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 recognizing requires a subject to see the other as a subject. All the while the daughter also needs to maintain the passionate energy that desire for the mother as love object produces, for this desire, too, is a part of her own subjectivity. Daughter-writing has the potential to negotiate and transform the relationship as it has been structured in everyday life.

The potential of writing to participate in the daughter-mother relationship in such a fashion devolves from language's basis in relationality: the fact that it originates within, rather than without, the first relationship, the mother-infant dyad. We may think of the daughter-mother relationship as a triangle, with the daughter at one corner and the two aspects of the mother, the (social) woman and the (idealized) Mother, at the other two corners. The existence of two figures, two components of maternal identity, enables symbolization to be achieved. Rather than seeing the father (and the Oedipus complex) as the third term that intervenes in a mother-infant symbiosis, we can thus identify the mother herself as the initial presence that enables distinctions to be made between self and other, inner and outer, or (linguistically speaking) signifier and signified: the ability, that is, to symbolize, upon which the achievements of subjectivity and language are predicated.

In this essay I refer to a series of contemporary and modern texts, then focus on Vivian Gornick's 1987 memoir, Fierce Attachments, to offer an analysis of how daughter-writing works towards enacting, negotiating, and potentially transforming the adult daughter-mother relationship. Using the perspective of relational psychoanalysis, I set up some parameters for daughter-writing by identifying the needs that the daughter brings to her writing and the potential that language offers for fulfilling those needs. I begin with a linguistic collage of moments of writing from texts by daughters.

I dreamed of Anna again last night. It was the same as always. I search everywhere for something I have misplaced and must find again. It is a matter of life or death. (Susannah Moore, My Old Sweetheart)

I looked back, saw her face pale and drawn, her eyes red-rimmed, her lips trembling...