also presents images of motherhood in such a negative light that Marie Rogers vows to escape marriage and all it entails. In “A Wake for Mother: The Maternal Deathbed in Women’s Fiction” Judith Kegan Gardiner elaborates on the role of motherhood in Daughter of Earth. She explains the role of mothers in recent literature as a juxtaposition between traditional womanly roles and the protagonist's desire to break free. Marie's mother's death signifys an end. Another widely discussed element of Daughter of Earth is the context in which it was written and its format. The novel is widely believed to be autobiographical. In his 1973 afterword of the novel, Paul Lauter notes the similarities between Marie's and Smedley's lives. In essence, they are identical with changes mostly to geography and names. Lauter explains that Smedley wrote the novel while seeking psychoanalysis. The novel was meant to be a therapeutic exercise performed while in therapy. Nancy Hoffman addresses the unique structure of the novel, which she also attributes to the therapeutic purpose of the writing. Daughter of Earth takes on three forms as it progresses through her childhood and adult life: mythic, novelistic, and autobiographical. Hoffman is somewhat critical of this format, noting that it may hinder fluid reading. References Citations Sources Foley, Barbara. "Women and the Left in the 1930s." American Literary History, 2.1 (1990). 150-69. Print. Gardiner, Judith Kegan. “A Wake for Mother: The Maternal Deathbed of Women’s Fiction.” Feminist Studies, 4.2 (1978). 146-65. Print. Guttman, Sondra. “Working Toward ‘Unity in Diversity’: Rape and the Reconciliation of Color and Comrade in Agnes Smedley's Daughter of Earth.” Studies in the Novel, 32.4 (2000). 488-515. Print. Hoffman, Nancy. Afterword. Daughter of Earth. By Agnes Smedley. New York: The Feminist Press, 1987. 407-425. Print. Launius, Christie. “The Three Rs: Reading, (W)riting, and Romance in Class Mobility Narratives by Yezierska, Smedley and Saxton.” College Literature, 34.4 (2007).125-147. Print. Lauter, Paul. Afterword. Daughter of Earth. By Agnes Smedley. New York: The Feminist Press, 1973. 407-427. Print. Rabinowitz, Paula. “The Contradictions of Gender and Genre.” Labor and Desire. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1991. 63-96. Print Walker, Alice. Foreword. Daughter of Earth. By Agnes Smedley. New York: The Feminist Press, 1987. 1-4. Print. Yerkes, Andrew C. “‘I was not a character in a novel’: Fictionalizing the Self in Agnes Smedley's Daughter of Earth." “Twentieth-Century Americanism” Identity and Ideology in Depression-Era Leftist Fiction. New