Exploring The Mother/Daughter Relationships In Amy Tan's The Kitchen God's Wife And The Bonesetter's Daughter

Amy Tan has been viewed as one of the most important contemporary female writers in American literature. All of her novels are characterized by her familiar technique of employing different narrative perspectives to tell stories and reveal secrets, bridges two different contexts: between mother and daughter, China and America, past and present. Being a Chinese female reader, the current study tries to avoid the conventional interpretation of major canon and expects to expand a new range of reading on Chinese-American work. By doing a comparative study on The Kitchen God's Wife and The Bonesetter's daughter, this thesis attempts to explore the recurrent theme Tan takes up in both novels, the intricate painful love and hate relationships between mothers and daughters, with psychological feminist approach. The constantly evolving course, i.e., from resistance to reconciliation, in which the daughter heroines struggle for self-assertion through the maternal heritage is also analyzed in this thesis. All women are daughters and must resolve the conflicts inherent in the mother/daughter relationship if they are to understand themselves and ultimately to establish their own identity. The discrepancy between them becomes resolved through mutual recognition; the mother-daughter bond can narrow and bridge the generational and emotional gap. The daughters are eventually provided with their maternal strength. Identifying with their mothers and reinterpreting their mother's past enable them to reconstruct themselves and have a better understanding of their own identities. Finally, the daughters discover that their mothers'love and hope are based on the close bond, which provides them with the positive support to confront their difficulties in life.This thesis is divided into four chapters. Besides the introduction and conclusion in the first and final chapter, in Chapter Two, the painful love and hate intricacies between mothers and daughters are illustrated, as well as the reasons for their misunderstanding and collision and tortures. How the mothers and daughters get to understand each other, how the daughters learn from their maternal heritage and how they achieve self-assertion would be discussed in Chapter Three. The final part intends to elucidate the intentions of Tan's writing and the reason for her success.Amy Tan finds writing as a liberating and rewarding experience and she uses writing as a healing balm, just as the mothers in her novels see storytelling as an outlet to heal the painful past.