Secret, The (1992)
By Eva Hoffman
Biological determinism; Cloning; Nature/nurture
When Iris discovers that she is her mother’s clone, she leaves home to try and forge an individual identity.
From the time she is a child, Iris senses that there is something unique about her relationship with her mother. They exist as an insular unit, isolating themselves from family and friends; often, Iris finds it difficult to distinguish herself from her mother. As this is the only existence she has known, Iris might not have recognized odd nature of their relationship had she not sensed the censure of others. She calls this “the Weirdness”: the frozen, horrified looks, her mother’s evasiveness about the past. As she grows older and she begins to look strikingly like her mother, she begins to sense the truth and resents her mother for concealing her origins. Only when she discovers on her birth certificate that she is a clone does she finally break with her mother. Along with the certificate, Iris discovers hidden letters from the grandparents she has never known, so she decides to track down these relatives to discover the sense of past she has been missing. When she meets them, however, she finds the same confused, fearful reception she has met with her entire life. Iris returns home only long enough to confront her mother and sever ties with her, although she realizes that their unique bond – forged by genetics and social rejection – cannot be fully dissolved. When she meets a man who does not measure her against her mother, Iris finally recognizes her own humanity.
This novel is as much about discovering one’s self as it is about identity problems specific to cloned individuals. The difficulties that Iris faces in defining herself as something apart from her mother is both unique to her – she literally is her mother – and a struggle against the pull of genetics that is universally accessible. Many of her problems, though, represent wider social fears about cloned figures; like those who openly stare at her, Iris does not believe in her own humanity. She is a spectral figure, a ghost of a woman still alive, a manufactured replica. Iris figures that because her mother has already lived once, hers is a superfluous existence; in her mind, anything that she does is merely a revisitation of earlier events. Moreover, Iris believes that her existence invalidates the lives of the rest of humanity, because if clones can replicate the early experiences of their progenitors, then the significance of those events is lessened. Iris’s challenge, then, is to determine how much of her life is genetically fated, and how much can be self-determined. Her sense of personhood relies largely on her ability to balance her individual desires with those she shares with her mother, and she begins her journey of self-awareness only when the exclusiveness of her relationship with her mother proves insufficient. In some sense, Iris sees her rejection of her mother as an untenable rejection of self, and perhaps her final realization of personhood through her relationship with a man compromises the possibility of her true individuality.
Evaluation: This novel would be appropriate for someone who is more interested in mother-daughter psychology and philosophizing about identity than thinking about the social impact of cloning. Hoffman is less concerned with creating plausible characters than repeatedly examining the meaning of consciousness.
– Natalie Champ