Lives Together/Worlds Apart

Mothers and Daughters in Popular Culture

Suzanna Danuta Walters

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2023
• ISBN:
  9780520915039
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

In the 1940s 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. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1993.
In the 1940s 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, in

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter One The Sacrament of Separation / The Penance of Affiliation
• Chapter Two From Sacrificial Stella to Maladjusted Mildred
• Chapter Three Father Knows Best about the Woman Question
• Chapter Four The Turning Point
• Chapter Five Terms of Enmeshment
• Chapter Six Parting Glances
• Chapter Seven Whose Life Is It Anyway?
• Chapter Eight Beyond Separation
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Selected Film Chronology
• Selected Television Chronology
• Index