The Bridges of Madison County (1995) is Eastwood’s only mature film in the romance genre.1 Early in his directorial career he made Breezy (1973), the story of a May-December relationship.2 Breezy moves through a story line that is quite typical for Hollywood romances, and it was released long before Eastwood has cinematically explored the significance of a man’s taking in a woman’s heart as he did in Blood Work. But since this early romance, he has advanced in other directions as well, as exhibited by his shooting Bridges almost entirely from a woman’s perspective. The film follows the female protagonist’s erotic gaze as she openly lusts after her male love object, and the film’s narrative is essentially hers.
Interestingly, Robert James Waller’s novel takes the opposite position, relating the conflicts of a male journalist who is a loner struggling to come to terms with the ways in which the first woman to grab his heart disrupts every idea he has of himself and his position in the world.3 The novel works well through the familiar themes of Hollywood romance. Consider, for example, the recent film Something’s Gotta Give (2003), in which a wealthy sixty-three-year-old man finally learns what it truly means to love—and (my God!) the object of his affection is at last older than the twenty-two-year-olds he usually goes for; a fine film as far as it goes.4 Yet this twist does absolutely nothing to disrupt the fundamental diegetic reality (to use Paul Smith’s phrase) of how the construction of the romance genre is integrally tied into an imagined reality and all of the possibilities therein. Telling the same story but turning it on head by reorienting it from the point of view of the desiring woman, Francesca Johnson (Meryl Streep), Eastwood begins, as we have seen elsewhere, within the conventions of the genre, only to later twist them to bring into question the cultural foundations that support the genre’s stereotypic reality. A woman’s desire, recorded in loving detail as the camera brings the audience into her world, challenges not only the Hollywood romance genre; it also resists one of the most powerful psychic undertows of our stubbornly sexist culture. As the writer and philosopher Susan Bordo eloquently reminds us,
It is not only those with a religious agenda, however, who censor purposefully or not the sexual subjectivity of women. All feminists know in theory that Hollywood rarely plays to the female gaze. But sometimes you only truly realize—viscerally—what’s been forbidden when it is finally permitted. Clint Eastwood—who began his career as a “screw you” action hero and wound up directing and starring in one of the best “women’s movies” of all time improved vastly on The Bridges of Madison County by telling the story of the affair almost entirely from the heroine’s (Meryl Streep’s) point of view, focusing on her desires, conflicts, and anxieties, rather than the hero’s as was the case in the book. Eastwood’s film was the exception that made me aware of what I’d been missing.5
Meanwhile, Eastwood’s film also foregrounds the lessons learned by each of the children within their own lives, as each of them comes to terms with their mother’s life and identity through her retelling. The film’s narration unfolds retrospectively as Johnson’s children, Caroline and Michael, read from journals that their mother left for them. These recount her sexual affair in such vivid detail that Caroline remarks to her brother in shock, “And now I find out that in between the bake sales my mother was Anaïs Nin.” The account is even harder on Michael, who struggles to come to terms with the fact that his mother’s journal violates the safe stereotype through which he had always understood her. Indeed, Johnson had not shared her story when she was alive because she was deeply afraid about how her family would respond, and she understood that even in death the truth would be difficult for Michael, willing the letter and key leading to the journal’s discovery to her daughter Caroline. She explains in the letter that as a person gets older, her fear subsides and it becomes increasingly more important that the truth be told. “How sad it seems to me to leave this earth without those you love the most ever really knowing who you were.” After death, she asserts herself at last by giving her family a chance to know her as a woman who claimed her desire and followed her heart, contradicting the images they had of her.
The story of Johnson’s affair begins when her husband takes the children to the state fair to show Caroline’s prize steer, leaving Johnson alone for four days. Eager for the reprieve from raising the children and maintaining a busy household, Johnson is distracted and impatient at the last dinner before her family leaves. She goes through the motions of a caring wife and mother, reminding her husband not to smoke and checking that his suitcase is packed, but her relief is palpable when her family finally departs. Left to herself she is restless; she tries to listen to opera but is clearly unsure of what to do with herself outside her daily routine.
