【摘 要】本文以后殖民主义文化理论和女性主义理论为基础,旨在探讨母女关系与华裔女性身份(主要涉及性别身份和文化身份)建立的关系。着重论述女儿通过认同母亲的性别身份而建立自己的性别身份。文中两种母亲对女儿性别身份的建立起到不同作用。坚强的母亲是性别典范;软弱的母亲是性别镜像。通过女性主义理论的应用分析母女关系如何影响女儿性别身份的建立。
　　【关键词】身份 性别 母女关系
　　【中图分类号】I106.4 【文献标识码】A 【文章编号】1006-9682(2010)05-0042-04
　　
　　The Joy Luck Club was published in 1989 by Amy Tan, which brought the 37-year-old Chinese American Writer great and instant fame and stayed on the New York Times best-seller list for nine months. It was translated into more than twenty languages and was made into a big-budget Hollywood film. The novel won the writer many prestigious literary awards including the National Book Award for Fiction.
　　The Joy Luck Club portrays the stories of four pairs of mothers and daughters: Suyuan Woo and Jing-mei(June)Woo; An-mei Hsu and Rose Hsu Jordan; Lindo Jong and Waverly Jong; and Ying-ying St.Clair and Lena St.Clair. In the novel, the mother-daughter conflict and mutual incomprehension are interwoven with mothers’ recalls of a different world in prewar and wartime China. In the struggle against the oppression of patriarchy, the mothers in The Joy Luck Club can be classified into two groups: the weak mothers, such as Yiny-ying and An-mei’s mother, and the strong mothers, such as Lindo and Suyuan. These two kinds of mothers play different roles in daughter’s formation of gender identity. The weak mothers play the role of mirror, in which daughters reflect and reexamine themselves and thus gain power to deal with the problems in their own marriages. The strong mothers play the role of model, which the daughters admire and keep learning from.
　　1.Weak Mothers as Gender Mirrors
　　In her essay “Mothers and Daughters in the World of Father”, Maecia Westkott suggests that patriarchal society defines not only the structure but also the content of the mother-daughter relationship (1). The mother not only gives birth to the daughter, but also engenders her. Under patriarchy, the mother assumes the primary role of teaching her daughter the proper place in society: to be a good wife to her husband and a good mother to her children. Yiny-ying and An-mei’s mother are good examples.
　　Ying-ying, who is born into an upper class family in the feudal China, can’t get away from this convention. She is brought up to believe that she “can never ask, only listen”(Tan 66). Her mother socializes her into predictability, into traditional sexual and gendered identities for a behaved Chinese woman of her class and times. Social doctrine and familial education, which is characterized by patriarchal sexism, lead to the passivity and fatalism in Ying-ying’s character. The result is the originally innocent girl turns out to be an abused and deserted wife of the playboy husband. For ten years, she just waits passively until the death of her husband. Later she allowed another man to marry her because once again she believed it was her destiny. Immigrating to the United States, she is once more silenced by her American husband: Her husband translates Ying-ying’s thoughts in his words even when he cannot possibly imagine what she says. What’s more, Ying-ying’s identity is erased by her English-Irish husband, “so, with the sweep of a pen, my mother lost her name and became a Dragon instead of a Tiger”(161). In China and in America, Ying-ying is oppressed by patriarchy. Deprived by voice and identity, she has no choice but to refer herself to passivity and fatalism.
　　Passivity is also the character of another mother-An-mei’s mother. As a victim of the Chinese patriarchal society, she is another woman who is powerless in the face of the hardship and unfairness. She is described as a ghost among the living. She is a dead woman, “decayed flesh, evil, rotted to the bone”(36). She is a traitor to her husband and ancestors. Her name can never be spoken in the family circle. The underlying reason for this severe ostracism is the familial and societal perception that An-mei’s mother has failed to remain an honorable, life-long widow, in “prostituting” herself to a rich man named Wu Tsing. In fact, she is entrapped and raped by him, and was left without any independent means. She has no choice but to become his fourth concubine. In order to give her daughter a better living condition, An-mei’s mother committed suicide. She sacrificed her life for her daughter’s future happiness, she knew that in death she could ensure her daughter’s promoted status and comfort with more certainty than she could in life.
