after a year or less of mourning. The women took very much longer to re-couple, if at all.
Back on the year that is gone, with what I hope is perhaps a glint of the old eye to come, there is of course the house on the canal where mother lay a-dying, in the late autumn, after her long viduity.
He starts, plays the section again and, murmuring the word, goes off in search of a dictionary from which he reads a long definition that puzzles, then amuses him. Is it the word itself, the fact that he no longer quite recognizes it, or that his mother is at last off to join his father that gives Krapp momentary pleasure?
Sylvia Plath’s devastating poem ‘Widow’ has a near-Gothic resonance – ‘widow’ is a word that consumes itself, a dead syllable with a shadow of an echo, a ‘great, vacant estate!’. Daddy’s idealizing daughter, Plath was her mother Aurelia’s alone from the age of eight. It was a relationship fraught with difficulty. Plath rarely manifested her deeper thoughts to her mother. She enacted them in suicide attempts instead. Aurelia outlived her by thirty-one years, a terrible fate for both. The widow wears death as a dress, Plath writes.
Freud uses the word ‘widow’ only three times in all the twenty-three volumes of his work in English. It was the loss of the father that spurred his thinking and his seminal The Interpretation of Dreams; and later, like Darwin, the terrible loss of a daughter. Darwin and his wife Emma treasured a box full of their little Anna’s keepsakes – discovered at their home, Down House, long after their deaths. Freud, who stoically eschewed sentiment, nonetheless made one of his great discoveries about absence and how it can be contained and mastered by repetition through his daughter Sophie’s son, Ernst, and his game of ‘fort/da’ – Gone and Here. This consisted of the child throwing a spool on a string out of his cot and retrieving it while uttering the words: the child’s ability to control the going and coming of his toy transformed an unhappy situation – parental absence – into a manageable one through a repeated game. If at the time eighteen-month-old Ernst played this game, his mother was not yet permanently gone, when Freud published Beyond the Pleasure Principle, she was.
Some might speculate that Freud’s resistance to thinking directly about the condition of those left behind by their spouses is not unlinked to the fact that his own, rather demanding, mother outlived his father by thirty-four years and died only nine before her eldest son. Widows, female or male, don’t even come into The Psychopathology of Everyday Life where you’d imagine they’d be rampant. But, then, widows are scary people – or scared people, which may not always be far from the first.
Freud’s first use of the word ‘widow’ is in relation to anxiety caused by abstinence, the second in the context of a taboo among many native peoples against consorting with the dead. Illness and death seem to be contagious, so the prohibitions stretch to widows and widowers. In some places, the very presence of people who have been close to the dead is considered unlucky, and may indeed kill those who lay eyes, certainly hands, upon her or him. Lurking behind such practices, and the sense of threat surrounding the widow, Freud suggests, is the danger of temptation.
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