Mother as Villain and Victim in Joy Luck Club
In The Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan focuses on several mother-daughter relationships. One of the relationships explored is that between an immigrant Chinese mother and her American born daughter Jing-mei. The mother expects Jing-mei to be a prodigy child - while pursuing this dream she unintentionally creates a serious conflict between her and her daughter.
To fulfill her unrealistic expectations, the mother pushes Jing-mei to be the best in anything and everything. At first, the reader may perceive the mother as the villain in the story; however, the mother just wants her daughter to have the life that she never had. Jing-mei does not understand her intentions.
Jing-mei's mother thought opportunity was everywhere in America, "America was where all my mother's hopes lay" (Tan 1208). The mother lost everything when she moved from China to San Francisco in 1949. In China she lost her family, her spouse, and she had to abandon her twin baby girls (Tan 1208). This implies that her mother had a difficult life and wanted to start a new life in America.
Unfamiliar with the customs of America, she had been brought up in a strict Chinese culture. Her mother probably raised her the same way, and therefore, that is where she learned her parenting skills. The Chinese life is strict, more so than the American life, and that was the only way the mother knew how to raise her daughter. The mother seemed to be the villain in the story, but she was only trying to be the caring parent the best way she knew how. She only wanted her daughter to be the best, but a conflict started when the daughter failed to meet her expectations.
In the beginning Jing-mei, th...
... middle of paper ...
...he wanted to see her daughter become something better than what she had become. Instead of encouraging her daughter to become someone who she wanted to be, she ends up pushing her in the wrong direction. I think that Jing-mei finally realized why her mother did what she did. I agree with Ghymn when she states that "Jing-mei does care deeply what her mother thinks of her" (84). It is obvious that even though they were two kinds from two different cultures they still found forgiveness in the end.
Work Cited
Souris, Stephen. "'Only Two Kinds of Daughters:'" Inter-Monologue Dialogicity in The Joy Luck Club." Melus 19.2 (Summer 1994):99-123.
Tan, Amy. The Joy Luck Club. Vintage Contemporaries. New York: A Division of Random House, Inc. 1993.
Willard, Nancy. Asian American Women Writers. Ed. Harold Bloom. Chelsea House Publishers, Philadelphia 1997.
No relationship is ever perfect no matter how great it seems. In the novel The Joy Luck Club, written by Amy Tan, she tells the story of a few mother daughter pairs that are in a group named the Joy Luck Club. The Joy Luck Club is a group of women who come together once a week to play mahjong. The founder of the Joy Luck Club, Suyuan Woo, dies, leaving her daughter Jing-mei to take her place in the club. Her daughter, Jing-mei, receives money from the other members of the club to travel to China in order to find her mother's twin daughters who were left many years ago. In this book you get more of the details of this family and a few more. Amy Tan uses the stories of Jing-mei and Suyuan, Waverly and Jindo, and An-mei and Rose to portray her theme of, mother daughter relationships can be hard at times but they are always worth it in the end.
Amy Tan 's novel, The Joy Luck Club, explores the relationships and experiences of four Chinese mothers with that of their four Chinese-American daughters. The differences in the upbringing of those women born around the 1920’s in China, and their daughters born in California in the 80’s, is undeniable. The relationships between the two are difficult due to lack of understanding and the considerable amount of barriers that exist between them.
Here is a journey that not only started "a thousand Li away", but from generations upon generations of tradition. The Joy Luck Club travels over time and continents to present the background and turmoil of eight amazing women. All of these women have had to deal with the issues of culture, gender, and family, each in their own way, yet all similarly. Amy Tan dedicates her novel to her mother with the comment "You asked me once what I would remember… This, and much more." Each of the mothers in Tan's novel wanted to teach their daughters the lessons learned in China while giving them the comforts of America. But language and culture barriers diverge the women until they were almost lost to each other. Each character had to take their own journey to finally understand what drove them apart and find their common ground.
Utilitarianism, a book written by John Stuart Mill during mid 19th century in England, encompasses Mill’s major viewpoints about the constructs of pleasure and pain for human beings; as well as utility in itself as a way of promoting political and social goals. As Mill quotes, “A cultivated mind, that is any mind to which the fountains of knowledge have been opened and which have been taught to exercises its faculties-find sources of inexhaustible interest in all that surrounds it; in nature, art, poetry, history, and the ways of man of past and their prospects for the future” (Mill, Utilitarianism, p. 372). This passage directly connects to Mill’s interpretation of Utilitarianism which is ultimately achieving happiness, or least one of his
Throughout the novel, The Joy Luck Club, author Amy Tan explores the issues of tradition and change and the impact they have on the bond between mothers and daughters. The theme is developed through eight women that tell their separate stories, which meld into four pairs of mother-daughter relationships.
