For Emily, Wherever We May Find Her

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Title:	For Emily, Wherever We May Find Her
Creator:	Fialka
Date(s):	August, 2001
Medium:	online
Fandom:	The X-Files
Topic:
External Links:	For Emily, Wherever We May Find Her - Fialka, Archived version
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For Emily, Wherever We May Find Her is by Fialka.

It was part of a series. The author comments that: "Many of these essays first appeared as discussions on OBSSE, Scullyfic and/or ATXA." The essay was first posted to The Annotated X-Files Study Guide and is at Fialka's Candybox.

Later, it was reposted:

Sadly, when the old NBCI server went the way of so many really cool, free things on the net, I never could find another free site with enough space to house the whole Study Guide, and it didn't get enough traffic to warrant paying for 250mb on a server somewhere. Not to mention, I no longer have as much time on my hands as I did back then, so like the UFOs...well, it is another UFO. Some of it still appears to be here, if you can wade your way through all the advertising on FortuneCity. I sure won't be insulted if you don't. These essays are from the original site, and appear here unchanged. Unlinked titles got abducted by aliens somewhere along the way. If you find them wandering dazed by the side of the road, could you be so kind as to send them home?

Excerpts

I think we've got two things going here. One, and it's a major one, is that the way 'Emily' was written, almost everything to do with Scully's emotional reactions happened offscreen, not at all, or badly (ex. the scene in the judge's chambers). They threw away all the character exploration from CCarol, brought in Mytharc!Mulder and gave Scully little to do except act shocked and then watch Emily die. Given that script to work with, I think GA made the only honest choice she could - she played Scully as being so overwhelmed by the whole thing that she didn't actually know what she felt about any of it, so she shut down all her personal feelings and tried to react professionally.

Scully cannot think 'daughter' and feel as her mother would, nor can she think 'mother' and connect herself to the woman in my story. In her world, as defined by this experience, those words have only the coldest scientific meaning. She knows (or does in my version anyway) that when she says something like 'I had a child that died', as she does in All Souls, it has a meaning in the mind of the listener that is not entirely true. And yet she cannot NOT use those words to describe their relationship without robbing Emily of all importance, in fact without making Emily merely a piece of failed technology, rather than a little girl who was briefly alive. It's a hell of a choice, talk and she lies; explain the truth and no one will believe it, nor is that information about herself that Scully would want most people to have. The only choice that feels honest to her is silence, but that means she cannot learn, or grow or heal. How can Scully grieve when she cannot even define the terms of her grief, when she has no norm to compare herself to in order to find some common language to describe her loss? 'I had a child that died', when said by Scully is so different from the same words said by her mother, that it's entirely possible this is a no-go area between them. (Of course we never saw Mrs S this season, so we don't know, but if we're going to analyse this as if it's RL then we have to assume that fact means that Scully doesn't see her either, except possibly when obligated, and then says very little of import.)

We are left to assume that Scully doesn't talk about Emily, doesn't think about her unless confronted with something that smacks her in the face with it, and then is merely striving to get her still very confused feelings under control, rather than seeking once and for all to understand them. Couple that along with her own ambivalence about her infertility...I agree that her grief there is more about the lack of choice than the desire to give birth and watch a child grow, to be a part of that process. If that is truly what Scully wanted, she could make the necessary changes in her life to allow her to adopt as a single parent. I don't think she actually wants to be a mother, so there is a very real anger that these faceless men have not only stolen a part of her and created a very damaged life with that, but have actually forced her into motherhood and then dictated the very narrow (not to mention horrific) parameters of that experience.