Analysis On Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club From The Perspective Of Trauma Theory

From the perspective of Cathy Caruth's and Judith Herman's trauma theory, this thesis, through taking four pairs of mothers and daughters' lives and emotions of Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club as its manifestation discourse, analyzes and discusses how the Chinese American writer Amy Tan profoundly depicts and interprets these mothers and daughters'past and present traumatic experiences. By means of trauma narration, Amy Tan cogently discloses the trauma predicament confronted by the Chinese American women because of various racial, sexual and cultural oppression, thus the construction of a series of engraved female images hopefully sheds some light on the successful solution of ethnicity problems and identity reconstruction.Regarded as the significant heritage of Chinese American literature, the novel The Joy Luck Club is the result of Chinese-American cultural collision and hybridity. As a Chinese American writer, Amy Tan is endowed herself with double cultural identities and visions, which depicts her much stronger cultural passion in a holistic perspective. Identified as the first and the second generation of Chinese American women, these four mothers and daughters are constantly suffering from traumas in the cultural conflicts. As a result, whether from the patriarchal system of old China or from the hegemonic culture of America, these four mothers and daughters' emotional experiences and living situations are overwhelmed with indelible traumas throughout their childhood and adulthood.Based on intensive reading and exhaustive textual analysis, this thesis illustrates the four mothers' and four daughters' traumatic experiences in The Joy Luck Club, explores their traumatic entanglements as well. Based on trauma theory, the study attempts to work out the trauma causes. And the exploration points out that emotional entanglement of historical traumatic memories, and multiple oppressions from racism, sexism and culture are the main causes that result in traumas. Through the analysis of trauma treatment and recovery, the crucial remedies including the awakening of female self-consciousness, the employment of story-telling strategy and the identity reconstruction are thought to be constructive and effective.