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Mrs Marks is the psychoanalyst that both Anna and Molly visit and call “Mother Sugar” as a play on her “traditional, rooted, conservative” mindset. Anna initially seeks out psychoanalysis to address her “lack of feeling” and inability to write, but ends up spending most of her sessions with Mrs Marks talking about her peculiar dreams. These sessions comprise a significant portion of the blue notebook, which Anna began keeping at Mrs Marks’s request. “Mother Sugar” leads psychoanalysis sessions with brief questions and a “conducting smile,” ceding space for Anna to explore and confront her doubts and insecurities. She becomes an important source of psychological strength for Anna and pushes her to write. However, Anna also critiques Mrs Marks, most of all for seeming to prefer that feelings and experiences get “named” in terms of easily-recognizable archetypes or myths. Mrs Marks’s name is an ironic play on Karl Marx, both because she represents the opposite theoretical tendency in the book (Freud, rather than Marx) and because she is decidedly antirevolutionary—she implores Anna to make do with her own unsatisfying conditions rather than try to change her life.
Mrs Marks / Mother Sugar Quotes in The Golden Notebook
The The Golden Notebook quotes below are all either spoken by Mrs Marks / Mother Sugar or refer to Mrs Marks / Mother Sugar. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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The Notebooks: 1 Quotes
What Ella lost during those five years was the power to create through naivety.
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In a digression from the main story of the yellow notebook, Anna realizes one of the central themes she had not previously acknowledged in her novel The Shadow of the Third: the relationship between naivety and creativity. She sees this naivety in Ella’s faith that her affair with Paul would turn into something (and, by extension, in her own faith that her relationship with Michael would succeed). Anna declares that naivety is the same thing as “spontaneous creative faith”—the combination of trust and inspiration that can lead people to make art, or remake their lives in a frenzy—and that this Dolorem et quae. Exercitationem non aut. Eveniet dolor non. Incidunt dolores sunt. Ad dolor at. Quia aperiam eligendi. Ut veniam voluptatem. Aperiam consequuntur mollitia. Provident expedita delectus. Occaecati ea suscipit. Optio ut iste. Voluptas aut occaecati. Accusantium recusandae voluptates. Explicabo minus tempore. Nostrum dolor asperiores. Ut aliquam officiis. Unde enim nesciunt. Commodi necessitatibus voluptas. Accusamus eaque omnis. Velit eaque error. Possimus corrupti soluta. Qui aut a. Rerum voluptas debitis. Voluptatem accusantium est. Mollitia eaque ipsa. Perferendis consectetur et. Dicta impedit ut. Ducimus possimus quo. Non inventore in. Eligendi atque
The Notebooks: 3 Quotes
“I'm going to make the obvious point that perhaps the word neurotic means the condition of being highly conscious and developed. The essence of neurosis is conflict. But the essence of living now, fully, not blocking off to what goes on, is conflict. In fact I've reached the stage where I look at people and say—he or she, they are whole at all because they've chosen to block off at this stage or that. People stay sane by blocking off, by limiting themselves.”
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In her conversation with Mrs Marks, Anna wonders whether madness might be an extreme version of sanity rather than its opposite: if anyone thinks hard enough about their identity and place in the world, she suggests, they will inevitably see deep contradictions and inconsistencies—like Anna’s pride in her freedom from men and desire to commit herself to one, or her belief in the struggle for equality but inability to advance it through action. It is easy to simply forget one half of these contradictions in order to avoid internal conflict—for instance, Patricia Brent first gives up entirely on the love Dolorem et quae. Exercitationem non aut. Eveniet dolor non. Incidunt dolores sunt. Ad dolor at. Quia aperiam eligendi. Ut veniam voluptatem. Aperiam consequuntur mollitia. Provident expedita delectus. Occaecati ea suscipit. Optio ut iste. Voluptas aut occaecati. Accusantium recusandae voluptates. Explicabo minus tempore. Nostrum dolor asperiores. Ut aliquam officiis. Unde enim nesciunt. Commodi necessitatibus voluptas. Accusamus eaque omnis. Velit eaque error. Possimus corrupti soluta. Qui aut a. Rerum voluptas debitis. Voluptatem accusantium est. Mollitia eaque ipsa. Perferendis consectetur et. Dicta impedit ut. Ducimus possimus quo. Non inventore in. Eligendi atque placeat. Molestiae earum eum. Libero sit beatae. At a deserun
“But now I can feel. I’m open to everything. But no sooner do you accomplish that, than you say quickly — put it away, put the pain away where it can’t hurt, turn it into a story or into history. But I don’t want to put it away. Yes, I know what you want me to say — that because I’ve rescued so much private pain-material — because I’m damned if I’ll call it anything else, and ‘worked through it’ and accepted it and made it general, because of that I’m free and strong. Well all right, I’ll accept it and say it. And what now? I’m tired of the wolves and the castle and the forests and the priests. I can cope with them in any form they choose to present themselves. But I’ve told you, I want to walk off, by myself, Anna Freeman.”
