“In Affection and Acrimony”: Exploring Mother-Daughter Relationships in Gilmore Girls
Almost every woman in North America has some form of a relationship with their daughter and/or mother in their lifetime. However, these relation can vary in amiability and affection. Whether due to similarities or differences in personality or circumstances in life, mothers and daughters can be close confidants or fierce foes. These familial relationships have been studied in part by Marianne Hirsch and Sharon M. Varallo in their essays on “the familial gaze” and “the genre of family photographs,” respectively. In this essay, I will be using the work previously done by Hirsch and Varallo to analyze two different mother-daughter relationships presented in the television show Gilmore Girls. The two relationships differ vastly in their outward appearance, however both relationships show underlying characteristics of both friendship and animosity. Overall, these two mother-daughter relationships demonstrate that the love between a mother and a daughter can be expressed in various ways.
Gilmore Girls follows the lives of three women in the Gilmore family. Rory, the youngest, is a teenager at the beginning of the show. She is an only child and was raised by her single mother, Lorelai, in the small town of Stars Hollow, Connecticut. Lorelai is in her thirties throughout the show. She became pregnant with Rory when she was sixteen, and left her wealthy parents’ home to raise Rory alone. Emily, the
The book “Family Pictures: Caudros de Familia” by Carmen Lomas Garza is a must have book for any classroom library. The book is a told by a daughter from a Hispanic family. She teaches or informs the readers of things her family does every day, in certain seasons, and on certain holidays. This book helps students learn about the Hispanic culture from a child’s point of view. The book is also told in English and Spanish so it could be used for an ELL learner who is struggling to learn English. One of the ways this book is a good choice for a classroom library is that it the author provides a good insight to why this book was written. The author explains the readers that the book was created to inform us about the Hispanic culture through an
In the article “Never Just Pictures,” the author, Susan Bordo, addresses the cultural reasons behind the rise in eating disorders. She asserts that modern media and advertising campaigns have played an integral role in this increase. Though unfortunate, the media’s focus is not on the well-being of its viewers, but on the level of cash flow they provide. The advertising moguls use their agencies as double edged swords; they will make ads for McDonalds, then go in the next room and conduct a photo-shoot with a six-foot-two, eighty pound woman. The world of advertising needs to realize their work is being seen by millions of people and is affecting some of those people in extremely negative ways.
The relationship between a father and their child is tremendously salient, and will influence the life of both the parent and the adolescent in many ways. Often, it can be difficult for someone to share their personal relationships that they had with their father, as it can be a very delicate subject. Despite this, renowned authors Brad Manning and Sandra Cisneros are two people who chose to write about their unique experiences and childhoods that they shared with their fathers. Both Brad and Sandra felt their childhood relationships with their fathers were unorthodox. This was explicitly outlined in Brad's freshman composition paper titled Arm Wrestling With My Father and Sandra's magazine article titled Only Daughter. Through varying rhetorical strategies, the authors purpose and audience is clearly portrayed in both selections.
“i am a linguist” says Tannen and briefly explains what that means and how it better helps her explore the topic. She lets it be known that in fact she is someone's daughter but does not have one of her own. But because she is well past her adolescent years makes her just as credible if she were to have one. At first it may appear that this piece was written for women and girls who presumably have wondered why their relationship with their mothers or daughters were so complex. On the contrary it grabs the attention of both genders. All though not directly targeted to men and boys it could give them a better insight to the women relationship in their lives. Tannen says “... there is a special intensity to the mother-daughter relationship because talk,particularly talk about personal topics -- plays a larger more complex role in girls’ and women's social lives than in boys and men.” this does not dismiss the male , and Tannen does an acceptable job at engaging both
Sarah Vowell’s “Shooting Dad” discusses the relationship between a daughter and father. Engaged in a lifelong opposition to her father’s politics, interests, and his work, Vowell discovers just how much she actually has in common with him. Throughout her adolescent years, she was her father’s polar opposite. Her room was littered with musical instruments, albums, and Democratic campaign posters while her father’s, an avid gunsmith, was strewn with metal shavings and Republican party posters. Amongst all this conflict, Vowell found that they had more in common with each other than either of them realized. As she looks back on her childhood, Vowell explains that although it may take a while to see and understand others’ perspectives, once you
Throughout time, media has been used to reflect society. One popular method of doing so is television. Many people rely on television as a source of entertainment and history. From shows from the 1950s to now, culture and society have been shown in its truest forms. Looking back at the shows from the past gives one a good insight on how families acted in different time periods. One can analyze different shows in different decades to see how family dynamic and trends have changed over time. To get a grasp of the how the perception of families changed throughout time, I choose 5 decades and watched an episode of a popular television show at the time. I watched the 1950s show “The Honeymooners” to start off with because it shows the dynamic of a white, heterosexual, cisgender couple. I then watched “Good Times” from the 1970s to show an African American, heterosexual, cisgender couple and their family. Next, I watched the 1980s show “Growing Pains” to illustrate a white, heterosexual, cisgender family. I choose these 3 specific shows to get a baseline of three different family dynamics (White, African American, family, and couple). I then compared specifically “Good Times” to the 1990s show “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air”, and “The Honeymooners” and “Growing Pains” to the 2000s show “Modern Family”. Please note that homosexuality and non-cisgender will not
In many families, the relationship between a mother and her daughter is the closest relationship in the family. The bond a mother and daughter have can be similar to bonds between anyone else in the family, a mother’s and daughter’s relationship is different than anyone else’s in many ways.
