My Mother, My Self

Abstract

Although separated by several years, Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club (1989) and Rebecca Wells’s Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood (1996) are united by their status as blockbuster mother/daughter bestsellers that generated profound emotional responses in their readers.1 While it is certainly arguable that not every mother/daughter story is a feminist one, the mother/daughter form has clear links to second-wave feminist discourse. Before second-wave feminism, stories of mother-daughter relationships were few and far between. In the American Library of Congress catalogue, there are 1,211 entries under the subject-heading “Mothers and daughters—Fiction,” and of these only 62 are dated before 1970.2 And while novels like Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying (1973) devote chapters to the mother/daughter relationship, it was not until the 1980s that second-wave novels that focused primarily on the mother/ daughter connection became bestsellers. As this timeline suggests, the mother/daughter story grew apace with the other new trend in popular women’sliterature: the boom in the consumption of novels by and about women of color. This trend eventually wound its way back to writers like Marilyn French and Marge Piercy, both of whom were associated with the women’s liberation novel and both of whom produced mother/ daughter narratives in the 1980s and 1990s, French in the tellingly titled novel Her Mother’s Daughter (1987).3