Mothers and Daughters

             Mothers and Daughters, A Lifelong Relationship.
             The relationship between mothers and daughters affects women strongly at all stages of their lives. Even though not all women become mothers, all are obviously daughters, and daughters have mothers. Even daughters who never become mothers must counter the issues of motherhood, because the possibility and even the probability of motherhood remains. Yet this relationship is so often taken for granted that it is all but ignored, even by mothers and daughters themselves.
             For any daughter, the relationship with her mother is the first relationship in her life, and may also be the most important she will ever have. David Lynn of the University of California, has pointed out that "little girls may have a particularly difficult time separating from their mothers because they are of the same sex", and therefore identify most deeply with the very person from whom they must "psychologically" separate themselves. Dependency has played a particular part in the social role of women; the daughter who remains dependent on her mother will transfer her dependency to her husband and will expect her daughter to be dependent on her, repeating the cycle. These roles are no different in the African-American community, except for the fact that they are magnified to larger proportions.
             In the context of her relationship with her mother a daughter first learns what it means to be a person but finds that she is not encouraged to develop a sense of her own separate identity. In the Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison shows what can happen to a person alienated from positive black traditions. Pauline had lost her inner self, and the beauty of her own people. She tries to fill an aching void with the films, and makes efforts to look like Jean Harlow. Her daughter, Pecola, is further removed from community strengths and longs for "the bluest eyes" to gain entrance into a world that doesn&apo...

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Mothers and Daughters. (1969, December 31). In MegaEssays.com. Retrieved 07:41, March 29, 2024, from https://www.megaessays.com/viewpaper/53239.html