Chapter Six—
Parting Glances:
Feminist Images of Mothers and Daughters

In the Oedipus myth, the son murders his father in order to replace him. Contrastingly, in the new woman's myth, the daughter "kills" her mother in order not to have to take her place.
—Judith Kegan Gardiner

The subject of mothers and daughters has not only been a central topic for feminist scholarship but has played an important part in feminist cultural practice as well. Not surprisingly, most feminist cultural work on mothers and daughters emerges out of contemporary women's fiction. The mother/daughter relationship has become one of the central themes of women's writing, enough to warrant several books of criticism and a host of articles.^[1] Given the realities of the world of film and video production and its increasingly corporate nature, it is no wonder that most images of mothers and daughters are to be found in a medium that, at least at the outset, does not require a substantial infusion of finance capital. Nevertheless, feminists have produced work on mothers and daughters in other media, including film, video, and photography.^[2]

Although this explosion of mother/daughter imagery, much of it from an explicitly feminist perspective, is undoubtedly a welcome development, serious questions remain for those of us still deeply concerned with the prevalence of "mother-blame" in our culture. As I have argued in previous chapters, the women's movement has forced this long-submerged relationship out into the full glare of

the cultural spotlight, but this excursion into visibility and analysis is not unambiguously positive if the fundamental (male-defined) modes of analysis remain unchallenged and are simply replicated. I argued in the preceding chapter that feminist theory has all too often allowed itself to remain largely within the dominant categories of psychological thinking on mothers and daughters.

The question of whether feminist cultural work has moved beyond these limiting frames of reference now arises. Has the feminist movement attempted to develop self-consciously oppositional forms of imagining this relationship? Or has this literary work, albeit with more grace and artistry, fallen into the same traps of bond and separate, love and let go? The verdict on this tough issue is a mixed one. The most up-to-date feminist text analyzing fiction on mothers and daughters (Mother Puzzles: Daughters and Mothers in Contemporary American Literature ) proclaims in its introduction the all too familiar refrain: "The reality of the mother-daughter experience (at least in the writing examined here) is that mothers are often more disabling than enabling, that daughters are often more attached to (or detached from) their mothers in ways that are disturbing and disheartening." Mickey Pearlman, the editor of this volume, goes on to identify an almost transcendent imperative that these writers have in searching to understand the mother/daughter relationship, once again placing on this relationship a sort of either/or, life/death kind of emotional and psychological weight. Pearlman argues that these novelists "must finally understand their own relationships with their mothers or be condemned to a lifetime of daughterhood, to a 'girl's' angle of vision, to a dependent emotional space within a mother's parameters." Yet the ambivalence of the new feminist writing on mothers and daughters is neatly expressed in the editor's closing lines, where she echoes the romance of separation endlessly found in mainstream literature while simultaneously evoking the pleasure of maternal love: "And every mother-daughter story is also finally the story of how we find ourselves in leaving, or in being left, in excoriating the past or beatifying it, about finding the missing connections or losing the infantilizing ones, and most centrally about being loved, being loving, and what daughters do in solving mother puzzles."^[3] Thus we see once again the dichotomous framing, where "loving" and "letting go" are two sides of the coin of adult development.

Nevertheless, feminist cultural work on mothers and daughters has produced a wide range of diverse and complex texts, by no means as easily characterized as the more explicitly theoretical work. This realization forces me now to engage in a bit of self-criticism regarding my own approach to this particular chapter. I approached this work in an attempt to prove what I perceived to be a sharp divide between the cultural production of white women writers and fiction by women of color. Angered at the incipient mother-blame and double binding of much white feminist work, I sought to translate my critique of the theoretical material in Chapter 5 to a critique of the cultural material in the present one, this time including an analysis of women writers of color as an antidote to the white feminist propensity for buying into the dominant psychological frameworks.

But representations do not lend themselves to easy oppositions, and ambiguous and contradictory meanings often slip out from under the closed door of a simple critical distinction: no such pat and fixed distinction could be drawn. This is not to say that serious and profound differences in content, form, genre, and such could not be found in comparing several texts in this way. There is no question that the lived experience of black and ethnic writers must, by necessity, produce at least a somewhat different reading of this particular relationship. Instead, what emerges for me here in examining the cultural writings of both women of color and white writers is that the axes along which distinctions can be made need to be multiplied and diversified. In other words, although race (and class and ethnicity) do structure these representations, perhaps the specific representational choices also structure the final ideological moment of the text. The central issue seemed to settle around 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. As was true in my analysis of films of the thirties and forties, this location of the mother and the daughter in a real and social world lies at the heart of creating complex and thoughtful representations of the mother/daughter relationship. When this relationship is seen solely through the lens of psychology, through the double bind of the paradigmatic dichotomy of "bond/separate," it gets further mired in that selfsame double bind.

So I will not argue here that writers who are women of color somehow "like" their mothers more than white women writers but rather that they locate this relationship to an extent that mitigates against the purely psychological interpretation.

Rather than closely read feminist literary texts, I focus on what I see to be the central issue that determines whether these representations fall inside the dominant psychological frameworks or offer up alternative and empowering visions for both mothers and daughters. The novels examined in this chapter are paradigmatic examples of recent women's writing that help me elaborate my continuing discussion of the problems in the narrowly psychological representation. This is not an exhaustive comparative survey of white and nonwhite writers. Indeed, I do not give these literary texts their full analytic due in what follows. Most of these texts are quite well known and have received extensive critical attention elsewhere. In place of the detailed and delicate literary critical approach, I focus more narrowly on the continuation of the psychological theme examined in the discussion of feminist theories of mothers and daughters and how this theme is subverted and actively negated by both women of color and ethnically conscious writers.