Robert Kincaid (Eastwood) enters her life the next day; he is trying to locate the covered bridges that he wants to shoot for National Geographic, but he has gotten lost. We do not know at first whether she is attracted to this stranger or to the adventure of driving off with him, but her fascination with him rapidly increases, particularly when he tells a romantic story about getting off the train for an unplanned visit to her hometown in Italy simply because he thought it was pretty. His life is so different from hers, and she is clearly drawn to him because he reawakens her sense of adventure. When he reaches for the radio, the camera focuses on his hands as they brush against her and, through a shot-count-ershot technique, we watch through her eyes as he tests the lighting for photographs he will take in the morning. Eastwood’s direction communicates Johnson’s curiosity and desire as she peers through cracks and around corners at him, irresistibly drawn to him but afraid to let him see her looking. When he sends her to his truck to look for a drink, she works her hands through his things with palpably erotic interest in the man who owns them, who touches them every day.
Kincaid returns her interest, giving her flowers and responding with a sincere, appreciative smile when she jokes that they are poisonous. Johnson nearly walks away from the possibility held out by his flirtation, with the camera clearly recording the hesitation in her expression as she decides, finally, to invite him in for iced tea. Tea turns into dinner, dinner into a walk, and a walk into a nightcap. Periodically, the camera steps back to show Johnson’s enjoyment of Kincaid’s enthusiastic storytelling, but it is his ability to understand and relate to her ambivalence about her life in Iowa—her restlessness before the dreams she has lost—that ultimately draws her closer to him. Indeed, when he unwittingly hurts her by turning down her offer to tell a story—“You’re asking a man if he is too tired to talk about himself? You don’t get out much, do you?”—he understands that he has caused her pain by being insensitive to how it feels to be trapped in Iowa. But she is pleasantly surprised when he apologizes sincerely for his remark; she sees that he is paying attention to her feelings in a way to which she is not accustomed.
While this may seem like a minor incident, it is actually very significant because it shows the development of what Jessica Benjamin calls “the third” within Kincaid and Johnson’s relationship. The third for Benjamin is not something outside the bounds of the relationship, nor is it a symbolic embodiment, such as legal marriage, that bestows a kind of social or legal legitimacy upon the couple.6 Rather, the third grows out of mutual recognition of each other and, in turn, feeds and deepens this recognition as the couple finds in each other, through the creation of a shared world, imagined double meanings that belong only to them—and, of course, sexual involvement with all its fantasies and promises of intimacy. The third represents what it means to find each other through the struggles of discord and harmony, to understand how to both lead and follow the other. Benjamin’s third is not static; on the contrary, the movement itself brings the two people together in a relationship expressed as an ever-changing dance. Over time, within the safety of genuine intimacy, one of the partners may playfully revise or change the steps of the dance, transforming the shared language of mutual fantasy. When Kincaid asks Johnson if she wants to leave her husband, he risks disrupting the conception of the third between them by misreading the subtext and stepping too quickly; but he also leaves on a note that registers his commitment to listening to her: “Don’t kid yourself,” he tells her, “You’re anything but a simple woman.” Here Eastwood pays careful attention to the dance between them, moving the camera back and forth to record their reactions to each other and closing in on Johnson’s growing fascination, even as the camera steps back for the occasional third-person angle that celebrates the engagement and intimacy between the two. Eastwood portrays falling in love not as an irrational attraction but as an ever-deepening recognition, in Benjamin’s complex sense of the word.
