Journal Article

Nellie Campobello's \Las manos de mamá\: A Rereading

Meyer, Doris

2006

Overview

According to Chodorow: Women and men grow up with personalities affected by different boundary experiences and differently constructed and experienced inner object-worlds, and are preoccupied with different relational issues. By portraying the multidimensionality of the female psyche and the strength of the bond between self (daughter) and the other (mother), Campobello writes a very female biography of her mother, one that does not conform to traditional patterns of biographical (or autobiographical) linearity, unity, and chronology.12 Where critics have previously seen lack of unity and development in Las manos de mamá, one now glimpses the uniqueness of a female creative imagination. Because she is a woman, the psychological development of self-her own as well as her mother's, by projection-involves an \"ongoing process of attachment\" rather than a male's common experience of \"separation as it defines and empowers the self\" (Gilligan 156). [...]critical reaction is strangely silent about this incident, as if disconcerted or embarrassed by its moral implications. According to Gardiner, in the same article, \"Discussion of female identity thus inevitably returns to the special nature of the motherdaughter bond\" (342).

• Publisher: Asociacion Internacional De Literatura Femenina Hispanica,Michigan State University
• Subject: Autobiographies / Breaking Ground, Looking Forward / Children / Creativity / Dance / Dance schools / Daughters / Exegesis & hermeneutics / Latin American literature / Literary criticism / Mothers / Novelists / Novels / Poetry / Political revolutions / Self concept / Women / Writers / Writing