margaret Daymond notes tentative validation of
motherhood in Bessie Head's fiction (Daymond, 1990); Dorothy Driver
traces Ellen Kuzwayo's assertion (in Call Me Woman [1985]) of maternal
authority in the face of the youth's uprising in 1976 (Driver 1990). Miriam
Tlali, in her most recent collection, Footprints in the Quag (1989), has
certain characters and narrators protest against black men's treatment of
their womenfolk, and voice their protest as women speaking as mothers
(Hunter 1993). It seems it is precisely as women speaking as mothers and
on behalf of other mothers that Kuzwayo and Tlali can defy the cultural
imperative that excludes them from public life and from voicing criticism
of their menfolk. Indeed, Driver goes so far as to say that "it is only by
passing through" the "assertion" that the strength of women is their strength
as mothers "that the possibilities for an African feminism begin to emerge"
(237).
South Africa's black women writers are, then, confirming what the
Western reappraisal of motherhood has only recently extended to women,
the exhilarating, liberating realisation that, in order to be faithful to feminist
goals, it is necessary neither to ignore nor depreciate the biological fact of
motherhood or the practical ways in which women raise their children. We
may (and I probably do not speak for black women here, since they it seems
have never had such doubts), without ignoring such social and cultural
realities as the poverty of black mothers left to raise children alone or the
stigma attached to those women who do not have children, may speak as
feminists and speak as mothers, as well as sisters or daughters. So, I am
resistant to Boehmer's fabrication, in the Nineties, of another mother who
is weak, clinging, terrible, witch-like (as Sylvie snoops among her sleeping
daughter's books, the reader, sharing the point of view of the narrator, sees
that her "sickle of chin brackets that of nose" [4]). Perhaps the tardiness of
Boehmer's materialization of a Bad Mother is due to the fact that in the
colonies and ex-colonies the political and social attitudes of white
populations have tended to lag behind those of the metropolitan centres. If
there is a tendency amongst South Africa's black women writers to idealise
mothers (cf. Driver on Kuzwayo in Driver 239-43) - a tendency stimulated
by the mystique of Mama Afrika in popular and resistance culture -
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ELLEKE BOEHMER'S SCREENS AGAINST THE SKY
109
perhaps there has lingered, in our white women writers, a contrary tendency
to demonise white mothers.
My second point of resistance to Boehmer's fictional mother-daughter
relationship, besides its regressive, limiting nature, is related to Woods's
statement that it offers "authentic insight" into white "society." Given both
the patriarchal nature of white apartheid society and Sylvie's feebleness of
character as Boehmer depicts her, Boehmer is scapegoating an inappropriate
target. Especially after the death of her husband, Sylvie feels embattled,
hardly fit to face life alone. She is alienated from her own sexuality, protects
herself against intrusions from outside her snug home by avoiding television
news, and finds a comforting role for herself, as countless middle-class
women have done - we need think only of the Misses Mann and Ainley in
Charlotte Bronte's Shirley - in knitting for the needy. All this despite the
wealth that accrues to her when her dead husband's share portfolio begins
to flourish. Where ought contempt for such a person to end and pity to
begin? Is Boehmer not, as Lessing did in her characterisation of Mary
Turner in The Grass is Singing (1950), creating a character the reader can
hardly conceive of as able to comprehend the privileges her class and ethnic
origins bring her, a character whom, nevertheless. the author's techniques
urge readers to dislike and to judge as guilty?
Judged as complicit, Sylvie is. Her lethal nurturing is not idiosyncratic;
instead, it is part of a poison so pervasive it infects the very air in Hoopstad.
The atmosphere is "filled with sweetness" (194). There is an objective origin
for this smell in the sugar-growing area of Natal, and this is a chocolate
factory. But the odour functions, too, as a correlative for forces that spread
throughout the social fabric. The suburban good life, and the civilities of
white culture, are in reality toxic, because sustained at the cost of the terrible
poverty of the proletariat.
Like the sweet smell in the air, the names of the places where the
Rudolphs live - Merrydale and Hoopstad - resonate satirically, as
Boehmer exposes the falseness of the belief, which is defined by Steve Biko
in the second of the novel's epigraphs, the belief of the black "man" that,
while he is inferior, "completeness goes with whiteness." The Rudolph
family suffer what the second epigraph, from Lessing's The Golden
Notebook, warns against: "an inability or a refusal to fit conflicting things
together" means "ultimately either death or impoverishment of the
individual." The novel's focus is white consciousness and conscience. The
Rudolphs, refusing to see beyond the cluster of attitudes they have allowed
into their home, bequeath their daughter a legacy of impoverished
understanding. Mr Rudolph puts up hailscreens that blur the view to the
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110
EVA HUNTER
outside. More of the "screens" of the title are raised by Sylvie: she enjoys
watching mobiles hung in the window. They help her avoid looking beyond
them to a sky that is, for Annemarie too, frequently "blank."
