This morning (Thursday) at the Oral History Workshop of the American Psychoanalytic Association Meeting, Nellie Thompson, in discussing the life and contributions of Bertram Lewin mentioned his 1935 paper on “Claustrophobia”, reminding me that I had come across it years ago while preparing a discussion of the film, How to Make an American Quilt.
In his paper, Lewin tells of a young woman who had “ordered her life in general so as to escape marriage and the male sex.” From her arrangement of her room, her dreams, and her associations, Lewin convincingly concluded that “the patient was imagining herself a foetus in the maternal body—but this idea did not cause anxiety. Indeed, on the contrary, this was an idea of safety or defense. The anxiety arose when the defensive wall was threatened, that is to say, when the penis entered or threatened to touch her . . . The intrauterine fantasy is one of defense (flight) and relief from anxiety; the anxiety arises with the idea of being disturbed or dislodged by the father or father’s penis.” The other fear that disturbed the patient’s fantasy of being in the womb was of being born. Finn, the young woman who is the center of How to Make an American Quilt, has a similar problem.
Finn is 26 years old. In a prologue that is separated from the body of the film by the credits, she tells us, “For as long as I can remember, my grandmother and her friends have been part of a quilting bee.” She explains that her parents were divorced when she was young, and that she spent summers with her grandmother and great aunt and their quilting bee. She is planning to spend the summer there again to work on her thesis, but tells us her boyfriend, Sam, thinks she’s going because he proposed to her last night. Like Lewin’s patient, Finn is clearly ambivalent about the prospect of making such a commitment. She calls Sam her “possible soulmate.” The failure of her parents’ marriage has clearly left doubts in her mind about marrying. Finn’s ambivalence is not only about marriage. She also tells us she is working on her third thesis, having abandoned the first two uncompleted. Finn has trouble committing herself to anything.
After the credits, Sam drops her off at her great aunt and grandmother’s home. They are spending the summer making a quilt for Finn’s wedding present. The theme of the quilt, set by the group’s leader, Anna, is “Where love resides.” The structure of this main body of the film is simple and direct. Finn hears the life story of each of the women involved in making the quilt. Each story seems to express and emphasize Finn’s fears of marriage. Their stories intertwine and dovetail with Finn’s experiences as she has doubts about Sam and the marriage and becomes involved in an erotic affair with a sensual young man that she meets at the town swimming pool.
The first story involves her grandmother, Hy, and her great-aunt, Glady . They sit with her, smoking pot, and explain their long time feud. It is a story of double betrayal. Her grandmother, grief stricken over the impending death of her husband, found solace by making love to her sister’s husband. Glady saw through the guilt in their eyes. She flew into a rage, flinging every piece of pottery she could find and plastering the broken pieces on a wall that became a shrine to her rage. The incident solidified the destruction of her failed marriage. The sisters end up living together, but the underlying feud has continued to simmer.
With this tale of betrayal and infidelity in the background, Finn goes to the pool with her grandmother and great aunt, and meets Leon, the handsome seducer. She is trying to be faithful, but unable to hold back her interest in Leon.
She next hears about Sophia. Sophia first appears as a querulous woman who has always scared Finn with her directness and critical comments. She immediately criticizes Finn for using a typewriter rather than a computer and then for having failed to complete her earlier theses. We learn and see that Sophia was a beautiful young woman with exquisite grace that was applied to her passion for high diving. Her mother was as critical and querulous as Sophia was later to become. Sophia meets a young man, Preston, who is so taken by the grace of her diving that he tells her he plans to marry her. In a very romantic scene, we see Sophia leading Preston to her secret spot in the woods on their first date. She takes off her dress and dives from high rocks into a pool of clear water. Sophia’s impulsiveness and passion lead to pregnancy and marriage. Saddled with children, she is unable to go with Preston, a geologist, on his field trips. She becomes a depressed, complaining housewife like her mother, and eventually drives her husband away.
Once again, an element of the story Finn has just heard is carried over into her own experience. Finn’s fiance, Sam, visits her unexpectedly. Sam, a carpenter, has been renovating their home. He and Finn get into an argument over the renovation. When he mentions that he has planned a guest room that might eventually serve as a baby’s room, Finn accuses Sam of forcing the idea of babies on her. He leaves, and when she tries to call him that night to apologize, she first gets his answering machine and then hears a woman answer the phone.
