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• Title: Mother Vs. Daughter: The Relationship Between Eliza and Helen in Look Homeward, Angel (Critical Essay)
• Author : Thomas Wolfe Review
• Release Date : January 01, 2007
• Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
• Pages : * pages
• Size : 212 KB

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In Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward, Angel, Eliza and Helen Gant are at odds with one another. Critical analyses of the novel emphasize the envy and spitefulness pervading the mother and daughter's relationship. (1) Indeed, the women clash over family affairs and money matters. Yet a close examination of Eliza's and Helen's characters and their interaction reveals that they have a good deal in common. Wolfe scholarship frequently underscores the women's personal troubles, and it is in this regard that Eliza and Helen are remarkably similar. Both women are detached from friends and family and trapped in unhappy marriages. (2) They have trouble verbalizing their feelings. (3) Moreover, they suffer from compulsions and/or addictions. (4) Perhaps because of their similarities, Eliza and Helen make some effort to sympathize with and seek companionship from one another. Thus, a tenuous partnership underlies this adversarial mother-daughter relationship in Look Homeward, Angel. The relationship between Eliza and Helen is ostensibly antagonistic because the two are often rivals. In his character analysis of Helen, Robert Vaughan relates the women's enmity to their contrasting personalities (35). Helen, who exudes "the hysteria of constant excitement," is "rasped" by Eliza's composure and rumination (LHA 67). Annoyed by this difference in temperament, Helen separates the family into noble Gants and contemptible Pentlands (Vaughan 35). She indirectly criticizes her mother by attacking Eugene, whose personality is similar to Eliza's (Vaughan 35-36). When Eugene is thinking or reading, Helen strikes and kicks him, calls him "a regular little Pentland" with a "queer dopey face," and then covers him "in a wild smother of affection" (LHA 143, 144). Helen also mocks her mother. Vaughan and Phillip A. Snyder note the scene in which Eliza telephones Helen and rebukes her for feeding Eugene at W.O.'s house. Helen covers the receiver during the conversation and makes Eugene laugh by imitating Eliza's speech patterns (Vaughan 35; Snyder 89). Snyder argues that such mockery is the Gant children's means of subverting "the discourse of parental authority" (90). Yet this "broad mimicry" also helps Helen cheer up Eugene after she torments him (LHA 144). Though he weeps over his sister's meanness, Eugene cannot help giggling at her impressions of Eliza.

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