I initially concentrate on the work of three well-known white feminist writers: Kim Chernin, Robin Morgan, and Vivian Gornick. I pick these three for specific reasons. First, all are well known as both scholars and novelists, so their fictional work is always something more—or other—than that. Second, each has written a biographical/autobiographical story of her and her mother's life. In other words, they have chosen a similar generic form to explore the mother/daughter relationship. A myriad of other texts abound but these seem emblematic of a very common—and troublesome—trend in contemporary feminist writing, a trend paralleled in the theoretical work discussed in the previous chapter.

Writing a Mother's Life: The Omniscient Repository and the Interested Chronicler

Kim Chernin's popular and critically acclaimed 1983 memoir, In My Mother's House: A Daughter's Story, constructs just the location mentioned previously. In telling the story of her mother's life

and her own entry into it, Chernin contextualizes both their experiences through the rich specificity of left-wing Jewish culture. But Chernin must struggle to resist constructing her mother as the grand floating signifier of her daughter's angst. The two voices in this memoir are not simply those of mother and daughter but of two different approaches to a relationship. Nevertheless, Chernin's mother's Marxism, her lifelong commitment to political struggle (however Stalinist), produces a voice that militates against the daughter's tendency to turn specific lived experience into great and transcendent pronouncements on the mother/daughter relationship.

For all of Chernin's deep love and care, too often she seems to slip into the easy oppositions, the grand theorizing that dislocates the complex specificity of the memoir. When faced with her mother's proposal to write her life story, Kim writes: "I am torn by contradiction. I love this woman. She was my first great aching love. All my life I have wanted to do whatever she asked of me, in spite of our quarreling. . . . But it is not so easy to turn from the path I have imagined for myself. . . . I fear, as any daughter would, losing myself back into the mother."^[4] By transposing her own ambivalence into pronouncements that signify eternal "truths" about mothers and daughters ("I fear, as any daughter would . . ."), Chernin invokes a whole set of ideological discourses that only further serves to separate those discourses from the richness of her mother's story. Such pronouncements detract from the textures of everyday life between a mother and a daughter in an attempt to draw from this life and these events eternal truths about the mother/daughter relationship.

Yet the daughter Chernin, in agreeing to tell her mother's story, allows this maternal voice to emerge most completely. A beautiful passage toward the end places the love of mother and daughter firmly in the realm of a shared experience that is stronger than any sort of mythical bonding:

I can feel from my own love for her the certainty that nothing can destroy the bond between us. It is stronger than ideology, unshakable in its binding. It is not the birth bond which made us a mother and daughter; that we could have trampled down, in our impatience and confusion. This bond is a comradeship, won from the work we have done together. It comes so rarely to a mother and daughter, but once it is achieved it

tangles itself in with all the nature and shared flesh. And then even they, if they wished, could no longer pull it down.^[5]

What is clear about this memoir and so many others is that the daughters writing them are passionate in their belief that, by telling their mothers' stories, they are also uncovering the truth of their own: "With the resurgence of women's fiction in the twentieth century, many autobiographical or confessional novels by women trace the coming to adulthood, that is, to individual identity, of a daughter who must define herself in terms of her mother."^[6] As Rose Chernin says in speaking of her granddaughter, Kim's daughter: "My whole life will be in the story. And then we'll have to start all over again. But this time you will do the telling. . . . These stories are also for Larissa. Who her grandmother is, who her mother is, for a fifteen-year-old girl, what could be more important?"^[7] This is, paradoxically, both the feminist moment in these writings and the patriarchal.

For the hard question with all these memoirs is this: How does a daughter write the story of her mother's life? Can she, in narrating the elusive experiences of past events, do justice to the felt realities of her mother's existence? Or does the mother's story as told by the daughter become merely a vehicle for detailing the daughter's life or a lengthy compendium of a mother's mismothering? This terrain is most assuredly a difficult one. To write the story of our mother's lives is indeed a precarious and problematic project that raises a crucial narrative distinction in the telling of these tales: the difference between constructing oneself as a repository of one's mother's life or as an interested chronicler.

A writer who constructs herself as the repository of another's life assumes a unitary grandness to her own narrative expertise (for who can speak another's life with such surety?). If Gornick, for example, must be the repository for her mother's life, then what does that say about her mother's own ability to speak her own story, safeguard her own existence? 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 is about a dialogue, a multitude of voices, a dialectic of mothers and daughters. 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.

Alice Walker deals directly with this issue in an interview with Mary Helen Washington for Ms. in the early eighties. When Washington asks her the final question, "Do you actually speak with your mother's voice in your writing?" Walker thoughtfully replies: "Just as you have certain physical characteristics of your mother's—her laughter or her toes or her grade of hair—you also internalize certain emotional characteristics that are like hers. That is part of your legacy. They are internalized, merged with your own, transformed through the stories. When you're compelled to write her stories, it's because you recognize and prize those qualities of her in yourself."^[8]

Chernin manages, I think, to be a chronicler. Never denying her investment in this project, she nevertheless allows her mother her own reality, her own subjectivity, her own history. Chernin's own entry into the story is, appropriately, at the end, therefore granting legitimacy to her mother's life, a life that most assuredly had meaning and sustenance before her daughter entered into it.