This is followed by another story of marital infidelity. Two of the women in the quilting bee are at odds because Constance has been sleeping with Em’s husband. Em tells Finn about her long, painful marriage to her artist husband, Dean. He is shown in the flashback as an excitable, hysterical man who loves to paint his wife’s portrait and to make love to her, but cannot stop having affairs with other women. Each time she confronts him, he expresses extreme remorse, smashing his head against the floor and the wall, but continuing the affairs. She tries to leave him, fleeing to her parents’ house, but he pursues her three months later, finding her pregnant. She attempts to hold him off, but her parents pack her bags into his car and encourage her to continue the marriage. Now, we have the image of both infidelity and babies trapping a woman in a sadomasochistic marriage. We also hear Constance’s story. Somewhat like Hy, she also turns in grief over her husband’s death to the friendly shoulder of a man, Em’s husband, and must accept romance with friendship.
Meanwhile, Leon continues to test Finn’s loyalty to Sam. He brings her fresh strawberries picked from his family’s field. She makes a date with him, dressing up for a night out. Before she meets with him, she hears another story, this time from Anna. She is a wise old black woman, played by Maya Angelou. She was a servant to Finn’s grandmother’s family, and it was she who taught the women how to quilt. Anna shows Finn a story quilt handed down from her own Aunt Polly. She explains that the quilt tells the story of her own great grandmother, who, freed from slavery, went out to find her parents. One day she saw a crow and followed it to the man who became her husband. Anna says that her great grandmother’s search for her parents led her to her husband. She then tells her own story. Dreaming of finding a crow to lead her to a husband, she was sidetracked by a young white man from the family she and her aunt served. She became pregnant, and was sent to Hy and Glady’s family. Glady was with her when she felt the first birth pains. She says that she had not found a husband, but a daughter, Mariana. Despite this seeming acceptance of fate, she gives Finn a warning not to follow in her footsteps. Sensing that Finn is going to go out with Leon, she warns her not to saddle her life with a foolish act of youth. Finn once again enacts the story she has heard. She meets Leon in his family’s orchard, and makes love to him.
Confused, Finn turns to Anna’s daughter Mariana, a slightly older woman whom she has admired for her sophistication. Finn asks if she should turn to a man who is a lover or one who is a friend. Mariana says that she would choose to be with her “soulmate.” He is a black poet she met one day in Paris. Like two of the other men in the film, he first approached her to help console her grief. She had just broken up with another man. Unlike the others, he did not commit a betrayal. They spent a beautiful day together, but when she wanted to pursue it further, he said that he was a married man, and left her with a short poem he had written that day.
On the surface, Finn is torn between two images of a man, a lover, Leon and a friend, Sam, the steady carpenter. Finn’s choice creates some tension, but we, the viewers, aren’t torn between her choice of Leon or Sam. I know I’m not. We are meant to root for Sam. Leon is not a real choice. He clearly represents trouble, the temptations of the Devil. No one in or out of the movie believes that Finn is seriously interested in Leon. The film makes it clear that Finn is using her sexual desire for Leon to derail her marriage plans. As her mother tells her a little later in the film, Finn’s problem is that she’s scared. This is a straightforward premarital jitters story about a girl who is afraid to make decisions, afraid to get married, and afraid of growing up.
Mariana’s poem is the first in a series of magical events that transform the film and move us toward a resolution of the original problem. The poem reads: “Young lovers seek perfection. Old lovers learn the art of sewing shreds together and of seeing beauty in a multiplicity of patches.” After Finn reads the poem, Mariana tells her, prophetically, “You better get home. I think the weather’s changing.”
The first “weather change” comes from Finn’s mother. Finn finds her waiting at her aunt’s house. She announces that she and Finn’s father are going to be remarried. They had met and renewed their romance. Finn protests at how confused her mother has made her, first denigrating marriage and espousing serial monogamy, then coming with this news. Finn says she doesn’t know what to do. Her mother says, “You know what you want. You’re just scared . . . Move on and live your life.” Finn tells her mother that she has “fooled around on” Sam. Her mother tells her that she should never tell him.
At this point, we have not a god from the machine, but a machine from the gods. As if from a giant electric fan, a great wind stirs up, swirling about ferociously. Finn’s thesis, sitting as a pile of papers by a window, is blown over the lawns of the quilters. Em, who is about to leave Dean, has her car keys and hat blown right from her. She turns to Dean’s painting shed for shelter, and finds that the shed is adorned with pictures of her, young and old. She falls asleep on a sofa, and Dean later finds her there, awakening her with a touch and a kiss. Sophia goes out collecting the loose papers of Finn’s thesis, and finds her way to a small pond her husband had built for her the day before he left. She sits by it, resting her feet in the water. It will remind her of her youth and her diving, and in the final scene we will see her make a graceful dive into a pool.
