Breaking Silences Through Silent Ways

Since the publication of The Joy Luck Club in 1989, Amy Tan has become a household name. Succeeding the first success, Amy Tan published The Kitchen God's Wife in 1991, The Hundred Secret Senses in 1995, The Bonesetter's Daughter in 2001 and Saving Fish From Drowning in 2005. After the publication of The Bonesetter's Daughter Amy Tan has announced that the novel is her most personal work. The novel was written after the death of Tan's mother Daisy. In this novel, there are many similarities between the stories and Tan's life experiences. Therefore this novel has attracted increasing attention from readers and critics home and abroad. Many research studies have been carried out on the mother-daughter relationship, the cultural conflicts and cultural identity.In literary circle, more and more feminists and feminist narrative theorists pay their attention to women's silence. Based on the research achievements of many critics and reviewers, this thesis aims to study the silenced status of the women in The Bonesetter's Daughter, the reasons behind their silences, how the author uses authorial voice and personal voice to help the women and herself establish the authority, and further explore the silent ways through which they break their silences and search for self-assertions. Theoretically this thesis mainly relies on the feminist poetics of narrative voice advocated by Susan Sniader Lanser, in her masterpiece Fictions of Authority: Women Writers and Narrative Voice.This thesis consists of five chapters. Chapter One introduces the "Amy Tan Phenomenon", Lanser's feminist narrative voices, and the status quo of related researches. Chapter Two explores Ruth's silence before American whites, the imposed silence by racism and the way she finds out to break her silence and put forward her self-assertion, namely writing her own stories. In this novel Amy Tan chooses authorial voice to tell Ruth's story, so as soon as Tan helps Ruth's break her silence and accomplish her self-assertion, she also establishes authority for herself and achieve her own self-assertion. Chapter Three analyzes LuLing's silence before dominant American culture and the silence imposed by racism and sexism. LuLing finally breaks her silence and achieves her self-assertion through Chinese cultural heritage: Chinese words and Chinese food. Chapter Four demonstrates Precious Auntie's dumbness and her silent status after losing her motherhood. Under the confinement of Chinese patriarchy, the only solution for Precious Auntie to break her silence is suicide. This thesis concludes that through different silent ways: writing stories for themselves, practicing Chinese words, eating Chinese food and committing suicide, the Chinese women (or Chinese-American women) find their cultural identity, national identity as well as motherhood respectively, and break their silences before American whites, American dominant culture and Chinese patriarchy, thus achieving their self-assertions.