The Kitchen Sink

and the evergrowing anxieties of womanhood

Set in Great Britain between the decades of 1910 through 1940, Life After Life is a BBC Miniseries based on a novel of the same name, starring Thomasin McKenzie in the main role of Ursula. It also counts on stellar performances from Sian Clifford, Jessica Brown Findlay, Joshua Hill and Louis Hofmann.

PART I: THE SETTING 

Ursula has died. She has died and lived and died again, and she will go on to taste death many times before she is ever truly allowed to live.

We are first introduced to Ursula when her umbilical cord becomes wrapped around her fragile little neck, as her mother pants and screams on the second-floor of their secluded country home; Ursula dies before she’s able to take her first breath. But immediately after, she comes back, this time, saved by fate and the skilful hands of a doctor.

Ursula dies several more times; she drowns at the beach with her sister Pamela; she falls from the window of her bedroom; she succumbs to Influenza multiple times, but she always comes back.

Barely having reached the age of 10, and having already lived more lives than most of us ever will, Ursula becomes apprehensive, taken in by a lung-crushing sense of anxiety that she will die, and having seen multiple deaths in her dreams, she allows her anxieties to take her away from her life.

Her mother, believing something might be wrong, sends her to London to visit a psychiatrist, where she will die again, this time, at the hands of her aunt, in a vehicular accident.

Ursula’s story, however, isn’t really about death; as with every work of art, you must look under its initial premise to find its heart, and with the help of director John Crowley and writer Bathsheba Doran, Kate Atkinson’s time-transcending tale of the anxieties of womanhood leap out of the page to become a heartbreaking tale of the soul-crushing mundaneness of growing up as a woman.

Kate Atkinson’s Ursula is bright. She is intelligent and kind-hearted, albeit unable to portray these emotions in a healthy way, but she is stuck in a strict and colourless world that does not understand or appreciate her thirst for life. Perhaps that is why, when she becomes pregnant after being raped in her own home by a friend of her eldest brother, she runs to her aunt in London, who her father’s family has shunned for being openly bohemian and critical of the current social norms.

Ursula finds more than solace in her aunt Izzie, but understanding. Could it be that if a 16-year-old girl could logically conclude that her delayed menstruation and weight gain were a result of pregnancy, her mother could remain so clueless?

Ursula understands she is not her mother’s favourite. In a house with 5 children, isolated in the middle of the English countryside, a woman so young as her mother is bound to be more favourable to one of her children over the others, particularly the boys; however, when Sylvie boils down her daughter’s change in demeanour and physical appearance to “puppy fat” obtained by emotionally eating as a way to cope with her sister’s departure for university, was she blatantly ignorant to her daughter’s suffering, believing that if she got better once, she would eventually get better again, or was that a mother not wanting to believe her youngest daughter could be in the family way at just the age of 16? Can social norms truly prevent us from seeing others suffering around us, and caring for them? 

Either way, when confronted with the need for solace, young Ursula boards a train to London to find her aunt. The same train, mind you, that she was planning on using to end her life. And, even in a character who has such a deep relationship with death, and holds on to the knowledge that if she ends her life, she might immediately come back, Ursula’s face is filled with the dread and pain of understanding her situation does not have resolve, and will lead her to become a social pariah, isolated from her family and all those around her. 

When she does find her way to her aunt, Ursula is told there are options. She doesn’t quite understand them, but she comes to realise what the option given to her by her aunt is a bit too late. Days later, lying in a hospital bed, with her father by her side and her mother refusing to even look at her face, Ursula sees the salvation of death above her in the electric lights of her room. She extends her arms and silently hopes for a new beginning, but she is not granted that grace this time; this time, she will have to live with the outcome, and the knowledge of that brings her to tears. 

Going back home, Ursula confides in her sister about the assault but insists she wants to leave it in the past. She asks her mother to see her therapist again but is told he retired. Alone in a full house with parents who refuse to look at her, brothers who could never understand her and a sister far away at school, Ursula enrols in a typewriting course, undoubtedly expecting to be the one in charge of writing her story from now on, and perhaps, in that story, she’ll be allowed to come back once more.

PART II: URSULA’S HERO’S JOURNEY

Ursula is a fascinating character. Her intimate connection to the world around her yet inability to properly become a part of it makes Life After Life a story without a real protagonist, where the audience is made to follow a character trying her best not only to survive, but to live, the right way, the painless way, the happy way, and failing miserably to do so over and over again. 

