Reconstructing the Mother-Daughter Relationship: Lydia Davis and Amy Tan

With four waves of women’s liberation movements in the twentieth century, the relationship between mothers and daughters has come under increasing, frequent, intense, and passionate examination. Scholars East and West have examined this bond, giving it a universal appeal. Among the voices that have come to create speech and meaning to this relationship are. Fouad (1964), the Egyptian writer, in her book Ila Ibnaty (To My Daughter) and Rich’s 1976 classic feminist work, Of Women Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution. Concerning their definitions, this paper discusses the oppositional forms of the mother-daughter relationship in Amy Tan’s Two Kinds and Lydia Davis’ The Mother. In both short stories, Tan, with her Chinese traditions and American education, and Davis, whose background includes no ethnic derivations, explore the breakdown in communication in this problematic bond, aiming at reconstructing this richly influential relationship.