Women Like and Unlike Us: A Literary Analysis of the Relationships Between Immigrant Mothers and Their Bicultural Daughters

Abstract

The analytical and creative chapters of my thesis display the best and the worst of bicultural daughters and their mothers as writers represent this relationship in short stories. Throughout the analytical chapters, I show that the through their fiction these writers help us understand that the bicultural daughter/immigrant mother relationship not only is affected by general feelings of matrophobia – as Adrienne Rich points out – but also by different pressures and paradigms that can only be experienced if the daughter belongs to and/or associates herself with a different culture than that of her mother. I hypothesize that the stories reflect these paradigms as usually negative because the pressures from both “American” society and the immigrant mother are often so great that the bicultural daughter cannot embrace either one fully. However, with the adverse feelings from both mother and daughter, comes a realization from both that neither will succeed in dominating the other. Once this is established, both mother and daughter will either reach a consensual agreement to disagree, or will continue having a hostile relationship. By including my own short stories in context with the analyses done for the stories by Kingston, Tan, Pietrzyk and Danticat, I hope to bring interest to this genre for further analysis on the bicultural daughter and immigrant mother relationship as depicted in short stories.