Joanna Walsh - Hotel

Marriage is not what it contains, but its structure. It is not the nature of promises given; it is its bond. The contents of its bond are not set. They are no more than a set of family resemblances.

Does anything resemble a family?

Herr Rat likes to stay in family hotels without families.

HERR RAT

I have had all I wanted from women, without marriage.

Katherine Mansfield was married.

Herr K was married.

Frau K was married.

Dora’s dad was married.

None of them, it seems, to what they desired.

Desire was what took place outside marriage.

On the other hand:

Freud was married.

Dora was not married.

KM was not married.

Mae West was married, but she didn’t want anyone to know. She kept her marriage a secret. It wouldn’t do to tell what she desired. She and he made a home together, she said, “only for several weeks.” 1

MAE WEST

Marriage is a great institution, but I’m not ready for an institution. 2

No one in A Fragment questions that desire is not desirable. I am hardly surprised. A hotel is an institution in which there is nothing I could not be trained to desire.

IV

At the German Pension, KM’s enemies are often married—“successful businessmen,” and their wives, heavy as suitcases. Open them up and, inside, you’d find: offal, bread soup, sauerkraut, boys’ boots, cherry cake with cream, whalebone stays, hemorrhoids, and a little unattended dusty regret. Inside, the men, and the women are just the same. But “marriage certainly changed a woman more than it did a man,” says one of them, who keeps a photograph of his wife, single: “She doesn’t look like my wife — like the mother of my son.”

KM

I consider child-bearing the most ignominious of professions.

“Now I have had nine children and they are all alive, thank God,” says the fat German Pension guest.

In the German Pension, marriage ends in childbed — something to be frightened of for physical and mental reasons. Each child brings a portion of suffering, even unproblematic children, and this suffering must be distributed, fairly or unfairly (always, in Mansfield’s stories, unfairly). Pregnant women and mothers come to the spa by the German Pension. Their condition is a peculiar kind of illness.

FREUD

Once the child has become a woman and, in contradiction of the demands of her childhood, has married an inattentive man who suppresses her will, unstintingly exploits her work and expends neither affection nor money upon her, illness becomes the only weapon with which she can assert herself in life. It gives her the rest she craves. It forces the man to make sacrifices of money and care that he wouldn’t have made to the healthy woman.

The cure in the German Pension does not seem to work. Many of the guests return every year, leaving their marriages behind. What is it they want to be cured from?

V

Katherine Mansfield, like KM, her avatar, was pregnant by a man who was not her husband (her marriage was one of hasty convenience). Being with child, but not part of a family, her mother sent her to a spa hotel.

“With” child. Such a good, ambiguous phrase: with. Not dwelling, only staying a while. But no one gives birth in hotels. Or do they?

MOM

We walked in and I am telling you I was like, I am having this baby here. It was gorgeous. 3

“Every woman deserves a birth like this,” said the journalist, a birth away from home, where there is no home work. “All of our crap isn’t there. There is no pile of bills on the desk. The dirty dishes aren’t in the sink. The laundry basket isn’t right there filled with towels we need to put away.” In the hotel where the mom gave birth, there are “Superior Accommodations,” there are “Deluxe Accommodations,” and there are “Club Accommodations.” Then it’s suite. It’s impossible to start any lower. The decor of the hotel is “both nostalgic and modern. A 42-inch HDTV, DVD player, MP3 port and complimentary Wi-Fi, fulfil your entertainment needs.” The velvet couch is “expertly placed,” and the room is “grounded only by chocolate carpeting.” In its largest suite, “One and a half baths ensures convenience while entertaining.” The Club Level is “100 % smoke free.”

FREUD

There’s no fire without smoke.

(Or did I get that wrong?)

Katherine Mansfield was pregnant in her German Pension, until she slipped while miscarrying a heavy suitcase, which she was trying to put on top of a wardrobe.

(I am not pregnant.)

Dora was not pregnant, but nine months after Herr K kissed her, Dora gave birth to appendicitis. Then to a limp. Katherine Mansfield gave birth to. nothing.

A magic trick — there was nothing inside the box.

KM (Mansfield’s narrator/avatar) is unmarried but, when asked, discovers it is possible to give birth to a phantom husband (a sea captain, of all things). What a feat of ratiocination!

In the comments box beneath the hotel birth article: “I would rather stay in a hotel room that a baby had been born in, than a room where someone had a hooker!”

In the comments box beneath another article about the birth: “Maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t think that’s fair for the next hotel guest.” 4

Whoever thinks about the next hotel guest?

Dora’s mother might have. She, says Freud, cleans the house so as not to be dirty.

FREUD

Her genitals, which ought to have been kept clean, had been dirtied. [Dora] seems to understand that her mother’s mania for cleanliness was a reaction against this dirtying. 5

Dora, a scholar, scorns home work, but she also does not want to be dirty.

That’s the problem, isn’t it, and it’s the same problem now.

Who will clean the house?

Who will be dirty?

A cook in the kitchen, a lady in the living room, a whore.

Should I be one, or the other? Could I be all three? Is there a way to avoid being any of them?

All these problems are solved in hotels.

VI

FREUD

A Freudian slip is where you say one thing, but mean your mother.

Freud did not say that. It’s a joke (and, like many jokes, is anon).

It is a joke about parapraxis, in which the speaker expresses an unconscious wish, hidden inside a box of words that both reveal and conceal it. A parapraxis sounds like a joke, but it is an unintentional one. Freud did not name it the Freudian slip. He called these speech patterns Fehlleistungen , which means faulty actions. Sometimes, when they cannot be spoken, words enact off the page.

FREUD

If one’s lips are silent, one will be voluble with one’s fingertips, betrayal seeps through every pore.

Dora fiddles with her handbag.

FREUD

She was wearing a little purse around her neck, in a style that was modern at the time, and she played with it.

DORA

Why shouldn’t I wear a little bag like this, when it happens to be in fashion?

FREUD

The little bag, like the jewellery box, once again representative of the Venus shell, the female genitalia!

DORA

I knew you’d say that.

A symptom is a kind of Fehlleistungen . It is the physical evidence of something unspeakable.

FREUD

A symptom is a sign of, and a substitute for, an instinctual satisfaction which has remained in abeyance. 6

A symptom is an action that, like a word, stands in for a something else, but it is not like a regular word that stands in directly, but more like one of these word forms, that are a bit like Freudian slips, and jokes, as they suggest two things at the same time.

FREUD

(Symptoms are)

Like garlands of flowers stretched over metal wire.

(This is simile.)

FREUD