LANGUAGE IN INDIA

Breaking the Good Mother Myths -
A Study of the Novels of Amy Tan

Sushil Mary Mathews, Ph.D.

Myths of the Perfect Mother

"The loss of the daughter to the mother, the mother to the daughter, is the essential female tragedy," (237) writes Adrienne Rich in Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (1976). Paula Caplan, in The New Don't Blame Mother: Mending the Mother-Daughter Relationship (2001), speaks of the dangerous myths about mothers that have pervaded the culture and created or aggravated many of the problems between mothers and daughters.

The myths of the perfect mother give rise to impossible expectations and set mothers up for failure. These included the myth of the imperfect female body, the myth of the ideal mother and the myth that working mothers are not good for their children. These myths of mothers and their relationships with their daughters are rooted in mid- nineteenth century and this continued in psychoanalytical theories on child rearing which gave rise to the child expert in the 1950s. Most of these myths have been constructed in a patriarchal society and are responsible for destroying women's self respect and respect between mothers and daughters.

Three Myths

There are three myths that stand out. The first popular myth is the story of Oedipus and Jocasta. The second widespread myth is that of Electra, daughter of Clytemnestra and Agamemnon and sister of Iphigenia and Orestes. The third, the Homeric Hymn to Demeter (acclaimed to have been composed in the sixth or seventh century) is the oldest known version of the mother-daughter myth of Demeter and Persephone.

The mother-daughter relationship which has an emotionally charged content can be explored by examining conflict and how this is resolved. The conflict is constructive and the daughter gets a safe training ground for independent living. It also explores the damaged sense of self experienced in the mother-daughter relationship within a patriarchal culture.

Malinowski in his Myth in Primitive Psychology (1974), states that myth, "vouches for the efficacy of ritual and contains practical rules for the guidance of man. Myth is thus a vital ingredient of human civilization;" (101) Joseph Dorairaj in his book Myth and Literature (2003),talks about demythologization and states that it is "a literary enterprise that aims at endowing a literary artifact with a contemporary dimension, i.e., relevance and applicability to the present."(94-95). He further opines "Demythologization, which aims at decontextualizing a classical myth and subsequently recontextualizing it in a given context taking into consideration the given horizon of inquiry, is fraught with wide ramifications"(141).

The Goal of This Study

This study attempts a study of the movement of the daughter towards the mother, after a brief estrangement. The mothers who had migrated to America tried to dictate terms and bring up their daughters in the strict cultural and familial traditions that they had learnt in China. The daughters who were born in a different country saw the easy lifestyle around and rebelled against their mothers. The daughters who were born in America have many models of motherhood around them and they compare their mothers with their American counterparts. They set for their mothers certain criteria which they feel would help them assess their mothers and they concluded that their mothers had fallen short and did not belong to the category of the good mother. The daughters did not comprehend that these ideals were just myths and the love of a mother was beyond all comparison and judgment.

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