http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/2012/11/reconsidering-mary-sally-field-in-lincoln.htmlNovember 20, 2012
Reconsidering Mary
Posted by Michelle Dean
Toward the end of Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln,” Mary Todd Lincoln tells her husband that if people want to understand him, they’ll have to understand her, too. It’s an unusually heavy line in a script that favors elegant levity when not quoting the Gettysburg Address. Demanding to be remembered in a certain way does not easily lead to bons mots. That’s especially so with a character who is given scant screen time because she is secondary to the plot that Spielberg and his screenwriter, Tony Kushner, have chosen. Mary wasn’t much involved in the realpolitik that propels the story, the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment that outlawed slavery. But her blunt line confirms what the rest of the movie points to: an attempt to rehabilitate Mary, to find in her domestic capabilities a strength that accounts for her image as shrewish, extravagant, and difficult.
It’s a little too neat of an interpretation. Many before Kushner have not known what to make of the Lincoln marriage and of effect on the Presidency, other than as a drag on a great man’s spirits. It was not always that way. “Mary, Mary,” Lincoln is said to have called out in the streets of Springfield, Illinois, as he walked home upon learning of his 1860 Presidential win, “we are elected.” But she had no special interest in her husband’s grand politics. Even her most thorough biographer, Jean H. Baker, agrees that Mary was no Eleanor Roosevelt. She did not author any speeches, having few causes other than husband and children. She disliked many of Lincoln’s advisers, and spoke to her husband chiefly about patronage appointments for the people who did her favors around the house. Kushner, in an interview with NPR’s “Fresh Air,” takes a familiar line from historians like Baker when he offers simply that Mary “knew that the backdrop for the Lincoln administration had to be splendid and suggest power and coherence.” But his own film shows how this got Mary into no end of trouble with penny-pinchers in Congress. She caused just as many cracks as she hoped to cover over with new rugs and wallpaper.
It was certainly true that Mary had a fetish for strength and coherence, and particularly where her husband was concerned. In the film, Mary (played by Sally Field) repeats a rumor—somewhat anachronistically, as it’s drawn from historians rather than Mary’s contemporaries—that Lincoln hadn’t wanted to marry her. But there is much evidence in their letters to each other, and in descriptions from contemporaries, that the attachment was a strong one. It was only when it came to Mary helping her husband professionally that she could not will appearance into reality. She and her dressed-up White House became a symbol, but not the kind she’d hoped. A paradigmatic “difficult woman,” Mary was enormously unpopular in her own time and not much rehabilitated in any other, until Baker’s biography appeared, in 2008. Mary is often credited as the first woman to be referred to as “First Lady,” but it is an oft-repeated trope of Lincolniana that most Americans who used that term for her meant it as a smear.
Much of her problem lay in her love of aristocratic frippery. It did not quite love her back. A Napoleon relative described her attire as “the French style without any taste.” The sums she spent on these items considerably outweighed their ability to impress even relatively provincial Washington society. What’s more, she often bought her fine things in New York, disrupting old and lucrative commercial relationships between Washington merchants and the Presidency. Her sense of grandeur got in the way of theirs.
And when Mary was done with the finery, it was still a long time before it had finished with her. Lincoln died intestate, which meant that Mary ended up with only what the law entitled her to: a third of his small eighty-five-thousand-dollar estate, which meant a tiny income to live on in Chicago. To top it off, the administrator dragged his feet. Mary had gone into the heavy mourning dress she’d wear the rest of her life. It would take Congress years to grant her a pension—in the interim she tried to auction off old dresses to service her debts.
Her precarious financial situation quickly led to scandal. She left New York under a cloud of public furor, letting her half-black, ex-slave seamstress, Elizabeth Keckley, take charge. But even that didn’t shield her. Mary never paid Keckley, who later collected the debt by way of publishing an insider’s memoir that cast Mary as a frantic, selfish, difficult sort of person. Tad, the child who in the film is, as Richard Brody points out, a talisman of Spielberg’s obsession with innocence and hope, would die himself in 1871. Mary became obsessed with spiritualism, which she said helped her reach both Lincoln and her dead sons, not so unusual a belief in her own time. And when her son Robert had her declared insane and committed in 1875, it sealed the caricature endured right up to the present day. (She would die alone at her sister’s house, finally, in 1882.)
