Mother-Daughter Relationships in Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club
Alice Stone
University of Georgia
Project Rationale:
For my Multicultural English 1030 class, I had to prepare an annotated
bibliography. Annotated bibliographies are the first step to aid
in writing a research paper. Using the theme of mother-daughter relationships,
I analyzed five different sources over The Joy Luck Club by Amy
Tan.
Findings:
All of the following authors emphasize the importance of mother-daughter
relationships in Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club. However, each
author explores a different aspect of the mother-daughter relationships
and develops his or her own unique theory. For example, Patricia
L. Hamilton bases many of her interpretations of the mother-daughter relationships
on the cosmology of old Chinese culture, while Gloria Shen uses the aspect
of storytelling to explain the differences between the two generations
and their complex relationships. Even though each of these articles
has its own personality, much like Amy Tan’s characters, they all share
the common theme of mother-daughter relationships.
Conclusions:
Just like the mothers and daughters Amy Tan created in The Joy Luck
Club, these critical entries stand well enough on their own, but when
combined the reader can sense a more in-depth understanding of the mother-daughter
relationships. In her essay, Marina Heung says that “the readers
construction of the interconnection between motif, character, and incident
finally dissolves individualized character and plot” (612). Even
though Heung is speaking in regards to the novel, The Joy Luck Club,
the same can be applied to these articles. When compiled all together,
the ideas and thoughts of Hamilton, Heung, Shear, Shen, and Souri concerning
mother-daughter relationships collectively blend themselves into one centralized
meaning outside of the individual entries themselves.
| Sources |
| One: Feng Shi Astrology, and the Five Elements |
| Two: Generation Differences and the Diaspora |
| Three: Only Two Kinds of Daughters |
| Four: Matrilineage |
| Five: Mother-Daughter Relationships and Storytelling |
Hamilton, Patricia L. “Feng Shi Astrology, and the Five Elements: Traditional Chinese Belief in Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club.” MELUS 24 (1999 Summer): 125-145.
Patricia L. Hamilton explores how traditional Chinese beliefs define relationships between the mothers and daughters in The Joy Luck Club. In traditional Chinese beliefs, astrology determines the character of a person according to the year of his or her birth. Hamilton uses this aspect of Chinese culture to explain some of the conflicts that the mothers and daughters face. According to Hamilton, Tan uses astrology as a method to determine the personality traits of her characters.
Other traditional Chinese beliefs Hamilton states Tan uses to develop
her characters are the Five Elements. According to Chinese culture,
these five natural elements of the Earth are used to shape a person’s flaws.
Hamilton again ties in these traditional Chinese theories as reasons why
the mothers and daughters do not agree. The final traditional Chinese
belief Hamilton uses to support her claims is feng shui, “the most opaque
yet potentially the most important aspect of Chinese cosmology to Tan’s
exploration of identity” (136). Hamilton stresses in this article
that the separation of the two generations is not only the result of being
born in China or America, but it is also a separation based on traditional
beliefs of cosmology that determine the mothers’ and daughters’ persona
according to old Chinese culture.
Heung, Marina. “Daughter - Text / Mother - Text: Matrilineage in Amy Tan’s Joy Luck Club.” Feminist Studies 19 (1993 Fall): 597-616.
Marina Heung discusses the aspect of matrilineage in Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club. Here again, cultural differences arise between mothers and daughters. Heung writes about genetic traits passed from generation to generation in a family. Lindo is emotionally moved in The Joy Luck Club when the hairdresser notices similarities between herself and her daughter, Waverly. One of the mothers’ main concerns is that the family history will disappear after their deaths.
According to Heung, the storytelling of the mothers “heals past experiences
of loss and separation” (607). The mothers are giving their daughters
a gift by telling about their lives through stories. However, the
daughters often mistakenly interpret the storytelling as a criticism of
their lack of traditional Chinese values because they were not born in
China. Heung talks about how this was always a problem June faced
with her mother. Even though June feels she has never lived up to
her mother’s standards, after her mother’s death she finds herself engaging
in some of the same activities in which her mother used to participate.
