Gilmore Girls, Grey Gardens, and the Mother Wound
This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the documentary Grey Gardens, an intimate slice-of-life portrait of Edith Ewing Bouvier Beale and her daughter, Edith Bouvier Beale—cousins of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis—who lived in almost complete seclusion in their crumbling, condemned Hamptons mansion, along with cats and frequent visitations from raccoons. This year is also the twenty-fifth anniversary of the first season of Gilmore Girls, a sitcom following small-town manic pixie dream mom Lorelai Gilmore, who is just sixteen years older than her daughter and best friend, Lorelai (“Rory”) Gilmore, and who reinstates contact with her overbearing, wealthy parents when they agree to pay for Rory’s education.
Back when I was around Rory’s age, in a time before streamed TV, before even the humble DVR, I scheduled my life around Gilmore Girls: Tuesday night, 8:00 p.m., the WB. Everything else stopped. Dishes could wait. Homework could wait. It was time for my mother and me to watch our show. At that age, I thought that Lorelai’s and Rory’s was the best mother-daughter relationship possible. They do everything together, like sisters or friends: share clothes, give each other advice, swap rapid-fire one-liners, weigh in on the guys each one is dating. They are each other’s number-one confidant and best friend. Lorelai even jokes that they are like a married couple, Paul and Linda McCartney, who couldn’t bear to spend nights away from each other.
But as Bethany Webster writes in Discovering the Inner Mother, a book about the Mother Wound, “A daughter is being exploited when her mother gives her adult roles, such as surrogate spouse, best friend, or therapist . . . she is unable to rely on her mother enough to get her own developmental needs met.” I didn’t catch this at the age when I was watching Gilmore Girls, but now it rings true to me that Lorelai “may be looking to her daughter for the emotional nourishment that she never received from her own mother.” An important running thread on the show is how much Lorelai and her own mother—well-to-do, eagle-eyed, barb-tongued socialite Emily Gilmore—don’t understand each other. It’s a huge factor in why Lorelai ran away from home and had Rory at sixteen. The only reason Lorelai and Emily resume contact is because of a deal they strike: Emily and her husband will pay for Rory’s private school education if Lorelai and Rory will agree to attend weekly dinners with them. Though it doesn’t exactly phrase it this way, the premise of the show is relationship as transaction: Lorelai will be Emily’s daughter again once a week in exchange for tuition money.
I also see an implied transaction in Lorelai’s relationship with Rory, and their “shared dream” of Rory attending Harvard. Rory functions as a kind of proof of concept for Lorelai: If Rory turns out Successful and Good, and graduates from an Ivy League university, then Lorelai wasn’t wrong to have run away from home and had Rory at such a young age. That’s a lot of pressure for a kid to carry, and Rory often flounders under it, seemingly afraid to make decisions for herself until she’s checked in on her mom’s feelings about them first.
Considering the show now, I’m struck by how often their relationship seems codependent. Rory doesn’t know what to say when her first boyfriend tells her he loves her. She tells him she needs to think about it, and he asks if she needs to “go home and discuss it with your mother?” After moving into her dorm, Rory can’t cope with the thought of spending the night away from Lorelai, who is now twenty minutes away in Stars Hollow. Lorelai enables her by agreeing to come back and spends the night in Rory’s dorm. Despite having other surface-level friendships, they are each other’s only real friend.
But Big and Little Edie take it many steps further.
I saw Grey Gardens for the first time in a very different place in my life, when I was closer to Lorelai’s age, and it hit me like a cautionary tale. I was partly charmed—the outfits! the camp!—but also aghast, fascinated. Not just at the fact of two people living in a decrepit mansion overrun with feral cats and raccoons. Not just at the unbelievable clutter and dead lightbulbs and cat piss, or the hot plates in the one main room with the twin beds. It was the way these women talk to each other, how each one tries to win the narrative of their lives for the cameramen.
In an attempt to process how enamored I was with the film and untangle the sense of tragedy I felt at the heart of it, I immediately began a series of poems about Grey Gardens. I hoped to crack the logic of the Edies’ illogic, the unspoken and unspeakable assumptions and agreements each woman holds in her relationship to the other. Parts of their dynamic felt uncomfortably familiar to me, in ways I recognized quickly and also not for years. There is something subterranean, primordial about their dynamic, something that evades language but that I know in my bones. That series of poems ended up in my debut collection, Cosmic Tantrum, which plays with mother and daughter archetypes, costumes, mirrors, monsters, transactional relationships, and being a brat when you have no other access to power. (Much like Little Edie does when she gleefully refuses her mother’s command to stop singing.) Much of the magic of the film for me is in the way the Maysles brothers (the filmmakers) avoid narrating or commenting on what they’re seeing. They simply present their fly-on-the-wall observations—the squalor, the theatrics, the barely comprehensible arguments—and let viewers infer what they will, the way a poet does.