Amy Tan’s novel, The Joy Luck Club uses much characterization. Each character is portrayed in different yet similar ways. When she was raised, she would do whatever she could to please other people. She even “gave up her life for her parents promise” (49), I the story The Red Candle we get to see how Tan portrays Lindo Jong and how she is brought to life.
In John Stuart Mill’s “Utilitarianism”, Mill generates his thoughts on what Utilitarianism is in chapter 2 of his work. Mill first starts off this chapter by saying that many people misunderstand utilitarianism by interpreting utility as in opposition to pleasure. When in reality, utility is defined
Philosophy is defined by Webster as "Love and pursuit of wisdom by intellectual means and moral self-discipline" or "Investigation of the nature, causes, or principles of reality, knowledge, or values, based on logical reasoning rather than empirical methods." This essay is a general look at those who pursued that intellectual means, those who investigated, even those who reasoned Reason. Because volumes could be written and this is a rather quick, unworthy paper: apologizes.
John Stuart Mill claims that people often misinterpret utility as the test for right and wrong. This definition of utility restricts the term and denounces its meaning to being opposed to pleasure. Mill defines utility as units of happiness caused by an action without the unhappiness caused by an action. He calls this the Greatest Happiness Principle or the Principle of Utility. Mill’s principle states that actions are right when they tend to promote happiness and are wrong when they tend to produce the reverse of happiness. Happiness is defined as intended pleasure and the absence of pain while unhappiness is defined as pain and the lack of pleasure. Therefore, Mill claims, pleasure and happiness are the only things desirable and good. Mill’s definition of utilitarianism claims that act...
Throughout Amy Tan’s novel, The Joy Luck Club, the reader can see the difficulites in the mother-daughter relationships. The mothers came to America from China hoping to give their daughters better lives than what they had. In China, women were “to be obedient, to honor one’s parents, one’s husband, and to try to please him and his family,” (Chinese-American Women in American Culture). They were not expected to have their own will and to make their own way through life. These mothers did not want this for their children so they thought that in America “nobody [would] say her worth [was] measured by the loudness of her husband’s belch…nobody [would] look down on her…” (3). To represent everything that was hoped for in their daughters, the mothers wanted them to have a “swan- a creature that became more than what was hoped for,” (3). This swan was all of the mothers’ good intentions. However, when they got to America, the swan was taken away and all she had left was one feather.
Amy Tan is a Chinese-American author. She had become Americanized, according to her mother, who still held traditional Chinese values. They fought sometimes, just as the women and daughters of The Joy Luck Club, over who was right and who was wrong regarding many problems they encountered. Tan most likely modeled The Joy Luck Club after her relationship with her mother. She even dedicated the novel “To my mother and the memory of her mother. You asked me once what I wo...
In Chapter 2, What Utilitarianism is, Mill presents the aforesaid definition of Utilitarianism as the criterion of an action to be right or wrong. We have seen that Utilitarianism puts great emphasis on happiness. »By happiness is intended pleasure and the absence of pain; by unhappiness, pain, and the privation of pleasure.«3 The fact that pleasure is the only good for Mill makes his Utilitarianism a form of Hedonism which is most associated with the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus who claims that »Pleasure is our first and kindred good.«4 The difference to Epicurus’ Hedonism, however, is that »the happiness which forms the utilitarian standard of what is right in conduct, is not the agent’s own happiness, but that of all concerned.«5
Mill begins his essay on Utilitarianism by explaining his Greatest Happiness Principle, stating actions are right in that they promote happiness and actions are wrong if they take happiness away (Mill, “What Utilitarianism Is,” para 2). Following from this idea, happiness is pleasure, and unhappiness is pain and the privation of pleasure (Mill, “What Utilitarianism Is,” para 2). In defending the equivalence between happiness and pleasure from his critics, Mill makes the claim that there is “the superiority of mental over bodily pleasures chiefly in the greater permanency, safety, uncostliness, etc., of the former” (Mill, “What Utilitarianism Is,” para 4). He claims that pleasures can differ both in quality and qua...
I believe that Philosophy is the study of different ways of thinking. In philosophy, you should question everything and never take anything for face value. There are always two sides to every coin as there are different ways of looking at things, is what philosophy teaches us. In philosophy, you must throw off all the limitations you have set on yourself when dealing with how you view things and how things seem to be.
ABSTRACT: Philosophers cannot avoid addressing the question of whether philosophical anthropology (that is, specifically philosophical inquiry about human nature and human phenomenon) is possible. Any answer must be articulated in the context of the nature and function of philosophy. In other words, philosophical anthropology must be defined as an account of the nature of the subject of philosophical thinking. I argue that if philosophical thinkers admit that they are beings in nature, culture, and history, then the possibility of a uniquely philosophical theory of human nature and human phenomenon should be discarded. Rather, philosophy's catalytic and integrative role in human cognition should be stressed.