The domesticated woman is a product of pervasive social and cultural
forces, the history df whose formation has been traced by, for instance,
Nancy Armstrong, in Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of
the Novel (1987), and the ideology surrounding this figure is class-bound,
as Virginia Woolf saw (Woolf 1923). Like the oedipal dynamic that Freud
traced, the ideology of domesticated woman has a central relationship to
dominant middle-class culture. Sylvie's aJJegiance is clearly with the
dominant class grouping in South Africa, who assert their superiority also
by virtue of race: as Woolf understood, the ideology that constructs the
image of the An~el in the House is the ideology of imperialism as we)) as of
class hegemony. Sylvie sees herself as living in a land of barbarians, and
so plays her part in keeping them from the gate. She betrays her daughter's
confidence to a security policeman, so ensuring Annemarie, too, is
complicit, as child of her class and race, in helping to convict a white doctor
who is doing what Annemarie wishes to do, help the resistance.
There is, however, a possible way of deflecting the objection that
Boehmer is laying too much blame on this pathetic, even if destructive,
woman, Sylvie Rudolph. This is to argue that when Wendy Woods
encourages the reader to view Screens as an "authentic" account of growing
up white under apartheid she is misreading the author's style and intent. To
read the book Woods's way entails understanding it as depicting experience
that was already constituted, experience that remained only to be shaped by
the selections of the author. Yet Boehmer herself, through formal strategies,
signals her wish to forestall the notion that she is presenting realistic fiction
or a closed, perfected vision. (She has said she has "problems with" the
"self-sufficiency" and "completeness" of Gordimer's kind of "realism"
[1992: 94].) Instead, through techniques commonly termed postmodemist,
Boehmer points to fiction as a fabricated collage, and to the philosophical
point that 'truth' and any representation thereof are fickle entities. For
instance, the voice that begins the tale is uncoloured by emotion or
judgement; it is the voice of a recording eye, recounting what it sees, while
it sees, and referring at this stage only to "the girl" and "the woman." It
refutes any claim to omniscience, and, along with such refutation,
challenges the white masculinist values of liberal humanism which have
predominated in European realist fiction, with what Kenneth Parker calls its
"aggrandizing self-perception" of a "subjectivity [that is] assumed in the
twin disguises of authorial percipience and of the reader as unproblematic
centre of a particular and 'natural' sensibility" (Parker 39). An omniscient
narrator would supply the names of the characters, and would usually use
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ELLEKE BOEHMER'S SCREENS AGAINST THE SKY
III
the past instead of the present tense. The past perfect implies actions already
completed, a world already structured, finished.
Boehmer not only ruptures the implicit compact conventional to the
relationship between a fictional narrative's implied reader and its thirdperson narrator (or its implied author), she also, after three paragraphs,
changes to an "I" -narrator. And, as the reader continues, it is to realise that,
quite possibly, the voice previously heard waS, in fact, a device of the
protagonist, who has since decided to take over her story in her own voice.
Perhaps the reader never stops sharing Annemarie's perspective. The
reaqer cannot be certain of this. This uncertainty, in a postmodernist text,
is precisely the point, as may be further read from the fact that, in the
opening three paragraphs, the narrator sees, at "night-time," and from
outside, only whatever can be s~en through the windows of the Rudolph
house and where the Jightsare .on. This narrator must assume, guess,
surmise: "At the far end of the house Jies what must be the livingroom" (3).
Boehmer's postmodemist play is used to make the usual philosophical
point that meaning is unsettled. Annemarie, who is inside and, it may well
be, also at times (attempting to place herself) outside her own story, refutes,
frolll both perspectives her ability to convey the truth. Even her keeping of
a journal becoI1!es, instead of a guarantee of veracity and verisimilitude, its
opposite: the journal was one of her "ventures" intended to "bring about an
entirely new kind of existence"(5); like J. M. Coetzee's Magda in In the
Heart of the Country (1977), she turns to shaping her life into a fiction so as
to avoid !>oredom.
. [W]hat follows may in part be drawn from the memory not only of
what happened, but of what 1 once wrote happened. 1 do not set out
to re-create those fictions [of the journal]; but as 1 have no way now
of reviewing them, as 1 no longer have the journal books in my
possession and cannot check up on my memories, 1 can never be
sure that my present account did not in part begin on the pages of
my journal. If 1 spent so much time on the journal, it is possible that
details of what 1 remember of those last school years did not in fact
happen ... [I am] writing off, you could say - the fabricated facts.
(5-6)
If the past constructs the present, so, too, does the present construct the past.
Boehmer is, then, writing a tale that deconstructs its own authority yet
has a didactic purpose (Fay Weldon's technique has similar effects). Even
if any knowledge Annemarie may convey is called into question, yet the
novel still makes its critiques, of, for instance, white ignorance of the black
world, an ignorance more marked in women because of the split between
the home and the public world.