This is clearly a turning point. Finn is ready to give up her thesis, complaining to her grandmother that it is too much work to try to reconstruct it. Hy asks her if it would be easier to start a new one. We see Finn retrieving pages in the orchard, when Leon comes through in his truck, offering her more strawberries. She jumps up on his running board, but does not kiss him.
The women gather to finish the quilt. The critical Sophia approaches Finn to tell her how much she admires her writing. We see the women sewing the finishing touches on their quilt pieces. Each one contains some detail of the story they have told, and each in turn flashes back to a moment of joy and sharing from the story. Finn falls asleep, and they cover her with the quilt. When Finn awakens, she sees the quilt, and then looks outside and sees a crow. Wrapping the quilt around herself she follows the crow. It leads her into the orchard, where she sees a van. She looks in the van, and to our relief, finds Sam.
For me, the points of affect, those parts of the film when we begin to feel a little choking in our throat and perhaps a tear in our eye, begin with the “magic”. It starts with the poem that gives meaning to the metaphor of the quilt—“Young lovers seek perfection. Old lovers learn the art of sewing shreds together and of seeing beauty in a multiplicity of patches.” It reaches a crescendo when the women are finishing their quilt and we see each one reminisce about that special moment “where love resides” that is represented in the quilt piece. And, of course, it is there when Finn follows the magical crow to Sam’s car door.
The film’s trailer announces it as, “The story of one generation showing the next the beauty in the patterns of life.” We see much of this during the magical sequence that starts with Mariana. Up to this point, Finn has been given mixed messages from the women. They have been confused and misguided and their advice seems overly critical or contradictory to what they have done with their lives. From this point on the messages are clear and supportive in tone, beginning with the poem. Mariana then acts as a prophetic guide, telling Finn, “You better get home. I think the weather’s changing.” Finn’s parents’ decision to remarry is a guide with a twist out of Gilbert and Sullivan. Above all, Finn’s mother is now a mother, giving advice and encouragement—“You know what you want. You’re just scared . . . Move on and live your life.” We see inter-generational encouragement during the quilting scene when Anna praises her daughter’s work and when the formerly critical Sophia praises Finn’s writing.
But the guidance does not come only from people. This is a reality-oriented film aimed at a mature audience, yet at a crucial point, magic intervenes not once, but twice. The wind that blows up is not haphazard in its effects. It changes lives dramatically and turns around individual characters as well as the direction of the film. The wind is disguised as a natural event that happens to have a dramatic effect upon the story. The crow goes beyond that. We implicitly accept the crow as a messenger whose message has been deciphered earlier in the film, with Anna’s story about her great grandmother. The wind and the crow show a guiding hand that allows us to feel secure in the outcome.
Obviously, I did not cite Lewin simply because Finn resembled his patient in having fears of being closed in by commitments. It was only when I had begun to think about the meaning of the film’s magic that I went back to the beginning, the prologue. There was imagery associated with that prologue. We first see hands cutting, patterning, and sewing. Then, as Finn’s narrative begins in her adult voice, we see her as a little girl sitting under a table, surrounded by women’s legs. She says,
“For as long as I can remember, my grandmother and her friends have been part of a quilting bee.”
The quilting bee has existed as long as Finn can remember. It goes back to her origins.
“I remember sitting under the quilting frame pretending that I was surrounded by a forest of friendly trees and that their stitches were messages from giants written across the sky.”
First we see the little girl under the table, then we see her view of the quilting frame. It is an appealing image, like a multicolored membrane across the sky, with shadow hands moving along it. The little girl is protected and closed in by friendly trees and a membranous sky with the writing of presumably friendly giants. The giants are the loving parents that she needs, and the enclosure with its membrane sky is a comforting womb. We momentarily share the pleasure of this womb fantasy as we look at the giant hand shadows move across the membranous sky, like the hands of mother and father as they move across mother’s belly. I could easily imagine this being a child’s fantasy of what it’s like to be in the womb looking out.
But the fantasy is dispelled as her narrative goes on. She explains that her mother would “dump” her with her grandmother and great aunt over summers when she took off with her latest boyfriend. “My parents’ marriage didn’t last very long. They said they didn’t love each other any more, or maybe they were just afraid that their relationship had become like everyone else’s. They eventually parted as friends and I eventually stopped thinking it was all my fault. The truth is it’s no one’s fault. Sometimes love simply dies.”
We then see Finn in the present. She explains that she is hoping to finally finish her master’s thesis, while Sam is making over their home into some new form. He thinks she is leaving for her aunt’s house because he proposed last night. “But how do you merge into this thing called couple and still keep a little room for yourself? And how do we even know if we’re only supposed to be with one person for the rest of our lives?” Finn is kneeling down as she says this, and as she rises, we see the little girl rising from beneath the quilting frame.