After Kincaid leaves that first night, Johnson twice opens her robe to the night air—at first only to be eaten by mosquitoes, then again to treat her wounds. As she applies ointment to the mosquito bites, she examines herself in the mirror, stroking her skin and wondering—hoping—that she still has what it takes to be attractive to a man. Anxious but willing to take a risk, she composes a note for Kincaid, in which she quotes Yeats—for whom they share a mutual appreciation that has become a part of their third—and leaves it nailed to the edge of the bridge in the middle of the night. Despite her anxiety Johnson is beginning to reclaim her own desire, and her initiative certainly undermines the overused Hollywood stereotype of the manic lovestruck woman, who is, in the worst case, a person to be explicitly avoided. We have come a long way, indeed, from Eastwood’s portrayal of Evelyn Draper, the relentlessly aggressive woman of Play Misty for Me.
While Johnson is clearly not the irrational female lover of so many Hollywood films, Eastwood leaves no doubt that it is her simultaneous desire and refusal to relinquish the same that drive the development of a natural sexual relationship between Johnson and Kincaid. Kincaid, after meeting Lucy Redfield (Michelle Benes), another woman who has been shunned by the town as an adulteress, offers to tame or even call off the pending affair, leaving the decision in Johnson’s hands. But at this point in the film, she has put so much energy into taking a chance to be with him that she refuses to give up the opportunity, even though there will be consequences. She describes in her journal the profoundly erotic thoughts she experienced as she lay in a bath in which he had showered, preparing herself for the impending initiation of an eagerly awaited sexual relationship. “I was lying where the water had run down his body, and I found that intensely erotic. But everything about Robert Kincaid had begun to feel erotic to me.” Susan Bordo aptly describes how the camera brings out the sexual lust in Meryl Streep’s performance of the scene:
From her kitchen window, fanning her face, growing restless and disturbed, Streep watches shirtless Eastwood in the yard (the fact that his chest is frankly aging, sagging makes the scene all the more erotic; in an era of plastic beauty, Clint was real flesh—and so was Streep, zaftig for the role). Later in the bathtub, she is transfixed by the drops of water coming from the showerhead that has just recently poured onto his body. That touched you, we imagine her thinking, your body was here, where mine is now.7
Eastwood brings the camera to bear on all angles of her experience of the water dripping on her hands, looking up at the dripping shower, where he stood. The careful camera work brings us into her imagination; we see her and we see her imagining him, imagining feeling him. This is a middle-aged woman hot, hot, hot for her man and expressing herself, no holds barred. No, we do not see this kind of lustful female subject in the movies, unless of course she is or becomes a crazy monster, as in Fatal Attraction. It is only at the moment of her entrance that we see her through Robert’s gaze. We see him bowled over by how stunning she is, “running around the block howling.” But the camera does not linger on Robert. When the phone rings she touches him, letting her intentions to him be known. It is a subtle and gentle first move but it is indeed a first move:
After she’s had her bath and dressed—and it’s still clear between them what’s going to happen—she places her hand on his shoulder during a phone call. That’s all—a hand on his shoulder. But the film has been so finely tuned to her as a sexual subject—except for him telling her she looks “stunning,” it never focuses on his reactions to her body, always on her reactions to his—that the erotic charge of the gesture is almost unbearable.
My sister and I, watching the movie, gasped in unison. I felt as though I had put my hand on Clint’s shoulder. My body was visited by memories of that moment in my own life—that moment when a gesture, a look, a meeting of eyes, a brush of the skin, makes what what’s going to happen clear and unalterable.8
Their dance prolongs the tension, but Bordo has it right: the first touch sealed their fate.
This is not the aerobic passion of twenty-year-olds that is so often idealized in today’s films—super-agile men and women jumping on top of each other while balancing on a washing machine—this is real intimacy. Eastwood uses lighting and angles to heighten the intensity of their desire for one another, shooting one position and then returning from an angle that emphasizes the mutuality of their embrace. Sex deepens their private language. When they are lying together afterward, Johnson asks Kincaid to take her somewhere—to Bali, to Africa—to share more of himself with her, everything he has been. She is asking to be erotically transported, using travel as a metaphor. As her daughter Caroline reads her mother’s journal, she reflects on her own disappointing sex life—her husband certainly had never taken her to “Africa.” This turns us again to Benjamin’s discussion of the third. The couple’s “own” language of sex becomes part of a third that pulls the audience into a growing relationship of its own.
