Mothers and daughters in Morrison, Tan, Marshall, and Kincaid (Toni Morrison, Amy Tan, Paule Marshall, Jamaica Kincaid, Barbados, Antigua)

This dissertation examines female identity within the complex framework of mother-daughter relationships in Toni Morrison's Beloved, Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club, Paule Marshall's Brown Girl, Brownstones, and Jamaica Kincaid's The Autobiography of My Mother. I want to call attention to the issues regarding mother-daughter relationships addressed by these women writers of color, because the focus of the scholarship on mothers and daughters has generally been on white women. These four works reveal that mother-daughter relationships are complicated by the interlocking evils of racism, sexism, and classism. I argue that the discussion of mother-daughter relationships cannot be isolated from the politics and discourse of race, ethnicity, gender, and class---personal is political. Othermothers, community, and maternal heritage will be included.; Chapter One discusses both theories on mother-daughter relationships by Euro-American feminist critics---who tend to focus exclusively on gender---and the perspectives by African-American and Asian-American feminist critics, who write with racial, ethnic, and class consciousness.; In Chapter Two I use Beloved as a case study to explore the strengths and limitations of applying Euro-American feminist approaches to read a work by a woman of color. I focus on the problematic subjectivity of the characters caused by slavery, the danger of possessive maternal love, and communal mothering.; Chapter Three focuses on The Joy Luck Club. I follow critically Lisa Lowe's paradigm in which generational conflict in some Chinese-American literature parallels the conflict between nativism and assimilation. I argue that the line between these two sources of tension is fluid.; Chapter Four studies Brown Girl, Brownstones , focusing on the tension between the American-born daughter and her Barbadian-born mother. I analyze their different values between owning a selfhood and owning property, caused by their different backgrounds.; Chapter Five suggests that the death of the mother in The Autobiography of My Mother serves as a metaphor for the "death" of the local government, as it is colonized by England. I argue that personal history mirrors national history and the mother-daughter relationship represents the power struggle between the dominant and the dominated.