Heung believes that matrilineage is a way to blend cultures together.
After reading The Joy Luck Club, the characters all blend together
as one existing individual instead of eight separate people. Just
as the chapters themselves are woven together, so too are the characters
woven together while creating family identities.
Shear, Walter. “Generation Differences and the Diaspora in The Joy Luck Club.” Critique 34 (1993 Spring): 193-199.
Walter Shear explores the generation gap between the mothers and daughters
in The Joy Luck Club. The mothers use their own life experiences
“to come to conclusions about essential forms of character strength and
weakness” (194). Shear explains how this experience creates “domestic
demands” (194) on the daughters who often perceive themselves as having
no cultural belonging. According to Shear, the daughters never completely
understand the influence of culture on their lives because of the tension
between the old China and the new American environment. The mothers
try to teach their daughters the new American way for a woman to act in
the world while at the same time continuing to act in the constrictive
manner as they were taught in China. An awkward situation arises
between reserved mothers and their more outgoing daughters, thus creating
a crucial problem for the mother-daughter bonding that should be occurring.
Shear believes that this lack of bonding instills into the mothers a fear
of being abandoned by their daughters in the future. The daughters
seem to be searching for “the feeling of belonging” (198). Shear
suggests that Tan emphasized this desire of the daughters by Jing-mei’s
journey to China. Jing-mei discovers her identity in China and feels
closure with her mother’s death. In other words, she discovered a
cultural family.
Shen, Gloria. “Born of a Stranger: Mother-Daughter Relationships and Storytelling in Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club.” International Women’s Writing. Greenwood: Westport, CT, 1995. 233-243.
Gloria Shen explains how storytelling has affected the mother-daughter
relationships in The Joy Luck Club. Just as Souris pointed
out in his article, Shen discusses how each individual character tells
her own story spurring the reader with the question of whether or not the
narrator is reliable. Although this analysis allows the reader to
get a more personal, detailed account of the characters lives, Shen realizes
that the pattern the monologues fall into “portrays the mother and daughter
relationship as both typical and universal” (235). The cultural gap
is what makes these mother-daughter relationships different. While
the mothers hang onto the customs and language of China, their American
born daughters are raised in the customs and language of the new land which
include “ethic and racial biases against the Chinese that the young daughter[s]
[have] to deal with on a regular basis” (239). This situation influences
the daughters to Americanize themselves as much as possible and separate
themselves from their mothers’ Chinese ways. Shen states that the
mothers discover that “storytelling is the best way to reach the hearts
and minds of their daughters” (240). The mothers tell their stories
as a way to help their daughters through the negative experiences in life.
Shen concludes that by using the device of storytelling the women are able
to turn a “hateful bondage” into a “cherished bond” (243).
Souris, Stephen. “‘Only Two Kinds of Daughters’: Inter-Monologue Dialogicity in The Joy Luck Club.” MELUS 19 (1994 Summer): 99-123.
Stephen Souris investigates inter-monologue dialogicity in Amy Tan’s
The
Joy Luck Club. Using Wolfgang Iser’s narrative model, Souris
explores the interacting narratives of the characters in order to grasp
a better understanding of the conflict between the mothers and the daughters.
Souris states that even though there is no actual communication between
the mothers and daughters, the reader is still aware of the distance among
them due to “dialogic potential” (107). The reader also uses this
potential for dialogue in character development. Using the monologues,
the characters fully develop themselves, and the reader does not just learn
about the mothers through the daughters or vice versa. The reader
gets to view situations through both American and Chinese eyes “suggesting
the theme of conflicting perspectives and the struggle between daughters
and mothers” (111). Souris applauds Tan for having an equal amount
of mother and daughter monologues. This balance keeps the mothers
or the daughters from falling into the background. The reader has
an equal opportunity to see the stories from different perspectives.
Souris explains that the Iserian gap, the creation of a theme by the reader,
in The Joy Luck Club is the “conceptual space between daughters and mothers,
between one generation and the other” (120).
Last updated December 8, 2002