Narrating Motherhood as Psychic Architecture: Maternal Narrative Space in Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s Before We Visit the Goddess and Amy Tan’s The Bonesetter’s Daughter

Abstract

Situated in the intimate worlds of private recollections, matrilineal scars and the soft negotiations between memory and migration, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s Before We Visit the Goddess and Amy Tan’s The Bonesetter’s Daughter create a maternal narrative space in which diasporic mothers and daughters confront silence, trauma, and fractured belonging. It argues that this space is constructed not only by plot but by narrative form itself, through letters, manuscripts, embedded family stories, multilingual exchanges, and shifts in focalisation that reveal the emotional labor women perform across generations. Drawing on Nancy Chodorow’s psychoanalytic theory of the reproduction of mothering and Nira Yuval-Davis’s intersectional framework of belonging, the study shows how domestic acts and everyday storytelling become a psychological arena where women work through loss, displacement, and intergenerational conflict. As daughters translate, reinterpret, and rewrite inherited narratives, maternal relationships emerge as dynamic negotiations shaped by memory, migration, and evolving identity rather than as fixed cultural expectations. Positioned at the intersection of feminist theory, psychoanalysis, and migration studies, this paper proposes the contours of a feminist psychoanalytic genre of diasporic maternal storytelling, one that foregrounds interiority, multilingual voice, and intergenerational emotional labor as central narrative principles. Together, these works articulate a distinct model of diasporic maternal storytelling that challenges gender inequalities, validates marginalised linguistic identities, and positions the study within the ongoing dialogue on how narratives can advance gender justice, cultural sustainability, and the visibility of vulnerable women in global literary discourse.