"I'm becoming more and more like my mother, it's the fate of every daughter"

New Weekly

2024-05-29 16:27Published on the official account of Guangdong New Weekly

撰写| Felicia

Edit| Yan Fei

One trend is that more and more film and television dramas are focusing on the mother-daughter relationship. The attachment, entanglement, and control between mother and daughter have become important emotional keys in the plot. This is no coincidence that the "mother-daughter entanglement" is exactly the reality that many women are experiencing.

Those parents who are particularly painful are described by the Japanese with the popular word "poisonous relatives". There are so many derivatives of "drug relatives" (a similar concept in China is "both parents are evil"), and many manga, talk shows, TV dramas and movies in Japan have been influenced by this. And among them, "toxic mothers" account for a large proportion.

▲ "Vicious Daughter, Holy Mother"

The Japanese seem to be more daring to shoot tragedies. "Vicious Daughter, Holy Mother", adapted from Minato Jiamiao's work of the same name, is a social problem drama. The mother controls her daughter's life as a guard, and the daughter is in great pain and does something irrevocable - "holy mother" happens to be a sad irony.

But if we only talk about "toxic mothers", the plight of mothers is ignored. Mothers contribute themselves, and their labor is the nourishment for the growth of their children. And the mother can't see her daughter's pain precisely because her pain has never been confronted and understood by others.

▲ "Vicious Daughter, Holy Mother"

For more than 20 years, there have been studies on the relationship between mothers and daughters in Japanese academic circles, such as "The Inner Mother Controls Everything - It is Dangerous to Invade Our Mother" (Saito Gaku) published in 1998, "Mothers Control Their Daughter's Life - Why is it so Difficult to "Kill Mothers" (by Saito Kan) and "Mother's Unbearable Weight" (Sayoko Nobuta) published in 2008...... These are all works based on cases of psychological counseling in mother-daughter relationships. And the comics, novels, films and television with the theme of mother and daughter have also repeatedly set off discussions in the past 20 years.

In China, although there are some novels from the 90s of the 20th century that involve the relationship between mothers and daughters, the period when the real discussion boom has to be pushed back to the last four or five years (synchronized with related films).

A mother loves her son as she loves another. This kind of love is not a secondary level of love. It is precisely because they are different from themselves that the mother can more naturally accept the fact that her son's physiology and psychology are different from her own; The other is also mysterious, and few mothers ask their sons to live her life again.

But mother and daughter are often entangled with each other. The mother sees her daughter as an extension of herself. On the one hand, it makes for a fascinating relationship – the mother-daughter relationship is deep, and a part of the mother will live inside the daughter. On the other hand, it also creates pain - many psychological counseling rooms are full of scenes where daughters complain that their mothers have a blurred sense of boundaries and a desire to control beyond the ordinary.

Mother and daughter are not a community of destiny

Like many scholars who study mother-daughter relationships, I look at mothers from the point where I don't want to be a woman.

Her mother was not strong, but she always silently recited various norms: "what should women do" and "how should women live". Those words came not only from my mother's mouth, but also from the era and small society in which she lived. You know that a mother's words are not always true, but they will hang over her daughter's life forever like a floating spell.

▲ "Vicious Daughter, Holy Mother"

In many psychoanalytic articles and feminist dialogues, I have seen daughters dissect themselves in stories and discuss the complex and entangled mother-daughter relationship. Quite a few books also mention the magic of mother's language.

It's not just an individual experience. In the past decade, more and more psychological counselors and sociologists have regarded the mother-daughter relationship as an important issue. It is precisely because women are in the process of compressed modernization, and mother and daughter face completely different realities of women's existence, that the conflict will become more and more obvious.

In "The Choice of Being a Woman", Chizuruko Ueno points out the double contradiction that exists in her mother: the mother wants her daughter to be "feminine", but "it is not enough to be a woman" - she hopes that her daughter will get things that she does not have, such as career and education; But he didn't want his life to be denied, so he urged his daughter to get married, have children, and take care of the family.

