Ruth's Mother example essay topic

There are certain times in our lives when we look back at our life stories and reflect why we have become the person we are. It has become apparent that the mother daughter relationship plays an important role in determining who the daughter turns out to be as an adult. In the following stories about the life of Ruth Benedict, as well as two others written by Jamaica Kincaid and Andrea Lee, we will explore the mother daughter relationship, and just how much effect these mother's had on their daughter's adult personalities. Ruth Benedicts experience as a child formed her into the adult person she became.

She was a very imaginative child, and at a young age was able to make distinctions between two different worlds, the world of her father 'her world', and the world of her mother, the 'other world'. Ruth Benedict was born in 1887, her father was a doctor, and her mother was a teacher (Mintz 143). Her father passed away when she was twenty-one months old (Mead 97). This is where Ruth decided that her life story began. She grew up in a single parent, extended family household. Benedict was born with full hearing, but became deaf after a case of the childhood measles (Mead 104).

As a child Ruth also suffered from tantrums. These tantrums continued until her mother made her swear on the Bible that she would stop having them. They were replaced by a form of depression. Ruth was very obsessed with the idea of death, and thought of it as a beautiful and peaceful time, she also associated death with her father. Benedict used to lie in the hay and pretend that she was dead in her grave (Mean 101). She also did not like to tell people what she was thinking about, especially if it was something of great importance that might hurt the other person, or cause the other person to interfere in 'her world' (Mead 101).

She was a brilliant young child who discovered at an early age that she did not need anyone to confide in, and that confiding in people about the things that were most important to her might cause those things to disappear (Mead 102). Benedict had two taboos in her life; not to cry in front of anyone, and not to show pain. She carried these taboos with her until after she married (Mead 105). Ruth Benedict attended Vassar College where she attained a degree in English Literature, and decided to pursue a career in teaching (Mintz 143). She married Stanley Benedict when she was twenty-six (Mintz 143). After marrying Stanley, Ruth Benedict decided to focus on becoming a good house wife, although she did try to get her essay on Mary Wollstonecraft published (Mintz 143).

She was able to get some of her poetry published. Ruth discovered that she was barren, and was forbidden by her husband to get the operation that she needed in order to have children. Benedict did not discover the field of anthropology until 1919 when she began taking classes at New School for Social Research (Mintz 143). She attained her Ph. D. in 1923 (Mintz 141). From then on she worked at Columbia University, but was not proclaimed a full professor until 1931 (Babock).

Throughout her life Ruth Benedict was concerned about equality across racial and gender lines. From day one Ruth Benedict was at odds with her mother. She did not identify with her mothers world. Ruth saw her mother as being a predictable person, She was able to predict how her mother would respond to certain things, like the mention of her fathers name. Ruth did inherit some of her mother's characteristics. Every March Ruth's mother would mourn the loss of Ruth's father.

Ruth's mother would weep in church and in bed at night (Mead 98). Ruth realized the effect that her mother's weeping had on her at a young age. 'It always had the same effect on me, an excruciating misery with physical trembling of a peculiar involuntary kind which culminated periodically in rigidity like an orgasm (Mead 98). ' It is my opinion that Ruth's hatred of her mother's grieving was what caused her to stick with her two taboos; not crying in front of others, and showing no reaction to pain.

'Looking back on it, it seems likely enough that these tabus -- they were mostly stringently required virtues -- grew out of my primal scene too. They belonged to the half of the picture I repudiated, and to be guilty of these breaches was to ally myself to the 'other' world (Mead 106). ' The other world Benedict is referring to is the world of her mother. Ruth did not love her mother, and certainly did not appreciate the fact that her mother was so full of grief, pain and worries (Mead 99).

Benedict stated that even after she was married, she did not cry or show pain in front of her husband. Her mother also drove deep into her another trait. When Ruth's father died her mother begged her to remember his face. Ruth stated that, 'Even now I feel I've been cheated or unfaithful if I can't see the dead face of a person I've loved (Mead 99). ' Her mother also drove her to love books. Books and Ruth's imagination were her escape from the realm of her mother's grief.

With a book Ruth could learn about other cultures, times, and places, and lose herself in her own world. Benedict's mother was a teacher, which also may have been the reason that Ruth strove to do so well in school. It was clear that the favorite was her domestically talented younger sister. Benedict's abilities in school might have been her way of gaining her mothers attention, and of being successful at something. Benedict's unhappiness, partially caused by her feelings of alienation from her mother, caused her to become a writer.

Writing was one of Benedict's escapes from her unhappy childhood, and eventually from her unhappy marriage (Babock). 'Expression is the only justification of life that I can feel without prodding. The greatest relief I know is to have put something into words (Babock). ' Ruth's mother was not the only person in Ruth's family that had an impact on the woman that Ruth became. The women in Ruth's family had an indirect impact on her as well.

Ruth remembers washing the dishes and looking around at the other women in her family, and realizing the it was terrible that they were all so tired (Mead 106). This began the roots of feminist thought within Ruth's mind, seeing that at the end of the day the women were exhausted from doing domestic chores. When she could, Ruth liked to escape to be with her Grandfather, which allowed her to see that men and women were not considered the same, as they were not given the same tasks to complete. '...

