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This chapter describes a process where mothers are essential to the replication of a particular cultural model of authority and yet also challenge the very structure that they work to support. It refers to the Babylonian Talmud and its depiction of mother–daughter relationships in two cycles of talmudic narratives, which argues that the Talmud uses this relationship to promote the value of father–husbands leaving home to study Torah. It also looks at the centrality and power of the father–son relationship that is disrupted when sons become disciples of male rabbinic masters. The chapter discusses mothers who are portrayed as a success when transmitting to their daughters the value of sending husbands off to study with a master. It emphasizes that the mother–daughter relationship becomes crucial to the creation and replication of a society that valorizes rabbinic authority and the ideal of Torah study.

The fifth chapter explores Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan as an example of a film in which Hollywood’s historical treatment of classical ballet is referenced to provide a self-reflexive and critical commentary on the role of the melancholic white woman in artistic representation. The film provides a horrific take on the ethereal and melancholic Russian ballet Swan Lake, deploying a variety of genre tropes associated with melodrama, horror and film noir in order to convey the protagonist’s increasing levels of paranoia as she loses control of her disciplined ballerina body. In doing so, Black Swan critiques the culture of competitive individualism and bodily discipline associated with neoliberal postfeminism and works to collapse the distinction between mental illness and the romanticised cultural discourse of melancholia. The film’s politics, however, are frustrated by the insistence on framing gendered pathologies in terms of white burden and by its strategic self-reflexivity in relation to Hollywood image construction.

A fair number of Cicero's letters reveal his concern for his daughter Tullia and his son Marcus. Recent scholarship has read these letters as evidence for a ‘natural’ emotional attachment of a father to his children, in reaction to Philippe Ariès's opposite claim. This chapter considers whether Cicero's letters can be analysed only as expressions of paternal affection. The fact that the pater familias Cicero occupies a political position simultaneously in his nuclear family, his domus, and the Senate, results in a concern for his prestige within the social field of the aristocracy. And this concern is necessarily conferred upon his support of the education and the social and political career of his children. The chapter traces the gender-specific differences between Cicero's treatment of Tullia and Marcus, shows the social construction of parental affection, and contributes to a further understanding of the different functions of daughters and sons in the social force field of family memory.

Following the pattern of the preceding chapter this deals with Henry Thornton’s courtship of Marianne Sykes, making extensive use of the material in the Thornton, Wilberforce and Venn papers. It begins with a discussion of Henry Thornton, his character, his relationships with his parents, John and Lucy Thornton, and his close involvement with Hannah More’s Cheap Repository Tracts. His initial proposal to Marianne Sykes was turned down, but when she accepted him, she found that her life was taken over by the Clapham sect. However, she was able to assert some independence in vetoing her fiancé’s more extravagant plans for setting up their household in Battersea Rise. The story of their courtship is used to illustrate Protestant, and particularly Evangelical views on marriage, male chastity, and mother-daughter relationships.

Focusing on Little Reunion, a key text for interpreting the series of self-fashioning performances Eileen Chang directed at Chinese reading publics as her imagined spectators, confessors, and adjudicators, this chapter argues that for Chang, autobiographical fiction calls for a unique and delicate balancing act between rhetoricity and historicity, imagination and factuality. An autobiographical text is neither a simple verbal construct of indeterminable referents, nor the mechanical recording of indisputable facts, but rather a process of self-recollecting and self-enactment repeated with an inescapable difference over time. Little Reunion brings the intersubjective politics of representation into high relief. Chang's desire for self-articulation and self-fashioning contends with the inscriptional authority of her former lover Hu Lancheng. Moreover, her desire to search for her roots, and in particular to construct a group portrait of her extended family, creates tension with the traditional Confucian expectation that respectful children/descendants should speak only selectively and positively about their parents/ancestors. Complicating her bid for access to inscriptional and cultural authority is the traditional marginality of women's self-representation. As a female autobiographical subject seeking to publicly interpret herself and the significant others in her life, Chang ineluctably confronts the gender bias of reigning literary, political, and social values.

The 1940s and early 1950s are identified as a crucial period for Graham both professionally and personally. This chapter discusses Graham’s decline in the 1960s and the historical misapprehension of her contribution at that time. This chapter proposes that Graham was a foundational figure for the analysis of patriarchy that was launched at the end of the 1960s. It studies the importance of the mother-daughter relation in her work.

