Aaron Antrim
Political criticism essay
Final draft
17 May 2005
On Einstein’s Daughter: Stronger Together
Einstein’s Daughter celebrates the triumph of one woman’s free will over a determining family structure. The “natural” validity of constructed norms is repeatedly challenged; freethinking is championed over the reuse of old values. The narrator’s mother’s preferences and behaviors represent antiquated social fixtures. This explains the reason the narrator describes her mother’s thoughts in a tone of condescension:
She can’t help herself; I know that. She believes what people tell her, believes there are immutable rules and consequences. She’s been taught it’s all cause and effect.
The narrator’s mother’s impulses to cling to the institution of marriage (even as her husband is gallivanting outside his marriage bed), and to expect her daughter to give herself over to a gender role, come from fear-based conditioning. Reba, the grandmother, beats the mother, justifying herself by saying “I had to teach her to be strong. I had to make her see that men will love you, leave you. They only want one thing, girl, then they will fly away from you” (403). Her defense is irrelevant and, like her abuse, irrational. In the end her abuse spawns another generation of irrational thoughts, justifications, and behaviors in her child.
One of the accomplishments of the narrator’s use of scientific language is to provide a contrast to the narrowly irrational thought and behavior of the mother figures in the story. The narrator’s (pseudo-)scientific approach as a historian, imaginer, thinker, and doer opens up her world. It is within the folds of her mind, rather than in the outside realm, that she is most free. Thus by retreating from the world she is actually embarking on an inward adventure:
I retreat to my room, crouch on my pink flowered bedspread, graph paper stretching from foot to headboard so I can record the curves of my constant curiosity. If I can write it down, I can understand it; I can rescue myself. If I can design a family tree, put down the names and events my travels have revealed, I will know where I must go and the speed and direction I must use to thwart happenstance and fate. I stare through Saturdays and Sundays at the canyon of Luke’s leavetaking, the continuous crests of my father’s takeoffs and landings. But I cannot draw the picture whole on the green and white plane. (404)
This description of the narrator’s intellectual journey and attempt to graph out her family forms a manifesto about social constructions, understanding and writing them, and the potential power offered by these understandings. She says “If I can write it down, I can understand it; I can rescue myself,” (405) stating one of the basic principles operating behind most of the social criticism work being done today. John Kerry expresses a variant on this same line of thinking when he points out that a president who refuses to acknowledge or understand the problems in Iraq will not be able to fix them.
Throughout the entire story, each element of reality is regarded as constructed and thus re-constructable. Hence the narrator’s choice of the word design when she says, “If I can design a family tree, put down the names and events my travels have revealed…”. The word “design” here suggests a certain level of arbitrary control over the product, rather than its simply mirroring an objective reality. As she designs her family tree she is creating a working model for the past, present, and future — hence, “…I will know where I must go and the speed and direction I must use to thwart happenstance and fate” (405).
The fact that the narrator speaks in terms of science (even though she uses these terms in unscientific, fanciful sentences and descriptions) also challenges the dominant notion that science and scientific language is more of a male rather than female domain. The narrator’s resistance to her mother’s stereotypically feminine world brings her more into her father’s world: “Instead I turn my attention to my father, to that part-time presence in our family of three” (404). The narrator’s father represents the world of technology (which is, of course, intertwined with science): “My father has kept flying, moving from the large, death-delivering planes of the war to the sleek, supersonic planes of commerce” (404). The narrator, like her father, also uses high-tech transport machines:
“I have a bicycle, its frame titanium, its wheels solid to slice the air and ease me into the slipstream. I have a skateboard, its deck maple, rating ninety-seven on the durometer. I have roller skates, speed skates with leather boots, urethane wheels. (406)
A central question in the text is whether the narrator should follow the examples of the males or the females in her family. Often, the narrator shows she is more ready to heed the words of her male ancestors than her female ancestors. Her grandfather whispers for her to “Speed up, speed up. See where it will take you” (402) whereas her mother shouts for her to “Slow Down!” (405), and her grandmother Reba says,
And you, my hurried granddaughter, your mother must make you sit still and listen. She must keep you safe. Put you in high-healed shoes and doubleknot the ties. Plait heavy ribbons in your hair. Starch your shirts, layer you in petticoats. Make you stay clean and fresh. (403)
The narrator is striving towards freedom from these restraints of femininity. The narrator’s mother plays two significant roles in illustrating this theme: her life itself represents the effects of restraint; she is also a restraining force in her daughter’s life:
Drive me home, darling, and stop at the red lights.
