i-xxii Front matter.qxd - Brandeis Institutional Repository

174 / The Extended Familya mother, Nancy may not evidence the same preternatural calm of Mary Cassatt’smothers: Mother and Child (Nancy and Olivia), 1967 (ƒg. 179); nonetheless,the pose at ƒrst signals the return of the Western idealized “misapprehension”of maternity. Yet Nancy is no modern madonna, nor is the infant asaint. In her embroidered shift, she sits awkwardly astride her kitchen chair,struggling to restrain the child, just as Neel had done in The Intellectual.Olivia tries equally vigorously to stand on her own two feet, while Nancy’sarms bind the child to prevent its inevitable fall. Head to head, each has amind of her own. In her green dress, Nancy is a “tree of life,” but her relationshipwith her child is not a naturally harmonious one: she is learning what isentailed in being a mother. By 1974, with the birth of her fourth child, Victoria(Nancy and Victoria, 1974, ƒg. 180), Nancy is an old hand at holding babies:one arm propped casually on the kitchen table while the other buttressesthe child, she is now a true master of her unpaid profession.That free arm had but recently held twins, Antonia and Alexandra, whowere born in 1971. In Neel’s portrait of Nancy and the Twins (5 months) (1971,ƒg. 181), one of her most delightful paintings, the infants launch eagerly forwardfrom the support of their mother’s body, crawling vigorously toward thefuture. Reclining on the couch, Nancy resembles a dog with her puppies. Isthis the new natural mother of the 1970s, a feminist rather than a Freudian interpretationof the old theme? During the “back to the earth” movement of thelate 1960s, women had embraced the idea of natural childbirth and nursing.Between the publication of Thank You, Dr. Lamaze (1965) and the Women’sHealth Collective’s Our Bodies/Ourselves (1971), the advocacy of natural childbirthoutside the hospital became a feminist stance, another way for women toreclaim their bodies from the medical establishment. Unfortunately, the appealto nature played into the very formulations the new earth mothers weretrying to escape. In 1967, using the familiar strategy of naturalizing socialstructures to make them appear inherited rather than historically mutable, thebiologist Desmond Morris argued that if one took a group of suburban familiesand placed them in a primitive environment, the family structure of this newtribe would not change. The men would go off to hunt for food; the womenwould remain in their caves with the children. 32 Nancy’s body thus representsa contradictory construct: both emancipated woman and “natural” mother, ahybrid phenomenon whose structural faults were bound to lead to problems.These tensions surface in The Family (1980, ƒg. 182), a portrait posed as afamily snapshot. The “V”-shaped composition funnels the eye downward fromthe bookends of Antonia and Alexandra to the seated ƒgure of Nancy holdingher “baby,” Victoria, now a chubby six-year-old. As in The Family from 1929,Nancy is weighed down. Her eyes disarticulated and unfocused, Nancy appearsshell-shocked, and the unit as a whole seems to be slowly sinking into the