Mother-Daughter Relations in Poems - Literature review Example

Comparing the Theme of Three Literary Works and number submitted The short stories “Everyday Use” by Alice Walker and “I Stand Here Ironing,” as well as the poem “A Song in the Front Yard,” all have a common theme: mother-daughter relations. It is evident in these literary pieces that the relationships the mothers have with their daughters are one way or another strained. Firstly, we see how the respective mothers of Dee in “Everyday Use,” Emily in “I Stand Here Ironing” and the girl in the poem “A Song in the Front Yard” are troubled over their daughters, who have turned out differently from normal children. These mothers are somehow estranged with their daughters and disappointed by how they have grown up. Secondly, unbeknown to these mothers, they play a significant role in their children’s becoming. It shows clearly in the manner they care for and love their daughters, which, though done in good faith, have caused them to behave differently instead. Dee, Emily and the girl in the poem may have just been products of the way their mothers have treated them. Mama, the narrator in “Everyday Use,” is particularly troubled over her eldest daughter’s behavior. Comparing her two daughters, she finds her traditional ways and principles as part of the rift between her and Dee, who is more flashy, modern, materialistic and confident. Mama “often … fought off the temptation to shake her” (Walker, 1973, p. 745). Her other daughter Maggie is homely, biddable, compassionate and “used to never winning anything, or having anything reserved for her” (Walker, 1973, p. 745). Yet as a woman making ends meet for both daughters, even so far as doing strenuous manly activities, Maggie’s everyday presence matters more to her than Dee’s capable but absent self. In fact, between the two, only Dee has gone to college while Maggie stays home. Indeed, there is a measure of estrangement between Mama and Dee. This particular passage speaks of how much Mama is estranged from her eldest daughter: Sometimes I dream a dream in which Dee and I are suddenly brought together on a TV program of this sort … Then we are on the stage and Dee is embracing me with tears in her eyes. She pins on my dress a large orchid, even though she has told me once that she thinks orchids are tacky flowers. (Walker, 1973, pp. 743-744) Certain passages in the short story also prove how although she has an affection for the elder Dee, she is disappointed in her ways and her views in life. When Mama refuses to give Dee the quilts, she looks at her “with hatred,” saying, "You just will not understand. The point is these quilts, these quilts!" Then, when Mama asks what she wants to do with them, Dee replies that she plans to “hang them." Sounding so disappointed, Mama thinks to herself: “As if that was the only thing you could do with quilts” (Walker, 1973, p.748). The impression Mama has on her eldest daughter is that she is shallow for equating heirlooms with art decorations. However, Maggie, in her simplicity, ignites Mama’s affection by seeing the spirit of a true heritage. This is why Mama decides that Maggie is more deserving of the quilts than her older sister because she treasures the memories of the people who left them rather than the antiquity of such quilts. She does attempts to be fair by telling Dee to “take one or two of the others” but the conviction of her words persuades Dee that Mama has already decided in Maggie’s favor (Walker, 1973, p. 749). On one hand, the mother narrating “I Stand Here Ironing” is someone equally estranged with her daughter. Like Mama, she is a single mother who has to work all alone to raise her first daughter, Emily, and without the help of any man. As a victim of existing social conditions (i.e. poverty at the backdrop of the Great Depression), the mother’s own personal and financial issues cause her to neglect Emily. Her inability to control the direction of her life reflects her inability to help her daughter. As a mother, she is more concerned with getting her responsibilities right than being there for her child when she needs her. As a result, the gulf that exists between her and Emily widens even as she finds herself. Even if in later years, she assumes a more motherly role to her other children and even shows a display of concern for her, the mother’s “wisdom came too late” and Emily has already drawn farther away (Olsen, 1961, p. 710). In one instance when Emily becomes restless and her mother tries to get her something to soothe her pain, she instead replies, “No, I’m all right, go back to sleep, Mother” (Olsen, 1961, p. 707). These words indicate a retreat from her mother’s belated attempts of showing affection. However, unlike Mama, her disappointment over her daughter has less to do with her different behavior, but more to do with Emily being her own reflection. If Mama is disappointed over the fact that Dee’s sense of heritage opposes her and Maggie’s, Emily’s mother is disappointed that her daughter is so much like her. Having grown up during the Depression era, she knows all the hardship women, young