We creep along, my mother quiet, her seat belt fastened. I stay behind a grey-haired granny in a green finned Chevy, letting her set our pace. I last for three blocks, five, but I want my mother to see that I, unlike her, am not my mother’s daughter. I stare ahead at the road, fighting my foot pressing down, my wrist rigid above the stick shift. I say, calmly, evenly, I’m not going to let gravity wreck me. I’m not going to spend my life at home waiting for some man to show back up. The more you try to tie me to you, the faster I’m going to go. (406)
The mother anticipates her daughter will drive like a wild woman, and she absurdly instructs her to “stop at the red lights.” The daughter would like to drive faster — or, at least, she is inclined to — she fights her “foot pressing down” — but she lets a slowpoke grandmother set the pace. In the next sentence she says, “I’m not going to let gravity wreck me.” It is interesting to notice the word “wreck” which connotes automobile accidents.
Gravity explains the impulse of her foot to press down on the accelerator; will explains the deliberate restraint of her foot. The narrator favors freedom of will over restraint and determinism. She expresses her preference for freedom over determinism by resisting gravity’s downward tug on her accelerator foot, trying to drive slowly, saying “I’m not going to let gravity wreck me,” but then she expresses her preference for freedom over restraint in a way that is at odds with her earlier statement about gravity: “The more you try to tie me to you, the faster I’m going to go.” The disagreement between these two motivations poses a quandary — if she goes too slowly, she is allowing herself to be tied to her mother, too fast, and gravity will wreck her.
Her mother’s interests fall much more in line with commonly held expectations of females, and when the narrator is forced to choose between her own preferences or her mother’s, she is in effect choosing between her own inclinations and some stereotypical notion of what she should gravitate towards. In this way, the “mother’s eye” represents some more general force, unspecific to her mother:
I edge toward the jean jackets. Her mother’s eye draws me back beside the long-sleeved lace blouses that stain so easily, the silk dresses intended only for dancing and desire, for slow movement toward tradition resolutions. (406)
In the end, she escapes the quandary where individual fulfillment can be achieved at the expense of another. She successfully resists being controlled by the metaphorical “mother’s eye,” but not by insensitively abandoning her mother. In this sensitivity she is obeying the instructions of her mother: “Don’t grow up like your grandfather… Leaving people. Don’t you turn selfish like some man” (407).
She appeals to her mother to let her have freedom by showing her the limits of caged feminine roles. She does this by offering her mother a 3 rd person perspective, circling “around her lonely self at the breakfast table:”
I step toward my mother; I reach out and take her in my arms like a dancing partner. I pull her surprised, resisting body to me and whisper past her pearl earrings, “Come with me just once. There’s ceaseless motion. So much to see.”…
… I take her hand, cold and small, and yank her to the center of the floor and twirl; ease my arms around her waist, lock them behind her back and spin; pull my mother into circumrotation, circumgyrations around the fires in the railroad yard, around the yellow car, around the ironing board, around her lonely self at the breakfast table. The coffee has finished brewing when our feet touch the floor again. (407)
The narrator “filled with desire and impatience” (407) to leave, doesn’t — showing she is not “leaving people,” and has not turned “selfish like some man.” Out of concern for her mother, she waits:
To disentangle is to leave my mother where she is; to leave her standing forever in the damp heavy air of the laundry room, her knees pressed into the warm metal of the still humming dryer. To insist she continue to pull from the frayed plastic basket my father’s pale blue shirts, my own faded blue denim and chambray. “Come with me,” I tell her. “I waited for you once when you asked. I waited for life for love of you. Now you come for love of me.
In the end, the daughter’s triumph can only happen with her mother’s permission:
Her hands release me, and I rise. Anabatic I rise, heading toward the only possible destination: now, a now of my own making. She has let go of me as we both knew she should. What will she do without me? I dare not stop to ask. (408)
Mother and daughter transform are transformed from adversaries into allies, and they release themselves from the bonds reaching from the very top to the bottom of the ladder of generations. The only way freedom is possible for these two (especially for the mother) is through the help of each other, hands clasped, “opposing forces, our heels digging into the dune, our backs angled against the sand, our faces to the stars. We start to circle, feeding off each other…” (408). The narrator finally receives permission, encouragement, and strength from her mother in her quest to create a new role for herself as a female. If Einstein’s Daughter has a moral, it is that generations of women must create solidarity amongst themselves, helping and learning from each other, instead of being at odds with each other, in order to figure out and assert what it means to be a woman.