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"Why doesn't anybody tell them their own mothers have stories?": Representations of mother/daughter relationships in contemporary American fiction

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"Why doesn't anybody tell them their own mothers have stories?": Representations of mother/daughter relationships in contemporary American fiction

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“WHY DOESN’T ANYBODY TELL THEM THEIR OWN MOTHERS HAVE STORIES?”:
REPRESENTATIONS OF MOTHER / DAUGHTER RELATIONSHIPS
IN CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN FICTION
by
Lori F. Smurthwaite
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(English)
May 1998
Copyright 1998 Lori F. Smurthwaite
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UMI Number: 9902868
Copyright 1999 by
Smurthwaite, Lori F.
All rights reserved.
UMI Microform 9902868
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UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY PARK
LOS ANCELE& CALIFORNIA 90009
This dissertation, written by
under the direction of Dissertation
Committee, and approved by all its members,
has been presented to and accepted by The
Graduate School in partial fulfillment of re
quirements for the degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
^ Demo/ G raduate S tu d ie s
Date
DISSERTATION COMMITTEE
r Chai rperson
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A cknow ledgm ents
I am indebted to many people for their suggestions that helped make
this dissertation better than it might otherwise have been. Foremost
among the many who have helped me is the chair of my dissertation
committee, Jay Martin, and my committee members, Carol Muske Dukes
and Maria Pellegrini, all of whom made themselves readily available to
help me, often on short notice. I am enormously grateful to my parents,
Richard and Beverly Smurthwaite, for their unending support and to my
grandmothers, Lorene Smurthwaite and Fay Merrill, whose timely
financial help made it possible for me to complete both my schooling
and this project. Finally, this dissertation would not have been finished
without the help of my dear friend, Leland T. Farrar, who knew when to
encourage and when to threaten.
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D ed icatio n
To my mother.
My story begins with yours,
Your voice still speaks to me,
I understand, now, the importance of asking,
and, someday, I will.
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i v
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments p. i i
Dedication p. i i i
Abstract p. v
Introduction and Overview p. I
Chapter One: “Cultural Discourses about Mothers and Daughters’ ’ p. 4
Chapter Two: “Depicting a Maternal Subjectivity?” p. 34
Chapter Three: “Resisting Dichotomies and Sustaining
Mother/Daughter Connection in A Cure for Dreams” p. 49
Chapter Four: “Neither Utopianism Nor Blame:
Learning to Plot in Opal on Dry Ground” p. 72
Chapter Five: “Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club:
Locating Mothers and Daughters in Culture and History” p. 99
Chapter Six: “New Discourses, New Representations:
Challenges to Traditional Paradigms of Mothers and Daughters” p. 122
Conclusions/Beginnings p. 141
Works Cited p. 147
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V
Abstract
In recent years, the work of many literary,
psychoanalytic, feminist, and other cultural critics has
begun to converge on the conclusion that in the
representation of the mother/daughter relationship in the
texts of American culture, the maternal "voice" and
subjectivity have been absent. The problem is not that the
person of the mother is consistently absent from our cultural
texts, but that mothers are primarily represented through the
perspectives of others (often their daughters) rather than
through their own accounts, or are represented as
mythological figures, such as the sacrificial mother or the
omnipotent psychopathological/ideal mother. Thus, mothers are
consistently reduced to objects and their experiences are
devalued. These critics call for new representations of
mothers as subjects rather than objects of others'
perspectives.
This dissertation identifies a trend in the contemporary
fictional works of some American women writers to "play" with
conventional narrative strategies, making it possible to
incorporate the voices of many women in a family and allow
mothers to speak as subjects rather than objects of another's
narrative. These novels, which I call "matrivocal
narratives," challenge subject/object dichotomies and suggest
the possibilities of the maternal voice, the subject/mother,
and sustained mother/daughter connections.
Chapter one summarizes the shared arguments of several
critics who analyze cultural representations of mothers and
daughters. Chapter two explores the movement among some
contemporary writers toward creating maternal discourses that
depict mothers as subjects rather than objects; the chapter
ends with an introduction to and description of "matrivocal
narratives." Chapters three through five analyze the
narrative structure and thematic content of three novels
which can be characterized as matrivocal narratives: Kaye
Gibbons's A Cure for Dreams, Sandra Scofield's Opal on Dry-
Ground, and Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club. Chapter six will
contain analyses of a sample of other fictional and non-
fictional texts that depend on or challenge traditional
representations of mother/daughter relationships. Several of
these works also exhibit structural characteristics of
matrivocal narratives. The conclusion discusses the
implications of this analysis for cultural representations of
mothers and daughters and suggests related areas of study.
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1
Introduction and Oueruieui
In recent years, the work of many literary,
psychoanalytic, feminist, and other cultural critics has
begun to converge on the conclusion that in the
representation of the mother/daughter relationship in the
texts of American culture, the maternal "voice" and
subjectivity have been absent. The problem is not that the
person of the mother is consistently absent from our cultural
texts, but that mothers are primarily represented through the
perspectives of others (often their daughters) rather than
through their own accounts, or are represented as
mythological figures, from Jung's Great Mother to more
contemporary incarnations such as the sacrificial mother, the
omnipotent, psychopathological mother, or the omnipotent,
ideal mother. Thus, mothers are consistently reduced to
objects and their experiences are devalued.
Most of these cultural critics call for new
representations of mothers and daughters which can present
mothers as subjects rather than objects of others'
perspectives. Several of these theorists discuss fictional
works which they believe accomplish this objective. Among
works of fiction and non-fiction written in the last twenty
years by American women writers, I have discovered several
works which share structural characteristics that allow the
creation of maternal discourses and the depiction of maternal
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2
subjectivities. I have chosen several such texts, primarily
fictional texts, to analyze in this project. Specifically,
this dissertation identifies a trend in the contemporary
fictional works of some American women writers to "play" with
conventional narrative strategies, making it possible to
incorporate the voices of many women in a family and allow
mothers to speak as subjects rather than objects of another's
narrative. These novels, which I call "matrivocal
narratives," challenge subject/object dichotomies and suggest
the possibilities of the maternal voice, the subject/mother,
and sustained mother/daughter connections.
In chapter one, I will summarize the work of several
critics who examine cultural representations of mothers and
daughters, thereby giving the reader an overview of the
primary themes on which their work converges. Chapter two
will explore the potential for and current movement toward
creating new maternal discourses that can depict mothers as
subjects rather than objects, ending with an introduction to
and description of "matrivocal narratives." In chapters three
through five, I will analyze the narrative structure and
thematic content of three novels which can be characterized
as matrivocal narratives: Kaye Gibbons' s A Cure for Dreams,
Sandra Scofield's Opal on Dry Ground, and Amy Tan's The Joy
Luck Club. Chapter six will contain analyses of a sample of
other fictional and non-fictional texts that depend on or
challenge traditional representations of mother/daughter
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3
relationships. Several of these works also exhibit structural
characteristics of matrivocal narratives. The conclusion will
discuss the implications of my analysis for cultural
representations of mothers and daughters and will suggest
further areas of study related to this topic.
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4
Chapter One:
Cultural Discourses about Mothers and Daughters
Marianne Hirsch:
Female Plotting and Subject-Formation
In The Mother/Daughter Plot: Narrative, Psychoanalysis,
Feminism, literary critic Marianne Hirsch traces the
evolution of the figure of the mother in novels by nineteenth
and twentieth century Western European and North American
women writers. The "conventional plot structure" in the
literature of Western civilization is one "in which men are
central and women function as objects or obstacles" (2);
thus, women's voices are often silenced, their stories
"unspeakable" (3) by the women themselves. Hirsch's
explication of Muriel Rukeyser's 1968 poem, "Myth," which is
a revision of the Oedipal story, suggests that a heroine who
is "in possession of a voice and a plot, [and] a subjectivity
of her own" (1) is a depiction of women, especially mothers,
which is not common in literature. Looking at the
"intersection" of family structures and plot structures,
Hirsch attempts to "place at the center of inquiry mothers
and daughters, the female figures neglected by psychoanalytic
theories and submerged in traditional plot structures" (3).
Her purpose is not to explore national differences among the
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5
novels she discusses; instead, her aim is to "reframe the
familial structures basic to traditional narrative, and the
narrative structures basic to traditional conceptions of
family, from the perspectives of the feminine and, more
controversially, the maternal" (3).
Hirsch finds that some of the women writers whose works
she examines substituted other constructions of family for
the "compulsory heterosexuality and triangularity" (121) of
father-mother-child which is the assumed route of female
progression in Freud's notion of the family romance. For
example, Hirsch describes a "female family romance" (43) in
nineteenth century literature, in which the daughter refuses
the "normal" route of heterosexual love and opts for a more
fraternal relationship with a more nurturing man (57),
rejecting both sexuality and maternity (84). She also
identifies a "feminist family romance" (131) in postmodern
literature, in which heroines move from male to "female
allegiance" as a "basis both of female plotting [possession
and control of their own plots] and female subject-
formation" (129).
More specifically, Hirsch finds that mothers in
nineteenth century novels by women tended to be "absent,
silent, or devalued" (14) and fraternal bonds were often
substituted for maternal ones (14). In modernist works,
mothers emerged as characters in their daughters' texts while
the daughters oscillated between maternal/female and
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6
paternal/male identification (15). Hirsch argues that many
feminist discourses of the 1960s through the 1980s distanced
themselves from the maternal, preferring the notion of
"sisterhood" to "motherhood" (164).
Other feminist fictional and theoretical texts which
Hirsch discusses feature mothers and displace male
characters, but these texts "are still written from
daughterly perspectives," (15) and thus "collude with
patriarchy in placing mothers into the position of
object— thereby keeping mothering outside of representation
and maternal discourse a theoretical impossibility" (163) .
"The mother is excluded from discourse by the daughter who
owns it" (137), she argues. Similarly, "to speak for the
mother . . . is at once to give voice to her discourse and to
silence and marginalize her" (16) . However, the attempt by
mothers to speak for themselves is also problematic:
her representation is controlled by her
object status, but her discourse, when it
is voiced, moves her from object to
subject. But, as long as she speaks as
mother, she must always remain the object
in her child's process of subject-
formation; she is never fully a
subject. (12)
Hirsch's use of the phrase "collude with patriarchy"
could be interpreted to mean that the daughter's act of
writing about her mother is necessarily hostile. Similarly,
her argument that speaking for mothers necessarily silences
and marginalizes them may seem to lack a recognition that
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7
daughters or others may attempt to speak with empathy for
mothers. However, Hirsch is identifying a problem of
narrative perspective, not of intention. Her argument as it
is applied to literature emphasizes that mothers have been
represented almost exclusively as objects in subject/object
relationships with daughters rather than as subjects in
subject/subject relationships.
Hirsch discusses the limits of psychoanalytic models as
a conceptual framework capable of producing new discourses in
which women can speak as subject/mother. She begins with the
identification of all psychoanalysis as "profoundly child-
centered" (12) :
For within the discourse of psychoanalysis,
the mother's story can only be named
inasmuch as it is a response to the child's
process of separation. And as such, this
story . . . does not begin with the mother,
does not begin to grant her agency,
initiative, and subjectivity. (175)
"While psychoanalytic feminism can add the female child to
the male, allowing women to speak as daughters," Hirsch
explains, psychoanalytic feminism "has difficulty accounting
for the experience and the voice of the adult woman who is a
mother" (12) . She "continues to exist only in relation to her
child, never as a subject in her own right. And in her
maternal function," Hirsch emphasizes, the adult woman who is
a mother "remains an object, always distanced, always
idealized or denigrated, always mystified, always represented
through the small child's point of view" (167).
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8
Perhaps psychoanalysis can be interpreted more broadly
than Hirsch's argument acknowledges, in that psychoanalysis
addresses the constellation of family relationships whose
members affect the development of each other. However, the
two central objections in her argument— that mothers are too
often represented as objects in others' stories, whether in
models of psychoanalysis or in fiction, and that traditional
psychoanalytic models do not fully account for the
experiences of adult mothers— are valid.
Hirsch emphasizes the need to challenge the Freudian
family romance "in which the developing individual shifts her
cathexes from mother, to father, to husband, and then to her
own child" (194). Even within the 1970s feminist "revision"
of the Freudian family romance, Hirsch finds that mothers are
still "no more than objects supporting and underlying their
daughters' process of individuation" (136):
It is the woman as daughter who occupies
the center of the global reconstruction of
subjectivity and subject-object relation.
The woman as mother remains in the position
of other, and the emergence of feminine-
daughterly subjectivity rests and depends
on that continued and repeated process of
othering the mother. (136)
One way to structure a discourse that may begin to
overcome the limits of the psychoanalytic models might be to
avoid the language of psychoanalysis. Thus we could
supposedly avoid the traps and limits of such models, which
rely on universalizing interpretations of development that
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9
have traditionally posited child as subject, mother as
object, male experience as the norm, and female experience as
deviation from that norm. One reason that psychoanalytic
models cannot be ignored is, of course, that such models have
pervasive force in the construction and internalization of
our cultural ideologies. Given the force of psychoanalytic
language and models of thought in cultural discourses about
mothers, some revisionists, such as Jean Baker Miller, Jane
Flax, Judith Jordan, Dorothy Dinnerstein, Jessica Benjamin,
Nancy Chodorow, Carol Gilligan, and Julia Kristeva, among
many others (and there are significant theoretical
differences among them) , have attempted to modify
psychoanalytic models which deny subjectivity to women and
cast the mother as object in relation to her developing
child.
Hirsch does credit such feminist revisionists for
challenging traditional, male-based psychoanalytic models
which "value separation as a touchstone of adult womanhood"
(131). By suggesting, instead, a more "characteristically
female pattern of selfhood . . . [located] not in autonomy
but in fluidity and connectedness" (132), these revisionists
"offer a psychoanalysis much more in tune with the ideals of
the feminist movement" and create "a psychoanalytic feminism
of enormous influence" (132), Hirsch writes. Such revisionist
models offer "a re-definition of maturity as different either
from autonomy and separation or from self-division and
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10
alienation"; defining adult personality as "embedded in
connectedness," feminist revisions offer a "picture of
continued mother-daughter entanglement" and "continued inter
relation" (132) between mother and daughter through the
lifespan of their relationship.
The inter-relation between mother and daughter is one of
the themes stressed in an anthology of essays, written
primarily by psychoanalysts and sociologists, which challenge
or modify psychoanalytic models of the mother/daughter
relationship. This anthology, titled Daughtering & Mothering:
Female Subjectivity Reanalyzed, explores the act of
"daughtering" in addition to "mothering." By exploring how
daughters are capable of affecting the continuing development
of their mothers and of the mother/daughter relationship,
these theorists attempt to re-cast mothers as subjects in a
subject/subject relationship with daughters.
Judith Jordan, in "The Relational Self: A Model of
Women's Development," emphasizes the need to move "from a
theory of separate self to a perspective of relational
being" (139) , with emphasis on "being" as a contextual,
interactional process" (139):
If self is conceived of as contextual and
relational, with the capacity to form
gratifying connections, with creative
action becoming possible through
connection, and a greater sense of clarity
and confidence arising within relationship,
others will be perceived as participating
in relational growth in a particular way
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11
which contributes to the connected sense of
self .... This growth and movement is
participatory and synergistic. This view of
"self with other" typifies much of the
socialization towards caretaking and
empowerment of others which occurs for
females in Western cultures. (139)
I do not take Jordan to mean that we must abandon the
idea of selfhood or of separate existence; rather, Jordan is
suggesting that models of the "self" need to more fully
contextualize individual development within life-long
subject/subject relationships with others. Jordan argues that
"while we can most easily see the importance of this in the
depiction of women's lives, the exploration of 'relational
being' should not stop with women"; instead, "a larger
paradigm shift from the primacy of separate self to
relational being must be considered in order to further our
understanding of all human experience" (142) . Similarly,
Hirsch emphasizes the need for a model of self in relation
with others when she argues that "we need to develop a more
complicated model of identity and self-consciousness" which
would "reflect a more tortuous process of adopting, and
continually refining and redefining a sense of
selfhood" (194):
That sense of selfhood would have to
balance the personal with the political,
the subjective experience with the
cognitive process of identification with
various group-identities. It would have to
include a consciousness of oppression and
political struggle. It would have to be
both familial and extra-familial. As such,
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12
it would be post-modern in a political
rather than merely an aesthetic or
epistemological sense. (194)
Hirsch emphasizes that such a model would need to displace
both the Freudian family romance and "revisionary family
romances which reverse or modify [it] without ultimately
challenging it" (194) in order to allow for the "picture of
continued mother-daughter entanglement" and "inter
relation" (132) that Hirsch prefers.
Whether "inter-relation" is inherent in the
psychological makeup of women or is a result of cultural
socialization or both is a question for a different type of
project than I am undertaking here; however, the arguments of
Hirsch and other critics whose work I will discuss in the
remainder of this chapter imply, and I agree, that a
redefinition of female maturity to reflect female allegiance
and "inter-relation" rather than "separation" more accurately
reflects women's development in its construction within
Western culture.
The depiction of both inter-relation and female
allegiance in women's relationships is important to Hirsch's
discussion of new maternal discourses in literature. In the
fictional works of some contemporary women writers,
especially works by American women of color, Hirsch does
identify an emerging discourse which:
might be able both to reverse the erasure
of the mother and the daughterly act of
'speaking for her' and to create the
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13
conditions in which mother and daughter
would each be able to speak for themselves
as well as for and with one another. (16)
Such discourses would allow the mother to speak "with two
voices" (197) as subject/mother. Hirsch uses several works by
American women of color to demonstrate the possibility of
such a discourse. I will discuss Hirsch's comments regarding
the fiction of American women of color in more detail in
chapter two.
Jessica Benjamin:
Domination and Mutual Recognition
Many of the theorists who have discussed the "absence"
of the mother's voice and experience recognize the need for
new modes of language which can express that which has
heretofore been inexpressible: a maternal subjectivity in a
relationship between mothers and daughters which is not
predicated on subject/object but rather on inter-relation.
In her book Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and
the Problem of Domination, Jessica Benjamin discusses the
developmental processes which lead to such subject/object
dualisms, and thus to the denial of subjectivity to women in
general and mothers in particular. Her description of "mutual
recognition" between mothers and children is similar to the
description of "inter-relational" selves in Daughtering &
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14
Mothering, in that each term implies the possibility of
subject/subject relationships.
Benjamin describes how the healthy desire for
recognition, when thwarted, can be twisted into
identification with or submission to a powerful other who
represents omnipotence. This leads to the problems of
domination and submission in relationships. "Domination and
submission, " Benjamin explains, "result from a breakdown of
the necessary tension between self-assertion and mutual
recognition that allows self and other to meet as sovereign
equals" (12). Benjamin continues:
Yet this balance, and with it the
differentiation of self and other, is
difficult to sustain. In particular, the
need for recognition gives rise to a
paradox. Recognition is that response from
the other which makes meaningful the
feelings, intentions, and actions of the
self. It allows the self to realize its
agency and authorship in a tangible way.
But such recognition can only come from an
other whom we, in turn, recognize as a
person in his or her own right. (12)
It is, Benjamin states, the "inability to sustain paradox in
that interaction [which] can, and often does, convert the
exchange of recognition into domination and submission" (12).
From the first relationship, between parent and child, "we
note the uneasy coexistence of contradictory tendencies:
mutual recognition and unequal complementarity" (222),
complementarity consisting of an "opposition between self and
other [which] can only reverse— one is always up and the other
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15
down, one is doer and the other done-to" (220) .
Benjamin explains that, because the mother is, or is
usually assumed to be, the "principal caregiver in our
culture" (14), she becomes "the original other, the mother
who is reduced to object" (220) in relation to her developing
child:
The denial of subjectivity to women means
that the privilege and power of agency fall
to the father, who enters the stage as the
first outsider, and so represents the
principle of freedom as denial of
dependency .... freedom means fleeing or
subjugating the other; autonomy means an
escape from dependency. (221)
Masculinity and femininity, then, "become associated with the
postures of master and slave" (8). "These postures arise in
boys' and girls' different relationships to mother and
father, and . . . they shape the different destinies of male
and female children" (8). This "gender polarity . . .
permeates our social relations, our ways of knowing, our
efforts to transform and control the world" (220). It shuts
out the possibility of in ter subjective relationships and
leads to domination of women. This structure is so deeply
rooted in the psyche, Benjamin argues, that it gives
dominance "the appearance of inevitability, makes it seem
that a relationship in which both participants are
subjects— both empowered and mutually respectful— is
impossible" (8).
But Benjamin asserts that this psychological structure
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16
is not inevitable. A breakdown of mutual recognition will
occur, but mutual recognition can be renewed. "The conception
of equal subjects," she argues, "has begun to seem
intellectually plausible only because women's demand for
equality has achieved real social force" (221) . Obviously
Benjamin recognizes the difficulty in theorizing and
achieving a maternal subjectivity, but does not see maternity
and subjectivity as mutually exclusive. Significantly,
Benjamin emphasizes the need for mothers to claim their own
subjectivity (221) as part of an effort to sustain tension
between the breakdown and renewal of mutual recognition and
unequal complementarity.
Cultural Mythologies of Mother(ing)
Ironically, one of the results of not positing the
mother as an acting subject in relation to her daughter, a
relationship in which each affects the continued development
of the other, is a certain contradictory logic by which the
