Mothers and their daughters' searches for identity in NAR literature

Mothers and their daughters‘ searches for identity in North Atlantic

Rim literature

The relationships of mothers and daughters in narratives and their implications on the

daughters‟ searches for identity have been the subject of various studies. They have

been approached from feminist, postmodernist and psychoanalytical perspectives

(Hirsch 1981, McDaniels 2003, Crew 1994). However, so far this topic has not been

looked at from a North Atlantic Rim context perspective. Therefore, in the following I

will elaborate on various very different mother-daughter relationships in five North

Atlantic Rim texts and how they influence the characters‟ perceptions of identity.

In Peter Høeg‟s Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow the main protagonist Smilla‟s mother,

an Inuit huntress, died in a hunting accident when Smilla was a child in Greenland.

This set off a cascade of events, leading to Smilla having to move to her Danish

father‟s country where she is a profoundly unhappy teenager, being evicted from

various schools, and never properly finds her place in society.

According to Nadeau, removing the mother from the narrative is often necessary in

adolescence or young adulthood of a female character in order to give the daughter

the opportunity to develop her character without a controlling mother figure (Nadeau

1995). Indeed, without her mother‟s death Smilla would probably not have become

the investigator of Isaiah‟s murder in the narrative. Lingard for instance compares

Smilla to Lisbeth Salander from the Swedish Millenium series by Stieg Larsson as

both young women are tough, independent investigators (Lingard 2012: 170-172).

Coincidentally, Lisbeth Salander has also lost her mother at a young age, so the two

protagonists‟ respective lack of a female role model in their teenage years might

indeed have led to their almost masculine toughness.

Andrea Blendl, UHI: Mothers and their daughters’ searches for identity in North Atlantic Rim literature

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Smilla‟s memories of her mother are presented to the reader gradually as flashbacks

during the progression of the crime solving and through them, the reader slowly

develops an understanding of why and how Smilla‟s character could develop into

what it is.

Thisted interprets Smilla‟s mother as a symbol for a peaceful coexistence with nature

who therefore is permitted a dignified death in this very nature (2002: 319). Indeed, in

the scene where Smilla recounts her mother‟s death, there is not much of a struggle

or bitterness on the daughter‟s part:

“Whoever falls into the water in Greenland does not come up again. The sea is

less than 4°C, and at that temperature all processes of decomposition have

ceased. That‟s why the fermentation of the stomach content does not occur

here […] But they found the remains of her kayak, which led them to conclude

that it must have been a walrus.” (Høeg 1996: 34).

The scene is told in a very matter-of-fact way, using many scientific terms, as if

Smilla is emotionally detached from her mother‟s death. On the other hand, she also

seems to find a certain peace in the thought that her mother‟s body rests in the sea

without ever decomposing. It almost appears that her mother, who has been

intimately connected with nature in life, has been fully immersed back into nature in

death.

While Smilla is with her mother, she lives in a state of innocence and closeness to

nature, for Greenlanders are described as symbiotically connected to their

environment. Only once Smilla learns more about her Danish father, she loses this

original bond with nature (Thisted 2002: 332-335). Thus, Smilla‟s mother can also be

seen as a metaphor for a bond with nature that is innate in any human being but is

cut once one comes in touch with modern technology and civilization.


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The motif of mothers and nature as connected is actually as old as literature itself. In

many different mythologies, nature is seen as giving birth to life and nurturing people,

which led to the metaphor of “Mother Nature”. Merchant even argues that solely by

assigning a feminine mother role to nature in a male-dominated society, it became

possible to study nature and finally conquer it through male-associated technology.

(Merchant 2001: 68-81). This means that in a certain way the narrative of Smilla

could also be interpreted as a very feminist mother-daughter story: Through her

intimate knowledge of the female/mother-associated nature, Smilla in the end

triumphs over the male/father-associated Western civilization and its technologies.

This idea of a somewhat feminist meaning behind the strong mother-daughter bond

and its relation to the mother as a female archetype is especially interesting if one

takes into account that in the past, Smilla has often been associated with fairly

masculine traits like for example toughness and independence (Lingard 2012: 170-

172).

