Channels • 2021 • Volume 5 • Number 2 Page 25 avoidance or denial, and thus, lead them to resist the differentiating process (Tyson 15). In these acts of avoidance, daughters will attempt to carry on with the same maternal connectivity they experienced throughout their mothers’ lives, or flee their grief entirely (Flax, The Conflict 176). Differentiation requires maternally identifying daughters to face “the fear of being abandoned by the mother, or the rage at having been abandoned emotionally by her,” inciting the psychologically strenuous process of differentiation that forces daughters to negotiate the balance of newfound independence and lost maternal codependency (Flax, Mother-Daughter Relationships 12). Since “daughters serve as confidants [and] friends” to their mothers, the degree of closeness in maternal identification “often retards a daughter's ability…to separate” (12). This habitual intimacy inhibits natural endings, such as death, from “break[ing] the underlying psychological unity” between mother and daughter, and consequently wages debilitating conflict on the daughter’s psyche (Chodorow 59). She must suddenly “develop a sufficiently individuated and strong sense of self” by “consciously or unconsciously rejecting [the] mother,” despite having spent her life in unity with and reverence of her mother (65, 34). These grieving daughters, as a result, face “what feels like an irresolvable dilemma: to be loved and nurtured, and remain tied to the mother, or to be autonomous and externally successful” in psychological independence (Flax, MotherDaughter Relationships 12). While the death of a mother logically points a grieving daughter to differentiation, the codependent daughter’s maternal socialization complicates the process by leaving her in a double bind of seeming betrayal: “if she attempts to regain a sense of fusion, she will not be able to be autonomous. If she exerts autonomy, she must reject the infantile mother and give up her needs for fusion” (Flax, The Conflict 178). Thus, the psychological separation that maternally identifying daughters face upon such loss, in addition to grief, taxes the psyche considerably. Ash’s Struggle to Differentiation After Her Mother’s Suicide Hunt’s novel showcases the psychological struggle for maternally identifying and grieving daughters to differentiate through Ash’s attempts to cling to elements of her mother. While both alive, Ash and her mother developed a closeness that made Ash’s eventual task of separation overwhelmingly difficult. Ash and her mother lived alone on their farm, taking care of each other and existing as each other’s confidants and friends (Hunt 184). Memories of Ash crying as a “scrawny child in her mother’s arms” and her mother kicking Ash’s supposed father off the farm speak to the interwoven connection and exclusive dependence between the two; aside from sporadic trips to town or the neighbor woman’s house, the two solely interacted with and relied upon each other, creating both a physical and psychological codependency (202, 189). As such, when Ash’s mother commits suicide, Ash wrestles with the notion of separation and resists differentiation by clinging to elements of her mother’s identity. She likewise struggles to accept that, unlike natural death, her mother’s suicide was a decided abandonment of their relationship. As a result, Ash clings more firmly to her mother. Originally Constance, Ash chooses the name ‘Ash’ for her
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