mother is omnipotent in the psychological life of her child.
Traditional discourses of psychoanalysis have focused on the
mother-child relationship as central to the child's
development, and the early years of childhood (when the
mother has routinely been the primary caretaker) as the most
important, thereby setting up mothers to be blamed or praised
for whatever follows in the child's development.
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17
The cultural mythology of the mother as an all-powerful
force in the psychological life of her child, and the
subsequent glorification or blame of the mother for all that
follows, is identified and critiqued by theorists in various
fields. This "mother-blaming, " as it has come to be known
among feminist and other critics, has been apparent for
decades. Cultural and film critic Susanna Danuta Walters
describes the "momism" of Philip Wylie, which emerged in the
1940s. Walters refers to Wylie's argument in Generation of
Vipers— that mothers were emasculating their sons and teaching
their daughters to do the same and that this tendency was
responsible for most social ills— as "one of the most virulent
attacks on women in the last fifty years" (40) .
Feminist criticism has itself been criticized by
psychoanalytic and feminist critics for setting up a perfect
and impossible ideal for mothers who are then demonized when
they fail to achieve it. Nancy Chodorow and Susan Contratto
argue that "feminist writing on motherhood assumes an all-
powerful mother who, because she is totally responsible for
how her children turn out, is blamed for everything from her
daughter's limitations to the crisis of human
existence" (192) . Nancy Friday's My Mother/ My Self is an
oft-mentioned title by later feminist critics who criticize
her for blaming mothers for everything. "The book's central
argument, " as Chodorow and Contratto put it, "is that mothers
are noxious to daughters, and that a daughter's subsequent
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18
unhappiness and failings stem from this initial
relationship" (192-3) . Dorothy Dinnerstein's The Mermaid and
the Minotaur echoes Philip Wylie's construction of the
overpowering mother. Even Judith Arcana, who Chodorow and
Contratto acknowledge wrote Our Mothers' Daughters "out of
explicit feminist commitment and concern" (193), is accused
of mother-blaming. Although Chodorow and Contratto (193) and
Walters (145) point out that Arcana blames patriarchy, not
mothers themselves, for the circumstances that lead mothers
to wreak havoc on their children psychologically, to Chodorow
and Contratto, the idea that "mothers themselves are
oppressed and are therefore not responsible" (193) for
damaging their daughters implies, ultimately, that mothers
could be perfect if not operating under patriarchal social
ideologies.
"The other side of blaming the mother is idealization of
her and her possibilities," explain Chodorow and
Contratto (194) . Most of the writers, such as Friday and
Arcana, who engage in mother-blaming, subsequently posit that
"if only the mother wouldn't do what she is doing, she would
be perfect" (194) . The Ideal Mother is also omnipotent but,
instead of wreaking havoc on her children, she is "the
mythical figure who sees, understands and fulfils her
children's every need" (Leira and Krips 87). The Ideal Mother
harks back to Jung's Great Mother and to the split between
"good" and "bad" mother in much psychological theory. This
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19
division between good and bad mother is seen by many recent
critics as evidence of the "patriarchal tendency to
dichotomize reality; to ignore women's lived experience and
to devalue women" (Nice 135) and as another form of mother-
blaming. When actual mothers fail to achieve the ideal, they
will be at fault for the presumably devastating psychological
effects on their children. Thus, the Ideal Mother must
inevitably become the monstrous mother. Such tendencies
toward idealized versions of motherhood are cautioned against
by Walters, Halldis Leira and Madelien Krips, and Chodorow
and Contratto, among others.
Similarly, although their intent was also rooted in a
recovery of the mother/daughter relationship from its
patriarchal restraints rather than in mother-blaming, some
feminist critics have tended to idealize the mother/daughter
relationship. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg indulges in a utopian
vision of the potential mother/daughter relationship outside
the boundaries of patriarchy. Adrienne Rich, who is generally
praised for Of Woman Bom, is criticized by Chodorow and
Contratto (195) and Walters (145-6) for assuming that
motherhood could be perfect, or nearly so, if it were not
constrained by patriarchy. Rich's discussion of the
mother/daughter relationship is not utopian nor is it fully
idealistic, but Walters argues that both Rich and Arcana tend
toward a "dangerous slip toward essentialism, as if there
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20
were a true maternal essence underlying the falseness of
patriarchal constructions" (146) .
Recasting of the mother/daughter relationship as varied
and historically located is a useful revisionist response to
the negative portrayal found in many cultural discourses of
the mother/daughter relationship as one rooted in inevitable
conflict. As X have shown, and will show in the next several
paragraphs, many theorists argue that psychoanalytical models
of development which posit separation and rejection of the
mother as essential to the daughter's development not only
cast mothers as objects, but set mothers and daughters
against each other and ignore the potential for locating
women's selfhood in a sense of mutual connectedness.
Psychologists and psychoanalysts such as Benjamin,
Chodorow, and Leira and Krips and cultural critics such as
Hirsch, Walters, and Vivien E. Nice have recognized what
Leira and Krips call the "cultural myths [of]
motherhood" (83) which include the omnipotent mother, the
utopian mother/daughter relationship, as well as the
mother/daughter relationship inevitably rooted in conflict,
and have called for more realistic discourses which, as
Chodorow and Contratto suggest, "recognize collaboration and
compromise we well as conflict" (210), and which establish
the mother as an acting subject in her own right and not as
the all-powerful monster of our cultural mythologies.
The portrayal of mothers as mythologized figures may be
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21
more expected in fictional works, in which there is a need
for villains and conflict. However, even such fictional
portrayals are part of an overwhelming cultural pattern of
reducing mothers to objects rather than subjects, a pattern
that is apparent in scholarly, fictional, and popular
discourses. In the face of such a consistent depiction of
mothers as objects and mythologized figures, the need for
cultural discourses of all kinds that portray mothers as
acting subjects is apparent.
Suzanna Danuta Walters:
Naturalized Narratives vs. a Dialectic of Mothers and Daughters
Film and cultural critics such as E. Ann Kaplan and
Suzanna Danuta Walters also argue that, while the figure of
the mother has been present in cultural texts and discourses,
her representation has been as object rather than subject.
Kaplan, a feminist film critic, argues that mothers have most
often "been studied from an Other's point of view; or
represented as an (unquestioned) patriarchally constructed
social function" (Motherhood and Representation 3). Few
scholars prior to the 1980s, according to Kaplan, "had been
interested in understanding [the mother's] positioning or her
social role from inside the mother's discourse, in whatever
context, of whatever type" (3). Kaplan continues:
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22
The absence of concern with the Mother as
subject, not only in dominant literature
but also in intellectual and scholarly
pursuits, cannot be an accident.
Significantly, until the work produced by
the recent women's movement, there has been
no history of Motherhood analogous to the
work done on childhood, the family and
sexuality. ("Mothering, Feminism and
Representation" 12 0)
Like Chodorow and Contratto, Nice, and Leira and Krips,
Walters argues that mothers have been portrayed through the
course of twentieth century American culture in
universalizing cultural myths that do not recognize the
realities and differences of maternal experience— as, for
examples, ideally self-sacrificing or as psychopathological
or as all-powerful victimizers. In Lives Together/Worlds
Apart: Mothers and Daughters in Popular Culture, Walters
traces the development and popularity of these images of
mothers in the products of popular culture and the mass media
from the 1930s to the present. Mothers appear dichotomized
as, for instance, the "devouring mother and the virtuous
mother" (75). These "mystifications, both the haloed
idealization and the vicious demonization," serve to
"distance mothers and daughters from their own complex, lived
reality" and to make mother "guilty and responsible not only
for her children's miserable failures, but for the failures
of society as well" (75).
Women's experience is further dichotomized through
"double-bind" messages (75) that make it impossible to be
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23
both a good woman and a good mother. The daughter must
repudiate the mother to find her own femininity and be a true
woman, but to be a true woman, she must be maternal (228) .
"Western culture has so incorporated the dichotomization of
'mother' and 'woman,'" according to Walters, "that
identification with the mother will always imply for the
daughter a denial of her own sexuality" (228) . Other critics,
such as Chodorow and Contratto, also discuss "a radical
[cultural] split between sexuality and maternity" (198) .
According to another common dichotomous representation,
if mothers are "engaged and involved" with their daughters,
they are criticized for being "intrusive, controlling, and
"overinvolved," yet, if mothers engage "with the outside
world" and are "self-determined and independent, " they are
"neglectful and selfish mothers, capable of producing
'maternal deprivation'" (214). These descriptions are
reminiscent of the mythological monsters discussed by
Chodorow and Contratto.
Walters credits feminist theory with opening up "a new
and exciting range of study on mothers and daughters," but
alleges that much feminist work thus far repeats the "same
old dichotomous stories":
The relationship between mother and
daughter is either valorized as a
transcendent bond of almost sexual
plenitude or pilloried as the "bond" that
keeps women tied to self-destructive
behaviors and patterns of submission. Once
again mothers are either victims or agents,
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24
pawns in the game of male domination or
sneaky operators in their own psychic power
plays. And daughters are, as always, the
passive respondents to these maternal
machinat ions. (161)
Unfortunately, "the possibility of mother/daughter continuity
that doesn't deny their autonomy, sexuality, or adulthood,"
Walters argues, "that sees them in a relationship where
neither one is 'all-powerful' or 'all-victimized' . . . is an
option rarely explored in popular culture" (228) .
Walters also recognizes that many of these dichotomies
have their roots in psychoanalytic models of development and
criticizes our cultural use of such models to measure the
development of women and of the mother/daughter relationship,
especially since they often pit women against each other. She
argues that the mass media and other "agents of
socialization" such as the "family, church, education, [or]
politics" compress the mother/daughter relationship "into the
narrow vision of psychology, framing it within the
dichotomous boundaries of "bonding" and "separation" and thus
actively constructing a relationship to be inherently
conflictual, forcing women apart, and rendering this prophesy
self-fulfilling" (16).
Debating the "truth value" of such models is "a
fruitless project" to Walters, since "engaging with
psychoanalysis . . . clearly involves a certain leap of
faith" (149) . "Feminist scholarship revealed early on that no
term, no idea, no concept is gender neutral," Walters
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25
asserts, and criticizes theorists on the mother/daughter
relationship for accepting the terms of psychoanalysis as
"pure, natural, psychological givens" (158) :
the mother/daughter relationship needs to
be described, understood, and analyzed in
fully social and historical terms. The ways
we understand and talk about mothers and
daughters are structured by our own
unconscious acceptance of certain concepts
and paradigms that are not innocent but
are, in fact, often destructive to the
possibility of mother/daughter intimacy and
continuity .... [therefore] the themes
we take to represent psychological truths
about the relationship need to be seriously
and rigorously questioned ... to uncover
and reveal the ideological agendas
inscribed within many commonsense
understandings of this
relationship. (10-11)
The potential usefulness of psychoanalytic terms such as
"bonding" and "separation" for examining the mother/daughter
relationship, Walters argues, "can be revealed only after
they have been subjected to a thorough, historical, feminist
critique" (159).
Like Hirsch, Nice, and various contributors to
Daughtering & Mothering: Female Subjectivity Reanalyzed,
Walters would prefer a model of "gender formation that sees
the construction of femininity . . . as a much more
contradictory and drawn out process that does not begin and
end before age three but evolves throughout our
lifetimes" (149), rather than as a process of inherent
conflict between mothers and daughters. She recommends that
we "expose" and "tear down" the "naturalized psychological
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26
narratives" and construct instead "not a new truth but rather
a multiplicity of possibilities centered on the feminist
commitment to woman identification" (232) where "woman
identification" suggests a "recognition of the shared
experience of all women, however differently structured by
race, class, sexuality, or identity as a mother or a
daughter" (8).
Walters cautions that "we cannot tell one story of
mothers and daughters" (234). "The variations of class, race,
ethnicity, national identity, sexual preference, and
historical location," she argues, "all help create a
multitude of possible narratives"; thus, "no single
narrative, no unified discourse, can possibly flesh out the
complexities and contradictions in mother/daughter
relationships" (234).
Walters believes that women come to understand their
relationships as mothers and daughters "not only through the
exigencies of family life, economic survival, and social
policies, but through the systems of representation and
cultural production that help give shape and meaning to that
relationship" (4). She believes that daughters need to
internalize "empowering and complex images of their
mothers" (8). I interpret Walters to mean that "complex"
images would avoid universalizing about or mythologizing
mothers and would, thus, "empower" daughters to perceive
their mothers as individual subjects. In her analysis of
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27
novels by American women, Walters found that "at the heart of
creating complex and thoughtful representations of the
mother/daughter relationship" is:
the extent to which the author located her
mother (either literally her mother or the
fictional mother of the novel) in a set of
complex social relations— in a world, a
culture, a class, an ethnicity, a politics,
in short, in history. (164) .
When daughters write about their mothers' lives, their
ability to create complex representations of their mothers or
of relationships between mothers and daughters depends on the
daughter's commitment to being what Walters calls an
"interested chronicler" rather than an "omniscient
repository" (165) of her mother's life. In criticizing the
act of writing as an "omniscient repository" of a mother's
life, Walters is, like Nice and Hirsch, noting the tendency
for mothers' lives to be written from the perspectives of
daughters while the mothers' voices or perspectives are
limited if not entirely absent. "A writer who constructs
herself as the repository of another's life," Walters
explains, "assumes a unitary grandness to her own narrative
expertise" (167), attempting "to draw from this life and
these events eternal truths about the mother/daughter
relationship" (166). But "the dialogic chronicler realizes
that one cannot be a repository for another's life, that the
sifting through the complex meanings of generations of
women," Walters asserts, "is about a dialogue, a multitude of
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28
voices, a dialectic of mothers and daughters (167):
To be a repository is to say your history
ends here with me: I am the result of your
life, and I can speak the truth of it. To
be a chronicler is to perhaps be more
modest, more local, more wary of any claims
to truth, aware that there are many
chroniclers, many ways of telling a
story. (167-68)
Walters emphasizes that we must tell stories of
relationships among mothers and daughters, calling that
relationship "a central nexus . . . between women" (235) and
reminding us that the experiences of our mothers are "part of
our shared history as women" (235) .
Vivien E. Nice:
Patriarchal Distortions and the Literature of Matrilineage
Walters's claims that relationships between mothers and
daughters are often described in universalizing cultural
myths and her calls for new forms of mother/daughter stories
are echoed in Mothers and Daughters: The Distortion of a
Relationship by Vivien E. Nice, who argues that
psychological, sociological, and other cultural texts ignore
and distort the "complexity of lived experience" (2) in the
relationships of mothers and daughters and, instead, use
"male-dominated psychological theories, an adherence to
patriarchal concepts" (15), and interpretations of the
experiences of white, middle-class women imposed on the
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29
experiences of all women (15) in an attempt to "unravel the
mother-daughter relationship" (2). These "distorting myths
about women, and particularly about women as mothers ....
disconnect women and deny the continuity in the mother-
daughter line" (4). Like many of the critics I discuss, Nice
asserts that "patriarchal knowledge ... is characterized by
dualisms and hierarchy" (4), among them dominant and
subordinate, independent and dependent, objective and
subjective (5) . Within this dualistic framework, Nice argues,
the "male-defined concepts" of "individuation, separation,
and independence . . . are considered developmentally mature,
whereas women's connectedness, mutuality, concern with
relationships are seen as developmentally immature" (9). In
such a developmental process, daughters must hate and reject
the mother in order to separate (12). However, Nice questions
the "separation myth" and calls for new language to "replace
such distorting concepts as 'separation'" (233) with the
language of "mutual dependency" and "connection" (233) .
Nice, herself, may appear to engage in the same kind of
dichotomous thinking that she criticizes by privileging
"connectedness" and "mutuality" over "separation" and
"independence," thereby simply preferring the other position
in each dichotomy. However, within Nice's argument, the
concepts of "connectedness" and "mutuality" do not oppose but
encompass "separation" and "individuation." Connectedness and
mutuality posit a separate-identity-situated-within-
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30
relationships, similar to Jordan's concept of "relational
being." The reverse, however, is not true: traditional
theories of separation and individuation cannot include the
concepts of connectedness and mutuality as described by Nice.
Theories of "separation" choose one position in a false
dichotomy, A versus B (separation versus connection), while
to Nice, Jordan, and others, "mutuality" suggests something
similar to A within B, or recognizes an on-going tension
between A and B, similar to Benjamin's description of the
necessary tension between self-assertion and "mutual
recognition" (Benjamin 12).
The model of development which Nice would prefer becomes
more clear in the following passage. Her words reinforce the
criticisms and suggestions of many theorists already
discussed:
the mother-daughter relationship has been
viewed from the perspective of the daughter
attempting to grow up and find her own
identity. In this it has also been the
story of individual development rather than
the development of a relationship between
two people. The development of the mother
as an individual has hardly been viewed at
all. But in order to attempt to understand
the relationship we need also to have some
under standing of the mother within it and
some understanding of the process of
negotiation between mother and daughter as
their relationship proceeds and
changes. (226)
Like Walters, however, Nice cautions that "we need to think
about the complexity" and "variety" of mother/daughter
relationships and not posit "one way of relating which then
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31
becomes the 'norm' against which other relationships are
judged and found wanting" (234) . "Only by attempting to
explore all possible facets of social context," argues Nice,
facets such as race, class, and age of mother and daughter,
"can we hope to increase our under standing of what may be
common factors in relationships between different mothers and
daughters" (11) . Like Walters, Hirsch, and Jordan, Nice takes
a "life-cycle approach" to the relationship between mother
and daughter, attempting to include "motherhood as a
developmental process through the life cycle" (15).
In addition, Nice asserts, as does Jessica Benjamin,
that the mother needs to be seen and needs to present more of
her self to her daughter than just that portion of her
identity which is "mother" (228) . For this to happen, Nice
argues, "we need to take more heed of what the mother is
actually saying and less about the daughter's or societal
interpretations of mother's experiences" (230) . Thus, Nice
ties the discussion to the mother's "voice" which, she says,
"needs to be heard more" (234) . In her discussion of the
daughter's desire for a "perfect mother," Nice points out
that such a mother "would tell you it is a fantasy which
denigrates what she has to give as a real mother." Nice notes
the irony that "for many women the ’mother' in them does not
tell the ’daughter' what she knows" (73).
The idea that the daughter needs to learn what the
mother knows is suggested by many of the critics discussed
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32
thus far. Echoing Virginia Woolf's observation that women
"think back through our mothers” (Woolf 76) , Nice argues
that:
daughters may learn to value
themselves . . . by looking back through
their mothers, but not in the patriarchal
way of denigrating mother and wresting
'power' from her, but by valuing her
strengths and understanding her needs— which
are also the daughter's" (154-55).
Nice and Nan Bauer Maglin see a trend toward this "looking
back” through our mothers in a new "literature of
matrilineage” (Nice 185) which I will discuss more fully in
chapter two.
As can be seen from my discussion thus far, the
arguments in which these critics engage concerning our
cultural erasure of the mother converge on several themes.
These shared themes include: the recognition that traditional
psychological models are predicated on norms of male
development, valuing separation as the goal of female
development and equating female inter-relation with
immaturity; the related recognition that traditional models
of female development imply an inherent hostility between
mother and daughter as a prerequisite for separation, thus
disrupting relationships among women; the consequent need
for new models of female development based on inter
relatedness, especially within the mother/daughter
relationship, and the correlative need to explore that
relationship as an on-going life process; the recognition
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33
that psychoanalytic models posit universalizing "truths"
about the mother/daughter relationship and the subsequent
need to explore that relationship through such specificities
as history, race, class, and age; the tendency in cultural
discourses toward positing a potential "ideal"
mother/daughter relationship and the subsequent tendency
toward mother-blaming; the recognition that traditional
psychoanalytic models cast the mother as object in relation
to her developing child; the correlative recognition that
many cultural discourses are written from the perspective of
the child/daughter while the mother's voice is absent; the
need for new language to express maternal subjectivity and
upset patriarchal dualisms; and the need for women to "think
back through [their] mothers" (Woolf 76) in order to reclaim
a female personal and social heritage.
In chapter two, I will discuss the possibilities for new
maternal discourses and maternal heritages suggested in some
works by American women of color and in "the literature of
matrilineage. " I will also introduce and describe a genre of
fiction which I refer to as "matrivocal narrative."
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Chapter Tuio:
Depicting R Maternal Subjectivity?
34
A potential pit-fall of the focus on the lack of the
mother's voice and subjectivity is the consequent attempt to
"restore" the voice of the mother and, thereby, claim a fixed
subject "mother." It would be easy, based solely on the mere
presence of a mother's voice in a text, to slip into the
assumption that the text explores "the experience of
motherhood," as if it is a unified experience. I am not
attempting to show that the novels I will discuss explore
"motherhood"; nor do they necessarily meet all the criteria
called for by the critics I discussed in chapter one who
describe what they believe maternal discourses should or
would do. I believe that the descriptions given by Vivien E.
Nice, Marianne Hirsch, Suzanna Danuta Walters, and other
critics of potential maternal discourses are not meant to be
prescriptive or offer a formula with which women can write
"acceptable" fiction about mothers and daughters. Rather,
their arguments are cautionary and suggest ways that fiction
and other genres of cultural texts might create space for the
voices of mothers, resist positioning the mother as mere
object in her daughter's story, and recast the
mother/daughter relationship as one of inter-relatedness
rather than separation through opposition. My purpose is to
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35
analyze several novels which focus on multiple generations of
women in a family and which, through narrative and structural
strategies, challenge the subject/object dichotomy and
suggest the possibility of the maternal voice, the
subject/mother, and sustained mother/daughter connections.
Chapters three through five will focus on the novels. In
the remainder of chapter two, I will briefly summarize key
arguments from Marianne Hirsch and Suzanna Danuta Walters on
works of fiction by American women of color which they feel
successfully create new maternal discourses. I will then
define and describe the "literature of matrilineage," a new
(or newly-recognized) tradition among contemporary American