The next day as Johnson and Kincaid listen to jazz at a bar, Kincaid breaks down: “I can’t do this. . . . Try and live a lifetime before Friday. Cram it all in.” Again, Eastwood reverses the stereotyped gender roles: it is Kincaid who becomes clingy and vulnerable, who cannot bear the impermanence of the relationship. Eastwood the actor allows the anguish to take over his face, playing “the woman.” When one of the neighbors stops in, Kincaid is forced to hide, and when Johnson finally finds him, he is immobilized by his sorrow at the hidden, contained nature of their relationship. She comforts him, though she shares his grief over their impending separation. A grief that she expresses the next morning not through weeping or sobbing, but through anger: she accuses Kincaid of routinely sleeping with women and leaving them as he travels the world. But he declares his love boldly, unable to endure her accusations: “It seems right now that all I’ve ever done in my life is make my way here to you.” He hugs her, tears in his eyes, praying that their affair should not end and that they should build a life together.
Alone in her room, packing, Johnson looks with sorrow upon the familiar furnishings and architecture of her home, and it becomes increasingly clear that though she has packed she will not be able to leave. As the night wears on, Kincaid also becomes aware that their hopes of a life together will not be realized: Johnson cannot simply begin a new life with him, because it would be wrong. Ultimately, she cannot step out of her life with her family that has defined who she has become over all the years. The obligations of the life she had made limit her options for herself. Her husband’s farm has been in the family for generations, and given the smallness of the community, he would be humiliated by her leaving him. Also, she would be leaving a house that only became a home through her labors. In a sense, she identifies herself through what she has done to make their house a home. Indeed, the house and her place within it represents the past that has made her who she is, and she cannot leave that part of her behind or simply cut it out: “No matter how much distance we put between us and this house, I bring it with me.” Her recognition that her life’s choices have turned her into a woman who lives with this husband and these children, and that she cannot simply remove the time that has passed, makes her understand sorrowfully that she cannot start anew and still be herself. Johnson’s revelation leads her to the conclusion that their love would be undermined by her leaving her family, contaminating their third with bitterness and resentment.
Johnson thinks of her daughter at the vulnerable age of sixteen, who is struggling to come to terms with her sexual difference. And her son too is involved with his Oedipal fantasy that his mother is the one for him. The abrupt disruption that would be caused by their losing the maternal figure as a stable object in their lives seems to be too cruel for her to ignore, because her investment in her life as a mother is not peripheral to how she identifies herself. One could read this as a classical female sacrifice, where a woman must give up her dreams for the sake of her family but Johnson’s realization is more subtle. At another point in her life, she might have been a different person; but now she has become a mother who has built up a life that is inseparable from who she is. It is a profound recognition of finitude: we can’t simply make ourselves up from scratch and step out of time. Johnson’s love for Kincaid has put her in touch with the woman she could be, but she is too honest to believe that this new woman could eclipse the life she has created for the woman she is now in Iowa. To simply deny who she is would itself be a form of traumatic dissociation, and she knows that very dissociation would return with a vengeance to destroy the relationship.
