Mother/cultures and 'new world' daughters: Ethnic identity formation and the mother-daughter relationship in contemporary American literature

Contemporary woman-authored novels of development have shifted away from the Eurocentric and male-dominated bildungsroman toward new formulations of the genre that compellingly explore the identity formation of young women. My analysis of recently published novels by ethnic women writers engages two aspects of female identity formation: the mother-daughter relationship, insofar as the development of identity is often at stake in the power dynamics of the dyad and the contestation for cultural "allegiance" between mainstream American culture and the traditional ethnic and cultural heritage of the mother. I examine representations from different ethnicities in order to transcend the particulars of individual cultures and discover larger patterns of struggle. I analyze four contemporary novels of development to illustrate my argument: Paule Marshall's Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959), Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club (1989), Gish Jen's Mona in the Promised Land (1996), and Louise Erdrich's The Antelope Wife (1998).For each novel, I bring together three fields of study: literary genre theories related to the novel of development, psychoanalytic theories of the mother-daughter relationship, and theories of ethnic identity formation. By bringing the different theories into dialogue with one another, I explore how the negotiation of ethnicity is depicted in textual representations of mother-daughter relationships, and furthermore discuss the social and political implications that such representations may have. I compare representations of mothers' discursive constructions of the "homeland," daughters' experiences of racism in social institutions such as school and the workplace, the impact of language barriers upon mother-daughter relationships, and daughters' elaborations of ethnic identities that incorporate both cultural/ethnic heritages and American upbringings. Furthermore, I argue that these novels meaningfully represent female experiences of negotiating identity, presenting alternative models of subjectivity and female relationships that operate outside of binary paradigms such as assimilation versus ethnic nationalism, or mother versus daughter. I conclude that as they draw upon both the tensions and possibilities of cultural sameness and difference, the contemporary women writers under discussion offer new models for imagining and negotiating mother-daughter relationships and identity formation.