"I believe that always, or almost always, in all childhoods and in all the lives that follow them, the mother represents madness. Our mothers always remain the strangest, craziest people we've ever met"
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Duras takes the safest figure in the cultural imagination - the mother - and spikes her with danger. Not cruelty, not villainy, but "madness": a word that yanks motherhood out of the sentimental and into the psychic. The opening hedge ("always, or almost always") is doing real work. It sounds like reasonableness, even modesty, while smuggling in a near-universal claim: the mother is our first encounter with irrational intensity, with a person who seems to live by laws that don't match the outside world.
The subtext is less about diagnosing mothers than describing the child's position. Childhood is a regime of asymmetry: your survival depends on someone whose moods, desires, and contradictions you can't interpret. To a child, that can feel like madness, because the mother is both omnipotent and opaque. Duras makes that strangeness permanent: "in all the lives that follow them". The mother becomes a template for later relationships - love that doesn't fully make sense, authority that is intimate, tenderness that can be frightening because it is so total.
Calling mothers "the strangest, craziest people we've ever met" also flips the usual hierarchy. We think we grow up and finally understand the adults; Duras suggests we never quite outgrow the original enigma. In her wider work, where desire, family, and trauma blur into obsession and memory, "madness" reads as the name for excess: the mother's capacity to exceed social scripts, to be too much, and therefore unforgettable. The line stings because it admits what polite culture represses: our first love is also our first uncanniness.
The subtext is less about diagnosing mothers than describing the child's position. Childhood is a regime of asymmetry: your survival depends on someone whose moods, desires, and contradictions you can't interpret. To a child, that can feel like madness, because the mother is both omnipotent and opaque. Duras makes that strangeness permanent: "in all the lives that follow them". The mother becomes a template for later relationships - love that doesn't fully make sense, authority that is intimate, tenderness that can be frightening because it is so total.
Calling mothers "the strangest, craziest people we've ever met" also flips the usual hierarchy. We think we grow up and finally understand the adults; Duras suggests we never quite outgrow the original enigma. In her wider work, where desire, family, and trauma blur into obsession and memory, "madness" reads as the name for excess: the mother's capacity to exceed social scripts, to be too much, and therefore unforgettable. The line stings because it admits what polite culture represses: our first love is also our first uncanniness.
Quote Details
| Topic | Mother |
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