In Breathe, Eyes, Memory, Tante Atie usually tells about the chunk of the sky and flower petals story to explain from where Sophie was born, but of course, Sophie is not an exception of nature. Like billions of girls all over the world, she was linked to her mother’s body by the placenta, and lived in the womb for nine months before being greeted by the world. When the placenta is removed – a girl and her mother do not share the same body any more, however, she does not develop into a woman independent of her mother. It’s not simply a matter of genes or inheritance, but a complicated relationship between mother and daughter.
How does a mother positively or negatively influence her growing up daughter? What is the meaning of a daughter to her mother? How do a daughter’s personality form under her mother’s influence? These questions are answered in both novels Breathe, Eyes, Memory by Edwidge Danticat and Sula by Toni Morrison with some from similar views, and some from different views. For ages, a mother’s love is always mentioned as the symbol for pure and selfless love. Digging deep in the complex maternal love, nevertheless, both Morrison and Danticat draw an unexpected conclusion that daughters are somewhat detestable to their mothers.
Perhaps the biggest impression that Hannah, Sula’s mother, gives readers is her seemingly unfathomable love for her daughter. One day, when Sula passes by, some women are talking about problems of child rearing, and Hannah says that she does not like her daughter: “You love her, like I love Sula. I just don’t like her. That’s the difference” (Morrison 57). Along with Eva’s murder of Plum, Hannah’s words raise a question about the ambivalence of a mother’s love, which is not a simple definition of romantic understanding.
Instead, it can be an emotion tightly sticking to heavy responsibility, or even a burden of taking care of children. Perhaps deep in Hannah’s soul, she does not like Sula’s own self, but as a mother, she needs, or even has, to love Sula. Overhearing her mother’s word, Sula takes her first step into the convoluted world of adulthood where emotions are ambiguous and intricate rather than simple and straight in her own childish definitions: her mother will never stop loving her, but it’s not an unconditional love as she has long believed – it’s a love of responsibility.
Through Hannah’s comment, Morrison affirms that loving and liking are not the same thing, as well as maternal love is not pure love of devotion and sacrifice, but may associate with obligatory duties of a mother. In Breath, Eyes, Memory, although Martine has never said she does not like Sophie, it’s not difficult to realize Sophie is, or at least used to be, part of Martine’s life of which she wants to get rid. Sophie is the result of a sexual assault, a baby that the rapist pounds into Martine.
Sophie has a distinctive face looking like no one in her family, but rather echoing the unknown rapist’s. Martine admits that she once tried any possible ways to abort Sophie, because Sophie is the witness to the horror Martine suffers, and part of tragic memory Martine wants to completely forget (Danticat 190). Just as Sula knows Hannah loves her, as it’s the duty of a mother, Sophie also realizes that she is a relic of Martine’s dreadful past.
When having dinner with Marc and Martine, Sophie notices them eyeing each other as if there are things they cannot say because of her: “I tried to stuff myself and keep quiet, pretending that I couldn’t even see them. My mother now had two lives: Marc belonged to the present life, I was a living memory from the past” (Danticat 56). Marc is a well-dressed, relatively affluent lawyer – part of Martine’s present life in America, while Sophie is an innocent little girl from the impoverished Croix-des-Rosets – part of Martine’s past life in Haiti.
As Martine goes to America and has not returned to Haiti for years to forget the terrible memory and restart a new life, Sophie seems to not belong to Martine’s American life, but just to be living remnants of Martine’s old life, which remind Martine of horrible events in Haiti, and obstructs Martine from getting a brighter life in America. Despite different situations and different reasons for mothers to dislike their daughters, both Morrison and Danticat point out that between mothers and daughters does not always exit a pure love, but can be a set of intricate and contradictory emotions, possibly include the dislike, or even hatred.
One famous quote from the play The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde is “All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy”. Keeping eyes on grow up females, again, Morrison and Danticat simultaneously support the quote. Morrison obviously shows this point through her two protagonists Sula and Nel by giving Sula some “Hannah” and giving Nel some “Helene”. The definition of inheritance here is no longer just a matter of genes or birth, but is expanded to the similarity between mother and daughter in reaction to their environment and experience.
Especially, Helene’s reflection is easily recognized inside Nel’s personality. Perhaps Nel’s inheritance of personality is due to the inheritance of the way her mother is brought up. Helene grows up under guard of her strictly religious grandmother until safely gets married. Then Helene raises Nel under the same strict rules governing her own childhood. Morrison makes it clear that Nel is a calm and unimaginative girl who completely comforts to her mother’s rigid orders: “Under Helene’s hand the girl became obedient and polite.
