A Study Of Spatial Narrative In The Joy Luck Club

Amy Tan,having published six novels,two children's books and three non-fictions,is one of the most successful female Chinese American writers.As a prolific writer,she favors exploring the theme of mother-daughter relationship which makes her unique among Chinese American female writers.After the publication of her best known work The Joy Luck Club,she has created subsequently five other novels in the same theme,such as The Kitchen God's Wife,The Hundred Secret Senses and The Valley of Amazement.Her works could touch readers' soul and have been translated into more than twenty languages and been read widely around the world.Published in 1989,The Joy Luck Club is Amy Tan's first novel,which has got many awards since it came off the press.Amy Tan wrote the book according to the personal experiences of her mother and grandmother.The novel tells about four dyads of mothers and daughters in four Chinese American families.The mothers were the first generation immigrants.Their life in old China was suffering and made them victims of either the Anti-Japanese war or the feudal system.They were forced to leave their motherland eventually and immigrated to America in order to seek a new life.The four daughters were a new generation born in America where they were nurtured by American culture and education.The novel mainly describes how the mother-daughter relationship develops from conflicts to reconciliation.Mothers from China and native-born daughters encountered various contradictions at first due to diverse cultures and social values.Through reminiscing in the form of storytelling in turn,they hit the right way to introspect and understand each other again,the two generation turn to compromise ultimately.The heartwarming theme,abundant cultural contrast and original narrative form help the novel attract wide attention from readers.Time and space are two parallel dimensions to perceive the world.Time is always in the dominant position in the field of humanities and social sciences,while space is neglected for a long time.At the end of the twentieth century,scholars in narratology began to attach importance to the study of space because philosophy and social sciences turned its attention to space.Among the numerous theories on space research,Gabriel Zoran constructs the most elaborate and practical model of space in his discussion about spatial issues based on fictitious world of text.Gabriel Zoran stresses that space is the process of text construction in which readers can participate actively.In light of Gabriel Zoran's theory,this paper aims to analyze the vertical structure of space in The Joy Luck Club from the topographical,chronotopic and textual levels respectively.Chapter Three,Four and Five are the main body of this thesis.The third chapter is the analysis of the topographical space,which consists of the physical environment and space formed by characters' existence.Different living environments are not only the basis for other spaces,but also the origin of conflicts for mothers and daughters.The diverse values produced from these environments even deepen their misunderstanding.Three single objects are selected to show their significance of existence and functions in easing mother-daughter intension.As for the second space,one pair of mother and daughter is chosen as an example to explain how this kind of space is formed.In the silent space,mothers used silence to hinder normal communication between two generations.The process for daughters to understand why their mothers kept silent just reflected the development of mother-daughter relationship.The fourth chapter analyzes the chronotopic space which consists of synchronic and diachronic relations.In the synchronic space,two kinds of relations are discussed.The first kind is relations reflected in American society.The American immigration officials treated mothers roughly when they entered America.This attitude highlighted its hegemonist policy.Mothers then generated xenophobic psychology which affected mother-daughter relationship.The second kind is relations formed in the four Chinese families.Houses were the main sites for characters' activities,the traditional education and modes of behavior brought from China by mothers were totally different from those of their daughters,so that contradictions would definitely occur.As the eight people introspected themselves,conflicts transformed into affection.In the diachronic space,characters' cross-border trajectories reflected their changes in ideology.China was mothers' root and they hoped that their daughters could achieve their dreams by going back to the motherland.Jing-mei's trip to China to find her lost sisters drew a delightful end for the whole story.Chapter Five analyzes the textual space in terms of the selectivity of language,the linearity of the text and the perspectival structure.This chapter firstly discusses the specialty of language used by mothers and its subsequent cultural misunderstanding to show how language stirred up displeasure.Regarding the linearity of the text,analysis is made of the loop structure by revealing the sequence of characters' appearance and the development of mother-daughter relationship.With regard to the perspectival structure,this paper probes into the specific spaces of here(America)and there(China)as well as the process in which daughters reconstructed the image of there to understand mothers' sufferings in China and failures in America.Guided by Zoran's Spatial Narrative theory,this paper's interpretation of The Joy Luck Club displays various patches of space.The forms of this narrating text are spatial,which is reflected through topographical space,chronotopic space and textual space.The three levels of space work together as a dynamic whole to demonstrate that there is a big difference between mothers and daughters.At the same time,the space expresses at the relationship between mothers and daughters always goes from conflicts to fusion which is the theme of this novel.This research not only provides a new perspective for the study of the novel,but also helps the readers to have a deeper understanding and to deal with mother-daughter relationship better.