women writers, in which the relationships among women in a
family, often mothers and daughters, are central in the text.
Finally, I will introduce and define what I call "matrivocal
narratives."
Maternal Discourses and the Fiction of American Women of Color
Both Marianne Hirsch and Suzanna Danuta Walters find
that the fiction of some American women of color successfully
incorporates the voices of mothers and portrays the
complexities of mother/daughter relationships. Hirsch begins
by asserting that "in recent years, several women writers
have written in specifically maternal voices," mainly "poets
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36
and short fiction writers" (176) of various races and
ethnicities. Hirsch pays particular attention to a tradition
of black feminist writers of the 1960s through the 1980s
whose works she believes "feature the mother prominently and
in complex and multiple ways" (176) . Hirsch mentions Toni
Morrison's novels Sula and Beloved and Alice Walker's short
story "Everyday Use" as examples of such works. Women authors
of this tradition, according to Hirsch, are "writers for whom
fathers, brothers, and husbands occupy a less prominent
place, writers who are in a more distant relation to cultural
and literary hegemony" (16) . These authors "tend to find it
necessary, much more than white feminist writers, to 'think
back through their mothers' in order to define themselves
identifiably in their own voices as subjects" (177) .
These writers, among them Morrison, Walker, Paule
Marshall, Gloria Naylor, Ntozake Shange, and Toni Cade
Bambara "belong to a generation whose writing is obsessed
with issues of continuity and separation, connection and
disconnection" (Hirsch 177):
Their public celebration of maternal
presence and influence and their portrayals
of strong and powerful mothers, combined
with the relative absence of fathers, makes
this uniquely feminist tradition a
particularly interesting one in which to
explore issues of maternal presence and
absence, speech and silence. If maternal
discourse can emerge in a particular
feminist tradition, it may not be
surprising that it should be in one that is
itself marginal and therefore perhaps more
ready to bond with women— mothers and
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37
daughters— letting go of male, paternal,
fraternal, or filial approval. (177).
Similarly to Hirsch, Walters concludes that American
women of color and ethnically conscious writers tend to
locate the mother/daughter relationship "in a set of complex
social relations" (164) "to an extent that mitigates against
the purely psychological interpretation" (165). According to
Walters, "women writers of color have consistently
acknowledged the importance of their maternal heritage, a
heritage that refuses the easy oppositions so characteristic
of less located tales" (173). Although she does acknowledge a
few works by white feminist writers which she feels achieve
the perspective of an "interested chronicler" rather than an
"omniscient repository" of the mother's life, she argues that
"much of the fiction of women of color avoids the perils of
the repository narratives so prevalent in white women's
fiction" (171). She discusses Alice Walker's novel Meridian
and, like Hirsch, Walker's short story "Everyday Use" as
examples of such works by American women of color.
Additionally, Walters uses Amy Tan's 1989 novel. The Joy Luck
Club as an example of mother/daughter fiction which
"exemplifies with particular force the rich possibilities for
mother/daughter representations" (180) . (I will discuss The
Joy Luck Club extensively in chapter five.)
Walters enlists the support of the work of many black
critics, including Gloria I. Joseph and Jill Lewis, Patricia
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38
Hill Collins, and Gloria Wade-Gayles, to argue that because
"most black and ethnic daughters have been witness to the
labor of their mothers," labor that "supported them, made
their very existence possible," black daughters "have had to
develop a certain respect for their mothers as competent and
active women" (172). This respect is in opposition to the
anger that many white daughters feel toward their mothers
who, according to the arguments of various white feminists,
daughters perceive as "trapped in the domestic role" (172).
The same black critics "also note the importance of
extended kinship systems in defining the black
mother/daughter relationship" (172). Such kinship networks
offer emotional support for the daughter as well as more
female role models and a sense of empowerment (173). Walters
notes that "similar patterns of closeness and mutuality have
been found by sociologists studying the working-class
family" (173) of various races or ethnicities, which supports
her contention that neither mother/daughter relationships nor
"what we assume to be the issues for mothers and daughters
(separation, autonomy, etc.) are "transhistorical or
transcultural"; rather, they are "products of particular
historical times and specific social and cultural
groupings" (173).
Walter's point that "patterns of closeness and mutuality
have been found by sociologists studying the working-class
family" (173) of various races or ethnicities implies that
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39
stories of maternal heritage are not necessarily more easily
written by women of color but can be told by many mothers and
many daughters. In fact, that conclusion is reached by Vivien
E. Nice, who finds that:
In exploring the literary works of Black
women, women from varied ethnic groups,
working-class women, lesbian women we can
see beyond the issue of problematic mother-
daughter relationships and the possible
reasons for that to something more like the
complexity of those relationships. Here we
see "ambivalence" in all its glory. Rage
and love; autonomy and connection; a
recognition of the hurt, and a pride in
one's heritage. This literature speaks of
the connection between mothers and
daughters and the legacy of strength
between them without denying the anger,
guilt and difficulties in communication
which can also exist, and the fact that
connection and anger can in fact co
exist. (187)
The arguments of Walters and Nice might be interpreted
as implying that oppression makes it easier for women to
produce "superior" literature. However, Walters's discussion
points to social factors such as kinship networks and working
mothers— which tend to be more prevalent among the working
class, especially among minority and ethnic groups— rather
than to oppression as factors which make complex depictions
of mother/daughter relationships more likely. Furthermore, to
assert, as Walters does, that American women of color and
ethnically conscious writers tend to locate the
mother/daughter relationship "in a set of complex social
relations" (164) or that "women writers of color have
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40
consistently acknowledged the importance of their maternal
heritage" (173) or that "much of the fiction of women of
color avoids the perils of the repository narratives so
prevalent in white women's fiction" (171) is not necessarily
equivalent to asserting a connection between oppression and
"superior" literature in an imaginative or esthetic sense.
Nor do Hirsch's arguments— that the works of certain black
feminist writers "feature the mother prominently and in
complex and multiple ways" (176) or that these authors "tend
to find it necessary, much more than white feminist writers,
to 'think back through their mothers' in order to define
themselves identifiably in their own voices as
subjects" (177)— equate to asserting a cause-effect
relationship between oppression and superior literature.
Hirsch's comment that "it may not be surprising" that
maternal discourse would emerge within a feminist tradition
"that is itself marginal" (177) makes a stronger suggestion
that oppression may foster maternal discourse or complex
representations of mothers and daughters but, again, not
necessarily more esthetically or imaginatively successful
literature.
However, the implication that oppression may produce
more complex depictions of mothers and daughters is a
generalization that deserves more discussion. Nice asserts a
more direct connection between oppression and socially- and
culturally-located representations of mothers and daughters
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41
in a literary tradition which is referred to by Nan Bauer
Maglin, Nice, and others as the "literature of matrilineage."
The “Literature of Matrilineage”
When I began exploring the shared assertion among so
many critics that we need to explore new maternal discourses
in our fictional and theoretical literature, I soon found
repeated in the work of many critics, such as Hirsch,
Walters, Nice, and especially Nan Bauer Maglin, the word
"matrilineage" to describe the focus of a new genre— or,
according to Nice, perhaps only a recently-recognized
genre (191)— of literature by and about women. Maglin uses the
term "literature of matrilineage" (257) to refer to
literature which focuses on relationships among women,
especially on the affiliations among women in a family, and
which usually incorporates the following themes:
1. The recognition by the daughter that
her voice is not entirely her own;
2. the importance of trying to really
see one's mother in spite of or beyond the
blindness and skewed vision that growing up
together causes;
3. the amazement and humility about the
strength of our mothers;
4. the need to recite one's
matrilineage, to find a ritual to both get
back there and preserve it;
5. and still, the anger and despair
about the pain and the silence borne and
handed on from mother and daughter. (258)
Nice cites Kim Chernin's 1985 work In My Mother's House,
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42
which tells the story of four generations of women in a
Jewish family, and Margaret Walker's 1966 novel, Jubilee,
about the life of Walker's great-grandmother, as examples of
this genre (190).
Maglin's definition of the literature of matrilineage
echoes many of the themes discussed in chapter one. The
assertion that a daughter's voice "is not entirely her own"
suggests the inter-relatedness of the mother/daughter
relationship. The need to "really see one's mother" is
reminiscent of Walters's and Nice's emphasis on the need to
resist viewing mothers and motherhood through the distorting
lenses of patriarchy and other cultural mythologies. The
"amazement and humility" felt by daughters about the strength
of their mothers is consistent with the attitude Walters
calls for when daughters attempt to act as chroniclers rather
than repositories of their mothers' lives and when they
attempt to give those lives a "history." The "need to recite
one's matrilineage" is a call to hear the mother's voice or
to know our mothers' stories. And finally, the recognition
that there is anger, despair, pain, and silence in the
mother/daughter relationship is a resistance to idealizing
this relationship. This is an essential recognition if we are
to remember that the fact that mothers and daughters
experience problems does not mean we must construct the
relationship as one rooted in conflict. As Nice explains,
"connection and anger can in fact co-exist" (187) . The
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43
recognition of "silence" is especially important to remind us
of the relative silence of the maternal voice in cultural
texts thus far and the importance of establishing texts which
create space for such a voice.
Nice sees a connection between the literature of women
of oppressed social groups and the literature of
matrilineage. "It is probably not coincidental that much of
the literature of matrilineage comes from women who
experience more oppression than sexism" (190), she argues:
The experiences and the stories of women
who are subject to added oppression through
being Black, working-class, Jewish, lesbian
and so on have until recently remained
within their own cultures or have been
rendered invisible by racist, classist,
homophobic society. Because of this it may
be wrong to assume that the matrilineage we
discover now in the writings of "minority"
women is "new" . . . but that it is now
slightly more accessible. (191)
She does acknowledge that white women also pursue their
"maternal heritage" in their writing. If the matrilineage in
the writings of "minority" women is not new but is now more
recognizable, "what may be new," according to Nice, "is the
breaking out of white, middle-class women from the
traditions, values and theoretical constraints of white,
middle-class men" (191). She speculates that:
perhaps it is through listening to the
experiences and values of "minority" women
(who have had much less to gain from the
upholding of white, middle-class, male
values) that more women generally will feel
able to pursue their maternal heritage and
gain a better understanding of their own
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44
mothers; their strengths, their
difficulties and their legacies to their
daughters. (191)
Nice does not imply that oppression somehow fosters
superior literature about mothers and daughters, but she does
seem to imply that women who are members of marginalized
groups are more "able" or more likely "to pursue their
maternal heritage." Dianne F. Sadoff also connects oppression
to the pursuit of a matrilineal heritage. She argues that
"race and class oppression intensify the black woman writer's
need to discover an untroubled matrilineal heritage, " which
she subsequently describes as "a source not of anxiety but of
nurturance" (5). However, Sadoff's assertion that oppression
"intensifies" one's need to explore one's matrilineal
heritage does not mean that oppression is a necessary factor
in that process of exploration.
Perhaps the most effective caution against assuming a
cause-effect relationship between oppression and "successful"
literature about mothers and daughters is the shared
assertion among the critics discussed thus far that "the
recognition of culturally and historically specific
conditions in women's lives" (Heung 597) encourages complex
depictions of mother/daughter relationships. In other words,
that recognition, not necessarily the experience of
oppression itself, may foster varied rather than
universalizing representations of mothers and daughters.
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45
In any case, the pursuit of a maternal heritage is
increasingly evident in literature by contemporary American
women, including increasing numbers of white women writers,
who are finding it important to explore their matrilineage.
One form it is commonly taking is in novels about multiple
generations of women in a family. Several such novels will be
my focus in subsequent chapters. These novels are related by
both structure and content; I describe these similarities in
more detail in the following section.
Contemporary American Women Writers and “Matrivocal Narratives”
Examples of contemporary novels about multiple
generations of women in a family are becoming quite numerous.
The novels often explicitly emphasize the importance of
women's stories, especially mothers' stories, and the act of
telling those stories, especially to subsequent generations
of women. In my survey of such novels, I found that a number
of them employ unusual narrative structures which I will
describe more specifically in subsequent chapters. While
playing with conventional narrative strategies is not new in
literary history, I found that use of unusual narrative
structures makes it possible for these novels to tell stories
of mothers and daughters in new ways that incorporate the
voices of many women in the family and allow mothers to speak
as subjects rather than objects of another's narrative. As I
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46
stated at the beginning of this chapter, these novels
challenge subject/object dichotomies and suggest the
possibilities of the maternal voice, the subject/mother, and
sustained mother/daughter connections.
To my knowledge, the type of novels I am bringing
together by virtue of their similar narrative and structural
strategies have not been grouped under any particular label
by anyone else, so I have chosen to refer to them as
"matrivocal narratives" in order to distinguish them within
the larger category of the literature of matrilineage and
from other novels about mothers and daughters. I intend the
suggestion of "voice" in "matrivocal" to imply not only the
foregrounding of mothers' voices through structural
strategies, but a broad range of maternal connections, from
an actual voice, represented by dialogue, to a more general
sense of maternal consciousness, experience, perspective, and
subj ectivity.
In each of chapters three through five, I will examine
novels which can be described as "matrivocal narratives."
Before beginning my discussion of the novels, however, I need
to briefly explain how they are all "contemporary" and
"American" and what constitutes a "family" and a
"mother/daughter" relationship for the purposes of this
analysis. These terms can obviously be defined in many ways.
"Contemporary" can refer to date of authorship, date of
publication, or period of time in which the novel is set. The
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47
novels I will discuss are "contemporary" simply by virtue of
the fact that they were all published after 1980. Most of the
novels are set in the period of their publication. However,
because the novels follow multiple generations of mothers and
daughters, some of their stories take place over decades. A
Cure for Dreams by Kaye Gibbons, for instance, begins in
tum-of-the-century Kentucky and follows the women in the
family to 1940s North Carolina; it then skips ahead to
December of 1989 in the opening and closing segments.
The novels are all "American" in the sense that they
were written by American women and they are set in the United
States for the most part, although two of the novels, Amy
Tan's The Joy Luck Club and Kaye Gibbons's A Cure for Dreams,
flash back to experiences the women had in other countries.
Most of the featured mother/daughter relationships are
among generations of biological mothers and daughters.
However, the narratives also include great-aunts, aunts,
half-sisters, step-mothers, and women who are non-blood
relations but who are regarded as family members. The
families in the narratives are primarily composed of
traditional heterosexual family constellations of
father/mother/children, although there are also uncles and
grandfathers, step-fathers and absent fathers.
There are, of course, many other relationships which
could be defined as "mother/daughter, " such as among women
and their adopted daughters or among women who act as mother-
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48
figures for other women. Although the criticism of
mother/daughter relationships summarized in chapter one is
also primarily focused on biological mother/daughter
relationships within traditional nuclear families, many
critics discussed in chapter one question the biases of our
current cultural narratives about mother/daughter
relationships which take that particular family constellation
as the "norm." Obviously, the growing number of families
headed by single mothers or lesbian partners, for instance,
underscores the need for new cultural narratives to address
mother/daughter relationships within non-traditional
families. In addition, more exploration needs to be done of
the differences among women writers of various races and
social classes on the topic of mothers and daughters, in both
fiction and non-fiction works. These and other variations of
mother/daughter relationships and family structures are too
numerous to address in my project, but their representation
in contemporary fictional works needs to be addressed.
Because I am limiting my analysis of novels to those
with particular characteristics, it should be apparent that I
am not attempting to give a comprehensive overview of
contemporary American novels or of representations of mothers
and daughters within current fiction. I am simply offering a
"sampling" of contemporary fictional works which employ
matrivocal narratives.
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49
Chapter Three:
Resisting Dichotomies
and Sustaining Mother/Daughter Connection
in H Cure for Oreams
Through narrative strategies and content, Kaye Gibbons's
novel, A Cure for Dreams, conflates, undermines, and
otherwise resists the easy dichotomies to which many of the
critics discussed in chapter one object: dichotomies of
subject/object, daughter/mother, separation/connection,
(usually equated with maturity/immaturity in emotional
development), and speaking to/for each other as mother and
daughter. Through the intermingling of the voices of mothers
and daughters in the text and the positions from which they
speak, the novel sustains tensions, rather than embraces one
position in a dichotomy. In the process, this novel suggests
the possibility of depicting both the subject/mother and
sustained connections among mothers and daughters.
Most of the story takes place in North Carolina in the
1920s through the 1940s. On a page before the actual text of
the novel begins, W. T. Couch, the Regional Director of the
Federal Writers Project of 1939, is quoted as saying, "With
all our talk of democracy it seems not inappropriate to let
the people speak for themselves." In this case, the "people"
speaking for themselves are the women of this southern
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50
family. The story begins on an un-numbered page, with "Simply
enough, my name is Marjorie Polly Randolph" and the narrator
elaborates on her matrilineage, naming her mother, Betty
Davies Randolph, and her mother's mother, Lottie O'Cadhain
Davies.
Marjorie asks her mother, Betty, to tell the stories of
her own youth, of her relationship with her own mother,
Lottie, and of "the years that made you," as Marjorie puts
it. Referring to her mother, Marjorie tells us "Then she
would talk. Talking was my mother's life." Marianne Hirsch
points out that the moment a woman speaks as mother, she
becomes object in relation to her child, but the significance
of Betty's act of speaking as mother is not so easily
reducible. Betty, who is the speaking voice of most of the
novel, speaks as daughter and mother simultaneously, as she
recounts to her daughter the stories of her relationship with
her own mother. If "daughter" in psychoanalytic, literary,
and other theories has been cast as subject in relation to
object-mother, then Betty's ability to speak as mother and
daughter simultaneously means that she can maintain a tension
between the positions of subject and object. Betty is not
cast as object in relation to her child since Betty is
subject in her own story; neither does her story necessarily
cast her own mother as object, since Betty's position as
mother-subject-daughter is conflated.
Betty's ability to speak as mother and daughter
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51
simultaneously in this novel depends on the fact that she
tells her own story, that her story is about her mother, and
that her audience is her child, Marjorie. Structurally, the
novel thus "acts out the double voice" Hirsch describes by
suggesting the "double identity" of the subject/mother,
"signalling perhaps the self-division that by necessity
characterizes and distinguishes maternal discourse" (181).
This structure relies on mothers telling their own stories to
their daughters and, so, establishes a continuity from
mothers to daughters. Rather than casting these women as
objects when they speak as mothers, the structure of the
novel makes their speech as mothers a necessary part of
resisting objectification.
An essential, uncomplicated, maternal "presence" or
"subjectivity" is not established here simply because of
dialogue that comes from the mouths of successive generations
of women speaking as mothers. Instead, the novel suggests the
way that these particular women shape each other over their
lifespans. Each woman builds on the stories and the voices of
the other women. For instance, it is evident that Marjorie's
voice both shapes and is shaped by the voices of the other
women in the novel. That this process of co-construction is
not solely linear is attested to by the circular nature of
the novel's structure, beginning and ending with Marjorie's
words. In her closing comments, she tells us that her "first
true memory is sound,” especially "the sounds of the women
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52
talking" and, in fact, she is obviously attaching her opening
and closing comments as an adult, after internalizing the
stories of generations of women in her family.
Several structural elements initially create the
impression that we can clearly distinguish among the voices
of the women in this text. The opening and closing segments
of the novel, in Marjorie's voice, are italicized and close
with Marjorie's initials at the bottom— "M.P.R." These pages
are not numbered with the rest of the text. The initials, the
italics, and the lack of numbers separate Marjorie's preface
and conclusion from the rest of the text, seeming to indicate
a clear distinction between her voice and those that follow.
Marjorie's voice operates to set up "bookends" for the rest
of the novel, which is apparently almost entirely in the
voice of Betty, her mother.
When we turn the page from Marjorie's opening, we find
that chapter one and subsequent chapters, excluding, of
course, Marjorie's concluding comments, begin with an opening
quotation mark— Marjorie is repeating for us the stories her
mother told her and the quotation mark signifies that the
repetition is in Betty's words. This first page of the first
chapter is numbered, indicating to Marjorie's audience that
Betty's story has begun. During the course of the novel, when
Betty quotes her mother, the words are italicized to indicate
the change of voice to Lottie's and, in the one instance of
dialogue in which Lottie may be indirectly quoting her
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53
mother, Bridget, the words are in plain text. Through this
use of alternating plain and italicized text, we get a visual
representation of the voices of the women in this family-
intertwining, and it appears that we can clearly distinguish
among their voices.
The successive generations of women in this novel are
attempting to preserve their mothers' stories in their
mothers' own words. Each woman appears to achieve that with
more success and in more detail as the generations proceed
forward. Lottie gives us only a few of the words of her
mother, Bridget. Lottie's daughter, Betty, recounts the life
she led with her mother, much of it an apparent repetition of
her mother's words. Marjorie could certainly be called one of
Suzanna Danuta Walters's "interested chroniclers" as she asks
her mother to tell her own story in her own words and then
preserves that account for the audience.
The least information we get is about Bridget, Lottie's
mother, who was the original matriarch of the family in
Kentucky. Bridget appears in a significant way in only two of
nineteen chapters of the novel. Almost all dialogue
attributed to Bridget is reported dialogue, embedded in the
speech of one of the other characters. Slightly more than
mid-way through the novel, Betty repeats the story her
mother, Lottie, told her about Lottie's recent trip to
Ireland with her mother, Bridget. Lottie's narration of this
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54
