No one loves you like your mother. Mothers are full of love and
             devotion, full of the patience of saints. They are pure and good. Or
             mothers are vulgar, instilling false values into the hearts of their
             daughters because of the societal privileged relationship of the maternal
             bond and the too-overwhelming presence of maternal flesh and weight.
             Louise Edrich's Tales of Burning Love portrays a mother of the first
             stripe, a mother as traditionally self-sacrificing and selfless as apple
             pie, a trapeze artist of the delicate societal relations that spin around
             the human heart regarding motherly and daughterly love. In contrast,
             Tereza's mother of Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being is a crude
             woman whom is oppressive to her daughter in the girl's eyes because of her
             vulgarity and the way the woman emotionally exploits the maternal bond. To
             Tereza, her mother represents all she despises about the town in which she
             Both mother-daughter relationships, however, portray a kind of
             inescapable destiny in terms of the relationship between mothers and
             daughters in terms of the daughter's later relationships with men and their
             own sense of self hood. Whether the women resist these former relationship
             patters that they see in their mother's relationships with their fathers,
             or seek to mirror them in their relationships with men and their own
             bodies, these daughters cannot escape the maternal influence and modeling
             A perfect artist on the high wire and a perfect mother in the whirl of
             society€"or at least so seems Anna Schlick. Once upon a time, Anna was a
             famous trapeze artist. Now she takes the guise, however, of a
             conventional, society wife. She is married to a jealous, abusive husband,
             the wealthy but emotionally and morally bankrupt Lawrence Schlick.
             Lawrence is constantly filled with a sense of overwhelming, destructive
             ...