Chapter Seven—
Whose Life Is It Anyway?:
Fatal Retractions in the Backlash Eighties

Mother: "When Reenie grows up she's going to have a profession if I have to grind myself into dust in that dime store."
Daughter: "I don't want a profession! I want to get married and have babies like Aunt Marie."
Mother: "You'll do what I say. . . . A woman has to have a profession!"
—"Mother and Daughter: The Loving War," 1980

In July 1989, the Supreme Court handed down the most regressive decision regarding women's lives in decades. Although Roe v. Wade , the historic 1973 decision legalizing abortion, was not completely struck down, it was dealt a blow from which it may never recover. Predictions are that, in these next terms of court, Roe will actually be overturned. Two additional Supreme Court decisions have added to the crisis and effectively limited access, "gagged" publicly funded doctors, and created a climate of fear and hostility. Falling as the 1989 decision did on the day before America's great annual hurrah of freedom and equality, it rendered July 4 more than a little ironic.

The eighties were indeed a strange decade. We undoubtedly were and still are in the midst of a tremendous backlash against the women's movement and civil and human rights of all shades. The 1989 Supreme Court decision was the final chapter in a decade-long right-wing agenda that whittled away at the already dwindling welfare state and sent the message to many Americans that if you aren't a middle-class white male, you don't matter. Homelessness, rampant ghetto drug use, destruction of the environment, deunionization of industry, and feminization of poverty are all the watchwords of a society increasingly defined by its harsh assertion

of the rights of so few over those of so many. Yet feminist cultural practice has exploded, with women's writing taking its place within the established lists of best-sellers and Pulitzer Prize winners.

Perhaps this very disjuncture best describes what contemporary social critics have chosen to call the "postmodern condition." Perhaps this very lack of continuity, this absence of a sense of some wholeness and coherency to an "epoch" or even a decade, describes so palpably what it means to live in the ruins of modernism, in this strangely confusing fin de siècle. If "Father Knows Best" made sense in the world of 1950s domesticity and the politics of containment, then what does "Cagney and Lacey" mean in the age of clinic bombings and the erosion of the Civil Rights Act? Perhaps the defining feature of our era is that there is no defining feature.

One's sense of the movement of history is thrown up for grabs when faced with this: my mother's generation grew up without the right to abortion, felt the special terror of sex that accompanies that reality, knew what it meant to make furtive phone calls, drive women to dark anonymous buildings, hope for the best. And my mother and her generation fought to change that bleak reality, to provide women with at least some control over their bodies, over their sex.

My generation and I have grown up with this hard-won right, accepting it as a right, much as we knew we had a right to vote, even if we didn't exercise it all the time. We came to our sexual maturity without that particular and potent fear of sex. Now, like our mothers, we have witnessed a reversal in our lifetimes: this time not toward freedom, but a sharp turn toward domination. Are we destined to repeat our mothers' labor, to engage once more in a battle we thought they had already won for us? And what of our daughters? Is this miserable retrenchment our final resting place after twenty years of feminism? Is this frustrating "holding the line" what some call "postfeminism"?

As the latest Court decision assures us, our political era is hardly feminist, much less "postfeminist," as some contemporary critics would have it. If one of the cornerstones of feminist practice and thought has been the pro-choice movement and the concomitant knowledge that the heart of patriarchy is the control over women's bodies and reproduction, then we are most assuredly moving back into a "prefeminist" era. There are other indicators of this as well.

A Washington woman named Elizabeth Morgan, for example, sat in a jail cell for two years for refusing to obey the (male) judge and reveal the whereabouts of her young daughter, whom she claimed, with strong evidence, had been repeatedly abused by her exhusband. For protecting her daughter, she was incarcerated. A parade was held in honor of her ex-husband, her daughter's father, a rapist. But another woman in New York (Hedda Nussbaum) was condemned by the public and feminist writers alike for not protecting her child, for "allowing" the abuse to escalate until death released both mother and daughter from their father/captor. People magazine printed both stories, defending both women.

What, then, to say of mothers and daughters in the 1980s and early 1990s? First, the representations of the mother/daughter relationship have not escaped this overwhelming sense of imploding contradictions. There has never been so much material on mothers and daughters. Although sitcom and series television, except for that glorious interlude in the mid-1970s, maintains a benign indifference to the subject, mothers and daughters have positively exploded as a media subject. Talk show superhosts Phil Donahue and Oprah Winfrey do regular specials on mothers and daughters, dragging out dirty linen, amusing anecdotes, and glib truisms. Cable stations HBO and Lifetime produce their own movies on mothers and daughters, replay network movies of the week, and air smarmy Mother's Day specials urging viewers to write in with their "mom of the week." Prime-time television annually airs the "Mother-Daughter Beauty Pageant," thus firmly ensconcing mothers and daughters in the popular rituals of our time.^[1] Mothers and daughters become a trusty topic for women's magazines and pop psychology, and film treatments emerge again after the long hiatus of the 1960s and 1970s. The problem now, as opposed to in earlier periods of history, cannot be so simply characterized by absence and lack: the women's movement has irrevocably pushed this long shadowed relationship into the cultural and ideological spotlight.

Although this new presence is heartening, it needs to be examined carefully. As we have seen in Chapters 5 and 6, the specifically feminist discussion of this relationship has been deeply problematic, often relying on narrowly psychological ways of understanding and knowing. Looking now at more mainstream images of mothers and daughters, one is struck by the contiguous nature of these pop-

ular images and the feminist images. They are not "worlds apart," but indeed often apply quite similar frameworks to this particular relationship. This points to the real and substantial effect the women's movement and feminist thought have had on our culture. The impact of the women's movement becomes apparent in the women's magazines of the 1970s, TV sitcoms like "Maude," and films like An Unmarried Woman . This intersection between feminism and mainstream culture—often involving cooptation and vulgarization as well as celebration and popularization—is apparent in every one of the media analyzed here.

Because of this significant overlap and the difficulty in defining what is specifically "feminist," troublesome research questions plagued this chapter. Do I include here (or in Chapters 5 and 6) women writers whose work is popular, assuredly mainstream, yet who clearly address questions and issues raised originally by feminists? There is no simple delineation of what is "feminist theory." However, I have chosen to include here work by writers such as Colette Dowling, Evelyn Bassoff, Ann Grizzle, and Paula Caplan and Ms. magazine articles with the rest of the women's magazines because I believe these popular texts are directed toward the "general public" and not toward any specifically feminist readership (with the possible exception of Ms. ). Therefore, my choice here is largely based on the imputed readership, a readership that marks these texts out as significantly different from those discussed in the previous two chapters.

Indeed, content is less the issue than is availability and style, for I argue that many of these popular texts written by women end up at the same psychological resting place as do the more sophisticated and "academic" works of explicitly feminist writers like Chernin and Chodorow. The exception is the work of Paula Caplan, which constitutes a valiant attempt to counteract the mother-blame so prevalent in our culture.^[2]

This resting place is not a completely unified one, although it is dominated by the object relations school of psychology made newly respectable by Nancy Chodorow and popularized by any number of writers. I previously claimed that the defining feature of our postmodern era is the lack of any single defining feature. To a great extent, I think this is true. But the representations of mothers and daughters in the 1980s and early 1990s do present some striking

themes that differ sharply from both their early feminist 1970s predecessors and the more class based discourses of the 1930s and the psychological and domestic discourses of the 1940s and 1950s.

The historical movement has been toward the increasing definition of this relationship in solely psychological terms. Yet the women's movement of the 1970s provoked a break from this overwhelming restrictiveness, and there emerged representations and discourses that had as their referent not eternal psychological "truths" but rather the newfound specificity of male domination and the various configurations of women's oppression and struggle. Mothers and daughters can never again be completely relegated to the psychological closet. Nevertheless, this backlash decade has generated a new set of (all too familiar) discourses that continues to construct and imagine the relationship of mothers and daughters as a fundamentally psychological one.

Loving, Hating, Letting Go: Eternal Truths and Inevitable Conflicts

A 1983 article in Cosmopolitan states in its title what I take to be the new discursive structure of the mother/daughter relationship: "Mothers & Daughters: The Eternal Love-Hate Relationship." The author claims, "Women spend their most valiant moments breaking away from their mothers in order to survive." Although the idea of mothers and daughters in a contentious relationship is hardly new, the discourse of the 1980s that structures it in terms of an inevitability helps produce a relationship constructed in conflict, where the mother and her daughter are depicted as eternal combatants in a bloody and unavoidable battle. The issues in this battle repeat the psychological litany: independence, autonomy, individuation, separation. As Madeline Pober notes: "Women do sever the maternal connection, and the process can be violent—for rebellion, if it is to result in true autonomy, often entails watching the mother you love suffer pain and confusion because you choose to live a life alien to her."^[3] Although we have seen these themes in earlier periods, they have never been so strong or so all-encompassing as in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The infamous Wylie years were equally nasty; then, however, the concern was rarely with the effect of mother on daughter, but rather with what was understood to be the

much more significant effect of smothering moms on weakened and passive boys and men.

