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

Chapter 4 
 
Mothering as Transition in Betty Smith's A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
and Paule Marshall's Brown Girl, Brownstones 
The fictional immigrant mothers discussed in this chapter come from 
impoverished backgrounds, but they are portrayed as having fewer emotional problems 
than the other mother characters in the previous chapters. The examples in this chapter 
show mothers who are more positive characters than those previously discussed. They are 
by no means perfect mothers. For example, Smith’s Katie Nolan openly nurtures her son 
more than her daughter, and Marshall’s Silla Boyce uses any means necessary to achieve 
her economic goals. The examples in this chapter also present mothers who do not have 
nurturing natures and the conflict that it causes for the mother-daughter relationships.
In Chapter 4, “Mothering as Transition in Betty Smith's A Tree Grows in 
Brooklyn and Paule Marshall's Brown Girl, Brownstones," I argue that oppressive 
circumstances, such as marital stress, socioeconomic issues, nurturance issues, and 
mother-daughter conflicts, create the need for inner strength, economic security, and 
women-centered networks as coping strategies for the mother characters. I analyze 
examples of mothering in stormy, but productive mother-daughter relationships. By 
“mothering as transition,” I refer to the Bildungsroman experience of the daughter 
character in each work and how the work shows the positive development of the mother-
daughter relationship through the stages of the daughter’s maturation from adolescence to 
her late teens. During that period, mother and daughter do not always agree. I refer to 
each mother-daughter relationship as a battle of wills that develops into a mutual respect 
for each woman’s strength. Throughout the progression of the developmental stages, the 

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mother-daughter relationship makes great gains in mutual understanding, respect, and 
love. 
In this final chapter, each mother-daughter pair comes to a mutually successful 
understanding of their relationship, as in The Kitchen God’s Wife, except that the 
daughters reach this point as very young women in the examples in Betty Smith’s and 
Paule Marshall’s novels. Several issues make these mother-daughter relationships more 
successful than those examples found in the previous chapters: 1) the mother characters 
discussed are extremely strong, ambitious, intelligent, hardworking, money-conscious 
women, 2) the daughter characters discussed are also strong, ambitious, intelligent, and 
hardworking, 3) the mother characters recognize their daughters as younger replicas of 
themselves, and 4) networks of othermothers are very effective in guiding the daughter to 
an understanding of her mother. The examples of successful mother-daughter 
relationships discussed in this chapter show how the right coping strategies can alleviate 
the negative circumstances under which mothering can take place.
However, this relative success does come about as the result of female conflict 
throughout the adolescence and early womanhood of the daughter protagonists (Francie 
Nolan and Selina Boyce) in these two Bildungsromane and in spite of socioeconomic, 
educational, and single-parent hardships for the mothers. Their mothering is constantly 
affected by the strained connections with their willful daughters, the dissipating 
relationships with their unsupportive husbands, and the unyielding dominance of their 
own personalities; in spite of these complications, Brown Girl, Brownstones’s Silla 
Boyce and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn’s Katie Nolan successfully mother their daughters 
into women whom they respect and who mirror them, into introspective, outspoken, 

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intelligent, socially conscious women, thereby breaking with the commonly accepted 
notion that overly strong and/or overly protective mothers rear weak, dependent 
daughters.
In addition to their mothering stories are the many other comparable aspects of 
these works. The great similarities between A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and Brown Girl,