1. Hasty abjection

A hasty reaction the daughter can take to stop the mother’s controlling behaviours is the renunciation of the relation with her. In doing this, the daughter believes that she is putting an end to the mother’s attempts to maintain this attachment and is establishing herself as an independent subject. In reality, however, the daughter is still in the transitional phase of the abject where the distinction between her self and the (m)other is blurred. Controlled by the fear of annihilation, she is unable to joy in the freedom the abject offers her and this makes her see the connection with the mother as an obstacle in her way to subjectivity and social assimilation.

This reaction is apparent in Tan’s “Two Kinds” and Walker’s “Everyday Use” where the two daughters feel that their attachment with the mother threatens their initiation into subjectivity. In “Two Kinds”, the Chinese-American daughter, Jing-mei, seems not only to reject her mother’s attachment to the Chinese way of living, but to see any of her attempts to make her a successful child as a distorted understanding of the American culture, specially its so called American dream. As a second generation immigrant, Jing-mei interprets her mother’s desperate attempts at making her a prodigy child as a destructive form of self-love. Her insistence on making Jing-mei excel in whatever skill or talent other children are distinguished for is, to a certain extent, an attempt to convince herself that she succeeded in her role as a mother. This is not to deny that the mother does indeed take the narcissistic feelings Kristeva sees as normal to an extreme by demanding her daughter to live up to whatever expectations she has for her. The several roles the mother asks her daughter to take up every time she fails to live up to one of her expectations complicate their relationship and make the daughter see this love as devouring.

I was a dainty ballerina girl standing by the curtain, waiting to hear the music that would send me floating on my tiptoes. I was like the Christ child lifted out of the straw manger, crying with holy indignity. I was Cinderella stepping from her pumpkin carriage with sparkly cartoon music filling the air.

In all of my imaginings I was filled with a sense that I would soon become perfect: My mother and father would adore me. I would be beyond reproach. I would never feel the need to sulk, or to clamor for anything. But sometimes the prodigy in me became impatient. “If you don’t hurry up and get me out of here, I’m disappearing for good,” it warned. ‘And then you’ll always be nothing’. (134)

Though Jing-mei shared her mother’s motivation to become a prodigy at the beginning, every time she could not live up to her expectations has made her lose the impetus to go on. The multiple roles her mother enforces on her make her unable to strike a healthy balance between her relation with her mother and her self. And this brings her to the realisation that maintaining this attachment is going to result in self-effacement. This point is emphasised by Azm Aminur Rashid who explains in an article titled “’Why don’t you like me the way I am? I’m not a genius’: A Mistakable Understanding of a Child Prodigy in Amy Tan’s Two Kinds, the Symbolic Crisis of Identity in the Specific Contexts of the American Dream” (2014) that the clash between Jing-mei and her mother springs from the different identity goals each has. As the mother “places unreasonable expectations on the shoulders of her young, tender daughter” (34), she pushes her to seek separation to overcome this pressure.

By the same token, Jing-mei finds it hard to strike a balance between the two cultures that form her identity. Here, the mother’s narcissistic approaches are to blame as well. Her unrealistic understanding of the American dream makes her force her daughter into becoming the American prodigy child. She, however, fails to realise that her understanding of what a child prodigy in the American context is seen through her Chinese upbringing where strict rules and codes of behaviour are enforced on the child to discipline her and make the best out of her potential. In the American context, making a prodigy of one’s child is not usually accompanied with enforcement. That is why the mother fails to make her daughter excel in any of the skills she chooses for her. For the daughter, this faulty understanding of this aspect of the American culture makes her averse to the Chinese culture. She even comes to associate the whole culture with her mother and since her relationship with her mother is based on her rejection of the of the latter’s possessive tendencies, the daughter develops the same abject feelings towards the Chinese codes of behaviour and traditions.

“Turn off TV,” she called from the kitchen five minutes later. I didn›t budge. And then I decided, I didn›t have to do what mother said anymore. I wasn›t her slave. This wasn›t China. I had listened to her before, and look what happened she was the stupid one.

(…)

“You want me to be something that I›m not!” I sobbed. “I’ll never be the kind of daughter you want me to be!”

“Only two kinds of daughters,” she shouted in Chinese. “Those who are obedient and those who follow their own mind! Only one kind of daughter can live in this house. Obedient daughter!” (140)

As can be noted in this conversation, the daughter’s chaotic relationship with her mother shapes her attitude to her Chinese upbringing so that she comes to connect the strictness of her mother and her love for discipline to her rejection of her control to the Chinese culture. She also comes to connect identifying with the American culture as the way to her independence and initiation into subjectivity.