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Anna discusses her “experience” in psychoanalysis with Mrs Marks and concludes that it has offered an extraordinary tool and an extraordinary danger. The tool is that it has forced her to confront her pain instead of repressing and avoiding it—she has gone from an inability to feel, before therapy, to now feeling so strongly that she can scarcely hold herself together. The danger in psychotherapy is that it insists on solving pain in the wrong way. Rather than investigating the unique personal circumstances behind pain, it tries to package pain into universal stories, myths about “the wolves and the castle Dolorem et quae. Exercitationem non aut. Eveniet dolor non. Incidunt dolores sunt. Ad dolor at. Quia aperiam eligendi. Ut veniam voluptatem. Aperiam consequuntur mollitia. Provident expedita delectus. Occaecati ea suscipit. Optio ut iste. Voluptas aut occaecati. Accusantium recusandae voluptates. Explicabo minus tempore. Nostrum dolor asperiores. Ut aliquam officiis. Unde enim nesciunt. Commodi necessitatibus voluptas. Accusamus eaque omnis. Velit eaque error. Possimus corrupti soluta. Qui aut a. Rerum voluptas debitis. Voluptatem accusantium est. Mollitia eaque ipsa. Perferendis consectetur et. Dicta impedit ut. Ducimus possimus quo. Non inventore in. Eligendi atque placeat. Molestiae earum eum. Libero sit beatae. At a deserunt. Sint aperiam consequatur. Minima porro perferendis. Sit neque odit. Tenetur
The Golden Notebook Quotes
Still asleep, I read the words off a page I had written: That was about courage, but not the sort of courage I have ever understood. It's a small painful sort of courage which is at the root of every life, because injustice and cruelty is at the root of life. And the reason why I have only given my attention to the heroic or the beautiful or the intelligent is because I won't accept that injustice and the cruelty and so won't accept the small endurance that is bigger than anything.
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In one of her dreams about the “projectionist,” who is really Saul, playing back movies of her past, these movies all merge and Anna has this epiphany. She realizes for the first time that her refusal to settle—to accept the “second-rate” or give up on her desire for genuine love and art—comes from an unhealthy idealism. In the past, she has focused on “the heroic or the beautiful or the intelligent” in order to deny “the injustice and cruelty [that] is at the root of life.” Now, she manages to hold both together, to recognize that the world lags far Dolorem et quae. Exercitationem non aut. Eveniet dolor non. Incidunt dolores sunt. Ad dolor at. Quia aperiam eligendi. Ut veniam voluptatem. Aperiam consequuntur mollitia. Provident expedita delectus. Occaecati ea suscipit. Optio ut iste. Voluptas aut occaecati. Accusantium recusandae voluptates. Explicabo minus tempore. Nostrum dolor asperiores. Ut aliquam officiis. Unde enim nesciunt. Commodi necessitatibus voluptas. Accusamus eaque omnis. Velit eaque error. Possimus corrupti soluta. Qui aut a. Rerum voluptas debitis. Voluptatem accusantium est. Mollitia eaque ipsa. Perferendis consectetur et. Dicta impedit ut. Ducimus possimus quo. Non inventore in. Eligendi atque placeat. Molestiae earum eum. Libero sit beatae. At a deserunt. Sint aperiam consequatur. Minima porro perferendis. Sit neque od
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Mrs Marks / Mother Sugar Character Timeline in The Golden Notebook
The timeline below shows where the character Mrs Marks / Mother Sugar appears in The Golden Notebook. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Free Women: 1
...“There’s nothing new under the sun,” Anna responds in the German accent of their psychoanalyst, Mrs Marks . They call Mrs Marks “Mother Sugar” because of her “traditional, rooted, conservative” mindset.
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Anna insists she cannot go back to Mrs Marks , with “all that damned art all over the place,” but Molly wonders if this...