With her story being set around multiple historical events that went on to shape the world as we know it, Ursula becomes less of a character and more of a symbolic representation of the women of her time, plagued with the anxieties of a constantly changing world that seems to be moving faster than their brains can comprehend, but that still refuses to create space for them.

Her life during the First World War, being made to patiently wait for her father’s return from service while the world moved on to better and bigger things, without ever wanting for anything but without ever having anything to want for, shaped Ursula’s understanding of the world around her. Things are supposed to be simple, a father, a mother, siblings and afternoons having tea or strolling about, while the real problems of the world happen far away from her, without her interference. A life every child should be allowed to live.

It isn’t until Ursula enters her teens that she begins to understand what exactly her role is. What her purpose in being alive is, and why she must keep coming back. Her anxieties are unknowingly paralleled by Bridget, a maid in her home who believes Ursula should never have been alive in the first place due to the circumstances of her birth, and that now God is doing what He can to bring her back. Even after Ursula pushes Bridgit down the stairs, which the young girl explains was an attempt to stop Bridgit from contracting Influenza, which had previously caused Bridgit herself as well as Ursula and her siblings to die multiple deaths, Bridgit continues to believe Ursula is not mentally ill but simply has a connection to the divine that no one seems to understand. 

Life After Life isn’t a particularly religious story. Of course, it is common for humanity to use divine intervention as an answer to any question that boggles the mind, but Ursula’s connection to death and her visions of cold snow and the void of the afterlife isn’t ever explicitly connected to any religious dogma. And yet, Ursula’s purity, her sensibility and curiosity, and her eagerness to actively participate in the world around her can certainly remind the viewer of a sort of angel.   

Further down the line, even after acquiring a degree and securing herself a job, Ursula felt her life was not well lived. She longed for company and love, someone to share her life with, even the uninteresting details of day to day. One afternoon, after weeks of drinking wine and dancing by herself in her little apartment, Ursula met Derek with a face washed with blood after having fallen nose-first onto a sidewalk and nervous agitation as she attempted to gather her fallen groceries. 

He was kind. Helpful and romantic like a knight in shining armour he helped her to her feet and made a lighthearted dig at the blood running through her face and onto her scarf. He didn’t seem to mind that she was covered in her blood, and she didn’t seem to notice he didn’t even offer to help stop her bleeding. Perhaps he didn’t have any issue with her bleeding at all.

Her mother, like many others, was always a realist in regard to life and its circumstances. Older women often are, as they have been burdened and broken by life, forced to watch the ones they love commit the same mistakes in a neverending cycle of mocking torture. Sylvie had convinced herself her daughter must’ve confused gratitude for love, and flown into marriage without quite understanding what the union could mean for her.

For as long as time has existed, a woman’s relationship with her mother has acted as the defining agent for every relationship she will have later in life. For Ursula, the daughter of a young bride who married for financial stability after being suddenly stricken by poverty, and whose relationship with her daughters was nothing short of lukewarm and distant, Ursula craved affection and care, just as she craved the need to belong, a common human affliction. A marriage, perhaps, could satiate both her hungers at the same time. And like her own mother, like many women before them, Ursula had given up her life and freedom for the promise of eternal happiness without fully grasping the consequences of a lifetime agreement under the eyes of God and State, but hoping this would give her the fulfilment she’s always been taught she required. 

Ursula’s mother, Sylvie, was likewise promised fulfilment she never came to find in marriage. Her qualms for her daughter’s marriage were, as well, an admission of her doubts and desires as to her married life. She had gambled away her freedom at the tender age of 18 but was given economic stability, a respectable place in society, children and comfort. A life. Was it the one Sylvie had always wanted? Was it fulfilment? She would never know, but she was grateful. What an interesting feeling to associate with marriage.

Must Sylvie and Ursula, must women spend their lives hoping marriage will make them truly whole? Were they ever broken, to begin with? Ursula and Sylvie may never know the answers to those questions, as they were doomed to live the lives of their mothers from their first breath, but others may find solace in looking for those answers. 

In the whirlwind of the intersections between regular life and womanhood, constant questioning of our place in the world and our contributions to it might just be the only thing that can save us from insanity, and make sure our daughters and granddaughters are born whole.

