"A child too, can never grasp the fact that the same mother who cooks so well, is so concerned about his cough, and helps so kindly with his homework, in some circumstance has no more feeling than a wall of his hidden inner world"
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The sting of Miller's line is how it weaponizes domestic intimacy. She sets up the mother as the archetype of care - good food, vigilant concern, gentle help with homework - then swivels abruptly to a quieter cruelty: in one crucial dimension, she is "no more feeling than a wall". Not a villain, not even unkind. Just impermeable.
The intent isn't to accuse mothers of hypocrisy; it's to name a child's first encounter with the limits of being seen. Children are trained to read care as total comprehension: if someone tends your body and your schedule, surely they also understand your private self. Miller punctures that assumption. The "hidden inner world" is telling: the child has secrets, shame, fantasies, fears he can't articulate. The wall isn't just the mother's emotional distance; it's the architecture of family roles. A parent can be competent, loving, even tender, and still be locked out of the child's interior, partly because the child is locked inside it.
As a poet writing in an era when motherhood was romanticized as instinctive omniscience, Miller lets the sentence do the cultural critique. The long, accumulating list of nurturances mimics how a child inventories proof of love. The phrase "in some circumstance" slips in like a legal clause: there are conditions under which the maternal figure becomes unreachably adult, bound by propriety, fatigue, or her own unspoken life. The subtext is modern: emotional literacy isn't guaranteed by devotion. Sometimes the most familiar face is the one that can't cross the threshold.
The intent isn't to accuse mothers of hypocrisy; it's to name a child's first encounter with the limits of being seen. Children are trained to read care as total comprehension: if someone tends your body and your schedule, surely they also understand your private self. Miller punctures that assumption. The "hidden inner world" is telling: the child has secrets, shame, fantasies, fears he can't articulate. The wall isn't just the mother's emotional distance; it's the architecture of family roles. A parent can be competent, loving, even tender, and still be locked out of the child's interior, partly because the child is locked inside it.
As a poet writing in an era when motherhood was romanticized as instinctive omniscience, Miller lets the sentence do the cultural critique. The long, accumulating list of nurturances mimics how a child inventories proof of love. The phrase "in some circumstance" slips in like a legal clause: there are conditions under which the maternal figure becomes unreachably adult, bound by propriety, fatigue, or her own unspoken life. The subtext is modern: emotional literacy isn't guaranteed by devotion. Sometimes the most familiar face is the one that can't cross the threshold.
Quote Details
| Topic | Mother |
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