Vivian Gornick's Fierce Attachments locates itself on the other side of this repository/chronicler fence. Whereas Chernin's book is filled with the richness and detail of Jewish left-wing life, Vivian Gornick chooses to locate her mother almost completely outside of time, place, politics, and history. In so doing, she makes the text of the world a mere extraneous background to the text of this mother's mismothering. Indeed, she explicitly says, "I am the repository of your life now, Ma." It is less a memoir of a mother, or even of a relationship, than of an adult daughter's anger, unhappiness, and confusion. The jacket blurb is telling: "Vivian Gornick's brave and deeply moving memoir is a tour de force, a book that dissects one of life's most complex, maddening and closely entwined alliances—the relationship between mother and daughter. Heralded as a landmark in American autobiography, Fierce Attachments probes the intimate, sometimes destructive family passions that can shape a woman's childhood—and change her life forever."^[9] Here is the familiar language that formulates the mother as all powerful, all impacting, potentially destructive.

Now, granted, this book constructs itself in an autobiographical

mode rather than the more mixed biography/autobiography of Chernin. Yet, by making the relationship between mother and daughter the focus, the recurring narrative core of the text, Gornick attempts to tell us not only of her own life, but of her mother's as well. Like Chernin, Gornick acknowledges right off the difficulty in the relationship ("My relationship with my mother is not good"), but, unlike Chernin, she never socially locates this anger and disappointment. Thus she leaves us with the evil simplicity of the mother in Now, Voyager .^[10] Even the rare moments of self-criticism that emerge in the book are couched in a discourse that locates her mother as the ultimate cause of her own callous behavior.

When her mother does speak of her own experience of past events (events that, after all, happened to her), the narrator/daughter Gornick is unable to resist her own interpretation, her own intervention, as in this scene early in the book where Gornick and her mother are walking (as they are in all their dialogues) and her mother is repeating a story from her childhood, a disturbing story about her molestation by a young uncle:

The third time she told the story I was nearly forty. We were walking up Eighth Avenue, and as we neared Forty-second Street I said to her, "Ma, did it ever occur to you to ask yourself why you remained silent when Sol made his move?" She looked quickly at me. But this time she was wise to me. "What are you getting at?" she asked angrily. "Are you trying to say I liked it? Is that what you're getting at?" I laughed nervously, gleefully. "No, Ma, I'm not saying that. I'm just saying it's odd that you didn't make a sound." Again, she repeated that she had been very frightened. "Come off it," I said sharply.^[11]

This scene is horrifying on a number of levels. First and most obvious is the sad irony of a feminist activist (here the daughter) questioning the silencing terror that accompanies sexual assault and male brutality. But just as important here, we have a daughter disallowing the feelings of the mother about her own experience and exhibiting almost no empathy, either sisterly or filial, toward another woman victimized by sexual violence. Gornick repeats this lack of empathy in her account of her father's death, where her depiction of her mother's grief is a sarcastic parody of what she perceives to be her self-serving histrionics. The point is not whether the grief was self-serving or histrionic—it might very well have

been. But if one attempts to speak of another's grief, perhaps the voice of the griever ought to be accorded some modicum of space for articulation. To say this text is solely from the daughter's point of view is too simplistic, although that is true as well. But a daughter's point of view need not demean and negate the felt reality of the mother at the same time, as Chernin has amply demonstrated.

Robin Morgan's Dry Your Smile is yet another (feminist) tale of a daughter produced and victimized by bad mothering. You could literally open this book to any page and be assailed by a catalogue of vicious mothering techniques that make Joan Crawford look like Stella Dallas. Unlike Chernin and Gornick, Morgan has written her memoir as a novel (or a novel within a novel), but there is no question that this is a memoir, the story of a child actress (Morgan was the child star of an early TV series called "Mama") smothered and curtailed by an overbearing and obsessively controlling mother. The daughter grows up, becomes a feminist leader/writer (like Morgan), and is finally liberated by her mother's death. This circularity (daughter reborn as mother dies) is central to the conception of the daughter as repository for her mother's (failed) life.

Morgan's book directly addresses the problem inherent in writing a memoir that is at once both a telling of your own life and a telling of the life of your mother: How do you give power back to the mother and to the mother/daughter relationship without falling into the trap constructed by the patriarchal psychology of singular blame? How does the daughter speak of her mother's impact on her without locating mother as sole and essential creator of the daughter's psyche (and usually her neuroses as well)? Morgan expresses this ambivalence when her alter ego, Julian, considers writing about her life with her mother: "Why would you write it? To justify yourself? Poor beleaguered Jule, beset by evil nonstepmother and then by wicked nonprince and finally by starving masses of enthralled women? Come on ." Yet that is precisely what she does. Every time the character Julian acts, every interaction she has with her husband, her female lover, and her interior self, is referenced through the mother, to the extent where, in her dreams, her mother and her husband seem to merge. The desire to write this story is not, she claims, "some sophomoric catharsis," not "another act of vengeance against her," and certainly not "an expression of love." It is rather the pressing need to explain her own identity

through the realization that she had never "committed an act pure of her." To tell the truth of their shared life is here to tell a narrative where one partner is most assuredly the total victim, the other the total victimizer: "This time, this time to really write about it, her wardrobe of faces and the faces she bequeathed me, lies appliqued with the skill of a needleworker, possession and terror and hunger so interthreaded and unacknowledged as to become inseparable from the fabric of living itself. Fool, you'd have to dare become her even more than you fear you already have. "^[12]

