Women as the other: Ethnic feminist success in the art of the opposites

An Analysis of Sandra Cisneros The House on Mango Street and Amy Tans The Joy Luck Club

Presented by Autumn FrykholmENG 3705 Multicultural Literature Women as the other: Ethnic feminist success in the art of the opposites

A Tale of Two Texts

Published in 1989 huge successAuthor Amy Tan was born in 1952 in Northern CaliforniaChinese-American just like many of her charactersThe Joy Luck Club was Tans biggest successMovie adaption came out in 1993

Summary

Sixteen episodes pertaining the intertwining lives of Chinese mothers and their Chinese-American daughters

Begins and ends with Jing-mei Woos story, the daughter of a Chinese mother who passed away. She travels to China to be reunited with her two half-sisters she has never met from her mothers first marriage

Jing-meis mother had created an optimistic group for her and her Chinese friends in China and again in San Francisco. It is there that Jing-mei learns of her other family in China.

More SummaryThe mothers worry that their daughters will not remember them in the way they want to be remembered when they are gone.

The daughters worry about their own marriages and sense of freedom.

The mothers and daughters are so busy thinking about how they are perceived by each other that they often do not see what they have in common with each other.

When the mothers and daughters reconcile their differences, many of their problems are solved.

In the last episode, Jing-mei is reunited with her sisters in China

Relational Identity Formation?

In her essay on The Joy Luck Club, Wong writes that fate does not determine the admiration of a novel like Tans but rather a convergence of ethnic group-specific literary tradition and ideological needs by the white-dominated readership including the feminist readership for the Others presence as both mirror and differentiator (Wong 177).

She was a horse woman too, born like me in the Chinese year of the horse which is supposed to be bad luck if youre born female but I think this is a Chinese lie because the Chinese, like the Mexicans, dont like their women strong (Cisneros 10).She looked out the window her whole life, the way so many women sit their sadness on an elbow I have inherited her name, but I dont want to inherit her place by the window (Cisneros 11).

Works CitedCisneros, Sandra.The House on Mango Street. New York: Vintage, 1984. Print.

Kalay, Faruk. "The Women Figures and the Notion of 'Home' in Sandra Cisneros' The House on Mango Street."Journal of Graduate School of Social Sciences17.1 (2013): 117-26.Ebsco. Web. 19 July 2016.

Tan, Amy.The Joy Luck Club. New York: Penguin, 1989. Print.

Wong, Sau-Ling Cynthia. ""Sugar Sisterhood": Situating the Amy Tan Phenomenon."The Ethnic Canon: Histories, Institutions, and Interventions. Ed. David Palumbo-Liu. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota, 1995. 174-210. Print.