Reprinted by permission of The PANY Bulletin
Psychoanalytic Association of New York
Volume 39, Number 1 Spring 2001
Book Review
Toward Understanding Loneliness in Women
A Book Essay on Judith Hearne, Turtle Diary, and Ella Mason and Her Eleven Cats
by Arlene Kramer Richards, Ed. D. and Lucille Spira, Ph. D., C.S.W.
Many women come to treatment complaining that they are alone and lonely. others who are without partners do not complain about their loneliness, but rather focus on anxiety and feelings of helplessness. Loneliness is a concept and experience that has been of some interest to psychoanalysts and novelists alike. Aloneness and loneliness can be discrete; one can be lonely in the midst of others as well as comfortable when alone (Satran,1978; Buchholz,1997.) But chronic loneliness can be toxic (Fromm Reichmann, 1959.)
Given the prevalence of loneliness, its seriousness, and the way it can become a life style, and the reluctance of lonely patients to reveal the details of their misery, it seems useful to look to novels and poetry for observations that can lead to formulating hypotheses about the dynamics and etiology of the propensity to loneliness. Brian Moore’s Judith Hearne highlights issues faced by many lonely women and allows us to formulate hypotheses about their underlying conflicts. Judith Hearne, the eponymous heroine, is an over-forty spinster. We meet Judith as she is moving into a rooming house and learn from her musings that she is suspicious and critical of her new landlady and surround. These traits seem to contribute to her isolation. As she settles into her room, she arranges her most valued possessions; two photos, one of her deceased aunt, and the other of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. While her circumstances are meager, her manner and dress suggest that she may once have had more. This sets her apart from others in her surround and makes her potential prey.
The attention she gives to the photos emphasizes how little she has in the way of human connections. These pictures are the family she relies on to assuage her loneliness. But when Judith, an alcoholic, seeks comfort in alcohol she must turn the pictures around. This suggests that they represent an externalized harsh superego, always watching and potentially critical. Likely, they also keep her from pursuing anything that might be comforting or pleasurable including sex.
Drinking may represent impulses more generally and perhaps is not only a way to escape her bleak reality but a masturbation substitute. Consequently, she must drink too much and suffer humiliation afterward. She does not permit herself conscious sexual or aggressive fantasies, let alone acts. Likely, you have found this with a number of the women you treat who live similarly constricted lives.
Judith considers her life a failure because she is without a man and family of her own. Often, our patients express a similar view though analytic theory might lead one to see the situation as more complex; conflict might play a role. But Judith blames her circumstances on her deceased aunt whom she nursed for decades and who disapproved of the one man who came forward. It would have been inconceivable for her to separate from her aunt while she was alive. Now that the aunt is dead, it is hard for Judith to let go of the aunt’s values, further reinforced by her religion, and find ones more appropriate to her adult needs and the choices available.
Alcohol is Judith’s usual respite, although it causes harm as it contributes to her bad self feelings. Jarvis (1965) might explain the compulsive drinking as rooted in what she found to be the tendency of lonely children to adopt compulsive behaviors. Bruch’s (1958) idea about the way fearful adolescents use compulsive eating to avoid social interaction by making themselves less acceptable to peers may have relevance here as well, with alcohol substituting for overeating.
Judith is preoccupied with her limited finances. Her meager financial resources can be understood as a metaphor for a paucity of good objects, as well as interests. While early on she could have been considered a victim of circumstance-the loss of her parents at an early age, the selfish aunt who demanded she forego her aspirations, and the cultural constraints confronting a Catholic woman in Ireland-but this is not the whole story. Later, Judith becomes her own enemy through her self-criticism, holding onto rescue fantasies and destructive drinking.
Her downfall comes in the form of a nervous breakdown. After years of keeping herself back, she convinces herself she is in love with a man whom she incorrectly assumes has feelings for her, only to learn that he is looking for a financial rather than a marital partner. Her humiliation is magnified because, as Judith tells us, in her younger and more hopeful years she would never have considered this lower-class man. Adding to the irony is the reader’s awareness that Judith does not know that he has forced himself on the young household maid.
As the precarious psychological balance that Judith had organized begins to crumble, all those toward whom she turns fail her, including a family friend, her confessor, and the Sacred Heart of Jesus. It’s as if to outsiders the intensity of her suffering is invisible. At the end of the novel, we find Judith in a sanitarium having lost the little autonomy she had. Although one gets the sense her former balance will be restored, it seems unlikely that Judith will again be hopeful. The novel suggests that the lonely spinster is prey to the unconscious thrall of her fantasy of pleasing and loving both of her parents in the form of the aunt and the Sacred Heart, distorted by her religious beliefs and her fantasies of double Oedipal victory. It is our hypothesis that it is her insistence on the double victory, being the best beloved of both father and mother, that makes her dreams impossible to realize and ultimately leaves her chronically alone.