In using the metaphor of rebirth at the end of the book, after the mother has died, Morgan falls (perhaps unwittingly) into the stance of perpetual child, and ultimately into a feminist form of mother-blame.^[13] In an earlier scene, Julian has come to visit her mother and suggests she read to her. When the mother responds, "We'll see," adult woman Julian says, "Momma, 'we'll see' are the two words a child of any age most dreads hearing from a parent."^[14] The point is that Julian/Morgan is no longer a child; she is a grown-up woman. Yet, like Gornick, she is unable to relate to her mother as such and, importantly, refuses to take much responsibility for that inability. In the context of this narrative, which insistently details the mother's controlling, infantilizing behavior toward the daughter, the only possible reading is to legitimate Julian's childishness as the result of the kind of mothering she had.

This mother-blame is not limited to feminist novels. As Madonna Miner has pointed out, twentieth-century women's best-sellers elaborate the daughter's angst with equal fervor:

Daughter-heroines voice complaints shared by daughter-readers: it is mothers who condemn daughters to inhabit bodies capable of mothering . . ., it is mothers who leave, failing to provide adequate nourishment, it is mothers who remain, exacting compensation for nourishment not provided. The story told in the bestsellers, then, is built on a bisexual triangle, with tremendous psychic tension marking the relationship between mother and daughter.^[15]

Situated Relationships: Roots and Branches

Much of the fiction of women of color avoids the perils of the repository narratives so prevalent in white women's fiction. If these white feminist representations of mothers and daughters have been

characterized by their dichotomous framing (good versus evil mothers, etc.) with an emphasis on conflict, literary images produced by women of color have tended to be more nuanced, more complex, less starkly defined. As many black critics have argued, mother-blame is less the issue than is the role of the mother (or often the surrogate mother) as healer to the daughter wounded by the vagaries of racism.^[16]

In the most general terms, the relationship is depicted differently because the experience of mothers and daughters of color in a racist culture is so patently different from that of white mothers and daughters. Central here is the role of work outside the home in defining daughters' relationships to their mothers. Most black and ethnic daughters have been witness to the labor of their mothers, labor that they knew—even in an unspoken way—supported them, made their very existence possible. Thus the anger that so many white daughters feel toward their mothers, largely provoked by the limitations of a mother trapped in the domestic role, is not perhaps as prevalent among black daughters, who have had to develop a certain respect for their mothers as competent and active women. In a study of black mothers and daughters conducted by Gloria Joseph and Jill Lewis that included extensive interviews, the authors report a very positive sense of respect between mother and daughter: "The reason for this . . . seems to be located in the Black daughters' familiarity with the circumstances within which their mothers existed and raised their children and an empathy caused by understanding these situations."^[17] Indeed, even black women's magazines such as Ebony and Essence , although not completely outside the psychological frameworks that encase the magazines of the dominant white culture, speak in voices suffused less with blame and resentment and more with gratitude and respect.

This respect born of familiarity and social consciousness is true not only for black writers, but also for many daughters of mothers who worked. Chernin's witnessing of her mother's political work, however distressing it often was in the McCarthy years, enables her to experience her mother as something other than, or something besides, her mother. The competency and skill the mother exhibits cannot help but place her in a more complex light.

The same authors also note the importance of extended kinship systems in defining the black mother/daughter relationship. The

presence of other emotional supports for the daughter—aunts, siblings, grandmothers, fictive kin—may play a role in defusing the "overwhelmingness" of the mother/daughter relation:

The presence of othermothers in Black extended families and the modeling symbolized by community othermothers offer powerful support for the task of teaching girls to resist white perceptions of Black womanhood while appearing to conform to them. In contrast to the isolation of middle class white mother/daughter dyads, Black woman-centered extended family networks foster an early identification with a much wider range of models of Black womanhood which can lead to a greater sense of empowerment in young Black girls.^[18]

Similar patterns of closeness and mutuality have been found by sociologists studying the working-class family, where the mother/daughter relationship is often the most enduring familial relation.

The existence of such different patterns of mother/daughter relating and such different representations of that relating should point to the "constructedness" of that relationship. What we assume to be the issues for mothers and daughters (separation, autonomy, etc.) are themselves products of particular historical times and specific social and cultural groupings: they are not transhistorical or transcultural. Perhaps the whole notion of this relationship as one constructed in conflict is itself a phenomenon limited to white, bourgeois society.

The implications of acknowledging this "constructedness" are critical for the elaboration of a more positive and mutually affirming rendering of the mother/daughter relationship. For example, if a black daughter seems more respectful and appreciative of her mother because she recognizes her strength and competency, then we need to think of how to enhance every mother's sense of competency. In addition, a media world of greater cultural diversity might present a wider and more complex array of representational offerings.

