| Thanks to the publication of a series of novels including The Joy Luck Club, The Kitchen God's Wife, The Hundred Secret Senses and The Bonesetter's Daughter, Amy Tan may well be one of the best-known American writers of Chinese ancestry. Females, especially those Chinese American females, are consistent protagonists in Tan's novels, whose impacts on readers are profound and powerful. From the perspective of feminist narratology, we can see that Chinese American women have already achieved an authority of narrative voice in Tan's works.Tan attempts to make Chinese American female figures hold an authoritative narrative voice for two reasons. Firstly, she herself is a female, and to set up an authority for females—the weaker gender in the human society—is her mission; secondly, she is a member of the Chinese American community which is regarded as a marginal group in America, thus she is driven by the desire to let her community hold an authoritative voice.In order to achieve her intention, Tan adopts varieties of narrative techniques in her writing. She not only skillfully applies conventional and common narrative voices—authorial voice and personal voice—in appropriate parts of her novels but creatively puts the modern communal voice into the narration of The Joy Luck Club and the special Chinese huaben narrative model into the writing of The Bonesetter's Daughter as well as The Joy Luck Club.Therefore, as a female writer and Chinese American writer, Amy Tan succeeds in achieving the authority of narrative voice for Chinese American women by a combination of conventional and modern narrative means and a synthesis of Western and Chinese narrative art. |
