摘 要

凭借处女作《喜福会》，谭恩美成为一位杰出的、颇具影响力的女作家，并在美国华裔文学中占有举足轻重的地位。然而，在她的笔下，中国男性长相丑陋、无耻邪恶和平庸无能，这与高大威武的美国男性形成鲜明对比，也与中国传统文学中英勇无畏的男性形象不符。

本文将从华裔文学的兴起、中国传统思想的背景、美国主流文化的影响和女性意识的觉醒这四个方面对《喜福会》中中西方男性人物形象的成因进行分析。

本文包含六个章节。第一章是作家作品介绍和文献综述。第二章是小说中中西方男性人物的具体介绍。第三章是华裔文学的兴起的简述，包含对东方主义视角下他者化形象的阐述。第四章是两种不同文化影响的分析，包括中国传统文化和美国主流文化。第五章是女性意识的觉醒的分析。第六章是结论。通过文本细读和文化研究，我们可以更好地理解《喜福会》中中西方男性人物形象的成因。

关键词：《喜福会》 ；男性形象；女性意识；华裔文学

Abstract

By right of her debut novel The Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan has established her position as an outstanding and influential woman writer in Chinese-American literature. However, the Chinese male characters in her works play an ugly, evil and incompetent role in her works that is completely different from the righteous role of American male characters, and also the heroic role in traditional Chinese literature.

This paper aims to analyze the shaping of Chinese and American male characters in The Joy Luck Club from the aspects of the rise of Chinese-American literature, the engrained traditional Chinese ideology, the impacts of mainstream American culture and the awakening of feminist consciousness.

The paper consists of six chapters. The first chapter is an introduction to the writer, her works and literature review. The second chapter is a specific introduction of male characters in this novel, including Chinese male characters and American male characters. The third chapter is a brief introduction of the rise of Chinese-American literature, including an elaboration on “The Other” in Orientalism. The fourth chapter is the analysis of the impacts of traditional Chinese culture and mainstream American culture. The fifth chapter is the analysis of the awakening of feminist consciousness. The last chapter is the conclusion. Through close reading and cultural studies, we can have a better understanding of the shaping of Chinese and American male characters in The Joy Luck Club and why Amy Tan has done so.

Key Words: The Joy Luck Club; male characters; feminist consciousness; Chinese-American literature

Contents

1 Introduction 4

1.1 Amy Tan and Her Works 4

1.2 Literature Review 5

2 Male Characters in The Joy Luck Club 8

2.1 The Image of Chinese Male Characters 8

2.2 The Image of American Male Characters 9

3 The Rise of Chinese-American Literature 10

3.1 The Rise of Chinese-American Literature 10

3.2 “The Other” in Orientalism 11

4 Analysis of the Impacts of Culture 14

4.1 The Impacts of Traditional Chinese Culture 14

4.2 The Impacts of Mainstream American Culture 16

5 Analysis of the Awakening of Feminist Consciousness 19

6 Conclusions 22

6.1 Summary 22

6.2 Limitations and Further Study 23

References 24

Acknowledgements 26

An Analysis on the Shaping of Chinese and American Male Characters in The Joy Luck Club

1 Introduction

1.1 Amy Tan and Her Works

Amy Tan is an outstanding Chinese-American woman writer, who was born on 19 February, 1952. Her father John is an electrical engineer and Baptist minister who travels to the United States in order to escape the chaos of the Chinese Civil War, with her mother Daisy Tan. Thus it provides a dual cultural environment, both Chinese and American for Amy Tan, from the moment of her birth.

Amy Tan is the second of three children, and the only girl. She grew up in Northern California, but after her father and older brother both died of brain tumors in 1966, she moved with her mother and younger brother to Europe, where she attended high school in Switzerland. In 1969, Amy Tan went to San Jose City College in California, where Amy Tan met her future husband on a blind date. In San Jose State University, Amy Tan received her bachelor's and master's degrees in English and linguistics. Then she engaged herself in doctoral studies in linguistics at UC Santa Cruz and UC Berkeley, but then abandoned her doctoral studies in 1976.

