Motherhood, Daughterhood and Mother-Daughter Relationship
Journal Articles
Bazargan, Susan. “Oxen of the Sun: Maternity, Language, and History.”
James Joyce Quarterly 22.3 (1985): 271-280.
Caputi, Mary. “The Abject Maternal: Kristeva's Theoretical Consistency. ” Women and Language 16.2 (1993): 32-37.
Tries to affirm Julia Kristeva’s continued importance to feminist scholarship by examining her writings on motherhood. Kristeva undergoes a transformation in her thinking and writing: she has abandoned formal politics and retreated into the private realm. Her interest in semanalyse reconsiders the relationship of language, meaning, and subject; her insistence on semiotics seeks a disruption of language. Yet as she channels her investigation of semanalyse into an endorsement of motherhood, which troubles many feminists, Kristeva is still consistent with her earliest writings. For Kristeva, motherhood illustrates the violent, disruptive aspects of the semiotic and “literally enacts the dissolution of unicity toward which semanalyse strives” (36).
du-Plessis, Michael. “Mother's Boys: Maternity, Male 'Homosexuality,' and Melancholia.” Discourse 16.1 (1993): 145-73.
Fellman, Anita Clair. “Laura Ingalls Wilder and Rose Wilder Lane: The Politics of a Mother-Daughter Relationship.” Signs 15.3 (1990):
535-561.
Gauthier, Lorraine. “Desire for Origin/Original Desire: Luce Irigaray
on Maternity, Sexuality and Language.” Canadian Fiction Magazine 57 (1986): 41-46.
Kahane, Claire. “Questioning the Maternal Voice.” Genders 3 (1988):
82-91.
Examines how recent feminists seek to construct empowering representations of an idealized mother and how the construction of this idealized mother will influence feminism. The figure of this idealized mother and the idealizing inscriptions of the maternal voice appear in the writings of Helene Cixous, Alicia Ostriker, Jessica Benjamin, Melanie Klein, and Julia Kristeva. Kahane offers a brief review of these discourses on the maternal. This new feminist poetics is an “articulation of a powerful dream, of a lost but recoverable maternal voice that speaks especially to women” (90-1), and it can disrupt the repetition and authority of the Symbolic.
Nevertheless, Kahane warns feminists that although this feminist poetic seems to provide the liberation of women ’s voices in writing, its dependence on the figure of the mother can eternalize the repressive connection between matter, mater, and female subjectivity, that is, the link between “female” and “nature.”
Kaplan, E. Ann. “Sex, Work and Motherhood: The Impossible Triangle.”
Journal of Sex Research 27.3 (1990): 409-425.
Kirby, David. “'The Thing You Can't Explain': Theory and the Unconscious.” ARIEL 25.2 (1994): 109-20.
Kristeva, Julia. “Stabat Mater.” Poetics Today 6.1-2 (1985): 133-152.
Leder, Sharon. “Women's Experience of the Holocaust and the Cult of Motherhood.” Xanadu: A Literary Journal 15-16 (1993): 70-81.
Lidoff, Joan. “Fluid Boundaries: The Mother-Daughter Story, the Story-Reader Matrix.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 35.4 (1993): 398-420.
Focuses on the feminist thinking about the mother-daughter relation, which has altered the concepts of the self and of the relation between self and other. Lidoff mentions Nancy Chodorow ’s notion that women’s identity is defined by more fluid ego boundaries and less absolute separation of self from other. As such, Lidoff finds that women’s writing is also characterized by more interactive, reciprocal definitions of self and other, identity and difference. Moreover, Lidoff indicates the emotional ambivalence of the mother-daughter relation and the problematic in identifying the female self with the
fused self. Lidoff discusses the idealized image of the Perfect Mother in Tillie Olsen’s Tell Me a Riddle and what D. W. Winnicott called “good enough” mother in Grace Paley’s work.
Parker, Alice. “Le Mal de mere/The (M)other's Text. ” Tessera 14 (1993):
47-63.
