“‘Why don’t you just marry him?’ ‘Because you don’t marry someone to escape something that’s inside your head'” (192).

When it is revealed that Sophie’s mother is pregnant for the second time with Marc, the mother-daughter dynamic is reversed. Sophie ends up taking the role of a mother figure for her own mother by comforting her as well as questioning her rather impulsive behavior. Because of the sensitivity and irony of the issue, Sophie is exposed to a lot of information regarding her mother’s relationship to sexuality and other deep-seated aspects of her psyche that she would not have otherwise had the opportunity of knowing. This quote is particularly telling of the mother’s psychological state, and also creates a strong parallel between Sophie and her mother’s struggles with sexuality and desire. For both Sophie and her mother, it seems that physical desire is often blocked or muddled by their respective desires of coming to terms with and overcoming distortions of sexuality dominated by haunting memories. Because of traumatic experiences with sexuality in their youth, Sophie and her mother have unconsciously woven since then a more abstract and distorted association with sexuality and desire, as the two are highly connected for them.

For Sophie’s mother, she is not even in a state of mind to be able to desire her unborn child or Marc as both of them are more like byproducts of her desire to escape her nightmares, which are tied to the rape that gave birth to Sophie. Because of the power of the memory of her rape, the mother’s perception of desire is controlled by a specter in her own unconscious. Even her relationship with Marc in its essence stems from her desire to have someone to wake her up from her nightmares. She regards it almost like a transaction in which she sleeps with him in return for him watching over her in her sleep. Once she realizes she is pregnant, she cannot help associating the baby in her stomach with the baby in her nightmares about the rape. She cannot possibly desire the baby when the nightmares resurface the unpleasant associations she has with pregnancy and sexuality. She knows she can’t desire marrying Marc when what she truly desires is to escape her own psyche and past. Ultimately, her desire to run away from the grip of her own unconscious mind overwhelms her to the point of her taking her own life.

Sophie also has a similar relationship with sexuality and desire as her mother. The idea of running away or escaping is a strong motif as well in Sophie’s story. She also has a relationship with Joseph that resembles more of a dutiful transaction than one of raw desire and passion. She considers sleeping with him as an act of bravery and duty that is what fundamentally keeps him by her side. She escapes to Haiti because she has the strong belief that she is undesirable due to her inability to physically enjoy sex. Her mental block regarding desire and sexuality manifests through her bulimia and her fear of abandonment. She has the added burden of desire being associated with her being a child born of rape, her detestation of having been tested, knowing that her mother tried to poison her before she was born, and at the end of the novel, her mother having committed suicide and homicide of her own child. Her relation with desire and sexuality is heavily abstracted because of all the layers of experiences in her life that makes her simultaneously want to run away from her own psyche and desperately want to desire and be desired.