Mothers and Daughters: Jamaica Kincaid's Pre-Oedipal Narrative

In 1976 Adrienne Rich wrote that the bond between mother and daughter—"essential, distorted, misused—is the great unwritten story. Probably there is nothing in human nature," she asserted, "more resonant with charges than the flow of energy between two biologically alike bodies, one of which has lain in amniotic bliss inside the other, one of which has labored to give birth to the other. The materials are here for the deepest mutuality and the most painful estrangement" (225-26). Rich claimed that there was "no presently enduring recognition of mother-daughter passion and rapture" (237), that the "story" of the mother-daughter bond, in language evocative of that intimacy, had not yet been written. Jamaica Kincaid's penetrating novel Annie John (1983) is just such a story. Focusing on the painful struggle to separate from the mother that characterizes early adolescence for many girls, Kincaid evokes with intensity the wrenching many of us shudder to remember.

The simple yet richly sensuous language, the emphasis on an adolescent's point of view, and the immediacy of the subject matter make Annie John an appealing book for adolescents. Perhaps because Annie John was not written specifically with a young adult audience in mind, it lacks the preciousness and the superficiality of many novels aimed at the young adult market. Often in the adolescent "problem novel," issues are raised and then hurriedly resolved. Characters and plot tend to be secondary, the narrative forced, and the characters one-dimensional. By contrast, Annie John is a fully developed psychological study. And perhaps because the work draws so heavily on autobiographical material, Annie John feels authentic (O'Connor 6). Annie, the young heroine, is honest and engaging; the portraits of her parents, based on Kincaid's own mother and father, are complex and convincing. They love their daughter, but they ultimately fail her, as we all were failed by the imperfections of our parents. And if we ourselves are parents, we are doomed to fail our children as well. Although the pain we cause (and were caused) obviously can be survived, the story of the severing of the parentchild bond, particularly from the standpoint of the adolescent, is often one of betrayal and anguish.

Adolescence can be seen as a second individuation process (Bios 11-14). As teenagers begin to separate from their parents and strive for autonomy, often a regressive longing surfaces for that original, pre-oedipal state of merging when the child lives in symbiosis with the mother. Jacques Lacan, in his interpretation of Freud, claimed that the appearance of the father forces the child to separate from the mother to enter into what he calls the Symbolic Order or the Law of the Father. There the child learns to repress the desire for the mother.

The pre-oedipal longings that surface in early adolescence are particularly intense for girls, as Nancy Chodorow has pointed out. She suggests that mothers cling tightly to their daughters out of a need to merge with an "other" in a way that remains unfulfilled in their relationships with men (The Reproduction of Mothering 212). The cyclical pattern in which mothers pass on to their daughters what they have received from their own mothers perpetuates the experience of the world as fluid and without boundaries. In their identification with the mother, girls experience themselves as inextricably linked to, defined, and completed by this connection. The struggle to separate from the mother, then, is particularly wrenching for girls, for to separate is to deny the mother, which for girls is also to deny some part of the self.

Chodorow and American feminist psychoanalysts whose work relies heavily on object-relations theory see the pre-oedipal period as remaining important throughout adult life, as the infant gradually internalizes the mother's early mirroring and nurturing so that the child is able to become more independent of her.¹ American feminists offer a perspective that illuminates the psychological stages of the development of the self. In France, where psychoanalytic theory has been profoundly influenced by Lacan, feminists like Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray offer an essentially...