Explores how Julia Kristeva, Andrienne Rich, and Nicole Brossard
“write (on) the body of the mother with a different ink” (53) and whether their writings can explain her own experience as a lesbian mother. Parker argues that as Kristeva removes the maternal body and female desire to a precultural locus— the semiotic, she re-essentializes the mother and fails to liberate the maternal body from a repressive discourse. Kristeva is not willing to move beyond the heterosexism of psychoanalytic doxa. By contrast, Brossard emphasizes that since the body is inscribed in culture, the only way to reorganize it is rewriting it. And Rich’s lesbian rereading of the mother forces us to ask more disturbing questions. Parker also points out that the mother as a sign is overburdened with messages while the daughter as a sign is underdetermined.
Patterson, Yolanda Astarita. “Simone de Beauvoir and the Demystification of Motherhood.” Yale French Studies 72 (1986): 87-105.
Tubert, Silvia. “The Deconstruction and Construction of Maternal Desire:
Yerma and Die Frau ohne Schatten.” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 26.3 (1993): 69-88.
Zerilli, Linda-M. G. “A Process without a Subject: Simone de Beauvoir and Julia Kristeva on Maternity. ” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 18.1 (1992): 111-35.
Provides a discussion on maternity in Simone de Beauvoir ’s The Second Sex and in Julia Kristeva’s theory. Zerilli claims that Beauvoir’s critiques of the maternal put into question the very masculine subject of modernity. Pointing out Beauvoir’s discursive strategy to defamiliarize, demystify and unnaturalize motherhood, Zerilli suggests that Beauvoir does not uncritically adopt the language of reproductive biology from the male perspective; rather, Beauvoir amplifies the male utterance to the point of absolute absurdity.
Moreover, as Zerilli indicates, Beauvoir’s unmasking man’s horror of the female body is the precursor of Kristeva ’s theory of abjection.
However, Zerilli claims that Beauvoir refuses the nonsubject of the Kristevan maternal which, relegated to the silence, would secure rather than contest the patriarchal order.
Book Articles
Badinter, Elisabeth. Myth of Motherhood: an Historical View of the Maternal Instinct. London: Souvenir P Ltd., 1982.
Bassin, Donna et al, ed. Representations of Motherhood. New Haven, CT:
Yale UP, 1994.
---. “Maternal Subjectivity in the Culture of Nostalgia: Mourning and Memory.” Representations of Motherhood. 162-73.
Benjamin, Jessica. “The Omnipotent Mother: A Psychoanalytic Study of Fantasy and Reality.” Representations of Motherhood. 129-46.
Bloom, Lynn Z. “Heritages: Dimensions of Mother-Daughter Relationships in Women's Autobiographies.” The Lost Tradition: Mothers and Daughters in Literature. Ed. Cathy N. Davidson and E. M. Broner.
New York: Ungar, 1980. 291-303.
Brown-Guillory, Elizabeth. “Disrupted Motherlines: Mothers and Daughters in a Genderized, Sexualized, and Racialized World. ” Women of Color: Mother-Daughter Relationships in 20th Century Literature.
Ed. Elizabeth Brown-Guillory. Austin: U of Texas P, 1996. 188-207.
Brown-Guillory, Elizabeth, ed. Women of Color: Mother-Daughter Relationships in 20th Century Literature. Austin: U of Texas P, 1996.
Champagne, Rosaria. “True Crimes of Motherhood: Mother-Daughter Incest, Multiple Personality Disorder, and the True Crime Novel. ” Feminist Nightmares: Women at Odds: Feminism and the Problem of Sisterhood.
Ed. Susan Ostrov Weisser and Jennifer Fleischner. New York: New York UP, 1994. 142-58.
Chasseguet-Smirgel, Janine. “Being a Mother and Being a Psychoanalyst:
Two Impossible Professions.” Representations of Motherhood.
113-28.
Chodorow, Nancy. Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender. Berkeley: U of California P, 1978.
Studies the reproduction of mothering in the light of psychoanalysis in order to theoretically explain what has been unquestionably been true— that women have primary responsibility for child care; that women by and large want to mother and get gratification from their
mothering; and that women succeed in mothering though with conflicts and contradictions. Women’s mothering reproduces itself cyclically:
women, as mothers, produce daughters with mothering capacities and the desire to mother. But they produce son by repressing and curtailing their nurturant capacities and needs. Chodorow emphasizes that the reproduction of mothering is a central and constituting element in the social organization and reproduction of gender.
