SOURCE: Shumaker, Jeanette Roberts. “Mother-Daughter Rivalries in Stories by Irish Women: Elizabeth Bowen, Edna O'Brien, Mary Beckett, and Helen Lucy Burke.” North Dakota Quarterly 68, no. 1 (winter 2001): 70-85.

In the following essay, Shumaker applies theorist Julia Kristeva's “myth of the superior woman” to explicate the troubled mother-daughter relationships in several stories by Irish women writers, including O'Brien's “A Rose in the Heart of New York.”

Traditionally, Irish women have been regarded primarily as mothers, according to Jenny Beale (50). Being defined through motherhood creates problems of identity for long-suffering mothers in short stories by modern Irish women. These stories also dramatize the burden of being a “good” daughter to a self-sacrificing mother. Strained relationships between mothers and daughters reflect the changing gender roles, economic limitations, and, sometimes, the troubled politics of Ireland and Northern Ireland.¹ Feminist theory is pertinent for examining the struggles between modern Irish mothers and daughters, since...