Dialogicality In Amy Tan's Novels

Amy Tan (1952-) who has published four novels and two children's books is a very successful Chinese-American writer. She is still working hard on writing. In 2004, a collection of essays, The Opposite of Fate was published. Amy Tan shares a number of common concerns and themes with other hyphenated American women writers. Their eagerness to break up the silence, their efforts to constructing self-identity in the white-dominated culture, and their painful experience of being marginalized by both white culture and patriarchal society can also be found in Amy Tan's novels. Tan's writing is effective and more strategic way of fighting, thus constructing a non-stereotypical identity. In this dissertation, I will analyze Amy Tan's novels in Bakhtin's dialogism, feminist criticism, and post-colonialism. The monologue narration, limited points of view, and internal structure of her novels show that her novels are dialogic text. As a brilliant story-teller, Tan's good at writing in monologue narration, which presents only one voice, but actually holds double voices. Because a hidden voice of Other and voice of an alter ego are arguing with the narrator in such cases. Both the first-person narration and the limited third-person narration are subjective and inefficient in telling the whole story. The characters and the readers are not under the control of authorial narration, so that the characters'consciousnesses and the readers'consciousnesses, as equal and independent subjects, can dialogue with the writer's consciousness. Tan endows the characters with the authority of telling their own life stories so that the Chinese-American women can destruct the stereotypical images in white/male dominated culture. Tan is constantly concerned with the mother-daughter relationship, love and loyalty, and the construction of self-identity. People's opinions on the same theme differ from one another. The various opinions form in to the internal structure synchronically or chronologically to be a polyphonic internal structure. According to Bakhtin's interpretation of dialogicality, the condition of dialogue is the existence of autonomous and equally signifying consciousnesses. In Tan's novels, the writer, the character and the reader have respectively independent consciousnesses of equal significance. Characters of different cultures are also treated equally so that they speak in their own voices. The Chinese-American women's voices dominate in Amy Tan's novels so that they can break away from the marginalization and silence in white/male society. The subjectivity of Chinese-American women is constructed by speaking in their own voices and dialogues as an independent consciousness in white/male society.