Cixous, Helene and Catherine Clement. The Newly Born Woman. Trans. Betsy Wing. Minneapolis, U of Minnesota P, 1986.
Argues that there is a voice crying in the wilderness, “a voice of milk and blood, a voice silenced but savage ” (ix). It is the voice of a woman, newborn and yet archaic. In Part I, Clement provides an analysis of the images of women and focuses in particular on those of the sorceress and the hysteric, both of which become exemplary tropes for the female conditions. In Part II, Cixous reviews the
“hierarchical oppositions” in patriarchy and points out that woman is alienated from her own bodily self and that female desire is channeled into the flights of the sorceress and the fugues of the hysteric. To liberate herself from such an oppressive and repressive system, “woman must challenge ‘phallo-logocentric’ authority through an exploration of the continent of female pleasure, which is neither dark nor lacking, despite the admonitions and anxieties of patriarchal tradition” (xv). In Part III, both Cixous and Clement focus on female madness fostered by marginalization. Though oppressive sometimes, this madness can becomes a privilege of marginality if silenced woman finds ways to cry, shriek, scream and dance in impassioned dances of desire.
Collins, Patricia Hill. “Shifting the Center: Race, Class, and Feminist Theorizing about Motherhood.” Representations of Motherhood.
56-74.
Corbin, Laurie. The Mother Mirror: Self-Representation and the Mother-Daughter Relation in Colette, Simone de Beauvoir, and Marguerite Duras. New York: Peter Lang, 1996.
Cosslett, Tess. Women Writing Childbirth: Modern Discourses of Motherhood. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1994.
Dally, Ann G. Inventing Motherhood: the Consequences of an Ideal. New York: Schocken Books, 1983.
Daly, Brenda O. and Maureen T. Reddy, ed. Narrating Mothers: Theorizing Maternal Subjectivites. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1991.
Attempt “to map the psychic geography of maternal consciousness”
(12). To understand the complex maternal consciousness and to relocate the voices of mothers in women ’s collective future, we have to, Daly and Reddy argues, “follow the way of mothers, dislodging mothers from their place in our psychic and cultural past in order ” (12). The essays collected in this volume are all feminist works on motherhood or the mother-daughter relation in women’s novels or autobiography.
Dixon, Penelope. Mothers and Mothering: an Annotated Feminist Bibliography. New York: Garland Pub., 1991.
Everingham, Christine. Motherhood and Modernity: an Investigation into the Rational Dimension of Mothering. Buckingham: Open UP, 1994.
First, Elsa. “Mothering, Hate, and Winnicott.” Representations of Motherhood. 147-61.
Fleenor, Julian E., ed. The Female Gothic. Montreal: Eden, 1983.
Franklin, Sarah. “Romancing the Helix: Nature and Scientific Discovery. ” Romance Revisited. Ed. Jackie Stacey and Lynne Pearce. New York:
New York UP, 1995.
Gallop, Jane. Feminism and Psychoanalysis: The Daughter’s Seduction.
London: the Macmillan Press Ltd., 1982.
Studies the relationship between contemporary feminist theory and the psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan. Standing at the intersection of French psychoanalysis and feminism, Feminism and Psychoanalysis confronts problems of sexual difference, of desire, of reading, of writing, of power, of family, of language, and of phallocentrism.
Gallop calls into question not only the idea of “opposite sexes” but also the opposition between psychoanalysis and feminism (namely, politics). The encounter of the two, Gallop hopes, will bring radical change on each side. On the one hand, psychoanalysis can unsettle feminism’s tendency to accept a traditional, rational, unified, puritanical self— a self supposedly free from the violence of desire.
On the other, feminism can shake up psychoanalysis ’s tendency to think itself apolitical and disclose its conservativeness in encouraging people to adapt to an unjust social structure.
Gardiner, Judith-Kegan, ed. Provoking Agents: Gender and Agency in Theory
and Practice. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1995.
