The mothers struggle to express the importance of their Chinese heritage while also keeping balance with “good” American characteristics to their daughters; while the daughters struggle with their identities and relationships with others.
The mother daughter relationship is of significance in Edna O'Briens writting perhaps because of her own experiences of how the state repressed women (as mentioned above) but also religios factors and mythological....
Amy Tan is an author who uses the theme of Chinese-American life, converging primarily on mother-daughter relationships, where the mother is an emigrant from China and the daughter is fully Americanized --yellow on the surface and white underneath.
Author’s Note: It took me a long time to write this story because I couldn’t make sense of my relationship with my mom. I was worried that she would be upset with me for writing it, but she cried and told me she loved me.
Looking at the concept in a familial context, James Cain has created two well-developed characters, Mildred Pierce and her daughter, Veda, that not only emphasizes the nature of mother-daughter relationships, but looks at how love and hate permeates the very essence of the relationship....
Jing-Mei's mother has her mind set on making her daughter a prodigy of some kind. She constantly presses Jing-Mei to do better and be better at whatever activity she participates, but why is she doing this? There are a...
Nora Al-Mosaed’s “Mother-Daughter Relationships: A Feminist Overview” argues that sexism and unequal treatment towards women in a patriarchal society negatively impacts the behavior and relationship between mothers and daughters.
Al-Mosaed describes a study conducted where 173 female college students were questioned about their relationships with their mothers; of the most notable information collected, married daughters reported having a better relationship with their mothers while divorced daughters cited a much more negative r...
My daughter Beatrice is now almost three, and I still haven’t collected or read many books about parenting—maybe because I don’t remember my own parents reading such books, or maybe because I suspect such books would fail to match the wisdom of Arnold Lobel, the poetry of Cynthia Rylant, the wit of Kay Thompson. But there is one book on the subject—at least in part—that I discovered after Beatrice’s birth, and which has meant more to me than any other: “The Little Virtues,” by the Italian novelist, essayist, playwright, short-story writer, translator, and political activist Natalia Ginzburg.
The mother-daughter relationships are most likely different aspects of Tan's relationship with her mother, and perhaps some parts are entirely figments of her imagination.
I first read “The Little Virtues” on a family beach trip when Beatrice was eight months old, and my attention was divided between vacationing, caring for her, and writing syllabi for the fall semester. I thought I could use some of the book in a class I was planning on the personal essay, but I also began to see the book as piercingly relevant to my own life, to my hopes and uncertainties. I read lines out loud to my husband, my mother, and to Beatrice—lines like this one: “What we must remember above all in the education of our children is that their love of life should never weaken.”
My husband and mother nodded and turned the pages of their own books. Beatrice listened placidly, teething alternately on her fist, her foot. I have read the essays in the collection many times since, and I often teach them or recommend them to my students. In a graduate class that I taught at North Carolina State University, a woman with a wry sense of humor who wrote speculative short fiction gave a presentation on “The Little Virtues.” Near the end of her talk she tried to read the final passage from a tender and heartbreaking essay called “Winter in the Abruzzi,” about Ginzburg’s last winter with her first husband. My student had to stop herself because she was so overcome with emotion.
She was a terrible flirt, sliding up to me with her gumpopping and leaning back against the counter, thrusting her remarkablebreasts outward, or bending over in an exaggerated manner so I couldn'tmiss her marvelous bottom, the whole time making outrageous commentsabout sex or politics that shocked her mother.
After reading “Everyday Use” by Alice Walker and “Two Kinds” by Amy Tan I realized that the two stories had the same subject matter: mother and daughter relationships.