Written in 1985 Punishment was Anna Mitgutsch’s debut novel which won two literary prizes: the Brüder Grimm Preis and Die Goldene Claassen Rose. With its roots in autobiography Mitgutsch’s book confronts the ambiguous and complex relationship of mother and daughter via the sad and traumatic life story of three generations of daughters in rural Upper Austria from the 1920s to the present day.

The novel is a chronicle of the repeated mistakes of each mother, the mistreatment of each daughter, the cruel and callous physical and mental torture passed down from one woman to the next. The narrator is a contemporary mother, Vera, who has resolved not to beat her daughter, but with whom even so she fails to have a happy relationship. The book comes out of her analysis of her own upbringing and of her mother’s life in an attempt to find reasons for this absence of happiness and the repeated transference of hatred.

For the daughter initial analysis of the mother merges into self-analysis — a common trait of many contemporary autobiographical, quasi-autobiographical or confessional novels by women, where the daughter has to undertake a psychological journey in order to achieve separation from her mother and break free from dependence. The uneasy process of writing is often indicative of self-therapy and self-affirmation. Even though the mother of the narrator has been dead for sixteen years, she continues to influence her daughter. The mother-daughter bond is so inextricably linked that the daughter suggests that she belonged to her mother because she created her identity, so that when her mother died, she also died. Their interdependence was such that the daughter could not imagine surviving without her mother.

Motherhood itself brings her back to her own mother. When she becomes pregnant herself she starts to think about her — with her own screaming baby the adult daughter wishes that she was being nurtured once more. She doesn’t want to face the responsibility of motherhood, the reality of another mother-daughter relationship taking shape, and the fear she has of being her mother all over again. Scarred by her mother’s sado-masochism, Vera risks expressing feelings of guilt in sado-masochistic behaviour towards her child. She becomes so obsessed with being a ‘good mother’, so concerned about not making the same mistakes as her mother, that she does not see how this continuous self-analysis adversely affects her own daughter.

In Mitgutsch’s novel beatings, according to Vera’s mother, are equivalent to God’s wrath and fulfil the Old Testament proverb ‘He who spares the rod hates his son, but he who loves him is careful to discipline him’ (Proverbs 13:24). The ‘perfect’ mother is, therefore, the punishing mother. The daughter is brought up to believe that love and torture are one and the same. In this way the portrayal of these monstrous mothers illustrates how the mother in traditional, Austrian society is able to rule the home, whilst the daughter takes on the role of servant.

‘For sixteen years I buried her over and over, but she always rose and followed me. She caught up with me long ago. She looks at me with the eyes of my child; she observes me from the mirror when I think I’m unobserved; I meet her in my lovers, and I run off with her own arguments. Then she punishes me with loneliness, and I try to win her back through achievement, brilliant achievement, the epitome of achievement. I never please her....

She has transformed herself into me; she created me and slipped inside me; when I died sixteen years ago, when she beat me to death thirty years ago, she took my body, appropriated my ideas, usurped my feelings.

She rules and I serve her, and when I gather all my courage and offer resistance she always wins, in the name of obedience, reason, and fear.’ p215-216