Detabooing the mother’s image in the novel by D. H. Lawrence "Mother and daughter"
Authors:   Ukrainian State University of Chemical Technology, Kulakevych L. 
Published: June 2024

Cultural d iscussions of D.H. Lawrence's creative legacy never cease, but his novelistic work remains the least considered in literary scholarship. A direct reading of D.H. Lawrence's works gives us every reason to note that a woman very often becomes the subject of his prose. The discourse on women in his texts is presented in the context of socio-cultural and family stereotypes of the female role. Analysis of recent research and articles on the works of D.H. Lawrence over the past three years has shown that his novels continue to be the main subject of scholarly consideration. Only a few literary critics have dealt with D.H. Lawrence's novels, completely ignoring the image of women in short prose. Hence the obvious relevance of our research. The aim of the article is to analyze the features of the image of the mother in Lawrence's novel ‘Mother and Daughter’. The task of the research is to establish the foundation of the plot of the novel and the artistic components of female images in it. It has been established that the novel’s core plot is the latent conflict between Virginia Bodoin and her mother, whose dominant feature is overprotection. The text consistently demonstrates the personal and emotional subordination of an adult daughter to her mother. In his works, Laurence often artistically depicts the fate of his characters as a direct result of maternal psychological violence. In the short story "Mother and Daughter", similar to many other short stories and novels of Lawrence, the artistic image of the family features a psychologically dominant, educated, and strong-willed woman, who, through overprotection, deprives the opportunity for the rest of the family to live their own life. The figure of the father in Lawrence's works is often absent: he is either deceased or reduced to the image of a spineless alcoholic or a passive romantic. As the author gets into the routines of the Bodoin women's lives, they implicitly lead us to an understanding of the relationship between the two of them as that of a married couple, where the mother "plays" the male role. Rachel's separation from men appears to be caused rather by the psycho type of the heroine than the modern way of living. Guided by the classification of the most common types of human behavior developed by Jean Shinoda Bolen, a follower of the Jungian school, we consider the depiction of relationships in the Bodoin family as the author's version of the Greek myth about Demeter and Persephone. The text contains details that attest to the financial prosperity of the heroines and emphasize their beauty and intelligence, but according to Lawrence's artistic version, all this did not make the women's lives fulfilling. Mother and daughter feel unhappy for different reasons. If Rachel, due to her asexuality and hypertrophied maternal instinct, seeks to dominate her daughter's life and takes any man as a competitor, Virginia, on the other hand, lacks male attention and even paternal care. The conclusions state that the short story "Mother and Daughter" by D.H. Lawrence is a kind of interpretation of the Greek myth about the abduction of a girl as a way to get her out of her mother's care. The fact that the words denoting blood relationships are used in the title of a short story leads us to the following interpretation: the lives of Bodoin women artistically represent a very common in society of that time model of relationship, and so, we would consider Virginia's life not as a special case, but as a norm. Keywords: Lawrence, the image of a woman, the myth of Demeter and Persephone, novel