Gender Roles In Mary Karr's The Liar

“’What do you fear, lady?’ He asked.
‘A cage,’ she said. ‘To stay behind bars, until use and old age accept them, and all chance of doing great deeds is gone beyond recall or desire.’”
-J. R. R. Tolkien, The Return of the King (Tolkien, 767) Many people refuse to believe that the expectations that society’s gender roles enforce upon us do more harm than good. But these cages have been the undoing of many. An excellent example of this occurrence is the character of Mary Karr’s mother in Karr’s memoir, The Liar’s Club. Charlie, as she is known, faces tall expectations that she ultimately cannot reach by her own mother, her society, and ultimately herself as well. These harsh expectations placed upon Charlie and her own sense of failure following her first marriage ending horribly lead to the psychotic break in chapter seven and her behavior in Colorado.
From the time she was a child, as with most other girls in her generation, Charlie was faced with the expectation that she would grow up to be a loving housewife to a financially successful man with a couple of cute little kids to look after in her beautiful home.
But when she is unable to live up to those expectations, her world quickly becomes darker. Her mother sharply disapproves of her and favors her own more successful, Dotty. This disapproval leads to impulsive behavior, a precursor to the erratic breakdown she has at the end of chapter seven. Mary at one point describes her grandmother passive-aggressively praising Dotty, and Charlie’s
response:
“At some point, Grandma announced that Dotty had sure made a good marriage, which judgement wasn’t lost on Mother, I guess. She got all quiet. Then she took her sketch pad and a stub of charcoal from the backseats and wandered off to the barn… Mother was talking soft Spanish to two guys studying he sketchpad. One of them quickly tucked a bottle of clear liquid into his back pocket.” (Karr, 31)
The quote shows us how Charlie uses her impulsive behavior as a coping method for her mother’s disapproval. She creates a sort of counter-culture of drinking, smoking, and socializing with those of whom her mother might disapprove (the Latinos mentioned in the above quote, or her own blue-collar husband, for example). But at the same time, Charlie’s mother’s disapproval weighed heavily on Charlie, to the point of being almost unbearable. This is a precursor to the psychosis she experiences in chapter seven. But the expectations placed upon Charlie were not the only factor in her breakdown and her behavior following. Her experiences contributed as well. A large contributor to her later behavior was her guilt over her ‘failure’ in her role as mother in her first marriage. Once she had accepted that she would never have custody over her children again, she fell into a deep depression. Not only had she ‘failed’ her mother, and her society, but she had failed her children, her husband, and herself. When she tells Mary how she accepted this, she says:
“’Then it was like a big black hole just swallowed me up. Or like the hole was inside me, and had been swallowing me up all those years without my even noticing. I just collapsed into it. What’s the word the physicists use? Imploded. I imploded.’” (Karr, 318)
The quote reveals just how dependent Charlie is upon the ideal family image that was drilled into her head as a child by her mother. She never tells Mary and her sister Lecia this until she is in her sixties, and when asked why she waited to tell them, she states:
“As to why she hadn’t told us all this before- about the marriages and the lost children- her exact sentence stays lodged in my head, for it’s one of the most pathetic sentences a sixty-year-old woman can be caught uttering: ‘I thought you wouldn’t like me anymore.” (Karr, 318)
The way in which Charlie was brought up taught her that everyone would disapprove of her past. It was bad enough that she had been married more than once, but a woman’s place in that time was with her children, why her mother-in-law had disapproved so greatly of her job. The fact that she felt herself unable to tell Lecia and Mary about her previous life probably ate at her, and was most likely a factor in her mental break. Her past could have also led to the specific hallucination she had; the hallucination of killing her daughters might have stemmed from her fear of ‘failing’ again, or her guilt over past failures. Altogether, this was a major contributing factor to the psychosis Charlie experiences in chapter seven and her behavior in Colorado. In Colorado, Charlie’s behavior takes a sharp turn towards the worse. She becomes addicted to methamphetamine diet pills and she is spending lavishly and impulsively, among other questionable activities. Perhaps her mother’s death created, for Charlie, an opportunity to ‘accept’ herself by indulging in the behavior her mother had so abhorred. But Mary says about her mother’s behavior:
“She read more and more books by guys with more and more unpronounceable names, saying existentialism was the philosophy of despair. Lecia took to hiding what I called those ‘French-fried’ books down deep in the magazine racks, for they always got Mother talking misty-eyed way about suicide. She would gaze up from the page and say that for some folks killing yourself was the sanest thing to do.” (Karr, 230)
Although Charlie’s mother also instilled in her the very same household ideals that led to Charlie’s breakdown, her presence also reduced Charlie’s impulsive behavior, most likely out of a strong desire to please her. For instance, she stops the family from fighting so often when she comes to live with them. After her mother died, and her impulsive behavior reached its peak, she also fell into a major depression, possibly feeling as if she had never satisfied her mother while she had been alive and consequently accepted once again that she had failed, in a similar way to how she accepted she had failed after her husband left her. Before she was failing society as a whole, but now she had failed her mother by being unable to reconcile her own image in her mother’s eyes. The turmoil between satisfying her mother and given into impulsive desires is a key factor to her depressive behavior in Colorado. Mary further details this behavior at the beginning of chapter twelve:
“Mother got a local doctor to order her up diet pills. She zipped them in the inner pocket of her Coach bag where she’d always carried baby aspirin before. The “bounce” she claimed they gave her did stop her from spending whole days laid up drunk in bed. …she’d drink from a bottle of Smirnoff she’d made syrupy in the freezer and cut back her cuticles. Or she’d smoke while paging through back issues of Vogue, some blues record in the corner moaning about how shitty men were. … When Lecia and I finally figured out how to pronounce the magic word on the diet-pill label- methamphetamine- we used it in a jump-rope rhyme…” (Karr, 229)
This exemplifies her impetuous behavior at its height. She is spending lavishly on Coach bags and Vogue magazines. One day she is living in a swamp, and then she has taken her daughters to live in some mountainside cabin, complete with their very own horses. She had taken the behavior that Mary describes in previous chapters to new extremes. We never see how Charlie recovers from this, however, because Karr choses this spot to jump ahead almost twenty years. But Charlie’s behavior, an important aspect of Mary’s childhood memories, can be linked back to her mother and her past. Charlie had accepted and enforced lofty expectations in herself from the time she was a girl, but when she found it impossible to live up to them, she began to unravel. This all is not to say that Charlie should be forgiven for her treatment of Mary and Lecia in their childhood. Nothing justifies the neglect of children. But Charlie’s behavior should not be blamed entirely on herself. She is a by-product of her time, in her own way. Her behavior was her own unique response to situations and expectations placed upon many of the women in her generation. Although Charlie’s reaction might be unique, her situation surely was not.