Mother Daughter By Mary Oliver

The mother-daughter relationship is measured by a mutual empowerment. On the one hand, the mother plays a major role in her daughter’s transformation. On the other hand, the daughter reshapes her identity when she becomes a mother herself. In terms of the “maternal love”, the mother endows her daughter with love and warmth. It is functional in the process for the daughter’s reconstruction of her identity. The mother teaches love and the daughter learns it, in return. Kelly Oliver states that Cixous believes that the best solution for the “feminine fatigue” or the female identity crisis is through “motherhood and pregnancy” (3). The mother seeks the intertwinement with her daughter in order to eclipse the figure of the father, the root of her

The love of the mother to the daughter, during pregnancy, reinforces the sense of herself. The fusion with the daughter helps the mother develop a sense of her own supremacy since “an experience that, without the child, she would only rarely encounter: love for an other”. Besides, the love of the mother mirrors an interconnectedness with the social sphere. Social marginalization is eclipsed as the “maternal love affects the dynamic between the self as mother and society insofar as it creates connections and opportunities for engagement where none existed” (qtd. in Lemma 96). The strong bond and the reciprocity of the mother-daughter relationship foster a sense of creativity. She laughs, sings and embraces with the mother though the latter seems arrogant or severe. Put differently, the strictness of the mother can, under no circumstances, be a barrier to the fulfillment of the daughter’s

It is worth mentioning that American confessional female poets have dwelled on this issue. From the first American poet, Anna Bradstreet to Anne Sexton, the quest for female identity has occupied an integral part in the poetic scene. In this respect, Laura Major states that Anne Bradstreet “unwittingly became the first American poet to publish poetry” (111). Belonging to the Puritan era of the seventeenth century, she has paved the way for generations of female poets, for the forthcoming centuries, to forge their own identities through poetry. The female confessional poets break the norms in poetry in terms of the thematic anchorage. Taboo issues have become the talk of the day in the early 1960s. Poetry, written by American female figures, begins to flourish in the mid-twentieth century. Women take the initiative to write in verse form. The reason behind a tremendous “emphasis on poetry performance” hinges on the “public role [that] poetry could play” as Kim Whitehead points out (qtd. in Crown 657). Apart from poetry written by male confessional poets, a new generation of female poets appeared under the umbrella of “Confessional poetry” including Sylvia Plath, Kamala Das, Elizabeth Bishop and Anne Sexton. Whitehead argues that these confessional poets blend both personal and artistic life. They narrow down the abyss between reality and fiction