Blog "Post": Rebekah Calhoun, White Oleander, and "Rethinking the Maternal"

When somebody asks if you have a favorite book, I always feel like it's hard to answer considering how many books there are, the variety of ways a book can affect you, and the impossibility of comparing them all adequately, etc. However when someone asks me what my favorite book is, Janet Fitch's White Oleander always comes to mind.
It's the story of Astrid, a daughter who's consciousness of the world and her environment (1990s downtown Los Angeles) is shaped by her eccentric and brilliant poet mother Ingrid, whose fierce independence has had a significant effect on her daughter, whose talent lies in drawing instead of writing. Astrid is meek, inquisitive, but silent. It is suggested that school officials suspect her of being developmentally retarded in the book, when they get to America, but it is because her Mother secretly brings her traveling, to Amsterdam, Mexico, and other places, and to adult situations, hiding nothing in her eccentric lifestyle from her daughter.
Ingrid, the mother, harshly denies the existence of Astrid's father, telling her: "You had no father. I am your father. You sprang full-blown from my forehead, like Athena."
Routinely, Ingrid tells her daughter exaggerated myths such as this about their Viking ancestry, of volcano goddesses and the imnportance of power over men. She exerts a great deal of control over her daughter in this way, and by isolating and ignoring her. In fact, she even exposes Astrid to radical poets such as Anne Sexton in the novel. She tells her daughter:

“Always learn poems by heart. They have to become the marrow in your bones. Like fluoride in the water, they'll make your soul impervious to the world's soft decay.”
― Janet Fitch, White Oleander

 But then a stout and unattractive man somehow seduces and wins Ingrid's heart, and then leaves her indifferently for a younger girl, the enraged and heartbroken brilliant madwoman poet uses the poison from a beautiful flower to kill her lover. And Astrid, at age 12, young, blond, bright, and beautiful, is transported in anguish to her first foster home.
The story follows (it is very long, and a complete masterpiece with varied and fully realized characters) Astrid's experience in foster home hell, where she meets and learns from many different men and women, some who abuse and use her, others who love and cherish her. Her Mother, whose fury rages on as she is forced to watch her daughter become molded by strangers who do not share her level of intellect, tries desperately to control her.
I think that this is an appropriate blog post in response to the Rethinking the Maternal introduction. It is the struggle of one creative woman's woman's realization that "motherhood continues to be a patriarchal construction"(LAWL 611), a female poet's inner suffering involved with desiring to maintain a rock-star lifestyle of a poet while also winning her daughter's trust, and a daughter's journey to find herself, distinct from her own mother but unable to deny her influence.
The novel is known as a "buildingsroman" novel I guess, which makes me think of Charles Dickens because I believe it was known as his style. The term means basically a "growing up story" and please, I urge you to read it over some break or vacation. It is engrossing, brave and sensual, hilarious, and you learn a great deal about art history and things like that.