Is It Really Mommie Dearest?: Daughter-Mother Narratives in Young Adult Fiction (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Is It Really Mommie Dearest?: Daughter-Mother Narratives in Young Adult Fiction Karen Coats (bio) Is It Really Mommie Dearest?: Daughter-Mother Narratives in Young Adult Fiction. By Hilary S. Crew. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 2000 About halfway through many children's literature courses, the students begin to wonder where the moms are in the books they are reading. They seem to always be missing for some reason or another. The easiest answer to why this is the case is that it is a literary convention to get rid of the parents in order for the child to take center stage in the action and conflict of the story. But in literature written for young adults, the relative presence or absence of the mother is much more complicated, especially in realist texts that feature female protagonists. One of the most complicated aspects of growing up female is negotiating and renegotiating one's relationship with one's mother, and girls often look to books as one avenue of figuring out the complex dynamics of the daughter-mother relationship. Hilary S. Crew's Is It Really Mommie Dearest?: [End Page 107] Daughter-Mother Narratives in Young Adult Fiction is an impressively thorough analysis of what they find there. Crew begins by establishing the problem of voice in narratives that focus on the relationship between a daughter and a mother. Most often, she says, one finds that the narrative is focalized through the daughter, so that we see the mother almost exclusively through her eyes; the mother's voice is silenced. Crew argues that we must acknowledge that this relationship has two participants, and she looks for texts that allow the mother her own voice so that a "harmonics of relationship," a term borrowed from feminist psychologists Lyn Mikel Brown and Carol Gilligan, is visible, rather than a univocal rendering of the relationship through an often disgruntled and confused daughter (Crew 29, n. 6). Nonetheless, it seems that in most of the books included in her study, the story is told by the daughter, or a narrator that focalizes the story through the daughter, with the result that the mom is often vilified and the daughter emerges as strong, independent, and capable, filling in the gaps left by incompetent parenting in almost miraculous ways. After setting up her general method of attempting to listen to both mothers and daughters, Crew moves to the paratexts and metanarratives that script the daughter-mother relationship in white, Western narratives. She begins with fairy tales, focusing on the traditional stories of Rapunzel and Snow White and some contemporary retellings. An interesting and troubling elision occurs in this section regarding the slip from mothers to stepmothers. While Crew notes both the psychological and sociohistorical arguments that seek to account for the predominance of stepmothers in traditional stories, she proceeds to examine their maternal behaviors and misbehaviors without asking why and how their behavior might have been different had they been left as birth or "natural" mothers. That is, in both psychological and sociohistorical accounts, stepmothers are symbolic or actual figures set up as fundamentally in conflict or competition with the young protagonists. The question then seems to me to be why, in the patriarchal tradition of these tales, the presence of a birth mother is so threatening to the established order that she must always be done away with? What if she were allowed to live, or allowed to keep and rear her daughter? If we can read anything from the behavior of Cinderella's stepmother, for instance, we see that as a mother, she is a fierce advocate for the interests of her own daughters, educating them and authorizing their sexuality in ways that result in her being severely punished. So what we are being asked to identify against in these tales is a mother who stands behind her daughters and attempts to make the best deal she can for them in a world where their only chance for a good life, as she well knows, is a good marriage. By conflating the stepmother into the mother, Crew misses the chance to pose such radical questions; she listens only to the stepmother as stepmother, not as...