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:

Black women writers acknowledge the need to "recite our matrilineage, to find a ritual to both get back there and preserve it." They testify, explains Mary Helen Washington, "to the existence of a generational conti-

nuity between themselves and their mothers, and they write that continuity into their texts." Imbued as daughters with an inside vision, they write of complex mother-daughter relationships that have no simple equation for friendship, no fail-safe formula for bonding.^[19]

In the fiction of women of color, mothers and daughters bond and break up, love and hate each other (like everyone else in the world), but the writing tends to avoid the pitfalls of an essentialist discourse where the all-powerful mother wreaks havoc on her all-victimized daughter or (less frequently) the beneficent mother gently guides her adoring daughter into the pristine fields of adult femininity. As Alice Walker (and many others) have so eloquently articulated, the "search for our mothers' gardens" is central to the reconstruction of a tradition long repressed by the powers of dominant white culture and thus central not simply to the daughters' understanding of "herself" in a strictly psychological sense, but to the understanding of a history and the vibrant female desires that often are the lone voices of resistance in the wilderness of racism and oppression.

This attention to the maternal voice as historical memory crops up in an early (1973) short story by Alice Walker called "Everyday Use," in which the prodigal daughter comes home to visit her poor, country family. As in much of black women's fiction, the generational conflict in this story is analyzed through the lens of black identity and culture. The eldest daughter has come back from college with a new African identity/name and a similarly politicized boyfriend. This mother/daughter story contains two daughters, and the differences between them—as much as the differences between the mother and daughter—are the subject. In many ways, it is a good daughter/bad daughter story, but the difference from most white fiction is that the good daughter is the one who remains tied to the ways of her mother and her mothers before her, who remains identified with the patterns of "everyday use." The title itself refers to a quilt made by women in the family that the eldest daughter now wants to take back with her to hang on the wall as a "sign" of "authentic" black culture and identity. But the mother has promised it to the younger woman, Maggie, for her wedding, and she will submit it only to everyday use; it will not be a decoration or a sign.

The story begins with the mother waiting for her daughter to

arrive and immediately refers to TV images of families reuniting and the unreality of those images, as the mother indicates in this internal narrative:

You've no doubt seen those TV shows where the child who has "made it" is confronted, as a surprise, by her own mother and father, tottering in weakly from backstage. (A pleasant surprise, of course: What would they do if parent and child came on the show only to curse out and insult each other?) On TV mother and child embrace and smile into each other's faces. Sometimes the mother and father weep, the child wraps them in her arms and leans across the table to tell how she would not have made it without their help. I have seen these programs.

Sometimes I dream a dream in which Dee and I are suddenly brought together on a TV program of this sort. Out of a dark and soft-seated limousine I am ushered into a bright room filled with many people. There I meet a smiling, grey, sporty man like Johnny Carson who shakes my hand and tells me what a fine girl I have. Then we are on the stage and Dee is embracing me with tears in her eyes. She pins on my dress a large orchid, even though she has told me once that she thinks orchids are tacky flowers.

In real life I am a large, big-boned woman with rough, man-working hands. . . . But of course all this does not show on television. I am the way my daughter would want me to be: a hundred pounds lighter, my skin like an uncooked barley pancake. My hair glistens in the hot bright lights. Johnny Carson has much to do to keep up with my quick and witty tongue.^[20]

The presence of the white (distorting) media is significant here because it intrudes on the reality of the mother's life and helps move her daughter away from her, as when Dee/Wangero takes posed Polaroids of her "authentic" poor black family.

When Dee announces that she now calls herself Wangero, her mother accommodates the change, although she keeps using the other name in the narration. She ends up giving the quilt to Maggie, and Dee leaves after telling them they should "do something with themselves." The story ends with mother and Maggie settling in on the porch with snuff, reinforcing the continuity of female presence both in the face of the "radicalized" daughter and in the white media, of which the daughter's presence conjures up images.

A story by Gloria Naylor from her novel The Women of Brewster Place is similar to Walker's "Everyday Use" in its account of a young woman dedicated to her newly found black radicalism, her African

identity, as it comes in conflict with a mother she considers either anachronistic or downright counterrevolutionary. Like the daughter in Walker's story, Kiswana has changed her name to an African one, and that in itself is a source of conflict. Kiswana's mother has married an "educated man" and is living a very middle-class life that Kiswana has left in defiance. She now refuses to take money from her mother and lives in relative poverty in Brewster Place. Her mother comes to visit her unexpectedly. The mother clearly wants her to "do something" with her life—to be upwardly mobile like the family she has come from. Kiswana resists this and proclaims her revolutionary identity in the face of what she perceives to be her mother's acquiescence to the dominant white culture.

They argue, Kiswana defending her life-style and the mother saying that she could make more use of herself is she continued her education and became a lawyer or politician for black rights. In many ways, this scene recreates a classic debate over the relative virtues of working within the system and outside of it and mirrors New Left anger at liberal parents (Kiswana's parents are in the NAACP, which she thinks is a sellout organization). When Kiswana insults her mother by referring to her as a "whiteman's nigger," mom blows up and gives her a fiery lecture about her ancestry and her proud heritage that gets around to the question of the name: "It broke my heart when you changed your name. I gave you my grandmother's name, a woman who bore nine children and educated them all, who held off six white men with a shotgun when they tried to drag off one of her sons to jail for 'not knowing his place.' Yet you needed to reach into an African dictionary to find a name to make you proud." This is very reminiscent of Walker's story, where the mother named Dee for a beloved female relative. Kiswana is devastated by this tirade and recognizes her naivete and arrogance, but she can say nothing until her mother rescues her: "Mrs. Browne lifted Kiswana's face gently. 'And the one lesson I wanted you to learn is not to be afraid to face anyone, not even a crafty old lady like me who can outtalk you.' And she smiled and winked."^[21]

The story ends with them coming together around typical "women's things"—fashion, sexuality, and such. After an unusual conversation about men and sex, Kiswana is amazed at the recognition that they "inhabit the same world": "I'll be damned, the young

woman thought, feeling her whole face tingle. Daddy's into feet! And she looked at the blushing woman on her couch and suddenly realized that her mother had trod through the same universe that she herself was now traveling. Kiswana was breaking no new trails and would eventually end up just two feet away on that couch. She stared at the woman she had been and was to become."^[22] The uncertain mother/daughter reconciliation is thus arrived at through a historical and political history that locates their "sameness" in a shared world of struggle and femaleness. Their shared identity as women is always placed within a context of their shared reality as black in a white culture, however they may differ in interpreting both those contexts, both those identities.

