A Feminist Reading Of Mother-daughter Relationships In The Joy Luck Club And The Kitchen God’s Wife

Under the background of the contemporary American society advocating multi-culture, agroup of Chinese-American writers infuse new life and vitality to the contemporary Americanliterature and enriched the connotation of American literary writing with its unique narrativeperspective and style, rich cultural image and peculiar tales. It makes the Chinese-Americanliterature which reflects the marginal culture gain a rapid growth. Amy Tan is just a memberof them. She is recognized as another influential Chinese-American women writer afterMaxine Hong Kingston. The success of her novels resides in that her works are based on herown personal experience, her mother and her grandmother’s life experience in immigrantcommunity which presents the complicated and delicate relationships between mother anddaughter caused by generation gap, different cultural backgrounds and values. The mergenceof Chinese traditional culture and American culture promotes the popularity of her worksamong the readers with different ethnics, ages, educational and cultural backgrounds.It is known that the mother-daughter relationship is an eternal theme of Amy Tan’snovel. With the help of the feminist criticism theory and based on the textual analysis, thisthesis chooses Tan’s first two representative novels The Joy Luck Club and The KitchenGod’s Wife to discuss and analyze the theme of mother-daughter relationships. The reason forchoosing these two works is in that both these two novels focus on the subtle relationshipbetween mother and daughter, but they are represented in different ways. The stories ofChinese-American women written by a Chinese-American woman show us the relationshipsfilled with paradox, misunderstanding, estrangement and eventually harmony that theminority American women face in their daily lives–in a patriarchal society, in a Caucasianworld, and in their relationship with each other.