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112
EV A HUNTER
Do I betray that I was concerned, almost obsessively concerned,
with nothing so much as with my own self. Yet this is, I suppose,
my intention. I believe my preoccupation at that time was in itself
telling. I believe that my life then - in its confinement, its littleness,
its negligible engagement with external matters - shows up,
precisely by virtue of exclusion, how very much was left out: the
entire history of a long struggle, the endurance of that struggle, its
effort and its pain. (7)
There is an internal tension between the novel's emphasis on its didactic
purposes and its ludic, reflexive strategies. And, in both its internal tensions
and its choice of scapegoat for white culpability - an unhappy, white
woman - Boehmer's novel recalls Lessing's first novel, The Grass is
Singing (1950). In Lessing's novel, the analytical discourse (of formal
realism) carried by the narrator casts blame for the cruelty of Southern
Rhodesia's racist society on broad social forces, which are controlled by
white men, but the author's animus is, in the novel's climax, directed, in a
surge of melodramatic language and metaphor, against sick, pathetic Mary
Turner. Boehmer, using not realism but postmodernist techniques, would
counter a sense of finality and infallibility, but her didactic purpose draws
the reader to focus on the referentiality of the novel, and the emotional
weight of the author's dislike of her creature Sylvie works against the
detachment called for by Boehmer's deconstructive techniques.
The ignorance of the privileged comes in varying degrees, ranging from
the state of genuinely not knowing (as among children, for instance) to a
condition in which one refuses either to know or to acknowledge that one
knows. Mrs Rudolph clearly does not wish to know; furthermore, the effects
such a woman may have upon a young psyche are terrible (and may be hard
to forgive). But, the intensity of the bitterness seems misdirected (with
Annemarie's father dead, all blame may be attributed to her mother). The
novel's targets, white mother and daughter, are those most like herself in
class, gender, and ethnic identity; this does not make them the targets that
most deserve to be attacked.
My objection here is not merely an academic one, since South Africans
face together a future in which some will face demands for redress, while
others will be deciding in what circumstances, who, and how much to punish
for the past. The story potentially obscures where ultimate power has been
located, in white men; it could also add fuel to attacks upon white women
by their black sisters. In the struggle for resources and power, white women
are next in the firing line to black women. If they are berated more than
white men - and, in some circumstances, black men - deserve to be, this
could dilute the power of all the women of South Africa to press for their
own interests.
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ELLEKE BOEHMER'S SCREENS AGAINST THE SKY
113
NOTES
I. All page references are to the Penguin edition, 1992. An earlier version of
this article was presented at the annual conference ofthe Association for University
English Teachers of South Africa, Wild Coast, July 1994.
2. Paradoxically, Lessing must herself be counted among the 'good.' nurturing
mothers of post-World War II feminism. along with thinkers such as Simone de
Beauvoir. Furthermore. Lorna Sage. in her study of post-war novelists entitled
Womi!n in thi! HOWi! of Fiction. notes the existence of a group of "women realists
in the nurturing. matriarchal mould." amongst whom Sage counts Iris Murdoch and
Margaret Drabble (154). Lessing. too. for all her experimentation with form in Thi!
Goldi!n Noti!book and her space fiction, has impressed her readers as a realistic, and
sage-like chronicler of the experience of modern women.
3. Boehmer's setting is clearly South Africa. yet. just as her formal choices are
influenced by transcontinental fictional practices. so the lives she depicts unsurprisingly. given both the original transplanting of metropolitan cultures to the
colonies and the contemporary forces of mass communication and trade - exhibit
characteristics that are widespread. For instance. Lorna Sage. writing of Fay
Weldon. says. "As Praxis [The main character in Praxis (1978)] points out. most
women are left alone with themselves. or other women. in the end (if not a lot
sooner)" (Sage 156). and "In Thi! Lifi! and Lovi!S of a Shi!-Di!vil" [1983]. women
are, as it were. the suburbanites of the human race. The opening setting. 'Eden
Grove.' with its brand-new houses. half-grown trees. domestic seclusion and
large-scale consumption of tranquillisers and Mary Fisher novels. is a lUXUry ghetto
where wives are insulated (for the moment) from material pressures and
opportunities. It could be anywhere in the developed world ... a haven ofinsecurity"
(Sage 159). Simply alter the name of the favoured novelist, and the statement would
apply as appropriately to the lives of wives in South Africa's suburbs. (Not all of
South Africa's suburbs are inhabited only by whites: the Indian and 'coloured'
communities and some amongst the black communities also have their suburbs. the
women who inhabit their houses. 11ali depicts a black woman emulating white.
suburban ways in "Masechaba's Erring ·Child· ... in Footprints in thi! Quag.)
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