When I hear other people discuss this film, it’s always with a sort of chuckling appreciation for two wacky senior ladies, content in their shared delusions. But what I see is triangulation, a battle of wills, the “crabs in a bucket” zero-sum-game mentality of two women who have already lost basically everything. There’s something so sweet and childlike in their songs and dances and Little Edie’s unconventional fashion ensembles. There’s something so sad to me in their palpable hunger for company—despite Big Edie’s insistence that she’s “been a very happy woman all my life.” To me, their shared, secluded life is a bleak, literal example of the phrase You’re my whole world. Aside from a regular grocery delivery, and the occasional visit from a relative, the Edies have no one but each other to fill every role a person encounters in a life: ally, protector, partner, tormentor, sounding board, enemy—to name a few. Introducing an audience into the mix—the filmmakers, and eventual viewers at home—seems to activate the Edies’ fantasies of being rescued, or being proven correct and triumphant. Little Edie talks a big game about wanting to rent a little “rat-hole” apartment in New York, or being a “staunch character,” S-T-A-U-N-C-H! Big Edie comments proudly on Little Edie’s great figure and her “remarkable” memory when she swiftly retrieves Big Edie’s slippers, but becomes enraged when Little Edie sings a song incorrectly. In the prequel documentary, That Summer, Big Edie tells her daughter, “The only vermin here is you, Edie”! Repeatedly, when Little Edie is alone with the filmmakers, Big Edie calls her away, as though she doesn’t want Little Edie talking to them unaccompanied.
As Lindsay Gibson writes in Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents, some parents, in response to their child’s enthusiasm, “may abruptly change the subject or warn them not to get their hopes up. In response to their children’s exuberance, they’re likely to say something dismissive or skeptical to bring it down a notch.”
Aside from Little Edie daring to do Big Edie’s “thing” (singing), much of their interpersonal drama plays out over the legends of Little Edie’s marriage proposals. In the same way that the pair rehashes all events from their past lives as wealthy socialites—reverently gazing upon photo albums and painted portraits in their twin-bed room as they narrate—these stories glow, imbued with a mythological power. But the myths of the proposals change with each telling, according to Big Edie’s whims. On the one hand, Big Edie seems to take delight in the attention her beautiful daughter received from suitors. When she’s not goading Little Edie about how she has “no husband, no babies, nothing,” Big Edie seems proud to name the millionaires who proposed to her. But when Little Edie mentions Eugene, the man she did want to marry when she was in her mid- to late thirties, her mother counters, “I didn’t want my child to be taken away. I’d be entirely alone.” Her child.
In a later scene, Little Edie remarks, “When I go to New York City, I see myself as a woman. But in here I’m just, you know, Mother’s little daughter.”
As Webster explains it, a particular type of wounding—the Mother Wound—is passed from mother to daughter when patriarchal forces require a mother “to give up her personhood for motherhood” and the daughter “may remind her mother of her own unlived potential,” with the mother’s frustration instilled in the daughter “through subtle or even aggressive forms of emotional abandonment, . . . manipulation (shame, guilt, and obligation), or rejection.”
In Big Edie, I see a woman who’s enraged and ashamed from having been abandoned. She upheld her end of the old-money marriage deal by being a beautiful, talented prize for a man to win—she was opera-trained and enjoyed singing around the house—and then her husband divorced her, informing her via telegram. This woman had no income of her own, did not drive or own a car. In 1946, the year of the divorce, women could not even have their own bank accounts. (Not until 1974!) What she had was the house she had spent her happier years in, and her refusal to leave it, despite no longer having the funds to maintain it. I feel sorry for her, a wounded bird. But I feel sorrier for Little Edie, who, in my view, sacrificed a life of her own so she could be the caretaker for someone who lived in denial.
Gibson explains how the emotionally immature parent reverses roles with their child: “the child catches the contagion of the parent’s distress and feels responsible for making the parent feel better. However, if the upset parent isn’t trying to understand his or her own feelings, nothing ever gets resolved.”