These contemporary phrases, and the psychological theories they reflect, are left to explain the totality of the mother/daughter relationship. Except for the rare feminist exceptions, discussed in Chapters 5 and 6, this thematic of antinomies (love/hate, bond/separate, enmeshment/autonomy) runs through almost all the cultural material on mothers and daughters in the 1980s. Just a glance at the titles of several magazine articles illustrates this theme: "You and Your Problem Mother," "Mothers and Daughters Who Can't Get Along," "Your Mother, Your First Love—Can You Ever Get Over Her?" "Are You Still Trying to Please Your Mother?" "Should You Divorce Your Mother?" "Daughters and Mothers: Making Peace, Making Friends," "Are You a Better Mother Than Your Mother?" Popular books are no exception, with titles such as Mothers and Daughters: Loving and Letting Go; Mother Love, Mother Hate: Breaking Dependent Love Patterns in Family Relationships; Mothermania: A Psychological Study of Mother/Daughter Conflict; and Colette Dowling's Perfect Women, whose first chapter is entitled "Mothers and Daughters: A Shared Disorder." The list goes on. If the books and articles don't explicitly explore the inevitable conflict paradigm, they offer homilies of togetherness based on overcoming the inevitable conflict and becoming "friends."

The theme of mothers and daughters as friends is prominent. Almost all happy and healthy mother/daughter relationships are described in terms of friendship (e.g., "She's not just my mother, she's my friend"). As Jean Marzollo writes in the May 1983 edition of Mademoiselle, adult mother/daughter relationships can be urged along by these two practical hints: "Whenever it might be helpful, try to forget that the two of you are related [and] don't say anything to your mother that you wouldn't say to a friend."^[4] In other words, in order to be "friends" with your mother, you must disassociate yourself from the reality of your "relatedness" to her. In addition, it implies that the mother/daughter relationship is not "naturally" mutual but rather "naturally" conflictual. The discourse of friendship is mobilized precisely because we have so much difficulty conceptualizing mother/daughter mutuality and reciprocity within the terms of their own relationship, within the terms of familial relating.

Even articles that set out as critical of the inevitable conflict paradigm end up repeating many of its terms. For example, an article by Grace Baruch, Rosalind Barnett, and Caryl Rivers attempts to provide alternative data to counter the new wave of mother bashing that Nancy Friday made acceptable (especially to women) in My Mother/My Self . The authors acknowledge, "The American mother has not had an easy time of it over the last few generations. In the 1940s she was roundly charged with 'Momism'—of being overprotective and too indulgent towards her children. . . . Then, when she looked to her own life, bending over backward not to 'smother,' new experts appeared to tell her she might be causing 'alienation' by too little mothering." Nancy Friday herself is taken to task for seeing mothers "as being locked in mortal combat with her daughters." They report, on the contrary, "that the majority of relationships between adult women and their mothers are characterized by warmth, companionship and compassion."^[5]

What Baruch, Barnett, and Rivers give with one hand, they take away with the other, for this alternative testimony is placed within a developmental framework that allows for the positive interpretation while conceding the "truth" of the opposing position that stresses separation, struggle, and the quest for autonomy. Lest anyone worry that this data indicate "that all the mother-daughter angst we have been hearing about is nonexistent" or that it is all "a tempest in a teapot," the authors are quick to stress that they are speaking primarily of adult mothers and daughters, where the inevitable battle has already been waged. By using a simplified framework borrowed from Chodorow, they are able to argue that, on the contrary, "it is not surprising that many younger women seem locked in ego-conflict with their mothers" because they are not yet able to see them as less than "giants." In claiming that the adult relationship is different, they thus rely on the inherent conflict model: "But by age 35 . . . most women have completed this process. The inherent conflict in many mother-daughter relationships need not signify a permanent, ongoing battle; it may simply be a part of that difficult process of growing up."^[6] Although the framework has been modified to portray the battle in time-limited and developmental terms, the fact remains that the battle metaphor, and the idea of inherency itself, remains unaltered.

This idea of inherent struggle is almost always connected with its

developmental result: separation. The "loving and letting go" motif emerges in 1980s popular culture with a vengeance, cropping up in practically my entire sample. Evelyn Bassoff's 1988 Mothers and Daughters: Loving and Letting Go states this explicitly in her first sentence: "Although most love relationships are a coming together, the love relationship between a mother and her adolescent daughter requires that each take leave of the other." As much as possible, this "loving and letting go" theme is naturalized so as to appear as the eternal psychological truth: "Maternity has two seemingly opposite aspects: A mother's tasks are to create a unity with her child and then . . . to dissolve it. Yet, as psychoanalyst Helen Deutsch wrote, most mothers suffer as they cut the psychic umbilical cord that ties them to their children; the wish to preserve this tie is inherent in motherliness and its renunciation is one of the major challenges of motherhood."^[7]

Here we get a hint of a very powerful theme in both feminist and nonfeminist writing of recent years: the "natural" move of mothers toward "symbiotic unity" with their daughters. In order to maintain the separation battle motif, mother must be understood as inherently reluctant to "let go": she naturally years to keep the daughter her "little girl," or, as Pober puts it, "Mothers strive for fusion, while their offspring seek disengagement."^[8]

Not only must mothers separate from their adolescent daughters, but they must cut the "ties that bind" from their own mothers: "In order to realize the full possibilities of her individual life . . . the middle-aged mother must not only separate from her adolescent daughter, she must also complete her separation from her aging mother. It is, after all, only as mothers and daughters grow apart, that each becomes a full woman." This final line speaks volumes: a woman's selfhood is here defined as her ability to "grow apart" from another woman. Not only does this define feminine selfhood negatively, but the only positive affirmation of selfhood comes through an identification with men. Bassoff again reiterates explicitly what is implicit in so much of the ideological framework of separation: that the end result of separation from mother is not only "autonomy" or "maturity" but, more exactly, identification with men: "As the little girl grows into young womanhood, her awakening sexuality threatens the exclusive mother/daughter bond. . . . As a young girl passes into womanhood, she leaves the

open sunlit world of childhood and moves into the mysterious dark world of love and passion. She leaves her mother behind to meet her lovers."^[9] This was, after all, Nancy Friday's bottom line: that ties to mother retard, distort, and inhibit the full realization of male-centered femininity.

Writing in Woman's Day in 1981, Janet Chase spells this out clearly and adds to the traditional separation motif a dimension of mother's lost opportunities that is clearly ideological runoff from the feminist critique of domesticity: "One of the hardest things a mother must do . . . is to allow her daughter to grow up. . . . And that brings up an important issue: The woman who has ignored other-than-mother dimensions of her self-image may well have a much tougher time letting her daughter separate and grow up."^[10] The double bind here is extraordinary: mother cannot "let go" properly if she is too domestic (only a mother); yet that very ideology of woman as wife/mother was precisely the one she was reared on. The difference here between the Wyliesque version of "momism" and this 1980s version is that here mother's culpability lies not in her attempt to be too "masculine" (e.g., not in her position as worker) but rather the opposite: Mother is now made into "mom" because of her lack of a more engaged and social life. In either scenario, maternal culpability and neurosis are unquestioned.

This theme of the mother/daughter relationship as a "love/hate" one is typified in a 1988 work by family therapist Ann Grizzle. As with many other texts and articles, much is said in the title itself: Mother Love, Mother Hate: Breaking Dependent Love Patterns in Family Relationships . The move here, as in so much of the literature, is from a more inclusive discussion of "family relationships" (which could include fathers, for example) to a specific and definite location: mother. Grizzle's book, relying on her own experience as a family therapist and using clinical anecdotes, describes "loved and loving people" who have "real and even crippling problems" caused by a family pattern "in which necessary, caring love isn't balanced by the encouragement of independence." In other words, she is speaking here of "overprotectiveness." Grizzle then goes on to describe the basic ingredients of the dependent love pattern, which includes a mother who is overinvolved and a father who is under-involved. Although Grizzle, like so many of her colleagues, is quick to point out that no one person is to blame for this unhealthy family

pattern, all her examples are of "overinvolved" mothers and their correspondingly infantilized daughters or sons. Even the test she gives to ascertain if the reader is an overdependent child contains explicit references to actions relating only to the mother, such as "You secretly worry about what Mom would do if she didn't have you to fuss over" or "Your mother-in-law, or your mother, is more in charge of your life than you are." The so-called underinvolved father only signifies a mild "lack," but the overinvolved mother is the creator of the dysfunction itself. The cure, as usual, is more father and less mother: "The greatest challenge for adult children who have grown up in loving but over-caring homes is to break free of the Dependent Love Pattern. . . . To achieve this goal, you first must learn to 'leave' home. Most likely, you're too closely tied to your mother; you lack a deep relationship with your father."^[11]

Victoria Secunda (whose book, When You and Your Mother Can't Be Friends: Resolving the Most Complicated Relationship in Your Life, comes replete with appreciative jacket blurbs by none other than Dr. Spock) continues down the love/hate road by telling us, "What we know of love we learned from our mothers [and] what we know of hate we learned from her as well. Love and hate are the tandem cadences of the mother-daughter connection."^[12]

Along with this "love-hate" relationship theme is the ever present ideology of separation and the need for the daughter to claim herself as an "independent person." This is often placed in the context of a scenario that depicts mother as clinging to daughter as little girl and daughter as struggling to be free of the weight of maternal overinvolvement. Almost all "friction" between mothers and daughters is explained using this one narrative strategy. Theodore Rubin, writing in Ladies Home Journal, responds to a daughter who complains that she and her mother have been fighting a lot lately and her mother has not been as supportive as she used to be. Working only from that small bit of information about the two women, the doctor makes this pronouncement: "It's no coincidence that suddenly there's friction between you and your mother. The reasons are complex. For one, your mother is obviously having trouble seeing you as a separate person. Like many mothers, she's made you into an idealized version of herself—and then feels compelled to compete with you."^[13] He goes on to invoke the daughter's need to "cut the umbilical cord" that ties her to a mother who, he

claims, is motivated by overidentification as well as envy of the daughter's success.

