Daughter And Daughter Relationships In Chaucer

UNBRIDLED REBELLIOUS DAUGHTERS: A study of daughter/mother relationship IN MANJU KAPUR’S DIFFICULT DAUGHTERS AND shashi deshpande’s the dark holds no terrors

Literature depicts the changing attitudes in relationships down through the ages. Earlier fictional representations of daughter characters were illustrated as meek, docile, passive, modest, humble and unpretentious. Much of the literature looks back to the Demeter and Persephone myth as an archetype of the mother daughter relationship. The myth reveals that each daughter loves their power generating mother. Then in Medieval literature, the daughters were not given much importance and mothers are making visible into invisible. The well-known writer Chaucer, the father of English poetry

The feminist critics look into this relationship of mother and child very deeply with different factors. Daughter – mother relation is dynamic in nature which has undergone sweeping changes down through the ages. Those particular changes have taken place due to the attention rested on mothers and daughters respectively, since every mother was once herself as a daughter and every daughter can attain motherhood later in their life. Feminist psychoanalytic theorists suggest, “The sex-role socialization process is different for boys and girls. While boys learn maleness by rejecting femaleness via separating themselves from their mothers, girls establish feminine identities by embracing the femaleness of their mothers. Girls identify with their mothers, a sense of connection that is incorporated into the female personality” (Collins 52).Thus they are mutually determine by each other. The only essential difference between them is that one is the original, experienced and fully realized self and the other is merely the mirror and above to attain its originality. In this way, again an identification and understanding takes place between the daughter and the mother.

The daughter in Manju Kapur’s Difficult Daughters and Saru in The Dark Holds No Terrors are quite different from the qualities of above mentioned daughters. These Daughters struck into Matrophobia feelings and started to show resentment towards their mother. Adrienne Rich in her book Of Woman Born calls 'matrophobia ' - "not the fear of one 's mother or of motherhood, but of becoming one 's mother" (1976-