My Mother, My Self

Abstract

Although separated by several years, Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club (1989) and Rebecca Wells’s Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood (1996) are united by their status as blockbuster mother/daughter bestsellers that generated profound emotional responses in their readers.¹ While it is certainly arguable that not every mother/daughter story is a feminist one, the mother/daughter form has clear links to second-wave feminist discourse. Before second-wave feminism, stories of mother-daughter relationships were few and far between. In the American Library of Congress catalogue, there are 1,211 entries under the subject-heading “Mothers and daughters—Fiction,” and of these only 62 are dated before 1970.² And while novels like Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying (1973) devote chapters to the mother/daughter relationship, it was not until the 1980s that second-wave novels that focused primarily on the mother/ daughter connection became bestsellers. As this timeline suggests, the mother/daughter story grew apace with the other new trend in popular women’sliterature: the boom in the consumption of novels by and about women of color. This trend eventually wound its way back to writers like Marilyn French and Marge Piercy, both of whom were associated with the women’s liberation novel and both of whom produced mother/ daughter narratives in the 1980s and 1990s, French in the tellingly titled novel Her Mother’s Daughter (1987).³

Willing liberates; but what is it that puts even the liberator himself in fetters? “It was”—that is the name of the will’s gnashing of teeth and most secret melancholy. Powerless against what has been done, he is an angry spectator of all that is past. The will cannot will backwards; and that he cannot break time and time’s covetousness, that is the will’s loneliest melancholy.

—Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

It seems useful … to distinguish, from [the] ultimate subtext which is the place of social contradiction, a secondary one, which is more properly the place of ideology, and which takes the form of the aporia or the antinomy: what can in the former be resolved only through the intervention of praxis here comes before the purely contemplative mind as a logical scandal or double bind, the unthinkable and the conceptually paradoxical, that which cannot be unknotted by the operation of pure thought, and which must therefore generate a whole more properly narrative apparatus—the text itself—to square its circles and to dispel, though narrative movement, its intolerable closure.

—Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious