What would you think if your Mum sent you this?

[Autumnleavesfluttering]

"Perhaps that's how it is for every woman. The repression your female ancestors suffered accumulates over the generations, resentment building in daughter, granddaughter and great-granddaughter like hair clogging a washing machine filter, until along comes a child who is so pumped full of fury that she kicks all obstructions out of the way.

I became the receptacle for her pain, her fury, her bitterness...
I dragged it behind me as an ox drags its plough

• Violette Leduc, La Batarde, 1964

• from a book by Viv Albertine. I haven't read the book, so don't know the wider context.

What do you think it means? In particular, the part about the receptacle for pain etc?

Drunk.

I'd think she's been on the sauce.

medication.

Ask her. I'm interested, I might even agree a bit.....

Sounds like she's trying to justify being a twat towards you.

Definitely not drunk. I can't ask her, no.

resentment building in daughter, granddaughter and great-granddaughter like hair clogging a washing machine filter

I'd be surprised at the inelegance of her simile.

I kind of like it- assuming the context isn't awful. She means that all the societal resentment builds up until some one further down the line snaps (and hopefully pulls down the establishment as opposed to being destroyed by it). And the receptacle of her pain means you carry the pain etc of the person before you and it becomes your burden and pain.

I suppose what I'm not sure of is whether it is talking about the mother 'dragging' the child's pain behind them? Or is it the child carrying the mother's pain?

So like in Ireland maybe women now pull the burden of mother and baby homes behind us and carry that pain and resentment even though it didn't happen to us, or women being denied abortion, or general shit rights. And even though I'm educated and experience equal rights etc I feel the resentment of the past.

I'd think she's been on the Gin.

Child dragging the mothers pain- I think

It sounds to me as if you and your mum have/had a very challenging and difficult relationship and she is looking for answers. She now believes she has found them and she considers your behaviour towards her is what is at fault. She is hurt but sort of reaching out. She wants you to realise what (she considers) your behaviour has done to her.

I presume you have gone NC with her?

I'd think she was a fierce feminist who was in the middle of a wider conversation with you or someone else (and wrongly messaged you) about the wider context of this theory.
It is in no way negative.

A lot depends on your relationship with her. However, my first take on this is:

See it from her perspective. You are her child. Therefore you are the ‘child who is so pumped full of fury that she kicks all obstructions out of the way’. And given the previous sentence about obstructions, that could be a good thing.

This is interesting..definitely am reading it as the child takes the burden..

Is it sort of like 'Man hands on misery to man', only specifically focusing on the wrongs done to women and the way we women carry the generational anger forward?

From that perspective it sounds like an attempt at female solidarity, and possibly an attempt at paying you a compliment - maybe you're the child who kicks all obstacles out of the way? It does suggest it's not been easy for her either though.

That's one interpretation anyway!

Sounds like you are the child filled with fury.

I suspect that you and she have a difficult relationship: she expects you to toe the line but you never did. You feel stifled and constricted but she said she just wanted to guide you and not control you.

Thanks for the insights, all.

No we are not NC. However, we have at times had a difficult and painful relationship in the past. Not now though.

I'm thinking the child is the one who breaks down patriarchy, and lashes out at the parent, and it's painful for the parent but she understands why the child behaves that way

It's a feminist statement, not about mother and child relationships surely.

The awareness of, anger at, and pain caused by the repression of woman grows with each generation. Eventually a generation comes along who says fuck this and kicks back overthrowing the system that represses women.

Nothing do with you and her personality. Surely!

Almost all of Violette Leduc’s work is autobiographical. This work, “The Bastard,” a name we are told she used for herself, reflects her early life through the German occupation of France in WWII, although she wrote this book in 1964. Leduc was a bisexual who wrote about sex with such frankness that some of her work was censored or went unpublished. She had affairs with women and gay men and for a while was married to a straight man. She worked for a time as an editor and publicist in a mainstream Paris publishing house and many leading French writers became friends of hers and mentors: Andree Gide, Simone de Beauvoir and George Bernanos (Diary of a Country Priest, Mouchette). Camus, Sartre and Genet praised her writing. Folks like Collette, James Joyce and Vincent Van Gough have walk-on roles in the story. Her (non-sexual) affair with a gay man was Maurice Sachs who was writing Witches’ Sabbath at the time.

Leduc blamed her mother for her problems, but the reader, even with Leduc as prosecutor and no chance to hear from the defense, has a hard time seeing exactly what the problem was. Her mother supported her, took her in multiple times when she was down and out, and apparently stuck by her without a blink when she was expelled from a girl’s school for having an affair with a female teaching assistant, who was fired. Leduc felt she was ugly because she had a large nose. In her thirties she had an operation to reduce it but of course she was not satisfied. One of her lovers says to her “You will never be satisfied” and another tells her “You’re simply crammed with neuroses” but it goes beyond that: the reader wonders how can a person try so hard to be unhappy and to be discontented? Leduc herself writes that she told her schoolmates “I said I shall be the anvil on which I forge my own sorrow.” They replied “Violette Leduc is nuts.”

Maybe just send her a "Lol 👍"?

We are both feminists, and in alignment in our feminist thinking.