A Feminist Study of The Joy Luck Club

Abstract : The Joy Luck Club displays clearly the author's feminist pointviews through the stories of different women characters. Through the skillfully weaved story the author achieved the full presentation of the essential problems concerned with the women including the meaning of their social gender, their marginalized roles , and the lack of power of articulation . This article intends to interpret detailedly the novel The Joy Luck Club from the perspective of feminism .

摘 要：小說《喜福会》通过四位不同的女性角色的故事清楚地体现了作者的女性主义观点，作者通过巧妙地故事情节成功地体现了有关女性的最基本的问题如社会性别意义，角色边缘化及话语权缺失问题，本片文章将用女性主义观点来详细地阐释小说《喜福会》

Key Words : The Joy Luck Club ; The theory of the feminism

关键词：《喜福会》；女性主义理论

作者简介：刘晓华，女（1976-），陕西渭南，渭南师范学院讲师，英语硕士，主要研究方向美国文学及文学翻译。

[中图分类号]：I106[文献标识码]：A[文章编号]：1002-2139(2011)-16-0024-02

Ⅰ Introduction

The Joy Luck Club is Amy Tan's first novel, and published in 1989 . The book exceeded an astounding 40 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and was nominated for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Award.

Amy Tan's noticeable success in her work The Joy Luck Club catched the attention of many reviewers and researchers. They analyze the novel from the different angles , such as from the perspective of cross-cultural communication , the vernacular tradition , the narrative strategies and cultural discrepancy , and from the post-colonialism . This paper aims at the interpretation of the women's marginalized role to the dependent role through the perspective of feminism .

Ⅱ Interpretation of the Feminist Viewpoints in the Novel

According to Feminism, men and women are equal in political, economic and social spheres. And women are oppressed simple due to their sex based on the dominant ideology of patriarchy. Patriarchy is the system which oppresses women through it's social, economic and political institutions. So women are naturally put in the marginalized position in either family or society .

2.1 Background Position of the Male Characters in the Novel

The novel The Joy Luck Club is mainly about the women's lives and their different experiences . It seems that the author intentionally places the male characters in the background position . In this work , male characters aren't the central roles in it and they just serve as the contrast to the female characters . Especially their roles as father the author seems not to attach much importance to . Because the mothers exert much greater influence on their chilren's growth and later life experiences which is displayed clearly in the novel . Meanwhile male roles as husband is the same . Such as the male character Clifford St. Clair: Husband to Ying-ying St. Clair and father to Lena St. Clair. He is an American man with a jolly personality and he wooed Ying-ying when they were both living outside Shanghai, but he has died before the time of the novel. It seems that the author purposefully arranged so to show that his male roles in the novel as a husband or father without any practical effect or real meaning is just the title for the men's role in the marriage and family.This self-evidently presents the author's resistence of the traditional male dominant roles in literature and the system of patriarchy. 【1】

2.2 Marginalized Position of the Female Characters in the novel

In The Joy Luck Club the author displays her attitudes of the feminism through the different female characters' life experiences , especially through the four mothers who have been born and raised in China and have experienced great sorrows, and their American-raised daughters who have never tasted real suffering . Even though mothers and daughter are raised in different times and different social surroundings their own life experiences incarnate the same problem---the women's established marginalized role in the man-centered marriage and family and in society which the women have suffered a lot from . The mothers such as Lindo , Ying-Ying , An-mei Hsu and her mother all grew up in a society that urged them to forget their own desires , they were expected to be quiet and "dark" , not expressing their own opinions and any wihses they had were sinful by definition .【2】 Like the Moon Lady , they would be punished and shamed for taking what sweetness they wanted out of life . They were taught to desire nothing , to swallow other people's misery , to eat their own bitterness . Like An-mei Hsu's Mother she is tricked into being raped by Wu Tsing , After An-mei's father dies . At that time in china a woman who was raped is considered sinful and considered as a very serious shame for the family . she has no choice but to become aconcubine of Wu Tsing in order to live even though she lives unhappily in her unprivileged position, She finaly choose to poison herself to death in order that her daughter Am-mei can gain power from it to be strong in life . An- mei Hsu's Mother's role is determined to be marginalized , ignored and unprivileged in old china at that time because as a woman she has no other way to live and the only way she can choose to live is to depend on man , which will naturally determine her tragic fate . 【3】

Daughters are in the same case even though they are born and raised in America . They also consciously make themselves invisibe in marriage and family . Lena St. Clair the daughter of Ying-ying St. Clair is married to Harold Livotny. But she chooses to adapt to his ideas about how they should live, such as he insists they have separate bank accounts, and cannot manage to give himself over to her completely. though this makes her unhappy , she never makes her unhappiness and what she wants what she needs from the marriage and family known to her husband , and she always tries to adjust herself to adapt to what her husband wants and needs . She lost herself identity in the marriage. this also determined her unhappiness in marriage .

Rose Hsu Jordan the daughter of An-mei Hsu. She is in the midst of divorcing Ted Jordan, She has been denying her own true wild, strong spirit in order to accommodate her husband meticulousness and pettiness. But this makes Ted Jordan also feel tired and intolerable , which directly causes the break of their marriage . 【4】

2.3 Transition From Marginalized Position to Independent One

The mothers have suffered a lot from their marginalized position in most time of their life . They hope their daughters can be happy and beome more strong and indepent in their marriage . However their daughters behave samely like them in marriage they show weakness in personality and lose their own self-identity . The mothers like An-mei and YingYing can not stand the way their daughters live life passively , giving up so much happiness in the name of comfort and routine . As usual , they refer back to their own lives in china to show their daughters how to be strong . Both Rose and Lena have magpies in their lives --their husbands . Ted and Harold feed off their wives' sorrow unknowingly , taking advantage of the women's generosity and inability to stand up for themselves .【5】An-mei and Ying Ying want their daughters to have joy and luck while recognizing and obliterating the evil around them . They must go through life like their mothers , carefully subverting others in order to achieve true happiness . So finaly Rose bravely assert herself and tells Ted her husband she is keeping the house and she has not signed the divorce papers . For once , Rose has forced her husband Ted into submission instead of the reverse . She find herself and gain her own identity from her gradual independence .Rose's great changes and becoming independence through the marriage crisis has greatly influneced Lena after Lena talking with her This change is a case in point of resistance of the man-centered patriarchy system .

ⅢConclusion

The Joy Luck Club a very successful work by Amy-Tan begins to establish the author's fame in American literature . It narrates vividly the four mothers and their daughters's life experiences through which the author's ideas of feminism are fully and clealy embodied in it . This paper through the analysis of the male characters' background position in the work and the women characters' transition from the marginalized position to the independent one presents adequately the author's tendency of feminist writing reflected in the work .

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