The lost mother: Exploring maternal ambivalence

The film, 'The Lost Daughter', explores and challenges the cultural construct that glorifies motherhood

"Children are a crushing responsibility," says Olivia Colman in Maggie Gyllenhaal's disturbing psychodrama, The Lost Daughter, now streaming on Netflix. The sentence encapsulates the white-hot core of the film and turns its gaze on what is often felt but rarely uttered — that mother love is not always unalloyed and unstinted, that it is often mixed up with agony, frustration and resentment at the Sisyphean task of rearing a child.

There are dazzling performances in this film, led by none other than Colman, now known the world over for her bravura turn as Queen Elizabeth in the Netflix series, The Crown. And it is strewn with mysteries and ambiguities, with cinematic cuts and thrusts between alternating timelines. But more than anything else, the film is a cultural knock-out punch, exploring as it does the unspeakable emotion of maternal ambivalence and the searing guilt that a woman wrestles with as a result, largely because society conditions us to think of such mothers as 'bad'.

Adapted from Elena Ferrante's novel of the same name (Ferrante's works dwell on mother-daughter relationships in visceral detail), The Lost Daughter tells the story of Leda (Colman), a 48-year-old professor of literature based in Boston, who comes to a Greek island for a holiday. Here, she makes the acquaintance of a large American-Greek family, also on vacation. She watches two of them with particular interest, a young mother called Nina and her little daughter, who is quite a handful. It's clear that Nina finds her boisterous child stressful and chafes at her role as a mother. And watching them, Leda telescopes back to her own past, when she was a graduate student trying to realise her academic ambition while bringing up two small daughters.

As the film unspools and jump-cuts between the past and the present, we see a young Leda, frazzled and irritated by the demands of motherhood, which, to her, seem entirely at odds with her own personhood. There is a husband in the picture, also a student, yet as is often the case, it is the wife who ends up minding the kids. Eventually, Leda walks away from both her marriage and her daughters, so she can follow her desires — intellectual as well as sexual. She does not see her children for the next three years.

Her daughters are long grown up now — she breezily refers to them in conversation — but in the dark recesses of Leda's mind, her past act of abandonment continues to be a ragged claw, drawing blood and taking her to the very edge of her reason.

Motherhood is, of course, a hallowed cultural construct, universally glorified and universally regarded as a state of grace that a woman should aspire to. Whether it is Mary, the mother of Jesus, in Christian iconography (supremely idealised as "Virgin Mary"), or in almost any other religious and cultural context, the mother figure is identified with transcendent love, patience, service, sacrifice, self-abnegation, and so on.

The burden of this ideology is not easy to bear and live up to, especially for the modern woman, whose vision of herself is rarely limited to her identity as a mother. And it's a double whammy for women in a country like India, where the mother figure is elevated to the level of a goddess. Religion idolises her as divinity, an expression of superhuman shakti (energy), and popular culture, represented by films like Mother India, Karan Arjun and countless others, idealises her as superhuman in her ability to offer a stream of unconditional love and sufferance.

Feminist studies have analysed the glorified construct of motherhood (often used to compensate for the powerlessness of real women and mothers in society) and argued for the need to create a space for maternal ambivalence, especially among new mothers. Post-partem depression is also accepted as a serious malady now, and medical science recognises that the joy that a new baby brings to the mother may be tempered with an overpowering sense of loss, a debilitating sense of the erasure of the self.

Western literature, too, has, albeit sparingly, dwelt on the storm of mixed emotions that motherhood often brings in its wake. Doris Lessing's 1988 novel, The Fifth Child, and Rachel Cusk's 2001 book, A Life's Work, come to mind. Incidentally, in the 1940s, Lessing abandoned two of her children (and her husband) in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and moved to London, an act for which she was vilified for years.

Yet maternal ambivalence continues to be a bad word. And such is the cultural opprobrium against it that it is largely denied by mothers themselves — even if they feel overwhelmed by the responsibility of nurturing a child.

The pandemic, which threw thousands of moms into the exhausting task of working from home while they struggled to manage their children who were also stuck in the house, has sparked a great deal of conversation about the unequal load borne by women when it comes to housework and childcare. The Lost Daughter, too, comes at an important cultural moment, when it is perhaps time to recognise that women need not necessarily be demonised if they fall short of impossible ideals, and they need not necessarily beat themselves up about it if they do.

(Shuma Raha is a journalist and author)

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.