SOURCE: Wolk, Merla. “Uncivil Wars: The Reproduction of Mother-Daughter Conflict and Rosellen Brown's Autobiography of My Mother.” American Imago 45, no. 2 (summer 1988): 163-85.

In the following essay, Wolk examines the emotional and behavioral dynamics of the mother-daughter relationship in Brown's The Autobiography of My Mother, using Nancy Chodorow's study The Reproduction of Mothering as a reference guide.

The studies of recent feminist psychoanalytic theorists and the fiction of contemporary female writers reveal a common interest in mother-daughter relationships, each demonstrating in its own fashion the centrality of that relationship to the development of female identity. To examine the novels in light of the theory (or vice versa) is to gain greater appreciation of the dynamics of mother-daughter conflict. The most extensive theoretical work on this subject is that of Nancy Chodorow who, in The Reproduction of Mothering, explores the effects of the mother-daughter dyad on female development, seeing its...