Abstract

Psychoanalysis has tended, in its discussions of the entanglements between women, to weight negative aspects--recalcitrant guilt, envy, and rage. This essay seeks to redistribute that balance by adding to the scales a goodly measure of the strength that derives from female-to female intergenerational bonding. The following pages are dedicated to one regal grandmother, two wise daughters, a stepmother who never quite realized that she had become a real mother, and a very real mother who died too young but whose articulate voice can still be heard, softly modulated, throughout these pages. Inspired by a small head of Demeter in Sigmund Freud's collection of antiquities, this essay offers a "thematic" reading of the ancient myth of Demeter and Persephone with the interpolation of selected texts of contemporary fiction that also foreground the relations between mothers and daughters. These include: The Joy Luck Club, Annie John, Lovingkindness, A Rain in the Sun, and The Shawl.