Zones Of Hell In The Chinese-american Society: The Mother-daughter Troubled Relationship In Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club

Résumé: This dissertation investigates the representation of both Chineseness and Americanness through the characters of the mothers and their daughters as well as the chief factors that contribute to the creation of conflicts between them in Amy Tan's novel of The Joy Luck Club. The purpose of this dissertation is to explore how the different cultural backgrounds lead to the mother-daughter conflicts. In addition to that, it aims to demonstrate how the Chinese mothers harshly enforce the Chinese culture whereas their daughters choose to obtain the American way of life. To reach these objectives, the dissertation needs to be divided into three chapters. The first chapter is theoretical in the sense that it will introduce the Chinese-American society and its literature in addition to the theories of Jessica Benjamin and Erik Erikson. Moreover, the second chapter highlights the most dominant mother-daughter clashes that Amy Tan demonstrates in her novel with reliance on Jessica Benjamin's theory of intersubjectivity. These clashes which highly represent the cultural in-betweeness and the difference of perspectives are classified to be either personal, familial, cultural or moral. The final chapter aims to analyse the process of identity development of the American-born Chinese daughters who belong to the minority groups through dealing with the different stages of their personality development as well as the psychological shock caused by the mother-daughter clashes in view of Erikson's theory. The dissertation concludes that due to the different cultural backgrounds and the differences of perspectives, several clashes take place in the mother-daughter relationship, and this leads to an immense failure in the daughters' formation of identity.

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