A 1986 article in McCall's called "How To Get Over Your Mother" visualizes this idea perfectly. The picture introducing the article is of a "dress for success" young woman with a rope around her waist, trying to cut it with a pair of scissors. At the other end of the rope—holding on with all her might—is an older woman dressed stereotypically like a housewife. Mother is not only demonized in this 1980s version, but made pathetic as well: we are to pity these mothers whose own lives have been so paltry, so lacking, and who thus feel the need to drain us of our young, vibrant life, suck from us not only the juices of our youth but the excitement of our careers: "Besides, when your mother undermines your confidence . . . your intelligence . . . and your diet . . . you know it has more to do with her than you. Emotionally, you lurch into a fetal position, but intellectually you understand she's just competing, compensating and trying to maintain her control."^[14]

Author Mary McHugh echoes this statement when she notes, "Pulling away can be painful, but not until we break old parent-child patterns can we get free of Mom's judgment and control . . . then find the way to a new and better understanding." She goes on to clue us in on mom's failed life and remind us of her more halcyon days: "You may see your mother as a slightly overweight lady wearing Love That Pink lipstick, but she was once like you—sharp and smart and ready to conquer the world. Then came marriage and a family. . . . Somewhere along the way, she began to let life happen to her instead of grabbing at experiences. Rediscover the young woman she once was. You'll probably like her."^[15]

How far is this from the work discussed in Chapter 5? Is this really that different from the explicitly feminist work of writers like Eichenbaum and Orbach and Chernin? The popular discourses are now borrowing from feminism to put a new spin on maternal culpability. Many women's magazine articles and popular nonfiction of the eighties hide their retro sentiments under the guise of a glib feminism. Indeed, numerous authors, such as Evelyn Bassoff in her new book, Mothering Ourselves: Help and Healing for Adult Daughters, are quick to name and condemn the mother-blame that permeated so much prefeminist literature. Yet the motif of mother as inherently damaging to daughter's psyche is (perhaps more

obliquely) still invoked, even if we are now urged (in the name of feminism?) to "forgive her." Popular pundit Colette Dowling, no feminist, to be sure, locates her tired separation theme within a vaguely defined milieu of feminism that sounds suspiciously like Chernin's theme of the "oppressed mother/liberated daughter": "Girls today are confused by the contradictions in their mothers' lives, and by the discrepancy between what mother says and what she does . Mothers still give double messages, and the daughters perceive very early that for all her bows to feminism, mother is far from free. Rather, she is anxious, self-absorbed, and often intimidated by daddy."^[16]

Many of these books and articles are quick to point out their aversion to "mother bashing" and to note the role of the daughter in constructing a more positive relationship with her mother. Nevertheless, one such article by Elizabeth Tener still frames the relationship in terms of a timeless and primordial bond ("the tie to mother is primitive and profound") and thus sets the narrative stage for the (necessary) "process of cutting this emotional cord."^[17] In the true tradition of self-help literature, the author lists the different types of problem mothers (including all the usual suspects of dominating, infantilizing, dependent, etc., but with the added attraction of the "unliberated" mother) and then offers a seven-step "Blueprint for Improving Mother/Daughter Relationships."

A more concise version of this can be found in Barbara Creaturo's article, where she proposes a neat two-step approach to "making friends with Mom." The first step is "Liberation from Mother's Power," and the second is "Forgiveness of her Mistakes."^[18]Mademoiselle author Annie Gottlieb wonders about "Two women . . . bonded forever by blood and love, rivalry and rage. She gave you life, taught you how to be a woman. Can you ever forgive her?" Never fear, that primordial bond will win out: "No matter whether you overidentify with your mother, reject her ways or strike a happy balance, one fact remains: Your womanhood is a unique, complex answer to your mother's—a lifelong argument full of love and anger, the last word of which is 'Yes.'"^[19]

Mothers are now seen to be "poignant" in their inability to "love and let go," their inability to follow the scripts written for them. Aimee Ball, writing in Mademoiselle , describes this poignancy, and her language—that of violence and death—is telling here: "There

is a poignancy that comes from the recognition of how desperately our mothers still need us to be their children. We forge our emotional distance early on, killing them with small stab wounds, and then we make the job complete with physical distance—a distance they are constantly trying to close up."^[20]

The Perils of Enmeshment and the Rapture of Separation

The metaphor of separation as a violence, a wounding to mother, is no accident. Indeed, it is a defining feature of contemporary images, from the lighthearted "Rhoda" episodes in which the daughters consistently employ battle metaphors to describe their negotiations with their interfering mother to 1980s magazines where this metaphor reveals its ugly underside. Once again authors are telling us, "There is something about the mother-daughter connection that has far more potential for harm than the tie between mother and son."^[21]

If this separation is depicted as a violent and inevitable battle, then what are the consequences for a daughter who does not win this particular war or for a mother who refuses to engage in it? Enmeshment here emerges as the new pathology of female psychology. In this narrative, separation and struggle are not problematic and are rarely questioned, but are rather necessary parts of this teleological move toward mature adulthood: "'If there were such sameness,' says Donald S. Williamson, Ph.D., director of the Houston Family Institute, 'we would be looking at a very immature daughter, a person in whom no developmental process had taken place. The more extensively a woman reflects her mother, the less likely it is that she possesses an authentic self.'"^[22] There it is, no minced words. The carrot on the end of the stick of separation is maturity and adulthood. What is this saying, too, about mothers? If to reflect mother is to be inauthentic, then mother herself is necessarily demeaned and inauthentic. If it is "immature" to be like someone, to resemble her, then mustn't one assume that that person is not worth being like, is not worth resembling?

More pointed attacks on the perils of resembling mother can be seen in many of the TV specials on mothers and daughters. As Ella

Taylor notes, this seems to be a recurring feature of eighties television:

The theme of the disillusioned career woman returning home to her suburban family has been featured in more than one late-1980s made-for-TV movie. Thus the celebration of the opening up of women's roles in the 1970s shows becomes, in the 1980s, at best a rehearsal of the costs of careerism for women, at worst an outright reproof for women who seek challenging work. In this way the genuine difficulties women face in reconciling home and work are often casually translated into a backlash against feminism itself.^[23]

One of these shows stands out dramatically, as it seems on first viewing to resonate with many of the ideas of the feminist movement. "Supermom's Daughter" borrows from feminism very selectively and, in doing so, presents an ideological orientation that is infinitely more subtle in its sexism than, say, "Father Knows Best." In this HBO special, star TV news reporter mom is horrified to learn that her teenage daughter has swerved off the academic fast track and is instead intent on achieving an early marriage, producing lots of children, and working in early childhood education. This is every feminist mother's worst nightmare: her daughter wants nothing of the life she has struggled to make available to her. Mother's horror is here treated with gentle humor. In one scene, her guilt ("I haven't been a good mother. . . . I didn't bake cookies for you.") is playfully negated by the daughter's insistence that her choice has nothing to do with her mother's life-style. Yet, as in 'night, Mother , we find that a bit hard to believe because all our cultural signposts point ineluctably to mother's responsibility.

A television show like this locates itself firmly within the ideological framework of the 1980s, which presents an image of beset womanhood, of striving career women suddenly faced with the deep truth of their bottomless need for hearth and home, hubby and the kids. In this age of Fatal Attractions and Baby Booms , feminist struggles and gains are reduced to the issue of personal choices, which, we are now informed, have created a no-win situation: we can't have it all. The messages of many 1980s films, TV shows, and other forms of popular culture are precisely this: to further dichotomize mother and woman, this time adding a sort of postfeminist gloss by identifying "woman" not only as sexual, but as climbing-to-

the-top "superwoman." The "you can't have it all" issue emerges specifically as a response to real and substantive feminist changes in the workplace and in social and personal life. Thus the supermom of the TV show confides to her housewife friend (and her daughter's idol) that she often envies her domestic life, and the friend appropriately follows suit, thus reinforcing the work/family dichotomy that has come to be defined as the crucial "postfeminist" issue.