While Smilla describes her mother‟s death in a very detached way, it becomes

nevertheless clear that she does have emotions towards this woman. When

explaining about her mother‟s trade in hunted gyrfalcons for commodities, she

explains:

“She got whatever she asked for. By wrapping her guests in a web of fierce,

mutually obliging kindness. This made me ashamed of her, and it made me

love her. It was her response to European culture.” (Høeg 1996: 67).

This shows that Smilla has ambiguous feelings about her mother‟s actions. On the

one hand she is proud of her rejection and at the same time exploitation of European

culture, but on the other hand, she knows that she herself will never be fully

Greenlandic, either.


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She does have a certain admiration for her mother in retrospect though, for how this

woman brought up her and her brother on her own after her father left for Denmark

again, while she is also aware that her memories of her childhood are very

subjective:

“Like everybody else, from the age of seven I have painted my childhood with

lots of false gliding, and some may have rubbed off on my mother as well. But

in any case, she was the one who stayed where she was, and set out her seal

nets and braided my hair. She was there, a huge presence, while Moritz with

his golf clubs and his unshaven stubble and syringes oscillated between the

two extremes of his love: either a total merging or putting the entire North

Atlantic between him and his beloved.” (Høeg 1996: 33-34).

So in this flashback, Smilla credits her mother with giving her stability, while her

father put other things first. It is very telling that she talks about “mother”, while only

ever calling her father Moritz by his first name, which creates a totally different

relationship between them and makes them seem less familiar. Even after her

mother‟s death, she never gets very close to her father and once attacks him with a

scalpel, which only makes him sigh: “You are just like your mother” (Høeg 1996: 98).

In Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow, the mother‟s death might in fact be counted as the

single most important event in shaping the main protagonist‟s character.

In another great North Atlantic Rim narrative, namely Laxness‟ Independent People,

the mother of the main female protagonist, Asta Sollilja, dies even earlier: As her

father left her mother all alone in winter on their remote farm of Summerhouses when

she was heavily pregnant, she has no help during the birth and bleeds to death:


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“She was lying dead there in her congealed blood. It looked as if she had got

out of bed for something, and, too weak to climb in again, had collapsed by the

bedside; in her hand a wet towel, blood stained.” (Laxness 2008: 118).

It turns out that the child is still alive and her mother actually died while she was

trying to warm up water in order to give some warmth to her baby (Laxness 2008:

118-119). So in a sense, she sacrificed her life for the child, which is probably the

greatest possible sacrifice in any mother-daughter relationship.

There are various other women in the narrative who take on mother roles for Asta

Sollilja. First the wet-nurse Gudny, then her stepmother Hallbera and finally the

mistress of Rauthsmyri. However, none of them can completely replace a real mother

figure for various reasons: Gudny despises her father Bjartur and would not stay

longer at Summerhouses than necessary, Hallbera is sickly and confined to bed for

most of Asta Sollilja‟s youth and the mistress of Rauthsmyri takes her in to educate

her when it is already too late, just to discover that the girl is pregnant. The most

important point, however, is that none of them has motherly feelings or any motherly

love for her, so that she easily falls prey to the first person to express any loving

emotion towards her after being rejected by her father (Laxness 2008: 374-387).

Laxness, himself a committed Catholic (Birgisdóttir 2015: 1), later indirectly also

blames this lack of a mother figure who would have given her daughter at least some

sort of religious education, for Asta Sollilja‟s misery after she has slept with her

teacher because the girl does not know what constitutes a sin even though she has

an idea that it is morally wrong to betray her father in this way (Laxness 2008: 381-

387).

In modern literature, the mother is often seen as „primary role model and teacher of

cultural values‟ (Nadeau 1995), too. Clearly, this lack of a female role model plays a

major part in Asta Sollilja‟s moral tragedy. In addition, upon finding her pregnant, a


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mother figure might have saved her from being expelled from Summerhouses by

Bjartur.

One major literary genre, in which mother-daughter relationships play an important

role, is young adult fiction (Crew 1994). North Atlantic Rim literature is no exception,

and a good example for this is the Norwegian Torill Eide‟s novel Skultje Aerend. It

has never been published in English, so I will use excerpts from the German edition.

