Maquia: Mother, Woman, and the Female Subject

Interests: studies of anime, comics, and game culture / gender / space / intellectual history. An observer on the margins, overflowing with empathy.

1. This essay contains major spoilers. Read at your discretion.

2. In this essay, “female subject” (女性) means a woman as subject; “woman” (女人) designates her position as an object.

Introduction

Mari Okada is renowned among anime screenwriters for her skill in depicting characters’ inner lives and intricate interpersonal relationships, and is well known to anime fans at large. In Maquia: When the Promised Flower Blooms (Maquia hereafter), the first animated feature she both wrote and directed, Mama Okada¹ makes some adjustments to her creative style. She sets the story in a fantasy world and uses family and war to establish an opposition between the infinite and the finite—the “Clan of Partings” and “mortals.” She concentrates on “growing up,” “bonds,” and “love,” playing down the tangled relationships of school-age drama. The storytelling breaks some new ground compared with her earlier work.

It is precisely this “change of direction” that permits psychoanalysis to make its “unceremonious” entrance, revealing the work’s symptoms in the very failures for which it has been criticized. Some viewers online have voiced their dissatisfaction: the mother–son relationship comes out of nowhere, the characters are affected, and the film tries too hard to make us cry. These are flaws in the work itself, but they are also the key that leads us toward a feminist engagement with desire. Without these faults and negative responses, we could not recognize what we disavow. Mama Okada is called a “witch” because her writing has a bewitching pull: it ties our stomachs in knots, yet we cannot leave it alone.

Through a symptomatic reading, this essay will examine how the story’s contradictions operate, focusing on two aspects: the relationship between Maquia and Ariel, and Leilia’s hysteria. It attempts to introduce some basic psychoanalysis and open the door to exploring the work’s “residual categories.” In brief, the film is not merely a celebration of maternal love, as it is widely understood to be. Through Maquia’s compulsive identification with maternal duty, we actually discover the “father”; through Leilia’s final leap of faith, we touch on an identity as woman rather than mother; through the work’s discordant moments, we catch sight of Mari Okada’s doubts about family and gender, and the restless nature of the audience’s desire.

What grounds do we have for these inferences?

I. Maquia and Ariel: The Presence of the Absent Father

The expression “the father’s presence” is surprising, since we scarcely see a “father” anywhere in the story. The only person who could be called a father is Ariel, once he has grown up and gotten together with Dita. Even when Ariel goes into battle to defend his home as a “father” and a “man,” Dita has only just given birth: he has not yet had any actual interaction with his daughter.

This readily brings to mind the creator’s own upbringing. Raised by her mother in a single-parent household, Mari Okada never experienced a father’s love. Instead, she witnessed her mother being abused by one “boyfriend” after another. Without a father’s protection or recognition from society, the young Okada withdrew into her own little world and became a shut-in. The most immediate expression of this background is the “absence of the father” in her work.

But when someone has no father, we need all the more to consider how much desire and impetus to act this lack generates for her. Mama Okada is not a mentally ill person wholly cut off from the world. Quite the contrary: precisely because she wants recognition in that world, her desire points outside the totality, toward the external symbolic order surrounding the space of dreams. This way of connecting with enjoyment invites the “father’s ghost” back in. In Maquia, the father’s absence dialectically summons an omnipresent, unrestricted father. The crucial step in this process is Maquia’s identification with the role of “mother.” Mama Okada did not initially intend to portray the bond between mother and son. Yet she considers that bond exceptionally strong, precisely because maternal identity has this double character.

How does a mother become a “father”? Let us begin with the composition of a traditional nuclear family: mother, father, and child. In the family traditions of the old social order, the father is the head of the household, with the right and responsibility to lay down its rules and establish his authority. He is active, strong, and forceful; he also observes the established order and is reluctant to reveal his feelings. He can no longer exercise the force he wielded in primitive society because society’s laws prohibit it. He must learn to respect the vulnerable and abide by social regulations to win society’s recognition, and thus exercise power within limits.

