Food for Thought

For my paper, I will be looking at the female identity within the mother/daughter relationship. I find it interesting how the mother is either deceased or not present in many of the novels we've read in class. Using Reuben and Rachel, I will look at the concept of motherhood in the Republic. One critic who also talks about this issue is none other than Cathy Davidson. Her chapter entitled "Mothers and Daughters in the Fiction of the New Republic" opens with a quote from the October issue of Parent's Magazine in 1840. It reads, "Compared with maternal influence, the combined authority of laws and armies and public sentiment are little things." This quote fits in well with my argument that mothers or mother figures develop their daughters' identities. Davidson even uses an example of Charlotte Temple to illustrate that a "good daughter of the Republic" would have not been seduced as she was. Further discussing this idea of a "good daughter of the Republic," she says that "instead, she would settle for the simpler homespun pleasures of connubial bliss and maternal satisfaction." In Charlotte, for example, if she had heeded the maternal advice, there would have been no actual seduction in the seduction novel.