In my opinion the prologue “The Woman in the Photograph” is a very interesting and informative prologue. It was very eye opening and inspirational. The smallest things in our bodies can be used in many different ways. It shows that one woman immortal cells can make a humongous impact on many of people's lives. I myself do not consider Henrietta’s cells to be immortal I just consider them to be a special type of cells. The reason I consider them special is that, her cells are able to stay alive after decades even though she has been dead for many of years and most human cells die after awhile. Even after being dead for so long Henrietta’s cells are being used in many different ways. Scientist use her cells to make medical advances and save
Theirs is a complicated relationship, one that at times, is portrayed as a friendship, the once beautiful mother proud of her daughter’s beauty yet jealous of what she has lost. And the beautiful daughter, who knows that her mother once bathed in the same glow of youth and beauty, seems to both understand and resent her mother. Oates describes their relationship as if they are two people looking at a mirror image of themselves, each exposing the other’s
The mother-daughter relationship is a common topic throughout many of Jamaica Kincaid's novels. It is particularly prominent in Annie John, Lucy, and Autobiography of my Mother. This essay however will explore the mother-daughter relationship in Lucy. Lucy tells the story of a young woman who escapes a West Indian island to North America to work as an au pair for Mariah and Lewis, a young couple, and their four girls. As in her other books—especially Annie John—Kincaid uses the mother-daughter relationship as a means to expose some of her underlying themes.
Amy Sherman-Palladino, the creator of Gilmore Girls, essentially wrote the show about nothing. After not having a job for years, Sherman had writer’s block. On television, everything she saw seemed the same, identical characters and paralleling plots, she desired to create something different. Once, she had visited the small town of Washington, Connecticut and loved the “everyone knows everything” idea. So she thought, “Why not make a show about it?” After tweaks by the production company, Gilmore Girls was born. Although it is a show about a single mom, by nitpicking through character’s witty banter, one can see the philosophical aspects of the show. One of Sherman’s main goals was to create no analogous characters. In this attempt, she
In their recent work, Brad Manning and Sarah Vowell have written about more than one way to have a close, but different relationship with their fathers. There is has always been a belief that to get along with someone you would have normal conversations, enjoy each other’s company, or share a common interest. In the story they love their father as any other child would, but their ways of communication are not the same and are different from a common father-child relationship. Both authors use rhetorical devices as a framework for differentiating their relationships with their fathers by characterizing them.
Cultural values and expectations are at the root of the tensions between mothers and daughters in Kincaid’s work , among which are the preference for the male child, the stress on housework as opposed to education, and the sexual repression put on
The poem “My Mother’s Face” by Brenda Serotte depicts the difficulty of a mother and daughter with a close bond trying to cope with a difficult situation of becoming an adult. “My Mother’s face” talks about the women’s state of affairs, the words used in the poem indicate that the mother is going through a difficult situation and the speaker can feel it through her close observation and on her own accord. The poem basically highlights the human aging process and the difficulty for a mother to realize the fact that her beloved daughter doesn’t need her anymore. The daughter sees the mother’s reflection and passes it for her own, feeling empathetic to the sorrow being shown on her mother's face. The daughter now realizes that with time,
In the pieces “The Eye” by Alice Munro and “Girl” written by Jamaica Kincaid, both writings go into depth explaining the relationships between mother and daughter on how much it impacts the roles of women in society. In Alice Munro’s story, the mother and daughter's relationship starts to change once she starts to gain siblings in her life. Once this occurs, the mother tells her how she's supposed to feel. Unfortunately, she does not feel the same way that leads her admiring someone else who makes her own choices in life. In Jamaica Kincaid's piece, it shows us on how to follow these specific rules, to be able to live life as a woman that is being told by the mother to her daughter. Both of these pieces show how much these mother and daughter relationships affect their child's on what their women role will be in the future.