PART III: URSULA’S DEMISE(s)

In marriage, Ursula sought fulfilment, but she doesn’t find it in her husband’s affection. Having only experienced physical intimacy when her innocence was brutally taken at the age of 16, Ursula seems to expect tenderness from marriage, but of course, it would be ghastly for any woman to discuss such private affairs, or even mention them out loud. As for the other aspects of her newlywed life, Ursula is expected to keep up her end of the bargain by becoming more acquainted with her husband’s kitchen. Her husband is fond of stews. She isn’t. She will then be cooking only stews from now on, after all, isn’t selflessness the language of love? So what if she is the only one who must constantly give something up? 

When the sharpness of a knife and the heat of the stove become the most intense things in her life, Ursula understands her role is different than advertised, and she might as well attempt to make a go of this modern life of hers, after all, what other options are there if not warming her stomach by the stove and awaiting her husband’s arrival? 

Ursula believed married life would give her a chance to share her tribulations and adventures with someone else, but what tribulations are there in deciding which vegetables should go in the stew, or how much salt would be to her husband’s taste? How many women, she must’ve been left to wonder, have traded their freedom for a brand new set of kitchen knives and a stuffy dining room they’re not even allowed to eat in? 

Suddenly, it has become apparent that she has traded her lonely apartment with lively music and wine for someone else’s lonely house which she, and she alone, was expected to make a home out of. Ursula stands at the window, watching her husband leave for another day of work while humming the soft blues she used to listen to at the end of her workday. Ironically, there is no end to her work days now. They seem to last forever. 

It seems Ursula has traded her endless cycle of death for a new cycle of mundane boredom, standing in her kitchen reading cookbooks and attempting to prepare dinner before her husband comes home and tells her about his day in the outside world. It is human of the mind to wander, it is human of the body to want more, more excitement and something to live for. For Ursula, the facade of her simple suburban life is shattered by the sudden discovery of her husband’s violent tendencies and debt. Turns out he truly does not mind the sight of blood, hers least of all.

Now more lonely than ever, unhappy in every room of her home, Ursula realises the price she paid for her lovely house and dining room table. How unbearable that no matter how many different people she attempts to bring into her life, it only seems to expand her loneliness, and there is no more powerful poison than loneliness.

That empty house, filled with furniture and silence, has become her prison cell, and, if she is not careful, her final resting place. 

Her next encounter with death, this time only a close one, comes through the hands of her husband. Beaten, bruised and bleeding, she is left in her kitchen, within an inch of her life and an inch from her stove, and she is lucky. What a strange and disgusting word to use, but Ursula truly would be, to anyone else, considered lucky. How confusing that the best thing her husband, the man she believed to love, could’ve done for her that day in her kitchen, was genuinely beat her to death, allowing her to escape his grasp and start anew in a shining new life. 

How many women have we lost to marriage? How many women left bleeding in their homes never woke up? How many souls have been taken by the fists of men who believe a marriage licence is equal to a certificate from a cattle auction? And how many women closed their swollen bloody eyes to never open them again, wishing, like Ursula, they could have another chance to make things right? 

As Ursula lays on the floor, crunched up into a fetal position, we are left to wonder what must’ve been going on in her head. Did she see the irony? The irony is that after all these years, after all these deaths, her husband turned out to become more of a danger to her life than anything that killed her before. Is this what she came back for? After all those unlived lives, could it be that the one she gets to live only amounts to this?

Instead of looking for those answers, Ursula once again seeks solace in her aunt. And still, with broken cheekbones, missing teeth, eyes swollen shut and covered in her blood, she finds in herself the ability to be happy for someone else, confident big eyes staring at her aunt’s life, a life that seemed worth living.

Perhaps she could find a life worth living. Even after the brutal suffering she was made to endure, perhaps she could find fulfilment in working again, dedicating herself to her family and making friends. There is no time, however, to ponder what she might make of the rest of her life now that she no longer had the love and companionship she was promised, if ever she did have, for her next death came, unsurprisingly, at the hands of her husband. 

There on the carpet of her aunt’s living room, the cold of death found her once more and guided her hand back in time, as she joined the time-bending list of women taken from this world too soon at the hands of their husbands. 