Whether “Lincoln” marks a change in Mary’s image in the culture remains to be seen. (Louis C.K.’s recent parody held that Mary was “literally historically insane.”) Mary’s preoccupation with the finer things in life can indeed be recast in Kushner’s feminist terms. Feminist historians, Baker included, have interpreted it as an attempt to control the small sphere in which Victorian Washington allowed women power.
A more intuitive explanation is that it distracted Mary from a life that can not have been all she’d hoped it would be. She was not left untouched by certain grittier externalities in her pre-Presidential life. She came from a comfortable background, sure, was known as a flirt and a belle in Springfield and Lexington, Kentucky, where she’d grown up. But the slave who’d raised her had let her in on a secret: the gate at the Todds’ was marked to indicate that it was a place where escaped slaves could find shelter and help. As to her own comforts with Lincoln, Mary became poorer than she’d ever been. Early in her marriage, she bore and raised two children in a boarding-house room, alone and without help. She often functioned as a single mother, because Lincoln’s lawyering took him on the road.
The film collapses all of that strain into a Mary devastated by the loss of a son in late midlife, though, in fact, Willie was the second of her sons to die, catching sick just as the Lincolns threw one of their grander parties. She lost Eddie, the first, long before the family ever went to Washington, either to consumption or an undetected cancer, as he’d been sickly from the start. (Tad, the child featured in the film, would die, too, in adolescence.)
Even installed in the capital, Mary was never so remote from the turmoil of the Civil War as her contemporaries imagined. Her front-row seat was not wasted on her. When Lincoln left his inaugural train to avoid potential violence in Baltimore, Mary remained aboard, watching angry partisans roam in search of her husband. Willie’s fatal illness was likely typhoid, spread by Washington’s overtaxed wartime sewers, which, built for a population less than half that of wartime, spilled into the nearby Potomac. The one cause Mary did really take up as First Lady was the one dear to Mrs. Keckley, the care of the “contraband” ex-slaves who fled the South to live in slum conditions in the capital.
Mary met every one of those burdens with a combative attitude that would haunt her to her grave. She was reputed, before she arrived in Washington, to be a woman who haggled over every purchase, strawberries particularly. And Baker claims that Lincoln’s estate was only the size it was because Mary sought out every available source of funding for official matters other than the President’s own pocket. The obsession with money led to that disastrous sale of fancy clothing and to the act of sewing her entire inheritance of fifty-six thousand dollars, just before her commitment, into her skirts.
You can read that as parsimony or greediness, but what it boils down to is control. The film has Mary proudly proclaim her housekeeping, shining and defiant, “The miracles I have wrought… because I had to.” Yet something beyond pride was at work there. There is evidence that even before the Presidency Mary was prone to shopping binges, when there was money for it. Some historians think this further evidence that she was bipolar, with a mania that expressed itself as acquisitiveness.
It is hard to say if they are right. There are certainly people in this world who could testify to the satisfaction of impulse buying, and to its fleetingness, without falling under psychiatric scrutiny. A court, at her surviving son Robert’s request, did decide the question of Mary’s sanity in the negative. But as Baker has pointed out in many a review of books on that subject, it doesn’t particularly matter whether they were right. Sane or insane, we don’t usually institutionalize people anymore for being difficult and eccentric. It’s no longer a matter of Mary being either as strong as Kushner seems to want her to be, nor as weak. She gets to be both.
It’s that open complexity which, funnily enough, makes Sally Field the perfect person to play Mary. Much of her nuanced performance implies what the script leaves out. Field has told the press that she struggled to keep the role after Liam Neeson dropped out of the project; Spielberg thought she was too old. Let us be glad someone (she hints it was Day-Lewis) brought him to his senses. Temperamentally, she is Mary’s rightful heir. She is perhaps best known to one generation of fans at least as M’Lynn, the steeliest of the “Steel Magnolias,” another woman prone to anger and frustration at the things she cannot change, and who has trouble maintaining proper appearances in grief. Or, alternately, as the woman who could not control her gratitude enough to suit public ideals of the behavior of successful women. In that famous, though oft-misquoted, speech she gave to accept her second Oscar, she said, “I can’t deny the fact that you like me, right now, you like me!” Had Mary Todd Lincoln’s life been a little different, had the people that surrounded her been given to less stringent kinds of judgment, it is something one can easily imagine her saying herself.