Garner, Shirley Nelson. “Constructing the Mother: Contemporary Psychoanalytic Theorists and Women Autobiographers.” Narrating Mothers: Theorizing Maternal Subjectivites. Ed. Brenda O. Daly and Maureen T. Reddy. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1991. 76-93.
Traces how the mother is constructed in D. W. Winnicott’s essays, Nancy Chodorow’s Reproduction of Mothering, and two collections of essays— Psychoanalysis and Women: Contemporary Reappraisals , edited by Judith L. Alpert, and Lesbian Psychologies, edited by the Boston Lesbian Psychologies Collective. Then Garner explores Maya Angelou ’s The Heart of a Woman, Zami. Angelou’s autobiography falls outside Winnicott’s system; Chodorow’s psychoanalytic theories of the relationships of mothers and daughters fail to account for Angelou and her mother. The two collections draw attention to the role class, race, sexual orientation, and other factors of difference play in the idea of the mother. Garner concludes that turning to the fiction and autobiography of women writers would enrich psychoanalysis.
Glenn, Evelyn Nakano et al, ed. Mothering, Ideology, Experience and Agency. New York: Routledge, 1994.
Provides a collection of essays from interdisciplinary perspectives on how mothering is socially constructed as a set of activities and relationships involved in nurturing and caring for people. These essays focus on two themes: the existence of historical, cultural, class, and ethnic variation in the construction of mothering, and the existence of conflict and struggle over competing conceptions and conditions under which mothering is carried out.
Graulich, Melody. “Speaking across Boundaries and Sharing the Loss of a Child.” Private Voices, Public Lives: Women Speak on the Literary Life. Ed. Nancy Owen Nelson. Denton: U of North Texas P, 1995.
163-82.
Hall, Deanna L. and Kristin M. Langellier. “Storytelling Strategies in Mother-Daughter Communication.” Women Communicating: Studies of Women's Talk. Ed. Barbara Bate and Anita Taylor. Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1988. 107-126.
Provides an empirical investigation of women’s storytelling and concentrates specifically on storytelling strategies in personal experience narratives of mothers and daughters. The stories in mother-daughter communication are not gender-exclusive in topic, but they usually reflect the particular experience and concerns of women in the family. Collaborative strategies are the preferred mode of
storytelling: mothers function as family historians, daughters as storytellers under their mother’s guidance. But mothers and daughters present family stories from their different generational perspectives. In mother-daughter communication, collaboration is a rich and complicated interplay of identification and differentiation between mother and daughter as they define their relationship to each other. Collaborative strategies also function to confirm the mother-daughter relationship.
Ireland, Mardy S. Reconceiving Women: Seperating Motherhood from Female Identity. New York: Guilford Press, 1993.
Challenges the definitions of womanhood that result in the view that women cannot be complete without children. People always experience childless women as missing something and as a source of discomfort because their lives lay outside the parameters of traditional womanhood. Ireland emphasizes that only when the implicit assumption that motherhood is intrinsic to the fulfillment of adult female identity is challenged, will a woman’s destiny truly be her own.
Irigaray, Luce. This Sex Which Is Not One. Ithaca, New York: Cornell UP, 1985.
Reconsiders several topics: the implications of the thought of Freud and Lacan for understanding womanhood, classic views on the significance of the difference between male and female sex organs, the experience of erotic pleasure in men and in women, and the economic exploitation of women, who are reduced to an object of exchange between men or groups of men. Irigaray seeks to dispute and displace phallocentric structures of language, and with a challenging writing practice, she tries to shape a feminine discourse that would put an end to Western culture ’s enduring phallocentrism.
Kahn, Coppelia. “The Hand That Rocks the Cradle: Recent Gender Theories and Their Implications.” The (M)other Tongue: Essays in Feminist Psychoanalytic Interpretation. Ed. Shirley Nelson Garner et al.
Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985. 72-88.
---. “Mother.” Changing Subjects: The Making of Feminist Literary Criticism. Ed. Gayle Greene and Coppelia Kahn. London: Routledge, 1993. 157-67.
Kaplan, E. Ann. “Motherhood and Representation: From Postwar Freudian Figurations to Postmodernism.” Psychoanalysis & Cinema. Ed. E. Ann Kaplan. London: Routledge, 1990. 128-142.
