Mothering modes: analyzing mother roles in novels by twentieth-century United States women writers

Sociological and Psychological Perspectives on Mothering: 
In For Mothers of Difficult Daughters (1998), self-proclaimed mothers’ advocate and 
veteran psychotherapist Dr. Charney Herst has become a well-known expert on addressing the 
problems of and healing the relationships between mothers and their daughters. She has made it 
her mission to retaliate against the mother-blaming techniques still practiced in areas of 
psychology. She writes: “It’s no surprise [mothers] blame themselves: for the past thirty years, 
most psychologists have held Mom responsible for her child’s personality. Our daughters, often 
at the urging of their therapists, reason that their unhappiness has been caused by a bad 
childhood—which basically translates to bad mothering” (xiv). According to Debold, Wilson, 
and Malave
′, even some of the terms often used in our culture to describe mothers’ behavior falls 
into the trend of mother blaming: “controlling, intrusive, engulfing, enmeshed, seductive, 
overprotective, cold, critical, competitive, distant, depleted, narcissistic, abusive, crazy” (26). In 
fact, some of these same terms appear within the chapters of my study. However, despite the 
causes of their behaviors, these descriptions are correct in certain instances. Some of the 
examples in this study show mothers whose childhood experiences as daughters affect their 
mothering in a negative manner. So, regardless of the truthfulness of some diagnoses, it is still 
obvious from a historical survey of the past psychological literature on mothers that “the basic 
message is clear: Look no farther; the cause of what ails you is your mother” (26). Herst 
acknowledges that part of her focus on this familial relationship in particular is its extreme 
power: “As mothers and daughters both know, there is no bond more intimate than the one they 
share. It’s same-sex, it lasts a lifetime, and it can be intensely rewarding or brutally painful. 
When a relationship that profound goes awry, it takes effort to get it back on track” (xv). The 
extreme difficulty of getting the mother-daughter relationship back on track is exhibited in The 

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Kitchen God’s Wife and Dreaming in Cuban in Chapter 3 of this study. So many years of 
distance, resentment, disagreement, and misunderstanding are hard to overcome for both the 
daughters and the mothers in these works. 
Herst’s years as a therapist are characterized by “trying to bring together women who see 
each other as rivals, martyrs, or manipulators, but rarely as equals” (4), which she believes is 
directly linked to a trend that makes most of the population believe that it should “toe the 
psychology line and blame Mother for her child’s behavior” in almost all circumstances (6). The 
fact that biochemical and genetic mental disorders are diseases that were once blamed on the 
mother is a prime example of the perplexing tendency to blame mothers for what goes wrong 
with their children (Herst 13). Herst also points out that almost all of the literature and research 
on mother-daughter relationships “came from the daughter’s perspective” and that “someone had 
to take the mothers’ side” (6). This uneven depiction of the mother-daughter relationship is an 
issue that inspires this study; purposes of this project are to continue to tell the mother’s story 
and to examine the oppressive circumstances under which mothers rear their children.
Debold, Wilson, and Malave
′ also comment on the pressure to measure up to the 
unattainable ideas of the perfect mother myth: “The culture of mother blaming creates a 
psychological prison for mothers of daughters. Whether or not a mother is conscious of these 
forces within the culture, the desire to do right, to provide a daughter with new opportunities, 
makes mothering incredibly pressured” (31). This is the case with Silla Boyce in Brown Girl in 
Chapter 4 of this study. She is obsessively driven to give Selina the opportunities 
(neighborhood, education, socialization, travel, etc.) that she has never had for herself. Such 
pressures unfairly goad mothers into believing that they “can’t afford to fail; failure would 
damage their daughters. By being set up by impossible expectations, mothers are doomed to fail” 

