Psychoanalysis of Mary Karr's Mother in The Lair's Club

Mary Karr growing up in 1961, Leechfield, Texas, as gone through a lot of hardships, she describes those of her childhood in her memoir's of The Lair's Club. Mary only learns of why her mother, Charlie Marie Karr, has become wavering and potentially hazardous to Mary and nine year old sister, Lecia, towards the end of the novel. All at once Mary talks to her mother, where she revels unknown parts of her past. The story Mary's mother shares with Mary about trying to regain her children; shows how she slowly lost her mind and how her past has affected her relationships with her children.

Because she was so preoccupied with trying to regain her first two children, Tex and Belinda, and cannot succeed in doing so; Mary's mother comes to realize that this issue has been eating away at her and has driven her to insanity. Mary Karr's mother in The Lair's Club is shown to be highly unstable figure in Mary's life.

Get quality help now

Bella Hamilton

Verified writer

5 (234)

“ Very organized ,I enjoyed and Loved every bit of our professional interaction ”

+84 relevant experts are online

Hire writer

Mary discovers as an adult that in her parents attic a box of old wedding rings and pictures of unfamiliar children. Once before she had seen these pictures from her grandmother who had said to her that they were her mother's "Other" children.

When Mary shows her mother what she has found, her mother tries to change the subject completely. Mary brings it up again and her mother decides to finally talk about it with her for the first time. Her mother told her that when she was really young, she got married and had two children.

Her husband's mother did not like Charlie; one day while Charlie was at work her mother-in-law came picked up the children and everything in their apartment. When Charlie came home she was devastated, she went to her parents to ask for help in finding her family.

Charlie finds her children after months of searching for them. Charlie went to the house to find her husband and children with a new mother. She tries to take her children back, and realizes that maybe her children would be better off there, for the time being, Charlie says she tries to do the right thing. Where Mary Karr in The Lair's Club says, "Then Mother did what seemed at the time the Right Thing, though had she Thought, she may have Thought Twice about how Right the Right Thing would wind up being, for surely it drove her mad" (317).

Charlie drives herself to depression, alcoholism, addictions, and even infanticide over this. Trying to rethink the same moment over, playing what she might have been able to do differently ultimately drives her mad. Charlie decides at that moment that the best thing for her to do to get her children back is to get remarried. If she finds someone else to share her life with, they would surely help to get her children back. Charlie gets married to man after man, but many do not want to help her.

Finally Charlie marries Peter Karr, who wants to help get Charlie's children back. But by this time the children are almost grown up and do not want to come move with their mother. Charlie is again distraught with her life and the circumstances that surround her. Charlie revels to Mary that it is only then when her children say they do not want to come back with her, that "Then it was like a big black hole just swallowing me up. Or like the hole inside me, and had been swallowing me up all those years with out my even noticing.

I just collapsed into it" (Karr 318). It is right then when Charlie just snaps into her life long struggle with depression. Peter wants to help his wife as much as he can, he suggest that they should try to have more children. His hopes that if Charlie has more children she will get over the lost of the others. However, after having her two new children, Lecia and Mary, her depression becomes worse and she starts having infanticide. Mary brings up that one incident with her mother, "And the night she'd stood in our bedroom door with a knife?

She'd drunk herself to the bottom of that despair. 'All the times I'd wasted, marrying fellows. And still I lost those kids. And you and Lecia couldn't change that. And I'd wound up just as miserable as I started at fifteen. ' Killing us had come to seem merciful. In fact, she'd hallucinated we'd been stabbed to death. 'I saw blood all over you and everything else. Splashed across the walls'" (Karr 318). Charlie was experiencing infanticide, she wanted to kill Mary and Lecia to put them out of any suffering that they might experience.

In a hypertext version of Velma Dobson and Bruce D. Sales' The Science of Infanticide and Mental Illness they write that, "Over half, fifty six percent, of the filicides were classified as "altruistic" killings, in which the mother killed the child to relieve the child's real or potential suffering; for example, from an incurable disease or from the suffering the child would potentially experience following the mother's suicide.

In another twenty four percent of filicide cases, the mother was acutely psychotic at the time of the murder, as indicated by hallucinations. " Where Charlie wanted to protect her children and by being so disturbed by the lost of her previous two she envisioned Mary and Lecia dead so they would not have to endure anguish any more.