earticle

영어

Despite its unprecedented popularity in the book and film market, Joy Luck Club has suffered unfavorable criticisms from a few cultural nationalists and feminists: the former find in the work the author’s adoption of Orientalist perspectives and misreading and appropriation of Chinese culture to the liking of the American mainstream, while the latter criticize that the work ignores and rejects feminist issues in favor of cultural issues. However, a careful analysis of its mother-daughter relationships reveals that Joy Luck Club offers a new way of reconciling these two issues of gender and ethnicity, giving full and careful attention to both issues. As the mother-daughter relationships in Joy Luck Club are not only the psychological outputs of individual characters and their domestic situations but also constructions where culture, gender and other social issues are working dynamically against each other, they are a focal point for exploring the complicated functions of gender and ethnicity consciousness in the work. The conflicts and bondings between mothers and daughters in the work are portrayed through the stories of the women, whose narratives reveal their protean complexity and inner power, thus challenging the reduced and simplified Orientalist views on ethnic women. Especially, contrary to the stereotypes from Orientalism, the immigrant mothers are stronger than their Americanized daughters in their will to independence, and they teach their daughters to break out from the silence and assert their own identity, the lesson of which the daughters finally learn to appreciate and follow. Also, in its portraits of Rose and Lena's marriage lives, it is shown that the mothers’ sufferings in old patriarchal China and the daughters’ sufferings in modern individualistic and ‘pragmatic’ America have the same root in the male-dominant social system. Thus, the mother-daughter relationships in Joy Luck Club are the reflections of their reactions to their situations as women and Chinese Americans, and through them ethnicity and gender issues are dealt with in their full complexity. For these mothers and daughters, their quests for identity as women are inseparably bound and complicated with the quests for identity as Chinese Americans.