Kincaid, on the other hand, does not have the same sort of obligations that are inseparable from himself. The right thing for him, then, is to follow his desire and his love for Johnson, but of course there is no risk of dissociation for him. Kincaid tries to convince her to leave with him; indeed, he almost pleads with her that what they have found is too unique and valuable so they must be together: “Some people search their whole lives for it and wind up alone. Most people don’t even think it exists and you’re going to tell me that giving it up is the right thing to do?” But for Johnson, as we’ve seen, it is too late to leave the life she has made. “We are the choices we’ve made. . . . No one [understands] when a woman makes a choice to marry to have children—in one way her life begins, but in another way it stops. You build a life of details. You become a mother, a wife, and you stop and stay steady so that your children can move.” Here again Eastwood reverses the gender stereotype: Johnson decides for both of them, while Kincaid pleads with her to put off her decision. He puts his head in her lap; he bows down in submission. He pushes her close to going with him, but she ultimately decides she must stay. As he leaves, Johnson runs through the door after him, but she does not call out for him to return.
The next day, her family returns and she falls back into her past life. Her two lives—one with Kincaid, another with her family—are so different from each other that being with her family again makes her intense desire for Kincaid more bearable: life with him no longer seems a realistic possibility. Soon after her return to normalcy, she sees Kincaid’s truck in town when she is running errands with her husband, Richard. Richard is in the store when Kincaid gets out of the truck, getting soaked by the pouring rain as he, stands there, smiling, awaiting her acknowledgment. But he does not approach her. This is an excellent example of the trope that Katja Silverman has described as the subversive power of a man who deliberately casts himself in the role of masochist. The scene is so emotionally powerful because, as Silverman writes, this kind of absolute laying bare before the Other deliberately disrupts the foundational fantasy of masculinity—the premise that the man has the phallus, that independent of all others he stands alone. For Silverman the male masochist
acts out in an insistent and exaggerated way the basic conditions of cultural subjectivity. . . . He loudly proclaims that his meaning comes from the Other, prostates himself before the gaze even as he solicits it, exhibits his castration for all to see, and revels in the sacrificial basis of the social contract. The male masochist magnifies the losses and divisions upon which cultural identity is based, refusing to be sutured or recompensed. In short, he radiates a negativity inimical to the social order.9
Silverman’s description of the male masochist highlights the disruptive force of Eastwood’s performance: he bares himself before her, totally captured by her gaze, leaving it to her to come to him if she will. All he can do is show himself in all his vulnerability, because only she has the power to make a move. His face is filled with love, and with the pain of losing her.
As Kincaid drives away, we see him only from behind—again from Johnson’s perspective—as he takes his gift from Johnson, a medal from her grandmother, and hangs it from his rearview mirror. Then we see her husband, Richard, as she sees him, his anxiety mounting as he begins to understand something is wrong. Kincaid lingers at the traffic light, hoping against hope, and Johnson’s hand actually reaches to open her car door and run to him, but she restrains herself. Kincaid finally makes the turn after Richard persistently honks the car horn. As Richard drives her home, Johnson finally weeps and her husband attempts to comfort her, asking, “You feeling better, Franny?” Much of the film’s significance lies in its dramatic details, and here we see that, even though Richard is a good man and Francesca respects him as a father and a husband, he does not really understand her as Kincaid does—a shortcoming reflected when he calls her by an Americanized bastardization of her Italian first name. And she does not try to make him understand. He loves her, but his love is inseparable from her role as wife and mother. He cannot love her in the other way, the one that creates a more playful and creative third, which would ultimately give her an expansive, symbolic space in which to move.
Johnson relates in her journal that Kincaid ultimately respected her decision. He writes her one letter and buys a subscription to National Geographic, but then he falls silent. He does not press himself on her. Only after her husband’s death does Johnson look for him, but by then he has left National Geographic. She learns that he left all of his belongings to her, including a book about the four days they spent together. His ashes were scattered off the Rosamunde Bridge, which formed such an important part of their third.