Meridian , a 1976 novel by Alice Walker, also examines the mother/daughter relationship through the lens of political struggle. This story of a woman living through and past the civil rights movement is relevant here even though it is not a "mother/daughter" story in any explicit sense. The main character, Meridian, does reject her mother, as occurs in many white feminist novels, but she expresses it in such a different way as to render that rejection both more complex and more poignant. The fact that the daughter's remembrance of the mother is referenced through the civil rights movement renders this emotional turmoil differently:

Meridian found, when she was not preoccupied with the Movement, that her thoughts turned with regularity and intensity to her mother, on whose account she endured wave after wave of an almost primeval guilt. She imagined her mother in church, in which she had invested all that was still energetic in her life, praying for her daughter's soul, and yet, having no concern, no understanding of her daughter's life whatsoever; but Meridian did not condemn her for this. Away from her mother, Meridian thought of her as Black Motherhood personified, and of that great institution she was in terrible awe, comprehending as she did the horror, the narrowing of perspective, for mother and for child, it had invariably meant. Meridian felt as if her body, growing frailer every day under the stress of her daily life, stood in the way of a reconciliation between her mother and that part of her own soul her mother could, perhaps, love.^[23]

Here Walker speaks to the institutionalization of motherhood in a way that recognizes both the ossifying nature of the cultural stereotype of "black motherhood" and the harsh realities embedded within it. Her mother doesn't understand her rejection of reli-

gion, doesn't understand her politics, but Meridian's feelings about the ever widening gap between them are expressed in almost neutral and matter-of-fact tones, as when Meridian has rejected the church that remains so fundamental to her mother's identity: "Her mother's love was gone, withdrawn, and there were conditions to be met before it could be returned. Conditions Meridian was never able to meet."^[24]

Throughout the story, as Meridian thinks back through the mother, she parallels her own grief at her mother's unlovingness with a neutral yet detailed account of her mother's sacrifices and the price they both paid for the inescapability of motherhood. Here Walker states the realization of her mother's own loss within the confines of motherhood and marriage, but she says it matter of factly, never referring back to herself as the one who suffered because her mother shouldn't have had kids: "Her mother was not a woman who should have had children. She was capable of thought and growth and action only if unfettered by the needs of dependents, or the demands, requirements, of a husband." Here again she comprehends with simple clarity the demise of her mother's independence as a teacher once submerged into the myth of family life: "She could never forgive her community, her family, his family, the whole world, for not warning her against children."^[25]

This sense of the mother's life as circumscribed by the dictates of family and husband is a familiar one to feminist fiction, both white and black. But the difference here is that the daughter is chronicling her mother's sorrow; and although the effect on the daughter is implicit, this chronicler is also able to move away from blame and toward a politicized understanding: "When her mother asked, without glancing at her, 'Have you stolen anything?' a stillness fell over Meridian and for seconds she could not move. The question literally stopped her in her tracks." Here we see the classic feminist daughter's dilemma of having, by her very existence, cut short her mother's possibilities. Yet Meridian never questions the reality of her mother's "serenity" being "stolen" and thus validates both that reality and her own in her knowledge that it was not her fault: "It was for stealing her mother's serenity, for shattering her mother's emerging self, that Meridian felt guilty from the very first, though she was unable to understand how this could possibly be her fault."^[26]

It is also important that Meridian recounts her mother's history:

how Meridian's grandmother went without and struggled to make sure her mother got educated and how she rewarded her mother's endurance by becoming a schoolteacher.^[27] The sense of endurance is passed on to Meridian:

When her mother talked about her childhood Meridian wept and clung to her hands, wishing with all her heart she had not been born to this already overburdened woman. . . . It seemed to Meridian that her legacy from her mother's endurance, her unerring knowledge of rightness and her pursuit of it through all distractions, was one she would never be able to match. It never occurred to her that her mother's and her grandmother's extreme purity of life was compelled by necessity. They had not lived in an age of choice.^[28]

Finally, Meridian comes to realize the importance of simple endurance in the face of racism and poverty and is able beautifully to reverse the theme of "surpassing the mother" that is so prevalent in both white fiction and white theory: "To Meridian, her mother was a giant. She had never perceived her in any other way. . . . Besides, she had already forgiven her mother for anything she had ever done to her or might do, because to her, Mrs. Hill had persisted in bringing them all (the children, the husband, the family, the race) to a point far beyond where she, in her mother's place, her grandmother's place, her great-grandmother's place, would have stopped."^[29]

Walker's consistent locatedness is mirrored in the work of other women writers of color. Even Paule Marshall's classic 1959 novel Brown Girls, Brownstones, in which mother/daughter discord is visceral and central, never lapses into the psychological whining that has marked so many similar tales of struggle. As Gloria Wade-Gayles writes:

