the problematics of motherhood in twentieth century women's fiction

97
:elect it. Her obsessive remembrance of her mother is
~ndicative of her own sense of gullt and defeat. Her
assertion, "why should she matter dead when she had never
mattered alive7" (DH . 231 is ineffectual. The realization
that her mother is dead brlngs to Saru not grief but anger
because she could not now have her revenge Even after her
death, her mother seems to draln away Saru's happlness like
a vengeful ghost "I hate her, sapping me of happiness, of
everything She's always done it to me taken happlness
away from me She does it even now when she's dead" (DH .
100)
3.3.4.3. Alzhougn she never admlred or trled to emulate her
mother, the influence of the dead woman is so profound In
Saru's unconscious that she often merges wlth her mother's
she went on ]umbllng herself wlth the dead woman,
sometlmes feeling she was actlng out a role,
sometlmes feeling she was her mother herself And
somewhere was that unloved, resentful, neglected
chlld. Saru (3H 97).
What Rrch says of her own experience as a daughLer loaklng
at her mother, "I too shall marry, have children -- but not
llke her
I1976
I shail find a way of dolng lt all differently"
219) -- exactly flts Sam, who tries hard not to be
what her mother was, but ultimately realizes that she is no
more than an educated version of her mother.