Waking Sleeping Beauty: Feminist Voices in Children's Novels

7. Refuting Freud: Mother/Daughter Relationships

7. REF UTI N G F R E U D : MOTHER/DAUGHTER RELATIONSHIPS In chapter 6, I investigated the implications of community as an arena in which the child or adolescent protagonist could explore her voice within different types of interrelationships . The most complex form of relationship in feminist literature , however, seems to be the mother/daughter relationship, for that is the primary relationship for many girls. Adrienne Rich notes that mother-and-daughterhood existed long before cultural constructs of sisterhood did, and that the mother/daughter relationship, at various times both blown out of proportion and not given enough attention , "is the great unwritten story" (OfWoman Born 225). She further notes that "the loss of the daughter to the mother, the mother to the daughter, is the essential female tragedy. We acknowledge Lear (father-daughter split), Hamlet (son and mother), and Oedipus (son and mother) as great embodiments of the human tragedy; but there is no presently enduring recognition of mother-daughter passion and rapture" (237). Although Jo loves her mother passionately in Little Women, few other classics ofchildren's literature demonstrate mother/ daughter bonds at all, much less strong, positive ones. Jamaica Kincaid 's AnnieJohn (1983) is perhaps the closest recent text that tries to breach this gap: Annie lives rapturously with her mother until she 100 REFUTING FREUD· 101 discovers her parents having sex. The girl's discovery of sex leads to her departure from the Garden of Eden: Annie no longer lives in paradisiacal harmony with her mother. Roni Natov analyzes Kincaid's Annie John as a Lacanian story; Annie's childhood naivete marks a pre-Oedipal innocence that can no longer exist once she becomes aware of her father as the figure who splits her from her imaginary oneness with her mother.1 Natov's work delineates for feminists the strength that can adhere to a mother/daughter relationship that is not corrupted by classically Freudian competitions for male attention, but her work focuses on the daughter's subject position, as many feminist critiques tend to do, in a way that virtually ignores the maternal subject position. Barbara Johnson suggests three possibilities wherein pre-Oedipal paradigms, such as the one used by Natov, could be interpreted as a positive rather than as a regressive aspect of growing up (142). First, she believes more than simple autonomy from the mother should be used as a mark of maturity. Mothering, she says, should be viewed as only one of a number of possible "maturational models" (143). Second , she perceives the Oedipal model as needlessly favoring the point of view of a child who must necessarily be egotistical. When we interpret literature through a Freudian lens, we necessarily focus more on the child/Oedipus figure than on the parent figure, and since childhood is a necessarily ego-centered time, Freudian readings invariably result in readings that focus on the child at the expense of the adult, especially the mother. And third, Johnson advocates analyzing the maternal figure "as the subject of discourse rather than as the source of life or the object of desire and anger" (143). Children's literature as a field of study has had some success in regard to at least the last of these three suggestions, for several studies exist that share a goal with this chapter: they investigate maternal subjectivities within literary discourse. In fact, among children's literature critics, the mother/daughter relationship is problematized more than any other facet of female-female relationships, perhaps because (rightly or wrongly) the mother stands in our culture as the representative of female adulthood for children. For example, Mitzi Myers investigates the implications of the power of mothers and surrogate mothers in Georgian children's books in her essay "Impeccable 102 . REFUTING FREUD Governesses, Rational Dames, and Moral Mothers." Myers concludes that for women such as Wollstonecraft, the creation of "benign and powerful maternal governance and good girlhood reflect[s] both female fantasies and real cultural change. On the one hand, they read nurture as power, shOWing a decided preference for maturity over the childishness male preceptors recommend to women. . . . On the other hand ... [they] encode complex social messages" (54-55). Anita Clair Fellman explores a similar dynamic between the strength of nurturing and the benefits of being nurtured in the actual mother/ daughter relationship between Laura Ingalls Wilder and her daughter in "Laura Ingalls Wilder and Rose Wilder Lane: The Politics of...