　　Ying-ying and An-mei’s mother are both powerless women. They are victims of patriarchy and live tragic lives. Patriarchy marks in their characters passivity, endurance, submission, and selflessness, with no awareness and autonomous will. What’s more important, as mothers, they have handed down parts of these characters to their daughters, which is revealed in how the daughters deal with the problems in their marriage.
　　2.Strong Mothers as Gender Models
　　The other group of mothers in The Joy Luck Club is the mothers who show great bravery and willpower in the face of patriarchal oppression and hardships. Lindo Jong learns from an early age the powers of “invisible strength”-of hiding one’s thoughts until the time is ripe to reveal them, and of believing in one’s inner force when finds oneself at a disadvantage. She discovers these values while in China, caught in a loveless marriage and oppressed by the tyranny of her mother-in-law, who forced her to bear a grandson for her family. By playing upon her mother-in-law’s superstition and fear, Lindo eventually extricated herself from the marriage with her dignity intact. “I was strong. I was pure. I had genuine thoughts inside that no one could see, that no one could ever take away from me. I was like the wind”(53). With strong willpower, Lindo is a rebellious image in the struggle against the misery and hardship that the patriarchal society brings to women.
　　Suyuan Woo is another strong-minded woman who refuses to be victimized by misery and survives with dignity. She struggles to create happiness and success where she finds it lacking. It is with this mentality that she founded the original Joy Luck Club while awaiting the Japanese invasion in Kweilin. In such a unique way, Suyuan faced up to the misery of life with bravery and dignity like she said in the novel: During her flight from Kuiling to Chongqing, she lost her twin daughters, Chwun Yu and Chwun Hwa. Rather than mourning her lost twins and stroke down by the great sorrow, Suyuan started new life in the United States and raised her newborn daughter, and at same time, revived the Joy Luck Club with three new friends. It is also by the virtue of her hope and strong willpower that Suyuan eventually found her long-lost twin daughters in China, although her death makes them unable to see each other.
　　3.Identifying: To Construct the Gender Identity
　　(1)Necessity of Identification: Daughters as Gender Others
　　To cope with male dominance generally, the daughters in The Joy Luck Club reclaim the mother-daughter bond and depend on their mothers for strength. Though living in modern American society, the daughters still experience sex prejudice and male dominance as their Chinese mothers did in old China. Both the mothers and the daughters are victims of patriarchy. The only difference is to what degree and in what form they are suffering. The mothers and daughters in Tan’s novels have the same status-they are doubly oppressed as cultural others and gender others. The daughters in The Joy Luck Club, despite their American birth, unavoidably encounter gender discrimination and fall in to the status of second-sex or gender others, although the American patriarchal society seems nowhere near as brutal as the Chinese society in which their mothers have lived. Nonetheless in both cases, as Phillipa Kafka points out, “the men whom both generations encounter have made the rules for their own advantage and for women’s oppression” (Kafka 19). Like some of the mothers, the daughters are silenced by their husbands as well, such as Rose and Lena. Their status as second-sex or gender others in their families is clearly revealed in their marriage lives.
　　Lena is an architect with fresh and genuine ideas, but she does not have confidence in her marriage and her husband Harold. Professionally and economically, Lena is the second-sex compared with her husband, However, the husband and wife are equal in household expenditure. This seeming equality based on economic independence and emotional mutuality, in fact, is male dominance and exploitation in disguise. Like Lena, another daughter Rose also
　　willingly gives up her choices and her voice. In her relationship with her husband Ted, she is simply submissive wife who is always dependent on her husband. “…I was always in danger and he was always rescuing me…The emotional effect of saving and being saved was addicting to both of us”(Tan 126). Rose has no self throughout her marriage life. Her passivity with Ted is based on the stereotypical gender roles of a proactive, heroic male and a submissive, victimized female. To some extent, Rose is like “the angel in the house”. If it’s not for her resistance to the Chinese tradition, she may fall into the image of “Shy Lotus Blossom.” For Tan, it seems that submission to sexist modes of thought and behavior, regardless of cultural tradition or personal tragedy, is unacceptable as it encompasses a passive destruction of one’s autonomy.
