From Silence To Full Voice--Silence-Breaking Of Chinese American Women In Amy Tan's Works

Amy Tan is widely recognized as a successful American writer of Chinese ancestry. Her works receive great popularity among readers from both America and china. They arouse the critics'attention and interests as well. The dual cultural background enables Tan to gain insight into the external experiences and internal emotions of the Chinese American women. Her mother's and her grandmother's true stories shed light on her creation. She successfully creates a series of vivid characters: the immigrant mothers and their American-born daughters. This thesis attempts to analyze Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club and The Bonesetter's Daughter in a combined perspective of post-colonial and feminist study. This thesis contains five parts. The first part begins with a brief review of the history of Chinese American literature, the popularity of Amy Tan's works and their critical value. Furthermore, it introduces the methodology of Said's Orientalism and Homi Bahba's"hybridity"theory. The first chapter deals with the immigrant mothers'and their American-born daughters'identity dilemma. The immigrant mothers are silenced by the patriarchal society and the white-centered mainstream culture. They are forced to cling to their ancestral culture but they are caught between two worlds: they are neither pure Chinese as soon as they depart from china, nor are they Americans, because they are regarded as"other"and outsider in the mainstream culture. The American-born daughters adopt different survival strategy by means of denying ancestral culture and striving to enter the mainstream society. However they are still marginalized by the mainstream culture. The second chapter focuses on the conflict between the mothers and daughters. The conflict arises from the daughters'resistance towards maternal power, the silence between mothers and daughters, and daughters'"othering"process of their mothers out of the internalized colonization. The third chapter focuses on the reconciliation of the two generations. Chinese American women finally awaken and break the self-imposed and externally sanctioned silence to fulfill the redemption of themselves. The above analysis contribute to the conclusion in the end, the new cultural identity is constructed by"hybridity"of American and Chinese culture.