Fractured Mirror: One Male’s Lacanian Reading of Katherine Patterson’s Jacob Have I Loved

Louise, the protagonist of Katherine Patterson’s Jacob Have I Loved, infuriates me. She fights against ghosts of what she wishes to be and against what she really is, kicking and screaming all the way. I don’t debate that she struggles with good reason -- certainly the neglect from her family, whether perceived or real, and the expectations her culture (I really want to say environment here) has placed on her gender role have contributed to her plight -- but her great inner strength and insight belies her inability to overcome or at least circumvent those obstacles. To me, she is a rebel with the sole cause of declaring her independence from her expected gender role. And, in that, I find myself, a young man with no common ground with my same gender parent, knowing that I am strong in not being so, and yet flailing loudly but vacuously against that fact as if it were not good enough. I do not like Louise because she is a female reflection of me whose wounds are mine.

Early in the novel, the roots of Louise’s issues are easy to trace to her resentment of her sister and the attention she commanded, resulting in my initial disregard for her as, to use a colloquialism, a whiner. Indeed, I did not at all identify with this other than my experience with younger siblings (I am the oldest.) whining in much the same way about me. This certainly made it easy for me to create an objective distance from Louise and in fact, made it possible for me to tolerate listening to her since I could see nothing in her like me -- she was no threat and even though I didn‘t like her, it was more a matter of taste than sensibility.

This changed dramatically when she suggested that the school’s Christmas show be reconsidered in light of the war and was met with indifference by her teacher, Mr. Rice. Her reaction to his rejection (to her at least) cut me to the bone:

...but the hot shame and indignation inside me made me forget the wind as I walked. I was right. I knew I was right, so why had they all laughed? And why had Mr. Rice let them? He hadn’t even tried to explain what I had meant to the others... (31)

First, the power of this quotation overwhelms me with the exact same hurt I always felt when rejected by peers and/or abandoned by a trusted adult (whose gender and role also hold significance, as I will show shortly) in the face of that rejection. The phrase hot shame and indignation is the perfect synthesis -- the tangible, concrete sensation of heat that comes with shame combined with the attitude of righteousness that comes from knowing in your very soul that you are right in what you feel. It is a violent phrase that captures the vivid memories of such experiences I retain to this day. Second, the agent in Louise’s drama here is a male teacher for whom Louise bears considerable respect and maybe even a bit of sexual attraction as evidenced in her unexpectedly lengthy discussion of him as one of the only eligible men on the island. Given her lack of validation by her own father that undoubtedly leads to her need for male attention, Mr. Rice’s rejection of her was devastating. Add to this Louise’s struggle with her male persona that becomes more apparent as the novel develops, and Louise’s pain screams from within me. I realize now as I consider my youth -- the fact that I was always more impressed by my mother as a nurse than my father as a salesman, the feeling that helping people and nurturing was more important than selling things, the intuition that nurturing and being nurtured felt better than conquering the world, the tremendous reinforcement my female teachers gave me as I grew (I had all female teachers until I was in seventh grade) -- that even the most trivial disregard or disapproval from a female figure in my life shook me to the core and forced me to recreate myself at every turn. (I will conspicuously refrain from any discussion of my current psychology in the matter here.) Of course, Louise was humiliated! Her role model, her potential nurturer, and maybe even her lover had rejected her deepest thoughts. She was hurt and I hated her for it; I couldn’t overcome that but surely she should.

By now, it should be apparent that the heart of my reading can be found in Louise’s explosive reactions to growing into a gender role opposite of her actual gender. Looking back on my reading, I found myself almost frighteningly violent in my response to her: I wanted to smack her and make her forget about fighting who she was and just get on with being it. However, there was a turning point in the book where I felt at ease with her, practically proud of her, and it is here that I am most comfortable with the parallels between her and her father and me and my mother. Louise comes to work with her father and, for a time, finds peace with the person she is.