Many people believe that being a “real man” should be expressed through responsibility toward family and career, rather than outward displays of masculinity. This judgment springs from people’s favorable view of civilization and is associated with what they take to be gender’s essential nature. Once this civilizational myth is established, masculinity—paternal masculinity—is projected onto a broad social background, producing a description of an ideal state. The responsibilities, ethics, and laws society requires constitute the libidinal basis of our civilization’s entire development. Regardless of gender, anyone who enters civilization and participates in its institutions must submit to the assimilating force exerted by this “male society” (the workplace has no sympathy for tears). At the same time, the presence of that force gives them a place. Here the symbolic phallus (**) confers a place and performs castration. This is the “paternal function” at work.

What, then, do we get when we abstract the mother? This raises a basic question. After discussing the father in the traditional family, we naturally think of the feminine qualities associated with mothers in some traditional families: passivity, docility, indecision. Yet the mother’s role contains a paradox. Does a mother bear no responsibility? Is she exempt from morality and ethics? Of course not. The mother, too, is a parental authority. She must be constrained by the wider social symbolic order and exercise masculine powers. At first, Maquia has no substantive concept of what a “mother” is. By imitating and learning from Mido, a single mother, she gradually comes to understand a mother’s duties. She learns how to “love” Ariel and work to earn their living. What we see here is a resolute mother.

But does the saying “motherhood makes a woman strong” not reveal precisely that a mother is another kind of father? In an intact family, the establishment of paternal authority means that the mother must often resume the position of woman through masquerade: the “gentle and kind” object a. She pretends to love the father, drawing the jealous child into the Oedipus complex. The single mother, however, exposes what we have overlooked. In the father’s absence, the coercive force of the mother’s paternal side becomes apparent. As a woman, she is partly exempted by the symbolic order as an “other who bears no responsibility”—“a good man does not fight with women,” “ladies first.” Yet she also possesses the father’s powers. In this subtle vacuum, she is able to wield the father’s power without being bound by his rules. Take the great households of Republican-era China: if the male householder’s father had died, his mother was the real head of the family. She exercised patriarchal power and enforced its norms upon her daughter-in-law in the man’s place, and could do so more ruthlessly than a man. Here, the mother is the father’s mask—Woman with a capital W.

This perspective brings us to the perplexities of Maquia and Ariel’s relationship. To begin with, the establishment of their symbolic single-parent family is uncanny. Nothing in the story tells viewers why Maquia chooses to experience “love” by becoming a mother. A crude reading would attribute it to a chance occurrence during her escape. From another angle, however, an external ideology has supplied an a priori basis for the emergence of “maternal love.” It is precisely the contingency of this relationship’s formation that lets us detect the father’s ghost haunting the text’s unconscious: “Mother” with a capital M essentially bears the Name-of-the-Father (Nom-du-Père). Striving to be a good mother means that Maquia wants recognition from the social order. Moreover, because she has not herself undergone childbirth as a process of the Real, but enters the relationship as Ariel’s mother “in name,” she cannot develop an identification with “blood ties.” She depends even more than an ordinary mother on recognition through paternal symbols.

Thus, in the early and middle parts of the story, what Maquia gains from their relationship is love harnessed to the father—to moral responsibility. It is a binding, repressive love, an insistent desire governed by the superego. The first crisis in Maquia’s self-identification comes when she sees a symbolic marker sent by her people: Hibiol, their woven cloth. Immersed in her mother–son narrative, she is shocked to learn that her childhood friend Leilia is about to marry. Her homesickness and sense of duty toward the Clan of Partings immediately awaken. The story then turns to the death of Onora, the sheepdog belonging to the family with whom Maquia is staying. The editing here shows great skill in carrying the story’s emotions forward. Onora’s death gives a more persuasive impetus to Maquia’s recognition of her limits: she will, after all, watch those she loves die one by one. This leads her to identify anew with the Iorph and confront the unresolved knots of her past.

During the attempt to rescue Leilia, Leilia ultimately refuses Maquia’s invitation to escape. She is already pregnant and can no longer return to her lover Krim. This episode once again reinforces the “Name-of-the-Father” concealed behind the script. As an Iorph who has interbred with a human, she has already broken her promise to her fiancé Krim. Her insistence on keeping that promise powerfully supplements the symbols of patriarchy—as if to say, “From now on, I am no longer a pure Iorph, but an ‘exception.’” The ghostly father appears once more, carrying out the Law’s slut-shaming.

