Mothers and Daughters in Kristin Hannah’s Firefly Lane
Mothers and Daughters in Kristin Hannah’s Firefly Lane

Summary/Abstract: This paper sets out to investigate the female characters of Kristin Hannah’s Firefly Lane, focusing on the roles of mother and daughter played by them, the types that may be considered to arise according to their behaviors, the triggers that get pulled, when it comes to both motherhood and daughterhood, in their relationships – for character formation and further interactions in their lives – as well as the way in which concepts such as femininity or role models emerge in changing colors in context. Also, we will look at the way trauma either dictates or influences one’s adult behavior, long after it has been enacted, thus functioning as an underlying layer that either conditions or heavily impacts one’s life choices and interactions. Last but not least, we also take into account the way femininity, motherhood and womanhood in general are modelled by the social specificity of the decades that provide their background, especially the sixties and the seventies. The analysis, performed from the standpoint of cultural studies, also relies, to a great extent, on aspects of child and adult psychology. Wherever we consider it to be the case, we will also draw on the linguistic content that is resorted to as illustration of character and sociocultural context.

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