I suppose if I were to try to stick a pin through that most elusive spot “the happiest days of my life,” that strange winter on the Portia Sue with my father would have to be indicated. I was not happy in any way that would make sense to most people, but I was, for the first time in my life, deeply content with what life was giving me. Part of it was the discoveries . . . Part of my deep contentment, I’m sure, was being with my father, but part, too, was that I was no longer fighting. (187-188)

I know this happiness, the contentment of finding a place where you can be who you truly are. Significant here is that it is found with her father doing the things that make her male. It is here that she can stop fighting and accept herself. An amazingly specific incident from my own history illustrates my identification with Louise in this instance. When I was eleven years old, our school district closed in the middle of the year due to lack of funds. In response, the parents in our neighborhood set up “schools” in the basements of our houses and those parents, specifically mothers, who were home were the teachers. Unfortunately, there weren’t enough moms to go around, and older children were employed to teach the younger. Volunteers were asked for, and I was the only boy to offer to be a teacher and took quite a bit of ridicule for it. But my mother encouraged me and worked closely with me as I helped the 8-year-olds with their reading. It was such a wonderful time with my mother and even the other mothers smothering me with a praise I can only describe as coming from people surprised that I could or would do it. Finally, who I was had a purpose and was acceptable. Funny that I lost track of that feeling and began fighting again as I progressed through adolescence, constantly finding just about any other male dominated role (athlete, math and science whiz, Chemical Engineer) to take on just to fulfill what I thought others expected of me. I, like Louise, had found my place long before I actually took it.

Painfully, my examination of Louise and, by extension, myself ends with Louise’s intense attack upon her mother. I cannot overstate the polar nature of my reaction to her in this instance: I love that she says to her mother everything I want to say to my father, and I hate her for actually doing it. Perhaps I resent that she was actually able to do it while I have still never been able to. Or, maybe I just do not like that she does it because it seems to me that the conflict does not originate in the mother as much as in Louise herself which is very much how I have always felt in my conflict with my father. In either case, her extreme anger towards what she perceives as the compromise of her mother’s life and the implicit expectations that she believes that places on her are familiar.

“You could have done anything, been anything you wanted.”

“But I am what I wanted to be,” she said, letting her arms fall to her sides. “I chose. No one made me become what I am.”

“That’s sickening,” I said.

“I’m not ashamed of what I have made of my life.”

“Well, just don’t try to make me like you are,” I said.

Taken at face value, this outburst seems a resentment of the parent herself (and certainly an excellent argument can be made for that -- an argument I would agree with wholeheartedly), but I rather see it as Louise’s violent attempt to purge herself of the implicit expectations placed upon her to take on her mother‘s female role. She strikes out at her natural role model because she, by the very nature of who she is, cannot fulfill the role of that model. She, therefore, vilifies that role and strikes out at it with a horrid tone and a word that captures the essence of how she feels: sickening. Any commonality between the two disgusts her; any difference is organized into what is essentially morally superior or stupid. As I watch her do this, I am struck by the hurt she intends to do her mother, and that same hurt I can find myself wishing to create for my father with my words. I hear the implicit guilt in doing this in her words -- she is indeed sickened by it inasmuch as it likely makes her ill to face who she is as compared to who she thinks she should be -- while simultaneously realizing that she almost has to do this in order to truly define who she is in relation to her mother. (Perhaps her mother knows this, and that is why she responds so calmly to Louise.) No matter how I interpret this point, it is clear that my negative attitude towards Louise in this case originates in my own guilt of enjoying her doing what I wish to do (to sin in one‘s heart is the same as to sin), the simple fact that she does it whereas I cannot, and the pain she elicits in others in her attempt to fulfill herself. In one short exchange, she exposes me to myself as malicious, cowardly, and self-serving.

Yes, Louise infuriates me. She fails everywhere I have failed: she has the power that is herself and gives it away; she knows where her peace is and ignores it; she rips away at the heart of those she loves -- all because of the expectations she believes she must fulfill but, quite naturally, cannot. And, to add insult to injury, she bravely overcomes her guilt to truly separate herself from her mother, something I cannot fully do with my father to this day. It is no wonder to me that I could not like her. What is a wonder to me is that, having completed this analysis, I do.