Mother/Daughter Plot (Hirsch)

Marianne Hirsch's study focuses on the mother-daughter relationship through examples from the literature of western Europe and North America in the 19th and 20th centuries. Hirsch draws the mother-daughter cathexis from the margins to the center in her discussion of women's writings, placing them against classical mythological paradigms.

In The Mother/Daughter Plot (1989), Hirsch argues that the stories of mothers were seldom treated in Western literature until recently, in part due to the privileged position granted to the Oedipal myth in which Jocasta's voice is not heard. In 18th- and 19th-century female novels such as those by Jane Austen and George Sand, mothers are typically absent or ineffectual, which Hirsch links to the heroine's need to break from the mother in order to be productive and creative. In looking at works from the 1920s by authors such as Colette and Virginia Woolf, she finds conflict in the desire to create both male and female role models which still honoring the Oedipal plot model. By the 1970s and 1980s, she sees the maternal experience placed at the center of novels, although [Page 809]they may be written from the daughter's rather than the mother's perspective, a tendency she also see in feminist writings. Hirsch argues that women writers should consider alternative myths, such as that of Demeter and Persephone, as more appropriate models for the experience of motherhood.