A woman's legacy: Conflict in the mother-daughter relationship in contemporary American fiction

In this dissertation, I intend to explore the motif of the cyclical, multi-generational mother-daughter relationship in novels written by five American women during the past ten years. The minority and ethnic American women's fiction of the 1990s concerning the mother-daughter relationship continually points the reader toward the social and psychological constraints that radically shape these relationships. In spite of the distances that cause the relationship to falter, the inherent goodness in the relationship most often triumphs and the mother-daughter dyad emerges intact. In Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club, Toni Morrison's Beloved, Cynthia Ozick's The Puttermesser Papers, Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres, and Edwidge Danticat's Breath, Eyes, Memory, the writers use the motif of the dysfunctional mother-daughter dyad to exemplify both the abuses of slavery and culturally sanctioned, patriarchal mistreatment by society of women, especially minority women and other marginalized groups of women.; Central to my investigation of the five novels will be the question of why so many women writers feel drawn to use the trope of mother-daughter strife in their writing. Throughout twentieth century post-Freud literature, mothers have often been portrayed as absent, neglectful, psychotic, or overbearing. In the past, mothers often have been depicted as the perpetrators of disharmony. Contemporary women writers, however, shrug off the constraints of matrophobia, and in the novels I examine in this dissertation portray family dysfunction as having multiple perpetrators. Writers, in other words, have begun to recognize forces outside the family such as the religious and cultural traditions, as well as the prejudices of our society as being responsible for individual and collective abuse.; When stories of such huge failures at parenting appear in a temporal and national cluster, a remarkable moment has been created in literary history. Minority women novelists, employing their craft, have created an activist forum for protest using their stories to resist cultural practices and to create space for people to make choices about the way they will interact with their children.