A similar, though less tension fraught, relationship is found between the African American mother and her daughter Dee in Walker’s “Everyday Use”. Like Jing-mei, Dee associates her mother with her native culture and just as she sees her mother not up to date, she sees her native culture so and seeks to modernise it by claiming that what is old needs to be updated by being luxuriously exhibited, not by being put to ‘everyday use’. The conflict between the mother and the daughter is present but is not as severe as it is in the case of the Chinese American mother and her daughter due to the fact that Dee is a grown up and is not living with her mother and sister Maggie in the same place. She is not likely to be straddling the borderline separating her from the mother now. Nevertheless, the fact that the few short visits she pays to the family easily bring up disagreements between the mother and the daughter indicate that the relationship between the two of them has not been a peaceful one when she was younger. Just like Jing-mei, the young Dee is expected to have been conscious of her mother’s attempts to liquidise the distinction between her and her daughter by controlling the latter’s perception of who she is and of the African side of her identity, a thing which Dee refuses given her Americanized approach to her African American roots.

“Well,” I say. “Dee.”

“No, Mama,” she says. “Not ‘Dee,’ Wangero Leewanika Kemanjo!”

“What happened to ‘Dee’?” I wanted to know.

“She’s dead,” Wangero said. “I couldn’t bear it any longer, being named after

the people who oppress me.”

“You know as well as me you was named after your aunt Dicie,” I said. Dicie is my sister. She named Dee. We called her “Big Dee” after Dee was born.

“But who was she named after?” asked Wangero.

“I guess after Grandma Dee,” I said.

“And who was she named after?” asked Wangero.

“Her mother,” I said, and saw Wangero getting tired. “That’s about as far back as I can trace it,” I said. Though, in fact, I probably could have carried it back beyond the Civil War through the branches. (Walker 318)

Dee’s insistence on not being called Dee by her mother and her association of this inherited name with racial oppression is an indication of her refusal to maintain the relation with the mother. For her, being called Dee by her mother means that she is still under her mother’s control which she associates with being under the control of “the people who oppress [her]” (Walker 318). In this way, Dee introduces her own perception of oppression as a state of being inflicted by the individual upon himself. This point is worth pondering on as it shows us that the relation with the mother, from Dee’s perspective, is not only narcissistic but is also oppressive. As she insists on naming her daughter after her Grandma Dee, she is indirectly enforcing a borrowed identity on her which turns out not to suit her as an individual.

Dee’s abjection of the mother is, in this regard, an abjection of the latter’s perception of the African heritage. In the short story, this is clearly seen in the conflicting views Dee and her mother have about their heritage. Thus, while the mother believes heritage has to be put to everyday use, Dee goes to the extreme of seeing her heritage as a precious object to exhibit, not to use. Dee’s attitude is also clear in the name she has chosen for herself. While her mother bestowed an everyday name on her (Grandma’s name), Dee has gone for a name that reflects her African roots but that is not frequently used in the daily lives of African Americans. The different choices Dee frequently makes shows that she refuses to have her identity merged with her mother’s, specifically in dealing with her heritage.

2. Replaceable Attachment

Abjecting the relation with the mother is also noticed in cases when the mother is not sufficiently assertive in the daughter’s initiation into subjectivity. The loss of distinction which the daughter in the case of the controlling mother tries hard to evade is sought by the daughter in this case. The mother’s passiveness, however, leaves her succourless as she is willing but unable to joy in the unhinged freedom of the abject. Lacking guidance and support, the daughter is eventually forced to renounce the motherly connection and to seek it elsewhere.

The mothers in the two other short stories, Lalami’s “How I Became My Mother’s Daughter” and Hogan’s “Aunt Moon’s Young Man”, do not exhibit extreme narcissistic feelings in their relationships with their daughters. On the opposite, their daughters regard their loose feelings of love as a form of passiveness and this is what, ironically enough, pushes them to abject their mothers and seek that motherly connection elsewhere. In the case of these two daughters, the relationships tying them to their mothers do not exactly reflect their attitudes to the native side of their identity as in the cases of Jing-mei and Dee. The reason behind this is the fact that their mothers have chosen not to impose their own perspective of the native culture on their daughters. In other words, they have, though not intentionally, given their daughters some space to shape their perception of the native culture. This so called freedom, however, proves to be as dangerous as the imposing approach which the Chinese American and the African American mothers in the two previous stories have taken up. The lack of guidance the two daughters suffer from as they verge the borderline separating them from the mother leaves them with the same feelings of loss that Jing-mei and Dee experience as their mothers have been enforcing their views on them. They both, as a result, eventually choose to abject the mother as they come to equate their connection with her as a hindrance to the process of individuation.