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(31). Mothers feel the pressure that they must be everything at once—the “Super Mom” 
complex. Most would agree that charging mothers to empower their daughters in a society that 
has constructed vehicles to un-empower women is definitely leaving mothers to contend in a no-
win situation. Attempting to be a “perfect mother” in an imperfect society is an exact recipe for 
failure. However, this is where the issue of effective coping strategies becomes extremely 
important. Some examples in this study show mother characters who benefit greatly from coping 
strategies. Though, some coping strategies are more effective than others.
In Don’t Blame Mother: Mending the Mother-Daughter Relationship (1989), Paula 
Caplan describes “aspects of girls’ and women’s socialization that creates or exacerbates 
problems between mothers and daughters, as well as methods that mothers and daughters have 
found helpful in repairing the rifts between them” (238). Also, in opposition to some of her other 
colleagues already mentioned in this introduction, she depicts the mother-daughter relationship 
as no more a struggle than other parent-child relationships, but she cites socially-created barriers 
for women as issues that complicate this relationship more than other parent-child relationships.
In “Don’t Blame Mother: Then and Now” (2000), Caplan revisits her previous work and makes 
new observations and assessments. It is the depressing analysis that the basic principles that 
existed when she wrote the book still existed that is her purpose for writing this encore essay. 
Acknowledging that her interest in mother blaming was initiated when she was working in a 
clinical setting where families were psychologically evaluated, Caplan’s motivation to initiate 
her own documented studies was a reaction to the fact that “it seemed that there was nothing that 
a mother could do that was right” (237).
The pressure of mother blaming leaves mother’s desperate to be the best but hard-pressed 
to find the best ways to cope with the burdens of mothering. As a result of women’s own 

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conditioning: “Throughout history and across cultures most women mother according to the 
prescribed institution of motherhood; that is, women’s mothering practices and identities are 
defined and controlled by the larger patriarchal society in which they live” (O’Reilly and Abbey 
7). I must agree with this assertion. Women often mother as a reflection of how they were 
mothered, usually consciously and unconsciously duplicating the methods with which they are 
most familiar, regardless of whether those acts are negative or positive. Only learning to 
question this particular structure can eliminate the failures that it predetermines for the process of 
rearing independent daughters.
Women must tell others about their experiences, so that others can learn from their 
examples. This validation of women’s voices is positively extended to telling women’s stories in 
novels as well. These are the kinds of stories associated with Naomi Lowinsky’s definition of the 
“motherline.” In “Mother of Mothers, Daughter of Daughters: Reflections on the Motherline” 
(2000), Lowinsky defines the motherline as the “ancient lore of women” (227) and stories from 
the motherline as those stories of “female experience: physical, psychological, and historical; 
stories of the life cycles that link generations of women; stories that show how times have 
changed and that show that nothing much changes at all” (227). She writes about the fact that 
“women lament the lack of narratives of women’s lives, yet women’s stories are all around us. 
We don’t hear them because our perception is shaped by a culture that trivializes ‘women’s talk’ 
and devalues the passing down of female lore and wisdom” (228). In fact, female lore and 
wisdom is usually referred to as “old wives’ tales” and retold with a great amount of skepticism.
Lowinsky also refers to the struggles between mother and daughter as “mother-daughter 
wrestling, a struggle at once to identify and differentiate from one another. Mothers and 
daughters wrestle with bodily, temperamental, stylistic, generational, and emotional differences, 

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with the power of the feminine mysteries and how little they are honored in our cultures” (232).
Daughters struggle not to relive their mothers’ existences, existences that they believe they know 
about but do not really understand (like Pearl Brandt in Kitchen God’s Wife), existences 
characterized by living as those oppressed in a patriarchal society.
Obviously, the strain of living with oppressive circumstances might very well create 
emotional barriers in a mother’s rearing of her child, especially her daughter, whom she sees as a 
potential mother. These challenges make for many different forms of mothering, resulting from 
the mothers’ experiences as a mother, a daughter, a woman, and as a person and demand that the 
mother find beneficial coping strategies, which make her life and the lives of her children better.
These ideas are reflected in the various chapters of my study. In some cases in this dissertation, 
mothers emerge triumphant despite their oppressive circumstances.