and old, have to endure. Every time Emily is in her depressed, melancholic state, she is reminded not only of her own troubles before, but also of her failure as a mother. She wants Emily to cease repeating history, but because of her work and in a rough time to boot, she does nothing to help her daughter avoid it. Unable to repair the damage she has wrought upon her child, the mother only hopes that Emily becomes more than the “dress on the ironing board, helpless before the iron” (Olsen, 1961, p. 710). In this line from the poem “A Song in the Front Yard,” the mother attempts to intimidate her daughter by predicting the fates of some people known to them: “My mother, she tells me that Johnnie Mae / Will grow up to be a bad woman / That Georgell be taken to Jail soon or late / (On account of last winter he sold our back gate)” (Brooks, 1963, p. 771). The line hints at a bad relationship between mother and daughter—the mother’s strict upbringing of the girl provokes her to inwardly rebel against her mother. Intimidating her in such terms to morally questionable people also speaks of the mother’s worry over her daughter’s behavior. Compared to the two mothers in the short stories, who have left their daughters to themselves, this mother may have held such a tight rein on her daughter until it results to estrangement. The mother appears to be a control freak who demands from her daughter a rigid compliance to her rules. She even gives the girl a curfew of “quarter to nine” (Brooks, 1963, p. 771). The poem also suggests that the girl narrator in the poem belongs to the upper class or to an upright family—metaphorically speaking, the “front yard” (Brooks, 1963, pp. 771). Unfortunately, the mother senses how her daughter desires to peek at the back yard, into the lives and activities of people not of their own class. She becomes irritated and attempts to cite the examples of Johnnie Mae and George in the hopes of scaring and discouraging her daughter from pursuing the same deplorable actions. The mother in the poem is clearly disappointed in her daughter’s tendency to be rebellious and disobedient. She may have set high expectations for her daughter and does not want her to spend time loitering “down the alley,” to play with other children or to have a “good time” (Brooks, 1963, p. 771). Dee is a misunderstood character in the short story “Everyday Use.” Despite being confident and all, she is in some way insecure with her lame sister, Maggie. Maggie’s accident when their previous house burned to the ground has probably brought her more attention and affection from their mother. Since Dee is able enough to take care of herself, her mother may have decided to focus on Maggie’s care instead while leaving Dee to do things on her own. In the course of being independent, Dee must have developed a sense of isolation from her family and a discontentment in life, which may have led her to seek the finer things in life and to think only of her wants—and to the point that "no" becomes “a word the world never learned to say to her” (Walker, 1973, p. 743). Though Mama has never failed to support her financially or to say “no” to her whims, she may have wanted more than that. Dee values her heritage but she feels that between her and Maggie, her sister is favored by her mother to inherit. This may be the likely reason why, under the excuse of hanging them for the sake of art, she asks for the hand-made quilts. She not only believes that "Maggie cant appreciate [the] quilts” or that she would “probably be backward enough to put them to everyday use," but she has nothing that is hers anymore, since most of the heritage and her mother’s affection technically belong to the “backward” Maggie (Walker, 1973, p. 748). Nevertheless, what Dee only needs from her mother is assurance. During those times she is on her own, she probably feels unloved and just resorts to her self-indulged ways to mask the fact that she badly wants the affection of her family. Emily, the daughter of the mother narrating in “I Stand Here Ironing,” is just as complicated in character as Dee but physically and emotionally stunted as Maggie. Like Dee, she is the eldest and has, to some extent, been left to discover herself. Like Maggie, she has trouble with her self-esteem. Her pessimistic views of her surroundings come as a result of her mother’s treatment throughout her developing years. Many occasions in her life, Emily has been parted from her mother. She has experienced being sent to convalescent homes, where she becomes more gloomy, sickly and depressed. What is worse for Emily is that her mother does not even attempt to understand her, but takes her negative outlook as-is without making any move to help her out of it. In some way, she herself is a victim of the circumstances her mother is caught in. Emily is “a child of her age, of depression, of war, of fear” just as her mother is (Olsen, 1961, p. 710). However, Emily takes no personal grudge in her mother’s neglect of her emotional needs and struggles to define herself instead. She tolerates several things: the unfair treatment she gets from her