The Untold Desire An Archetypal Approach To The Hungry Ghost Image In Amy Tan’s Fiction

Tan’s woman images are mostly Chinese American. At that moment, many literary works also focus on female issues. Tan is quite different from that. Her female characters have to be faced with the racial problems and the conflict from their parents, apart from the social discrimination that most women suffer. Tan excels in putting all the conflicts into the mother-daughter relationship. In Tan’s fiction, the mothers suffered from the tragic history in the Japanese occupied China. They treated America as a wonderland to save them from sorrows and pains. They, like most parents in China, plant their own dreams on their children’s future, which put great pressure on the daughters. The mother-daughter conflict is derived not from the lack of love but the gap caused by the generation and cultural differences.The literary studies on Amy Tan’s fiction home and abroad are mostly from the perspective of the mother-daughter relationship, feminism and post-colonialism, but rarely from the archetypal criticism. Archetypal criticism stresses the influence of the archetype on literary works. Archetype is the recurrent narrative designs, patterns of action, character-types, themes, and images which are identifiable in a wide variety of works of literature, as well as in myths, dreams, and even social rituals. It is what Carl Jung’s called the collective unconsciousness. The literary creation is the process of enacting and working on the archetypal images from mind until it becomes a complete literary work. Archetypal criticism emphasizes myth and ritual Myth, according to Northrop Frye, is the resource of literary works. Analysis of Tan’s works from the perspective of archetypal criticism aims at revealing the deep links of the female images. Amy Tan was Chinese American writer whose works are characterized by the Chinese elements. It is reasonable to treat her works as a process of seeking her Chinese identity. The readers were immersed into her Chinese elements, though she was brought up in Chinese way. Furthermore, I hope this thesis could be a start of studying the inner relationships of other female characters of the Chinese American women writers through the perspective of archetype.This thesis focuses on the Hungry Ghost image from Chinese mythology as the archetype to study the female images in Tan’s representative works The Joy Luck Club, The Bonesetter’s Daughter and The Kitchen God’s Wife. Tan’s female characters are alienated and disserted by the surroundings. They lack mutual understanding and communication. This kind of alienation is not only presented in the mother-daughter conflict but also the relationship with other members in the family. They desire others’ understanding, love and family bond, but their longing cannot be fulfilled. This unfulfilled desire builds the link between the Hungry Ghost and the Tan’s women characters.