trip contains an account of words that Bridget spoke to
family members in Ireland:
[Bridget] jabbed her cane at them and said
she was leaving to go stay with old Mrs.
So-and-So, who would treat her better, but
the cousins said this lady was dead.
Bridget said, Fine, then I'll go stay with
another old So-and-So. And she was dead
too. She named off five or six people and
they were all long dead, and then she
whirled around and blamed me for dragging
her off to Ireland to visit a bunch of dead
people (111).
The presentation and structure of this dialogue make it clear
that this is not Bridget's voice we are hearing nor are these
Bridget's exact words. The words are all italicized,
indicating that they are in Lottie' s voice throughout. The
fact that the "f" in "Fine" is capitalized and appears in the
middle of the sentence might suggest that the sentence,
"Fine, then I'll go stay with another old So-and-So" is in
Bridget's voice. But, Bridget would most likely have referred
to the "So-and-So"s by name, especially since after Bridget
mentioned those two, Lottie tells us that Bridget named five
or six more people. This example is more complex and layered
than a simple instance of reported dialogue. We must remember
that Lottie's account of Bridget's words is told to Betty,
who tells Marjorie, who tells us.
That all of their voices shape this account is clear if
we look closely at the only instance in the novel in which we
may hear Bridget speaking in her own words. Betty reports
that every morning her grandfather would infuriate Bridget,
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55
who would come in and drive her husband and brother-in-law
from the breakfast table, screaming "Jesus, Mary, Joseph!
Blessed Virgin, Mother of God!" (9). The alternation of plain
text and italicized text for successive generations of women
would dictate that these words, if they belong to Bridget,
would appear in plain text, as they do. A few paragraphs
later, Lottie tells us that "the only English thing [Bridget]
ever said that sounded like it was said in her true voice was
Jesus, Joseph, Mary, Blessed Virgin, Mother of God" (10) .
Lottie's emphasis on "her true voice" in reference to Bridget
speaking indicates that Lottie's account contains a faithful
repetition of Bridget's words, but this assumption is
undermined by the transposition of "Joseph" and "Mary" in the
two accounts. That slight difference suggests that the words
are Bridget's, but they are shaped by Lottie's repetition of
them.
We get much more information about Bridget' s daughter,
Lottie. The first story we hear about Lottie is of how she
sat on the banks of a creek "dreaming of love coming to
her" (3). Lottie dreams of a man on horseback riding up to
her as she sits knitting. In Lottie's dream, the man "never
hopped down off the horse sheerly to kiss her. He always
left" (4). And Betty comments that Lottie "never let herself
dream the story any other way. Even in her dreams my mother
denied herself the impossible" (4) . The voice telling the
story is Betty's: Lottie is "she" in the story not "I," yet
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56
Betty tells the story in great detail, obviously having heard
her mother tell of this dream many times, and the volume of
detail with which Betty narrates her mother's life signifies
that much of the narration must be an entirely or partially
verbatim recounting of Lottie's words. Betty's account is
actually a mixture of the voices of Lottie and Betty.
Soon, the text is marked in italics to signify the
change to Lottie's words and voice, even though Betty is
still narrating all of it. Significantly, when Betty reports
the speech of other characters, the words are marked by
neither quotation marks nor italics, although they are
sometimes marked by a capital letter at the beginning of the
first word of the reported dialogue. For instance, in a
discussion with Trudy Woodlief, who is pregnant, the
narration tell us that "Sade noticed Trudy's longing [for
attention] . . . and said, Well, how does it feel to be
having twins?" (65). Sade's question is embedded in Betty's
narration of the incident. Similarly, the narration tells us
that "Trudy said, You get more accomplished than having them
one at a time" (65-6). Trudy's response is also only marked
by the capital letter at the beginning of "You."
Only Lottie's voice is marked by italics to create the
appearance that she is being quoted directly. This change
gives visual emphasis and separateness to Lottie's words
throughout the novel, even as her words are actually shaped
by Betty's retelling of them, such as when Betty talks about
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57
the day that Lottie told her to hammer nails into one of
Trudy's walls to provide a place to hang clothes. Betty
objects to going into Trudy's home without permission and
"putting holes in the wall. But," Betty continues, "my mother
said I had a perfect right to do this. Anytime somebody's not
looking after themselves it becomes your business" (97) . The
italics indicate that the last sentence belongs to Lottie,
but it is impossible to know how accurately the dialogue is
reported by Betty or Marjorie. One must suspend disbelief to
assume that Marjorie can quote Betty's novel-length
recitation verbatim or that Betty can accurately speak for
Lottie or Lottie for Bridget. This excerpt of dialogue, and
many others like it, actually combines the voices of Lottie,
Betty, and Marjorie. It is apparent that the women are
building their stories on the voices of previous generations.
Instances of reported and quasi-reported dialogue are
common in both fictional and real speech. Such dialogue to
some extent and in any context obscures the distinction
between separate voices. Alone, such speech might not provide
enough evidence of how the voices in the novel conflate.
However, as demonstrated in the previous examples, the use of
alternating italicized and plain text or a single capital
letter does not as clearly distinguish between reported and
quoted dialogue as would quotation marks. Another element of
the narration which contributes to the conflation of voices
in this text is the brief (less than one sentence) ,
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58
italicized summary which heads each chapter. Exactly whose
voice is speaking in these headings is ambiguous. The italics
could suggest that, like the prefatory and concluding remarks
bracketing the novel, these chapter headings are added by
Marjorie. We could also assume these words are in the voice
of the author. The combination of such ambiguous structural
elements, such as instances of reported and quasi-reported
dialogue, the use of alternating italicized and plain text,
the use of quotation marks to mark the shift from Marjorie's
to Betty's voice juxtaposed with the lack of quotation marks
elsewhere, enhances the effect of blending the women's
voices, creating dialogue that both is and is not in the
voice of each woman.
At this point, it may seem that my argument suggests
that the conflation of voices implies a lack of separateness
among the women in this novel. As discussed in chapter one,
terms such as "separation" or "autonomy, " traditionally used
in psychoanalytic theory to describe maturation, are under
fire by various critics. Hirsch criticizes the dualistic
nature of traditional, male-based psychoanalytic models which
define maturity as separation or autonomy, and prefers
instead a pattern of female selfhood located "not in autonomy
but in fluidity and connectedness" (132), in "continued
mother-daughter entanglement" and "inter-relation" (132).
Similarly, Vivien E. Nice argues that the "male-defined
concepts" of "individuation, separation, and
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59
independence . . . are considered developmentally mature,
whereas women's connectedness, mutuality, concern with
relationships are seen as developmentally immature" (9) . Nice
recognizes that in such a developmental process, daughters
must hate and reject the mother in order to separate (12).
She questions the "separation myth" and calls for new
language to "replace such distorting concepts as
'separation'" (233) with the language of "mutual dependency"
and "connection" (233). Judith Jordan also emphasizes the
need to move "from a theory of separate self to a perspective
of relational being" (139). The structural and thematic
elements of A Cure for Dreams underscore both the importance
of separate identity and the importance of connection within
the world of these women. The novel maintains a tension
between separateness and connectedness so that neither
position is exclusive of the other.
At first read, the relationship between Betty and Lottie
may appear as if it follows the traditional model of the
daughter's emotional separation from her mother as a
necessary step toward adulthood. As a young girl, Betty
prefers "to stay right by her [mother] like a little
twin" (50). As she enters her young adulthood and finds that
Lottie does not want her to leave home, Betty complains that
her mother "had enjoyed taking her turn [away from home] and
now she expected me to do without mine" and later complains
that when "I asked her for my liberty, finally, she simply
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60
couldn't understand me" (101) . Betty does leave and later
returns home, by her own choice. She seems happy to
acknowledge that the big city is not the place for her and
happy to marry a man first suggested to her by her mother. If
this enmeshment of their lives stunts the psychological
progression of either mother or daughter, it is not obvious,
once we let go of the idea that their continued connection
is, by definition, unhealthy. When Betty finally gives birth
to Marjorie, the most important event in her life to that
point, the narration and dialogue make a point of the fact
that she is able to do so without the presence or aid of her
mother. Thus the narration sustains a tension or, perhaps, a
balance between the women's individuation and their
connection.
Additionally, the women's acts of expression and
interpretation, acts of speaking, writing, and of "reading"
the significance of their social world, are important
symbolic aids to establishing separate identities yet
resisting dichotomization into opposing positions. The
importance to Betty of her mother's story is evident not only
in the way she attempts to preserve her mother' s words but in
the way she describes her mother's life as a story to be
viewed: "My mother . . . was a walking, talking, free moving
picture, and people looked and listened to see what she would
wear and what she would say the same way they sat in the
Centre Theatre and stared at the screen, waiting for the
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61
story to start" (50). Betty's emphasis that Lottie is a
"walking, talking free moving" agent, prevents this analogy
of Lottie's life to a film from becoming a portrayal of
Lottie as the two-dimensional object of her daughter's
description. Further evidence that Betty is not reducing her
mother to object comes when Betty tells us on at least one
occasion that she could not "read" her mother's response to a
particular event as she usually could (24) . This remark
contributes to the establishment of Lottie as subject in her
own story, even as Lottie is simultaneously a character in
Betty's telling of her own story.
In one of the chapters, headed "feminine secrets
disclosed" (29) , Lottie has organized a social hour for the
town women for the purpose of discussion and card playing,
the latter of which "was looked upon by some as immoral, if
not for the gambling then for the pleasure women received
from something other than home and hearth" (31) . In addition
to the confession that the women enjoy a break from home
duties, other "secrets" are spoken in this chapter. So that
she and Betty can spend the afternoons pursuing their own
pleasures, Lottie habitually serves her husband dinner made
from lunch left-overs mixed with canned goods so that it
appears to be a different meal. As Lottie and Betty walk by
the houses of the town women, Lottie can reveal to Betty
whether the women inside are happy or sad, loved or unloved
by their husbands. When Betty asks, "what is the sign? How
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62
can you look at your friends and tell if they're loved
right?" (34), Lottie's response reveals much to Betty about
the nature of relationships between men and women in the
world of this novel:
Listen and hear what the men call their
wives when they come to the store to fetch
them. Listen. Old squaw. This sounds bad
but it's truly sweet. Dear and Honey. I
wouldn't trust these. They have an
unnatural ring. No name. Just, Come on!
This is what your father says, so that
should tell you something. And this is what
Roy Duplin says calling for Sade, and you
know how nasty this sounds. Watch Sade's
shoulders hop the next time he yells for
her. At least your father's call has no
kind of tone attached to it, which is
almost worse. Rarely, rarely though will
you hear a woman called from the store by
her name, which is best. So listen for each
time Richard Bethune comes to the door and
calls, Amanda! so nicely. And watch how
gladly she goes to him. A woman's name will
always suffice, but if you'll keep your
ears open in a room with men and women,
you'll hear it's the call used least
often. (34-5)
So, the final secret of the chapter is the importance of
the woman's name. Significantly, even the sentence structures
of the passage contribute to that emphasis. The first half of
the passage contains several short sentence fragments, such
as "Listen. Old squaw . ... No name. Just, Come on, " which
create an abrupt rhythm, reflecting the various names— many of
them mundane or even brusque— that the men substitute for
their wives own names. Those short sentences are framed by
longer, more poetic sentences, embodying Lottie's lyrical,
passionate reflections on women's names. The first sentence
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63
of the passage, which begins with "Listen and hear, ' is a
call to the audience in the tradition of oral storytelling,
signifying that what is to follow is important information.
In the second half of the passage, Lottie's longer
sentences and lyrical rhythms take over in the poetic
repetition of "Rarely, rarely" and the alliteration of "how
gladly she goes to him" and "comes to the door and calls."
The latter phrase introduces and lends emphasis to "Amanda, "
the woman's name which follows. The sentence reaches its
crescendo on "Amanda!" and immediate decrescendo on "so
nicely." It begins with "So listen” and is followed by "And
watch,” a parallel command, similar to the opening
construction in "Listen and hear. " The passage ends on the
longest sentence, which emphasizes both the importance of a
woman's name and its infrequent use by men.
Later, when Betty goes to Richmond and has her first
real romance, she discovers the truth of her mother's
observation. As she thinks back on her relationship with a
man who has turned out to be trouble, Betty asks herself if
this young man had ever called her by name. "I convinced
myself he had," she thinks, "though to be honest, I'm not
sure if he had or he hadn't" (131) . All Betty can remember is
him yelling after her as she left, "Hey, girlie! Come back,
girlie!" (131).
If Lottie or Betty were more passive women, we could
read Lottie's speech as implying that women need to hear men
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64
speak their names in order to be or feel loved. But,
coming within the context of the structure of the novel as a
whole, bracketed by Marjorie's introductory section naming
the women in the family and her concluding section on the
voices of the women in the family, we can instead read the
entire novel as an example of women recognizing the
importance of establishing their own identities, in part
through the use of their own names and voices. It is
significant, for instance, that it is not their married names
or family names (names which they took from men) which the
women consider important; the emphasis is on the importance
of their first names, which, in this novel, seem to be given
them by their mothers.
Significantly, Marjorie's middle name, Polly, is the
first name of the family's black housekeeper and local
midwife. Betty describes Polly as "a wonderful gingercake-
colored woman who worked as our part-time cook and laundress
and doubled as a midwife and baby doctor" (29-30) . Polly is,
in many ways, in the social position one would expect in the
south in the early 1900s. She usually calls Lottie "Miss
Lottie" while Lottie also refers to her rather formally by
both her first and last name, "Polly Deal." Polly takes care
of the mundane and special needs of the family, such as
cooking, washing, dressing the father when he dies, and
delivering Betty's baby. There is no indication that she is
invited to the women's social hours in town. Her dialogue
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65
appears in the same plain text as Betty's, perhaps indicating
that she is outside the genealogy of the women in the family.
But Lottie and Betty have great respect for Polly. Betty
tells Marjorie that "Polly Deal was very wise with
women" (86). Lottie and Betty take her opinions seriously.
Polly lectures Betty about birth control (142) . Betty also
listens to Polly when she insists that Betty needs to give
birth without her mother's help: "You as much as anybody
needs to do this one thing this time without Miss
Lottie" (167), Polly tells her. Betty and Lottie do not treat
Polly as a servant or take her help for granted. They help
Polly with the household duties and pay her extra wages when
they need extra help from her (93) . Betty convinces Polly to
move in with Lottie while Betty is away in Richmond, not so
that she can help Lottie maintain the house, but so that they
can continue to be company for each other (115) .
While Betty is away, Polly is humiliated by a woman who
slaps her for scorching her handkerchief. As a result, Polly
refuses to do anyone's laundry anymore. "This was a bad, bad
thing to see happening to her, " Lottie tells Betty. "I'd
never seen her like this. She went to sleep right with me.
Right with me! This was not the modest Polly Deal I knew"
(133). While Lottie's surprise at Polly climbing into bed
with her indicates a social distance between them, she and
Betty both immediately accommodate Polly in her distress.
When Betty returns from Richmond, Polly makes it clear that
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66
she is very comfortable in Betty's room and waits for Betty
to tell her, "Well, you stay right there then and I'll move
in the room with my mother" (132) . When Betty envisions the
future, she sees herself, and her mother, and Polly
together (156).
Betty offends Polly by her desire to deliver her baby in
the hospital, but the baby comes at an unexpected time, and
Polly delivers her after all. "Polly Deal probably got her
wish because she willed it so, on the strength of her fiery
nature" (162), Betty says. At Polly's insistence, Betty named
her daughter "Marjorie Polly" (168) , a combination of names
which neither Betty nor Lottie cared for, but which,
according to Marjorie's concluding comments, they accepted to
make Polly happy.
Polly rarely appears in the narration while Betty's
father is alive, but after his death she is mentioned far
more frequently and has more dialogue. By Marjorie's
conclusion, her position as one of the constellation of women
in the household is well established. "J stayed in the house
with my mother and grandmother and Polly Deal, " Marjorie
tells us in her conclusion, "and from further reports thrived
on all the attention. All of us waited together for my father
to come home [from the war], and when he finally did I was
two." Polly is an important part of the formation of female
allegiances in the novel, and, by sharing her name with
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67
Marjorie, Polly becomes part of the women's genealogy in this
family.
Following the discussion of names in "feminine secrets
disclosed, the next chapter heading reads "An account of
things which heretofore were unsaid, or a lesson for the
tardy" (37). The things that were unsaid were finally spoken
by Lottie to Betty and by Betty to Marjorie but were never
known or spoken by the men in the story. In fact, being
female is a condition of both understanding and being able to
speak of the events of this chapter. The plot line of this
chapter is very similar to that of Susan Keating Glaspell's
short story "A Jury of Her Peers." In both stories, a farm
wife of the early twentieth century kills her cold,
domineering husband. Also in each story, the lawmen and other
men sent to investigate at the farmhouse are unable to piece
together what has happened, while the women are able to
figure out the motive and, in Gibbons's story, the murderer,
because they can interpret the clues in the details of each
woman's world in a way that the men cannot. In a crucial
feminist essay entitled "A Map for Rereading: Gender and the
Interpretation of Literary Texts," Annette Kolodny compares
Glaspell's story to Charlotte Perkins Gilman's short story
"The Yellow Wallpaper" and concludes that both stories make
the same point: "lacking familiarity with the women's
imaginative universe, that universe within which their acts
are signs, the men in these stories can neither read nor
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68
comprehend the meanings of the women closest to them" (58) .
Kolodny's reading of these stories also works for this
chapter in A Cure for Dreams: not inhabiting the same
"conceptual and symbolic" world (58) as their wives inhabit,
the men in this chapter are unable to understand that Sade
killed her husband. In fact, Betty's narration explicitly
points out the men's inability to read the world of the
women. Observing the deputy's inability to understand the
clues in the way she does, Betty says: "this had more to do
with the fact that he was full-time male than it did with the
fact that he was merely part-time deputy and neither bright
nor curious. Details escaped him" (46). Betty tells us that
her mother and Sade "never said a word to each other" (48)
about the "reckless stitching" on a quilt, which was one of
the clues Lottie finds. (Reckless stitching is also a clue to
the wife's guilt in the Glaspell story.) Lottie, however,
does finally tell Betty the story (when this telling took
place, we do not know) , and Betty passes the tale and its
interpretation on to Marjorie. This chapter and the previous
one, containing Lottie's advice to Betty on how to tell if a
woman is loved, demonstrate that part of the heritage that
Lottie is passing to Betty is the ability to read the world
of these women, a world in which female maturity includes a
recognition of both the importance of individual identity and
of the women's shared experiences. In her preface, Marjorie
tells us that the women in their family carry the trait from
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69
their mothers of looking young; this trait is symbolic of
both the separateness and connection among these women.
The heroines in this novel certainly move to female
allegiance as a basis for plotting and subjectivity, a
process that Hirsch describes as essential to texts that
would challenge the Freudian family romance "in which the
developing individual shifts her cathexes from mother, to
father, to husband, and then to her own child" (194) .
However, Hirsch argues that this challenge is not
accomplished by texts that simply modify or reverse the
pattern (194) through, for instance, eliminating mothers or
fathers entirely from the textual landscape. While there are
fathers present in A Cure for Dreams, their representation is
troublesome. Betty's father, the central male character in
the story, is a cold, compassionless workaholic whose wife
manipulates and punishes him in order to get what she wants.
Betty dislikes her father and almost never associates with
him. Her mother tells her that she and her father have never
had a good relationship: "He didn't like you very much from
the start, and this is my fault all around. But you weren't
liking him very much either. You cried whenever he picked you
up. He had big hard hands" (15) . Betty remembers that one
afternoon when she was drawing pictures and enjoying her
mother's company, her father came home from work and she
thought, "He's come home to ruin our day. I assumed this was
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70
his intention. This was my first original thought of my
father" (15).
There is no genuine intimacy shown in the family that
includes the father. His name, Charles, is rarely used.
Instead, he is consistently referred to by Betty as, simply,
"my father." This is a significant dismissal of him, given
Lottie's advice to Betty about the importance of the woman's
name. In addition, this practice helps to reduce him to a
type rather than a fleshed-out character.
The extent of the father's coldness and the level of
antipathy between husband and wife is clearly exhibited in
the fallout of an accident at the father's mill. One day,
Betty remembers, her father "stunned everyone in the
community by showing how little feeling he had for anybody
but himself" (72) . When a boy who worked at the mill fell
into the cotton baler and was killed, her father "ordered the
others to clean up the equipment and crank everything back up
to production" (72) . His employees, understandably upset,
asked to take the rest of the day off, but her father
"threatened to fire them all and thus they worked" (73) . When
Betty's father came home from work, Lottie made sure to lure
the neighbor's dogs over with leftover food from dinner and
serve it to them on her husband's mother's best dishes, so
that he would come outside to yell at her. When he stormed
outside, the dogs, who hated and terrified him, "lunged for
him, " growling and baring their teeth. "My father," Betty
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71
remembers, "ran through the house and went out the back door
and drove off in his automobile, I know with stars thrashing
before his eyes" (74). It appears that it is necessary to
kill off Betty's father in order for the women to have access
to subjectivity and plotting. He drowns himself about one-
third of the way through the novel. (On a sidenote, some men
are portrayed better in Gibbons's other novels, Charms for
the Easy Life, for instance.)
There are a few men in A Cure for Dreams who appear to
be loving characters. Richard Bethune, the husband who calls
his wife by her name, Amanda, is one example; however, he is
only mentioned a few times. Unfortunately, the presence of
Betty's father somewhat restricts Lottie and Betty from
access to subjectivity and female plotting. The women are
able to do what they want to do, but Lottie must manipulate
and deceive her husband in order to act. After he is dead,
they have control of their own plot. However, neither the
narrative conflation of the mother-subject-daughter
positions, the most important structural element of the
novel, nor the female allegiances among the mothers and
daughters in this novel are dependent upon the death of
Betty's father. In these ways, the novel still succeeds in
suggesting the potential of both the subject-mother and of
sustained connections among mothers and daughters.
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72
Chapter Four:
Neither Utopianism Nor Blame:
Learning to "Plot” in Opal on Dry Ground
