Footfalls - Background

Background

Beckett’s mother, also called May, had “difficulty sleeping through the night, and there were often times when she paced the floor of her room or wandered through the darkened house as silently as one of the ghosts which she swore haunted it… She removed the carpets in some areas” so she could hear her feet no matter how faint they fell.

Hildegard Schmahl wanted to know how was the figure of May to be understood. “In the thirties”, he said, “C.G. Jung, the psychologist, once gave a lecture in London and told of a female patient who was being treated by him. Jung said he wasn’t able to help this patient and for this”, according to Beckett, “he gave an astonishing explanation. This girl wasn’t living. She existed but didn’t actually live.”

Jung does not appear to have explained what he meant by ‘never been properly born', but he must have meant either that the trauma of birth had somehow been bypassed, leaving a gap in the emotional history of the patient or that the person concerned did not really exist in terms of having a full consciousness.

Beckett recognized in this psychological dilemma an example of “his own womb fixation, arguing forcefully that all his behavior, from the simple inclination to stay in bed to his deep-seated need to pay frequent visits to his mother, were all aspects of an improper birth.”

“The implication in Footfalls is that May has remained in the Imaginary, ... womb” and that that womb is also her tomb is a recurring theme with Beckett.

Among the myths underlying psychic life, Jung favoured that of the hero who has to stand up to a devouring Great Mother figure threatening to drag him back into symbiotic unconsciousness. His entry into her womb/tomb and successful re-emergence constitutes his own renewal and transformation.

“Only two years before writing Footfalls, had also met the daughter of an old friend, who described to him graphically her own depression, distress and extreme agoraphobia, telling him how, unable to face the world, she used to pace relentlessly up and down in her apartment.” It is not unreasonable to assume there may be an association between the character of May and this girl.

If we viewed May’s pacing from above “we would see the tracing on the stage floor of a tremendously elongated variation of the figures 8 turned on its side … the mathematical symbol for infinity.”

Beckett was also indebted to the French psychologist Pierre Janet for his conception of hysterical behaviour. In his overview of Janet’s work, Robert Woodworth in his Contemporary Schools of Psychology, a work Beckett read, pays particular attention to Janet’s description of the “hysterical paralysis of one arm”, which Beckett incorporated, into May’s posture. There are a number of analogies between Footfalls and Janet’s work with a patient called Irène: He lists “the deep sleep, the sleep-walking, the hearing of the mother’s voice … the terrifying extreme of Irène’s fabulation, the drama of daily re-enactment, of pathological memory possessing the body and mind of the traumatised hysteric, … returning again and again each night light a nightmare in a private theatre.”

Much time was spent in pre-production getting May’s posture exactly right. Whitelaw said she felt “like a moving, musical, Edvard Munch painting”. In reality her pose creates “a striking parallel with the picture of The Virgin of the Annunciation by Antonello da Messina” which Beckett had seen forty years earlier in Munich.

Beckett too was very familiar with the work of Munch and May’s pose is also reminiscent of Munch’s Madonna. Munch described the work in this way: "Now life and death join hands. The chain is joined that ties the thousands of past generations to the thousands of generations to come" He painted a woman in warm hues, her torso bare and her head tilted back, with long reddish hair flowing around her body. Her eyes are closed, her lips slightly parted in silent rapture. Her face is pale and bony, and crowned with a deep orange halo … The lithograph versions have sperm border, and a foetus with its arms crossed in the corpse position looking up unhappily at the Madonna from the lower left corner. Munch is playing with opposites here: fertility and virginity, lust and chastity, and in his words, life and death.