论《喜福会》女性主义的显现-文学学士毕业论文.doc

摘 要
随着女性主义文学的不断发展，研究观点层出不穷。我们在文学批判的领域里可以发现，有关文学作品中女性主义的研究已成为了女权倡议者关注的焦点。而《喜福会》正是这方面的代表作之一。本文基于谭恩美这部小说，尝试分析母女两代人的奋斗历程和相互的影响,从而体现女性主义的内涵。
无论是母亲还是女儿，经历了作为传统女性的社会角色所带来的痛苦后，她们以各自的方式找到了自我，不能消极等待，而是要打破传统，寻找自我的命运出路。作为华裔美国女性，首先，她们是欧美世界中的中国人；其次，她们是东方男性世界中的女性；再次，她们还是西方世界中的中国女性。深受三重身份压迫之苦的女性争得发言权，描述中美文化差异所造成的母女之间迥异的奋斗之路。
关键字：《喜福会》；母女；命运论；女性觉醒；奋斗

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Table of Contents

Abstract i
摘 要 ii
1. Introduction 1
1.1 Introduction of Amy Tan 1
1.2 Overview of The Joy Luck Club 1
1.3 Literature Review 2
2. Female Struggling experience in The Joy Luck Club 4
2.1 Introduction of Feminism 4
2.2 Mothers experience 4
2.2.1 Suyuan Woo's story 4
2.2.2 An-mei Hsu's story 4
2.2.3 Lindo's story 5
2.2.4 Ying-ying's story 6
2.3 Daughters experience 6
2.3.1 Jing-mei Woo 6
2.3.2 Rose Hsu Jordan 6
2.3.3 Lena St. Clair 7
3. The Reason and Embodiments of Female Struggling 8
3.1 The Main Reason for the Different Experience of Struggle 8
3.2 Different Embodiments of Struggle 9
3.2.1 Family Concept 9
3.2.2 Values 9
4. Conclusion 11
References 12
Acknowledgements 13

1. Introduction
1.1 Introduction of Amy Tan
Amy Tan was born in Oakland, California, in 1952, whose works explore mother-daughter relationships. Her parents, both are Chinese immigrants, eventually settling in Santa Clara. When Tan was in her early teens, her father and one of her brothers died of a brain tumor within months of each other. During this period, Tan learned that her mother had been married before in China. Tan's mother had divorced her first husband, who had been abusive, and had fled China in 1949. She left behind three daughters, whom she would not see again for nearly forty years.
After losing her husband and son, Tan's mother moved her family to Switzerland, where Tan finished high school. During three years, mother and daughter argued about Tan's college and career plans. Tan eventually followed her boyfriend to San Jose City College, where she earned a bachelor's and a master's degree in English and linguistics, despite her mother's wish that she study medicine.
After Tan married her boyfriend, Louis DeMattei, she began to pursue a Ph. D.in linguistics. She later abandoned the program in order to work with developmentally disabled children. Then she became a freelance business writer. Although she was successful, she found writing for corporate executives dissatisfied. She began to write fiction as a creative release.
Meanwhile, Tan's mother was suffering from a serious illness, and Tan resolved to take a trip to China with her mother if she recovered. In 1987, after her mother returned to health, they traveled to China, where Tan's mother was reunited with her daughters and met her half-sisters. The trip provided Tan with a fresh perspective on her mother, and it served as the key inspiration for her first book, The Joy Luck Club. Soon after its publication in 1989, The Joy Luck Club garnered enthusiastic reviews, remaining on the New York Times best-seller list for many months. It won both the National Book Award and the L.A. Times Book Award in 1989.
Tan has written several other bestselling novels, including The Kitchen God's Wife, The Hundred Secret Senses, The Bonesetter's Daughter and Saving Fish From Drowning. She also wrote a collection of non-fiction essays entitled The Opposite of Fate: A Book of Musings. And her most recent novel Saving Fish From Drowning. In addition to these, Tan has written two children's books: The Moon Lady ( 1992) and Sagwa, the Chinese Siamese Cat ( 1994), which was turned into an animated series airing on PBS. She also appeared on PBS in a short spot encouraging children to write.

