In search of the mother's lost voice: Mariama Ba's 'Une si longue lettre', Francesca Sanvitale's 'Madre e figlia', and Amy Tan's 'The Joy Luck Club'

The mother-daughter dyad as it is explored in the narrative of three contemporary women writers, Mariama Ba's Une si longue lettre, Francesca Sanvitale's Madre e figlia, and Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club, is here reexamined in the light of the slow emergence of maternal speech from silence, and the potentially disruptive force of the mother's voice when she speaks as a subject, as the "I" that shapes "herstory.".;The notion that the text constitutes itself on the premise of the mother's absence, repression, or censorship is challenged here from a feminist approach, using the works of both American and French feminist theorists. The psychoanalytic model (which is a necessary starting point in a subject so closely interrelated with the theories of the development of the self) has been integrated with a cultural, historical, and social perspective in order to be able to account for the differences between women who are acting out their roles as mothers and daughters in environments that are ethnically, culturally, and linguistically very diverse.;The three novels discussed here embody progressive steps of the emergence of maternal speech from silence: still filtered through the daughter's perspective in Madre e figlia, one of the voices in a mother-daughter dialogue in The Joy Luck Club, and finally creating her own "maternal text" in Une si longue lettre.;These texts allow the (m)other's story to be told, thus putting an end to her cultural muteness, filling with voice the vacant space of a silence which is societally imposed and psychically internalized. The maternal as the locus of silence and absence, of the "mother-as-she-is-spoken-about" becomes the locus of the mother as subject, "the-mother-as-she-speaks," who ceases being merely the object of the discourse of the other.