SOURCE: Sullivan, Mary Rose. “Breaking the Silence: Marilyn French's Her Mother's Daughter.” In Mother Puzzles: Daughters and Mothers in Contemporary American Literature, edited by Mickey Pearlman, pp. 41-7. New York: Greenwood Press, 1989.

In the following essay, Sullivan examines how French portrays strained family relationships in Her Mother's Daughter.

The title of Marilyn French's novel signals her view of the complex and mysterious tie that binds mothers and daughters. For French, a woman is, for better or worse, eternally her mother's daughter and, as the proverbial phrase itself seems wryly to suggest, the resemblance is likely to be for worse, not better. But French's novel—part fiction, part social history—holds out, in its unsparing examination of mother-daughter conflicts through several generations in one typical American family, the possibility that the apparently irresistible impulse that drives a daughter to repeat her mother's mistakes is not, in fact, irresistible—the...