II. Maquia and Ariel: Leaving Oedipus Behind

The failed rescue marks a moment of reconciliation with the symbolic markers of her past attachments. Although incomplete, this reconciliation gives Maquia and Ariel’s relationship a period of stability. The middle of the story concentrates on Ariel’s Oedipus complex.

As noted above, the mother Maquia plays actually occupies the father’s position, but this observation is not enough. Although the mother bears the father’s surname, she is still called “mother”; she cannot cast off her dimension as “woman.” Thus, when the mother is captured by the father’s image, their fundamental difference also produces a “stain” on that image: a window through which to expel the abject—things harmful to civilization, such as death, indulgent love, and femininity. Such a father is not the stern, all-good Holy Father, but the anal father.²

Maquia becomes a mother through discourse, without the suture supplied by an “imaginary of blood ties.” This gives some basis for her wavering feelings toward Ariel. It is precisely in this wavering that the father’s stain becomes visible: when Maquia expresses maternal love for Ariel, she acts on feeling and lets him enjoy himself, embarrassing an overbearing “superego.” Tickling his belly, for example, is connected to jouissance (enjoyment). The sensation of tickling intertwines pain and touch. It makes the subject “laugh” without warning, not through language or signifying symbols, but through an unconditioned reflex. Here it “embarrasses” the rational viewer. For viewers who have already secured paternal law’s recognition of their place in social civilization, returning in fantasy to such “childish” mother–son interactions is shameful. The paternal Other keeps admonishing us in the unconscious: you must not accept this enjoyment—or may accept it “only under certain conditions.” It is therefore understandable that some viewers find these depictions of a “mama’s boy” uncomfortable. Figuratively speaking, maternal love is “drowning in honey”: it can never be filled, and it “swallows whole” everything that belongs to the subject.

This “cloying unease” among viewers eases somewhat as Ariel grows up. Like the protagonists of so many coming-of-age stories, Ariel enters a rebellious phase, begins to reflect on his relationship with his mother, and reorganizes the structure of his desire. Maquia, meanwhile, encounters a second crisis of identification: whether to become an object of desire—a woman—or remain a mother—a father.

Because the father’s role has not been separated from Maquia, Ariel remains unable to account for where his mother’s desire is directed. His Oedipus complex is effectively prolonged. Obviously, it is only when Ariel drunkenly makes an “incestuous” demand of his mother one day, and she refuses him, that this complex is finally worked through. Although Maquia expresses her maternal love for Ariel without reserve, she holds fast to the maternal superego—that indulgent love which retains paternal ethics—and it is precisely for this reason that she refuses, through her rejection of Lang’s advances, to become Ariel’s object of desire.

Alongside this “failure of incest,” Maquia’s identity as an “other,” a member of the Clan of Partings, helps separate the images of mother and woman. A hidden symbolic marker—Maquia’s body—calls forth this otherness. As a girl of the Clan of Partings, her most distinctive physical trait is that she does not age. After more than a decade of hardship on the road, she still looks fifteen. Friends around them even take Ariel and Maquia for a couple for a time. Here, “woman,” representing all that is feminine, returns like a specter to their relationship and threatens the anal father. An internal split opens between Maquia’s roles as “woman” and “mother.” This becomes an internal split in Ariel, the desiring subject: should he “be,” or should he “have”? Only after his mother imposes the “father’s prohibition” can Ariel, drawing also on his rational understanding of the Iorph, separate “woman” from Maquia’s body as “mother” and go in search of recognition from the paternal order, and of his own desire.

The resolution of the Oedipus complex is the text’s crucial turning point, playing a decisive role in the characters’ subsequent changes. Once this conflict ends, Ariel rushes away as though fleeing his mother, leaving the universe of maternal love to pursue a wider world—recognition in the Symbolic. This exactly mirrors Mari Okada’s childhood wish. After Ariel leaves, Maquia breaks down sobbing, laying bare the hysteria produced by the conflict between woman and mother: her woman’s body, subjected to the gaze, reveals her identity as an “other” extimate to humanity, while her desire to become a mother demands that she embrace a human child!³ Deep within her heart, unsettled emotions beat back and forth, collide, and accumulate until they escape control. Only when Maquia witnesses Dita giving birth does she finally shake off this wavering “shame.”