　　(2)Reflection on Mirror Image
　　Instead of considering mother as objectified, silenced, selfless, and powerless, Marianne Hirsh advocates the empowerment of the mother as a subject who speaks for herself. She believes that: “only in combining both voices, in finding a double voice that would yield a multiple female consciousness, can we begin to envision ways to live afresh”(Hirsh 161). In The Joy Luck Club, all the immigrant mothers break their silence and tell their stories to their daughters. The tradition of story-telling has great significance as means of self-assertion and communication between the mothers and daughter. It’s also regarded by many feminists as mutual empowerment for both the mothers and daughters. What’s more important, in this novel, story-telling is means for the mothers to help their daughters out of marriage dilemma and construct independent gender identities. It’s revealed in this novel that the weakness of the victimized mothers turns to be a mirror for the daughter, in which they realized their powerlessness in the oppression of sexism.
　　1)Rose: A Strong and Straight Tree
　　“Maybe it is because she was born to me and she was born a girl. And I was born to my mother and I was born a girl. All of us are like stairs, one step after another, going up and down, but all going the same way”(Tan 241). This is a question about matrilineage heritage. What is being reproduced along the matrilineage heritage is the weakness of the female personality. An-mei knows about Rose’s weakness because once she almost became that way herself. The mother has a clear understanding of what is happening in her daughter’s marriage. However, Rose still does not realize the problems between her husband and her. By listening to her grandmother’s story, Rose realizes that like her grandmother, she herself is in the state of submission, inferiority, and unhappiness. Grandmother’s story provides a mirror for Rose, in which she sees herself and re-examines herself, thus finds the weakness in both of them. Rose is finally able to change her circumstances by following her mother’s advice. She stands up to Ted and suddenly realizes how powerful she really is. Then she feels connected to her mother in a way she never did before. The novel proves that the daughters can and do accept the matrilineage heritage, and shows us the potential of the reproduction of strength by reflecting on weakness.
　　2)Lena: The Broken Vase
　　The vase in Lena’s home symbolizes her marriage. Lena had placed the vase upon a wobbly table; she knew the placement of the vase there was dangerous, but she did nothing to protect the vase from breaking. Like the vase, her marriage is in danger of failing and shattering, but she refuses to take action. When Ying-ying “accidentally” broke the vase, she let Lena know that she should prevent disasters from happening rather than stand by passively as herself had done before. It is implied that with the help of Ying-ying, Lena can strengthen herself and improve her situation. Although Lena still does not have a clear picture of what she wants of her marriage, she starts to speak up for herself. She refuses to pay half for the ice cream anymore, she tells Harold, “we need to think about what our marriage is really based on…not this balance sheet, who owes who what”(180). Lena has taken the first step toward standing up for herself. She began to think about the relationship between her and Harold seriously and speak up for her own happiness instead of taking everything for granted passively. Like Rose, by listening to her mother’s story, the daughter identifies with her mother for her strength, not for her weakness. Thus, the daughter is in the process of building up an independent gender identity, not only economical but also spiritual.
　　(3)Ambivalence to Gender Model
　　As Rich says in Of Woman Born: “The loss of the daughter to the mother, the mother to the daughter, is the essential female tragedy”(Hansen 158). The two strong mothers, Suyuan and Lindo both have this kind of female tragedy: Suyuan lost her twin babies during war time and Lindo lost maternal love since an early age. Their tragedies of losing mother or daughters forge either a romance of daughterhood or a romance of motherhood in their memory. Therefore, their daughters become, to a certain degree, source of emotional security for the mothers. The memory of lost romance as mother or daughter, evolves into severe love and high expectation of the mothers to their daughters. It is this kind of high expectation that threatens and impedes the daughter’s development of their own identity as an individual. Thus, in this novel, the dynamic relationship between the mothers and daughters is characterized by mothers’s control and daughters’ rebellion. On one hand, the daughters see the merits of bravery, independence, and willpower in their mothers and try to grasp these merits. On the other hand, the control the mothers imposed on the daughters drives them to go to extreme and intensified the cultural conflicts between the mothers and the daughters. That also explains the ambivalence between the mothers and daughters in this novel.
