Maternal Love as Narcissistic Deprivation: On the Mother-Daughter Relationship in Everything I Never Told You

Abstract

In Celeste Ng’s debut novel Everything I Never Told You, both the two generations’ mother-daughter relationships witness the maternal use of the daughter as “obscure maternal double”, as the daughter unwittingly suffers from the mother’s narcissistic deprivation in the name of maternal love. This thesis attempts to illustrate that the profound shaping motivation of the daughter’s tragedy lies in the mother’s desire and practice of power-participation in a patriarchal society. Under the phallocentric culture that strangles female voice, the mother-figure establishes identity and gains authority by materializing her daughter as a receptive vase, strangling her development of an autonomous sense of self through the operation of doll complex and symbiotic illusion. This traps her into a dualistic power paradigm, which makes her voluntarily or subconsciously play the role of a maintainer and a conspirator to patriarchy, and this power-operation mode bears great generational continuity from mothers to daughters.