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The Jewish Mother: Comedy and Controversy in American Popular Culture
MELUS, Spring, 2000 by Martha A. Ravits
Torn between indebtedness to the mother and resentment of her, Portnoy grows increasingly hostile as he ages. With the onset of male puberty, the mother's greatest power becomes her ability to influence her son through guilt, which Charlotte Baum, Paula Hyman, and Sonya Michel define as "that most exquisite instrument of remote control" (236). It is the mother's struggle to restrain her son's libido and the son's efforts to free himself that fuel Portnoy's story. Indeed, once Sophie Portnoy with her countless admonitions and suspicions is left behind, the novel loses comic force. There's no place like home in Portnoy's narrative because that's where the mother is, "the most unforgettable character" the reader meets in the text.
To escape the mother's gravitational pull and assert his independence, Alexander Portnoy uses a tactic familiar to readers and observers of Jewish sons in American comedy: he seeks as a love object the non-Jewish woman or shikse, a woman who is the antithesis of the mother in appearance, culture, and mental attitudes. Thus, the mockheroic drama of Jewish humor combines the male erotic quest with the quest for assimilation. From Alex Portnoy to Woody Allen to Jerry Seinfeld, love in the arms of a non-Jewish woman symbolizes the embrace of the gentile world. The struggle for filial autonomy is equated with the quest for mainstream acceptance that requires repudiation of both ethnicity and the ethnic mother in the pursuit of a mate.
By the 1970s, when Tillie Olsen issued her call for a defense of the Jewish mother, two feminist responses had already appeared: one was Grace Paley's meditation on "Mom," discussed above, (published, ironically, in the same magazine that carried Sophie Portnoy) and the other was Erica Jong's comedy, Fear of Flying (1973), which contains a pointed rebuttal to Portnoy. Jong's iconoclastic, ribald, and scathingly funny novel became the sexual manifesto of the women's liberation movement and established her as a spokeswoman for her generation. It won praise from critics Henry Miller and John Updike. Bookstores had a hard time keeping it in stock. In the novel, the protagonist Isadora Wing is a journalist, poet, and former analysand, who travels to Europe to report on a psychiatric conference in Vienna with her psychiatrist husband. Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, amidst the sensationalism of Isadora's disclosures about sexual affairs and erotic fantasies (including the "zipless fuck"), her reflections on the Jewish mother received scant attention.
Jong's portrait of the mother, in a chapter entitled "Pandora's Box or My Two Mothers," is a deliberate attempt to complicate and revise the reductive image of the Jewish mother crafted by male writers. Jong's narrator makes duality the key to her conflicting feelings about her mother as a good and a bad parent, in short, a mother who defies stereotyping. Indeed, Isadora Wing's mother is introduced as a direct rebuttal to Portnoy: "I envy Alexander Portnoy. If only I had a real Jewish mother--easily pigeonholed and filed away--a real literary property"(161). Wing's stereoscopic view of the mother may fall into the trap of binary categorizing shunned by later feminist critics, but it rightfully condemns the male view of the mother as an oversimplification. By satirizing the distortion and commodification of the Jewish mother in male comedy, Jong underscores the need for the corrective vision of female experience.
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