Romantic affairs that break the social contracts governing gender conventions often end in suicide. Indeed, there is a long and proud history in drama upholding suicide as the only way out for a couple doomed by law, convention, or social conflict. Yet neither of the lovers in this film needs to die to make sense of their relationship. Johnson’s decision to stay with her family is not merely a capitulation to convention; it represents instead her profound recognition that “we are the choices we have made”—and thus, as finite creatures, we cannot simply deny the past and the commitments to which we are bound without conceding to an even deeper denial of ourselves. Significantly, Johnson reaches out to Lucy Redfield, who later becomes Lucy Delaney, a woman who chose the forbidden alternative by disrupting her first marriage and taking up a new life with another man. Many years into their friendship, Johnson confesses her own affair, and through her confession the secret becomes an intersubjective reality rather than merely a fading memory, a fantasy in her own mind. Just as importantly, her identification with Redfield preserves her relationship with Kincaid as a meaningful love—a could-have-been that emphasizes the reality of Francesca’s decision qua choice rather than an inevitable defeat. While the suicide romance celebrates a tragic commitment to love that cannot be realized, an attachment to a third that cannot exist in the real world, Johnson’s ethical commitment to her family transforms her return to life with them into a livable alternative. It is livable because it is hers, and it is hers because for her there was no viable alternative.
Kincaid respects Johnson as an ethical being who has done what she believes to be right for her life. Integral to his love for her is this respect for her otherness, including her otherness to his own desire: she is not just a woman to him, but a singular Other. And she asks her children to respect that singularity as well, a respect she asks them to realize by throwing her ashes from the Rosamunde Bridge where she can, symbolically, rejoin the only true love of her life. “We were as bound together as tightly as two people can be. . . . I gave my life to my family. I wish to give Robert what is left of me.” After intense psychic struggle, they concede to her wish. Their struggle to come to terms with their mother’s desire and her unrepentent subjectivity has a profound impact on them by undoing their own fantasies. Michael struggles with his anger at his mother, feeling betrayed and storming out to get drunk enough to attempt, again, to touch that enormous taboo, his mother’s sexuality. He reacts with a classic commentary on his own fantasy resolution of his Oedipal conflict, which was no resolution at all, because it continues to deny his mother her subjective otherness: “I feel really weird. Like she cheated on me, not Dad. . . . Being the only son, you’re sort of made to feel like you’re the prince of the kingdom, ya know? And in the back of your mind, you kind of think your mother doesn’t need sex anymore because she has you.”
Returning to his wife after a long night away without explanation, he interrupts her anger by asking, “Do I make you happy?” He realizes now that a conventional “resolution” of the Oedipal conflict is not enough, because it is not enough to step into his father’s shoes by getting a job and handing a paycheck over to his wife. To truly be a man and a husband, he must open himself up emotionally and intellectually to the person he has married. Oedipal complimentarity—“You play the girl, I’ll play the boy, and everybody knows the rules of the game”—is too closed to the possibilities for play, for creativity in the third.
Caroline’s life with her husband, meanwhile, is no longer workable. In her struggle to come to terms with her mother’s subjectivity, she has blown apart her accustomed excuses; she can no longer believe that her marriage is as good as life can get. Kissing the dress her mother wore on her first night with Robert Kincaid—fondling of clothes is a gesture that Eastwood uses throughout the film as a sign of intimacy—Caroline expresses a new kind of identification with her mother, a desire to be like her, to follow through on her mother’s fantasies for herself. It should be noted that though it is an important part of the film, the children’s struggle with their Oedipal crises does not appear in the novel. Yet the unfolding of the narrative as presented in the film is inseparable from this subtext. Johnson, unable to fully claim her love for Kincaid while she was alive, projects her ideals of romance and erotic fulfillment into the lives of her children, enabling Michael to become the kind of lover an independent woman desires (and deserves) and encouraging Caroline to reach for new possibilities in her own life.
