To conclude, it can be stated that, throughout the novel, Jeanette’s description of the maternal character changes remarkably according to the woman’s attitude towards the affirmation of the girl’s subjectivity. She is represented as a helper during her religious educational training, turning into an engulfing witch when the girl starts rebelling and finally becoming an antagonist when she rejects her daughter. When Jeanette starts affirming her own subjectivity, the mother tries to repress it through negligence and passive violence. Once she realises that she cannot fight her daughter’s nature, she decides to exclude the girl from her own life. The adoptive mother’s inability to accept the affirmation of Jeanette’s ‘deviant’ tendencies is …show more content…
As Oranges Are not the Only Fruit ends with mother-daughter reconciliation, Sharp Objects starts with the daughter’s homecoming. Camille, the narrator of the whole story, is a young and independent reporter who is sent back to her hometown, Wind Gap, to investigate the murder of a little girl and a disappeared child. Instead of being represented as the triumphant return of the heroine, who comes back home enriched by a new and deeper knowledge about herself and the world, Camille’s return determines the main character’s regression, since she has to face the painful memories of her troubled past, the haunting absence of her dead sister Marian, and the oppressive presence of her mother Adora. The first part of this section examines Adora’s representation as a phallic mother, as opposed to the traditional representation of women’s passivity and to the weak male characters represented in the novel. The second part analyses the reasons for the woman’s differently damaging attitudes towards her daughters. The last part discusses the reproduction of deviant maternal patterns and their impact on the child’s