Towards Recognition: Writing and the Daughter-Mother Relationship

Women writers are grown-up daughters, and for many of them writing has everything to do with their relationship to their mothers. There must be hundreds of modern and contemporary novels and memoirs written from the perspective of the daughter about the daughter-mother relationship, so compelling is the desire, it seems, to write of the first and formative relationship.1 Recognition of the mother by way of writing is often what enables many adult daughters to make art. Recognizing the separate subjectivity of the mother helps to bring a daughter's own identity into being, even as her own vantage point or subjectivity is what permits her to recognize her mother.

These remarks about subjectivity suggest that the complex weave of need, expectation, desire, anxiety, idealization, disappointment, loss, hurt, and joy that characterizes the daughter-mother relationship has much to do with the tensions between connection and differentiation that it engenders. In this essay I propose that writing becomes a site, and a process, for negotiating this originary relationship, which can be understood as the source and model for all love relationships that follow. I draw on relational psychoanalytic theory to study both the dynamics of the daughter-mother relationship and the writing that adult daughters create in its service. When daughters write to and about their mothers, they are seeking to work out the complex matter of subjectivities: their own and that of their mothers. To see the mother as a “like subject,” in Jessica Benjamin's term, the daughter needs to create her, in writing, as such; her own subjectivity both occasions and emerges from her ability to see her mother. This is the process of “recognition” that Benjamin and others have described; more specifically, it is what Benjamin calls “mutual recognition,” for