Dennis Batin
The University of Georgia 

I prepared an Annotated Bibliography for my English 1030 class covering the topic of mother-daughter relationships in Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club. Analyzing the five sources below are the first steps to writing a well developed research paper.

    The author of The Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan, writes a story of four daughters and three mothers who share a series of sixteen stories about American and Chinese culture. The assimilated daughters are very much American while their Chinese immigrant mothers hold on to native culture. Stubbornness of the women in The Joy Luck Club hinders the mother-daughter relationship. Trying to teach Chinese character to her (figuratively speaking) “deaf” daughter and not getting any results, the mother still stays persistent. The daughters on the other hand, do not try to sway their mothers into American ways but instead just choose not to listen, making their relationship more difficult than it should be. 

    The critical essays below offer interpretations of the mother-daughter relationship in The Joy Luck Club. Even though each of the essays comes from different stances on the subject indirectly the essays share the same idea. The mother-daughter relationship is weak throughout the majority of the novel and then in the end the mothers and daughters finally understand each other’s cultures and realize the potential of a combination of Chinese character and American circumstance.

 

Foster, M. Marie Booth. “Voice, Mind, Self: Mother-Daughter Relationships in Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club and The Kitchen God’s Wife.” Women of Color: Mother-Daughter Relationships in 20th Century Literature: 208-227.

    Foster adds mother-daughter relationships from Chinese ancestry to Guillory’s collection. Foster explains that voice, both heard and unheard, dictates the mother-daughter relationship. She then goes to comment that fortunes and faults reflect from mother to daughter and vice versa. The lack of communication will lead to a sense of despair for both women. Not until both mother and daughter listen to each other do they begin to understand themselves. Understanding begins with storytelling making a balance of East and West. After years of an unbalance, the American daughters understand themselves and share a balance of Chinese ancestry and American circumstances (244).
   

Heung, Marina. “Daughter - Text / Mother - Text: Matrilineage in Amy Tan’s Joy Luck Club.” Feminist Studies 19 (1993 Fall): 597-616.

    Heung makes an argument of how daughter-text and mother-text define the connections between the American daughter and the Chinese mother. The illustration of broken and fluctuating family bonds materializes when the daughter begins to have a relationship with another family. Language, although embarrassing to the daughters, makes the mothers unique and express their view of Chinese superiority. Hueng comments that, “Maternal voices in The Joy Luck Club begin to shift from “I” to “you” to engage the discrete subjectiveness of mother and daughter in a tentative exchange of recognitions and identifications” (613). Lastly Hueng remarks that, “At once disintegrative and constructive in its operations, the novel holds its dual impulses in unresolved suspension and fulfils its fundamentally transformative project- a mutation from daughter-text to mother-text-to sister-text” (613).
 

Mistri, Zenobia. “Discovering the Ethnic Name and the Genealogical Tie in Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club.” Studies in Short Fiction 35 (1998): 251-257.

    Mistri explains the breach in the mother-daughter relationship. The daughter is fixed on her American ways, but the mother wants her daughter to understand the strengths of the two cultures. However, the daughter does not respect Chinese ways meaning that she does not respect her mother. The lack of communication between the two women does not help their relationship. Mistri explains that the mother rescues her lost daughter towards the end of the story because she has to not because she really wants to; only until the end does the daughter understand her mother (257).

Shear, Walter. “Generation Differences and the Diaspora in The Joy Luck Club.” Critique 34 (1993 Spring): 193-199.

    Shear writes about how Chinese identity is a healing factor for the Diaspora of World War II. He goes on to explain that the mothers and daughters tell separate stories. The mothers tend to preach about pre-1949 China while the daughters speak of growing up and their current family situation. Daughters receive their mother’s knowledge and sometimes this newly befounded knowledge is used against the mother illustrating tensions between mother and daughter. In addition, the mother’s separation of family is directly correlated to the idea of self-abandonment from culture that the daughter experiences (197). The generation differences between mother and daughter cause indifference between two family members that does not necessarily conclude.

Shen, Gloria. “Born of a Stranger: Mother-Daughter Relationships and Storytelling in Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club.” International Women’s Writing. Greenwood: Westport, CT, 1995. 233-243.

    Shen illustrates Brown and Gooze’s objective of addressing interrelationships between female identity and place. The focus of Shen’s essay revolves around narrative strategy and Chinese mother-American-born daughter relationships. The Joy Luck Club is separated into four mother/daughter sections and each of the sections tell four stories which contain disguised elements of the mother and daughter relationship. All sixteen stories are different but linked to the same topic: the mother wants to hold on to their daughter but the daughter battles away. The struggle of the American daughter fighting off the very persistent Chinese mother is a pair of phases in human life. Only with time, the transition from the daughter phase to the mother phase can be accomplished. The daughter must accept her mother and identify what she stood for to realize that the hateful relationship really was something to be cherished (243).

Last Updated on December 09, 2002