| This dissertation aims to contribute to the ongoing investigation of the mother-daughter relationship in literature by American women by focusing on Chicana writers, whose mother-daughter literature has not been discussed at length. I examine texts by the Chicana writers Ana Castillo, Denise Chavez, Sandra Cisneros, Alma Luz Villanueva, and Helena Maria Viramontes, who demonstrate multifaceted dynamics of the Chicana mother-daughter relationship. By creating mothers and daughters who are vibrant, angry, passionate, self-sufficient, or even neglectful, the writers successfully break down the traditional good/bad dichotomy of women inherent to the dominant society and the Mexican culture to which they belong. In chapter one, I explain the significance of the three maternal figures of the Mexican culture (La Virgen de Guadalupe, La Malinche, and La Llorona) in order to provide a context for the mother-daughter relationship and to illustrate ways in which Chicana writers and scholars have re-imagined the three figures through a Chicana feminist consciousness. Chapter two provides a close reading of Villanueva's short story "La Llorona/Weeping Woman" and two short stories by Viramontes, "Miss Clairol" and "Snapshots." These texts suggest that the marginalization of Chicana women, working-class roots, and impossible standards of motherhood strain the relationship between mothers and daughters. In chapter three, I analyze Villanueva's story "The Burden" and Ana Castillo's novel So Far From God. Rather than reinforce the motif of the suffering mother/sufrida madre idealized by the Mexican culture, the mothers in these works choose to act on their martyrdom, forging a union between motherhood and activism/resistance. Lastly, chapter four argues that a daughter's rejection of the mother drastically impacts the formation of a female self. The daughters in Cisneros's novel Caramelo and Chavez's novel The Last of the Menu Girls refuse to model themselves after their mothers, and it is only by reclaiming their mothers that the daughters may gain insight into their own lives. |
