Fierce Attachments: In and Out of Space

Fierce Attachments describes a journey through time and space.  The book is split into two distinct sections: the first seems devoted to surveying the terrain and the second, to discovering the ways in which the author is defined, and confined, by space.  In carefully constructed flashbacks, triggered by the narrator and her mother’s loaded conversations, Vivian Gornick recreates a childhood spent within the confines of her family’s apartment and the surrounding flats.   Present day conversations are woven into scenes of the past.  The author and her mother walk, tracing and retracing a map of Manhattan as they replay scenes from a shared history.  These beaten paths contrast with those in and around the Bronx tenements of the 40s.

The kitchen is where much of the early action occurs, where her mother irons, cooks, and does dishes with an air of bored efficiency.  It is also the site from which she analyzes and interprets the clothing line dramas happening beyond the window. “She heard every voice, every motion of the clothesline, every flap of the sheet, every communication.  We laughed together over this one’s broken English, that one’s loud mouthed indiscretion, a screech here, a fabulous curse there.  Her running commentary on the life outside the window was my first taste of the fruits of intelligence: she knew how to convert gossip into knowledge.” (15)  It is in this domain that her mother dispenses wisdom and advice to those of her circle that she perceives to be less “developed” than she is.

In early days, Gornick’s is a life of relative privilege.  The location of their flat (to the front of the building), the orderliness of the rooms, and the placement of the furniture all lend to the space a quality of richness that is continually contrasted with that of the neighbor’s flats, and what they do or do not contain.  Their neighbor Nettie’s apartment is filled with beautiful, impractical things and reflect its owners own love of the sensual and aversion to the ordinary. Marilyn’s apartment is in shambles due to her mother’s eccentric nature and poor housekeeping.

While Gornick’s father is for the most part invisible in the narrative, he is presented as a source of strength and stability for her mother.  She sees him as a vital part of what sets her family apart and above the other tenement dwellers.  Hers is a marriage based on love.  Love is a valuable and seemingly scarce commodity in the community.  It elevates the narrator’s mother to a higher plane from which she can judge, advise, and direct.  Her privilege is also revealed in her neighbors’ esteem, but also in their eventual resentment.  

The other idea that sets the narrator’s mother apart from her peers is work, political work, work that takes her into the world.  While she is continually hungry for it, the ideas of love and work are mutually exclusive; a woman must choose one or the other.  She chooses love, and spends her life defending that choice.

The girl Gornick soon sees the holes in her mother’s veneer of “development.”  She learns from a quiet observation of the people around her that life is more complicated than her mother would have her believe.  People who her mother would dismiss with words like whore and idiot have a disorienting beauty and power that exist outside of her life’s defined space. 

Gornick’s mother continues to choose love, her ideal of romantic love for her husband, even after her love object’s untimely death, though it’s never clear he was even necessary to its expression.  She makes herself a martyr to her love, refuses any consolation life would offer her, and refuses to acknowledge the pain her grief causes others: 

“She could not see that her  insistent unhappiness was an accusation and a judgment.  ‘You?’ it said with each resentful sigh.  ‘You’re not the right one.  You cannot deliver up comfort, pleasure, amelioration.  But you are my dearest of dears. Your appointed task is to understand, your destiny to live with the daily knowledge that you are insufficient to cure my life of its deprivation.’” (126)  

Her daughter, a terrified witness to her mother’s despair and inertia, is determined to choose differently.

The first opportunity the narrator gets to break stride with her mother comes when she enters City College and learns a language out of her mother’s depth, a new language that makes her an outsider.  “[College] provoked and nourished an unshared life inside the head that became a piece of treason.  I lived among my people but was no longer one of them.” (105)  This creates tension; she is out of step with her mother, who, confused by the change in dynamic, is confronted with an unforeseen threat to her security and superiority.   Discovering things she does not know upsets her world view, shakes her certainty in the path she has taken.  Her daughter, the narrator, sees this disconnect as an opportunity to escape, not only the confines of her mother’s unyielding  values and judgement, but also of her mother’s fate.

From this point in the piece, Gornick continues to explore the themes of love and work as she mines her own history.  Love continues to hold an idealized place that is defined by what she hasn’t found, rather than what she has directly experienced.  Her lovers fall short of the ideal, and it is in the space between the experience and the standard, a standard set by her mother, that she creates her definition.  She struggles to connect with her first husband, with whom she shares a tension both artists define as the inability to work.  As she describes the confines of their shared space, she also embarks on an exploration of a new inner space directly tied to this idea of work and its capacity for filling her up:

“In the second year of my marriage, the rectangular space made it’s first appearance inside me.  I was writing an essay, a piece of graduate student criticism that had flowered without warning into thought, radiant, shapely thought....In the middle of the rectangle only my image, waiting patiently to clarify itself.  I experienced a joy then I knew nothing else would ever equal.  Not an “I love you” in the world could touch it.  Inside that joy I was safe and erotic, excited and at peace, beyond threat or influence.” (152)

At this point, the “present day” conversations with her mother diminish and Gornick’s personal journey takes precedence.  Gornick’s mother (and other people from the neighborhood, like Nettie) become disembodied heads floating in her imagination or echoes over phone lines.  While there is this gap in direct contact between Gornick and her mother, Gornick and her community, she gives the impression that her choices revolve around her mother’s feelings and opinions.  Her impulse is to shrug off her mother’s influence and traverse her own landscape, but inevitably, she ends up at the same place:  “It was almost as though I chose men who would ensure I’d arrive back at this moment, depressed and paralyzed by the failure of love.” (189)

The book ends with the dissolution of the narrator’s most enduring love affair, though arguably doomed from the start because of the confined space it is forced to inhabit.  At this point in the narrative she has developed a new way of thinking about her mother, a new way of being with her.  Most poignantly, she has reintegrated her mother’s life into her own: 

“‘You remember!’  She smiles beatifically at me.  ‘Look at that.  She remembers.  I can’t remember.  She remembers.’

‘I am the repository for your life now, Ma.’” (196)

She seems finally, through years of shared conversation tracing the past, examining points at which their steps merged and diverged, to have settled into an idea of herself as an individual, while at the same time, acknowledging her deep attachment to mother and the inevitable impact she had on her journey.