Browsing by Subject "postcolonial literature"

The aim of this thesis is to analyse Chinese and Chinese American womanhood and women’s experiences through comparing the portrayal of mother-daughter relationships in Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club and Fae Myenne Ng’s Bone. By situating both novels in the context of Asian American literary and immigration history, I employ deconstructionist criticism to question binary oppositions of gender and nativism/assimilation representations in the novels. The thesis is structured according to separate analyses on how mother-daughter relationships influence and are shaped by Chinese immigrant mothers and their American-born daughters. In the chapter on mothers, I argue that the different women’s consciousness is manifested as maternal practices and the desire to articulate their own experiences in a marginalising society. The chapter on daughters focuses on the impact conflicting Chinese and American cultural frameworks have on the daughters, who need to continuously renegotiate their self-identity. While The Joy Luck Club and Bone share common themes of generational discord and the significance of retaining a cultural and ethnic identity, they differ in tone and agenda. Whereas The Joy Luck Club focuses on feminist reinvention and empowerment through a matrilineal descent, Bone explores family dysfunctions in the context of larger sociocultural issues pertaining to Chinese immigration in the US. This is further emphasised by the inclusion of Chinese male experiences in Bone. I conclude that in The Joy Luck Club and Bone, mother-daughter relationships highlight the tension between independent and intersubjective identity negotiations, illustrated particularly through the themes of storytelling and memory. Binary oppositions of Chinese and Chinese American identities are deconstructed through interpreting women’s social and cultural experiences as fluid and hybrid, thus demonstrating the need for more convoluted, even conflicting, representations of gender and identity differences.