The cold, harsh world of racism beyond the community of brownstones gives Selina a larger view of her mother. She does not accept Silla's materialistic values, but she understands the mother's desire for control and power. Silla held the reins tightly because she knew first-hand the vulnerability of being Black, female and Barbadian in white America. She had been suffocatingly overprotective and domineering because she wanted a different reality for Selina.^[30]

Toni Morrison's Beloved, of course, offers up a reading of the mother/daughter relationship that is precisely so horrifying to the extent it deconstructs typical renderings by its radical "located-

ness." Morrison's own words speak most accurately of the implications of this kind of story telling:

I'm just interested in showing what is hazardous to us and what happens to women when things are carried to an extreme. I want to present the dangers so that we as women can find the balance. For Sethe for instance the condition under which she has lived ie. slavery is such that when her children are threatened with re-enslavement, murder becomes an act of mother love. "I took my babies and put them somewhere they'd be safe." Motherhood was her identity. She lived in a world that tried to deny her responsibility for her children. So she protected them with the ferocity of a lioness. That is the dilemma of the novel.^[31]

And Morrison's earlier work speaks to the impossibility of representing mothers and daughters along lines that adopt a mainstream dichotomous approach of "bonding" versus "separation." Morrison's mothers and daughters are often characterized by what appears to be maternal "abandonment" and coldness; yet (particularly in the case of Beloved ) this seeming rejection often signals the depth of the mother's love. The exigencies of oppression help construct a multitude of survival mechanisms, often manifesting themselves in a toughness that less aware daughters might read as a repudiation of maternal love but that these writers interpret as a sign of womanly struggle in a world that has repudiated their very existence.

"Shou So Deep": Mah Jong Mothers and Walkman Daughters

Amy Tan's 1989 bestseller, The Joy Luck Club, exemplifies with particular force the rich possibilities for mother/daughter representations that these earlier texts have already indicated. This novel recounts the stories of four Chinese mothers and their assimilated Chinese-American daughters. The mothers, immigrants to San Francisco, have for forty years maintained a regular meeting where they play mah jong, eat elaborate meals, and share their lives with each other. The telling of the stories is inaugurated at the death of one of the mothers.

The book is divided into four sections, each beginning with a Chinese parable concerning mothers and daughters. Each section contains four stories. In the first section, the daughter of the dead Suyuan Woo recounts her entry into Joy Luck (the mahjong club),

and the three remaining mothers tell their stories. The second two sections contain daughters' tales, each one ending with the story of Jing-mei, daughter of the missing member. The final section returns to the mothers, with Jing-mei at the end.

The structure of The Joy Luck Club is important because it moves away from the linear chronological model that has lent itself so easily to the dual tropes of "surpassing the mother" and the daughter as repository. It substitutes a much more dialogic mode in which the often suppressed voices of the mothers emerge with full force: they tell their own stories, their own bitterness. This dialogic mode also allows for the full and various experiences of both mothers and daughters to emerge in ways that implicitly argue against any simple construction of blame.

This is not to say that these stories are without pain and anger; on the contrary, they are often full of bitterness and misunderstanding on both sides. But simply allowing the mothers' voices to speak of their lives and their understanding of their daughters places the reader in different emotional territory. In Waverly Jong's story, we feel the huge chasm that so typifies the experience of first- and second-generation immigrants, but we also see the attempt to know the other, her world, her life, her options, her ways of living in the world that both mother and daughter inhabit. After a long and confusing battle with her mother, Waverly is able to express her own desire for selfhood without simultaneously negating her mother's:

I saw what I had been fighting for: It was for me, a scared child, who had run away a long time ago to what I had imagined was a safer place. And hiding in this place, behind my invisible barriers, I knew what lay on the other side: Her side attacks. Her secret weapons. Her uncanny ability to find my weakest spots. But in the brief instant that I had peered over the barriers I could finally see what was really there: an old woman, a work for her armor, a knitting needle for her sword, getting a little crabby as she waited patiently for her daughter to invite her in.^[32]

In the story of An-mei Hsu (one of the mothers), we get a vision of generational rebirth as she recounts an event from her life in China that involves the death of her beloved grandmother, Popo. An-mei's own mother had left her, and she had been raised by this grandmother. But her mother has now come home to take care of the dying Popo, and what ensues creates in An-mei an appreciation of her mother that is far removed from the idealized images she had

kept alive in her fantasy. As the child An-mei watches her stranger/mother minister to her dying grandmother, she comes to know of a daughter's love:

I saw my mother on the other side of the room. Quiet and sad. She was cooking a soup, pouring herbs and medicines into the steaming pot. And then I saw her pull up her sleeve and pull out a sharp knife. She put this knife on the softest part of her arm. I tried to close my eyes but could not.

And then my mother cut a piece of meat from her arm. Tears poured from her face and blood spilled to the floor.

My mother took her flesh and put it in the soup. She cooked magic in the ancient tradition to try to cure her mother this one last time.

. . . Even though I was young, I could see the pain of the flesh and the worth of the pain.

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 forget what is in your bones. You must peel off your skin, and that of your mother, and her mother before her. Until there is nothing. No scar, no skin, no flesh.^[33]

In a later story, Ying-ying St. Clair, another mother, details from the mother's position the gap that separates mother and daughter:

For all these years I kept my mouth closed so selfish desires would not fall out. And because I remained quiet for so long now my daughter does not hear me. She sits by her fancy swimming pool and hears only her Sony Walkman, her cordless phone, her big, important husband asking her why they have charcoal and no lighter fluid.