　　1)Jing-mei: Best Quality
　　The complicated feeling of the daughters to the mothers in The Joy Luck Club can be described as ambivalent. In the end of the story “Best Quality”, Suyuan gives Jing-mei the hade pendant, which Jing-mei thinks that it’s meant merely as a sign of sympathy after her humiliating interchange with Waverly. Actually, Suyuan presents the pendant to Jing-mei at this moment not out of pity but out of pride: she has ceased to measure Jing-mei against Waverly, having recognized the fundamental differences in their personalities and their motivations. Suyuan recognizes the flip side to what she had always seen as Jing-mei’s lack of ambition-her humility and modesty, which can often translate into generosity and selflessness. Suyuan acknowledges this “best quality” and celebrate this aspect of her daughter with the gift of the pendant. However, Jing-mei doesn’t realize her mother’s love and acknowledgement until her mother’s death. In the process of daughter’s growing up, Suyuan’s inflated expectations and excessive pressure backfire, contributing to Jing-mei’s failure to achieve what she might have achieved if left to herself. The failure renders Jing-mei to become a sensitive girl lack of confidence. Although Jing-mei admires her mother’s spirits of independence, bravery and willpower as gender model, the misunderstanding between them hinders her from developing these qualities. As a result, Jing-mei grows up to be a sensitive and modest girl, who is at the same time lacks confidence and bravery.
　　2)Waverly: The Invisible Strength
　　Likewise, although Waverly successfully builds a lucrative career as an attorney, she still lacks confidence, and seeks for her mother’s confirmation. Waverley has been a model of success, but the daughter always misunderstood and resisted her mother. In fact, the mother and daughter are the same kind of people: they both have the ability of hiding the thoughts and have invisible strength. They are playing a silent game. Although the daughter is still a young girl, she desires to be independent and seeks for the self-worth through rejecting any intervention from her mother. While the daughter is in the state described by Flax as “the daughter is left in a painful conflict between needing to be nurtured by her mother and the desire for her autonomy”(Flax 25), the mother, for the sake of remedying the lost maternal love, considers the daughter’s honor as a part of her own worth and believes her behavior is reasonable. Struggling between the desire for self-worth and the reliance on mother’s support, the daughter is in a dilemma. Thus, the feeling of Waverly to her mother is both anger and love. This complex of feeling accompanies her to her adulthood: her failure of the first marriage, which is against the mother’s will and her lack of confidence in the second boyfriend Rich. The daughter is eager to win the confirmation from her mother and at the same time desperately angry at her mother’s ignorance of her hints.
　　4.Conclusion
　　The daughters in The Joy Luck Club, by identifying with the mother’s gender identities as victims of patriarchy, construct their own gender identities with the qualities of independence, bravery, and willpower. Although the feeling of the daughters to their mothers can be described as ambivalent, Tan emphasizes the blood bond between them-love between the mothers and the daughters is an uncuttable bond. Tan use this essentialist approach to precondition their identification. There are two kinds of mothers and they play different roles in the formation of daughter’s gender identities. The first group of mothers is strong mothers who play the role of gender models. Although the daughters admire them, the control the strong mothers impose on their daughters results in the ambivalence between them. The other group of mothers is weak mothers who play the role of mirror images, in which the daughters reflect and reexamine themselves and realize their submission and passivity in the face of patriarchy and sexism. The significance of breaking silence is that it not only subverts the distorted stereotypes imposed on Chinese American women but also provides the two generations with the opportunities of constructing their gender identity – walking out of the patriarchal oppression, gaining economical independent and building an autonomic self.
　　
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