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Product of Her Mother’s Imagination

This chapter, “Product of Her Mother’s Imagination,” probes the origins of Callas’s life-long conviction that she was celebrated not for her intrinsic worth but for her exceptional talent. Callas developed early in life an ambition to become a celebrated artist, one that she pursued with fierce dedication and commitment. Yet throughout her life she maintained that her career had been imposed upon her, that her mother compelled her to sing professionally, and this lingering view led to an ambivalent relationship with the world of opera. Callas’s sense of superiority derived from being celebrated by her mother as a gifted child but coincided with feelings of vulnerability and inferiority reflecting her perception that she was loved only because of her voice. Her feelings of being unloved and inferior were further exacerbated by her mother’s favoring of Maria’s older sister Jackie and the emphasis placed on physical appearance in the Callas household.