Any enthusiasms that little Nel showed were calmed by the mother until she drove her daughter’s imagination underground” (Morrison 18). Just as Helene becoming a stay-at-home wife at the age of 16 and spending the rest of her life for family, Nel quickly settles her life by getting married to Jude, to dedicate herself to her husband to “make one Jude” (Morrison 83). However, the most conspicuous resemblance between Hannah and Nel is the serenity. Seeing Chicken Little falling into water and drowning, “Sula had cried and cried….
But Nel had remained calm”, even had such a good feeling that she has to ask herself about it after years “Why didn’t I feel bad when it happened? How come it felt so good to see him fall? ” (Morrison 170). Her questions evoke the early scene at the beginning of the novel when Helene is humiliated and insulted by the white conductor on the train back to New Orleans just because she goes through the white car. Unexpectedly, in response to the discrimination, Helene remains composed, smiling dazzlingly and coquettishly to him (Morrison 21).
Seeing her mother’s unreasonable composure strongly affects Nel, and is probably a main reason of Nel’s composure to Chicken Little’s death after that. The similarity between two scenes suggests that both Helene and Nel are afraid of turbulence, but love the tranquility. As Helene’s smile is an attempt to bring the order after the train conductor’s anger, Nel is thrilled when watching Chicken Little drowning because the water wipes out all disorders and chaos of his flight, bringing back the serenity to the river.
Sharing the same viewpoint with Morrison, Danticat also corroborates the similarity between the way a mother and a daughter are reared through her story about Caco women. Martine, Sophie’s mother, is born into a Haitian society obsessed with virginity. As a girl, Grandme Ife tests Martine’s purity, which, according to Grandme Ife, is necessary for a girl’s own good and her family’s honor. Then it’s Martine’s turn to perform the test on her daughter, Sophie to make sure her hymen still intact since Martine knows Sophie is in love with Joseph.
Nonetheless, Danticat has a more sophisticated view on the daughter’s inheritance from her mother. Tighter and more complicated, the relationship between Martine and Sophie in Breath, Eyes, Memory is not just the simple reflection or inheritance, but the peak of a mother – daughter relation when the two women becomes twins, or even merge into one person as the story of Marassas, which Danticat uses to illustrate this unique connection. One of passages manifests the twin relationship between Martine and Sophie is at the end of chapter 29.
Knowing her mother’s pregnancy, Sophie recalls Martine’s nightmares and her first year of marriage when she wanted to suicide and had the same nightmare as her mother’s: “Her nightmares had somehow become my own, so much so that I would wake up some mornings wondering if we hadn’t both spent the night dreaming about the same thing: a man with no face, pounding a life into a helpless young girl” (Danticat 193). As Nel sees Helene remain calm despite the white train conductor’s humiliation and “catches” this composure, Sophie witnesses her mother’s terrible dreams every night and also “catches” these nightmares.
Nevertheless, to Danticat, the reflection of a mother in a daughter has evolved into a much more advanced stage – it’s not only passing the way a mother grows up or her personality, but it’s the coincidence and exact likeness of events and thoughts of the two women. At the same time, both Martine and Sophie suffer the same insomnia, dream the same nightmares about the same faceless rapist, and have the same suicidal thoughts with the same purpose – to flee from their pains and their fears of the past that still haunt their lives.
The two women’s souls have blended into a united one, so they can feel the emotions, as well as suffer pains of each other together. They are Marassas. They are twins, in spirit. They are an undivided woman until Martine commits suicide to help the Martine-Sophie woman defeat their own phobia. At the last moment of the novel, Grandme Ife says that “the daughter is never fully a woman until her mother has passed on before her”, and the question “Ou libere? ” is left unanswered, seemingly echoes throughout the cane fields.
It might be for Martine: whether she is free of phobias, demons, and nightmares. It might be for Sophie, too: whether she is free of her mother’s phobias, demons, and nightmares. It might be for the Martine-Sophie woman – the last time she appears and answers for both two women in her “We’re free! ”, and then let Sophie get into her own womanhood without her mother’s obsession. As Wynonna Judd, a famous American country music singer said “The mother-daughter relationship is the most complex”, there are never enough pages to write about every facet of this complicated relationship.
However, at least, as Morrison and Danticat show through their novels, a mother, positively or negatively, always plays a vital role to her daughter’s life, influences her during the daughter’s growing-up period, and leaves her own reflection in her daughter’s self, perhaps deep in her daughter’s soul.
Works Cited
- Morrison, Toni. Sula. Vintage International, June 2004. Print. Danticat, Edwidge. Breath, Eyes, Memory. Vintage Contemporaries, May 1998. Print.
