Gender, Race And Culture

As one of the most important Chinese American writers, Amy Tan is known by her not many but world famous works. The themes of her works are very rich. Based on her special identity as the Chinese American woman, she probed into the themes of gender, race and culture in her novels with her excellent writing skills and techniques; in addition, she opened out all kinds of oppressions the Chinese American women had suffered both obviously and unconspicuously in the aspects of gender, race and culture.The Joy Luck Club mainly deals with the relationships between four mothers and daughters. The book contained 16 interwoven stories which were mainly related to cultural conflicts between the traditional Chinese mothers who immigrated to America and the daughters who was born and grew up in America. The four mothers with different stories left their homes and country for various reasons. As the first generation, they were completely Chinese women from the deep of their heart, they could not cut their blood connection with their homeland from the bottom of their heart. While the daughters were born in America, they grew up in the dominant western culture though they had the same features of appearance as their mothers, they had to go through the contradictions between two very different cultures and values due to their special personal identities. The two generations cared each other and hurt each other, but finally they began to understand each other, and the oppositions between past and present, between two generations and between two cultures were gradually reconciled.The Joy Luck Club is an epoch-making novel which reflects Chinese Americans' struggles and conflicts in America. The selected materials in this book are very special and the writing techniques are unique, which promote the influence of Chinese culture in the United States. The book turns a new leaf in the Chinese American literature and pushes the Chinese American literature into a new peak.My thesis explores this book from the prospectives of gender, race and culture, which are the three main themes implied in this novel, in the hope of finding out the deepest meaning and getting more profound understanding of what the Chinese Americans especially the females from different kinds of classes had suffered and the process of their struggling.The thesis is divided into five parts. The first part simply introduces the Chinese Americans'spiritual state and the Chinese American literature under the impact of American culture; then I focus on the life of Amy tan and her representative work--- The Joy Luck Club, and the research background on Chinese American literature both in Chinese mainland and Taiwan. The second part sets forth from the perspective of gender on various oppressions the mothers and the daughters in The Joy Luck Club had undergone in the patriarchy society. The third part of the thesis expounds from the perspective of race with the aim of finding out the female Chinese Americans'loss of all sorts of rights due to both the evident and unconspicuous pressure from the society, and analyzes respectively the racial discrimination and oppression the mothers and the daughters had suffered as well as the mother-daughter relationship from the perspective of race. The fourth part expatiates on the symbolic meanings of some material things which appeared in the book with a lot of implied meanings, and then I discuss the culture conflicts between the two generations in virtue of their different living backgrounds. The fifth part is the last part of the whole thesis, that is, the conclusion.I choose this topic in hope of digging out the connotative meanings of the novel---The Joy Luck Club, and furthermore deepening my understanding about the author. The mothers experienced and suffered, the daughters, though they grew up in America could not avoid all of these. However, with the guidance and help of their mothers, the daughters made their transformation gradually, and the relationship between the mothers and the daughters is doomed to be optimistic.