In this text, a young woman returns to her grandparents‟ deserted home in the

Norwegian forest where she grew up after her mother died during her infancy as she

tries to find out who fathered her through reading her mother‟s diaries. In a striking

parallel with Smilla‟s mother, in this text the mother dies in icy waters, too:

“Die Schi hatten deutliche Spuren im Schnee hinterlassen, quer über den

Breitsee führten sie und von dort weiter hinauf durch den Wald. Dann endeten

sie. Sie war genau an der Bachmündung beim Bibersee durchs Eis

gebrochen. Man fand sie dort, verfangen im Holzgeflecht des Biberdamms.“

(Eide 1998: 233).

After her mother‟s death, the protagonist grew up with her grandparents. Her

grandmother in a way replaced a mother figure but due to the age gap, it was never

to the extent of a real mother-daughter bond, which would have supported her

emotional development. Therefore, the daughter is very much pained by her loss and

angry about her fate, while she also blames her mother for culpably leaving her:

“Warum musstest du das tun! Warum zum Teufel musstest du über brüchiges

Eis gehen, warum? Ich war doch da.“ (Eide 1998: 236).

However, after reading through her mother‟s diaries, the daughter has an almost

cathartic moment when she realizes that her mother had been unhappy and uprooted

ever since she left the forest for the big city, where she fell for different men and

ended up pregnant.


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“Ich erkannte sie nicht wieder, als ich die Tagebücher las, ich musste ein

neues Verhältnis zu ihr aufbauen, mir ganz andere Bilder erschaffen.” (Eide

1998: 238).

The narrator feels a much closer connection to her mother now and understands her

motifs, so she feels prepared to continue with her own life. Getting to know her

mother‟s thoughts is an important point on the daughter‟s way of creating an identity

for herself, which is a major plot line in most young adult fiction (Crew 1994).

Jane Rogers‟ Island starts with a very contrasting setup. Nikki Black‟s mother is alive

but the first sentence of the text is: „When I was twenty-eight, I decided to kill my

mother.‟ (Rogers 2000: 1). She is intent on taking revenge because her mother

abandoned her when she was a baby. Nikki as the narrator describes her original

feelings towards her mother in drastic terms:

“A young woman gave birth to a daughter whom, through no fault of her own,

she could not keep. The daughter grew up bitter and twisted. Everywhere she

looked she saw cruelty and selfishness and she reflected this back in her own

spiteful nature. She could neither love nor be loved; she was pretty and vicious

and destructive, she was cowardly and terrified of shadows. She had no

lasting friends, no real pleasures, no hopes or ambitions, no faith in herself.

Unable to shoulder any responsibility for her misfortunes, she laid the blame

on her absent mother. She decided to visit her mother on the island where she

lived and kill her.” (Rogers 2000: 260).

Basically, this means that in her life, Nikki has not achieved anything and does not

have any sense of direction or purpose. She has no social skills and, due to her

sense of abandonment, cannot love or trust people.


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It is a telling sign for the overarching conflict that, upon arrival on the island, Nikki has

no appreciation for its nature whatsoever:

“The island looked a dump to me. There were no trees here, just bare lumpy

pasture and stupid sheep that stood staring with their yellow eyes until you got

close then clattered off in a panic.[…] The light was a sodden grey and even

the green of the fields was greyed.” (Rogers 2000: 67).

She hates the island just as much as she hates her mother. This ties in with other

North Atlantic Rim narratives, where mothers and nature are innately connected and

makes for an interesting contrast with protagonists like Smilla who appreciates Arctic

nature basically because it is so closely related to her mother (Thisted 2002: 332-

335). Thus one can assume that Nikki‟s feelings for her mother are influencing her

view of the island and its nature negatively. She despises anything that is in any way

connected to the woman she blames for everything that went wrong in her life.

Only after she travels to the small Hebridean island where her mother lives and

discovers that she also has a younger brother with learning difficulties, she realizes

that her mother was forced to her actions by her own mother and manages to forgive

her. However, her brother kills her mother when he finds out that this young girl he

has secretly fallen in love with is his sister. Nikki takes the blame and goes to prison

for him, taking over her mother‟s role as the young man‟s protector. In the end, the

narrative hints that she is back on the island with her brother, where she has fully

taken her mother‟s place and responsibility and is content with her life, even liking the

island nature to some extent (Rogers 2000: 258-261).

