Location In Marginalization: Reading Hybridity In The Bonesetter's Daughter

Amy Tan is one of the most prominent and prolific writers in Chinese American literature,and her road to fame is marked by the publication of The Joy Luck Club.Since the book was published,Tan has received attention and popularity from both critics and ordinary readers.Moreover,it is also a milestone marking that Chinese American literature is on the rise.The Bonesetter's Daughter is another successful novel written by Tan,which explores the overseas Chinese family relations between mother and daughter.Inspired by family stories of her mother and grandmother,interweaving superb narrative skills,Tan depicts emotional entanglement of three generations of women in a moving manner.This thesis is a tentative attempt at an analysis of the construction of hybridity of Chinese American women in The Bonesetter's Daughter from posteolonial perspective and feminist viewpoint.Employing Homi K.Bhabha's notion of hybridity and Virginia Woolf's concept of androgyny,the thesis probes into the novel from identity issue and conducts a detailed analysis of how Chinese American women construct their hybridized identity from cultural,ethnic,and gender dimensions.As a whole,the thesis is composed of three major parts,including introduction,main frame,and conclusion.Introduction starts with a brief of Amy Tan and her work The Bonesetter's Daughter as well as reviews and comments on the book from both domestic and overseas academic spheres,and it ends with an exposition of feasibility and significance of the employment of postcolonial and feminist theories in interpreting the text.The main frame interprets the text from three perspectives:Chapter One explores how mother and daughter construct their cultural identity in the adopted country.Different cultural heritage directly leads to the loss of subjectivity,which neither LuLing's Chinese cultural identity nor Ruth's American cultural identity can be accepted in America.Underneath the gaze of domineering American culture,cultural identity seeking is bestowed with new implication which is to deconstruct the pre-given cultural diversity mode and construct the cultural difference mode.With the displacement of Chinese culture and the relocation of American culture,what Chinese American women pursue is the hybridized cultural identity empowered by two cultures. Chapter Two offers a detailed analysis of racial-ethnic identity rewriting process of Chinese American mother and daughter.In the American Orientalist discourse,Chinese Americans,including Ruth and LuLing,undergo the stereotypical expectation of mainstream society.Moreover,self-orientalizing precipitated by "the melancholy of race" further strengthens their stereotypical images.However,being the disadvantaged group,mother and daughter do not totally fall into the stereotypical depiction of mainstream doctrines.They finally go through stages of "mimicry" and "hybridity" when counteracting the American Orientalist discourse.Thus,by doing so they unconsciously subvert the Orientalist discourse to some extent.Of course,subversion does not necessarily signify the reverse;it means more to construct the hybridized ethnic identity that transcends the binaries.Chapter Three interprets how women of Chinese feudal society and Chinese American ethnicity,represented by Precious Auntie,LuLing and Ruth,articulate their gender identity. Locating at the conflicting cultural and racial crevice,identity crisis of Chinese American women is reflected in the marginalized area encroached by cultural,ethnic,and patriarchal elements.Similar to their ethnic identity construction,they experience from the absence to Other and further to articulation of the subjectivity.The painful journey makes mother and daughter in Tan's novel crave for the harmonious state of being between male power and female power,which is also the resonance of Woolf's ideal of androgynous mind.The concluding part of the thesis makes it clear that the unique Chinese American identity of Amy Tan renders unique artistic charm to her mother and daughter motif work,in which mother-daughter bond could transcend all obstacles in a sense.And having adopted Bhabha's notion of hybridity and Woolf's concept of androgyny,the thesis reveals that identity construction of Chinese American women in The Bonesetter's Daughter,represented by Precious Auntie,LuLing and Ruth,involves cultural,ethnic,and gender issues.It is no exaggeration to argue that hybridized identity construction of Chinese American women is a complex journey,both psychologically and historically.