Despite our perception of Ma being filtered through Jack's naive worldview, it's not hard to see that Ma suffers constantly. She lives with constant physical pain, she has to deal with the ever-present fear of Old Nick, and she is also trying to raise a child (which is stressful by itself) in a tiny room. It's implied that Old Nick comes to their room frequently and rapes her, and she has injuries that she received from him both recently and in the past. He abuses her physically. He also abuses her psychologically. The most commonly used diagnostic tool (the Conflict tactics scale) divides psychological abuse up into about 20 different tactics, which fall into three basic categories.
1. Verbal aggression (e.g., saying something that upsets or annoys someone else);
2. Dominant behaviors (e.g., preventing someone from contacting their family);
3. Jealous behaviors (e.g., accusing a partner of maintaining other parallel relations)
It's obvious that Old Nick does things that fall into the first two of those three categories (most notably is him confining them in Room, which falls into the second category.) If you read their conversations, Old Nick frequently pushes the blame for things onto Ma. For example, he complains that the wear on the cork board is Ma and Jack's faults, saying that he only expected to have one person in the room. The wear on the cork board is entirely Old Nick's fault, because he was the one who put Ma (and eventually Jack) in the room in the first place.
The entire experience for Ma would be extremely traumatizing in so many ways. When she was first captured, she probably was extremely scared and would do anything to get out - which is how she got her wrist injured. But then she just accepted the situation, realizing that she wasn't going to get out, especially when Jack was born, and she had to take care of him. The psychological toll this would have is absurd.
ReplyDeleteThe reality of Ma's situation is chilling. We see realities through Jack's innocent viewpoint that are truly horrifying. Being kidnapped at such a young age, and then being forced to endure sexual assault, verbal and physical abuse, and like you said dominant behaviors and verbal aggression, make the reality of Ma's situation and desire to escape all the more notable. She has been pushed so much in these past seven years, and like you said, is literally in constant pain. And yet, she somehow manages to raise a five year old child fairly well.
ReplyDeleteI agree that Ma's situation is utterly dismal. In "Dying" Ma says that she did not intend to have Jack, which suggests that Nick forced it. Before reading this chapter I thought that Nick had given Ma a child to have some leverage over Ma, and I'm sure that's true to some extent, but now I'm also starting to think that Jack is the (unwanted?) product of physical abuse. Ma is very happy with Jack, though.
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