What does childbirth mean? By producing pain, it ultimately reveals the unbridgeable gap between mother and woman. If pregnancy is maternal duty’s first interpellation of the female subject, childbirth is an irruption of the Real. Its arduous process places an immense psychological strain on her. She fears her own death or her child’s; she fears the new life she is about to face, which will mark her identity; she fears the self that this life will mark. However thoroughly she prepares herself psychologically, the process still produces an uninterpretable “Thing” and brings trauma. Mama Okada’s eye for life is acute: “mother” is not a woman’s natural vocation, but the symbolic result of suturing trauma.

After witnessing childbirth, Maquia reorganizes her desire and finally accepts an explanation: because she has not given birth, she is not a “true mother.” This seems once again to reinforce the patriarchal discourse that makes childbirth a mother’s function. From another angle, however, it is precisely by accepting this discourse that Maquia finally understands the importance of the “imaginary of blood ties” in constructing a mother–son relationship. This offers a way to connect with enjoyment other than through paternal law. She does not give up loving her son as a mother; rather, the meaning of “maternal love” changes. Maternal love here is no longer compulsory love weighed down by ethical commandments, but a love marked by lack, released from those commandments. Are Maquia’s departure, and her sobbing after their reunion at the end, not moving expressions of her recognition of lack—of the fact that, even with her infinite life, she cannot save the one she loves? Such love cannot, in fact, be encompassed by what we ordinarily understand as “familial affection.”

Throughout the work, Mama Okada repeatedly expresses feminine qualities such as love and crying, drawing out the distinctive presence of the female subject through the contradiction between “woman” and “father.” As discussed above, some viewers who have secured paternal law’s recognition in the Symbolic find it hard to accept the characters’ “dissociative/conversion disorder”—that is, hysteria—brought about by the intrusion of the “feminine” Thing. This is not entirely a failure of empathy on the viewers’ part; it may be a form of self-protection. The feminine is a “fatal temptation,” guiding our death drive. Just as people struggle to emerge from negative psychological states, this drive compels us to approach the void—that feminine being.

Through this account, we finally learn the name of the symptom running through the entire story: woman against mother. Leilia embodies it too.

III. Leilia: Mother—Woman—Lack in the Other

In analyzing Leilia, we can trace a new path that offers a contrast with Maquia. If Maquia moves from a “mother constituted through misrecognition” toward a “mother marked by lack,” then Leilia moves from an “actual mother” toward a “true woman.” The “true woman” is connected to the “lack in the Other” of female desire and breaks with viewers’ immediate expectations. Yet the constraints of the cinematic apparatus limit its effect within the work to “inherent transgression,” intricately bound up with Mari Okada’s “imagination of women.”

That programmatic paragraph is difficult to understand. Do not worry. Let us first discuss how Leilia turns against the “actual mother” and moves toward the “true woman.”

Obviously, Leilia refuses Maquia’s rescue because she is pregnant with a human child and has become a “true mother.” We have already discussed how even a true mother is, in essence, a “father.” Yet because the mother retains more feminine qualities, she can generate from within a fissure that breaks this paternal deadlock, producing a parallax. Viewed through the resymbolization of that gap, the mother becomes an anal father; viewed in terms of the force that reveals the gap—a threat without substance—the mother brings the destructive jouissance of the female subject.

Leilia submits rigorously to the father’s authority and so naturally falls into guilt over her “infidelity” to Krim. At this point, three factors in the story prevent her collapse. First, she transfers her attachment to her daughter and regains recognition from Mezarte’s paternal law. Second, she mistakenly believes her people have been killed, cutting off the thought of returning to the past. Third, she preserves the fantasy that “I can fly,” imagining her own boundlessness as a way of coping with a palace life hemmed in by restrictions. This fantasy is also connected to the carefree life she once led. The desire is “pre-Oedipal,” so we can call it “a child’s happiness.”

Things do not go as she wishes, however. Although Leilia is a true mother, after giving birth she is cast out once more. Her daughter does not possess the Clan of Partings’ vitality, and the prince has tired of her. The disappointed king strips Leilia of legal personhood, turning her from an object to be “governed” into an object to be “excreted.” In other words, unlike Maquia, Leilia is not reminded of her identity as an “other” by a past desire. She is abjected by the Law as an “ontological disgrace” within the symbolic order. Rejection forces her to confront her otherness.