In an analytic hour, the first lines are often important, and the same can be applied to a film. The images and verbal associations of this opening sequence reveal a trauma and a fantasy that attempts to resolve it. The trauma is clearly the destruction of the family. Experience teaches that despite the Oedipal forces that move to disrupt it, every child values the security of an intact family in which parents stand together as a protecting power and is threatened by the danger of its dissolution. Finn’s narrative adds the sense of loss of maternal love as she describes being “dumped” by her mother. We are told that the child struggles with her own role in the break-up. The claim that it is no one’s fault seems true, but defensive. Sophia’s story, of losing her freedom and ultimately her husband because of her children confirms the fear that it “was all my fault.” From this child’s viewpoint, “sometimes love simply dies” takes on a frightening tone. If love simply dies, how can you trust in the love of parents?
The womb fantasy, itself, is endangered by Sam’s entry into her life. When we shift from the little girl under the quilting to the present day Finn, we hear the noise of demolition in the background as Sam rebuilds their home into a new form. He actually breaks through a wall, sending dust and fragments towards her, reminding us of Lewin’s words, “The anxiety arose when the defensive wall was threatened, that is to say, when the penis entered or threatened to touch her.” Although she kisses Sam, and tells us that he is her “possible soul mate,” Finn’s protective womb is no longer safe. She gives open expression to her fear that he is breaking into her space. “But how do you merge into this thing called couple and still keep a little room for yourself?” Added to this is the insecurity that “sometimes love simply dies.” She asks, “And how do we even know if we’re only supposed to be with one person for the rest of our lives?” As she rises, we fade to the little girl rising from beneath the frame. In our preconscious, her self reflection as an adult has been linked with the magical womb of her childhood. In subtle ways, this plays upon our own fantasies of the safety of the womb and the fear of intrusion.
The prologue gives meaning to the magical resolution that comes later. The emotional high point seems to be during the sewing of the quilt. As each woman thinks back upon some bright spot in her narrative, she sews an image of it into the quilt as a gift to Finn. This scene is also marked by a spirit of cooperation, reconciliation, and approval. As Anna thinks back to her child’s birth, she looks at her daughter and tells her she’s doing good work. Em looks at Constance and tells her, “You’re not as attractive as I thought you were,” clearly meaning that she no longer sees her as a threat. Constance understands her meaning and says, “Thank you.” Glady Jo hands Hy a needle, betokening their reconciliation. Finally, Sophia, no longer critical and querulous like her own mother, approaches Finn and tells her that she is a good writer. All of this is accompanied by a crescendo of music as the film’s theme is reverberated. We have heard the theme music over and over from the beginning, so that now we experience it as familiar and reassuring, like a mother’s hug or a pat on the head. A warm, trusting environment has been reestablished. The good feeling that we get from this scene comes from the womb-like security of the restored parental nest and the sense that it can be comfortably shared. This is the comfort and safety that has been sought throughout the film.
That is where the magic comes in. The true magic, the wind and the crow, have the effect of letting fate take a hand. It is as if those giants of Finn’s fantasy are entering into the affairs of men (or mostly women). We are made to feel that the forces of (Mother) nature are directing us to a happy ending. Suddenly the trauma with which the film began, the dissolution of the family, has been repaired. Finn’s parents are back together. Em and her husband are also restored as a loving couple, sharing their own womb-like paint shed. The film makes us feel that there are protective powers that allow us to live with the security and safety of the womb or mother’s arms or the parental nest.
The crow is the final magic that gives absolute certainty. We know that the crow will lead Finn to her true soul mate. The crow comes not only from the god in the machine, but also from Anna’s great grandmother. For Anna’s great grandmother, the crow was her parents leading her to her husband. Finn has been sent a messenger from the past, from Anna, her great grandmother, and her great grandmother’s parents. She has inherited a special loving guiding magic and is now truly protected by the friendly trees and directed by messages from giants in the sky. In the final scene, Finn and Sam lie together in the van, like clams on the half-shell, sharing a half opened womb. Although Finn’s voice-over says that she thinks she and Sam have a good chance for success with their marriage, we have been reassured that their happiness has been sealed by fate and their marriage protected by the magic of the womb. Our own fears of family discord and the dangers of the uncertain world out there are quieted, and we leave the film feeling good.
Lewin, B. (1935) Claustrophobia. Psychoanalytic Quarterly 4: 227-233.
This was previously published (with minor differences from this version) in the PANY Bulletin and in Double Feature: Discovering Our Hidden Fantasies in Film by Herbert H. Stein,M.D. published by EREADS.