---. “The Politics of Surrogacy Narratives: Notes toward a Research Project.” Feminist Nightmares: Women at Odds: Feminism and the Problem of Sisterhood. Ed. Jennifer Fleischner and Susan Ostrov Weisser. New York: New York UP, 1994. 189-205.
Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York:
Columbia UP, 1982.
Provides a psychoanalytic discussion of the process of “abjection,”
that is, the expulsion or rejection of the other. Abjection is a necessary process “through which “I” claim to establish myself” (3).
Ironically, the abject, namely, what is rejected, is exactly the undesirable in the self, and therefore abjection amounts to the abjection of self. The earliest attempt to abject in our personal archeology is to reject the maternal entity. The child begins to become a subject only when it pursues a reluctant struggle against the mother, who will turn into an abject. For this abjection of the mother to happen, a third party, the father, has to intrude in the mother-child relationship. Moreover, Kristeva ties this process of abjection to the historical exclusion of women.
---. Tales of Love.
Lawler, Steph. “'I Never Felt As Though I Fitted': Family Romances and the Mother-Daughter Relationship.” Romance Revisited. Ed. Jackie Stacey and Lynne Pearce. New York: New York UP, 1995. 265-78.
Studies the women who define themselves as having been born into the working class and who see themselves as middle-class. Lawler is concerned in particular with their interpretation of their relations with their mothers. The accounts of these women contain the elements of what Lawler characterizes as a female family romance— “a sense of not ‘fitting’ with their birth families, and a wish to replace their mothers, either now or in the past, with other women who displayed characteristics which they valued highly ” (269) These women ’s search for replacement of mothers can be the search for the mother of fantasy— for an idealized mother who loves and accepts their daughters, and demands nothing in return. Yet such an idealization of motherhood obscures the material conditions of the mother ’s life and erases the desire of the mother.
Luker, Kristine. Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood. Berkeley: U of California P, 1984.
MacDonald, Claire. “Assumed Identities: Feminism, Autobiography and Performance Art.” The Uses of Autobiography. Ed. Julia Swindells.
London: Taylor & Francis, 1995.
McDowell, Linda and Rosemary Pringle, ed. Defining Women: Social Institutions and Gender Divisions. Polity P, 1992.
McMahon, Martha. Engendering Motherhood: Identity and Self-Transformation in Women’s Lives. New York: Guilford Press, 1995.
Mens-Verhulst, Janneke van et al, ed. Daughtering and Mothering: Female Subjectivity Reanalysed. London, New York: Routledge, 1993.
Offers analyses of many aspects of the mother-daughter relationship that were hitherto ignored or neglected, in particular the role of the daughter. The mother-daughter relationship is here seen as an archetype of real and symbolic generation differences between women.
The term “daughtering” is put forward in order to emphasize that daughters also take an active part in shaping their relationships with mothers. This emphasis on the active side of daughterhood not only “facilitates the articulation of the problems of mothers from a “motherly” point of view” but also exposes “the spontaneous development of female subjectivity as opposed to intervening practices managed more or less consciously, arranged more or less intentionally and professionally by ‘established’ female subjects”
(xiv).
Nussbaum, Felicity A. Torrid Zones: Maternity, Sexuality, and Empire in Eighteenth-Century English Narratives. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1995.
O’Barr, Jean F. et al, ed. Ties That Bind: Essays on Mothering and Patriarchy. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1990.
Pearlman, Mickey, ed. Mother Puzzles: Daughters and Mothers in Contemporary American Literature. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1989.
Rich, Andrienne C. Of Women Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution. New York: Norton, 1986.
In order for all women to have real choices, Rich tries “to distinguish between two meanings of motherhood, one superimposed on the other: the potential relationship of any woman to her powers of reproduction and to children; and the institution, which aims at ensuring that that potential— and all women— shall remain under male control” (13). Motherhood as institution has alienated women from their own bodies, denied their choices, ghettoized and degraded potentialities, and created the dangerous schism between “private”
and “public’ life. Rich makes this investigation in terms of her own
and “public’ life. Rich makes this investigation in terms of her own