Mother Archetype Mothers are seen occasionally as the strangest, craziest, altruistic people who have ever been encountered. However some argue that they are the complete opposite. The basic perception of mothers that they are loving, caring, and very nurturing, and this makes up the mother archetype, not only modern day but records and perceptions that date back to ancient history. Although it has come along way, Mothers play a very important role in modern day theatre, literature, and even stories dating back to the biblical era. In ancient texts, we see this role being played by Thetis, Achilles mother in Greek mythology.
She demonstrated signs of egoism. The Grandmother took her cat to the trip despite her son’s objections. She also made Bailey to change traffic rout to visit a house of her youth (that appeared to be in another state). It is possible to say woman’s indirect actions became a reason of family’s death. The Grandmother also looks naive and effusive; the character showed she recognized Misfit without thought of consequences of such move.
Through examining Amy Tan’s book The Joy Luck Club, Sandhya Shetty’s painting Mother and Daughter, and “Sonnets are full of love, and this is my tome” by Christina Rossetti, the power of a mother’s influence is evident. As the prominence of a mother’s wisdom grows, a daughter’s perspective will transform by understanding her relationships and situations. To describe the relationship between a mother and daughter as “complex” barely scratches the surface. For many, it is full of appreciation and admiration, frustration and contempt, or wonder and awe. Since birth, a mother and daughter feel an instinctual pull towards the other to care for and be
Marianne Hirsch writes that in a patriarchal family model, women are associated with values and traditions (1994: 93). Yet, this ideology does not apply to motherhood presented in the novel because slave mothers “own neither themselves nor their children” (Hirsch, 1994: 96). Another researcher, Carole Boyce Davies, considers motherhood and mothering in the novel as the “central and defining tropes in Black female reconstruction” (in Rindchen, 2002: 7). As a mother, Sethe can be perceived both as a feminine and masculine featured character. The protagonist decides to kill her own baby because she does not want her to go through the atrocities of slavery.
In this article, Khawaja focuses on Morrison’s ability to transform the archetypal illusions of motherhood by recounting the guilt Sethe feels as she is forced to remember her choice to murder her daughter to save her from the tortures of slavery. Khawaja denotes that several American authors have encouraged new feminist perspectives by portraying mother-daughter relationships as a significant aspect of the family structure, especially when that family is facing cultural adversity.
Friedan then stayed to care for her family. She was not satisfied as a housewife and wondered if other women felt the same. So, she surveyed her peers from Smith College What she concluded became the Feminine Mystique. Women’s personal identity as mothers and housewife was not fulfilling enough. Women suffered frustration because their only responsibility was the children and husband without exploring their intelligence and abilities.
Similarly to the likes of Margaret Sanger, Friedan fails to mention any reference to black women and those of different ethnicities, consequently raising concerns over the solutions that Friedan is suggesting; if these middle class women go back out and work on their careers then who will come in to their homes and look after their children and clean their house? Aren’t these women who have already been combining the reality of working and domestic duties? After all, when Friedan wrote ‘The Feminine Mystique’ more than one-third of women were already in the workforce. A notable comparison between the works of Sanger and Friedan is that the liberation of women is not only dependent on their gender but also on their social class, introducing an alternative that bodily autonomy is not forefront in the overlap of first and second wave feminism. The women of the feminine mystique had the choice to become a housewife or obtain a career, although they were pressured by society to adopt the latter, the element of choice was still there for them.
The following chapter analyses the description of mothering experience told from the maternal perspective in Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987) and Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin (2003). Despite their different socio-cultural and historical frameworks, these two novels are significant in the context of this dissertation because of the way in which they introduce the maternal perspective on mother-child relationship, which has predominantly been overshadowed in literature by the daughters’ totalising viewpoint. The first part of the chapter examines the representation of black motherhood through Sethe’s character, an enslaved woman who decides to kill her children instead of condemning them to a life of slavery. The second part discusses Eva’s perception of the gap between culturally-constructed expectations about mothering and reality from the perspective of a middle-class independent woman. The aim of the chapter will be to examine the two characters’ different conception of motherhood and to identify analogies and differences in their performance of the maternal role.
This essay explores historical, structural elements of society, in order to enlighten our understanding of the world in relation to Atwood 's The Handmaid 's Tale. notable sources include Betty Friedan, Nathaniel Hawthorne, George Orwell, Germaine Greer, and Emma Watson Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963)is widely regarded as one of the most influential nonfiction books of the 20th century and is widely credited with sparking the beginning of second-wave feminism in the United States. In the 1950s and 60s, the societal belief was that fulfillment for women could only be found in raising children, looking after the home and meeting their husband 's needs. She highlights the fears of Americans during World War II and The cold war and the want for a “idealized” home life, farther is the breadwinner while the mother is the stay at home housewife. This was helped along by the fact that many of the women who worked during the war filling jobs previously done by men faced dismissal, discrimination, and hostility when the men returned from the war.
Being a fragile and beautiful princess does not stop her becoming evil when it comes to the rivalry between two women, even if they are mother and daughter. The father-son conflict is not uncommon in classical myths by any means, but the mother-daughter conflict here is significant as it needs to set an example for women in a patriarchal society. Father and son might have hostility towards each other, but it is a fight between superiors who have power and intelligence. The conflict in Snow White results from a beauty contest and females do not exist in society to have conflicts. They are merely there to please men.