PART IV: URSULA’S LIFE

But this time, Ursula came back with vigour. She fights back the boy who forcibly kisses her, no longer being thankful for the mere idea that someone could think romantically of her; she learns to shoot and further value the life and independence of a woman of the new millennium, a woman like her aunt, might be able to enjoy; she decides to focus on her education and study Modern Languages, despite her brother’s insistence that she’s only doing so in pursuit of a husband. And, poignantly, the conversation she once had with her sister revolving around her sexual assault morphs into a discussion of their shared ideals of life and their future, bonding over their exquisitely human desire for living life at its fullest. 

It is here that Life After Life becomes excellent, earning a place alongside The Zone of Interest for its painful portrayal of the normality of Naziism, particularly as observed through the eyes of a naive young English girl. 

In this life, Ursula is allowed to live her youth. Allowed to fall in love, experience the simplicity of holding hands and stolen kisses, she’s allowed to be coy and embarrassed and confused, giggle and overcome her fear of water by swimming in the arms of a boy who’s kind and intelligent, and also a member of the Hitler Youth.

Dressed in white clothing that doubles as symbolism for her innocence and purity, as well as the racial purity of Nazi Aryan ideals, Ursula falls in love for the first time in her lives. And, after proving her love for Jurgen, she is made to witness a small portion of the violence of the Reich, standing over a window in horror as a group of officers physically assault a man’s shop and leave him for dead on the ground outside. After noticing the compassionate, yet dismissive, reaction of the boy she’s in love with, Ursula decides the best course of action is to go back home, at least for a while. 

In a reprisal of her previous life, Ursula decides to get a technical degree in typing once more, in hopes of finding work she enjoys upon discovering her passion does not lie with teaching. Horrifically, though, she only ends up finding out the teacher of her course takes sexual liberties with his students, and in another brave act of standing up for herself, she walks out of his classroom, followed by all the other female students.

After learning about her brother’s death in the War, Ursula is, for the first time, allowed to age. She becomes an old woman, having spent a lifetime in Social Services and paved the way for many others like her, but still, she feels unfulfilled. Unfinished. Like something crucial is still missing in her life. Grey-haired and tired, staring at the very sea which once killed her and thinking fondly of her brother Teddy, Ursula dies once more, still looking for another chance to live. 

Taken back to her youth once more, her next death comes after a night out with the very brother she longed for. There, buried in the rubble after a bombing, she wishes for her brother and closes her eyes once more. After a short conversation with a kind air-warden, she comes back this time to volunteer for the war effort at night, helping bombing victims. 

The next time she comes back before she succumbs to being choked by her umbilical cord in a reprise of her first death, her mother Sylvie takes it upon herself to save her daughter with a pair of sewing scissors, bringing to life a version of Ursula so deeply scarred and burdened by the meaning of life from a young age that she can’t help but build a world of her own to live in, in her mind.

This Ursula has not lived through the perils of her past selves. She’s not drowned, or fallen from a window. She’s not been taken by illness, or beaten to death by her husband or fallen in love with a Nazi, she hasn’t lost her brother to the War or died in the rubble, and yet she is still tormented by an innate sense of self-awareness that can only be understood by anyone who’s experienced being a young woman. The burdens we carry, the anxieties we ponder over, they are not our own, but fragile crystal heirlooms from the women who came before us, fed to us in the womb by the very same umbilical cords that could choke our lives away. It is an excruciating existence, that of the young woman. Trapped in a body that belongs to everyone but you, with thoughts and feelings that are often not your own, with no logical or healthy way to expel them from within and the knowledge that it is only bound to get worse, and there is nothing you can do to stop it.

As she grows older, her qualms with the universe manifest in a wish to study philosophy at university. Once more, it leads her to Summer in Germany, and meet Jurgen in yet another lifetime. This time, they discuss philosophy and politics, and she seems to be introduced to a different side of him. Whatever it is she sees commits her to him. Within a year, German lawyer Jurgen and young Ursula are married, and soon after welcoming a little girl named Frieda. For the first time in her many lives, her mother congratulates her actions. 

But not all is well, of course. Having settled into married life, Ursula resides in Germany with her husband, now a member of the Nazi Party, who according to her only joined because he needed to find work, despite his many criticisms of the Reich and Hitler himself. Ursula is then confronted by her family when her sister accuses her of looking the other way and choosing to not face the violence being enacted against Jewish people and minorities in Germany, which upsets a nonchalant Ursula.