1.2 Overview of The Joy Luck Club
And the theme of The Joy Luck Club focuses on the manifestation of feminism. How the Chinese-American woman struggle for their lives with a very complex identities? Firstly, they are Chinese in the western country; then, they are the women of eastern male world; furthermore, they are Chinese women in the western world. Describing the struggle of the women even though the mothers and daughters effected by different culture. The Joy Luck Club is a Chinese American writer Amy Tan's first novel, is also famous for her, that is published success, then had consecutive top eight "New York Times" best seller lists and soon adapted into films by the same name, far-reaching influence. This book is the United States in 1989, one of the four best selling books, has won numerous awards.
The Joy Luck Club contains sixteen interconnected stories about conflicts between Chinese immigrant mothers and their American-raised daughters. In 1949, the four immigrants met at the First Chinese Baptist Church in San Francisco and agreed to continue to meet to play Mah jong. They called their Mah jong group—The Joy luck Club, formed in China by one of the mothers—Suyuan Woo, in order to lift her friends' spirits and distract them from their problems during the Japanese invasion. And the novel is composed of four sections, each of which contains four separate narratives. In the first four stories of the book, the mothers, speaking one by one, recall their experience in China and their relationships with their own mothers. In the second section, these daughters—Waverly, Jing-mei, Lena, and Rose—relate their recollections of their childhood relationships with their mothers. In the third group of stories, the four daughters narrate their adult dilemmas—troubles in marriage and with their careers. Although they believe that their mothers' antiquated ideas do not relevant to their own very American lifestyles, their search for solutions inevitably brings them back to their relationships with the older generation. In the final group of stories, the mothers struggle to offer solutions and support to their daughters, in the process learning more about themselves. The novel ends the scene that the protagonist Jingmei Woo finds her elder sisters in Shanghai whom her mother lost in China when she left for America in 1949 and then they all murmur their dead mother" Mama, Mama." Under this situation, the author describes" I look at their faces again and I see no trace of my mother in them. Yet they still look familiar. And now I see what part of me is Chinese. It is so obvious. It is my family. It is in our blood." ( Tan, 1989: 287)

1.3 Literature Review
In 1989, Chinese American writer Amy Tan published her first novel The Joy Luck Club, both the reading public and critics loved The Joy Luck Club, and she won a number of national awards. In 1994, The Joy Luck Club was successfully adapted to movie,and has been translated into 20 languages including Chinese, and widely circulated. In the past two decades, became famous at home and abroad, there are many research results, mixed. After sorting out can find that Western academics are concentrated on the interpretation of their race, gender, identity, class, nationalism and other aspects of meaning.
The Joy Luck Club acclaiming for highly praise, mostly concentrated on the analysis of the themes and content. It is the main attitude of Chinese and foreign academics. In 1989, many brilliant reviews began to appear in Time, Newsweek, New York, New York Times Book Review, Los Angeles Times,Washington Post and other major U.S. media. This fully shows that many white American critics impressed by the obscure, bizarre, mysterious of China and the Chinese people describing in The Joy Luck Club, the novel has gained the American mainstream white society's concern and acceptance.
After the 1990s, Amy Ling (1990), Marina Heung ( 1993), Walter Shear ( 1993), Ben Xu ( 1994), Stephen Souris (1994), Zenobin Mistri ( 1998), Patricia L. Hamilton ( 1999), Alison Gee ( 2001) and Zeng Li ( 2002) , Cui Wansheng ( 1997), Xiaohong ( 1998), Lu Wei ( 2000), Tingting Chen (2006), and many United States commentators have yet approvingly comment The Joy Luck Club. They considered that Amy Tan inheritance and carry forward the Chinese-American literary tradition about the ancient, family relationships and cultural conflict, at the same time, she also rejected the old stereotypes about the image of Chinese women, developing the blend of Chinese and western thought.
The domestic research focused on text-based analysis of conflict and identity issues, tending to the works of cultural and political criticism instead of aesthetic criticism .Chinese academic community began to study The Joy Luck Club in 1994. Research paper of cultural exploration can be divided into two types: traditional Chinese culture, such as Reading Amy Tan ( The Joy Luck Club) in the Chinese mahjong"( Ruihua Zhang, 2001), and discussion about cultural conflict, cultural integration, such as Sino-US Conflict and Fusion: ( The Joy Luck Club) Cultural Interpretation ( Aimin Cheng , Ruihua Zhang , 2001); political criticism of the research can be divided into post-colonial cultural identity criticism such as Edge of the Culture and the The Joy Luck Club ( Ke Ke, 1999) and the perspective of feminist consciousness, such as From the post-colonial and feminist literary criticism perspective with Amy Tan ( The Joy Luck Club) ( Sun Gang, 2008).
This thesis is based on the original study of feminist perspective, combining with the theme of cultural conflict and integration. Study the conflict and fusion of the feminism in The Joy Luck Club under different cultural background, focusing on struggle of women, feminist awakening, analysing the tireless efforts and struggle of the two generations in order to change their fate. Though the feminist interpretation of The Joy Luck Club , I hope readers can get a insight into the difficulties and setbacks of women, especially for Chinese-American women in the process of integration into mainstream American society. Above all, arouse awareness on women issues, so that women no longer be silent, having the courage to fight for their rights, their voices can be heard by more people.
2. Female Struggling experience in The Joy Luck Club
2.1 Introduction of Feminism
Feminism refers to movements aimed at establishing and defending equal political, economic, and social rights and equal opportunities for women. Its concepts overlap with those of women's rights. Feminism is both an intellectual commitment and a political movement that seeks justice for women and the end of sexism in all forms. However, there are many different kinds of feminism. Feminists disagree about what sexism consists in, and what exactly ought to be done about it; they disagree about what it means to be a woman or a man and what social and political implications gender has or should have. In other words, Feminism can be considered as a spirit that woman fight for their life and struggle against fatality.

