Mother daughter relationship in Mary Gordon's Cleaning Up (short story) - Essay Example

and Number Due Mary Gordon and the Mother/Daughter Relationship Although it is not one of her most mentioned stories,Mary Gordon’s “Cleaning Up” highlights the relationship between a daughter and her mentally unbalanced mother. The messages in the story are clear: never feel sorry for yourself and love your mother no matter what. “Cleaning Up” begins with Loretta, then 13, observing at scene at church in which her mother is scantily clad and screaming obscenities. She is subsequently arrested, and sent to live with fellow parishioners (the Lavin family) for six weeks.

Her mother has taught her lessons about working for what you receive; therefore, Loretta never bathes for fear that she would be “putting herself in the camp of the Lavins’ children” (p. xx). Although she doesn’t like children, she makes an effort to engage herself in play with the oldest child, John Lavin, as her way of “pa[ying] her board” (p. xx). She knew her mother would have expected this of her. Although it is never written that the Lavin family is anything but accommodating during Loretta’s stay, Loretta constantly feels like an outsider.

She is convinced that her mother’s actions caused Martine Lavin, the matriarch of the family, and other community members to see her as an inferior person. Later, when she becomes a well-educated woman, she still feels that her old community would condemn her because of her mother’s earlier behavior. “Cleaning Up” is, in parts, consistent with Gordon’s life. In the story, Loretta attains the same level of education that Gordon currently has. Loretta’s pre-college schooling is better than what Gordon was provided, but both earn a Master’s degree and use it to teach.

Mother Perpetua is Loretta’s greatest influence. According to an Internet biography, Gordon received the same kind of influence from Elizabeth Hardwick and Janice Thaddeus. Gordon actually considered becoming a nun, a lifestyle that Loretta also briefly contemplates. Finally, Loretta’s work ethic is similar to Gordon’s. Gordon worked to support herself, just like Loretta. Against her mother’s advice, Gordon performed secretarial work and babysat for Thaddeus to put herself through school.

Gordon’s own mother, though disfigured from and afflicted with polio, also worked as a secretary to support her family because her husband wouldn’t. The fact that Loretta strives as hard as her mother would have wanted her to, makes it clear that Loretta loved her mother despite the turmoil she’d created. Even though Loretta never saw her mother again, she thinks about her. Loretta’s “violation” of John Lavin at the end of the story was for her mother, so to speak. The story ends with Loretta wishing she could tell her mother what she’d done.

In “Simulation and the Authentic Self: Issues of Identity in Works by Flannery O’Connor and Mary Gordon,” Diane Prenatt writes, “But both Gordon’s and O’Connor’s characters enact the necessity of owning one’s secrets, especially those that are ‘very important’ to a sense of self, that shape an identity” (47). Prenatt means that even if you don’t let everyone in on why you are the way you are, it is still important to know it for yourself. Like Loretta, Gordon never let her problems with her mother (or her father) get in her way.

She saw those relationships as obstacles to be overcome. Through characters, like Loretta, and others that Prenatt described, she self-reflected – then moved on. Works CitedAbout Author. http://galenet.galegroup.com.ezproxy.library.drexel.eduGordon, Mary. “Cleaning Up.”Prenatt, Diane. “Simulation and the Authentic Self: Issues of Identity in Works by Flannery O’Connor and Mary Gordon,” Flannery O’Connor Review 3 (2005): 39-48.