A Paradigm Of Feminist Narrative Authority

Amy Tan, a leading contemporary Chinese American woman novelist whose first novel The Joy Luck Club (1989) won her international fame, wrote three more national best-sellers in the following decade, namely, The Kitchen God's Wife (1991), The Hundred Secret Senses (1995) and The Bonesetter's Daughter (2001). This thesis, on the basis of Susan Sniader Lanser's argument of feminist poetics of narrative voice, is mainly on the discussion of how Amy Tan develops a feminist narrative authority in her four novels and its value and effects. A detailed analysis of various female narrative voices is made to engage questions of narrative authority. The writer constructs in her texts not only content of feminist concern but powerful narrative strategies characteristic of her style. The device of "talking-story" by mothers to daughters is employed extensively throughout the texts as an effective way to enlighten daughters, to pass on Chinese culture, and more importantly, an assertion of cultural identity and an ideological means of confronting and subverting the patriarchal and Orientalist discourse. And Amy Tan's texts are examined in relation to historical context to illustrate that the narrative strategies are closely related to the time, class, gender, race and culture the writer and the narrators belong to. By constructing and reinforcing female discourse through mother-daughter bond as a counterpoint to challenge the traditional patriarchal discourse, the writer vividly depicts the painful process of Chinese Americans' searching for and establishing their ethnic and cultural identity. The fact that her novels have won an important place in the American mainstream literary circle with considerable welcome from a wide readership and increasing attention from the literary critics suggests that Amy Tan has established a certain paradigm of feminist narrative authority.