IV. The Distributed Unconscious of Performing Mothers
The virtual mothering of Korean birthmothers is embedded in the trauma of adoption. The “repetitive, involuntary, obsessive” accounts of dreams, incorporation, and fantasies of reunion are characteristic of what Marianne Hirsch and Valerie Smith have described as the convoluted relationship between trauma and memory.1 The unconscious topography of birthmothers suggests the birthmothers’ entangled relationship with loss—loss of the baby, as well as the ideal of motherhood—and thus constitutes a complex, contradictory subjectivity.
Cathy Caruth argues that the traumatic event is an experience that the subject witnesses but cannot easily remember, if at all. Central to this conception of trauma is its unknown, emergent nature: “trauma repeats itself and demands a belated experience.”2 In this instance, the women’s unspeakable losses haunt them through various processes, including incorporation, reunion fantasies, and dreams, as in the following account:
ID: 정환맘
Date: 2001.11.11 23:54
How are you all doing? Today, I bought a rainbow rice cake [which a baby is supposed to eat on the 100th day of its life]. As I ate it in order to celebrate, instead of my baby, tears came along.
Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok argue that incorporation occurs when there is “no other choice but to perpetuate a clandestine pleasure by transforming it, after it has been lost, into an intrapsychic secret”:
Everything will be swallowed along with the trauma that led to the loss. Swallowed and preserved. Inexpressible mourning erects a secret tomb inside the subject . . . the loss is buried alive in the crypt as a full-fledged person.3
By swallowing a rainbow rice cake, the birthmother “buries” her living baby in her body, effectively turning herself into a “crypt.” This act of incorporation brings two incompatible lost love objects—the baby and the ideal of traditional motherhood—into coexistence within her body. Anne Anlin Cheng further focuses on the consequences of “swallowing” on the development of a melancholic subjectivity. She emphasizes that the melancholic subject’s ambivalence continues after swallowing the object that inspires not just love, but also profound resentment. This resentment leads to “the multiple layers of denial and exclusion that the melancholic must exercise in order to maintain this elaborate structure of loss but-not-the-loss.”4
Numerous women on The Sad Love Stories site manage to survive this life-death crisis by entertaining the fantasy of return and reunion with the baby. As Cheng suggests, the birthmothers’ losses sometimes are disguised as fictions of possession. In other words, the fantasy relies on a fictionalized narrative of adoption where the baby is studying “abroad at a little bit younger age compared to others” or “traveling right now.” Both accounts illustrate the denial of loss by suggesting an inevitable “homecoming” and reunion between mother and child.
The most prevalent fantasy of reunion defers the birthmothers’ motherhood until later in her life. Now, the story goes, they are too young, too poor, too unmarried to raise their child:
I am becoming a mother whom my baby will not feel ashamed of. So I should not drink. Until the time we meet again, I will live earnestly. I am going to study hard and enter college.
This young, unmarried, uneducated woman expresses a determination to live up to ideal of womanhood and motherhood. The vast majority of posts that express such hope for a future reunion suggest that the birthmothers’ subjectivity is built on “this elaborate structure of loss but-not-the-loss” through the deferral—rather than renunciation—of their motherhood.
The chronicling of the birthmother’s dreams further testify to the trauma and ambivalence surrounding her child’s adoption. Caruth described the traumatic moment as “an unexpected or overwhelming violent event or events that are not fully grasped as they occur, but return later in repeated flashbacks, nightmares, and other repetitive phenomena.”5 Adoption as experienced by many of these women—itself a series of violent events: the ostracization precipitated by a socially unaccepted pregnancy, the separation from the baby at birth, a second separation at adoption—is never fully experienced, and thus returns in the form of dreams. Consider:
ID: 혀니
Date: 2002.05.18 23:31
I saw you in my dream not long ago. You are really sick. I woke up and couldn’t go back to sleep thinking what if my baby is really sick.
ID: 보이지 않는 사랑
Date: 2005.06.10 06:13
I was holding my Haemin and feeling so happy in my dream a few days ago, you know my baby called me “UMMA” there . . . I wish I stayed in my dream . . . I woke up. I saw myself trying to fall asleep once more to stay with my baby, which made me really sad.
Though both dreams repeat the women’s traumas by inflicting a sense of guilt and anguish, they constitute the very conditions for the birthmothers’ survival by transforming them into virtual but also good—i.e., caring, worrying, attentive—mothers.
- Marianne Hirsch and Valeri Smith, “Feminism and Cultural Memory,” Signs 28, no. 1 (2002): 1-19. [↩]
- Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experiences (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996) [↩]
- Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok, The Shell and the Kernel, trans. Nicholas Rand (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 130-131. [↩]
- Anne Anlin Cheng, The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 9. [↩]
- Caruth, Unclaimed Experiences. [↩]