Sylvia Plath has shown the plight of another lonely spinster in her poem “Ella Mason.” Ella keeps cats, eleven of them, at least. Plath tells us that people have decided that someone who accommodates so many cats must be addled. In Plath’s description of Ella as rum and red faced, there is the suggestion that she is an alcoholic who has displaced the many suitors she once had with cats. Ella’s fat and messy state is contrasted with her earlier image: “Village stories go that in olden days/ Ella flounced about, minx-thin and haughty,/ a fashionable beauty,/ slaying dandies with her emerald eyes.” Plath suggests that her green eyed envy and her narcissistic refusals of suitors have led to her later loneliness. The portrayal of the suitors as dandies suggests that they could have been envious of her as well. The cats may be a bisexual symbol condensing male and female as it can stand in for a “pussy” as well as a man. Putting herself behind closed doors suggests shame and guilt as well as the opportunity for masturbation and masturbatory equivalents like alcoholism. Here we do not know what made her so angry that she would “slay” her suitors, but her solution of being single and having so many cat offspring may be a clue. If these are offspring she can have without a partner, she is complete in herself and has all that is needed to be whole. She has it all and need not envy any man for what he has and she does not have. Her guilt for slaying her suitors keeps her in her lonely prison. These dynamics may be seen in lonely women patients as well.
Another novel, also with loneliness as a main theme, stimulates ideas about what in life and treatment may help in overcoming loneliness. Russell Hoban’s Turtle Diary gives us a very different lonely woman. While Neaera, like Judith, also experiences a scarcity of available men, she is contemplative rather than hopeless. She reflects on life’s irony when she receives a female water beetle instead of the male she had ordered for her study of predators. The accompanying note reads: “No males available.” Her wish to learn about the male water beetle seems to signal Neaera’s readiness to re-engage with a man on an intimate level. If her intellect can be used to master what is unfamiliar and perhaps feared, maybe she can approach a man as an equal rather than submit or avoid.
Her prior compromise, as a writer of children’s stories, is no longer working. She contemplates, perhaps tongue-in-cheek, and soon dismisses, an alternative solution, writing a book on tragedy directed to the children’s market: From Oedipus to Peter Rabbit. This book idea shows Neaera’s sense of humor. It can also be a clue to understanding her loneliness and life so far. Is there something about her relationship to her father that has contributed to her being alone?
We are told that her father chose her unusual name; that of a nymph in mythology. Does this mean he had a strong fantasy about who she might become? Is she in some way destined? Even if destiny had a hand, Neaera will co-write her role. Her father and her fiance died when Neaera was in her twenties. Perhaps her loneliness is a way to punish herself for being a survivor. Neaera’s curiosity about fish and aquaria developed at her father’s side. It is not surprising that her interest in aquatic life has a part in the act that becomes critical to her coming out of her shell. As the story unfolds, circumstances converge and Neaera finds William, first in a bookstore and later in the zoo’s aquarium. Like Neaera, he too is awakening to the idea that passion is missing in his life.
Both Neaera and William empathize when they see creatures living in ways unlike that which nature intended. The giant turtles in the aquarium are the focus of their compassion. Freeing the turtles, with the zookeeper quietly colluding, becomes the means by which Neaera and William, also maybe the zookeeper, decide to fulfill their larger purpose. Predictably, the place where they discharge the turtles, as it connects them with their fathers, resonates with memories from both from Neaera’s and William’s childhood. After the turtles are freed William returns to his life, but with a sense of inner peace. Neaera is courted by the kindly-wise zookeeper. Possibly, he can satisfy both romantic and paternal longings.
Love did not simply come to Neaera. It seems as if adult love became possible as a result of her humane act. How can the freedom that results from liberating the turtles be understood? A Kleinian interpretation might see freeing the turtles as a form of reparations. One wonders how it might have gone for Judith Hearne, Ella Mason and our lonely patients, if reparations, not penance, was their response to guilt.
References
Adler, G. and Buie, D. H., Jr. (1979). Aloneness and borderline psychotherapy: the possible relevance of child development issues, International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 60: 83-96.
Bergmann, M.V. (1985). The effects of role reversal on delayed marriage and maternity, Psychoanaytic Study of the Child, 40:197-219.
Bruch, H. (1958). Developmental obesity and schizophrenia. Psychiatry, 21: 65-70.
Buchhoiz, E. (1997). The Call of Solitude: Alonetime in a World of Attachment, New York: Simon & Shuster.
Fromm-Reichmann, F. (1959). Loneliness, Psychiatry, 22: 1-15.
Hoban, R. (1975) Turtle Diary, New York:Random House.
Jarvis, V. (1965) Loneliness and compulsion. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 13: 122-158.
Lieberman, J. S. (1991). Issues in the psychoanalytic treatment of single females over thirty. Psychoanalytic Review, 78 (2): 176-198.
Moore, B. (1955) Judith Hearne Andre Deutsch:London.
Plath, S. (1956) Ella Mason and Her Eleven Cats. In: Collected Poems, by Sylvia Plath. New York: Harper Perenial, 1992.
Satran, G. (1978). Notes on loneliness, Journal of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis, 6 (3): 281-300.