Uncivil Wars: The Reproduction of Mother-Daughter Conflict and Rosellen Brown's Autobiography of My Mother

The studies of recent feminist psychoanalytic theorists and the fiction of contemporary female writers reveal a common interest in mother-daughter relationships, each demonstrating in its own fashion the centrality of that relationship to the development of female identity. To examine the novels in light of the theory (or vice versa) is to gain greater appreciation of the dynamics of mother-daughter conflict. The most extensive theoretical work on this subject is that of Nancy Chodorow who, in The Reproduction of Mothering, explores the effects of the mother-daughter dyad on female development, seeing its strengths in the fostering of an empathic feminine nature and ascribing its inevitable conflicts to matters of identification and boundary confusion.1 Chodorow argues that females commonly experience difficulty negotiating the requisite developmental tasks of separation and individuation (pp. 95-104). Because a girl “does not give up the preoedipal relationship [with the mother] completely, but rather builds whatever happens later upon the preoedipal base” (p. 115), an intense interaction between mother and daughter results, one that can interfere with the child's psychic maturation. Chodorow finds that females are more apt than males to establish strong attachments, but they are also more apt to suffer threats to their essential sense of separateness and remain persons in whose psychic lives the mother is the dominant figure.

In light of Chodorow's findings concerning the centrality of the mother-daughter relationship to the establishment of female identity, it is not surprising to note the frequency with which this relationship becomes a pivotal issue in fiction by women. This occurence is especially common in first novels