Rachel Ray: The Story of a Modern Mother/Daughter Relationship

If Trollope’s conventionality in most fields can hardly be denied, as soon as he deals with women, he urges the reader to reconsider his judgement which should be much more careful, not to say mitigated. The mother/daughter relationship in Rachel Ray offers an interesting example of Trollope’s dual attitude to women. The respective roles of the mother and the daughter are clearly defined, enhancing both the respect of the patriarchal law based on authority and obedience, and the mother’s duty of love and protection to her child who, thanks to the trust she puts in her mother’s decisions, is able to accept that authority. This is particularly true as the relationship is viewed at the time of the daughter’s passage from a daughter’s status to a woman’s status, having started a love relationship with a young man. Although these traditional roles are fundamentally respected, leading to the final harmony of the mother/daughter relationship, the path to this harmony is full of obstacles: unconventional doubts on both sides shake the conventionality of the novel, doubts about the legitimacy of the mother’s authority as well as doubts about the daughter’s role of obedience. The tension thus created is reinforced by the two women’s yearning to find a different place in the relationship, to reach a woman’s true iden­tity, devoid of the constraints of the traditional laws. The mother/law thus tends to disappear to be replaced by the mother/confidant, suggesting a new type of relationship that undoubtedly forecasts the more liberal relationships of the twentieth century.