Sandra Scofield's novel Opal on Dry Ground, uses
narrative devices similar to those which structure A Cure for
Dreams and Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club to undermine the
dichotomies of subject/object, daughter/mother,
separation/connection, and speaking to/for each other as
mother and daughter. Like those novels, Opal on Dry Ground
intermingles the voices of mothers and daughters and the
positions from which they speak to create a "double voice
that . . . yield[s] a multiple female consciousness"
(Hirsch 161) . Although the narrative of Scofield's novel is
not in the first person as in The Joy Luck Club, the
narrative perspective in Opal (controlled by an omniscient
third-person narrator) shifts primarily among several female
characters as in The Joy Luck Club. Like Betty in Gibbons's A
Cure for Dreams, each of the central women characters in
Scofield's novel, with the exception of the youngest
daughter, is both mother and daughter. The women's stories in
Opal are told from their position as daughters, so that we
get a picture of each woman as an object of her daughter's
perspective. We also see the women through the eyes of their
mothers, daughters, sisters, mothers-in-law, and through the
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73
dialogue of the men in their lives. However, each woman also
provides the primary consciousness of some chapters, thereby
allowing her to "speak" for herself, in the sense that the
story and interaction of the characters are seen largely
through the perspective of or in relation to the woman who is
the focus of the chapter.
As in The Joy Luck Club, the shifting narrative
perspective in Opal on Dry Ground prevents mothers or
daughters from being sole possessors of subject or object
status; instead, each woman is simultaneously subject and
object in the narrative. Because the novel contains multiple
generations of women— as in A Cure for Dreams—when each woman
is the focus of a chapter, she "speaks," simultaneously, as
mother and daughter. The shifting narrative perspective
presents each woman as a multiplicity of selves, sometimes
the object of another's narrative, sometimes subject in her
own story, repeatedly establishing and upsetting the
subject/object dichotomy.
The novel contains six sections, divided into thirty-
seven chapters. As in The Joy Luck Club, the consciousness or
perspective of one of the female characters, Opal Duffy,
"frames" and permeates the shifting perspective of the rest
of the chapters. Opal's is the central "portrait" being
created by the multiplicity of perspectives of the characters
that surround her. Opal is in her fifties, newly married to
Russell Duffy, who works on and off as a mechanic and on the
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74
oil pipelines of Texas and other places. Opal and Russell
live in Russell's four-bedroom house, into which move Opal's
daughters Joy and Clancy, both divorced, and Joy's obnoxious
teenage daughter, Heather. Opal has recently lost her own
mother, so she is coping with her grief as a daughter as well
as with her sadness over her own daughters' heartaches.
The opening sentence of each chapter names the character
whose perspective is developed in the chapter, with the
exception of three chapters which begin by naming a minor
male character associated with Joy. This structural exception
makes an appropriate framework for Joy's story, which
includes her history of unfulfilling relationships with men;
however, the perspective of these chapters belongs to Joy
rather than to the men named in their opening sentences.
Three others begin with Opal's husband, Russell, and develop
his perspective briefly before returning, within each
chapter, to focus on the women around him. With the exception
of these six chapters, each of the chapters begins with and
focuses on the perspective of one of the women. Of these
thirty-seven chapters, eleven open by naming Opal (or, as in
a few of them, Opal and Russell) ; six by naming Joy; eight by
naming Clancy, four by naming Heather (one of which also
names her friend, Jamaica); two by naming Opal's ex-mother-
in-law, Elizabeth. Other characters flit in and out of the
narration as well as in and out of Russell's house, including
Clancy's boyfriend, Travis (by whom she becomes pregnant);
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75
two or three of Joy's boyfriends; Joy's ex-husband, Wayne,
and his wife, Joanne; Russell's daughter, Tanya, and her baby
Rose; Russell's mother, Imogene; his son, Buddy; Buddy's
wife, Leanne; and their son, Jimmy. Even though the narrative
perspective shifts among the women and occasionally to one of
the men around them, Opal is at the heart of the narrative
and the interactions among this extended family. Chapters
which focus on other women also develop the portrait of Opal
by including their thoughts about or interactions and
dialogue with her.
While the individual chapters of the novel are merely
numbered, the six larger sections of the novel are titled.
Each title makes both literal and metaphorical reference to
the contents of the chapter. The title of the first section,
"The Queen's Bread Pudding," refers literally to the bread
pudding that Clancy wants her mother to help her make on
Christmas day and metaphorically to the mix of characters in
Opal's extended family, to whom we are introduced in this
first section. The title indicates that Opal is at the center
of the narrative overall, although sections one and two focus
primarily on Opal's daughters, Clancy and Joy, respectively.
The second section, "Fibrillations," focuses mainly on Joy
and her daughter, Heather, especially on Joy's troubled
entanglements with men. "Fibrillations" suggests both the
literal heart palpitations that Opal occasionally experiences
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76
and the metaphorical fibrillations of individual heartaches
in the lives of these women.
While the first two sections are primarily controlled by
the perspectives of Clancy and Joy, each section contains
individual chapters which focus on Opal and her relationship
with her daughters. Through this structure, the narrative
begins in a familiar way, with Opal as the object of her
daughters' stories, but Opal's perspective is gradually
integrated into each section; by section three, the narrative
is primarily controlled by Opal's perspective and develops
her relationships with the major characters in her world.
The third section carries the same title as the novel
itself, "Opal on Dry Ground." Section three presents Opal not
only as mother or grandmother in relation to Clancy, Joy, and
Heather, but as daughter to her own mother, Greta, who died
recently when her house was flooded, as sister to her
brother, Amos, as wife to Russell, and as herself— an aging
woman who is trying to learn how to cope with health
problems, ambivalent emotions, and a relatively new marriage,
among other things. Although the doctor told Opal that Greta
suffered a fatal heart attack before she fell on her flooded
kitchen floor, Opal cannot shake images of her mother in
danger of drowning. Subsequently, Opal finds herself
literally and metaphorically on dry ground in her waking and
sleeping hours. She visits her mother's house for the first
time since the flood and her mother's death. Afterward, she
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77
dreams of her mother endangered by rising water, then dreams
of herself in her own kitchen, "on dry ground" (118) , but cut
off again from her mother, unable to communicate with her.
The phrase "on dry ground" in that context suggests that Opal
is stranded by the loss of her mother but, as the novel
progresses, the phrase also takes on, in reference to all the
women in this family, its more common connotations of finding
safety in the midst of dangerous waters. Central to this
section is Opal's sense of loss: of her mother; of her
relationship with her brother, who is angry over the
settlement of their mother's estate; and of her mother's
house and other of her mother's possessions to which Opal has
a sentimental connection.
In section four, "Club Dancing," most of the characters
in the story go out dancing to celebrate Opal's and Russell's
third wedding anniversary. Almost all of the major and minor
characters make an appearance in this section, which develops
the dynamics among the group as they also "dance"
metaphorically with and around each other, stepping on each
other's toes emotionally, competing for space and attention.
This section highlights the loyalties and tensions among the
members of the group.
While "Club Dancing" begins with Clancy imagining
herself as an erotic dancer in a cage, something she could
only fantasize about, the next section, "Dreams of Little
Birds," suggests the women's movements toward independence
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78
and actual fulfillment of their individual desires. Like
Clancy's cat, Chocolate, who Clancy says is "getting up her
courage .... to stay out all night" (225-6) and do more
than merely dream of little birds, the women are gathering
their courage to take steps individually that they have
previously found difficult and somewhat frightening. The
title of the final section, "Shy Dogs," suggests both the
inhabitants of the prairie dog city in the park and,
ironically, the inhabitants of Russell's house, who are
venturing out on their own again.
The titles and structure of the sections, taken
together, could suggest that Opal's daughters clearly repeat
the traditional move from initial dependence on their mother,
embodied by moving back in with her, to the supposedly more
"mature" state of independence from her, demonstrated when
they move out again as the novel ends. However, the
apparently clear move from dependence to independence is
belied by both the state of the relationships among the
family members at the close of the novel and by the suggested
fluidity or temporariness of their new living arrangements.
At the end of the novel, Clancy and her baby move in
with Elizabeth, Clancy's paternal grandmother, so that Clancy
can think about what she wants to do with the rest of her
life. She doesn't want to go back to work at the bank or be
with Travis "right now" (247), she tells Opal, but reminds
her mother that "every time a person does something, it isn't
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79
forever" (248). Joy, exhausted from struggling with her
sullen daughter, sends Heather to live with Heather's father,
Wayne, for an undetermined period of time, in part, perhaps,
so that Joy can develop a more stable relationship with her
boyfriend, Otis. Heather has been attempting to "sabotage"
that relationship (195), but Otis, unlike other men in Joy's
life, seems determined to make the relationship last. Joy
needs a rest from parenting Heather on her own and an
opportunity to move in with Otis for a while. Heather needs
an opportunity to develop her relationship with her father,
her step-mother, and her younger half-brother. Even Russell
and Opal are leaving Russell's house, temporarily; Opal has
finally agreed, after much pleading from Russell, to live on
site with him at his next pipeline job.
These exits do not signal an "arrival" at independence
but the further development or maintenance of connections to
others. Russell's reassurance to Opal as they watch family
members depart, that "they're not gone so far or long" (278),
suggests that the comings and goings of family members will
continue. "What good's a house with nobody in it?" (279) he
asks. This rhetorical question closes the novel, letting the
family's story pause rather than end.
The story also undermines the apparent move from
dependence to independence in favor of a picture of inter
relation by its refusal to artificially resolve the tensions
among the generations of women or to characterize their
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80
relationships as inherently antagonistic. The women have
moments of real conflict, but because the structure of the
novel gives us an in-depth picture of each woman as subject,
familiarizing us with each woman's inner world, the conflicts
among them play as the expected, predictable clashes of needs
and personalities between individuals, rather than as
hallmarks of ''inherent" antagonism. Joy's and Opal's
contradictory interpretations of why Joy, as a girl, was sent
to stay with the biological father she had never known, are
compelling, though not necessarily pleasant, evidence that
these women's "voices" are given equal subject status in the
novel. The fact that the women's disparate interpretations of
events are never reconciled in the story merely suggests the
lack of such reconciliation between actual human beings,
rather than an inherently oppositional relationship between
mothers and daughters.
The disparate accounts are actually presented in
different sections of the novel. We hear Joy's version of
events first in "Club Dancing," an appropriate section for
this lengthy, painful story which reveals Joy's anger at her
mother's apparent insensitivity to her emotional fragility
and Heather's ignorance of her mother's inner life. Opal's
more brief recollections of the same event, in "Dreams of
Little Birds," are part of a train of thought in which Opal
worries about the directions her daughters' lives are taking.
Opal' s reflections on sending Joy away reveal that Joy is as
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81
ignorant of her own mother's emotional life and motivations
as Heather is ignorant of Joy's.
Responding to Heather's bitter complaint that as a child
you have to "take what you get, what else can you do with
parents?” (161) , Joy begins to tell Heather about the day she
learned that the father she had known all her life was not
her biological father. Heather groans in boredom, and Joy,
disappointed that her daughter is not more interested in
memories that are significant to Joy, wonders why she has
never told Heather this story. Joy asks herself one of the
central questions of this novel: "Why doesn't anybody tell
them their own mothers have stories? They should tell them to
ask” (162) . Of course, we see the ironic truth, that Joy, as
mother, is aware that she is the object of her daughter's
perspective, rather than subject in her own stories; as
daughter, however, she fails to realize that she needs to ask
her own mother for her stories. The structure of this novel,
which makes the reader privy to Opal's inner life as well as
to Joy's, allows the reader to know Opal and Joy as subjects,
rather than merely as objects in their daughters' accounts.
As daughter, Joy remembers being sent to her father' s as
a punishment. She had worked hard all day cleaning and
cooking dinner while her mother was at work but, when Opal
arrived home, she began yelling at Joy for not making a
salad. Opal's stress escalated tensions into a family fight,
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82
at the end of which Joy screamed "I hate it here, I wish I
lived someplace else!" (164) . When Opal came to her room to
talk to her, Joy remembers, "I thought she was going to say
she was sorry. I wanted her to hug me" (164) . Instead, Opal
said to her, "If you don't like our house, maybe you could go
live at your other parent's" (164) . Retelling the story makes
Joy feel "weak with old anger" (165) . She repeatedly
emphasizes the importance both of Heather hearing her story
and of her telling it: "I want you to hear this. I want to
tell you this" (164), she says to Heather. But Heather
complains that she cannot understand what her mother is
trying to tell her, to which Joy responds, "I just want you
to understand that I've had my turn too. As a girl. That's
not even talking about the rest of my life. My
husbands— " (166) , but Heather interrupts her again. Joy
continues to try to tell Heather about her experience as the
child rather than the parent, but finally, "it doesn't seem
all that important. Telling Heather has sent the memory up
like vapor. It doesn't matter anymore" (167).
Joy's resignation is only momentary, however; when
Heather whines, "I could have had a grandfather with a
swimming pool, and you couldn't get along with him?" (168),
Joy's anger returns. "The only person more hateful than you,
Heather Ronnander," Joy responds, "is your daddy" (168). When
Heather asks, "What about your mother?" Joy shouts, "Her
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83
too!" (168) . Joy is able to understand why Heather feels she
does not belong at her father's house, but Heather, who
should be able to empathize with her mother's memories of not
belonging, is so self-engrossed that she can only think of
the swimming pool her mother gave up. Similarly, Joy can only
internalize the way her mother's decision to send her away
affected her; she is unaware of Opal's ambivalence looking
back at that decision.
Opal's reasons, as she remembers them, for sending Joy
to her father's conflict with Joy's interpretation of the
decision as a punishment. Her thoughts also reveal her
current awareness that her young daughters had had emotional
needs of which she had not then been aware. As Opal worries
about Clancy's reluctance to let Travis be a part of her life
after their baby comes, Opal realizes that she never talked
to Clancy about the absence of Clancy's own father after the
divorce. In reference to this family silence, she asks
herself, "What were they all doing?" (225) and continues by
asking another of the novel's most important questions:
Don't grown-ups know how much is going on
inside their children's hearts? And Joy,
too. How hard she tried to give Joy more;
she even tried to let her know her real
father, when she saw where her marriage to
Thatch was headed. None of it was the right
thing to do: not shutting Clancy out
because she was a child, not sending Joy
off and hurting her and Thatch both with it
. . . . What can she tell Clancy about love
and hope and patience? You can't know.
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That's all you can really say. You can't
know. So you send your children out on
leaky boats. (225)
By giving the reader knowledge of both Joy's and Opal's
interpretations of this event, the novel is not reaching for
resolution of this tension in their relationship. Simple
resolution is not necessary if the goal, as Suzanna Danuta
Walters, Nancy Chodorow and Susan Contratto, and others
argue, is not to create a utopian picture of relationships
between mothers and daughters so much as to avoid
universalizing or mythologizing their relationships, thereby
positioning mothers as objects and the recipients of blame.
Instead of resolution or universalizing claims, the novel
substitutes questions that alternately position the various
women as subjects in the making of their own lives or as
objects of another's philosophical reveries. Their questions,
rather than claims, open the story to many interpretations
and allow for the intermingling of several voices and
perspectives.
The final paragraph of chapter two contains Opal's
assumption of blame for her own sadness and that of her
daughters: "So much is wrong," Opal thinks. "Her children are
sad. Her mother is dead. She has to be responsible for some
of it" (17). Opal's claim that she is at least partly to
blame will subsequently be challenged by the questions the
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85
women, including Opal, ask themselves through the rest of the
novel.
For instance, wanting to advise Clancy on her
relationship with Travis, Opal is tempted to tell her to try
again in spite of her two failed marriages, but Opal asks
herself if such advice is a good thing. "Has Clancy learned
anything after two mistakes?" Opal asks. "Like, whose
mistakes they were?" (191). Much earlier in the novel, in
fact, Clancy has already admitted to herself that she and her
sister repeat the same mistakes in relationships with men.
Clancy observes that "hardly anyone ever learns from past
mistakes, their own or anyone else' s. Why else do they say
that history repeats itself?" .... The way Clancy sees it,
Joy makes men mad, whereas she bores them to death" (28) .
Clancy's question about history repeating itself
reflects her own awareness that she and Joy need to accept
responsibility for their own unhappiness. The mothers and
daughters, however, never arrive at mutual awareness of
shared blame. We are aware of Clancy's assumption of
responsibility for her unhappiness, but Opal is not. We are
aware of Opal's concern about mistakes she made as a parent,
but Joy and Clancy are not. We understand Joy's attempts to
communicate with her daughter, but Heather does not. We see
the irony in the fact that Joy blames her mother for her
problems without trying to understand Opal's motivations or
experiences, yet Joy is the one who asks, "Why doesn't
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86
anybody tell [children] their own mothers have
stories?" (162). The structure of the narrative presents the
question of responsibility as complex, one which all the
women struggle with individually.
In the passage in which Opal begins by asking, "Don't
grown-ups know how much is going on inside their children's
hearts?" and a little later asks, "What can she tell Clancy
about love and hope and patience?" (225) , Opal recognizes
that parents can be ignorant of their children's emotional
needs and that it is a fact of human experience that it often
seems impossible to communicate important insights to one's
children, especially when those insights often come after the
children are grown. While caring for Clancy's baby, Opal
muses that, unlike her grown daughters, he is "uncomplicated,
he bears no grudges. His history is all ahead of him" (241) .
She knows that:
when he cries, he has a reason, and most of
the time Opal can figure out what it is.
You can make babies happy with so little.
When does that stop? When do they start
wanting more than you have to give? When do
they get angry that life has bumps in the
road? Why do they blame their
mothers? (241)
Opal's last three questions, taken together, recognize that
individual needs and choices, happenstance, and parenting all
shape a person's life, yet Opal's philosophical analysis of
her family's past and present also suggest the part that her
daughters have in shaping their mother over the lifespan of
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87
their relationships. Thus, blame and influence go both
directions between the daughters and mothers, between
subjects, rather than between subject and object.
Like A Cure for Dreams, Opal on Dry Ground, begins on a
page before the main text of the story, with a quotation from
Chana Bloch's "The Magnificat": "Now the fingers and toes are
formed / the doctor says. / Nothing to worry about. Nothing /
to worry about." The ironic repetition of the last line is an
appropriate prelude to Opal's story. She worries a great deal
about her daughters' lives. In fact, a psychiatrist whom Opal
dated for a while had advised her that she needed to "cut the
kids' cords" (11). At one point, she silently refers to
Clancy and her son, Murphy, as her "two babies" (239). We
know that Opal, who "often mourns the past" (13) partially
blames herself for her daughters' sadness and, currently,
feels responsible for the details of everything going on
around her: making sure that everyone in the household is
eating; wanting to help resolve every emotional crisis;
refusing to go with Russell to any of his job sites because,
she insists, her daughters need her; and leaving their
anniversary party after less than an hour because Clancy is
not feeling well. Opal feels the need to oversee everyone and
everything in the household.
Some readers would label Opal an over-involved mother.
She seems to consistently prioritize the needs of her
daughters even over her marriage to Russell. One could also
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88
interpret her behavior as that of the stereotypical mother of
traditional psychological narratives who "smothers" her
children or cannot accept their separation from her. However,
the novel's portrait of Opal is more complex than such
general assumptions will support. "Smothering" implies a need
to control someone's life, but if Opal acted merely to
fulfill her own need to "fix" her daughters' lives, she would
not question her ability to help: "There are a hundred things
about Clancy she'd like to tell [Travis], but she's made that
mistake before and wished she hadn't" (187) . She would like
to encourage Clancy in her relationship with Travis, but she
is not sure it is a good idea (191) . She understands that
some things her daughters have to learn for themselves: "If
Clancy thinks an infant seat makes her baby safe, let her.
She'll find out soon enough how many dangers there are," Opal
knows. "She'll find out what it's like to have your heart in
your throat half the time, worrying about your
children" (248).
The night before most of her family members move out,
she reflects on her priorities and what her life means now
that her children are leaving and Russell is asking for more
of her time and companionship:
It' s always been more important to be a
mother than a wife; when Greta was alive,
it was more important to be a daughter. Now
her mother is dead, and her children, like
little blind rats, are stumbling out of the
nest. Who does that make her, if not
Russell's companion? What does it give her,
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89
if she won't take what he offers? Is it so
bad? (271-2)
The passage might suggest that Opal has difficulty not
defining herself in terms of "mother" or "daughter." On the
other hand, this passage is preceded by Opal's reflections on
the importance of being aware of and acting on one's own
needs and desires. She knows that Russell understands that:
in the construction of your life's plot,
you narrow the options with age and error,
and he wants to make the best of what he's
got. Maybe he's right. Maybe what you've
got is out of your control; all you can
affect is who you are. (271)
Carol Gilligan's critique of traditional psychological
narratives about women, In a Different Voice, describes the
way in which women learn an ethic of care and connection to
others and develop "an overriding concern with relationships
and responsibilities" (16-17). This concern can sometimes be
transformed into "a morality of self-sacrifice and self-
abnegation" (149). Gilligan argues that as women come to
internalize the notion that "the interests of the self can be
considered legitimate" and "when assertion no longer seems
dangerous, the concept of relationships changes from a bond
of continuing dependence to a dynamic of interdependence
. . . . [and] an injunction to act responsively toward self
and others and thus to sustain connection" (149). In the
context of the entire passage, Opal's question about her
identity as "Russell's companion" reflects her realization
that it is time to shift emphasis, to focus on a role other
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than that of mother or daughter. It is not an act of
dependence or independence but of " interdependence, "
recognizing that she wants to sustain her connection to
Russell. This interpretation is supported by Opal's second
question, which suggests that she realizes this change can
benefit her and that being Russell's companion means she will
allow him to be connected to her in the way he has asked to
be throughout the novel. Opal realizes that "she doesn't want
so much from a husband anymore. She doesn't expect a daily
miracle" (189), but she also understands that, while "her
