Lucy--the mother-daughter relation

Please ignore this thread for now. It's really too long... I'll re-work on this later today! And add questions!

I was inspired by Mika's question in class, and thought about the mother-daughter relation as depicted in the novel. But I didn't exactly look at it in a feminism perspective. To me, how the protagonist Lucy treats this relation presents itself as the very process that she reconciles with her past.

In the narrative, Lucy's mother stands for a past that Lucy strives to depart from, but somehow fails. As she says explicitly "my past was my mother" (90). Lucy has an ambiguous feeling towards her mother: "The times that I loved Mariah it was because she reminded me of my mother. The times that I did not love Mariah it was because she reminded me of my mother" (58). Later on when she relates her memories of her mother to Mariah, she bursts into tears, the only time she cries in the story. As Lucy recounts, she started hating her mother when her mother gave birth to another boy, and thus Lucy felt that she could no longer get enough love from her mother, even though Lucy considered herself as her mother's "only identical offspring" (130). In other words, she feels "betrayed" (127).

Once a professor from Trinidad told me that "everyone comes with burdens." (Well, actually she kind of illegally came.) I never really understood that remark till I read Lucy. Maybe for her, her mother's love and what's represented by that love constitute her burden. "I had come to see her love as a burden" (36). It is a burden not only because her mother would naturally remind her of the islands she left behind, but more importantly, Lucy has always been exprienced a forced identification with her mother. The force came from people like Maude, but more directly from Lucy's mother, as Lucy described her mother's love as "designed solely to make me into an echo of her" (36). The only way of fully become independent and find herself is to get rid of this burden. Lucy actually achieves that. When Maude visited and passed on the sad news from home, she told Lucy that she resembled her mother. " It is this very remark that has "the only thing that could keep [Lucy] alive, because in her response that she was not like her mother at all, Lucy finally rid herself of that forced identification, and meanwhile, her past.

This burden goes off, however, at a price. When she wrote that "I wish I could love someone so much that I would die from it," it's likely that this inability to love could be attributed to her twisted relation with her mother. In her early decision to rid herself of her mother, Lucy lost the chance to come to terms with that traumatic past.