parents, her overbearing sister Susan, who steals her jokes from her, being left alone at home while the rest of the family goes somewhere, and to cope up with her depression on her own. Her tolerance paid off and in her misery, she discovers her own talent. Like Dee who resorts to overindulging herself, Emily finds comedy through mimicry and other such antics as her salvation. She and Dee share the same unspoken sentiments: the assurance that their mothers love them. When her mother fails to bring her out of depression and pessimism, she withdraws inward and, after finding solace there, learns to see the humor in her negative thoughts. Her dire situation and the gloomy things surrounding her become sources of inspiration and she becomes the “Somebody” she has always wanted to be (Olsen, 1961, p. 710). This desire to be somebody may have unconsciously taken shape during the time her mother neglects her as if she is nothing. Being that somebody will keep her out of nothingness, help her learn to love herself and fill in the void her mother’s lack of attention has left in her. The girl in “A Song in the Front Yard” is longing for the life outside of her yard and perhaps to find a place where she can belong to. She laments in the poem: “Where its rough and untended and hungry weed grows / A girl gets sick of a rose” (Brooks, 1963, p. 771). This passage indicates how much she is sick and tired of her untended and weedy situation in life. In the life she must have shared with her mother, she feels the need to escape and pursue the things that her mother specifically warns her not to do. Her mother’s strict upbringing and the tight reign she holds on her makes the girl feel withered rather than nurtured, thus she longs to be in a place where she can bloom. The girl does not want to stay “in the front yard all [her] life,” she also wants to have “a peek at the back” (Brooks, 1963, p. 771). It is clear that the long years of always being in the front yard, or perhaps following the strict rules and the tight curfew of her mother, has fostered a curiosity to discover the lives beyond her own yard. Her mother, after seeing this tendency, is provoked to verbally threaten her through the examples of Johnnie Mae and George. As it is told in her point of view, the girl implies to the readers that someday she plans to disobey and stop listening to her mother. She much rather prefer to be in another yard where she can do anything and where she can be “a bad woman, too” or “wear the brave stockings of night-black lace” or “strut down the streets with paint on [her] face” (Brooks, 1963, p. 771). The girl in the poem is different from Dee and Emily, who are not as closely monitored as her. Yet she is similar to them in the sense that her mother’s treatment of her has also contributed to her frame of mind. Though the actions of Dee and Emily cannot be fully justified because they are presented in the light of their mothers’ standpoint, the girl in the poem is able to justify her inward rebelliousness. If the daughters in the short stories feel imprisoned by their mother’s lack of attention, she feels caged with the curfews and staying too long in the front yard, kept away from the happenings of the outside world. Had the girl’s mother been more understanding and caters to her daughter’s socializing needs, she certainly would not have been bent on going to the back yard or becoming bad. In sum, the mothers in “Everyday Use,” “I Stand Here Ironing” and “A Song in the Front Yard” all suffer relationship problems with their daughters. The mother-daughter relationships in these literary pieces have been strained for different reasons and are manifested through the mothers’ disappointment over the behaviors of their respective daughters. Mama is disappointed over Dee’s materialism and loose sense of heritage—characteristics that diverge from hers and Maggie’s. Caught up with the burdens of a single mother working in the time of Depression, and somehow traumatized over her daughter’s similar predicament, Emily’s mother becomes frustrated to the point of neglecting her. Lastly, the mother in the poem does not like the behavior she sees in her daughter, who always watches the backyard contrary to her expectations. On one hand, the daughters in the two short stories and poem become who they are because of their mothers. The treatment of their respective mothers has prompted Dee, Emily, and the girl to behave the way they do. While Dee and Emily feel neglected, the girl in the poem has been excessively cared for. Thus, they all want a place for themselves and to be assured of the right blend and amount of motherly love. References Brooks, G. (2007). A song in the front yard. In R. DiYanni (Ed.), Literature: reading fiction, poetry, and drama (6th ed.) (p. 771). New York: McGraw-Hill. Olsen, T. (2007). I stand here ironing. In R. DiYanni (Ed.), Literature: reading fiction, poetry, and drama (6th ed.) (pp. 706-710). New York: McGraw-Hill. Walker, A. (2007). Everyday use. In R. DiYanni (Ed.), Literature: reading fiction, poetry, and drama (6th ed.) (pp. 743-751). New York: McGraw-Hill. Read More