Unable to see her daughter, she cannot fulfill her responsibilities as a mother. That law-worshipping “maternal superego” begins to torment her. Meanwhile, she believes that her lover Krim is dead, and she is no longer loved by the prince. Her defining quality as a woman—being an object of desire—falls away. Thus she can neither take the father’s surname and become a mother, nor hold on to the qualities of woman and become object a. Like Maquia, she falls into a vacillating hysteria. Losing control of her emotions, she throws away all the jewels and ornaments that represent wealth and status and express her womanly qualities, and begs General Izor to take her to her daughter.

At this stage, Leilia’s powerful maternal superego not only prevents her from recognizing the lack in the Other; it also profoundly shapes the subject’s “life history,” giving “everyday life” a powerful hold. Consequently, when she sees her former lover Krim again, even in her shock she still refuses his request: come back to him, come home, return to freedom. Her identity as a mother matters far too much to her. In Leilia’s struggle, we see a lawless, ghostly “father” who continues to obstruct her pursuit of her own desire even when the entire moral and social order has fallen apart.

This tragedy—this mystery that Krim cannot solve even at the end—is also a symbol of women’s predicament in the real world. For women who have long lived in patriarchy’s shadow, preserving this everyday life, preserving these awkward “small but certain pleasures,” becomes part of their very existence. To negate this layer of the subject’s history is to negate the subject herself, to kill the “I” she has become from the past to the present. This is the subject’s “perilous leap.” Fortunately, the subsequent story realizes that “perilous leap” through the romantic means peculiar to screen storytelling. The day after the war ends, Leilia suddenly understands her own desire and tells her biological daughter openly about her past—free and unrestrained—moving toward feminist redemption. Unfortunately, Mama Okada has not handled this transition toward the “female subject” well: Leilia’s change of attitude seems to lack logical continuity.

From a psychoanalytic perspective, however, we can also defend Leilia’s abrupt action. Approach the enigma of the female subject slowly; do not try to explain it. What matters is elsewhere, in that feminist symbolic marker: “I can fly.” The longing for “flight” is, on one hand, a return to “a child’s happiness”; on the other, it is the return of the repressed. Leilia cannot actually fly, so her “perilous leap” confronts death—opposing the order of life. Like the involuntary desire to jump when standing somewhere high, “embracing the sky” is intimately connected to “feminine being.” This is neither the paternal function nor maternal indulgence, but the void called the “feminine Thing.” Only in this wordless leap does Leilia recognize that she has nothing. Not only does she bid farewell to the self: the moment she gives up her daughter, the father within her, who so harshly demands that she fulfill her maternal function, also loses his divine power, exposing the lack in the Other.

At this point, we have seen Leilia move from an “actual mother” toward feminist redemption. It seems that she has not changed from a mother into a “true woman,” since, if she were a “woman,” she would necessarily become an object of desire for the masculine position. Has she, then, finally become a female revolutionary subject who disrupts the order? Obviously not. As the audience sees with its own eyes, Leilia does not die: Maquia saves her. She regards everything that happened in the palace as a stain on her life. She wades through it, then moves on, returning to a pure order. Her daughter’s spontaneous remark at the end, “My mom is so beautiful,” expresses not only her sorrowful affection and respect for the mother she is meeting for the first time. It also shows that Leilia has returned to the position of an imaginary object of desire. A sublime object—the “true woman”—appears here. The film ultimately stops short on the road to female revolution.

Conclusion: Mari Okada’s “Imagination”

To sum up, considered solely as a complete, self-contained story, Maquia’s final farewell to Ariel and Leilia’s redemption mark the film’s achievement. We first analyzed Maquia and Ariel’s relationship, arguing that Maquia’s wish to become a mother is actually a stigmatizing operation of the “paternal function.” We then explained how the work resolves the Oedipus complex and how Maquia finally moves toward a love marked by lack. Leilia, too, becomes a mother by assuming the “father’s name,” and ultimately discovers her true desire by casting off her maternal identity. There is no denying it: although the logic of the characters’ growth has holes, and the portrayal of war and politics is far too childish, Mama Okada’s ability to explore the depths of relationships sets a benchmark for the industry.

