The discourse of motherhood and motherdaughter relationships in the novel Sula by Toni Morrison

Abstract

Being an ideology, institution and experience, motherhood is an object of study of many authors. Many feminists recognize the significance of mother-daughter relationships and consider it the most powerful influence a woman can get in her life. By looking back into the past of their mothers, some of the female authors try to identify themselves and “pave the way” for their own daughters. The main question that emerges in this research is concerned with the way women are shaped as mothers under the influence of the family and the society. The aim of this paper is to present the discourse of motherhood and the mother-daughter relationships in the novel Sula by using the theories of discourse by Foucault, (1982) Bakhtin, (1981) Macdonell (1986), Lazar (2005), van Dijk (2008), the sociological theories of Chodorow (1978) and Donath (2015) and the feminist theories on motherhood as proposed by Ruddick (1989, 1986), Hays (1998), DiQuinzio, (1999) and Ross (2016) among others.