2.2 Mothers experience
2.2.1 Suyuan Woo's story
Suyuan Woo is a strong and restive woman who refuses to focus on her hardships. Indeed, she struggles to create happiness and manage to success what she finds it lacking. As she used to explain to Jing-mei about the original Joy Luck Club:
It's not that we had no heart or eyes for pain. We were all afraid. We all had our miseries. But to despair was to wish back for something already lost. Or to prolong what was already unbearable. How much can you wish for a favorite warm coat that hangs in the closet of a house that burned down with your mother and father inside of it? How long can you see in your mind arms and legs hanging from telephone wires and starving dogs running down the streets with half-chewed hands dangling from their jaws? What was worse, we asked among ourselves, to sit and wait for our own deaths with proper somber faces? Or to choose our own happiness?( Tan, 1989: 24)
It is with this mentality that she found the original Joy Luck Club while awaiting the Japanese invasion of China in Kweilin. Suyuan creates the Joy Luck Club in Kweilin because she wanted to have, or create, a sense of gladness, belonging, and order, even in the midst of complete uncertainty and turmoil. In America, the club has served a similar purpose, and also helps Suyuan and the other members feel a sense of continuity between their old and new cultures. For Suyuan, the club is a symbol of hope and of strength, and a means of holding her own during the change.

2.2.2 An-mei Hsu's story
At an early age, An-mei Hsu learns lessons in stoic from her grandmother, Popo, and from her mother. Her mother also teaches her to swallow her tears, to conceal her pain, and to distrust others. An-mei's mother was forced to marry as the fourth concubine. She wanted to use her physical beauty to spend the rest of her life. Otherwise, she had to commit suicide in the eve of the Lunar New Year. However, the mother of An-mei did not want to make her own destiny in the same to her daughter, she wanted to give the strength to her daughter using her death. After that, An-mei is aware of her identity crisis, she begin to shout in order to protest against the fate. An-mei's mother planning her own suicide to express the yearning for freedom and the right. Sober analysis of her daughter’s future, she committed suicide to protect her. Finally, the brave mother and heroic acts of despair of their own weakness completely negate the old system, the fate of contempt and openly protest injustice, but also set fire to protect her daughter's spirit, so that her daughter learns to speak against the injustice. On that day, An-mei shows second wife the fake pearl necklace she has given her and crushes it under her foot. "I know how it is to live your life like a dream. To listen and watch, to wake up and try to understand what has already happened."( Tan, 1989: 240)

2.2.3 Lindo's story
Lindo feels conflicted about her marriage: desperately, she dose not want to be submissive she knows the wedding will bring, yet she cannot go against the promises her parents made to her husband's family. In order to free herself from the dilemma, she secretly blows out her husband's end of the candle. A servant relights it, but Lindo later reveals to he mother-in-law that the flame goes out, implying that it does so without human intervention. The candle's original symbolism as a sign of tradition and culture, for it is by playing upon the traditional beliefs and superstitions that Lindo convinces her mother-in-law to annul the marriage. By blowing out the flame, Lindo takes control of her own fate, eventually extricating herself from an unhappy marriage. She controls over her own life. Before her wedding, Lindo made a second promise, a promise to herself:
I wiped my eyes and looked in the mirror. I was surprised at what I saw. I had on a beautiful red dress, but what I saw was even more valuable. I was strong. I was pure. I had genuine thoughts inside that no one could see, that no one could ever take away from me. I was like the wind. I threw my head back and smiled proudly to myself. And