heart aches . . . she knows whatever's hurting has to be
fixed with the living and not the dead" (246) . Russell "has
thrown his hat into her ring" (271) , she knows, and she has
discovered that "she can live with him in his trailer
anywhere. She can be his wife" (272) .
There are significant correlations between the passage
at the beginning of the novel in which Opal reflects that "So
much is wrong. Her children are sad. Her mother is dead. She
has to be responsible for some of it" (17) and the one at the
end of the novel in which Opal reflects that "now her mother
is dead, and her children, like little blind rats, are
stumbling out of the nest. Who does that make her, if not
Russell's companion?" (272). Like Marjorie's opening and
closing commentaries in A Cure for Dreams, these passages act
as "bookends," bracketing Opal's story, her negotiation of
who she is, of her various roles, of her relationships with
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91
her children, grandchildren, deceased mother, and husband.
Opal's thoughts at the end, still phrased partially in the
form of questions rather than claims, make clear that the
novel is not pretending to arrive at universalizing truths
about motherhood or about mothers and daughters. Yet it is
clear that Opal's process of introspection chronicled
throughout the story has yielded some insights. In the
earlier passage, she looks toward the past and assumes
responsibility for what is wrong in the lives of her
daughters; in the later one, she looks toward the
future— toward what her new circumstances can give her— and
assumes that her daughters' circumstances include the
consequences of their own ignorance.
In fact, the three primary women in the novel are all
struggling with what it means to be mothers and daughters and
with their relationships with men, but none of the women
define themselves solely as mother or as daughter or within
their romantic relationships. Like Opal, Clancy is trying to
create and adjust to new circumstances, and this process
leads to a change in her conception of herself. Clancy is
struggling through a divorce from her second husband, Jeeter,
at the beginning of the novel; by the end, she is trying to
decide what having a baby will mean to her and what role she
wants Travis to play in her life. She is exhausted and
depressed through most of the story. Initially, she is taking
Elavil, an anti-depressant, presumably to help her get
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through her divorce. Clancy has a history of depression,
however. Her sadness is a part of her image of herself. Opal
thinks that "Clancy's husbands seemed to be challenged by her
sad demeanor; they didn't realize it wasn't something she
could toss off like a discarded blouse" (187). Midway through
the novel, Clancy stops taking the medication and finds that,
while she is still "a little sad, resigned," she is "over
what Jeeter had done to her" (131) . "Maybe she was depressed
some of the time," she acknowledges, "but mostly she went
along on an even keel" (131). "This was life,* Clancy
decides, "and she was going to live it" (131).
Toward the beginning of Clancy's story, she thinks that
"it is her own life's lack of resolution— what's to become of
her— that is so depressing" (6) . Clancy describes the
direction in which she is headed as "a long slide down into
dependence" (23), and adds:
she would like to hold on to the sides of
the tunnel as long as she can. It's
probably silly, but she thinks that the
longer she takes care of herself in small
ways, the faster she will be in charge
again in ways that really matter. (23)
Clancy knows that her stay with Opal "is going to last a
while, but a stopover isn't your life. She does plan to move
on" (23).
In order to move on, Clancy feels she needs to listen to
the "buzzing" in her head, which she thinks could communicate
something to her if she could learn to listen to it (22).
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"She sometimes wonders if she might think of a good plot for
her own life, if she could sort out words or images in all
that buzzing between her ears" (30) . When she has her baby,
the buzzing disappears (233) . As it is for Betty in A Cure
for Dreams, giving birth becomes a moment for Clancy of
independence from her mother, not because she has somehow
fulfilled her destiny by becoming a mother herself, or
because she has resolved all of her conflicts with her
mother, but because she has learned that she is able to make
the difficult decisions in her life: whether to have the
baby, what role Travis will play in her life, and finally,
that there is "a lot ahead of me," as she puts it to Opal, "a
lot of my own life" (247). Clancy has gained access to
"plotting," in the sense that she is not "submerged in
traditional plot structures" (Hirsch 3), nor does she feel
obligated to the "compulsory heterosexuality and
triangularity" (121) of father-mother-child that Marianne
Hirsch describes.
She is not, however, free of tenuousness. As Travis
loads Clancy's things into the car for her move, Clancy
"stands on the walk with a lost look" (278) . All she can
manage to say to Opal is ”Oh, Mama"; then she "turns to put
the baby in his carrier in the backseat" (278) . Her decision
to move out of Russell's house came from pragmatism, not
certainty or bravado. But, the more that Clancy is able to
write the plot for her own life, the better she is able to
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94
adjust to the "bumps in the road" (241) , as Opal calls them.
Joy, on the other hand, has more trouble than Clancy
adjusting to the bumps in the road, in part, because she is
holding onto anger at her daughter, her mother, her ex-
husband, and herself. Joy's character makes the least
progression in the story; her anger is paralyzing. When she
dreams, she dreams of "affection and solace" because "sleep
suspends bitterness" (55) . She "cannot imagine her own future
brightened by the slightest happiness" (59) . When Otis asks
her who she is "so mad at," Joy "doesn't even have to think"
before answering, "My mother, for one" (220) , but, other than
her perception that Opal criticizes her, Joy cannot give Otis
very convincing reasons for her anger. Otis tells her, "You
can't be mad about stuff that's a hundred years ago. I mean
now. Where's all the anger coming from?" (221) . Otis thinks
that Joy "needs somebody to be on her side" and he is willing
to be that person, but he tells her, "I wonder if I have any
idea, if you have any idea: what's the other side?" (221) .
Joy is angry at Heather's sullen rebelliousness, but
tends to take Heather's side against Opal. When Heather dyes
her hair a morbid-looking black and pierces her ears, Joy
tells her she looks cheap, but when Opal says, "What do you
think you look like, Heather, walking around like that?" Joy
"snaps" back, "She looks like she wants to look!" (249).
"Privately, " however, Joy "really wants to be mad at
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95
Heather" (249) . The anger between mother and daughter extends
to grandmother and granddaughter: "There is so much hostility
between Joy's mother and daughter, usually contained in
sullenness and seething, that the least leak threatens an
explosion" (56).
Joy is also still so angry at her ex-husbands that she
sometimes cannot keep her rage in control. While at a party
with people she doesn't know well, she begins venting her
rage at her first ex-husband, a police officer, through
derogatory comments about how "cops always exaggerate ....
the danger they are in . . . [and] the part their wits
play .... While all the time they are in love with their
guns and cars and authority" (147) . Joy says that she has
"always thought cops are the guys who'd be making trouble if
they didn't have cop shit to do" (147) and adds that they use
"their wits on the end of a nightstick" (148) . Several of the
men at the party are police officers and, while they are also
angry, they leave the room or simply refuse to talk to her.
Joy's anger escalates, aided by too many beers, to the point
that she takes a swing at her date and ends up punching the
wall.
It becomes apparent that Joy's anger is not so much
because of wrongs, however real, done to her, as it is
because she does not feel like she is plotting her own life.
When Heather yells at Joy that she is tired of living in
Opal's house, Joy "feels sorry for her daughter, but she
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96
doesn't have the slightest idea how to help her. Heather
might as well complain about dust and wind" (58), Joy thinks.
"Control of their lives is not in Joy's hands, nor anyone's,
really. Destiny is cosmic; some people are never going to get
ahead" (58) . At the end of the story, when Joy sends Heather
to stay with Wayne, one gets the feeling that the temporary
break between mother and daughter will be good for both of
them, but not necessarily that either of them has learned to
let go of or even manage their anger at most of the people
around them.
Joy, who is the angriest at men, is also, not
surprisingly, the one who seems most lonely for men. Clancy
has learned that she can get along without men (219) and that
there is a lot of her own life ahead of her (247) , but Joy
seems happier when she is with a man; when she is alone, the
anger returns. Early in the novel, Opal recognizes that Joy
"is easier to live with" if her boyfriend, Mick, stays
overnight with her (21) . He is much younger than Joy, so she
is not surprised when he leaves her to go to medical school,
but she acknowledges that she does not hate him: "He never
slammed his hand against her face. He never called her names
and accused her of unspeakable acts. Her husbands did those
things, but not Mick" (59). Still, she is very saddened by
his absence; "now she's by herself" (59), she thinks. In
spite of her past abusive relationships, she has trouble
being alone. The two occasions on which Joy seems the most
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97
light-hearted are when she has been given a shot of
painkiller for her injured hand and when she and Otis are
about to have sex.
To Clancy and Opal, their relationships with men are
important aspects of their lives, but they do not reach
personal fulfillment only through the triangularity of
man/woman/child to which Hirsch objected, as discussed in
chapter one. All of the women have tended to have failed
relationships with men, but Opal's and Clancy's divorces
appear to be the result of dissatisfaction rather than abuse.
Opal's relationship with Russell seems stable. She may be
more supportive of her daughters than of Russell, but that
may be because Russell is willing to accommodate the needs of
the women in his house.
Men vary in the novel, from arrogant and abusive, to
loving and helpful; they are not stereotypically domineering
as in A Cure for Dreams, nor do they have to be removed from
the story line in order for the women to have access to their
own plotting. While it is not clear that the heroines
establish "female allegiance" as a basis for female plotting
and subject-formation, as Hirsch calls for (129), it is clear
that the women's relationships to each other are the primary
focus of the novel. In this sense, the novel pictures
female/female allegiances rather than male/female
allegiances. The relationships among the women are not
idealized. The strength of the novel is its honest portrayal
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98
of the tensions between generations of women in a family, its
refusal to rest on either utopianism or blame, and its refusal
to separate mothers and daughters through artificial
dichotomies.
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Chapter Fiue:
flmy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club:
Locating Mothers and Daughters in Culture and History
Like Sandra Scofield's Opal on Dry Ground, the structure
of The Joy Luck Club is marked by its changing narrative
consciousness from character to character. In The Joy Luck
Club, however, mothers and daughters tell their own stories
in their own voices, and the entire structure is framed by
the narrative perspective of one daughter, Jing-mei Woo, or
June, whose mother's death is the event that occasions the
narrative. Although Jing-mei's mother, Suyuan, is absent and,
therefore, not able to speak for herself, the narrative of
The Joy Luck Club does avoid in many ways the "daughterly
perspective" and other common pitfalls of narratives about
mothers which are criticized by Marianne Hirsch, Suzanna
Danuta Walters, and others.
First, the aforementioned strategy of changing the
narrative consciousness in each chapter means that mothers
and daughters, even though they speak about each other, also
speak for themselves. Second, the mothers and daughters are,
often painfully, aware of generational differences in how
they have internalized their ethnic and cultural heritages;
this explicit awareness locates these mother/daughter
relationships in a specific cultural, ethnic, and historical
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100
place, and thereby resists universalizing about
mother/daughter relationships. Such specific location of
these relationships also aids the novel in resisting a series
of dichotomies in addition to the dichotomy of
subject/object. Third, the novel reflects Jing-mei's process
of learning about her mother as subject rather than creates a
static portrait of her mother as object of her daughter's
perspective. Fourth, while the novel is one of woman
identification and men are not central to it, they are not
demonized or killed in order for female identification to
exist, nor do they control the women's plotting. In fact,
Jing-mei's father is instrumental in helping her make
connections to both her mother's and father's Chinese
families, especially with her half-sisters, who are her
mother's daughters by a previous marriage.
A great deal can be said about the unusual structure of
the novel, which contains a total of sixteen chapters,
interweaving the voices of three mother and daughter pairs,
and a seventh voice, that of Jing-mei, whose mother has
recently passed away. The mothers and daughters are neighbors
and friends in the Chinese-American community in San
Francisco and Jing-mei refers to the other three mothers as
her "aunties." As readers, we do not get a coherent,
straightforward, chronological narration of events beginning
with the scene in which Jing-mei and her aunties play mah
jong and leading to Jing-mei's trip to China in the closing
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101
chapter. As Ben Xu explains, the narrative form of the novel
reflects the "loosened family tie and shaky continuity
between the two generations" (13). The stories do not combine
to form a "fully integrated narrative structure" (14) :
The character relations are suggested but
never sufficiently interwoven or acted out
as a coherent drama. Our attention is
constantly called to the characteristics of
fiction that are missing from the book. It
is neither a novel nor a group of short
stories. It consists of isolated acts and
events, which remain scattered and
disbanded. It has neither a major plot
around which to drape the separate stories,
nor a unitary exciting climax which guides
the book to a final outcome. (14)
Yet, Xu explains, all of these elements of fiction are found
in the novel:
The successions of events are fully timed
and narrators of these events are carefully
grouped in terms of theme as well as
generation distribution (mothers and
daughters) .... The stories in the first
two sections are followed by successive
denouements in the next two sections,
leading to a series of revelations. All the
energies set in motion in the first story
of the book, which is told by the book's
"framework" narrator, come to fruitful
release in the book's last story told by
the same narrator, Jing-mei Woo. (14)
Like Marj orie's voice in Kaye Gibbons's A Cure for
Dreams, Jing-mei's voice acts as bookends, opening and
closing the novel, framing the multitude of voices therein.
Additionally, Jing-mei's perspective creates a circular
structure for the novel: the act which initiates Jing-mei's
process of discovery is brought to its conclusion in the
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102
final chapter when she uses the money her three aunties gave
her in chapter one to return to China to find her two half-
sisters .
All of the chapters are narrated in the first person as
the mothers and daughters tell their stories in their own
words. Marina Heung observes that "in the way that it
foregrounds maternal discourse, The Joy Luck Club
materializes Marianne Hirsch's vision of a mother/daughter
plot" (599) that is, in Hirsch's words, "written in the voice
of mothers, as well as in that of daughters .... combining
both voices [into] . . . a double voice that would yield a
multiple female consciousness" (161). Heung argues that The
Joy Luck Club "moves maternality to the center. It locates
subjectivity in the maternal and uses it as a pivot between
the past and the present. In so doing," Heung continues, "it
reclaims maternal difference and reframes our understanding
of daughterly difference as well" (601).
When the mothers speak, their daughters are objects of
their narratives, and when the daughters speak, their mothers
are objects of their narratives. For the reader, however,
these mothers and daughters speak, alternately, as subject
and object, so that The Joy Luck Club maintains tension
between these opposing positions, preventing either mothers
or daughters from losing subject status. A similar conclusion
is reached by Stephen Souris, who argues that the novel
contains "the potential for active intermingling of
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103
perspectives across utterances, with the site of the
dialogicity located in the reader's experience of the
narrative" (100) . Commenting on the subjectivity granted to
each woman by the narrative structure of the novel, Victoria
Chen explains that "Tan's writing instills agency and
visibility in Chinese American women. The silence is broken,
and their new voices are constructed in collective
storytelling, a language of community, without denying or
erasing the different positions such collaboration
encounters" (6) .
Chen's comments locate the subjectivity of the women in
the novel in the intersection of gender, culture, and race.
Similarly, Walter Shear argues that the novel's structure
"succeeds in manifesting not merely the individual psychic
tragedies of those caught up in this history, but the
enormous agony of a culture enmeshed in a transforming
crisis" (193). Thus, the structure of the novel locates these
mothers and daughters in a specific cultural and political
history, as called for by Walters and Hirsch, and makes it
possible to create stories about individual subjects rather
than about mythological or universalized mothers and
daughters.
The Joy Luck Club is divided into four sections, each
containing four chapters. Each of the four sections of the
novel is prefaced by a short tale or parable in italics to
set it off from the first person narration of the chapters.
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104
Each tale establishes the importance of stories or of
heritage and suggests the thematic content of the stories in
that section. Stephen Souris explains the function of each of
the prefatory tales as follows. The Chinese woman in the
first preface "is full of good intentions and hopes" for her
daughter, but "her relationship with her daughter is
characterized by distance and lack of communication. The
following four monologues," Souris explains, "reveal mothers
who bemoan the distance to their daughters but who had good
intentions" (111). The second preface suggests that "Chinese
mothers can be overbearing in their attempts to protect and
control their daughters" (111). Therefore, Souris concludes,
the second preface "prepares us to be sympathetic towards the
daughters" as we read their stories, just as the first
preface prepared us "to be sympathetic towards the
mothers" (111) . Thus, the prefaces also help sustain the
tension between the perspectives of mothers and daughters
instead of allowing the narrative to privilege either
position.
The preface to the third section "presents us with a
mother who appears to be overbearing in her desire for a
grandchild. She insists that her daughter mount a mirror on
the wall for good luck" (111) . The mother and daughter see
different things in the mirror: the mother sees her
grandchild; the daughter sees her own reflection. According
to Souris, this preface suggests the "conflicting
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105
perspectives* between mothers and daughters, "a theme that is
seen in the monologues that follow" (111) . This preface is
also "slanted" toward the daughters, whose stories follow,
since it "suggests that mothers project their own subjective
preferences upon what they see whereas daughters see
objectively" (112) . Finally, the fourth preface engages our
sympathy for the mothers, whose stories close the novel, by
"presenting a mother who has a grandchild and who is treated
sympathetically: she is self-critical and hopeful for her
daughter" (112).
The stories in the first section, titled "Feathers from
a Thousand Li Away, " are told by the mothers about childhood
experiences in China, except for the first story, which is
told by Jing-mei. Jing-mei tells us that she is to replace
her mother as the fourth comer at the Joy Luck Club, playing
mah jong with her aunties, then retells her mother's story of
creating the original Joy Luck Club just before fleeing
Kweilin during the Japanese invasion. Like Marjorie in A Cure
for Dreams, Jing-mei's ability to tell her mother's story,
with its details and variations, comes from having listened
to her mother tell her own story countless times.
The second section, "The Twenty-Six Malignant Gates,"
contains stories told by the adult daughters. Like the
mothers' stories in the first section, the daughters' stories
are about painful childhood experiences; they also depict
early conflicts between the mothers and daughters and the
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106
daughters' struggles to understand their mothers' Chinese
ways of thinking, knowing, and doing. The stories in the
third section, "American Translation," again belong to the
Americanized adult daughters. In some stories, the daughters
describe events which their mothers later describe in their
own stories. For instance, in "Rice Husband," Lena St.Clair
describes her mother's visit to the new home of Lena and her
husband, Harold. Later, in "Waiting Between the Trees,"
Lena's mother, Ying-ying St. Clair, describes the same visit.
The dual narratives allow the reader to understand each
woman's perspective as subject in her own story and to see
each woman as object of the other's story; thus, the
structure resists a stable positioning of daughters and
mothers as subjects or objects.
The first three chapters in the fourth section, "Queen
Mother of the Western Skies," are narrated by the mothers and
suggest what these Chinese mothers would like their
Americanized daughters to understand about them. Jing-mei's
chapter, which closes the novel, finishes the story she began
in chapter one: her mother's story about fleeing Kweilin and
being forced to leave behind her two infant twin daughters.
Jing-mei began telling the story in America and her father
finishes telling it in China, where they have gone to meet
Jing-mei's half-sisters. The novel's use of Jing-mei as the
"frame narrator link[s] the two generations of American
Chinese, who are separated by age and cultural gaps and yet
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107
bound together by family ties and a continuity of ethnic
heritage" (Xu 14). Furthermore, "these two frame stories,
ending with a family reunion in China, suggest strongly a
journey of maturity, ethnic awakening, and return to home,
not just for Jing-mei Woo, but metaphorically for all the
daughters in the book" (Xu 14). The closing chapter suggests
the coming together of Jing-mei's Chinese and American
heritages, resisting the "choice" of one or the other
position in the dichotomy, just as the structure of the novel
as a whole rejects the dichotomy of subject/object in the
relationships of mothers and daughters.
In fact, the novel's structure and thematic content
challenge a series of dichotomies, including the oppositions
of subject/object, Chinese/American, and speaking/silence.
From the beginning of Jing-mei's narration in the first
chapter, the novel foregrounds the cultural gap between
mothers and daughters, but the varied ways that mothers and
daughters experience their own cultural identity belie a
simple dichotomization of "Chinese mothers" and "American
daughters.*
In the first story, Jing-mei has difficulty remembering
Chinese words her mother used to describe kinds of soup:
She said the two soups were almost the
same, chabudwo. Or maybe she said butong,
not the same thing at all. It was one of
those Chinese expressions that means the
better half of mixed intentions. I can
never remember things I didn't understand
in the first place. (19)
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108
Recalling a conversation in which her mother was trying to
explain the difference between Jewish and Chinese mah jong,
Jing-mei concludes that her mother's explanations "made me
feel my mother and I spoke two different languages, which we
did. I talked to her in English, she answered back in
Chinese" (33-4).
Similarly, in a chapter titled, "Double Face,* Lindo
Jong expresses her regret that she "couldn't teach her
[daughter] about Chinese character" (254). Lindo's daughter,
Waverly, is going to visit China and wonders if she will fit
in. My daughter, says Lindo, "did not look pleased when I
told her . . . that she didn't look Chinese:
She had a sour American look on her face.
Oh, maybe ten years ago, she would have
clapped her hands— hurray!— as if this were
good news. But now she wants to be Chinese,
it is so fashionable. And I know it is too
late. All those years I tried to teach her!
She followed my Chinese ways only until she
learned how to walk out the door by herself
and go to school. So now the only Chinese
words she can say are sh-sh, houche, chr
fan, and gwan deng shweijyau .... How
can she think she can blend in? Only her
skin and her hair are Chinese. Inside— she
is all American-made. (253-54)
Lindo does not fully understand her daughter's language
either: Waverly has to try to explain to her mother what
"devious" and "two-faced" mean. "Devious," explains Waverly,
means that "we're looking one way, while following another.
We're for one side and also the other. We mean what we say,
but our intentions are different . . . .we're two-
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109
faced" (266) . Lindo understands "two-faced" only in its
application to their mixed Chinese-American heritage. "I
think about our two faces. I think about my intentions. Which
one is American? Which one is Chinese? Which one is better?
If you show one, you must always sacrifice the other" (266) .
She blames herself that her daughter doesn't understand what
it means to be Chinese, but explains, "I wanted my children
to have the best combination: American circumstances and
Chinese character. How could I know these two things do not
mix?" (254).
However, Lindo's reflections also show that the novel
resists an easy assignment of Chinese identity to the mothers
and American identity to the daughters. Lindo recognizes that
both mother and daughter experience a "doubled identity"