This chapter concentrates on the virtue of the mother–daughter relationship and its potential to provoke cultural change that is emphasized through the relationship between the pioneering maskilah Hava Shapiro and her mother Menuhah. It considers the nineteenth- and twentieth-century Haskalah and the writings of Shapiro, who depicts her mother Menuhah as fulfilling a traditional maternal role in nurturing her love and commitment to Hebrew literature. It also recounts how Menuhah gave her daughter the agency and intellectual tools to revolt against traditional conceptions of women and break free from a well-entrenched patriarchy. The chapter examines the talmudic wherein the mother–daughter relationship of Menuhah and Shapiro is central to the replication of a cultural value that excludes women. It analyses the mother–daughter relationship, which contests a previous cultural model of traditional mothers passing on Hebrew literacy to their daughters and nonconforming daughters writing Hebrew literature.

This chapter explores Black, queer, Southern women’s relationships with their mothers, their desires to have children and mother, and, in some cases, having maternal responsibilities imposed on them (due to poverty, abandonment, or the death of a parent). The women’s relationships with their mothers are varied; some recount the love and acceptance they were given when they told their mothers about their same-sex attraction, while others recall rejection. Similarly, these narrators have varied reasons for having children, including abiding by the conventions of heterosexuality and marrying men and wanting to raise open-minded people.

Chapter 5 considers why it should be that, in contrast to The Nun's Story, In This House of Brede and Agnes of God pathologize the intense mother-daughter relationships that bloom in the pseudo-family culture of the cloister. It suggests that the male filmmakers may have imagined the the claustral space as a claustrophic extension of the female emotional world of the home; and it reads the films against a Freudian discourse of psychosexual and gender tension in the oedipal family. It shows the ways in which the artistic input of women such as the novelist Rumer Godden who wrote In This House of Brede, the actress Diana Rigg who played the principal nun in the film version of Godden's novel and a French missionary superior thirty years later in The Painted Veil (2006), and the movie star activist Jane Fonda as forensic psychiatrist Dr. Martha Livingston in Agnes of God, open up alternative readings of passionate desire in these films.

Chapter 2 focuses on Martel’s second feature, La niña santa, a film which depicts the anxious construction of hard-and-fast boundaries between right and wrong, good and evil, beauty and horror, whilst revelling in the strangeness of a world in which everything – including its saintly-demonic heroine, and the moral and affective situations she negotiates, confounds these distinctions. In La niña santa, it is in particular the ideological conditions established by Catholicism – and their close relationship with constructions of femininity – which are subject to the scrutiny of Martel’s investigative gaze. The girls in this film suggest the possibility of resisting dominant narratives, a possibility with which the film is thematically and aesthetically engaged in multiple ways. The chapter explores the film’s aesthetic experiments alongside its foregrounding of the productive capacity of desire, arguing that both function to suggest ideological fissure and the glimpsing of alternative realities. Through its figuring of desire, and the female adolescent as agent of her desire, the film suggests the possibility of resistance to the subjective and identitarian roles and models into which she is socially summoned.

This chapter focuses on Durgā and describes the many ways in which she is identified with a little girl, for she is at once the martial demon-slayer and Umā, the humble wife of Śiva, whose festival resonates with details of the mother–daughter relationship as experienced in Bengali cultural history. Umā, Śiva's gentle wife and the daughter of Menakā and Himālaya, stands in for the missed daughters of youth as she evokes real longing. The mother–daughter bond expounds on this nostalgia by associating the “Mother” with “home.” Many urban Bengalis still speak of home as the village of their forebears, even as they ache for the rural, truly “authentic” festivals in remembered villages. In new environments, joining in or even initiating the Pūjā celebrations is one way of adjusting, as these still provoke feelings of bittersweet nostalgic craving.

Substance abuse and trauma are the topics of this chapter. The relationship between substance abuse and trauma histories, particularly intrafamilial sexual abuse, is examined. The application of integrative family and systems treatment (I-FAST) with two cases is described in detail. Both cases are examples of adult women who suffered serious intrafamilial sexual abuse, were not supported by their mothers, and subsequently developed serious substance abuse problems. In both cases, their mothers were included in the treatment. Support from their mothers regarding the sexual abuse was finally obtained. In both cases, repairing the mother–daughter relationship resulted in total amelioration of both trauma and substance abuse problems.

Like Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge, Edith Wharton's ‘Roman Fever’ is concerned with the persistence of parental secrets, and about how retelling or returning to a story at different times may give it new and sometimes powerful meanings in the light of changed circumstances. In Wharton's story, a revelation—‘I had Barbara’—about a long-ago secret liaison which changes another woman's perception of past events may also, today, be read or reread in more than one new way. More broadly, this shift of meaning is what happens with all the excavations of ‘old’ parental stories in this book: whether secret or not, they come out looking different in relation to the contexts in which we encounter them now.