?Introduction & Thesis Statement In one afternoon tea scene in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, 17-year-old Elizabeth leaves her tutor, Doris Kilman, in dismay, like a “dumb creature galloped in terror” (Woolf 146). Away from the stifling conversation with Kilman, Elizabeth muses upon her future. She would not grow up to be like Kilman, nor would she wish to lead a life like her mother’s. Elizabeth thinks about being a doctor or a farmer – “in short, she would like to have a profession. She would become a doctor, a farmer, possibly go into Parliament if she found it necessary...” (Woolf 150-151). Whether Elizabeth becomes a doctor, a farmer, or a parliament member is certainly left unanswered, given that the novel captures just one day in Mrs. Dalloway’s life. Yet, why does Elizabeth find it difficult to identify with the two elder women so close to her? Why does Woolf arrange for Elizabeth to turn away from Kilman and to wander alone in the streets of London? How, after the short wandering, is Elizabeth able to return to her mother “calmly and competently” (Woolf 153)? One thing is for certain – Elizabeth exhibits awareness that she has more choices regarding her own life’s course than her mother’s generation, and in this brief scene, Woolf seems to fling at later generations the question whether daughters can transcend the rigid dichotomy of women devised by patriarchy – docile, dutiful wife like Mrs. Dalloway/outlandish, unamiable single woman like Kilman? If women need not be trapped in any form of dichotomy which undermines their multiplicity, how do we free ourselves from the entrapment? Through imagination? Through creativity? Or through artistic creation? In an attempt to answer the above questions, I would like to quote a line from Margaret Atwood’s poem “Spelling”: “A word after a word after a word is power”, which indicates the relevancy between women’s writing and acquisition of power. Can we view women’s writing as an emotionally and intellectually cathartic experience in which the writer engages in continuous dialogues not only with herself, but also with her mother(s) who transmits social conventions and cultural myths that circumscribe the daughter’s selves? In other words, the mother acts as a cultural agent “who transmits social mythology – fictional constructs into which the child is expected to fit” (Rosowski 89). During this experience, if internalized ‘false’ values – such as the dichotomy of women – are expelled, then the woman, as a writer, may rids herself of the victim position, accepting power and taking on the responsibility that comes along with it. Incidentally, numerous feminist writings during the 1970s seem to answer the question Woolf implies about the daughter’s (Elizabeth’s) choice. Since the 1970s, hitherto silenced topics about female sexuality and desire have been widely written about, and among them the two areas interest me particularly are mother-daughter relationship and feminist revisions of orthodox, Freudian psychoanalytic theories. Notable books centering on mother-daughter relationships include Adrienne Rich’s Of Women Born, Nancy Chodorow’s The Reproduction of Mothering, Vivien Nice’s Mothers and Daughters: The Distortion of a Relationship, Nancy Friday’s My Mother/My Self: The Daughter’s Search for Identity, the collection of essays The Lost Tradition: Mothers and Daughters in Literature, and Marianne Hirsch’s Mother/Daughter Plot, with the first two focusing more on motherhood. Revisions of Freudian theories on femininity include Phyllis Chesler’s Women and Madness and Juliet Mitchell’s Psychoanalysis and Feminism, Nancy Chodorow’s Feminism and Psychoanalytic Theory, Barbara Hill Rigney’s Madness and Sexual Politics in the Feminist Novel: Studies in Brontë, Woolf, Lessing, and Atwood, etc. It is noteworthy that Margaret Atwood’s early novels, The Edible Woman (1969), Surfacing (1972), and Lady Oracle (1976) coincide with the rise of second-wave feminism in North America. More importantly, Atwood begins to indicate a solution to women’s predicaments, that is, “to refuse to be a victim”. In both Surfacing and Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature (1972), Atwood emphasizes the issue of victimization and how does the victim achieves “creative nonvictimhood” (Stein 146). In my studies of feminist writings, I cannot help but wonder whether the most tragic form of victimization is the one that mothers pass down to their daughters since it is easier for daughters to identify with their mothers than sons and thus daughters tend to internalize their mothers’ values. Usually, the mother is not aware that the values she transmits to her daughter are cultural myths or patriarchal construction of femininity which would undermine the daughter’s dynamic subjectivity, as Adrienne Rich writes in Of Woman Born about “the deepest mutuality and the