(Heung 603); even more significant, Lindo's description of
her daughter as "all American-made" inside (254) implies that
she "sees that Waverly's experience of cultural mixing is
different from her own" (Heung 603).
Jing-mei's mother, Suyuan, describes racial heritage in
yet another way. Suyuan believes that being Chinese is a
matter of "genetics." "Once you are bom Chinese, you cannot
help but feel and think Chinese," she tells Jing-mei.
"Someday you will see .... It is in your blood, waiting to
be let go" (267) . When Jing-mei arrives in China, she feels a
change inside: "I feel different," she says. "I can feel the
skin on my forehead tingling, my blood rushing through a new
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110
course, my bones aching with a familiar old pain. And I
think, My mother was right. I am becoming Chinese" (267) .
The novel does not resolve the Chinese/American or
learned/genetic oppositions but problematizes them. "The
mother-daughter tensions as constructed in their own
discourse are fraught with complexities of racial, gender,
and class issues," according to Chen, "not just the simple
binary opposition of Americanness and Chineseness, mothers
and daughters" (6).
The novel also challenges the opposition of speaking and
silence. Often in the past two or three decades, feminist
rhetoric has criticized mothers for teaching their daughters
to accept their "place" in patriarchal society, to remain
silent. Several theorists discussed in chapter one identify
this criticism as one form of mother-blame. However, in The
Joy Luck Club, part of the knowledge the mothers try to
communicate to their daughters is the importance and power of
speaking. As in the other novels I have discussed thus far,
and as in much of the critical work discussed in chapter one,
The Joy Luck Club recognizes, through its structure and
thematic content, the importance of women telling their
stories, but it also recognizes the dangers of speaking and
knowing those stories. Moments which challenge all of the
apparent dichotomies already mentioned— between the
generations, the Chinese and American cultural heritages, and
speaking or silence— are some of the novel's most poignant.
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Ill
"For all these years I kept my mouth closed so selfish
desires would not fall out" (67) , thinks Ying-ying St. Clair.
"And because I remained quiet for so long now my daughter
does not hear me ... . All these years I kept my true
nature hidden, running along like a small shadow so nobody
could catch me," she continues. "And because I moved so
secretly now my daughter does not see me ... . And I want
to tell her this: We are lost, she and I, unseen and not
seeing, unheard and not hearing, unknown by others" (67) .
Later, Ying-ying's daughter, Lena, ponders the dangerous
"magic of the unspeakable" and "the unspoken terrors that
surrounded our house, the ones that chased my mother until
she hid in a secret dark comer of her mind. And still they
found her," Lena continues. "I watched, over the years, as
they devoured her, piece by piece, until she disappeared and
became a ghost" (103). Not speaking, in both Ying-ying's and
Lena's stories, is associated with loss of the self, with
being "unseen," and "unknown," and with disappearance. "I did
not lose myself all at once," Ying-ying concludes. "I rubbed
out my face over the years washing away my pain, the same way
carvings on stone are worn down by water" (67) ; the rest of
her story is an expression of her wish "to be found" (83) .
Not speaking, or the inability to speak, in this case,
the culturally-dominant language, is associated with the loss
of self in another way in Lena's first story. Lena informs us
that her father insisted her mother speak English and guessed
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112
at what his wife was trying to say; so, Lena explains, "my
father would put words in her mouth" (106) . Lena confesses
that when she was embarrassed by her mother's behavior, she
mistranslated other people's responses (106). When Lena's
baby brother dies during birth, Lena purposely mistranslates
her mother's self-blaming version of the event for her
father (112). Thus, this chapter demonstrates how easily a
husband or daughter can rewrite a woman's feelings and a
woman's story. However, Ying-ying's chapters finally give her
the opportunity to tell her own story.
An-mei wants her daughter to understand the importance
of speaking because she learned for herself in childhood the
pain of women who cannot speak up for themselves as she
watched her mother suffer the humiliating consequences of a
rape, a forced marriage, and the treatment she suffered under
the authority of her husband's second wife. In "Without
Wood," told by An-mei's daughter, Rose Hsu Jordan, An-mei
tries to convey her knowledge about speaking and silence to
Rose. As a child, Rose remembers, "I used to believe
everything my mother said, even when I didn't know what she
meant .... The power of her words was that strong" (185) .
Later in the chapter, An-mei has to remind her daughter of
the importance of speaking. "Why do you not speak up for
yourself?" An-mei asks Rose. "Why can you not talk to your
husband?" (193) . "Please. Don't tell me to save my marriage
anymore. It's hard enough as it is," Rose replies. "I am not
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113
telling you to save your marriage," An-mei protests. "I only
say you should speak up" (193) . Rose does not initially grasp
that her mother is trying to get her to verbally assert
herself but, ultimately, Rose remembers the power of words.
She stands up to her husband, who has been controlling all
the decisions in their divorce. MI saw what I wanted, " says
Rose, "his eyes, confused, then scared. He was hulihudu [in a
"dark fog" (188)] . The power of my words was that
strong" (196).
Waverly Jong's first story, "Rules of the Game," on the
other hand, expresses what she has learned about the power of
silence. As she describes what she has learned from playing
chess, she is also speaking metaphorically about her
relationship with her mother: "A little knowledge withheld is
a great advantage one should store for future use. That is
the power of chess. It is a game of secrets in which one must
show and never tell" (95) .
A more powerful testament to silence comes, ironically,
from An-mei, whose own childhood experiences taught her both
the power of words and the need, sometimes, for silence. Yan
Chang, her mother's maid, tells An-mei the full story of her
mother's dishonor and consequent rejection and separation
from her family. "In truth, this was a bad thing that Yan
Chang had done," An-mei concludes, "telling me my mother's
story. Secrets are kept from children, a lid on top of the
soup kettle, so they do not boil over with too much
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114
truth" (237) . The story strips An-mei of her childhood
naivete: "After Yan Chang told me this story, " recalls An-
Mei, "I saw everything. I heard things I had never understood
before" (237). "I suffered so much after Yan Chang told me my
mother's story," An-mei continues:
I wanted my mother to shout at Wu Tsing
[her husband] , to shout at Second Wife, to
shout at Yan Chang and say she was wrong to
tell me these stories. But my mother did
not even have the right to do this. She had
no choice. (238)
An-mei's story does demonstrate the need for silence at
times; yet, it is only because An-mei knows her mother's
story and fully understands the significance of her mother's
experiences that she learns the power of words and is able to
convey that knowledge to her own daughter, Rose.
An-mei's story is also about coming to understand her
mother as subject rather than object. Although one could
argue that the pairs of mothers and daughters do not fully
establish subject/subject relationships, the novel gives
mothers and daughters opportunity to present themselves as
subjects for the reader. And the novel in its entirety is
about Jing-mei's process not only of coming to know her
mother as subject but of developing the ability, with the aid
of her aunties and her father, to tell her mother's story.
An anecdote Jing-mei tells us in the first chapter
demonstrates that she does not know her mother and does not
feel competent to take her place at mah jong:
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115
A friend once told me that my mother and I
were alike, that we had the same wispy hand
gestures, the same girlish laugh and
sideways look. When I shyly told my mother
this, she seemed insulted and said, "You
don't even know little percent of me! How
can you be me?" And she's right. How can I
be my mother at Joy Luck? (27)
At the end of the evening of mah jong, her aunties tell
Jing-mei that, after years of searching, her mother had
finally located her half-sisters in China just before she
died. Her aunties have written to Jing-mei's sisters and
arranged a meeting. When they give Jing-mei money and tell
her that she must go to China to meet her half-sisters and
tell them about their mother, Jing-mei asks, "What will I
say? What can I tell them about my mother? I don't know
anything. She was my mother" (40) . Her aunties are dismayed
by Jing-mei's response:
Not know your own mother?" cries Auntie An-
mei with disbelief. "How can you say? Your
mother is in your bones! .... "Imagine,
a daughter not knowing her own mother!" And
then it occurs to me. They are frightened.
In me, they see their own daughters, just
as ignorant, just as unmindful of all the
truths and hopes they have brought to
America. They see daughters who grow
impatient when their mothers talk in
Chinese, who think they are stupid when
they explain things in fractured
English .... They see daughters who will
bear grandchildren born without any
connecting hope passed from generation to
generation. (40-41)
Jing-mei promises to remember everything about her mother and
tell her sisters. Her aunties "still look troubled, as if
something were out of balance. But they also look hopeful
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116
that what I say will become true" (41) . And Jing-mei
concludes, "I am sitting at my mother's place at the mah jong
table, on the East, where things begin" (41). Thus begins
Jing-mei's process of discovering her mother.
Just as Jing-mei takes her mother's place at the mah
jong table in chapter one, she fills in for her mother in the
sections which contain the mothers' stories. In chapter one,
Jing-mei retells the story her mother told her about fleeing
Kweilin. Suyuan's story appears in quotation marks to signify
that these are Suyuan's words. Like Marjorie in A Cure for
Dreams, Jing-mei asks her mother to tell her own story in her
own words and then preserves that account for the audience.
Although we know that Jing-mei has heard this story numerous
times (25) , it is difficult to know whether these words are
solely Suyuan's or a combination of her words and Jing-mei's.
This ambiguity, as in A Cure for Dreams, allows Jing-mei to
tell a story that both is and is not in the voice of her
mother.
The mothers' stories in the first section are, in one
sense, about gaining subject status through becoming "known"
to themselves and others, especially their daughters. Jing-
mei had heard so many variations of her mother's story of
fleeing Kweilin that, until her mother told her about leaving
the babies behind, she never thought the story was "anything
but a Chinese fairy tale" (25) . Jing-mei begins to know her
mother when she realizes that the story is true. The
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117
complexity of her mother's life, reflected in the story's
variations, becomes real to Jing-mei metaphorically and
literally when she meets her sisters in the last chapter and
sees that, together, they look like their mother (288).
Similarly, An-mei remembers that the day she came to love her
mother was the day "I saw in her my own true nature. What was
beneath my skin. Inside my bones" (48) .
In Lindo Jong's first story, "The Red Candle," she
recalls the moment she began to know herself. She remembers
that, at the age of twelve, she was torn from her family, who
moved to a far away city and left her behind to live with the
family of the boy to which she had been promised in marriage.
Her husband and his family were strangers to her and treated
her like a servant. When Lindo describes her wedding day, she
remembers her discovery that she was "strong" and "pure" and
"had genuine thoughts inside that no one could see, that no
one could ever take away from me .... I draped [a] large
embroidered red scarf over my face, " she continues, "and
covered these thoughts up. But underneath the scarf I still
knew who I was. I made a promise to myself: I would always
remember my parents' wishes, but I would never forget
myself" (58). When Lindo is able to extricate herself from
her unhappy marriage without dishonoring herself, she takes
off the heavy bracelets given her by her husband's family
and, symbolically, regains the girl who promised not to
forget herself: "How nice it is to be that girl again, to
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118
take off my scarf, to see what is underneath and feel the
lightness come back into my body!" (66) .
The mothers' second stories suggest what they have
learned and would like their daughters to understand but have
trouble conveying to their daughters. Lindo wants her
daughter to be proud of her as Lindo is proud of
Waverly (255) . She wonders what she has lost and gained by
becoming both American and Chinese and wants to ask Waverly
what she thinks (266) . She wants the sharing of knowledge to
go both ways between herself and her daughter. Ying-ying St.
Clair's first story, "The Moon Lady," about how she lost
herself and desired "to be found" (82), leads naturally to
her second story, "Waiting Between the Trees," in which she
desires to give her tiger spirit to her daughter (252) . An-
mei wants her daughter to understand the cost of silence.
Jing-mei learns that her mother is with her, in her own face
and in the faces of her sisters (288). The novel reflects
Jing-mei's process of coming to know her mother and the
struggle of the other mothers and daughters to know each
other.
Although the focus of the novel is unquestionably the
relationships among the women, the potential for women to be
subsumed in the genealogy of their husbands and cut off from
their own families, particularly from their mothers, by
patriarchal culture and by the acts of individual men, is
poignantly depicted in the novel in several stories. Lindo
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119
Jong's first story, which movingly depicts her mother's and
her own grief when Lindo is sent to live with her husband's
family, depicts how easily the women's relationships with
each other could be disrupted within a patriarchal culture.
An-mei Hsu's pair of stories emphasize how her mother was cut
off from her own mother and children when she was forced to
become the third concubine of a wealthy man.
However, the men are not central to the stories, which
focus on the women themselves, and the male characters who
are part of the women's adult lives in America do not
represent disruptions to the women's relationships. We do not
know much about most of the male characters, but the most
significant man in the novel, Jing-mei's father, Canning Woo,
assists Jing-mei in beginning her metaphorical journey to
"find" her mother by asking her to take her mother's place at
mah jong, and he accompanies her on her actual journey to
China to find her sisters. Finally, the strongest example of
how a male character can aid the women in making female
identifications comes in Jing-mei's final story: her father
finishes telling Jing-mei (in Chinese) her mother's story of
fleeing Kweilin; he explains to her how and why her mother
had to leave the babies behind; he interprets Suyuan's name
for Jing-mei, the names of Jing-mei's half-sisters, and her
own name, establishing the importance of the women's names
and of the fact that Suyuan had named her daughters. Jing-mei
concludes that she has found her mother in her father's
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120
story (286) , not in the traditional sense that her mother has
been subsumed by her father's life and genealogy, but in the
sense that her father's efforts have helped her come to know
her mother.
Still, the novel's most poignant moments are when
mothers and daughters awaken to the strength of their bonds
as women and family. Xu argues that:
it is at these moments of revelation, often
after their own sufferings in life, that
the daughters . . . begin to hear the rich
and multiple meanings in their mothers's
stories instead of mere dead echoes of past
acts and events. (15)
Such moments occur when Rose relies on what she has learned
from her mother about the power of words in order to
challenge her husband's demands in their divorce or when
Jing-mei meets her sisters and recognizes the part of herself
that is Chinese. An-mei learns the meaning of shou— "respect
for ancestors or family" (44)— when her disowned, dishonored
mother returns home as An-mei's grandmother is dying, and An-
mei sees her mother cut pieces of flesh from her own arm to
put in a soup for her mother. "She cooked magic in the
ancient tradition to try to cure her mother this one last
time, " remembers An-mei. "Even though I was young, I could
see the pain of the flesh and the worth of the pain" (48) :
This is how a daughter honors her mother.
It is shou so deep it is in your bones. The
pain of the flesh is nothing. The pain you
must forget. Because sometimes that is the
only way to remember what is in your bones.
You must peel off your skin, and that of
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121
your mother, and her mother before her.
Until there is nothing. No scar, no skin,
no flesh. (48)
In her dedication before the novel begins, Amy Tan
writes, "To my mother and the memory of her mother. You asked
me once what I would remember. This, and much more." The
dedication and the novel itself establish the importance of
memory, especially of remembering the stories of generations
of women.
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122
Chapter Sin
New Discourses, New Representations:
Challenges to Traditional Paradigms of
Mothers and Daughters
The number of fictional and non-fictional works
published about mothers and daughters has risen greatly in
the last twenty years. This trend suggests an increasing
cultural recognition of the importance of this neglected
relationship in psychological, literary, and other texts. An
overview of fictional and non-f ictional texts about mothers
and daughters, however, such as that which I undertook in
chapter one, makes it apparent that both objectifying and
blaming the figure of the mother are still part of the
rhetoric of many of our academic and non-academic cultural
discourses. We have already seen that many psychological
theories engage in some form of idealization and subsequent
blaming of the mother, that fictional works from various
historical periods and genres have pictured mothers as
overwhelming mythological forces in the lives of their
daughters (or as absent and, thus, rendered powerless), that
even some feminists, writing in various genres, have
portrayed mothers as destructive to their daughters.
It is not surprising, given our cultural tendency to
portray mothers as types or even caricatures rather than as
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123
individual subjects, that our discourses have, for the most
part, lacked mothers voices and perspectives. Or, perhaps the
reverse is true: given that our cultural discourses have
lacked mothers voices and perspectives, it is not surprising
that we have tended to portray mothers as types and
caricatures rather than as individual subjects. The two
trends almost certainly reinforce each other. In either case,
these trends lead easily to blaming mothers and depicting
mother/daughter relationships as inherently antagonistic.
However, as my discussion of the novels suggests, also
apparent in recent cultural discourses are new ways of
foregrounding the voices and perspectives of mothers and new
portrayals of sustained relationships between mothers and
daughters. The "matrivocal" novels I have discussed thus far
embody one type of response to our cultural erasure or blame
of mothers, but in my survey of such fiction, I also came
across texts in other genres that incorporate the voices and
stories of mothers and depict mothers and daughters in
subject/subject relationships.
It is not surprising that many of these fiction and non
fiction works about mothers and daughters combine genres,
weave together the voices of multiple women, and engage other
structural and thematic strategies in order to incorporate
the voices and perspectives of women, especially mothers, as
subjects rather than as objects of blame. Feminist critics
have long recognized and articulated the necessity for women
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124
in a male-dominant culture to subvert traditional genres and
themes in order to be heard. In the remainder of this
chapter, I will briefly discuss other recent texts, mainly in
non-fiction genres, that represent or attempt to represent
mothers and daughters in ways that challenge traditional
paradigms.
One evidence of the increased interest in the
mother/daughter relationship can be seen in the appearance of
many recent "self-help" books about mothers and daughters.
Titles such as Mothers and Daughters: Loving and Letting Go
and Mothering Ourselves: Help and Healing for Adult
Daughters, both by Evelyn S. Bassoff, can be found on
bookstore shelves next to Mother Daughter Revolution: From
Betrayal to Power by Elizabeth Debold, Marie Wilson, and
Idelisse Malave or Paula J. Caplan's Don't Blame Mother:
Mending the Mother-Daughter Relationship. Many such works
depend, to some extent, on traditional cultural paradigms of
the mother/daughter relationship, assuming that daughters
must "separate" from their mothers in order to be functioning
adults, that mothers will resist or even undermine this
process and need advice on how to facilitate their daughters'
separation, that this relationship is one of inherent
hostility, that daughters need advice on how to "recover"
from the way they were mothered. However, most of the works I
named previously in this paragraph explicitly acknowledge and
reject the practice of mother-blaming and attempt, although
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not necessarily successfully, to avoid or even critique that
practice.
Other cultural discourses reflect the same and other
mixed messages that are evidenced in some self-help books for
mothers and daughters. The professional advice on child care
found in magazines aimed at mothers often reinforces the dual
assumptions that a mother is ignorant of how to properly mold
her child and yet is to be blamed or praised for everything
that happens in the emotional development of her child. A
look at one popular example of such magazines reveals these
contradictory assumptions. The title of the magazine,
Parents, seems to break with the assumption that mothers are
primarily responsible for children through its explicit
appeal to both parents rather than solely to mothers.
However, most of the articles are written by women who assume
a female audience, evidenced by the frequent use of phrases
such as "your husband" when directly addressing the reader.
The issues of Parents and other similar magazines are filled
with advice on a range of topics, such as accident
prevention, proper nutrition, or the advantages and
disadvantages of using pacifiers. If we, as a society, share
with these magazines the assumption that mothers are their
primary audience, it is mothers, not fathers, who need or are
responsible for the information in the articles and mothers
who must be to blame for parenting mistakes.
However, the texts of the articles do not seem to
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depend, for the most part, on the rhetoric of blame. For
instance, an advice column in the March 1997 issue responds
to a mother's complaint that her eleven-month-old daughter
needs constant attention by offering practical suggestions
aimed at teaching the child that she doesn't have to cry to
get attention. The author, a male doctor who holds a Ph.D.
(we assume in a field related to child psychology) , does not
engage the old rhetoric of "over-involved" or "neglectful
mothers" and does not warn the reader about the dire
consequences if she makes a mistake in responding to her
child (Kutner 82). "Love Without Spoiling," an article which
appears in the May 1997 issue, implicitly challenges the
rhetoric of maternal self-abnegation through advice on
"saying no to guilt" (Samalin 54) when disciplining children
and on "teach[ing] your child to respect your needs" (56) . An
article on "Coping With Colic" recognizes that, historically,
colic has been attributed to a variety of causes, including
breast-feeding, bottle-feeding, over-feeding, under-feeding,
over-educated mothers and inexperienced mothers (Hall 80) .
But the author dismisses those causes, which assume the
mother is at fault, and focuses on how to cope with colic
rather than on assigning blame.
Some articles, however, still contain subtle traces of
mother-blame. A teaser on the cover of the March 1997 issue
reads "Good Parents, Rude Kids," but the article inside is
actually titled "The Smart-Aleck Syndrome" (Wallace 106) . The
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teaser relies on a "good" mother's fear of being blamed for
her child's behavior, while the use of "syndrome" in the
title of the article and, in fact, the content of the article
imply that "smart-aleck" behavior is to be expected in
childhood. A less subtle example of this reliance on the
reader's fear of mother-blame appears in an April 1997
article titled "I Could Have Protected Him" (Haennicke 53).
The article actually explores the potential dangers of child
walkers through one mother's narration of "a freak
accident" (53) in which her son could have suffered serious
injury in his baby walker. It is clear in the article that
the author and her husband had, in fact, relied on an
explicit set of rules for use of the walker in order to
safeguard their son and were not negligent in their attempts
to protect him. The title, however, by focusing on the
assignment of blame, exploits the prevalence of mother-
blaming and the fears of mothers in order to engage the
reader.
A similar but even more disturbing example of reliance
on mother-blame appears in a November 1997 article titled "My
Daughter's Silent Agony," in which a mother tells the sad
story of her daughter's death as a result of drug use and her
own efforts to educate parents about dangers their children
face. Like the mother in the article about child walkers,
this mother acknowledges at the end of her story that she and
her husband, her daughter's step-father, had "done everything
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[they] thought [they] were supposed to do" as parents
(Barr 103) . Yet, the text that appears just below the title
on the first page of the text emphasizes what the mother
failed to do: "She seemed like the ideal teenager— obedient,
respectful, hardworking— and the last girl on earth to try
heroin. If only I had listened to my heart" (93) . Similarly,
the text that appears, enlarged and highlighted, in a window
in the middle of the first page of her story reads: "There