Ruth disliked domes tic duties in the Shattuck household... and escaped as often as she could with her grandfather to the barn and the fields and into a world of her own imagining (Babock). ' Ruth's love of the Bible stemmed from her grandfather. Her grandfather was a Baptist deacon, and she looked up to him for guidance. With her love of the Bible came her love of the story of the Christ (Mead 107).

She used the Bible to make up parts of her world after she realized that the world she imagined over the hill was not in existence. She admits to learning most of what she knows about life from the Bible (Mead 107). I think it was in Christ's life story that she began to see that she had her own life story, and that others had life stories, which eventually led her into the field of anthropology. 'People's folk tales are... their autobiography and the clearest mirror of their life (Babock). ' Even as an adult Ruth Benedict was afraid of physical affection.

This may have been because her Aunt Mamie used to play a game with her where Ruth would run around, and her aunt would chase her, threatening to hug her (Mead 109). She refused to hug her Uncle Justin, even after she was offered money. Ruth Benedict's father was not around for most of her life. However, it was his death that partially led her to think about different worlds, and thus different cultures. She saw her father's world, as the world of beauty and death; she related her own world to that of her father's, considering them one in the same, and different from her mother's world. I believe that it was this early acknowledgement of different worlds that led her to acknowledge that there were different cultures.

Although her father was not around most of her life, he still had a major impact on the way that she thought. Through reading other articles about women, and their relationships with their mothers, we are able to see that mother's make their daughters a large part of their lives in order to socialize them. Jamaica Kincaid's story The Circling Hand allows us to see how a mother socializes her daughter. The mother in this story made the little girl a part of everything that she did in her life including the cooking, cleaning, shopping, and doing laundry.

They even bathed together. "I spent the day following my mother around and observing the way she did everything (Kincaid 113)". Her mother made a point of explaining everything she did, and even at times asked the little girl's opinion, even if not warranted. Until the little girl hit puberty, the mother treated her like she was the most important thing in the mother's life. However, their relationship changed when the mother realized that she had to let go because the little girl was growing into an adult.

The mother takes her daughter to buy some cloth to make clothing, which results in the first time that the little girl realizes that things are changing. The little girl is forced to pick out cloth that is different from her mother's for the first time, which devastates her. Her mother warns here that she could not "go around the rest of (her) life looking like a little me (Kinkaid 120)". At one point the little girl tried to redeem her mother's affections, but her plan failed when she walked in on her parents having intercourse. She realizes that her mother's love for her is not the same, and begins to find a way to transfer her love to another person. The mother's sudden lack of affection for the little girl leads the little girl to transfer her love to another woman, thus becoming a lesbian.

So in essence, the mother's original goal to socialize the little girl to be like her mother backfired when the mother withdrew the reward of affection that she had been giving the little girl. Andrea Lee wrote a similar story dealing with a mother daughter relationship. In her story entitled Mother it is the mother's personality, as well as her domestic skills that rub off on her daughter. The mother was from an elite African-American family, and was well educated (Lee 102). The little girl enjoyed spending time with her mother, especially to listen to the way she played with words.

Her mother had a deep love for words, and the ways they went together (Lee 104). The mother's love of words rubbed off on the little girl and she became a writer. Also, the mother's personality, and her fascination with the gruesome and absurd became a part of the little girl's life. "Perhaps her near-fatal tumble underground was responsible for my mother's lasting attraction to the bizarre side of life... she quivered with excitement in the same way her children did over newspaper accounts of trunk murders, foreign earthquakes, Siamese twins, Mafia graves in the New Jersey pine barrens (Lee 101)". The mother also tried to socialize the daughter by showing her how to work in the kitchen. She gives the daughter instruction on how to tear open a chicken, which obviously grosses the daughter out.

The daughter admits that she. ".. was a rather lazy and dunderhead ed apprentice to my mother (Lee 104)". Unlike the mother in Jamaica Kinkaid's story, this mother does not try to alienate her daughter from herself. In fact their strong mother daughter bond remains clear through the end of the story. They go to visit a neighbor whose husband committed suicide the previous winter. The daughter realizes that she shares such a strong bond with her mother that certain feelings did not have to be spoken, but were still shared. "There are moments when the sympathy between mother and child becomes again almost what it was at the very first.

At that instant I could discern in my mother, as clearly as if she had told me of it, the same almost romantic agitation that I felt... it seemed as if we were conducting, without words, a troubling yet oddly exhilarating dialogue about pain and loss (Lee 107)". The young women in these three stories were exposed to many different people in their lives; however, they were mainly socialized by their mother's. There exists as special bond between most mothers' and their daughters, even if that bond does not include eternal love. Daughter's experience the same things their mother's do physiologically, as well as traditionally. Mother's are someone in this forbidding world that we can turn to as a beacon of light to guide us because they understand, and have been in similar situations. It is important to reflect why we do the things we do.

In order to do a complete reflection we must look at the both the way and the why of our socialization by our mother's.