The reaction of the two daughters to the absence of the motherly guidance differs, however. In Lalami’s “How I Became My Mother’s Daughter”, the daughter resorts to the father figure as a way to make up for the passiveness her mother shows to her need of her. Though the daughter shows readiness to identify with her mother and learn from her doing things the native way, the mother does not seem to reciprocate her daughter’s attachment nor to appreciate it. In the short story, the reader is told that in many instances the mother is noticed to be sitting alone in the sitting room watching an Egyptian film and reminiscing about the old days back in Egypt. The reader is also told that, during those periods of self talk the mother frequently indulges in, her daughter is noticed to spend her time with her father whose company she seems to enjoy more. The ear piercing episode in the short story represents another example of the indifference on the part of the mother. As the daughter is having her ears pierced, she hugs the big belly of her mother to soothe the pain. And this can be seen as an attempt on the part of the daughter not to abort her connection with the mother. The mother, however, does not seem to want to take on this attachment on a long term. As they leave the place, the daughter suggests they go eat a scoop of ice cream at a place she likes; her mother, however, suggests paying a surprise visit to her father at work. The different suggestions the mother and daughter make are initially highlighted by Lalami who, at that point, introduces the new character of the daughter’s French teacher, with whom the father is having a relationship.

What I hadn’t told my mother was that I already knew my father was having an affair. I knew the other woman. Her name was Beatrice Sauget and she was my French teacher.

I’d always walked to school on my own, but when I sprained my ankle after I fell off my bike, my father started to drop me off at school before going to work. He’d ask Mademoiselle Sauget how I did in class, his hands weighing on my shoulders or stroking my hair, and then he’d kiss me goodbye. After a couple of weeks, my ankle got better, but he still wanted to drive me to school every day. (300)

The fact that the daughter knows that her father is having an affair with her teacher, but chooses not to tell her mother about it or to ask her father to put an end to it, makes things more complicated. Thus, to say that the daughter is seeking a connection with the mother in the Kristevan sense is to oversimplify her relation with her mother. Though the daughter does indeed see her connection with her mother a boost to her independence, due to the experience her mother has in aspects her father is not good at such as the ear-piercing experience, she never accepts to be hindered from becoming an independent individual when she sees her mother’s role in guiding her diminishing. She immediately resorts to the backup plan in which she keeps the process of individuation active by abjecting the mother and identifying with the father. This is clear when she gets to see her father wearing perfume and dressing elegantly to meet her French teacher and does not mind it.

A similar reaction is observed at the beginning on the part of the Native American daughter Sis in Hogan’s “Aunt Moon’s Young Man”. The daughter senses her mother’s indifference at young age and is disturbed by the lack of guidance on her part, especially in issues related to her native culture. Like the Arab American daughter in Lalami’s short story, she seeks attachment in the Kristevan sense with her mother and sees this freedom-laden attachment not only a haven, but a means to become a full fledged individual. Like her, as well, she does not choose to sacrifice the mother, but chooses to perceive her as a partner with whom to share her journey of identity formation. The mother›s unwillingness to share this process, however, is what leads the daughter to abject her mother and to seek guidance and support elsewhere. And those she finds in Aunt Moon, a woman very different from her mother. As she describes Aunt Moon’s personality and behaviours, Sis tells the reader that she is not accepted by the women in the town. Her loud voice and her manly behaviours as the town people see them make her all the more attractive in her eyes to replace the mother’s position. And though the narrator says that she does indeed get along with her own mother, unlike Jing-mei and Dee, she still seeks something more genuine than a good relationship. She seeks a role model; someone in whose figure she could come in touch with her true self and with the Native American culture. Sis’ mother, in this regard, is as guilty as the Chinese American and African American mothers in the two previous short stories, although her fault is of a different kind. While the two mothers have played an integral role in distancing their daughters from their native cultures through their strict approach, this mother has likewise done but through her indifference to guiding her daughter to know more about her native culture. Her indifference has, therefore, shaped the daughter’s perception of the native side of her identity. This point is emphasised by Elise Doney (2009) who argues that the relation with the mother is culturally relevant in the works of Hogan. Thus, as the relation with the mother is disrupted, so is the relation with the land. And this is what forces the daughter to look for a surrogate mother figure to make up for the lack of guidance on the mother’s part (3–5).

