Mothered/Othered Daughters: Mother Abjection and Diasporic Identity in Ethnic American Short Fiction

Abstract

Mother-daughter relationships are usually fraught with tension, which is intensified by the cultural and social conditions under which the mother and the daughter live in culturally diverse societies. Immigrant mothers affect their daughters’ identity formation as they simultaneously nourish and hinder their initiation into the societies they reside in. Through adopting Julia Kristeva’s theory of the abject as a psychoanalytic critical framework, the study examines the extent to which the ambivalent feelings the daughter usually shows towards her mother are embodied in the conflicting feelings she experiences towards the two cultures forming her identity as a second generation immigrant. This is done by analysing the connection between the mother-daughter relationship, the diasporic daughter’s identity and the cross-cultural relations she forms in a culturally diverse setting as manifested in four short stories written by four ethnic-American writers: “Everyday Use” by the African American Alice Walker, “Two Kinds” by the Chinese American Amy Tan, “Aunt Moon’s Young Man” by the Native American Linda Hogan and “How I Became My Mother’s Daughter” by the Arab American Laila Lalami.