were warning signs, but I hadn't recognized them" (93) .
Certainly there are times when parental neglect leads to
tragedy, but neither article seems to depict neglectful
parents. The titles and layouts of the articles, however, as
well as the use of "I" rather than "we" by the mothers who
tell their stories, imply that the mothers— and only the
mothers— are at fault. The mixed messages contained in such
magazines aimed at mothers reveal the tenacity of our
cultural narratives of mother-blame.
Nevertheless, some recent works of fiction, in addition
to the works of non-fiction mentioned earlier, explicitly or
implicitly reject the rhetoric of mother-blame. The Good
Mother by Sue Miller and Saving St. Germ by Carol Muske Dukes
challenge discourses of mother-blaming in, for example, the
legal system and in child care magazines. Scenes from Saving
St. Germ not only depict the conflicting and domineering
messages in advice from child care magazines, doctors,
educators, and other "experts," but allow a mother's
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perspective to challenge the validity of the other
perspectives. This explicit challenge to dominant narratives
of motherhood is worth examining in some detail.
The novel's heroine, Esme Charbonneau Tallich, is a
brilliant scientist who finds refuge from the chaos in her
life by mentally reducing things around her to their chemical
equations. Esme is frustrated with others' attempts to define
and categorize her and her unusual kindergarten-aged
daughter, Ollie. Sitting in the waiting room of a renowned
child specialist, Esme is instructed on her child's progress
by a magazine titled A Mother's Guide to Child Development:
Your baby is five! Do you believe it, Mom?
Most child-development experts believe that
at five your child should be capable of
using words in comprehensible sentences.
(That means putting key "subject" words in
an order that makes sense!) They also
believe that at five the child should be
capable of an expanded attention span— he
should be able to sit and play by himself
for extended periods. And he should be able
to recognize and identify correctly most
primary colors, as well as a number of
familiar shapes!
Read to your five-year-old, then "quiz" him
gently about what you just read together.
You can actually improve your child's
educational potential! (11).
Most of these descriptors do not fit Ollie, who speaks
almost entirely in incomplete, often incoherent, fragments
and often spins or paces as she thinks. The tone of
unqualified enthusiasm in the magazine article, embodied in
the multitude of exclamation marks, allows for no variance
from this portrait of normality: according to the picture of
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a five-year-old presented in the magazine, Ollie is abnormal
(and the doctor who sees Ollie concurs) . Furthermore, the
advice presented is explicitly directed at the mother, who,
when she is reminded in the last sentence that she should be
able to "improve [her] child's educational potential," is
implicitly set up for blame if her child fails to progress
"normally. "
The novel, however, does not filter the experience of
motherhood solely through the perspectives of professionals
rather than mothers. Esme acknowledges that the doctor is "a
famous child specialist . . . confident in his
judgements" (11) but, Esme tells us, "I've been outspoken in
my reactions to his analysis of Ollie. Ollie's "problems,"
though they sometimes seem like involuntary withdrawal or
hyperactivity, are not, in my opinion, these states" (11). "I
don't want to put my child on medication for as you put it,
'occasional symptoms'" (12), she informs the doctor. Esme
understands something about Ollie that the magazines, child
specialists, and educators do not. "She isn't hyperactive,"
Esme insists to her doubtful husband, Jay, but:
the doctor will only pay attention to what
he calls her symptoms instead of what's
amazing about her .... She thinks in
very unusual ways. She figures things out,
you know, how things work, and explains
them in metaphors or verbal shapes, instead
of . . . conventional language" (34).
Throughout the novel, Esme's wry, ironic observations
contribute to the strength of her voice as an individual, a
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scientist, and a mother. She is an acting subject, more than
a passive object in the development of her child, at the whim
of (usually male) "experts" who would tell her everything
that she is doing wrong. Instead of seeing the mother's
psychological assault on the child, we are given a picture in
this scene and others of the psychological assault on the
mother by the various theories of motherhood, written and
spoken, which do not coincide with her felt and perceived
experience as a mother. The written text in the waiting room
asks her to fit her daughter into a pre-conceived set of
expectations and measure both daughter's and mother's
progress by them. The words of the doctor, spoken largely
into a tape recorder rather than directly to or with Esme,
similarly categorize Ollie and reject the interpretation or
input of her mother. This scene, combining the advice in the
magazine, directed at mothers, and the dialogue between
mother and doctor, fits the paradox described by Suzanna
Danuta Walters, in which mothers are assumed to possess a
"maternal instinct" yet are also assumed to be incompetent,
in need of expert advice (45-6).
Esme is protective of her child and is not always sure
of herself, but she does not allow the input from those
around her to invalidate her own perspective. "I'll protect
her, her different way of looking at the goddam storybook,
the goddam model galaxy" (13), Esme thinks; "She needs to be
the way she is in order to survive .... as herself" (234) .
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But Esme is willing to hear others' opinions. She asks her
attorney if her decisions as a mother are "irresponsible"
(234) . In addition, Esme is unsure whether to believe the
suggestions from school officials that her child is gifted,
attention-deficient, or both, although it is clear that she
believes Ollie is "exceptional" in some way (234) . Rather
than portraying Esme as absolutely correct or absolutely at
fault in her "mothering" of Ollie, the novel maintains
tension between Esme's lack of certainty and her gut feelings
that tell her that Ollie cannot be summed up by the various
diagnoses applied to her.
As with the novels I discussed in chapters three through
five, the structure of this novel highlights Esme's voice, or
voices, as a woman, mother, scientist, wife, daughter. Esme's
narration of current events is interwoven with letters she
writes to Ollie (which appear in italics) explaining herself
as "Mom the Scientist" (39) . In these letters, Esme talks
freely and in detail about her beginnings as a scientist, her
courtship with Ollie's father, and her relationship with her
own mother, among other aspects of her life; thus, she
presents herself-as-subject to her daughter, desiring her
daughter to, one day, be able to understand and establish a
relationship with Esme as an individual woman.
Other genres of fictional and non-fictional texts also
emphasize sustained connections among women, especially
between mothers and daughters. Recent anthologies on the
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subject of mothers and daughters abound in various genres,
including collections of letters, such as Between Ourselves:
Letters Between Mothers and Daughters, 1750-1982, edited by-
Karen Payne, which allows mothers and daughters to speak for
themselves and to each other. There are also collections of
stories which embody varied depictions of mothers and
daughters, such as Between Mothers & Daughters: Stories
Across a Generation, edited by Susan Koppelman; My Mother's
Daughter: Stories by Women, edited by Irene Zahava; or Did My
Mama Like to Dance? And Other Stories About Mothers and
Daughters, edited by Geeta Kothari. The Anchor of My Life:
Middle-Class American Mothers and Daughters, 1880-1920,
edited by Linda W. Rosenzweig, is a historical analyses of
mother/daughter relationships. Autobiographical accounts of
motherhood include The Mother Knot, in which Jane Lazarre
explores her own ambivalence about motherhood and the
mother/child relationship, its deep connections and painful
disruptions. Some anthologies employ creative structures by
mixing genres; they are part literature, part personal essay,
part cultural commentary, such as Mothers: Memories, Dreams
and Reflections by Literary Daughters, edited by Susan
Cahill; Double Stitch: Black Women Write About Mothers &
Daughters, edited by Patricia Bell-Scott, et al; and Mother
to Daughter, Daughter to Mother: Mothers on Mothering, a
daybook/reader edited by Tillie Olsen.
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Other works explore disruptions in mother/daughter
relationships, not due to the supposedly inherent hostility
in those relationships, but to more identifiable causes that
touch the lives of individual women, such as death or mental
illness. Works which address the grief of daughters whose
mothers have died include Loss of the Ground-Note: Women
Writing About the Loss of Their Mothers, edited by Helen
Vozenilek and Motherless Daughters: The Legacy of Loss, in
which Hope Edelman interweaves her own experience with that
of hundreds of women she interviewed about the loss of their
mothers. Edelman's book is part cultural commentary, part
autobiography. Linda Gray Sexton courageously interweaves her
own words with those of her famous and emotionally-troubled
poet-mother in an unsparing and touching account of their
relationship, titled Searching for Mercy Street: My Journey
Back to My Mother, Anne Sexton.
Similar to the structures of the novels I have
discussed, the structure of Searching for Mercy Street allows
Anne Sexton to speak as subject in her own story, even as she
is an object of her daughter's biographical and
autobiographical perspectives. As Linda Gray Sexton writes
about her mother's struggle with mental illness and of their
troubled family relationships, she includes excerpts from her
mother's letters and poetry, letting her mother speak for
herself, yet, through selection, commentary, and
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135
interpretation, simultaneously shaping her mother's voice
with her own.
The first excerpt of Anne Sexton's words which we read
is the text of a letter Anne wrote to Linda when Linda was
sixteen years old. Anne was writing, in part, to apologize
for a fight she had had with Linda's father the night before;
but the purpose of the letter expands, as Anne speaks to the
future Linda, the forty-year-old Linda. Anne Sexton's suicide
was five years away at the writing of this letter;
nevertheless, as Linda later inferred, the letter was a
"suicide note" (6) of sorts, a "trumpet call heralding her
[mother's] intentions" (6) and her belief that, like herself,
Linda would lose her mother before she was forty. Anne tells
Linda what she wants that forty-year-old motherless Linda to
know about the relationships among the mothers and daughters
in the family. Linda's comments suggest that her mother's
words to the future Linda resist reducing their relationship
to stable mother/daughter, object/subject dichotomies: "She
touched on several generations of womanhood in this letter
that summed up so much of her life: her daughterhood and her
motherhood; and my daughterhood and my motherhood" (6-7) .
Like Betty in Kaye Gibbons's A Cure for Dreams, Anne speaks
as mother and daughter simultaneously in this letter, and
Linda reads as daughter and hypothetical mother, then, later,
as actual mother.
Many of Anne's poems reflect her own emotional and
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mental states. Some, based on experiences with her daughters,
combine Anne and Linda as dual subjects whose perspectives
control the poetry and as dual objects of the poem itself.
Describing lonely nights spent at her maternal grandparents'
house, Linda writes that:
After dark each night . . . the voice of
the wind and the surge of the ocean against
the rocks frightened me. Wolves, I feared
skulked beneath my bed .... Later Mother
would take this memory of mine and use it
in her poem "The Fortress." No / the wind's
not off the ocean. / Yes, it cried in your
room like a wolf / and your pony tail hurt
you. That was a long time ago." (16)
In this poem, Linda's memory, told to her mother in her
words, is recast in Anne's words as a poem, then retold to
the reading audience of Linda's book, contextualized by
Linda's narration of the events that lead to the poem's
creation. Anne's acts of writing the letter and the poem and
Linda's act of writing this biographical/autobiographical
account became acts of writing their matrilineage, both as
daughter, both as mother.
The content and structure of some recent works, such as
Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club or Betty Louise Bell's novel,
Faces in the Moon, link the importance of mothers' voices and
stories to both racial identity and mother/daughter
relationships. Similarly, a contemporary play by Leslie
Ayvazian, titled Nine Armenians, makes use of structural,
especially visual, strategies in order to foreground the
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women characters' inherently linked histories as women and as
Armenian-Americans.
Nine Armenians is a moving play about nine members of an
Armenian-American family. As the play progresses, the
relationships among the women in the family— the daughter
(Ani) , her mother, aunt, and grandmother— become central to
the play.1 The play begins with an emphasis on the stories of
Armenian history. We learn through family conversation that
Ani' s grandfather has repeatedly voiced his concern that
Armenian history, specifically the Armenian genocide by the
Turks, is omitted from history books in America. Ani has
personalized the importance of this omission in her
education; feeling that she must learn of her own heritage as
an Armenian women, she goes to Armenia to experience life
there f irs thand.
Throughout the play, it is clear that Ani's Armenian
heritage is inseparable from her matrilineage as an Armenian-
American woman. Several scenes depict Ani's experiences in
Armenia and her mother's and grandmother's experiences in
America, simultaneously. As in a split screen in a film, we
see Ani at the back of the stage and hear her "speak" letters
1As of this writing, the play has not yet been
published, although it was first performed in 1995. I am
writing from my memory of a recent 1997 viewing at The Mark
Taper Forum in Los Angeles, so the reader should be aware
that I am not quoting dialogue verbatim; however, I took
detailed notes of this performance, so my analysis can be
trusted in its exploration of the play's general structure
and themes.
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138
she is writing to her mother and grandmother as her mother or
grandmother, upstage and in America, read the letters. At
times, their voices speak in unison; at other times, their
voices overlap, one picking up where the other leaves off. In
one such "split" scene, in which we can see Ani in Armenia
and her grandmother, Non, in America, simultaneously, Ani's
actions mirror those of her grandmother. Through such visual
structuring of the play's action, the link is made explicit
between the women's stories as women and as Armenians.
The men in this family are supportive of the women's
need to explore their Armenian-American matrilineage. It is
Ani's grandfather who has taught his family the importance of
learning their neglected Armenian history. Ani's father,
John, does not want Ani to go to Armenia; he is frightened
for her safety. But Ani's mother, Armine, defends Ani's
decision to go. She understands Ani's need to find out who
she is, and John listens to Armine and accepts his daughter's
decision. Armine explains to Ani that members of her own
generation, including herself and Ani's father, cannot go to
Armenia nor can members of Ani's grandparents' generation,
but Ani can go; Ani can confront the past for them.
In Armenia, Ani suffers through a terribly cold winter,
in which many of the Armenian people freeze and starve to
death. As Ani's letters become more bleak, her parents become
increasingly worried about her, until her father decides that
"it is enough, " and he sends her money, telling her to come
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home. When Ani returns, she confronts her grandmother in a
scene which emphasizes that these women have learned the
importance of telling and hearing stories of their Armenian
matrilineage: "I needed you to teach me," Ani tells her
grandmother, and Non responds, "I wanted you to ask."
Ani shows her mother and grandmother that she has
learned a traditional Armenian dance and the women join in
the dance together, with Ani's younger sister and brother
participating on in-line skates at the edges of the dance.
The traditional dance juxtaposed with the Americanized
children on skates brings the Armenian and American
generations together visually and thematically. At the end of
the play, Ani's mother, Armine, has found the courage,
through her daughter's example, to go to Armenia herself.
As I stated earlier in this chapter, feminist critics
have long recognized and claimed the necessity for women in a
male-dominant culture to subvert traditional genres and
themes in order to be heard. The works I discussed in depth
in chapters three through five and many of those I discuss
briefly in this chapter achieve that aim through narrative
strategies. It is reasonable to infer that we will continue
to see new works which embody challenges to traditional
paradigms of mother/daughter relationships. Such texts, in
various genres, do not merely embody political acts of
subversion, but creative acts of representation: their
content and their cross-genre, multi-voiced structures
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suggest mother/daughter relationships of inter-relation and
mutuality.
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Conclusions/Beginnings
141
My analysis of the novels thus far might lead to a
number of conclusions regarding potential areas of further
study on mothers and daughters as well as implications for
actual mothers and daughters in our society. In this closing
section, I will focus on several points that I consider to be
"beginnings" as much as "conclusions"; that is, they are
"jumping off" points for further thought and exploration.
First, it should now be clear that the emergence of
fictional and non-fictional works which explore mothers
voices and perspectives is a logical and welcome response to
the cultural erasure of mothers. This trend in fictional and
non-fictional literature is an important step toward the
establishment of the mother-subject in our culture. Hirsch
tells us that if we know our mothers' stories we have hope of
transforming those stories (116).
Second, as I argued at the end of chapter two, there are
many mother/daughter relationships outside of the biological
mother and daughter relationship within a traditional nuclear
family; these relationships and their representations in our
culture need to be explored and analyzed. Women and their
adopted daughters, daughters raised by female relatives other
than their mothers, women who act as mother-figures for other
women, women who are single parents, women who are lesbian
partners and parents: these and other family constellations
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underscore the need for new cultural narratives of
mother/daughter relationships. Mother/daughter relationships
need to be further explored within the context of race,
ethnicity, and class. The differences among women writers of
various races and social classes on the topic of mothers and
daughters, in both fiction and non-fiction works, needs
further analysis.
Third, as I stated in chapter one, by emphasizing
connections in the relationships between mothers and
daughters, I am not arguing that inter-relation is
necessarily inherently female; however, I do believe that
theories of female inter-relation suggested by various
critics in chapter one more accurately reflect the
socialization of women and more accurately describe female
development within western or patriarchal culture. However,
just as the more dominant cultural narratives of mothers and
daughters have needed qualification and modification, so,
most likely, do assumptions about female connectedness and
models of inter-relation among women.
Fourth, while I have argued thus far that the novels
discussed in chapters three through five resist the
opposition of subject/object in the relationships of
daughters to mothers and grant subjectivity to mothers as
well as to daughters, the final and perhaps most significant
resistance in the novels may, in fact, be to the idea of
"subjectivity" itself. Use of the language of subject/object
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143
relations thus far to interpret the novels is helpful since
previous discussions of mother/daughter relationships in
fiction and non-fiction texts so often engage those terms.
However, using the language of subject/object relations to
describe mother/daughter relationships is problematic, as
Hirsch argues in chapter one. Ultimately, resisting the
notion of a unified subjectivity frees interpretation from
the limits of subject/object relations and from the dichotomy
of subject/object altogether. Malini Johar Schueller argues
that The Joy Luck Club questions the notion of a "whole and
unified subject" (82) , substitutes an "awareness of ethnicity
as a constantly shifting social construct and [a] commitment
to community" (80) and suggests an ethnic identity that is
"linguistically constructed" (73). When Schueller adds that
"constructions of subjectivity by liberal white feminists
have typically relied on notions of the singular, autonomous
self, [while] women of color have typically stressed
collective and social subjectivities" (73), Schueller brings
the discussion back to the suggestion made in chapter two
that women of color have tended to more "successfully" create
"maternal discourses," in part, because women of color tend,
more than white women, to depict women's relationships as
based in continuity rather than antagonistic autonomy. I
questioned those assumptions in chapter two; however, I would
add here that perhaps women's ability to create less
universalizing depictions of mothers and daughters would be
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144
aided by our engagement of terms other than "subject" and
"object.*
Fifth, we need to create new representations of
mother/daughter relationships. In preparation for writing
this dissertation, I surveyed over eighty novels about
mothers and daughters, all published in the last fifteen to
twenty years. Many explore the connections and disruptions
among generations of women and many still rely on the
assumption that the mother/daughter relationship is
inherently antagonistic; some move beyond the traditional
paradigms of mothers and daughters within patriarchal
culture.
Luce Irigaray writes at length about mothers and
daughters in patriarchal culture in her collection of
lectures titled Sexes and Genealogies. Irigaray explores how
"History has collapsed male and female genealogies into one
or two family triangles, all sired by the male" (v) ,
"immolated" the mother "at the birth of our culture" (18) ,
"separated [the girl] from her mother and from her family in
general," "transplanted [her] into the genealogy of her
husband" (2), and "sever [ed] women from the roots of their
identity and their subjectivity" (20) .
In her final essay of this collection, "A Chance for
Life: Limits to the Concept of the Neuter and the Universal
in Science and Other Disciplines," Irigaray summarizes the
"sociocultural patterns" (189) that consistently value the
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145
son over the daughter and the father/son or sometimes
mother/son relationship over the mother/daughter
relationship. She then suggests a course of action which, on
first read, I thought was naive and assumed would be
ineffectual but which, after further consideration, I find
rather moving and potentially compelling, especially since
Irigaray makes clear that she intends this action as a simple
first step toward larger reform:
I suggest that those of you who care about
social justice should put up posters in
public places showing beautiful images of
that natural and spiritual couple, the
mother-daughter, the couple that testifies
to a very special relationship to nature
and culture .... We can do this before
we undertake the reform of the language,
since that will take much longer. This
cultural restoration will begin to heal a
loss of individual and collective identity
for women. (189)
Finally, Irigaray asks, "how [can] women unite when they lack
any representation or example of that alliance?" (191)
Like the critics whose arguments I discuss in chapter
one, Irigaray recognizes both the disruptions in women's
relationships— created, in part, by our lack of cultural
representations that emphasize alliance and connection among
women over separation— and the need to create new
representations of mothers and daughters. The question
Irigaray asks at the end of the previous paragraph was, in
some similar form, probably the catalyst that moved the
critics in chapter one to write and that moved me at a
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146
visceral level, especially as it relates specifically to
relationships between mothers and daughters, to undertake
this analysis.
The identification and analysis of common myths about
mother/daughter relationships, the creation of new cultural
narratives about these relationships, and the depiction of
mothers and daughters in ways that challenge traditional
paradigms of mother/daughter relationships continue to carry
the potential to better the relationships of actual mothers
and daughters. Adrienne Rich wrote that "the cathexis between
mother and daughter ... is the great unwritten
story" (225) . The novels that have been the focus of my
analysis do not tell the story of mothers and daughters but
suggest new ways to tell multiple stories of mothers and
daughters through narrative structures that challenge
subject/object dichotomies and create a space for maternal
discourses in which mothers and daughters can speak.
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147
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Asset Metadata

Creator Smurthwaite, Lori F (author)

Core Title "Why doesn't anybody tell them their own mothers have stories?": Representations of mother/daughter relationships in contemporary American fiction

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program English

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag literature, American,OAI-PMH Harvest,women's studies

Language English

Contributor Digitized by ProQuest (provenance)

Advisor Martin, Jay (committee chair), Muske-Dukes, Carol (committee member), Pellegrini, Maria (committee member)

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c17-359313

Unique identifier UC11350779

Identifier 9902868.pdf (filename),usctheses-c17-359313 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier 9902868.pdf

Dmrecord 359313

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Smurthwaite, Lori F.

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the au...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus, Los Angeles, California 90089, USA