This means that only once the protagonist understands her mother‟s motifs, she can

overcome her negative emotions towards her, continue with her own life and

ultimately find her own identity. This aspect ties in with Nadeau‟s observation that


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„young adults often need to understand their mothers in order to understand

themselves‟ (Nadeau 1995).

However, it is equally important to have a strong mother figure to reassure daughters

while they are growing up and to give them stability. This is more than obvious in

Island as the protagonist bitterly reflects:

“Mothers to their children. What are they doing? Worrying. Taking care of.

Fearing for. It‟s simple, isn‟t it? Why do I fear? Because my mother never did it

for me. If a mother does it for you you‟re free to fly. Swing high on the swing,

Mother can worry about what if you fall. Mother knows you‟re fragile,

vulnerable, tiny; she knows how practically nothing you are, just a tiny smear

of flesh squeezed out of her. She knows you‟re mortal – so you don‟t have to.”

(Rogers 2000: 30).

This feeling of abandonment and loneliness made the protagonist bitter and unable

to be proactive in her own life. However, in North Atlantic Rim literature there is also

the other extreme in mother-daughter relationships, namely that of a mother not

wanting to grant any freedom of choice to their daughters about what they want to be

or what they want to achieve in their lives.

In sociology, it is well-known that a too strong bond between mother and daughter

can be „inhibiting the daughter from establishing her own identity‟ (Nadeau 1995).

This means that a very controlling mother can lead her daughters to rebel in order to

pursue their own interests. A prime example of such daughterly rebellion in North

Atlantic Rim literature is to be found in Alistair MacLeod‟s short story The Boat, where

a mother tries to instill her own traditionalist views on her teenage daughters. The

mother is deeply rooted in her coastal fishing community and wants for her daughters

to remain there, too. The daughters, however, are curious for outsiders. One after


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another they become teenagers and start working in a restaurant for tourists, of

which the protective mother strongly disapproves:

“My mother despised the whole operation. She said the restaurant was not run

by “our people”, and “our people” did not eat there, and that it was run by

outsiders for outsiders.” (Macleod 2002: 10).

In spite of all this opposition, every single daughter marries an outsider and leaves

the community. The mother never forgives them and refuses their gifts, once they

have achieved some wealth outside the small coastal community:

“One by one they went. My mother had each of her daughters for fifteen years,

then lost them for two and finally forever.” (MacLeod 2002: 16).

In the end, the mother is a very lonely figure who cannot appreciate that her

daughters have developed their own identities. Through losing the bond to their

mother, however, the daughters are also losing their connection to the sea and to

nature as a whole. While they do send pictures of their families, they never return to

their home community and seemingly do not identify with their coastal roots any

more. One could speculate that, due to the conflict and lack of understanding from

their mother's side, they consciously distance themselves from their origins, thus also

creating a new and unique identity for themselves. The mother, however, never

admits that she misses her daughters. The only hint at any potential inner turmoil is

that she secretly looks at her grandchildren‟s photos when she thinks nobody sees

her (MacLeod 2002: 22). There is, however, no sign of regret for the situation from

the mother‟s side. It is quite telling that the same mechanism of rebellion and the loss

of the mother-daughter bond is repeated with every single one of her six daughters,

so maybe it is simply impossible for the mother to change her traditional ways in

order to accommodate her daughters‟ wishes for independence and freedom.


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In general, one can conclude that even though all these narratives from the North

Atlantic Rim take very different approaches to their mother-daughter relationships,

they do have some traits in common: Mothers connect daughters to nature and to

their roots, thus giving them a direction in their search for an identity. The earlier a

daughter loses her mother, be it through death or through estrangement, the worse

this loss will affect her development as an individual in society. Forshaw identified a

focus on social affairs and nature as the two key elements in Scandinavian Crime

Fiction (Lingard 2012: 180). These two elements also dominate the narratives of

mother-daughter relationships in North Atlantic Rim literature – on the one hand by

placing the mother as a social role model for daughters in a rapidly changing social

environment, which must lead to conflicts in their relationships, but on the other hand

rooting mothers deeply in the surrounding nature, so that through them daughters

can find their own North Atlantic identities.