During her lifetime, Amy Tan wrote several novels, including The Joy Luck Club (1989), The Kitchen God's Wife(1991), The Hundred Secret Senses(1995), The Bonesetter's Daughter(2001), Saving Fish from Drowning(2005), and The Valley of Amazement(2013). Among all these novels, she mostly focused on the relationship between the first generation of women immigrants and their American-born daughters. She also wrote a collection of non-fiction essays entitled The Opposite of Fate: A Book of Musings(2003). Additionally, her two other children's books The Moon Lady and Sagwa, the Chinese Siamese Cat had published in 1992 and 1994 respectively. In 1989, by right of her best known work The Joy Luck Club, which consists of sixteen related stories about the diverse experiences of four Chinese-American mother-daughter pairs, Amy Tan got National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award. Then Amy Tan frankly said that her inspiration came from her mother's former experiences in China that she married another man and had four children (a son who died as a toddler and three daughters), especially the traumatic experiences of how her mother left her three daughters behind in Shanghai. Moreover, director Wayne Wang adapted the book into a film in 1993.

1.2 Literature Review

The Chinese-American environment in San Francisco provides the major background of characters in Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club. There are four families in this novel - the Woos, the Jongs, the Hsus, and the St. Clairs. What they all have in common is the complex mother-daughter relation. Therefore, according to the stories of Chinese mothers and American-born daughters, The Joy Luck Club is rated as a paradigm to study the intricate links between Chinese and American culture.

Currently, the study of The Joy Luck Club mostly focuses on the three aspects followed. The first aspect is study on the theme of this novel. Based on the conflicts between eastern and western cultures, scholars aim to dig out the immigrants’ identities in a foreign country. Delucchi offers a unique insight into the psychological processes of the immigrants’ identities (Delucchi, 1998). Dai analyzes the differences of conjugal relations and social rules in eastern and western cultures, in order to boost the intercultural communication and eliminate the cultural barriers (Wenbo Dai,2016). The second aspect is study on the feminism. Through studying the works of Chinese-American writers as Maxine Hong Kingston and Amy Tan, scholars intend to figure out the development of the female characters in Chinese-American literature. In this regard, Beyond Feminist Aesthetics (Felski, 1989) and The Rise of The Chinese-American Literature and Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club (Lili Bao, 2003) are two wonderful examples. The last aspect is study on the narrative features in this novel. From the angles of modernism, collage technique and so on, scholars aim to analyze the structural features in Amy Tan’s works. In Chen’s Analysis the Gender Conflicts of The Joy Luck Club, she aims at finding out Amy Tan’s writing features through exploring the growth and transformation of the female characters, from the perspectives of narrative voice, narrative language features and narrative contents (Chen, 2016).

Nevertheless, only a few scholars study and investigate it from the perspective of the male characters so that the male characters in The Joy Luck Club have not received enough attention, let alone the differences between Chinese male characters and American male characters in it.

Domestically, The Male Characters Reflected in The Joy Luck Club talks about the male characters’ marginalized masculinity in The Joy Luck Club according to R. W. Connell’s masculinity theory. The author claims that it is the marginalized status of males that makes for females’ perversely central place (Ting Wu, 2017). Similarly, Liu says that most Chinese males in this novel are not masculine (Yi Liu, 2016). In addition, Shao focuses on the influences of mainstream American culture, as the fundamental cause, to discuss the frail, diminished figure of Chinese males described by Amy Tan. She finds that there are three reasons against the background of mainstream American culture. First of all, almost all Chinese males are regarded as the sick men due to the opium war. Inevitably, when writing about Chinese male characters, Amy Tan is more or less influenced by public opinion. Secondly, the American people look down upon the cheap Chinese workers with an innate sense of superiority then. They consider themselves as masters while the Chinese men as servants. Lastly, the American heroism always proposes that men and women are equal, so some writers deliberately uglify the Chinese men for catering to Americans (Li Shao, 2016).

There are fewer cases abroad. The western critics mainly focus on her unique role in connecting Sino-US culture. The Economist argues that, “Spirit-ridden past casts its shadow on the present for Amy Tan, a Chinese-American writer who has built a formidable reputation by describing the cross-cultural confusion of her people” (The Economist, 2001). Aitken claims that, “In Amy Tan’s novel, parents become the guardian-teachers of essential notions of a mainland Chinese identity, while their American-born children negotiate the contradictory claims of Chineseness on the one hand and forces of assimilation in middle class America on the other” (Aitken, 2008).