Competition for Resources in Motherless Daughters: The Legacy of Loss, a Critique

Popular Literature and Competition for Resources

Language manipulates people and people in turn manipulate language everyday to shape their needs. When the language of nurture is missing from a close relationship like mother and daughter or father and son, the immeasurable loss can leave emotional scars for life. Creating even more of a loss is advertising one's personal situation, because it cheapens the loss by putting it up for sale. If the resource lost is a parent, parenthood is marketed. If a child is neglected, childhood is marketed. However the child in the situation didn't ask to be patented.

Speaking of supply and demand, Hope Edelman's Motherless Daughters: The Legacy of Loss easily romances its readers with its heartfelt subjective language. In other words, readers are lured into a world of embellishing descriptives used to condition generations of female relationships as something they are not. Given a lifetime of conditioning, this ad-hocs the process all over again and displaces personal responsibility. As if that isn't enough, sometimes people conflate emotional conviction for fact. Although no one is going to deny Edelman's personal truth, the fact is that very few want to consider that mother and child are competing for the same depleting resources, whether food or parenting. In effect, popular literature manipulates by romanticizing with subjective language feeding into an emotional hype while competition for resources is the more objectively subtle agenda behind closed doors.