fatherdaughter

As i redraft my script for the play (The Women's Stories), inserting the final cues and directions, memorising as i go, i've been listening to tori amos, who always suits thinking about the female (hi)story. this track crept up on me and tapped me on the shoulder like jack frost...i may have written out these lines before... this is how i hear the conversation now... all punctuation is entirely my own imagining...

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Winter

Snow can wait -
"I forgot my mittens!"
Wipe my nose... get my new boots on.
(I get a little warm in my heart when I think of winter)
I put my hand in my father's glove.

I run off where the drifts get deeper...
Sleeping Beauty trips me with a frown.
I hear a voice,
"You must learn to stand up for yourself,
'cause I can't always be around..."

He says,
"When you gonna make up your mind?
When you gonna love you as much as i do?
When you gonna make up your mind?
'cause things are gonna change so fast..."

(All the white horses are still in bed...)

I tell you that,
"I'll always want you near!"
You say that,
"Things change, my dear..."

Boys get discovered as winter melts,
Flowers competing for the sun...
Years go by and I'm here still waiting
With a ring, where some snowman was.
"Mirror, mirror - where's the crystal palace?"
But I only can see myself.
Skating around the truth, I am:
"But I know Dad - the ice is getting thin..."

"When you gonna make up your mind?
When you gonna love you as much as I do?
When you gonna make up your mind?
'cause things are gonna change so fast..."

(All the white horses are still in bed...)

I tell you that,
"I'll always want you near..."
You say that,
"Things change, my dear."

Hair is grey
And the fires are burning...
So many dreams on the shelf.
"You say, 'I wanted you to be proud of me!'
Well I always wanted that myself...
When you gonna make up your mind?
When you gonna love you as much as I do?
When you gonna make up your mind!?
'cause things are gonna change SO fast..."

(...All the white horses have gone ahead...)

I tell you that,
"I'll always want you near..."
You say that,
"Things change, my dear."

"Never change..."

(All the white horses...)

Tori Amos, from Little Earthquakes, (1991)

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But the girl's development, in Freud's view, is more complicated. First, it is implicit in his description of male development that in order for a girl to become a woman who is desirable to a man she has to become someone who resembles a man's mother. But second, as a desiring subject - or rather, as Freud's normative version of a desiring heterosexual woman - she has to change her love-object. She has to experience, as it were, two degrees of newness; the first new object is the father, who, we assume (or presume), doesn't have to resemble the mother in order to be desirable, who is apparantly, by definition, not a copy of the mother; and then presumably she has to replace the father with a man who resembles or derives from him. Either a woman has to desire a copy of a copy; or, for the devloping girl, there is an excess of newness, which means two lots of newness, which means two lots of sufficuent resemblence to be dealt with. Normal Freudian man goes from mother to similar new woman; normal Freudian woman goes from mother to father to new man. If at the end of her development, as Freud puts it, her father should have become her love-object, how, one wonders, will she have the strength - the emotional and imaginative resiliance - to get to another new love-object? ...

Adam Phillips, "Waiting for Returns", from Side Effects, (2006) p.208

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LB,x