In the chapter "Misogyny", she also mentions the changes in the relationship between mother and daughter—in the past, "marriage provided a social opportunity to sever the relationship between mother and daughter, and the daughter who married out was someone else's family", and "the mother still has control after the daughter is married, which is a phenomenon since modern times".

▲ "The Choice of Being a Woman" [Day] Chizuruko Ueno / Sayoko Nobuta, translated by Lu Lingzhi, International Culture Publishing Company, 2023-3

▲ "Misogyny" [Japanese] by Chizuruko Ueno, translated by Wang Lan, Guangqi Books, 2023-5

The important social background is that the reality of the declining birthrate and the rapid increase in the cost of family pension also pushes the daughter to become the "son" and become the main person responsible for the parents' pension. However, in the face of Japan's employment ice, many daughters find it difficult to afford the cost of providing for the elderly.

Japanese sociologist Mizumata Airu proposes a generational observation of mother-daughter relationships in "Dangerous Relationships: The Mystery of Mother-Daughter Relationships" (Kan Saito, hereafter referred to as "Dangerous Relationships").

In the '70s, when the proportion of housewives among Japanese women was at its highest, the relationship between the two generations with their children was rather awkward—their children were the "second baby boomers," also known as the "Lost Generation" (the generation of college graduates facing the employment ice age after the bubble economy), the two generations with the greatest gap in economic and social structures.

It is too difficult for the daughters of the "lost generation" to follow their mother's path and find a husband who can afford to buy a house and support the family's living expenses like their father, "The current society requires everyone to improve their social status".

▲ "Vicious Daughter, Holy Mother"

Becoming a daughter like a mother is almost unrealistic.

The control of "toxic" is done first and foremost through the body

In recent years, many young directors' works have focused on the relationship between mother and daughter, and Yang Mingming's "A History of Tenderness" (2018) is one of the earliest films to attract attention.

"The History of Tenderness" contains many details of mothers' monitoring of their daughters - the rules of eating posture, the etiquette of drinking milk, the steps of washing dishes, and even the way toiletries are placed. Through the supervision of the body and space, the mother completes the psychological level of "control". And the mother and daughter, who don't like each other, can't do without each other.

Why are mothers and daughters so entangled? The first is that mother and daughter share a "female body".

▲《History of Jujo》

Menstruation and pregnancy are both unique physical experiences for women, and mothers impart physical experiences as well as thoughts. In Chen Ran's novel "Cheers to the Past", the mother taught her panicked daughter to deal with menarche, and told her daughter that this "wound" would not heal for decades, and the "wound" would grow up, and in this "growth", the girl became a woman.

The Japanese psychologist Kan Saito said in "Dangerous Relationships" that "the body of a healthy man can be said to be a 'transparent existence'", and men are hardly aware of their "embodiment" in their daily lives (except during sexual activity). But women have to be aware of their "embodiment", and they feel physical disobedience more commonly, such as menstruation.

He also wrote that women are forced to feel their bodies because of gender bias. Society's imagination of women is to have a "feminine body", including the so-called "feminine" upbringing, but it also requires them to suppress the desire of the subject and have a "feminine attitude" (that is, "feminine power" in the Japanese buzzword).

Mother's education of her daughter almost always begins with unconsciously controlling her daughter's body and demanding "physical identity". Through "suppression", the mother implants her own words into her daughter's body; Through "giving" (masochistic control), the daughter can feel the pain of her mother and feel guilty; Through "assimilation", the hope of "living your own life again" is pinned on her daughter.

A mother's control over her daughter does not necessarily mean violence, on the contrary, it is sometimes done through sacrifice – "I am for your good". And women will feel a sense of responsibility and guilt more obviously. In the counseling room, even the daughter who hates her mother will say, "If there is a war, I will definitely run away with my mother." ”

The independence between mother and daughter is more ambiguous, and sometimes mother and daughter are extremely close physically. In the novel "Two People Live", Mitsuyo Tsunoda describes a scene where he makes himself uncomfortable: mother and daughter wear underwear to each other. Tsunoda said she once heard her peers share her story: her daughter once respected and identified with her mother very much, and was very close to her mother, until she found out that she was controlled by her mother's paranoia, and found that "this is not my value", and then violently turned to a position of hating her mother.

