Abstract
In previous writings, I have argued that the 3-to-5-year-old boy’s emotional separation from his mother is the key experience in his development of a melancholic orientation to life (Capps, Men, religion, and melancholia: James, Otto, Jung, and Erikson, 1997) and that men’s religious proclivities (based on honor, hope, and humor) reflect this emotional separation (Capps, Male melancholia: Guilt, separation, and repressed rage, 2001). In an earlier article published in Pastoral Psychology (Capps, Leonardo’s Mona Lisa: Iconic center of male melancholic religion, 2004), I argued that Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa is the iconic center of the male melancholic religion, that it displaces the Virgin Mother Mary of traditional Christianity in this regard, and that the painting aids in the difficult task of transforming melancholia into the mourning of the lost maternal object. In this article, I argue that James McNeill Whistler’s painting of his mother plays a similar role in male melancholic religion, but with an important variation: I use Ernst Troeltsch’s classic church-sect typology to show that Leonardo’s Mona Lisa is the iconic center of the churchly form of male melancholic religion, while Whistler’s mother is the devotional center of its sectarian form.
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Notes
Freud compares the smile of Mona Lisa with those of the Virgin Mary and St. Anne in Leonardo’s The Virgin With Child and St. Anne. St. Anne is the grandmother of Jesus, and is believed by traditional Roman Catholics to have conceived her daughter, Mary, “immaculately,” that is, without the “original sin” normally transmitted by the act of sexual intercourse. In the fifteenth century, she appeared to Saint Colette in a vision, and confirmed rumors that she had been married three times (Kelly and Rogers 1993, p. 20).
I have pointed out that “there is nothing comparable to the Hindu goddess Kali—that bloodthirsty goddess who hates her children—in the Christianized West, only a highly idealized Virgin Mother who is without sin and harbors no evil thoughts” (Capps 2001, p. 157). A psychosocial study that challenges the universality of this view of the Virgin Mary nonetheless supports my general point. In Madonnas That Maim: Popular Catholicism in Italy Since the Fifteen Century, Michael P. Carroll (1992) explores popular views of the Virgin Mary in southern Italy, and shows that the Madonna has often been viewed at the local level as the agent of epidemics and natural disasters. He suggests, however, that these views of the Madonna as both nurturer and malevolent, which are “very much outside the official Catholic mainstream” (p. 87), reflect the predilection toward masochism among Italian males (p. 156). He offers a psychoanalytic explanation for this masochistic tendency, noting that the form of family organization (the father-ineffective family), especially found in southern Italy, “engenders in sons a strong but strongly repressed desire for the mother. This produces a strong sense of guilt and a resultant desire for self-punishment in these sons” (p. 158). The fact that ambivalent feelings of sons toward their mothers take the form of masochism suggests that even in this unapproved expression of Marian devotion, the son is unable to give vent to feelings of hatred and rage against the Virgin Mother.
Pater’s melancholia is also reflected in his fragmentary story, “The Child in the House,” written in 1878. It is the story of a man who dreams of his childhood home, and of his estrangement from it. In his discussion of the story, Anthony Vidler (1992) suggests that the story is semi-autobiographical, and notes that the dream conveys “a sense of primary narcissism” and gives “an uncanny aura to the memory of the house, a repetition of something half suppressed in the mind” (p. 58, emphasis added). Vidler does not make a direct association between Pater’s memory of the house and his mother, but such an association is implied in his use of the psychoanalytic concept of primary narcissism.
In my book, Young Clergy: A Biographical-Developmental Study (Binghamton, NY:Haworth Press, 2005), I argued that the years between 35–40 are absolutely decisive for the course of a man’s professional career. Whistler was in the exact middle of this period when he painted the portrait which was to become his most famous painting.
The French painter, Edgar Degas, who, according to Walden, was “a vastly superior artist, “once remarked to Whistler, “It must be very tiring to keep up the role of the butterfly. Better to be an old bull like me?” (Walden, p. 25).
The obituary also notes that he studied under the French painter, Charles Gabriel Gleyre, “who was a painter of classic and early Christian subjects in the Neo-Greek style,” but “Needless to say, one looks in vain in Whistler’s work for any trace of Gleyre’s teaching.” The implication here is that Whistler was a poor pupil, a young man who was unwilling to sit under the tutelage of an experienced painter.
Despite these elaborate precautions, the painting was slightly damaged in transit from Kansas City to Baltimore, but this fact was withheld from journalists, and when the painting was returned to the Louvre, the damage was not disclosed to officials at the Louvre, and they apparently did not notice it.
In their article on Miss Lonelyhearts, a novella by the American writer Nathaniel West published in 1933, the year that Whistler’s Mother was touring the USA, Scheurich and Mullen (2006) note the absence of hope in the main character of the novella, a male advice columnist, whose “nihilistic” worldview is totally devoid of hope.
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Capps, D. Whistler’s Mother: Devotional Center of Male Melancholic Religion. Pastoral Psychol 56, 375–401 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-007-0116-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-007-0116-8