Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution - Adrienne Rich IX MOTHERHOOD AND DAUGHTERHOOD [...] 4 “Matrophobia” as the poet Lynn Sukenick has termed it18 is the fear not of one’s mother or of motherhood but of becoming one’s mother. Thousands of daughters see their mothers as having taught a compromise and self-hatred they are struggling to win free of, the one through whom the restrictions and degradations of a female existence were perforce transmitted. Easier by far to hate and reject a mother outright than to see beyond her to the forces acting upon her. But where a mother is hated to the point of matrophobia there may also be a deep underlying pull toward her, a dread that if one relaxes one’s guard one will identify with her completely. An adolescent daughter may live at war with her mother yet borrow her clothes, her perfume. Her style of housekeeping when she leaves home may be a negative image of her mother’s: beds never made, dishes unwashed, in unconscious reversal of the immaculately tended house of a woman from whose orbit she has to extricate herself. [...] Matrophobia can be seen as a womanly splitting of the self, in the desire to become purged once and for all of our mothers’ bondage, to become individuated and free. The mother stands for the victim in ourselves, the unfree woman, the martyr. Our personalities seem dangerously to blur and overlap with our mothers’; and, in a desperate attempt to know where mother ends and daughter begins, we perform radical surgery. [...] 18 Lynn Sukenick, “Feeling and Reason in Doris Lessing’s Fiction,” Contemporary Literature, Vol. 14, No. 4, p. 519. Link Alternativo para download do livro