Another 1980 HBO Special, "Mother and Daughter: The Loving War," reinforces this framework even more dramatically by making the mother a single parent who is clearly coded as "overinvolved" and has very little life beyond taking care of her daughter. This working-class mother scrimps and saves so the daughter can go to college and do more with her life than she was able to do with hers. True to form, this 1980s daughter rejects her mother's values to opt for the glories of wifedom.

But, of course, the point here is a woman doesn't have to opt for anything other than domesticity. Feminism, as a positive and constructive theory and political practice, is here circumscribed around the issue of choice (e.g., feminism means having a choice to be a worker or a housewife) and then denigrated by a discourse that declares that too much choice has ruined American women and deprived them of the joys of family and motherhood.

Yet another TV movie not only focuses on mothers and daughters, but raises the stake by introducing a (wiser than thou) grandmother as well. "Family Secrets" stars Stephanie Powers as the overworked "career mother" Jessie, Maureen Stapleton as her stalwart mother Maggie, and Melissa Gilbert as Jessie's precocious, "parentified" daughter Sarah. In the midst of getting her second divorce, ad exec mom returns to her family homestead to help her mother pack up and move after dad's recent death. The first family secret is revealed rather quickly, as we learn of bitter Sarah's illegitimacy. In the first of many confrontation scenes between several mother/daughter pairs, Sarah confronts her mother around her illegitimacy and "abandonment." The grandmother raised her until she was nine:

Daughter: "You raised me? That's a laugh."

Mother: "I worked my butt off to give you what you wanted."

Daughter: "I wanted you . And you weren't there. I was stuck in an apartment with a nanny while you were at your damn office!"

Mother: "Don't lay that guilt trip on me Sarah. My mother was home all day, and it didn't keep me from being neurotic."

The daughter's speech here is eerily reminiscent of the daughter's speech in the 1959 version of Imitation of Life , albeit more explicitly savvy about the guilt placed on mothers who work outside the home. But the new motif of life cycle kicks in to stir the pot of daughterly angst, as Jessie next relays to her mother: "I just realized how much alike the two of you are! I spent the first part of my life worrying about your approval, now I'm going to spend the rest of my life worrying about hers?" The grandmother replies with the telling truth of inevitable conflict: "Now Jessie, hold on! If Sarah's taking you on for working, it's normal. A girl's got to pick on her mother for something ."

The final confrontation scene occurs during the last big dinner at the old family home, where, among other things, Jessie reveals her knowledge of her father's infidelity, a secret the all-knowing grandmother was already privy to. After yet another nasty fight between Jessie and Maggie, Sarah (screaming at the mother, "Are you satisfied?") runs out of the house into the arms of a rather unscrupulous young man. But Jessie's "mistake" is not to be repeated. Instead, the daughter returns home to announce her independence from her mother. This independence includes her decision not to go to college ("That's your dream, not mine") and to stay with her grandmother until she figures out her life.

The next morning, as Jessie prepares to leave, she gets a phone call from her office (which, incidentally, interrupts a poignant confession from her mother) informing her that she has lost the big account she has been working on. Jessie slips into maudlin and drunken despair ("I obviously cannot be a mother and manage a big account at the same time") and is temporarily cheered up by a chorus line dancing mother. The scene ends with Jessie in tears, claiming, "It's not that I've lost the account, it's that I've lost everything." But never fear, the newly vulnerable and chastened mom is now acceptable to the demanding teen. Having already admitted to Maggie that "Sarah's a woman. I have to let go," Jessie is surprised

to see Sarah show up on the morning of her departure, suitcase in hand, assuring mom that she still needs her (read: Broken mom needs strong daughter) but will not change her mind about college. Daughter confidently jumps into the driver's seat and they ride into the proverbial sunset. Daughter can now be "an adult" once mom has been made vulnerable and has "given her up."

A Crawford-like evil mom emerges in a 1987 HBO after-school special called "Terrible Things My Mother Told Me." A nasty, harried working mom gets saved not by a man or by death (which would have been the typical response years ago), but by the discovery that the origins of her "illness" are in her mother's "emotional abuse" of her. After calling a hotline number, the young teen daughter informs her mother (with all the weight of current psychology behind her), "Mom, I think we're both victims. Your mom yelled at you, you yell at me, now I yell at Katie [her younger sister]." Daughter now doesn't go off into the sunset with the male savior, but rather takes a weeping and penitent mother off into the brilliant light cast by psychotherapy.^[24]

Popular writers such as Secunda reinforce this ideology of mother as pitied victim of her own mother's pathology: "The process of healing includes seeing one's mother as other than oneself; recognizing that she is the legatee of her mother's behavior; acknowledging how terribly limited her choices may have been; realizing that such mothers are more to be pitied." The "child within" rears its (popular) head when the same author declares, "Most unloving mothers don't set out to destroy their daughters. But within them often resides a child who also felt unloved by her mother and who, because she is emotionally wounded, cannot help repeating with her daughter the patterns of her past."^[25] As we have seen with many of the psychoanalytic writers in Chapter 5, this idea of the endless reproduction of pathology (from mother to daughter ad nauseam) is a catchy one: "I needed to examine the legacy of self-doubt passed on to me by my mother, and her mother before her. I also had to face how I had passed my self problems along to my daughter."^[26]

In all these representations—both the TV specials and the popular treatises—mother's work/career is not denigrated or depicted (as in Mildred Pierce ) as damaging to her daughter's psyche. Indeed, the ideological discourse has shifted to new ground, implic-

itly challenging the meaning and substance of feminist gains by portraying these "daughters of feminism" as finding fulfillment as barefoot and pregnant teenagers. In the TV special, the daughter becomes the psychological agent to rescue her mother from the inevitable cycle of abuse and victimization (at the hands of women!) by marching bravely off to therapy and the recovery of the "child within."

Films of the 1980s similarly incorporate feminism while framing the mother/daughter relationship within the (implicitly) antifeminist theme of inevitable conflict. Terms of Endearment (1983) is most assuredly the (contemporary) "classic" mother/daughter film, one whose very title brings instantaneous recognition. It was immensely popular, winning Academy Awards for Shirley MacLaine, Jack Nicholson, and director James Brooks.

Terms of Endearment has been heralded as a "breakthrough" film about mothers and daughters and about women in general. In large part, this reading is based on the fact that an older woman—a mother—is shown to be sexually active while still retaining her maternal orientation. Terms of Endearment presents itself as a work responsive to the women's movement—a film that moves decisively away from the demonized and desexualized mothers that typified films of an earlier era. Although we cannot overlook the significance of this shift, Terms reinforces the "love/hate" and "loving and letting go" themes that have dominated both the women's magazines and much of the more explicitly feminist work.

Terms was presented as a timeless tale of the enduring and loving bond between mother and daughter. There is a certain rapprochement at the end when the daughter dies. But the daughter does, after all, die, and the mother is left to redo her mothering: she now takes her daughter's children, settles in with the astronaut next door, and returns to mothering. By film's end, she is brought back into the nuclear family, as Ellen Seiter notes: "In Terms of Endearment Aurora Greenway, Emma's mother, presents a problematic figure because she is unmarried. Throughout the film, Aurora creates disruptions. The film's narrative can be seen as the process of recuperating Aurora into a 'normal' relationship with a man within a family. The story redeems Aurora as a mother at precisely the same time that it redeems her as a woman, by finally replacing her within the family as the one who cares for children."^[27]

In Terms of Endearment , Aurora is a bad mother because she is not in a relationship with a man. It is only after her affair with Garrett Breedlove, the astronaut, that she stops nagging and endlessly phoning her daughter. Aurora's affair "cures" her of her overmothering, her selfishness, and her hysterical behavior. She becomes a truly sympathetic character only after she relinquishes control to the man. As the contrast between the sexually repressed, almost sterile mother and the sexually aggressive, eminently fecund daughter begins to fade with the mother's rebirth through her affair with Breedlove, the narrative firmly moves to focus on the intimacy and love between these two women. Indeed, after mother is "liberated" through her newfound sexuality, she is able to be both confidante and advocate for her daughter.

In two repetitious scenes, Aurora and Emma are in bed together in the family home. In the first, following the father's funeral, we see a needy Aurora imposing her vulnerability on her young (and thus "parentified") daughter Emma. As Aurora crawls into Emma's bed the night following the funeral, we are immediately struck by Aurora's inability to be an "appropriate" mother (she should be comforting her daughter, not vice versa). The opening shot of the film shows an obsessive young mother, Aurora, pinching baby Emma in her crib until she cries to make sure she is alive. After mom finds freedom (and loosens up) in the arms of the raunchy astronaut, she repeats the bedroom scene. But this time, deliriously giggly mom, legs intertwined with slightly wary daughter, speaks of the joy of sexual love, asserting her ability to befriend her daughter now that she has found liberation in male identification. In that sense, the classic narrative strategy of recuperating the wayward woman is reproduced.

