Amor matris
Amor matris
In Brief
Watching the pitiful Sargent copy his sums in Nestor, Stephen
thinks, "Yet someone had loved him, borne him in her arms and
in her heart. But for her the race of the world would have
trampled him underfoot, a squashed boneless snail. She had
loved his weak watery blood drained from her own. Was that
then real? The only true thing in life?" A little later, he
calls this true thing "Amor matris: subjective and
objective genitive." The Latin phrase means "love of mother,"
but matris could be "subjective" genitive, meaning
that the mother is the subject feeling the love, or
"objective" in the sense that she is the object for whom the
child feels love. Both kinds of love are crucially important
to Stephen, judging by details in his fictional history and in
Joyce's own life.
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Mother love preoccupies Stephen because he feels he poorly
repaid his own mother's protective care. Like Sargent's, his
mother saved him from the world's indifference: "She was no
more: the trembling skeleton of a twig burnt in the fire, an
odour of rosewood and wetted ashes. She had saved him from
being trampled underfoot and had gone, scarcely having
been." But, having counted on this protection thoughout his
childhood and adolescence, he subordinated his mother's
spiritual needs to his own (as any healthy child must) when it
came time to define himself as an adult. As an apostate, he
refused to pray at her bedside,
and he deflects his terrible Catholic guilt over that action
by identifying with an early saint who chose religious faith
over attachment to his mother: "His mother's prostrate body
the fiery Columbanus in
holy zeal bestrode."
This decisive development has taken place in the unnarrated
space between the end of A Portrait of the Artist and
the beginning of Ulysses, but Joyce has prepared his
readers for it in the final section of A Portrait. There,
Stephen's friend Cranly
has said, "Whatever else is unsure in this stinking
dunghill of a world a mother's love is not. Your
mother brings you into the world, carries you first in her
body. What do we know about how she feels? But
whatever she feels, it, at least, must be real." Stephen
has resisted Cranly's call to honor the supreme reality of "a
mother's love," asking him what he thinks of Pascal, who
"would not suffer his mother to kiss him as he feared the
contact of her sex," or Aloysius Gonzaga who "was of the same
mind," or Jesus who "seems to have treated his mother with
scant courtesy in public."
After some further conversation, he decides that Cranly's
devotion to women disqualifies him for Stephen's friendship:
"He had spoken of a mother's love. He felt then the sufferings
of women, the weaknesses of their bodies and souls: and would
shield them with a strong and resolute arm and bow his mind to
them...Away then: it is time to go. A voice spoke softly to
Stephen's lonely heart, bidding him go and telling him that
his friendship was coming to an end. Yes; he would go. He
could not strive against another." Attachment to one's mother
becomes associated in his thinking, then, with heterosexual
desire, and both of them feel like hindrances on his path to
spiritual independence. But things have changed by the time
represented in Ulysses. Heterosexual love now appears
to be not a stumbling block on Stephen's path to adulthood,
but its necessary first step.
As Stephen thinks in Scylla and Charybdis, "And my
turn? When? / Come!"
Furthermore, the link between heterosexual love and amor
matris seems to have persisted in Joyce's adult life,
making his love for Nora in some ways an attempt to recapture
the lost bond with his mother. Ellmann observes that on Sept.
2, 1909 he wrote to Nora, in language strongly reminiscent of
Cranly's words in A Portrait and Stephen's in Nestor,
"O that I could nestle in your womb like a child born of your
flesh and blood, be fed by your blood, sleep in the warm
secret gloom of your body" (293). Later in life, Ellmann
notes, Maria Jolas remarked, that "'Joyce talked of fatherhood
as if it were motherhood.' He seems to have longed to
establish in himself all aspects of the bond of mother and
child. He was attracted, particularly, by the image of himself
as a weak child cherished by a strong woman, which seems
closely connected with the images of himself as a victim,
whether as a deer pursued by hunters, as a passive man
surrounded by burly extroverts, as a Jesus or Parnell among
traitors. His favorite characters are those who in one way or
another retreat before masculinity, yet are loved regardless
by motherly women" (293).
As for Cranly's notion that a mother's love is more real than
anything else in one's life—"The only true thing in life,"
as Stephen says in Nestor—Joyce once remarked to
Stanislaus that "There are only two forms of love in the
world, the love of a mother for her child and the love of a
man for lies" (293).
