The Dilemma of Mother-Daughter Relationship

This study explores the maternal world of the British writers Shelagh Delaney and Margaret Drabble with its conflicts, impasses, struggle, resolutions and compromises for both mothers and their teenage and adult daughters. Both tackle it as a multi-dimensional recurrent theme and as the central conflict in the selected works: Delaney's A Taste of Honey, and The Lion in Love, and Drabble's recent novels, The Peppered Moth and The Seven Sisters. The study investigates their dilemma to reveal how this tension is resolved and how that experience guides their heroines to an internal change, new evolution and self-revelation. This tense relationship is analyzed within the framework of the major feminist, psychoanalytical and psychotherapeutic theories and perspectives of motherhood and mother-daughter relationship, stressing its different variables: societal, psychological, cultural, political, and economic. The main focus of the study, therefore, is to explore psychoanalytically how Delaney and Drabble resolve their dilemma and trauma as daughters and mothers, presenting two unique and authentic voices, of the angry young Delaney, and the contemplative middle-aged Drabble.

Autorentext

Dawla Al-Amri, PhD, the Dept. of European Languages, King ABDULAZIZ University, the Vice-dean of the Faculty of Arts & Humanities, Faisaliyya Campus, KAU. An instructor of different literature courses since 1990.