It should be mentioned that the Egyptian daughter’s resorting to her father and Sis› resorting to Aunt Moon can be seen as similar to Jing-mei›s and Dee’s abjection of their mothers. Though less aggressive and less blunt, their seeking a surrogate mother figure entails that they have gone for the same choice of abjecting the mother to become independent individuals. The one difference between the case of the other two daughters and these is that abjection in their case is accompanied with feelings of guilt at having to sacrifice the relation with their mothers for the sake of their selfhood. These feelings, it ought to be pointed out, can be noticed more obviously in the case of the Egyptian daughter as she abandons her mother and keeps silent about her father’s secret relation with her French teacher.

3. Blind Attachment

In cases where the daughter feels too weak to embark on the journey of self-discovery on her own, she sees in her attachment with the mother a safeguard and chooses to maintain that relation despite the negative impact it has on her as an individual. What makes this attachment destructive in the long run is the daughter not being aware of the mother’s overprotective presence in her life and of her attempts to merge the daughter’s identity with hers. Despite the fact that this relationship is usually not fraught with tension as other relationships, it does not give the daughter the needed satisfaction and is expected to end in the belated abjection of the mother.

This blind attachment is seen in the character of Maggie, the other daughter in Walker’s “Everyday Use”. To begin with, Maggie is similar to the two daughters in “How I Became My Mother’s Daughter” and “Aunt Moon’s Young Man” in that she refuses to abject her mother and chooses to keep attached to her despite knowing that this attachment can hinder her journey to selfhood. This is, however, where the similarity ends. Unlike the Egyptian daughter and Sis, Maggie does not experience motherly indifference; her mother is well aware of her daughter’s need for her support and guidance and does indeed stand by her side to help her become a full fledged individual. As a child, Maggie has suffered from the scars a house fire has left on different parts of her body and this, as her mother has always been aware, has necessitated giving her extra care and support. Compared to her outgoing and more confident sister Dee, Maggie has had the tendency to isolate herself and communicate less with those around her after the fire accident. Through all those years, her mother has made sure that Maggie is under her protection. No doubt, for the psychologically and emotionally scarred girl, this protective attachment has kept her safe and offered her a sense of self with which she felt comfortable and satisfied. Nevertheless, staying that attached to her mother, both physically and emotionally, has no doubt affected the kind of identity she has formed. Unlike the other daughter, Maggie has not given herself the space to evaluate her relationship with her mother. The four other daughters have paused to assess the pros and cons of their attachment to their mothers and, at finding that staying connected to indifferent or controlling mothers is slowing down their advancement to selfhood, they choose to abject the mother. Maggie, on the other hand, has a mother who is aware of her need for help and support; nevertheless, her involvement has helped Maggie form her identity to a certain point at which the mother’s attempts started to fire back. In fact, Maggie’s dependence on this imbalanced relationship has hindered her from becoming an independent individual. And this is a thing the mother does not seem to be aware of as a result of her controlling character. Compared to her attempts with Dee, the mother’s attempts at directing Maggie’s course of life turn out to be more fruitful; Maggie does not give her a hard time as much as Dee does in adopting her ways of seeing things. Maggie’s close relationship with her mother makes her see in her figure an embodiment of the African American culture and this helps her integrate its arts and lifestyles into her daily life and make it part of everyday use. Maggie’s quilting skill is highlighted by Walker who explains in the short story that she makes those quilts to be used, not to be displayed. This is contrasted with Dee’s perception of the African ways of living which, due to the fragile and tension fraught relationship with her mother, have been restricted to a marginalised zone in her daily life. This should not, however, distract us from evaluating Maggie’s relationship with her mother objectively. Despite the fact that Maggie’s association of the figure of her mother with the rich African heritage and her ability to see in this association a lived reality, she is not able to live this beyond the limited borders of their home. Dee, on the contrary, has proved more successful by introducing her heritage to new places and people, even if in the form of objects to be displayed. The wider circulation and access Dee has been able to achieve makes her seem the more successful at balancing the American and African sides of her identity.

“Maggie can’t appreciate these quilts!” she said. “She’d probably be backward enough to put them to everyday use.”

“I reckon she would,” I said. “God knows I been saving ‘em for long enough with nobody using ‘em. I hope she will!” I didn’t want to bring up how I had offered Dee (Wangero) a quilt when she went away to college. Then she had told they were old-fashioned, out of style.

“But they’re priceless!” she was saying now, furiously; for she has a temper. “Maggie would put them on the bed and in five years they’d be in rags. Less than that!”

“She can always make some more,” I said. “Maggie knows how to quilt.”