In addition, this film introduces the "love-hate" theme that has been so popular in recent years. As the film moves through the life cycles of these two women, one gets the sense of this endless and almost timeless push-me-pull-you pendulum, exemplified in the popular literature as well: "Mother and daughter, daughter and mother; it is as if we are part of some prepackaged, seamless unit whose characteristics have all been decided ahead of time, by someone else. An unconscious bondage develops in which mothers and daughters rely too heavily on each other for identity. We don't know how to get free to be ourselves."^[28] The notion of life cycle is

Fig. 24.
Now that repressed mom Aurora (Shirley MacLaine) has found sexual 
liberation with a lewd astronaut, she can warmly engage in girl talk with 
her rather bemused daughter Emma (Debra Winger) in the Oscar-sweeping 
Terms of Endearment . (Paramount Pictures, 1983; photo courtesy of Photofest)

important here. Many popular representations of the 1980s construct the mother/daughter narrative around this notion of life cycle, itself increasingly popular in the late 1970s and 1980s within the social sciences. The demarcations of a woman's life are set in stone here as moving from childhood intimacy ("bonding") through adolescence ("separating") and then to marriage and children, which supposedly brings a new form of bonding based on the daughter's new role as mother. These narratives often include the "role reversal" scenario where daughter now "mothers" an old and infirm mother.

Mommie Meanest: Narcissistic Moms and Neurotic Daughters

In a darker vein, the evil mother theme reemerges with a vengeance that much surpasses Charlotte Vale's almost quaintly Victorian misguided mother. No film typifies this image of the demon-

Fig. 25.
Evil mother Joan Crawford (played by Faye Dunaway) faces off against 
persecuted daughter Christina in the grotesque vamp  Mommie Dearest . 
(Paramount Pictures, 1981; photo courtesy of Museum of Modern Art 
Film Stills Archive)

ized mother better than Mommie Dearest (1981). Indeed, the wire hanger scene (in which the Crawford character brandishes a hanger in fury at her cowed daughter's neglect of her cleaning duties) has come to signify to daughters everywhere the violence behind the facade of maternal nurturance.

This film also points to what Nietzsche might have called eternal recurrence or Freud might have called the return of the repressed. For, in Mommie Dearest , Faye Dunaway portrays Joan Crawford as the evil mother incarnate, Crawford herself having played a less virulent version of this in one of the most famous (fictional) mother/daughter narratives of all time, Mildred Pierce . The star and the story, the person and the myth here merge to collapse both representational and historical distinctions. There are even scenes when Dunaway as Crawford rehearses lines from Mildred Pierce with her victim/daughter. All this is within the cinematic context of a film taken from an account written by Crawford's own daughter, Christina. This trope (tell-all biographies of evil star mothers written by angry daughters) seemed to become very popular in the 1980s. Crawford's daughter wrote the most famous one, but Bette Davis's daughter B. D. Hyman also wrote one (My Mother's Keeper ), as did Cheryl Crane, daughter of Lana Turner. The irony that all three of these real-life mothers played in famous mother/daughter films

Fig. 26.
Even after death, mommie meanest looms ominously behind her newly 
liberated daughter. (Paramount Pictures, 1981; photo courtesy 
of Museum of Modern Art Film Stills Archive)

sorely tests any theory of the media that sees images as soundly set off from what we call "real life."^[29]

The etiology of Joan's neurotic behavior is spelled out in the early moments of Mommie Dearest: her mother was bad, she had too many husbands, they were poor, she never had a father, so now she thinks she can "do it all" ("I never had a father. . . . I can be a father and a mother."). So Joan's evil is here, in true psychoanalytic fashion, referred back to her own slovenly mother and the lack of a father figure. This constant referring back (the "mommy did it to me" school of thought) is unique to, or at least much more pro-

nounced in, the present period. Although the mother in Now, Voyager was depicted as responsible for her daughter's illness, it was not presented as so inevitable as it appears in contemporary narratives. Nowadays the unhealthy dyad has expanded to encompass a seemingly endless trail of abusive mothers. Although Charlotte's mother was surely awful to the core, we never learn the reason for her nastiness, and it was definitely not referenced back to her own mother's behavior.

In contrast, even Joan's obsessive cleaning is portrayed as a response to her mother's uncleanliness. The desire to have a child is again seen as shaped by her own miserable childhood and the desire to "do it differently." As Joan says, "I'm going to give you all the things I never had." The echo of Mildred Pierce renders Joan's motivations for adopting a daughter immediately suspect: she wants to "give her everything," which we all know is not good for a child. Like Mildred, she is punished for wanting and desiring too much.

She is also punished for what can only be described as her narcissism. The daughter is made to be an object for the cameras at all times. This presents an interesting aspect of the male gaze question: Joan is placed as the person who offers up her girl-child as a spectacle for the publicity men, and the blame for this seems to be placed firmly on the head of the mother, who is, after all, herself a "victim" of the male gaze.

'night, Mother , made in 1986, deserves brief mention, although the poor quality of the film doesn't do justice to what was a significant and thoughtful stage play about mothers and daughters. Anne Bancroft chose to play the mother as a stupid and slightly hysterical "Southern white trash" woman. Sissy Spacek's anemic portrayal of a daughter who decides to take her own life never gets at the anger and venom directed at the mother in the stage version.

To a great extent, 'night, Mother is a film version of the "too much mother/not enough father" trope that pervades current discourses on mothers and daughters, feminist and nonfeminist alike. The specter of the dead father haunts this film: his picture is moved around the house, his gun is the one she uses, he is the subject of their fights, a specifically father-centered discussion is the catalyst for their battle throughout the film. In some ways, this film is about a "daddy's girl" whose one link to any depth and vitality was through her father. In one scene, in which the mother accuses her daughter of caring more for the father than for her, the daughter

Fig. 27.
Escaping the mother was never represented so literally as in  'night, Mother,  
starring Sissy Spacek as a daughter driven to suicide as her mother helplessly 
looks on. (Universal, 1986; photo courtesy of Museum of Modern Art 
Film Stills Archive)

belittles her mother's allegation by claiming, "you were just jealous because I'd rather talk to him than wash the dishes with you." The mother's painfully honest reply ("I was jealous because you'd rather talk to him than anything") typifies her dilemma: she is the one faced with her daughter's suicide threats and daily life with her daughter (symbolized by the "washing dishes"); the father represents the escape from that life, from "reality" in a sense. Of course the mother is jealous. Who wouldn't be?

The climactic guilt scene follows, in which the mother pleads for her daughter to stop the talk of suicide and says the classic lines:

Mother: "It has to be something I did. . . . I don't know what I did, but I did it. I know. This is all my fault Jessie but I don't know what to do about it now."

Daughter: "It doesn't have anything to do with you."

Mother: "Everything you do has to do with me, Jessie. You can't do anything . . . wash your face or cut your finger."

The double bind is again vividly expressed here: the whole film leads us to believe that it is the mother's fault. Although the daughter explicitly opposes that interpretation ("It doesn't have anything to do with you"), she also implicitly supports it through her insistence on making her mother witness the nightmare of her own daughter's suicide: she is killing herself to escape her mother. The mother doesn't know what to do, how to reverse the "damage" she has unwittingly wrought on her daughter.

Woody Allen's 1987 Bergmanesque film September presents a very 1980s twist on the evil mother/victim daughter theme that is similar to both Mommie Dearest and earlier films such as Mildred Pierce . Allen has never been known to be a filmmaker sympathetic to the situations of women; quite the contrary, in fact. Indeed, women in Allen's films typically play the role of beautiful Gentile foils to his nebbishy neurotic Jewish prince. September is something of an exception to his usual setting because it moves out of urban Manhattan and into Allen's American equivalent of the Bergman petit bourgeois suburb. The entire film takes place over a weekend in the rambling Vermont country home of Lane (Mia Farrow). Lane's postbreakdown angst is complicated by the presence of her good friend Stephanie (Diane Wiest), who has come to stay for a bit, a young tenant and would-be writer Peter (Sam Waterston), with whom Lane has carried on an affair over the summer, an elderly neighbor (Denholm Elliott) who loves Lane, and Lane's visiting mother Diane (Elaine Strich) and stepfather (Jack Warden).

The central theme is the tension between mousy, insecure Lane and her vibrant, loud, egocentric mother, a former movie queen. The family secret, revealed in a climactic confrontation scene, is that when Lane was fourteen, she killed her mother's gangster lover (à la Lana Turner's daughter, Cheryl Crane). But the real secret, which we find out almost at the end of the film, is that mom actually pulled the trigger, and Lane was forced to take the rap for her.

