Mothers And Daughters Give The Lie Analysis

MATROPHOBIC DAUGHTERS IN ALICE WALKER’S MERIDIAN AND

Shashi deshpande’s the dark holds no terrors: A COMPARISON

‘Phobia’ is one of the most basic human emotions. Everyone sense phobia in the progress of their life. In clinical psychology, ‘phobia’ is a kind of mental disorder which characterizes by anxiety and fear. For the present paper, the term ‘Matrophobia’ is adopted from Adrienne Rich seminal book Of Woman Born, where she calls it, “not the fear of one’s mother or of motherhood, but of becoming one’s mother” (1976, 235).

Feminists down the years have endeavored to explain the term ‘matrophobia’. Fran Scoble’s essay, Mothers and Daughters Give the Lie outlines the mainspring of feminist ‘matrophobia’ in the mother’s acquiescence with the crooked power dissemination of patriarchy, seen, in the words of Adrienne Rich, says [m]atrophobia can be seen as a womanly splitting of the self, in the desire to become purged once and for all our mothers bondage, to become individuated and free. The mother stands for the victims in ourselves, the unfree woman, the martyr. Our personalities seem dangerously to blur and overlap with our mother; and, in a desperate attempt to known where mother ends and daughter begins, we perform radical

In Meridian and The Dark Holds No Terrors, the young matrophobic daughters see their mothers (matrophillic daughters) as having taught them compromise and self-hatred that they are struggling to be free. They hate their mothers to the extent of suffering and developing a dread that if they relax their guard, they may identify with the mother completely. The mother stands for the victim in themselves, the unfree woman, the martyr; and so the matrophobic daughters do not want to be vessels of their mother’s (matrophillic daughter) frustration and