Dee (Wangero) looked at me with hatred. “You just will not understand. The point is these quilts, these quilts!”

“Well,” I said, stumped. “What would you do with them7”

“Hang them,” she said. As if that was the only thing you could do with quilts.

Maggie by now was standing in the door. I could almost hear the sound her feet made as they scraped over each other.

“She can have them, Mama,” she said, like somebody used to never winning anything, or having anything reserved for her. “I can ‘member Grandma Dee without the quilts.” (321)

Dee coming back to get the quilts is not as villainous as her mother sees it. The mere act of coming back proves that Dee acknowledges her African roots and the value of her heritage. Her attitude, however, makes her seem to prioritise the financial value of the African American heritage to the cultural and the national values. In fact, Walker’s portrayal of Dee, her appearance, her style and the fact that she comes accompanied by an African American who has tailored his African heritage to suit the modern American lifestyle he is leading can make her look as an opportunist who sees her own native culture as an object that needs good and well planned marketing. Nevertheless, we should not come to a hasty conclusion about Dee and judge her interest in her heritage as less genuine than Maggie’s. In an article titled “Fight or Flight: A Reevaluation of Dee in Alice Walker’s ‘Everyday Use’” (1998), Susan Farrell argues against interpreting Dee’s different approach towards the African heritage as superficial. Though her mother seems to reject her material interest in the quilts, she stills adores the success Dee has achieved on a personal level. Early in the story as she awaits the arrival of Dee outside the house, she fantasises about a “mother-child reunion” (Farrell 180) in an episode of the Johnny Carson shows where she pictures Dee, full of pride, pinning an orchid on her hair. This incident, though a figment of her imagination, proves that, after all, the mother acquiesces to Dee’s modernised view of their African heritage.

4. Balanced Connection

In a balanced connection, the daughter acknowledges that her attachment to the mother is indispensable to the process of individuation. She refuses, therefore, to hastily abject her, but is aware as well that blind attachment or passive attachment have the same negative consequences as hasty abjection. This makes her able to establish a healthy relationship with the mother whose guiding role she, as Kristeva (1982: 2–5) explains, realises she needs to become a fully-fledged individual. This balanced connection with the mother also mirrors her ability to strike balance between the two sides of her identity as a member of an ethnic group. As she gets in touch with the native side of her identity, she is able to remain in contact with the foreign one.

This balanced relation with the mother is made clear in Hogan’s “Aunt Moon’s Young Man” more than in Lalami’s “How I Became My Mother’s Daughter”. Though both Sis and the Egyptian daughter move from a relationship based on complete identification to one based on separation and abjection, they take different routes. In the case of the Egyptian daughter, choosing to identify with the father figure and to accept his relation with the French teacher shows that though she has had the desire to learn more about her origins and culture at the beginning, she does not keep this interest as she experiences her mother’s indifference and lack of guidance. As she starts to experience a conflict between the two sides of her identity, she chooses to resolve it by forming her identity in light of the foreign culture. The same conflict between the two sides of the identity is experienced by Sis, though differently. Experiencing the same motherly indifference and lack of guidance does not make her less enthusiastic to know more about her Native American roots. And getting to know Aunt Moon boosts this interest in her as she takes the place of her mother guiding her journey of seeking knowledge about her Native American culture. In this story, Aunt Moon comes to stand for the Native American way of life instead of her mother and her ability to integrate the Native American rituals and practises smoothly into her daily life without the need to do so by enforcing them like the mothers in “Two Kinds” and “Everyday Use” or to do so by reminiscing about them like the mother in “How I Became My Mother’s Daughter” eases Sis’ conflict and makes her see her native culture as an integral part of her identity. Unlike the feelings of tension and rejection that Jing-mei and Dee and those of guilt the Egyptian daughter experience, the daughter in this short story experiences a smoother transition into selfhood. As she experiences the merge of identity with the surrogate mother, she is drawn to the joy and freedom Kriteva associates with the abject.

As she leaves the small Native American community of the town into the large Americanised community of the city, Sis is aware that the identity she has formed as a Native American needs not get in conflict with the American identity she will construct in the new setting. The two sides complement each other; they do not exist in opposition to each other as in the case of the other three daughters. Jing-mei learns the need to balance the two sides of the song as well, but she does so too late. Dee does not seem to want to do so as a child or as an adult. The Egyptian daughter is too immersed in her sense of guilt to want to do so. Sis, on the other hand, manages to reconcile the two sides of her identity and to maintain a healthy relationship with the mother figure despite having to abject her biological mother and to perceive that healthy relationship to achieve individuation.