The bossy mother's visit taxes the patience of an already flustered Lane, trying desperately to sell the house so she can move to New York and get on with her life (after a recent suicide attempt). The writer with whom she is in love is in love with Lane's friend Stephanie. Lane's mother thwarts her well-laid plans by announcing that she wants to keep the house, but Lane's anger (this is when the family secret is revealed) causes mother eventually to give in, leaving Lane the house at the end of the film.

The film is difficult to categorize because in many ways it represents a very modern perspective on mothers and daughters. This is mother-blame of a new strain, concerned not with simple neglect or with elementary overinvolvement, but with a sort of malicious narcissism born of a too independent mother and an overshadowed daughter. If this seems familiar, it might be because the ideologies of mother-blame have taken on a new edge in the age of the "working woman," the "latchkey child," and the "mommy track." Now mother is too sexual, too lively, too engaged with her own life. The plea of the daughter is now "Hey Mom, what about me? How dare you get on with your life? Getting on with your life has cost me mine!"

Numerous scenes throughout September establish Lane's exasperation with her mother and strongly hint at maternal responsibility for Lane's inability to move on with her life. In fact, Lane is quite explicit in blaming her mother (and her mother's active life) for her own stagnation; as Lane says to Peter about the shooting, "Yeah, she went on with her life. I got stuck with the nightmares." This is the heart of the double bind message: Mother is condemned for leaving the past behind, for not remaining forever guilty and miserable about the family tragedy, for living a happy life. She is a bad mother because she goes on and because her refusal of paralyzing guilt means the daughter cannot go on. Yet if she were to remain forever guilty, forever in penance, she would inevitably oppress the daughter with that guilt; she would pass it on to her as a legacy of pain to carry with her throughout her life. She cannot win.

Right from the beginning, we know that Lane is not at all pleased with her mother's presence in the country home. She enters the house a few minutes into the film, leans against the door, and says (with exasperation): "God, I can't believe my mother. She's out there, she's made friends with Peter and she's trying to get him to

write her biography. Her stupid life, as told to." So the sexual competition is set up right away: mother is taking her man away. Indeed, in a later scene with Lane and Peter, just about five minutes into the film, Peter is complaining about his frustration with his work, and Lane blames it on the time spent with her mother: "Well, if you wouldn't let my mother seduce you. . . ." Mother is thus both more sexual than daughter and more interesting, and this "problem" is referenced through the desired man: he finds mother more engaging than daughter. This exchange is immediately followed by Lane's devastating line ("Yeah, she went on with her life. I got stuck with the nightmares"), thus narratively linking the mother's seductiveness and vibrancy with the daughter's depression and suicide attempt.

In an early, revealing scene, the mother enters from outside with her husband and Peter, the writer. She comes in like a hurricane, graphically epitomizing the difference between her and the daughter, who has previously entered the house with slumped shoulders and an air of sad resignation. The choppy dialogue that follows perfectly sets up the mother as narcissistic and self-serving and the daughter as withdrawn victim of maternal egomania:

Mother: "Lane, I asked the Richmonds over for dinner tonight—I thought we could all have a little party."

Daughter: "What did you do that for? Peter and I were going to drive into town tonight. We were supposed to see the new Kurosawa film."

Mother: "Oh god, I'm sorry. Why didn't you say something?"

Daughter: "I did."

Peter: "That's OK Lane. We can catch it another night."

Daughter: "OK. But it's only there tonight."

Mother: "Where was I?"

As the mother talks to her, Lane is almost completely off-screen, deep in the background, almost telescoped at the end of the full images of the mother and her male attendees. When she utters the line, "Where was I?" the mother turns away from an already retreating, small Lane and, putting her arm around Peter, walks away. Thus the mother both physically and linguistically ignores the last line and recognizes only the resigned "OK." The daughter's reality, her wishes, are thus completely blotted out by the mother.

The pivotal scene occurs about ten minutes into the film. It is shot in the mother's bedroom, where she is getting ready for the little party with her husband. She says to him, "Lane's changed towards me. She used to get such a kick out of me." At that point, the daughter enters the room when mother and hubby are kissing; she hides behind the door during the entire scene and barely edges her way out. Mother takes up most of the screen and is often shot from below to make her appear even more formidable; the daughter seems small, afraid, and childlike compared to her mother. As they argue about Lane's refusal to move on with her life, the mother's breeziness is again made manifest, "If your life hasn't worked out, stop blaming me for it. It's up to you to take the bull by the horns." The scene shifts from touchy argument to bittersweet poignancy, with the mother gazing into her mirror, musing on her advanced years, and urging her daughter to "make something of herself" while she's still "got the chance." The scene ends with the return of the narcissistic mother as she switches abruptly from this expression of concern to a brisk attention to her evening attire.

Again, this scene reinforces the idea of mother as self-involved, domineering, unconcerned with daughter's problems, yet at the same time intrusive and judgmental, commenting with unmistaken glee on the daughter's failures in love ("The one thing you shouldn't do is let your desperation show. . . . I always felt there was a fatal element of hunger in your last affair."). She is sensitive only when it concerns her; then she moves blithely off to breezy trivialities.

This scene could be read a different way. One could understand the mother as powerful, refusing to take responsibility for the daughter's life but taking full responsibility for her own, concerned about the daughter and supportive of her romantic adventures, energetic and full of life, wanting her daughter to live fully, as she had, wanting to pass on her own youth to her. Strangely enough, upon first viewing, I read it completely "against the grain," contrary to the "preferred reading" offered up by the text. In that particular scene, I perceived Lane as insipid, whining, complaining: blaming her mother for whatever befell her. I completely identified with the mother's exasperation ("stop blaming me . . . get on with your life") and felt annoyed at Lane's continual attempts to squelch her mother's exuberance. Clearly, I read it this way at least in part from having done this research on mothers and daughters, for everyone I

questioned informally about this film, although not exactly thrilled with Lane's excessive whininess, nevertheless saw it as resulting from this narcissistic and overblown mother.

The only moment when the mother is portrayed sympathetically is qualified by her obvious drunkenness, rendering her apparent love for her daughter more than a little pathetic. She is sitting drunk over a Ouija board and talking to her dead husband, father of Lane: "Your daughter hates me. Our daughter hates me, and I love her. She's my one child and I want her to be happy. . . . I want her to forgive me." But even this sympathetic display could be seen as yet one more instance of her selfishness: she wants the daughter to forgive her so she can rest easier.

This film perfectly points out some of the double binds mothers and daughters are placed in. If a mother is too aggressive, too sexual (Lane is jealous that Peter is spending so much time with her mother), has her own life, and is self-determined and independent, she has denied her daughter the proper maternal care she needs to flourish; she is a bad mother who is selfish and narcissistic. (Mother here is endlessly talking about how she looks, how others look.) If she is self-sacrificing, solely domestic, and selfless, the daughter wants to escape from her, to leave that boring and depressing domestic/maternal world. If she does much for her daughter, is engaged and involved, she is intrusive, controlling, and "overinvolved." Many women blame their mothers for being boring, not engaged enough with the outside world, not "worldly" enough; yet if they are those things, they are neglectful and selfish mothers, capable of producing "maternal deprivation."

In this contemporary film where a mother is actually allowed to be sexual and alive, she is shown to be predatory, competitive with her daughter's lover, and, by extension, a neglectful parent. The daughter in this case is consequently desexualized, desensualized, and made out to be pathetic and a failure with men. No daughter ever wanted to grow up actually to be June Cleaver or the nearly anonymous mother in "Father Knows Best." Those domestic icons of the fifties are just that, icons, and almost never an image modern women actually strive to emulate. In this film, mother has dared to be "not just a mother," and daughter will inevitably suffer the results of her independence.

The most recent films on mothers and daughters do not bode

well for the future. The terribly miscast and woefully misbegotten remake of Stella Dallas (called simply Stella this time) starring Bette Midler as a swinging 1960s working-class barmaid (with a heart of gold and a truckload of working-girl integrity) only confirms the impossibility of the maternal sacrifice theme in an era of increasing (and increasingly sophisticated) mother-blame. Hewing very close to the original scenario, this Stella just can't tear at our heartstrings anymore. The narratives of sacrifice and class conflict have both been occluded by the onslaught of 1940s "momism," 1980s antifeminism, and the demise of popular representations of working-class life. Although the early Stella's martyrdom was so poignant in its exposure of the double binds of class and motherhood, this updated Stella is a retro narrative in search of a context, which no longer exists.

In Postcards from the Edge , Meryl Streep plays Suzanne Vale, the thinly disguised Carrie Fisher—author of the book and screenplay and daughter of Debbie Reynolds. An updated version of the bad Hollywood mother and her benighted daughter, the film traverses the terrain of September and Terms of Endearment all at once. Starting out as a bright and witty tell-all account of life in the Hollywood fast lane, it quickly slips into maternal melodrama overdrive. Once again, the brassy (but cracking inside) mother victimizes her hapless daughter, only to reunite in the requisite cataclysmic scene where mom's true vulnerability emerges, and daughter can now take care of the newly exposed mom.

