Psychodynamics of Mother Daughter Relationship: Degrees of Deprivation, Oppression and Dispossession in Doris Lessing’s Fiction

Abstract

Contextualized within psychoanalytic feminist critique, this study aims at fathoming out various dynamics operating at psychoanalytic level within the mother daughter relationship that affect daughter‟s level of intimacy or repulsion towards the mother in the texts of Doris Lessing, in particular The Grass is singing (1950) and Under My Skin (1994). While focusing on these works and approaching them through a feminist critical perspective of the phenomenon of motherhood, mothering and matrophobia, I have consider a re-examination of Lessing‟s attempt to provide an inevitably fresh stance of mother daughter dyad‟s tussle. The research contends that by breaking idealized boundaries and positioning mother as an independent entity- the phenomenon of matrophobia -daughter‟s hatred towards the mother in early phases of her life is explored. Throughout the paper, it has been established that Lessing consciously relates the mother moving towards and away from the being of daughter at both fictional and biographical planes.