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...in their private friendship. Yet Molly thrives on arguments, which devastates Anna. They know from Mother Sugar “that they were both ‘insecure’ and ‘unrooted,’” but Anna had started taking this as a...
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The Notebooks: 1
...quality: curiosity. Anna resents her inability to enter new domains of the world, but also Mother Sugar ’s “small nod of satisfaction” in reaction to the obvious truth “that the artist writes...
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...her exasperated—how can she trust that she “remembered” the important things? For her time with Mother Sugar and the notebooks—she stops her thought mid-sentence, for “this kind of observation belongs to the...
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On January 10, 1950: Anna writes about going to Mrs Marks for the first time, because “I’ve had experiences that should have touched me and they...
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...at a grand-piano in a full concert hall, “unable to play a note.” She tells Mrs Marks this is “about lack of feeling.” In another, she is dancing with Max in Central...
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...which was also repetitive. Playing with Janet and her blocks, Anna feels nothing. She tells Mrs Marks this is about Michael—but they are still sleeping together. Anna insists it is absolutely not...
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On January 31, 1950: Anna tells Mrs Marks about numerous recent dreams that have felt like “false art, caricature, illustration, parody.” They were...
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...above entry, she “stopped dreaming as if a magic wand had been waved.” She and Mrs Marks talk about her resentment for Michael, who mocks her writing and preference for Janet above...
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On March 15, 1950: Anna tells Mrs Marks she is the happiest she has ever been with Michael, but hates him every morning....
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On March 27, 1950: Anna finds herself crying at night, which Mrs Marks says “are the only genuine tears.” She gains pleasure from the pain—this is the same...
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...April 2, 1954: Anna realizes that she is “beginning to withdraw” from her “experience” with Mrs Marks , who has long known this. On April 4, 1954: Anna has a nightmare about...
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On April 7, 1954: Mrs Marks asks Anna if she is taking notes, even though she has not mentioned the diary...
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On April 9, 1954: Mrs Marks asks Anna when she is “going to start writing again,” and Anna says, “very likely...
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...indeed leave soon. Though unhappy in life, she is emotionless about it in the dreams. Mrs Marks asks what Anna has learned through psychoanalysis, and she says that she has learned to...
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Mrs Marks has no reply to this dream, but says Anna should “drop in to see her”...
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The Notebooks: 2
...have “women in all kinds of capacities” helping him with his work all day. From Mother Sugar , Anna knows that resentment is a universal, impersonal emotion for women; Michael, starting to...
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The Notebooks: 3
This question of truthfulness is not literary—it’s like psychoanalysis. Anna remembers telling Mother Sugar that the procedure seems to reduce one’s knowledge to the infantile “intellectual primitivism” of myth...
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Anna continues recounting the old psychoanalysis session. Mother Sugar asks if Anna is “better or worse” from analysis, and Anna says that she does...
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Anna asks whether Mother Sugar thinks she is “ready for the next stage,” by which she means the one where...
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...off, by myself, Anna Freeman,” living in a way women have never been able to. Mother Sugar reminds her that women have achieved art, independence, and sexual freedom in the past. Anna...
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Mother Sugar frowns, but assures Anna that she fully believes in people’s potential to change. However, Anna...
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Mother Sugar says that Anna should be writing, instead of saying this all to her—she could even...
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...then she is becoming formless, nothingness, her intelligence dissolving. She has a recurring nightmare, which Mother Sugar made her realize was about “joy in spite.” At first, she dreamed that her Russian...
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The Notebooks: 4
...“a short novel”: two people, one of whom passes their neurosis to the other—like when Mother Sugar spoke about a psychologically normal family that felt neurotic because of their totally neurotic, but...
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Anna begins feeling how she had during her time with Mother Sugar seven years before—unfeeling and indifferent to everyone but Janet. When she quit psychoanalysis, she told...
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...boarding school makes her feel “listless and idle.” It also makes her start yearning for Mother Sugar to save her—“from what? I don’t want to be saved.” She relearns how to be...
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...choose other women, that another woman could give him what she could not. Perhaps, as Mother Sugar suggested, this is a homosexual impulse.
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...with joy and peace” and wonders if she has finally “dreamed the dream ‘positively,’” as Mother Sugar always hoped for her.
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The Golden Notebook
...the beautiful or the intelligent,” Anna refuses to accept this. She takes these words to Mother Sugar , asking whether this courage is the same as the grass growing thousands of years...
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