All these years I kept my true nature hidden, running along like a small shadow so nobody could catch me. And because I moved so secretly now my daughter does not see me. She sees a list of things to buy, her checkbook out of balance, her ashtray sitting crooked on a straight table.

And I want to tell her this: We are lost, she and I, unseen and not seeing, unheard and not hearing, unknown by others.^[34]

This piece poignantly encapsulates the experience of so many mothers, afraid to speak, to give voice to their self, lest their "selfish desires fall out." The daughter, now unable to see or hear the mother who has kept herself so tightly wrapped in, sees and hears only the sad detritus of an assimilated suburban marriage. Ying-ying goes on to tell of how she lost herself, thus giving depth and history to the mother's hiding and absence and giving voice to her own desire to be found—by her own daughter as well as by her-

self—echoing here Waverly's moment of understanding of her own mother's desire to be "invited in" by the daughter.

This sense of mothers and daughters finding each other is treated in Tan's book in a deeply antiromantic vein, implicitly challenging traditional (Western, patriarchal) notions of the autonomous self who struggles for her independence. The story of Lindo Jong, Waverly's mother, exemplifies this beautifully. Waverly wants to go to China for her second honeymoon, and her mother has been questioning her ability to fit into Chinese society. Lindo muses on the incommensurability of "American circumstances and Chinese character" and wishes for her daughter the knowledge that "Chinese thinking is best":

No, this kind of thinking didn't stick to her. She was too busy chewing gum, blowing bubbles bigger than her cheeks. Only that kind of thinking stuck.

"Finish your coffee," I told her yesterday. "Don't throw your blessings away."

"Don't be so old-fashioned, Ma," she told me, finishing her coffee down the sink. "I'm my own person."

And I think, How can she be her own person? When did I give her up?^[35]

This next scene, where Waverly has taken her mother to "Mr. Rory" to get her hair done before the wedding, points out again the mother's sadness at the implications of the daughter's vehement assimilation: her denial of the mother's reality and presence. When Waverly treats her like a "dumb foreigner" in the hairdresser's, translating for her, speaking for her, Lindo is deeply saddened: "I smile. I use my American face. That's the face Americans think is Chinese, the one they cannot understand. But inside I am becoming ashamed. I am ashamed she is ashamed. Because she is my daughter and I am proud of her, and I am her mother but she is not proud of me."^[36] What a reversal this scene is! Typically, we hear the beleaguered daughters bemoaning the fact that they will never be able to please their disapproving mothers, never be able to make them proud. Here, instead, we have a mother expressing the simple desire to be known and admired by her daughter.

In all these stories, and in so many more, the difference emerges both from the novelists' cultural choices and from their personal/political location. One of the issues that arises here has to do with

the question of address and narrative in various mother/daughter discourses. For example, what are the implications of a narrative that tells of the mother's life through the eyes of the daughter? First, are these daughter-narrated tales more prevalent than mother-narrated ones? Second, if the mother is narrating, are the same issues and themes apparent (e.g., blame, judgment on value of life, etc.)? In other words, it is important to distinguish exactly who is telling the story of a mother and daughter. Is it the mother or daughter, or is it from another (perhaps male) point of view? How does this shape the narrative itself? Are there ever narratives that don't speak from either the mother's or the daughter's position?

This raises the important question of whether feminism has allowed the voices of both mothers and daughters to emerge. It has clearly allowed the daughter's (mostly negative and complaining) voice to emerge; yet it is not clear if the mother's voice is still being submerged under various ideologies of motherhood and the overpowering figure of psychological explanation.

In film, too, this question of narrative address is central. In Mildred Pierce, Mildred narrates the story to the detective, but whose point of view is really shown? In Now, Voyager, the doctor clearly is the one who pronounces the sentence on the relationship. Charlotte's mother's point of view is hardly acknowledged. In a contemporary film such as Terms of Endearment, with its alternating and paralleled scenes, are we at last getting to see, in some sense, both sides of the story?

The differences between these two discursive movements should by now be apparent. The work of these women writers of color should point to the possibilities of feminist representations that construct a dialectic of mother and daughter within the context of a social and political world in which both of their lives have been circumscribed to a certain degree. It is this rootedness in a world, in a history, that allows for these more complex and empowering representations to emerge, a rootedness that is perhaps an imperative for minority writers in a way that it is not for white writers:

According to white female interpretations of motherhood . . . The "good" mother in a sexist society teaches her daughter to conform "to female stereotypes such as passivity, spirituality, or irrationality." These interpretations do not apply to the mother-daughter relationships in the Black women's novels we have examined. Because Black women have not stood

as fragile figurines on pedestals white feminists seek to dismantle, they have a decidedly different approach to rearing daughters. Quite the contrary, they socialize their daughters to be independent, strong and self-confident. . . . we want the truth of our mothers' lives, even if those truths are sometimes "cruel enough to stop the blood." . . . We dare today to search for sisterhood because our mothers, our "sister warrior(s)" taught us the beauty of struggle.^[37]

But this does not imply that similar choices could not be made with equal vigor by white feminists eager to relinquish the power of being the repository of their mothers' lives for the much more complex—and mutually empowering—location of fellow-traveling chronicler.