She has given up her previous lives dreams. Once, as she died in the rubble, she wished she had remained in Germany to fight Hitler. This time, her worries lie with her husband and daughter, and although not a sympathiser, she refuses to leave Germany. 

Having chosen to stand by her husband, Ursula is unable to flee Germany after the war and loses both her husband and brother at the same time due to the bombings. With her daughter too sick to travel and them both starving, it seems their lives are close to ending once more. With bomb sirens blaring in the distance, Ursula decides to poison herself and her daughter instead of watching her die from the bombings, or worse. At the end of this life, Ursula tells her daughter stories of her family as they both cuddle on the ground, deciding that dying with her daughter in her arms is more humane than watching her beaten and raped then executed. They die together, on the ground, surrounded by dirt and looking at the sky, their stomachs empty but for the cyanide pills.

In her next life, she’s frightened and fragile. Melancholia, her aunt calls it. The war office; and the death of her brother; all repeat once more, just like the first time. And no matter how many lives she lives Ursula is incapable of escaping the chain of events that lead her to her brother’s death. Because, even if she refuses to realise it, she might change but the world stays the same. She bumps into Derek on the street, the man who once killed her. She has a mental breakdown and ends up in a sanatorium, and then, just as she least expected, her therapist comes back.

She admits it. After coming back more times than anyone should be forced to, to this horrid plane of existence we call a home, Ursula believes to have become a corpse. A zombified mutant animal awaiting something that might never come, standing still and hoping, wondering if she’s forgotten something, wondering if her life is worth living. Dragging her rotting carcass around other decomposing corpses who do nothing but breathe and groan. All this time, all these lives, she has not found purpose. She has not found solace. 

Perhaps there isn’t any. Perhaps we are put on this earth to be pawns in the crooked hands of fate and nothing we do will ever be able to stop the inevitable ending of our lives. All Ursula hoped for was a good death. In her constant seeking of a life worth living, she wanted something nobody could ever have, a good death. There is no such thing, we may die and die and die again but it will always be crude, unsightly, and painful. All you can hope for is a good life.

But what is a good life? Is it worth spending precious years seeking and yearning for something better? Fighting for what you want is one thing, but is it truly the plague of human existence to be continuously fascinated with the idea that our lives are supposed to mean something? That our existences are supposed to amount to some small great thing instead of just another drop of water in the ocean of life?

What prison womanhood is. Hundreds of years of yearning and wishing for times to get better have done nothing but infect our minds with the knowledge that perhaps the only good deed that will make the lives of our daughters better than our own is to find ourselves in perpetual peace instead of constant worry. To breathe in and realise that we cannot do everything and that is perfectly okay. To exist with the same painless mediocrity that has guided men to become the masters of the universe. 

I wish for my daughters to be mediocre much like I wished for Ursula to be content. Not settle, not give up, but find contentment and enjoyment in the simple fact of being alive instead of constantly fighting to become something. Because she is enough already, she’s already become what she was meant to be. There is no upgrade from peace. There is no greater deed than the fundamental knowledge that our biggest achievement in life will be living it, fully and entirely in the moment.

Because the world will keep spinning with or without you. Time will move on with or without you. Whether it is fate, God, or the empty void of the universe, the greatest peace of humanity is that there will be another day and there will be another decade and there will be another century with or without you. The greatest achievement of humanity is itself. Our peace can be found in other people. Much like Ursula’s peace is found in Teddy. 

And so one more time Ursula dies, giving herself the choice to be with her brother once more, she hurls herself out the window of her psychiatric facility and comes back with one goal in mind: saving her brother. In a crowded cafe in Germany, she shoots Hitler. And promptly comes back to the beginning.

This time, Ursula does nothing extraordinary. She doesn’t shoot Hitler. She doesn’t marry Jurgen. She simply walks her brother to his deployment and watches him leave to never return. 

In the end, the joy of living, the passion for life and existence is what keeps Ursula from coming back. Because anyone who can answer yes to the option of coming back, not to change or fix anything, but to experience life and love and joy once more, doesn’t truly need to.

We never find out if Ursula gets married, if she has Frieda again, if she lives past the bombings. But we can be certain that for the first time after many deaths, she has lived.