Meryl Streep's Suzanne Vale is a young actor locked in a cycle of "B" movies and drug abuse. When an overdose lands her in a rehab hospital, the themes of maternal neglect and maternal narcissism (shades of September ) emerge. Mother misses the "family thing" at the hospital and instead breezes in late only to ignore her recovering daughter and play beloved movie star to a gay male couple who "do her" in their drag show.

This theme of maternal narcissism—of mother overshadowing the daughter and thereby "causing" her suicide attempt (September ) or drug overdose (Postcards from the Edge )—pervades this film. In a telling scene, mother has thrown daughter a welcome home party after her release from the hospital and forces her to sing for the crowd. Suzanne sings a melancholy song while mom mouths the words, coaching her from the sidelines as daughter stands in

front of a framed portrait of mom from her showgirl days. When mother Doris gets up to sing after requests from the assembled throngs, the contrast couldn't be more stark. The daughter's mournful, bluesy "You Don't Know Me" is replaced by mom's brassy, high-kicking showtune, "I'm Still Here." Even the cutaways are different: when mom watches daughter's performance, she is intrusive, anxious, and coaching; when daughter watches mom, she is obviously admiring, breaking into spontaneous shouts of energetic applause.

As in September , mom is sexually competitive with daughter. When a man comes to pick Suzanne up and Doris flirts with him, Suzanne says to her, "I would just like to have some people of my own is all, without them having to like you so much . . . why do you have to completely overshadow me?" Mom's response to Suzanne's attempts to challenge her "narcissism" are almost identical to those of the mother in September: "I think you should just get over what happened to you in your adolescence. It is time to move on ."

But daughter cannot move on until mom is shown to be the weak and vulnerable figure we know her to be. The cataclysmic scene begins with mom dumping vodka in her health shake after having informed her daughter that her agent has run off with all Suzanne's money. As Suzanne sits stricken on the stairs, Doris comes up to stand on the other side of the banister, informing her that "it's no good feeling sorry for yourself." When Suzanne says that she wants to get out of the business, her mother is only able to respond with yet another self-involved story:

Doris: "Let's take this one thing at a time. First, everyone is always getting out of the business and b: you are just like me. Somedays, I wake up and. . . ."

Suzanne (talking over her): "Will you please stop telling me how to run my life for a couple of minutes. Isn't it enough that you were right?"

As the battle heats up, mother directly addresses the question of blame ("You feel sorry for yourself half the time for having a monster of a mother like me"). Although daughter denies it ("I never said you were a monster!") and denies her mother's responsibility for her drug taking ("I took the drugs, nobody made me!"), the rest

Fig. 28.
Old movie queen Doris Mann (Shirley MacLaine) flirts shamelessly with 
daughter Suzanne's (Meryl Streep) boyfriend (played by Dennis Quaid) in 
Postcards from the Edge . (Columbia Pictures, 1990; photo courtesy of Photofest)

of the scene (as in September and 'night, Mother ) gives us ample evidence of mother's culpability:

Doris: "Go ahead and say it. You think I'm an alcoholic."

Suzanne: "OK. I think you're an alcoholic."

Doris: "Well, maybe I was an alcoholic when you were a teenager. But I had a nervous breakdown when my marriage failed and I lost all my money."

Suzanne: "That's when I started taking drugs."

So maternal culpability is clearly established here, or at least a causal relationship is set up between mother's drinking and daughter's drug abuse. But mother still resists:

Doris: "Well, I got over it! And now I just drink like an Irishperson. . . ."

Suzanne (talking over her): "Yeah, I know, you just drink to relax. You just enjoy your wine , I know, you've told me mother. You don't want me to be a singer. You're the singer. You're the performer. I can't possibly compete with you . What if somebody won? You want me to do well, just not better . . . than you."

Mother now stomps haughtily up the stairs past the daughter, turning around to look down at her from the top. As the camera looks up at her, from the daughter's angle, the imposing and threatening mother screams at the daughter that she can "handle it" (unlike the daughter) and then puts the question to her: "Will you please tell me what is the awful thing I did to you when you were a child?" Suzanne finally answers: "From the time I was nine years old you gave me sleeping pills!" As mom pathetically defends herself ("They were over-the-counter drugs, they were safe!"), she further implicates herself in a pattern of drug abuse and seductiveness toward the daughter's friends that clearly gives the lie to the daughter's earlier assertion of her own responsibility for her behavior. As the camera leaves the imposing maternal figure and moves alongside the daughter as she walks out the door, we hear off-camera (no longer the powerful image at the top of the stairs) the mother's desperate plea: "Don't blame me, I did it all out of love for you."

The next scene brings in the all-knowing father figure cum film director, played by Gene Hackman. He dispenses the wisdom of the women's magazines and popular psychologists discussed throughout this chapter: "Look, your mother did it to you and her mother did it to her and back and back and back all the way to Eve. At some point you just stop it and say fuck it: I start with me." Armed with that tidbit of fatherly insight, Suzanne can care for her (truly, deeply) vulnerable mom after she has a car accident while driving under the influence. As tender daughter applies makeup to the (denuded, unmasked, dewigged) mother, she is able to release her anger as mother is able to admit her jealousy. Both mother and daughter bounce back: mom goes out bravely to confront the press, and daughter closes the film with a music video production scene directed by the benign father figure previously seen granting solace and advice to a distraught daughter.

Another recent film, Mermaids , starring Cher and Winona Ryder as a mother and daughter locked in adolescent angst, helps construct a similar genre of "isn't mom wacky but really pathological underneath it all?" After getting over the initial stretch of imagining Cher as a Jewish mother, we are treated to a narrative that is much more effective as a coming of age drama than as a story about mothers and daughters. The adolescent alienation of mother from daughter is highlighted by the daughter's persistent reference to her as "Mrs. Flax" during her omniscient narration. Cher plays Rachel Flax, a rebellious refugee from a family of kosher bakers who traipses around the country with two young daughters in tow. The theme of movement is a crucial one because daughter Charlotte's rebellion is often signified by anger at her mother's easy mobility and refusal to stay "in place." The mother's constant movement, although momentarily amusing (as is her inability to feed her children anything but hors d'oeuvres: "Anything more," says her daughter, "is too big a commitment"), becomes understood quickly as signifying a more problematic refusal to grow up and a concomitant fear of responsibility. As Charlotte tells us again and again, mom moves on when the going gets tough.

This lighthearted yet melodramatic treatise on wacky moms comes complete with the Kennedy family as the recurring televisual reminder of the wholesome domesticity Charlotte yearns for. As the daughter retreats from mom's irreverence with fervent prayer, fantasies of eternal salvation, and desire for the never-seen absent father, she also begins to experience the sexual desires that seem to rule her mother's life and that will, inevitably, produce the final confrontation scene between mother and daughter. True to melodramatic form, an "event" occurs that brings mother and daughter to angry explosion and tearful reunion. Daughter's budding sexuality eventually provides the terrain for the reunion, which rings false precisely because it is based solely on the sharing of like bodies, not the sharing of values and beliefs.

The opening scene sets the stage, with teenage daughter Charlotte providing a wiser than her years voice-over detailing the nuances of her wacky family and particularly wacky and sexually active "Mrs. Flax." Mom's dereliction as a Kennedy-esque mother is treated with the humor that will eventually turn bittersweet and melodramatic (as in Terms of Endearment ):

Charlotte: "You never came to Parent-Teacher night before. I don't see what's so special about this one."

Mother: "Charlotte, you read the invitation: Community begins in the classroom. I am your mother, it is my job to watch over your education."

Charlotte: "There's so little of it left. What took you so long."

Mother: "Ohh, we're going to play my favorite game: who's the worst mother in the world? Oh now don't tell me, let me guess, who could it be? Could it be . . . ME?"

Although the scene is humorous and highlights the mother's awareness of "mother bashing" and refusal of guilt, the knowing humor is undercut by the mother's obvious "lack" in the realm of maternal commitment and responsibility. As funny as the hors d'oeuvres are, they are not what you feed two growing girls. As amusing as the premise of eternal mobility is, we know that it is disruptive to a developing child's sense of identity and continuity; it inspires terror in a child, not humor.

Even though other kids may envy Charlotte her rebellious mom, as we see in the comment a student makes to Charlotte at the PTA meeting ("See that woman there? That's my mom. And when I grow up I want to be just like yours"), we realize all too well that mom's obvious immaturity creates a daughter unable to revel in her own childhood. In one scene, the family has spent the night at the house of Lou Lansky, mom's shoe salesman boyfriend. When a storm wakes her up, Charlotte goes up to the attic, where mom has fallen asleep, having sat earlier for amateur painter Lou. As Charlotte kneels by the couch, she covers her mother up and gazes sadly on this woman dressed like a garish Cleopatra. Her melancholy voice-over utters the telling lines: "Sometimes I feel like you're the child, and I'm the grownup. I can't ever imagine being inside you. I can't imagine being anywhere you'd let me hang around for nine straight months." Again, while this bittersweet moment remains humorous, it also conveys the real sadness of a daughter who is both "parentified" and deeply unsure of her mother's love and concern.

