"Then you must teach my daughter this same lesson": an investigation of Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club and The Kitchen God's Wife

Abstract

The present dissertation aims at investigating two post-colonial novels written by Chinese-American author Amy Tan, namely The Joy Luck Club (1989) and The Kitchen God s Wife (1991). Both novels offer a locus in which questions of identity and diaspora and the mother-daughter relationships are approached and discussed. The Joy Luck Club is narrated by three mothers and four daughters, but The Kitchen God s Wife offers only the voices of Winnie and Pearl, mother and daughter respectively. The renegotiation of identity in the former novel takes place through the fragmentation of mothers and daughters experiences whilst the latter offers a rereading of the Bildungsroman by focusing on the story of a female character. An important question which permeates this investigation is that the female characters in both novels need to renegotiate their hyphenated identities and seek to understand themselves as mothers and daughters in a patriarchal society in which genre, class and ethnicity are erased so as to privilege an essentialism of the Asian subject, especially with regard to the diasporic woman.