An ominous “they” haunts this film, which stands for the expectations of society. With its imposed gender roles, the very law of Oedipal complimentarity its acceptance become a kind of living death for all too many couples. The psychoanalytic theorist Jacques Lacan explains this “they” as a part of the social contract, the shared symbolic order that we must accept if we are going to have culture at all. The idea of this order serves as a starting point in our efforts to reconcile with both the impersonal nature of “they” and our unconscious stake in maintaining this position. Lacan helps us to understand the cruelty faced by Lucy Redfield when she breaks the bonds of the social contract; for Lacan, to break this symbolic order is to threaten everything we understand to be civilization. Of course, the cruel treatment of Redfield after her affair also highlights the paradox at the heart of a civilization that is based on imposed orders of sexual difference, a social order that we enter symbolically when we become sexually differentiated. It is something imposed on us, not something that we create.10
At times Lacan maintains that the law of separation, which he calls symbolic castration and which differentiates us as individuals, must take a certain form of sexual difference. It also enforces a particular kind of sexual differentiation, in which we are either masculine or feminine, man or woman—however, these classifications do not directly correlate with our biological sex. In Lacanian terminology, we are identified—and thus come to identify ourselves—either as the one who has the phallus or the one who is the phallus. The two positions, however, are not symmetrical. According to Lacan, there is a symbolic referent for the masculine position: the man can identify as the one who has the phallus. This identification is a fantasy, however, because no one in fact has the phallus; it is the ultimate fantasy that underlies masculinity. To put it simply, the phallus is what a man thinks he must have to be a man; the penis is his actual biological body part. This fantasy association allows little boys to place themselves in the line of paternal descent, relating to the male identity to gain him a compass with which to direct himself as an active subject. He can imagine himself in his father’s place. To urge a man to “do the right thing” is comprehensible as a command, simply, to be a man. “Stand up and be a man,” we say, and this alone seems to contain every ethical standard, every ideal of strength and success, that an individual should need to assert his place in the world. The connection between “standing up” as an active subject and being a “man” seems so natural that it is almost tautological.
In this Lacanian story, can a woman tell her daughter to “stand up and be a woman”? Is this not a mixed metaphor, a contradiction in terms? Does a woman “stand up” by identifying with the masculine? What meaning could the command to be a “woman” entail? Be compassionate, Dress attractively, Make yourself up to be sexually appealing, Stand by your man, Don’t follow your heart, Reduce your life to the details, Be a good wife and mother—are all ideals that could be associated with the directive “to be a woman.” When Lacan writes that Woman is the symptom of Man, he means Woman is only representable to Man as the object of his desire: Man desires, hence there must be some object of his desire.
We must deconstruct Lacan if there is to be any way out of this nightmare of gender difference that simultaneously makes heterosexual love impossible while enforcing heterosexuality. The law with which Redfield and Johnson clash cannot be reduced to their trepidation before the stronghold of convention; they are up against a crisis of femininity that precludes a woman’s self-assertion outside of fulfilling the masculine fantasy, where she is relegated to the limiting roles of whore or mother. The power of The Bridges of Madison County lies largely in its sensitivity to the fact that the answers to ethical questions of love and commitment take women to a cultural crisis surrounding the question of what it means to be a woman.
If Lacan can help us understand the law that prohibits Johnson from claiming a life with Kincaid, he cannot help us understand how to overcome it or why Johnson’s confession to her children helps them heal. But feminist Lacanian clinicians have made great progress in deconstructing the limits of his theory. By rethinking the Lacanian concept of jouissance, the feminist Lacanian Judith Gurewich11 has argued that the Oedipal myth is an effect rather than a cause of human subjectivity. According to Lacan, the mirror stage is a structural moment in which the child comes to see himself as the beloved object of his mother. Viewing himself through the Other’s eye, the child creates an image of himself, which in turn shapes the ego-ideal that directs the child’s aspirations toward what he might become one day. But the experience of the mother’s love carries another message as well, one that conveys that the mother is fulfilled by the child. As long as the child maintains the fantasy that he is the heart of her mother’s life, he is spared the experience of her mother’s jouissance; while the child remains the center of attention, his mother’s desire is not threatening to him. But mothers are not only mothers, as Caroline and Michael learn in Bridges—a mother may well have a secret life as Anaïs Nin.