As in so many films, the wise male savior points out to the mother the errors of her ways. In Mermaids , Lou repeatedly points out mother's failings and provides analysis and explanation for her bizarre behavior. When the family is at Lou's for dinner, the contrast between his rich and warm family meals and Rachel's haphaz-

ard domesticity (where the kids eat standing or sitting on countertops) could not be more pronounced. When Charlotte runs away to construct a fictional "Cleaver" family after a painful scene in which she is unable to talk to her mother about her fears of pregnancy, Lou is quick to lecture Rachel on her dangerously aggressive mothering style:

Mother: "You know, I know that she's doing this to turn my hair white."

Lou: "She's doing this because she has a problem! And she's probably too frightened to talk to you about it!"

Mother: "Why would she be frightened?"

Lou: "Rachel, you can be a little abrasive! Shit, even I'm scared to talk to you sometimes. She's a kid, lighten up, don't ride her too hard!"

Mother: "I don't need a lecture on parenting from you ! OK, that's it, when she comes, I'm leaving."

Lou: "And you wonder why she runs away from problems. Will you listen to yourself?"

When Charlotte returns, after being fetched by Lou, her mother is furious: "Go to your room. I can't talk to you right now. If I talk to you right now, I'll kill you." After attempts to talk with a resolutely silent Charlotte, who will only speak in cinematic voice-over, Rachel tries to reach her with this matter-of-fact statement of her own ambivalence: "Let me tell you something Charlotte. You know, sometimes being a mother really stinks. I don't always know what I'm doing. It's not like you and your sister came with a book of instructions. You know, if I can help you . . . just tell me. I'll give it my best shot, but I, that's all that I an do." When her daughter doesn't respond, the mother leaves the room.

The denouement occurs when Charlotte, convinced that her mother is trying to steal boyfriend Joe away from her, gets all dressed up and spends an evening getting drunk with her little sister: "OK mom, you want to drive Lou away, that's your business. You want Joe: that's war." As the sisters sit on the front porch, Charlotte's overly parental role in the family is made manifest, a role that will later come back to haunt her by the events that follow:

Katie: "Tell me about when I was born."

Charlotte: "Aren't you sick of hearing this story?"

Katie: "No."

Charlotte: "OK, you were born in a hospital on a cold winter's day, and when Mrs. Flax brought you home, I pretended you were mine."

Immediately following this scene, Charlotte and Katie go to the convent where Joe (the boyfriend/caretaker) lives. As he and Charlotte make furtive love in the belltower, her inebriated little sister falls into the stream and is saved in the nick of time by the nuns. This event serves as the catalyst for Charlotte's confrontation with her mother. As the furious mother returns from the hospital, the penitent but awakened Charlotte refuses her usual silence in favor of "having it out" with mother:^[30]

Mother: "If you're smart you'll just stay away from me."

Charlotte: "Don't walk away from me, mom, you're not going to walk away from me! I am not invisible! Talk to me! Now! Yes, I made a mistake. Yes, I am really, really sorry. It was a big mistake. I know that. You make mistakes. You're always screwing up and we're always paying for it. Everytime you get dumped, everytime you dump on somebody. And it's just, it's not fair mommy, it's not fair."

Mother: "I am sick and tired of being judged by you. You're a kid. OK, when you become an adult you can live your life anyway you want to. But until then, we'll live my life my way. Start packing."

Charlotte: "No!"

Mother: "I said pack. This move is on you and if loverboy doesn't like it, that's too goddamn bad."

Charlotte: "This is not about him, this is about me, OK? That's over, he is gone, he has left. . . ."

Mother: "Surprise, surprise. . . ."

Charlotte: "No, it's not like that. Look, maybe your life works for you but it doesn't work for me. And I want to stay."

Mother: "And do what?"

Charlotte: "Finish high school."

Mother: "Great start, what's your major? Town tramp?"

Charlotte: "No, Mom. The town already has one."

They do, of course, end up staying, after mother and daughter have bonded over their relationships with men:

Mother: "You know, you're just one year younger than I was when I had you. If you hate my life so much, why are you doing your damnedest to make the same mistakes? . . . How do you feel about this guy?"

Charlotte: "I thought I loved him."

Mother: "Sounds familiar."

The reunion ends with a teary daughter questioning mother on her relationship with the absent father ("Did you love my father?"), and an epilogue follows that maintains mother's bantering relationship with Lou without completely altering her persona of "wacky mom."

Both Postcards and Mermaids thus replicate the mode seen in films of the fifties, where mother is not wholly killed off but rather "fixed" within the confines of the nuclear family, as it internally cleanses itself of its own deviations. In keeping with the madcap generic conventions, mom is "fixed" while still retaining her wackiness and idiosyncratic style. Daughter's point has been made: mom is now forced to face up to her responsibilities and finds with the daughter a new intimacy based on a recognition of their mutual enmeshment in the world of (male-defined) sexuality.

These 1980s paradigms have been challenged here and there by the lone book, film, or TV show. A number of books and articles shift significantly away from the simple themes of "loving and letting go," although they are few and far between and generally don't have the same popular appeal as, say, a piece by Colette Dowling. Terri Apter's Altered Loves argues explicitly against the ideologies of separation and for a more nuanced and complex understanding of the changing affiliations daughters and mothers negotiate. Apter strongly urges us to distinguish different meanings of "separation":

First, there is separation as individuation—the development of a distinct self, a sense of self-boundary, enabling one to distinguish one's own wishes, hopes, and needs from those of one's parents. . . . The second sense of separation is like a divorce. It is breaking the bonds of affection with the parent. . . . We must distinguish between individuation as self-identity, and some sense of self-determination or self-agency, and between individuation as a means of separating from others, cutting bonds of affection.^[31]

Apter's interviews with sixty-five British and American mother/daughter pairs reveal not the "truth" of inherent separation and

struggle, but rather the much more complex negotiation of new patterns of closeness built out of a sense of reciprocal effect and care. Apter eloquently critiques both mainstream and feminist theories for their commitment to the "myth of separation" and their endless perpetuation of mother-blame.

Emily Hancock's The Girl Within: Recapture the Childhood Self, the Key to Female Identity , although unfortunately mired in the contemporary obsession with "the child within," nevertheless manages to critique soundly the ideology of separation that is revealed to be more problematic when put to the test of actual interviews: "They did not want to break the mother-daughter bond; they wanted to transform it. Given the cultural ethos that urges separation on adults, the burden fell on each individual daughter to rework the attachment without forfeiting it. In a culture hellbent on separation, this activity took on an almost subversive character."^[32]

Paula Caplan challenges mother-blame head on in her passionate treatise, Don't Blame Mother , where she urges us to critique both the myth of the "perfect mother" (who must inevitably fail us) and the myth of the "evil mother" (who must also fail us): "Mothers are either idealized or blamed for everything that goes wrong. Both mother and daughter learn to think of women in general, and mothers in particular, as angels or witches or some of each. . . . As daughters and mothers, we have for generations been trapped in a dark web we did not spin. But once we are aware of the myth-threads that form the web, as we tell our mothers' stories and our own, we can begin to sort them out and pick apart the web."^[33]

These texts, all using extensive interview material and all written by psychologists, struggle to forge a new conceptualization of mothers and daughters that avoids the dominant patterns of dichotomizing mother-blame while remaining critical of the feminist tendency to replicate these selfsame patterns. However, all three texts remain within a solidly psychological framework and place their revisions within an interpersonal, rather than a more broadly social, context. Although many of these writers point to a culture of mother-blame and woman hate as the culprits in creating a climate of expected hostility between mother and daughter, they often leave these insights as mere asides to the more central topic of psychic reconstruction. Nevertheless, the presence of these alter-

native frameworks can only help in the project of reimagining the mother/daughter relationship.

The backlash of the eighties and early nineties has thus added a sad twist to the question: Whose life is it, anyway? As all women's lives (daughters and mothers) become more and more out of their own control, popular culture still insists on making this question of social control subordinate to the putative timelessness of maternal control and domination. For Adrienne Popper of Parents' Magazine , the question is addressed from daughter to mother: "The division between mothers and daughters here, as always, is one of control, a question of 'whose life is it anyway?' Undoubtedly, daughters can derive enormous benefits from mothers who allow them to live their own lives with maximal maternal support and minimal interference."^[34] This question needs rather to be addressed by all women (daughters and mothers) to the institutions and persons of male power and authority. The difference is not simply one of enunciation (who speaks what question to whom); it is instead a radically political difference: the difference between turning inward to locate oppression or turning outward to challenge it.