Many daughters have deeply experienced the connection between their mothers and their bodies, and at some stage, they will gradually peel off the dark shadow of their mothers in their bodies.

Reinventing the story of motherhood

The mother was the first female sample of her daughter to observe in depth, shaping her daughter's initial worldview. When they become adults, daughters often use their mothers as a contrast to think, inherit or escape from their original identity.

But if there was only a perspective from the daughter, the mother-daughter relationship would not be so complicated and entangled.

▲ "Vicious Daughter, Holy Mother", the boy is a scumbag from the mother's perspective, and the mother forces herself to break up from the daughter's perspective

Elena Ferrante once said with a bit of an exaggeration that she didn't seem to write anything but the mother-daughter relationship. In the novel, she is both a mother and a daughter, constantly switching the perspective of the narrative.

In the Neapolitan Tetralogy, mothers are the "home" of their daughters, who learn the language of the new women and the way of life that belongs to the city. And in "Annoying Love" and "Daughter in the Shadows", she is closer to her mother's situation.

▲ "Daughter in the Shadows" [Italy] by Elena Ferrante, translated by Chen Ying, Wang Yanding, and Huang Yutong, People's Literature Publishing House, 2024-4

▲ "Annoying Love" [Italy] by Elena Ferrante, translated by Chen Ying, People's Literature Publishing House, 2022-10

In "Annoying Love", the daughter becomes her father's accomplice, supervising the beautiful mother's body and unconsciously controlling her mother's dress. In front of her daughter, the mother hid her body in a wide, shabby robe. It wasn't until after her mother's death that the daughter discovered her mother's secret - underneath the patched old clothes was her mother's delicate underwear.

In "Daughter in the Shadows", the daughter controls her mother by unconsciously encroaching on her mother's time, space, energy, emotions and even her body. The mother who wanted to flee finally chose to go back.

Ferrante's women are not pioneers, and when they want to escape, they must be entangled with another force within them. "These mothers are humble, desperate, and painful, and they have the idea of being born again, but in the end, they don't give up." The mother needs to face this question: "As a contemporary woman, can I make my daughters love me, I love them, but without sacrificing my whole or hating myself for it." Ferrante also mentioned: "We, as daughters, will wrap our mother's body like a tailor. ”

In recent years, many literary and artistic works showing the story between mother and daughter have emerged in China, such as "This Woman", "I Wish People Were Long", and "When I Approached You". Among them, Yang Benfen's novel restores her mother's life, and at the same time, she is no longer just someone else's grandmother and mother, she is re-seen as a narrator. The retelling of the mother's story is an important action to uncover the "layers of baggage that wrap the mother's body".

▲ The pictures are "I Wish People Were Long", "This Woman", "When I Approached You"

In a conversation with Saito, counselor Sayoko Nobuta said that understanding is the starting point for easing the relationship between mother and daughter, "not only to understand the social structure, but to understand what lies between yourself and your mother, and how these are formed in history. The other is to "let go of the obsession of wanting to win over your mother", or share the obsession with people who have experienced the same experience and psychological counselors.

"Mom, it's an invincible existence." Sayoko Nobuta said. Even if the mother is outwardly weak, she will still "become stronger", and her blood pressure and blood sugar will rise. In this sense, the daughter is definitely going to lose.

▲ "Escape", the mother who obsessively controls her daughter

But she really wants to tell those troubled mothers that her daughter is a different person from herself, not her right and left hand. When a daughter is separated from her mother and away from her mother, she has the opportunity to look back on her life.

作者：Felicia

Editor: Yan Fei

Typesetting: Yang Panpan

Title image: "Vicious Daughter, Holy Mother"

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