In the documentary, Little Edie is fifty-six years old and her mother is seventy-nine. Being the live-in caretaker for her aging mother in a crumbling house might seem like the most charitable thing to do for a person with now-limited mobility who won’t leave an untenable situation. But Little Edie moved back into the house permanently when she was only thirty-five years old.
The 2009 HBO Grey Gardens biopic, starring Jessica Lange as Big Edie and Drew Barrymore as Little Edie, paints Little Edie as a tragic heroine. It seems to ask: What if you gave up your entire life in service to your mother, because you felt sorry for her, and you were still her emotional punching-bag? What if you, consciously or not, prevented your daughter from having a family, career, life of her own because you wanted to make sure someone could never leave you?
Webster asks, “To what degree did you feel you had to carry or absorb your mother’s pain as part of the role of being a good daughter?” I think this is so normalized that the average person can’t name it as a rule they live by.
One of the most moving scenes for me in Grey Gardens is when Little Edie shows off her wall of magazine clippings and a travel brochure with the title “Around the World,” gazing admiringly at them in a kind of show-and-tell presentation for the camera, as her mother calls and calls for her from another room. There’s something so childlike and reverent in her regard for the clippings—you can practically feel her willing herself into a different life. In another scene, she lounges, at last, on the beach. Little Edie speaks often of escape, her desire to travel, to be part of the world. Big Edie chides her, “You’re in this world, you know. You’re not out of the world.” Little Edie disagrees. Among her many complaints throughout the film of all the places she’d rather be and opportunities that passed her by, she says, “I missed out on everything.”
One detail that fascinated me in both Gilmore Girls and Grey Gardens is that both mothers have named their daughters after themselves. It’s not so uncommon for children to be named after their parents, especially for men to be named after their fathers, but it makes me think of copies, replacements. My grandfather, who once told me he was himself named after a sibling who had died, informed me that Salvador Dalí and Vincent van Gogh were also named after siblings who had died before them, and that being treated as replacements for other people was the source of great suffering for both artists. They were valued for the role they might fill, and the pain they might ease, rather than the actual people they were.
It’s the same with the Mother Wound: the pain of a child being asked to fill a particular role a particular way under the belief that doing so will make up for the mother’s original loss. But it never will.
In season 3, episode 9 of Gilmore Girls, Lorelai and Rory are cozied on their couch together, watching Grey Gardens. They hold a mixed bag of emotions for the Edies, at first admiring what’s beautiful about them: “They’re cool, they’re free.” (Are they free? Free of social mores, I guess?) But the Edies start to feel a little too familiar to the Gilmores. Jokingly, Lorelai says, “Add a few years, and they’re us!” Rory agrees. Both of them entertain this thought with a smile at first, which corrodes into a worried frown. I am not the only one who sees a Gilmore-girls relationship as a slippery slope to a Grey Gardens one.
I identified with Rory when I was a teen. But watching her make worse and worse decisions over the course of the show, I couldn’t understand why someone “fated” for success would crash and burn this way. She gives up on her dream of being a journalist the first time someone ever criticizes her. She doesn’t know who she is if she’s not someone’s golden child. Later, in the reunion season of Gilmore Girls, it was disappointing to me to see how Rory had spent ten years failing to launch, with little to show for her career. Disappointing, but maybe not surprising. When you are a precocious child, “so mature for your age,” and have all the same hobbies and interests as the person who raised you, and a life trajectory decided in childhood, it’s very possible to grow to adulthood and realize you never learned how to be a person on your own terms.
Gilmore Girls and Grey Gardens, in my view, sit at opposite ends of the same continuum. On one end: a closer-than-usual mother-daughter relationship we’ve been encouraged to view as unconventional but charming. On the other: an extremely isolated mother-daughter relationship whose dysfunction is evident. My hope for any of us who recognize bits of ourselves in these dynamics is to remember and honor our individual personhood more than the roles we are asked to play for other people. It’s not fair that sons are encouraged to become fully realized, three-dimensional human beings, and daughters are expected to sacrifice their personhood the way their mothers were expected to sacrifice theirs.
As Webster writes, “We have to stop sacrificing ourselves for our mothers, because ultimately, our sacrifices don’t feed them. What will feed your mother is the transformation that is on the other side of her own pain and grief, which she must reckon with on her own.”
These girls, these women—Rory and Little Edie—deserved better. And so did their mothers. And their mothers before them. All of us do.
