Zora Neale Hurston's motherless heroines

Mother-daughter bonding and the importance of mothers in the development of the daughter?s personality, femininity, and sexuality have been one of the core themes and issues from ancient myths to modern psychoanalytic, feminist and literary criticism. Many pivotal psychoanalysts and feminists have been preoccupied with how the maternal figure determines, shapes and modifies the daughter?s psyche and personality. In their work not only the importance of this early attachment between mothers and daughters but also the significance of the quality of this relationship have been underscored since the daughter?s well-being, perception of self, sexuality, consciousness, and subjectivity are all consistent with her good and mutual emotional relationship with her mother. In this sense, what mother loss or emotional absence of the mother means to a daughter gains vital importance. Therefore, in many women?s writing, we often see a heroine who tries to recover the psychological wound caused by her mother?s death, abandonment, or inadequate mothering.Zora Neale Hurston, who is one of the prominent writers of Afro-American literature, also illustrates the psychological and emotional conflicts of heroines who are simultaneously struggling for their individual freedom and longing for the reunion with their mothers. Having lost her mother at the age of nine, Hurston felt the agony of her mother?s death. Although mother-daughter bonding is not a recurrent theme in her oeuvre, we can easily detect that in addition to her autobiography Dust Tracks on a Road (1942) there is an implicit manifestation of mother-daughter bonding with its all complexities and ambivalences in her novels Jonah?s Gourd Vine (1934), Their Eyes Were Watching God (1934), and Seraph on the Suwanee (1948). In the light of classic psychoanalysis, object-relations theories and feminist literary criticism, this thesis aims to explore the variations of mother-daughter bonding in these selected novels. The main emphasis goes to the elaboration of motherless heroines? psychological journey to gain an autonomous and individuated identity.Key Words: Mother-daughter bonding, psychoanalytic theory, object-relations theory, feminist literary criticism, Seraph on the Suwanee, Their Eyes Were Watching God.