1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910496151403321

Autore

Walters Suzanna Danuta

Titolo

Lives together/worlds apart : mothers and daughters in popular culture / / Suzanna Danuta Walters [[electronic resource]]

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Berkeley, : University of California Press, 1992

ISBN

0-520-91503-8

0-585-28912-3

Edizione

[First Paperback Printing 1994, Reprint 2020]

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (xiii, 295 p. ) : ill. ;

Disciplina

306.874/3

Soggetti

Mothers and daughters

Women in popular culture

Mothers and daughters - United States

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Nota di bibliografia

Filmography: p. 277-279.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 253-276) and index.

Nota di contenuto

The Sacrament of Separation / The Penance of Affiliation: On the Subject of Mothers and Daughters -- From Sacrificial Stella to Maladjusted Mildred: De(class)ifying Mothers and Daughters -- Father Knows Best about the Woman Question: Familial Harmony and Feminine Containment -- The Turning Point: Mothers and Daughters at the Birth of Second-Wave Feminism -- Terms of Enmeshment: Feminist Discourses of Mothers and Daughters -- Parting Glances: Feminist Images of Mothers and Daughters -- Whose Life Is It Anyway? Fatal Retractions in the Backlash Eighties -- Beyond Separation: Located Lives and Situated Tales.

Sommario/riassunto

In the 1940's film Now, Voyager, Bette Davis plays a daughter struggling against her mother's stifling repression. Nearly fifty years later, in the Hollywood saga Postcards from the Edge, Shirley MacLaine, as a neglectful and bossy mother, inflicts untold psychological pain on her daughter, played by Meryl Streep. These dramas of conflict and the ambivalent struggle for separation have been central to popular images of mothers and daughters in the last half-century in the U.S. Walters boldly challenges these dichotomies and proposes an innovative and multilayered understanding of the cultural construction of the



mother/daughter relationship. In a discussion of popular media ranging from themes of maternal martyrdom to maternal malevolence, Walters shows that since World War II, mainstream culture has generally represented the mother/daughter relationship as one of never-ending conflict and thus promoted an "ideology of separation" as necessary to the daughter's emancipation and maturity. This ideological move is placed in a social context of the anti-woman backlash of the early post-war period and the renewed anti-feminism of the Reagan and Bush years. Walters uses exceptions to mainstream imagery-films such as A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, television shows like "Maude," novels like The Joy Luck Club-to offer evidence of alternative traditions and paradigms. Timely and vividly argued, Lives Together/Worlds Apart makes a brilliant contribution to discussions of popular culture and feminism.