Running up against signifiers of the mother’s real desire, which is much broader than her desire for the child, the child formulates a retroactive fantasy in which he is the only one for his mother. Michael still lingers in that fantasy space. The mother’s desire, successfully articulated, should prevent the child from retreating to the safety of that fantasy, but as we have seen, Lacan explains why it is so difficult for women to articulate their desire and claim it as theirs. Thus, the mother always appears to be slipping away, to be lacking something that cannot be replenished by the child, and so he sets off on the trail toward understanding her desire, wondering, What does she want that is not me? In a patriarchal society, of course, we are likely to find a father at the end of this trail—but not necessarily. Indeed, for Johnson it was not truly the husband/father at the end of the trail, but someone else offering her something different.
At the beginning of the film, both Johnson children are trapped in deadening relationships, and Gurewich’s reading of Lacan helps us to understand why. If the mother’s desire remains something mysterious, which is seemingly empty but for shallow clichés of femininity, the child cannot separate from the mother as an individual subject. The mother’s desire must have a symbolic referent beyond the child, one that the child can understand and even respect. Thus, the child does not necessarily need the fearsome father to enforce the incest taboo and ensure separation from the mother; what he or she needs is the symbolization of the mother’s desire itself. The father may play this role if he fulfills the mother’s desire; otherwise, his mere presence cannot be enough because he does not fill the mysterious vaccuum of the mother’s desire. This is why Gurewich says that the Oedipal fantasy is an effect of our desire to escape a position in which we are forever hooked into the wants and whims of our first love. We wish for a law that promises the possibility of separation, of selfhood, and that law is expressed as the Oedipal myth when the father stands in for mother’s desire. But the conventional Oedipal complementarity still leaves us caught in the fantasy.
The work of analysis, for Gurewich, means freeing the patient from this fantasy so that she can actively create a life as a desiring being. Crucially, for Gurewich, when the confrontation with the mother’s desire occurs, the child must be able to find signifiers for what the mother truly wants, so that he or she can avoid the trauma of remaining caught up in the fantasized world of the imaginary mother of early infancy. The hold of the Oedipal myth with its rigid gender roles must be dispelled, not reinforced—only then can we have the possibility to be ourselves. Once we read this Oedipal myth as effect rather than cause, we obliterate the appeal to civilization as a block against the woman’s desire and free both the individual woman and the culture itself for a more meaningful, more creative life. We do not need the image of the father as the law to endure individuation and separation as cultural and institutional realities.12
By exploring their mother’s desire through her journal, Caroline and Michael free themselves to see that they have both lived fantasies that have constrained their perceived options in the world. Ironically, against Johnson’s assertion that a mother must hold firm so that her children can move, it is only when Caroline and Michael learn that their mother did indeed move after what she desired that they too can move in their own lives. Michael now wants to move into a shared symbolic space with his wife, in which he can come to know her true self beyond his stereotypes of womanhood, which derived from his attachment to an Oedipal fantasy. Caroline decides to proceed with her divorce.
Why do so many women take for granted that the worst thing that can happen is to become like our mothers? Why don’t we cheer for the possibility? Here we see that Johnson’s journal opens up her life, so women can lead meaningful lives outside the strictures of Oedipal complementarity. She gives her daughter a mother who can embrace her own desire, and hence her daughter understands that she is capable of doing the same. Caroline kisses the dress that signifies her mother’s break with her feminine stereotypes. Identifying with her mother, she puts the dress on. Johnson showed that she loved her children in many ways. But in the end, her final gift to her children was her greatest gift of all: she gave them a mother who claimed her own personhood. She stole the image, which came from their Oedipal fantasy, of a mother who was always theirs, who needed only them, and in its place she gave them her complicated self with all its struggles. In this way, she undermined the Oedipal myth’s hold on them and opens up the possibility that they may both lead richer lives than they had been able to lead before reading her journal.