The protagonists‟ feelings for nature are closely tied to their relationships with their

mothers. They can span from extremely negative, as in Island to extremely positive

as in Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow. However, once the relationship with the mother

is broken beyond repair, it is also thinkable that the daughters become simply

indifferent towards their homeland‟s nature, as the daughter in The Boat who move

away without any obvious regrets.

Generally, no matter which narrative one looks at, the mother-daughter-relationships

in North Atlantic Rim literature are always very emotional, be it positive in Smilla‟s

unwavering admiration for her mother, or be it negative in Nikki Black‟s initial deep-

seated hatred of hers. These emotions are strong enough to drive the protagonist‟s

actions and thus more the narrative forward.

One interesting fact is how deeply the loss of the mother at an early age affects the

daughters‟ search for identity. The two protagonists who lose their mothers as infants


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in my examples face the worst struggles as they have no memories of their mothers

from which they could derive some kind of direction in their life whatsoever. While in

both narratives other female figures try to somewhat compensate this loss, they are

never able to fully replace the mother. It must, however, be noted that the

abandonment by the mother in infancy has equally negative consequences on a

character‟s search for identity than her death.

Obviously, teenage rebellion seems as common in North Atlantic Rim literature as it

is in other narratives from across the world, but what makes mother-daughter

relationships so special in this context is the protagonist‟s deep attachment to the

history and culture of their homelands forming through a mother-daughter bond which

endures even in the face of the harsh environment of the North Atlantic Rim.

[3596 words]


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Primary Sources:

EIDE, T. (1998) Östlich der Sonne – Westlich des Mondes. München: dtv.

HØEG, P. (1996) Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow. London: Vintage Books.

LAXNESS, H. (2008) Independent People. London: Vintage Books.

MACLEOD, A. (2002) The Boat. In MacLeod, A.. Island: Collected stories. London:

Vintage Books.

ROGERS, J. (2000) Island. London: Abacus.


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Secondary Sources:

BIRGISDÓTTIR, S.A. (to be published 2015) “…adieu to the religious orgies” Halldór

Laxness, Þórbergur Þórðarson and Catholicism in B. Hjartarson and S. Würth (eds.)

Halldór Laxness und die europäische Moderne, Tübingen: Francke Verlag.

CREW, H. (1994) Feminist Theories and the Voices of Mothers and Daughters in

Selected African-American Literature for Young Adults in K.P.Smith (ed.) African-

American Voices in Young Adult Literature: Tradition, Transition, Transformation.

Metuchen: Scarecrow Press.

HIRSCH, M. (1981) Review Essay: Mothers and Daughters. Signs. 7(1). pp. 200-222.

LINGARD, J. (2012) Scandinavian Crime Fiction: a review of recent scholarship.

Scandinavian-Danadian Studies 21. pp. 165-182.

MCDANIELS, P.W. (2003) Mothering Modes: Analyzing Mother Roles in Novels by

Twentieth-Century United States Women Writers. [Online] Louisiana State University.

Available from: http://www.etd.lsu.edu/docs/available/etd-01282004-122859/

[Accessed: 1st March 2015].

MERCHANT, C. (2001) Dominion over Nature in M. Lederman and I. Bartsch (eds.)

The Gender and Science Reader. London and New York: Routledge.


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NADEAU, F.A. (1995) The Mother/Daughter Relationship in Young Adult Fiction. The

Alan Review. [Online] 22(2). Available from:

http://www.scholar.lib.vt.edu/ejournals/ALAN/winter95/Nadeau.htm [Accessed: 1st

March 2015].

THISTED, K. (2002) Intertextuality and Discourse in Smilla‟s Sense of Snow in M.

Bravo and S. Sörlin (eds.) Narrating the Arctic: A Cultural History of Nordic Scientific

Practices. London: Science History Publications.

Mothers and their daughters' searches for identity in NAR literature

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