If we turn outward, to the work’s wider connections and an ideological reflection on its creator and audience, we can arrive at a harsher conclusion. Maquia is a story with a closed core, built entirely within a fictional fantasy world and constructing conflicts around race and gender. The most striking thread in these conflicts is the Iorph’s desire to return home. They have spent their lives in a village cut off from the world, living purely and happily. The romanticism of this setting echoes the childishness of the film’s political depictions. Although fathers are everywhere in the work, Mari Okada clearly summons only imaginary fathers: anal fathers who permit desire. They correspond to Mama Okada’s imagining of paternal love, to something she seeks. On the other hand, perhaps in retaliation against her dark childhood, she rejects “masculine men,” depicting the story’s actual father—the king of Mezarte—as a humiliated father. She gives only cursory treatment to such symbols of masculinity as politics, law, and war. This corresponds to her mockery of the forceful fathers she has encountered in reality.

This lays bare a fissure: confronted with the demand to “grow up,” she wavers between “longing” and “fear.” Mama Okada often turns to nostalgic subjects to express this unease. Nostalgia evokes a space of stability and peace, the original home to which the heart can never return. The preoccupation with “going back” is deeply connected to the desire to rely on family and seek refuge in maternal love. This is clearly expressed in Anohana: The Flower We Saw That Day. Is Menma’s ghost not precisely the symbolic marker that carries the fantasy of a “childhood universe”? This judgment opens up a field of associations: the Super Peace Busters’ secret base, the Iorph’s secluded homeland, and the home and room where the young Mama Okada felt safe all share the same core. These works might better be called products of the contradiction between that core and growing up—gaining recognition from paternal law.

More than that, she connects this uncertainty about growing up with sexuation so brilliantly that she resembles a psychoanalyst more than most of her peers. This is evident in the assurance of her screenwriting for works such as Simoun and Wandering Son. In Maquia, which she both wrote and directed, we can finally see Mama Okada’s thinking about gender without having to resort to the metaphor of ghosts. The father’s absence summons the omnipresent, omnipotent father; yet the omnipresent father becomes the humiliated and stained father. A pre-Oedipal metaphor is called forth in the fissures opened by this recurring contradiction.

What does the pre-Oedipal mean? Earlier, we said that if the post-Oedipal father symbolizes the Law, mass-producing myths of masculinity and institutional force, then the pre-Oedipal is an absolutely feminine presence: sensitive, emotionally charged, utterly unreasonable—it is woman as subject. It is the radical dimension hidden in Mary Sue narratives, the stain we can detect behind all those sentimental entanglements that make audiences uncomfortable. Many of Mama Okada’s works create a radical estrangement through precisely this discordance. They distress viewers while appealing to their “appetite for the strange.” This is what I meant at the beginning by the magic of Mama Okada’s work.

At least in how fully realized her works are, and how they expose female desire, Mama Okada has set us an example. Among the animated features of recent years, first Mari Okada warmed hearts with familial love, then Naoko Yamada moved audiences with yuri. The anime industry can no longer ignore women’s power, perspectives, and experience. Of course, speaking for myself, Mari Okada’s hysterical “unrest” and “fluidity” are closer to Hélène Cixous’s écriture féminine,⁴ and hold more promise than the “patchwork monster” trading in yuri fan service. Even if these works have limited effects in the world, becoming “ritual resistance” or “inherent transgression,” I am still very happy to read Mari Okada through a feminist lens—and that reading is accurate. Seeing so many people appreciate Mama Okada even while her work ties their stomachs in knots, or dislike her yet have to give her credit, I find it worthwhile to take this cultural process seriously. The remaining question is how to take them further.

Selected References

• Markos Zafiropoulos, 女人与母亲——从弗洛伊德至拉康的女性难题 [Woman and Mother: The Feminine Question from Freud to Lacan]. Translated into Chinese by Li Feng. Fujian Education Press, 2015.

• douban.com↗

• “How Does Feminism Understand Lacan’s ‘Symbolic Order’?”

• Anime Studies (动画考察)—Public Page

• AnimeTamashii: “Maquia Is a ‘Story of Lonely People’”

Editor’s Note

Well written, Mr. Zhong.