Mother-Daughter Plots

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Mother-Daughter Plots

• In Theories
• Works by
• Women of Colors

Image source
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Outline

• Theoretical Critical Plots a summary (another
  example? a thesis)
• About Chicana women Woman on the Edge of Time
• Afro-American Female Writers
• Caribbean Female Writers
• Annie John Plot Summary and the Hand

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Theoretical Issues

• Mother
• Phallic mother vs. erotic mother
• Motherhood as Experience and Institution
  Matrophobia (Rich)
• The hole ? search for The mother in us
  bisexuality Irigaray
• The maternal body always splitting
• Mother Child symbiosis and separation
• Bad/Good breast introjection projection
• Transitional Objects
• Mother-Daughter-- permeable boundaries
• ? psychic mothers mostly (except for Rich), or
  mothers understood in psychoanalytical terms.

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More American Feminist Works . . .

• Nancy Friday My Mother/My Self -
• Carol Gilligan In a Different Voice
• Sara Ruddick
• General Trend
• exploring and critiquing motherhood (60s)
• ? celebrating it (as part of feminine difference)
  
• ? different mothers (without child, of different
  colors, angry mothers, etc.)

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Literature

• In English literature,
• 19th century from absent, dead or inadequate
  mothers,
• early 20th century to longing for mothers,
  (with angry mothers-- Anna Wickham),
• Mid 20th century to mothers exploring
  motherhood (Plath, Olsen), daughters trying to
  understand their mothers (Atwood) and
  housekeeping (Robinson).
• Since 60s Multiple relations and exploration in
  multiple directions.

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Woman on the Edge of Time

• Anything you want to comment on?
• Chicano Family Structure and the Mothers Roles
• Medicine
• Matapoisette vs. the Present

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Medicine no such thing as side effects

• Instance, a factory makes a product. But that's
  not all. It makes there be less of whatever it
  uses up to make that product. Every pound of
  steel used we have to account for--whether what's
  made is needed and truly desired. It's a pound
  less for something else...A factory may also
  produce pollution. (270)

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Moraga, Cherríe,

• I remember this common skin,. Mamá
• oiled by work and worry.
• Hers is a used body like your
• one that carries the same scent
• of silence I call it home.
• Loving in the War Years (BostonSouth End Press,
  1983).

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Black Mother-Daughter (e.g. 1)

• Gloria J. Joseph best studied within the family
  network, instead of in the isolated dyad of
  mother and daughter.
• Different kinds black adolescent mothers,
  lesbian mothers
• Needs to consider racial oppression and cultural
  differences.

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Black Mother-Daughter (e.g. 2)

• Patricia Hill Collins Black vs. White
  motherhood
• White motherhoodbased on middle-class nuclear
  family with mothers limited to the domestic
  sphere.
• White womens own self-critique 1)
  differentiating motherhood as experience and
  institution 2) dismantling motherhood 3)
  examining differences in real mothers
• Black mothers 1) nuclear family model does not
  fit 2) sex role segregation less commonly found
  in Black mothers. 3) motherhood as a full-time
  occupation does not happen.

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Black Mother-Daughter (e.g. 2)

• Patricia Hill Collins Black vs. White
  motherhood
• Mothering is not a privatized nurturing
  occupation reserved for biological mothers
  (45). In West Africa, childcare is a collective
  responsibility of an age-stratified,
  woman-centered mothering network.
• Three kinds of mothers bloodmothers,
  othermothers, and women-centered networks.
• Black mothers teach their daughters to be strong
  and independent. Gloria Wade-Gayles Mothers in
  Black womens fictions are strong and devoted . .
  . But they are rarely affectionate.

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The Daughters Return

• Return to the mothers ancestral past.
• African-American authors-including novelists
  Paule Marshall and Jewelle Gomez, science-fiction
  writer Octavia Butler, film-maker Julie Dash, and
  poet Lucille Clifton-in order to trace the
  invention and subsequent development of the
  "magic black daughter."

