SOURCE: Malpezzi, Frances M. “Consuming Love: Edna O'Brien's ‘A Rose in the Heart of New York’.” Studies in Short Fiction 33, no. 3 (summer 1996): 355-60.

In the following essay, Malpezzi examines O'Brien's portrayal of the mother-daughter relationship in her story “A Rose in the Heart of New York.”

Nearly 20 years ago, Adrienne Rich in Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution lamented the paucity of material exploring the mother-daughter relationship:

This cathexis between mother and daughter—essential, distorted, misused—is the great unwritten story. Probably there is nothing in human nature more resonant with charges than the flow of energy between two biologically alike bodies, one of which has lain in amniotic bliss inside the other, one of which has labored to give birth to the other. The materials are here for the deepest mutuality and the most painful estrangement.

(225-26)

Even the most cursory survey of the subject...