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Afro-American feminist writers

• two key factors as facilitating her invention.
  The first was the establishment of
  mother-daughter separation and reunion and the
  "black mother-of-history"
• The second was "the adoption of a magical
  aesthetic. In some texts, a daughter's return
  to the past results in the construction of an
  "essentialist myth" of black womanhood (p. 81)
  while in others, the possibilities of/in
  historical return are examined more cautiously
  (e.g. Beloved).

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Caribbean Literature the trope of the mother

• The trope of the mother in Caribbean literature
  colonial "mother country," the desire to reclaim
  a lost Mother Africa and, more recently, a
  Caribbean mother-island who has often been
  defined in problematic terms by male writers.
• a Caribbean mother-island e.g.
• Braithwaite "This poem is about porous
  limestone my mother, Barbados most English of
  West Indian islands, but at the same time
  nearest, as the slaves fly, to Africa.

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Caribbean Lit the mother trope

• As a result, the mother-island of Caribbean
  literature is a more ambivalent, and more varied,
  figure than the honored mother-of-history
  characteristic of recent African-American
  fiction.

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Caribbean Womens WritingsMajor Themes

• female Bildungsroman stories of growth and
  development--national allegory the personal as
  the political
• racial and class issues and the process of
  socialization
• Mother Country vs mother land
• the process of education and mother-daughter
  relationship--usually alienation
• the grandmother as the positive figure

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Working Miracles Womens Lives

• Single mothers as breadwinners (1/2 of the
  Caribbean households are headed by women The
  Dancehall Queen)absent father (mother)child-shif
  ting (adoptionsBright Thursdays adopting to
  fill in an empty space for the grandparents 210)
• Outside childrenchildren born out of a fathers
  stable residential unionbut legitimacy is not an
  issue
• Olive Senior, Working Miracles Womens Lives in
  the English-Speaking Caribbean (Chapter 1)

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The Autobiography of My Mother

• "My mother died at the moment I was born and so
  for my whole life there was nothing standing
  between myself and eternity at my back was
  always a bleak, black wind."

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Annie John (1)

• Figures in the Distance death
• The Circling Hand Pre-Oedipal connection with
  the mother and separation from her
• Gwen distanced from the mother (the dream, her
  mothers explanation--eating unripe fruit before
  bed). Her first girl friend
• The Red Girl her second, everything the mother
  is opposed to.
• Columbus in Chains -- Columbus, John Milton's
  Paradise Lost.

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Annie John (1)

• Somewhere, Belgium -- daydreams of living alone
  in Belgium like Charlotte Brontë -- requests
  her own trunk.
• The Long Rain --falls ill for three and a half
  months and cannot leave her bed. -- an unusual
  period of heavy rains.
• -- Ma Chess, an obeah (or voodoo) woman,
  becomes Annie's primary caregiver.
• A Walk to the Jetty the final wrap up of
  childhood and teenage years and departure

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The Mothers Hand chap 1

• One day, a girl smaller than I, a girl whose
  mother was a friend of my mother's, died in my
  mother's arms. I did not know this girl at all
  ... I heard my mother describe to my father just
  how Nalda had died ... My mother asked my father
  to make the coffin for Nalda, and he did, carving
  bunches of tiny flowers on the sides. Nalda's
  mother wept so much that my mother had to take
  care of everything and since children were never
  prepared by undertakers, my mother had to prepare
  the little girl to be buried. I then began to
  look at my mother's hands differently. They had
  stroked the dead girl's forehead, they had bathed
  and dressed her and laid her in the coffin my
  father had made. My mother would come back from
  the dead girl's house smelling of bay rum a scent
  that for a long time afterward would make me feel
  ill. For a while, though not for very long, I
  could not bear to have my mother caress me or
  touch my food or help me with my bath. I
  especially couldn't bear the sight of her hands
  lying in her lap.