谭恩美长篇小说中母女矛盾分析——以《接骨师之女》为例

论文总字数：34991字

摘 要

谭恩美长篇小说描述了二代移民女儿与母亲的矛盾，通过对矛盾的剖析，解释了矛盾的原因，找到了解决移民关于文化身份认同方面的困惑的方法。本文运用精神分析法，通过对人物心理活动的分析，探究矛盾的根源所在。本文得出结论：文化差异是不可避免的，但这并不意味着文化是对立的。面临文化差异，我们应当主动学习、了解，以解决发生在种族和代际之间的文化代沟。

关键词：谭恩美；母女矛盾；文化差异 ；《接骨师之女》

Contents

1. Introduction…………………………………………………………………1
   1. Research purpose and methodology………...………………………………1
   2. Writing background…………………………………………………………2

1.3 Introduction to American Chinese literature………………………………...3

2. Literature Review……………………………………………………...……4

2.1 Researches at home………………………...………………………..……....4

2.2 Researches abroad……………………………………………………….......5

3.The Conflicts between the Mothers and Daughters……………………….5

3.1 Collisions in family…………….……………………………...…………….6

3.2 Collisions on sex ethic……………..……………………………….……….8

4.The Reasons of the Conflicts between Mothers and Daughters…..…...….8

4.1The mothers and daughters rooting in different cultures……………...….….8

4.2The mothers having psychological traumas………………..……….….…….9

4.3The mothers and daughters having different identities…….………….........10

5.The Reconciliation of the Mother-Daughter Relation………….………...11

6. Conclusion………………………………………………………………….12

Works Cited…………………………………………………………….13

1. Introduction
   1. Research purpose and methodology

1.1.1 Research purpose

With the development of economic globalization, transnational and cross-cultural population migrations have developed rapidly. The World Migration Report 2018, released jointly by the International Organization for Migration and Center for China and Globalization, shows that international migrations reached 244 million in 2015. Nowadays, due to the needs of work, education and so on, more and more Chinese people need to live abroad. On the other hand, Western countries, represented by the United States, continue to export culture and ideology to the world in the form of film, musical, literature and so on. After the reform and opening-up, Chinese young people began to absorb Western cultural ideas, and had disagreements and even contradictions with their parents who grew up in traditional culture, for example, differences in the notion of marriage and family, of the LGBT community that are widely discussed in today"s world. The younger generation are on the front line of cultural communications and cultural conflicts, and many of them have encountered the chaos of cultural identity, and they do not know what to choose when the Western culture represented by the United States contradicts the traditional Chinese culture. At the same time, the living situation of American Chinese and their achievements are hot topics in China. In the field of literature, Amy Tan is a typical American Chinese writer. This paper intends to study Amy Tan’s full-length novels, according to the conflict between the two generations in the works, analyze the contradictions and root causes of them between mother and daughter representing two kinds of cultures, explore the methods and significance of their reconciliation, and draw the enlightenment of solving the conflicts.

1.1.2 Research methodology

This paper uses the methodology of Psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis is Freud"s psychological analysis method. he divides people"s psychological activities into consciousness, former consciousness and subconscious mind. Freud put forward that literature is a daydream and a means for the author to realize the unsatisfied desire in reality in disguise. Amy Tan"s novels have a strong sense of autobiography, which involves a large number of psychological descriptions to show the character"s mental state and psychological activities. She passed on her conflict with her mother to the mothers and daughters in the novels, expressing her confusion through the daughters in the novel, thus releasing mental stress and obtaining relief in the process of writing. Amy Tan in the prose collection My Muse pointed out that the purpose of her writing is to write the confusion in life. In the book she also repeatedly mentioned psychological analysis, hoping to use the way of mind monologue to express complex human nature and excavate the deep self. This paper uses psychoanalysis to describe a large number of psychological activities in the novel, combined with context, to explore the characters’ inner world, find the causes for the contradictions, and explore the influence of race, culture and society on the psychology, self-construction and cultural identity of the characters.

1.2 Writing background

Amy Tan has wrote five full-length novels and most of them involve the mother-daughter relationship. Among them, The Kitchen God"s Wife, The Joy Luck Club and The Bonesetter"s Daughter directly described and discussed the theme. The mode of mother-daughter relationship in Amy Tan"s novels can be summarized as "contradiction to reconciliation".

Amy Tan"s novels have strong sense of autobiography. Like the daughters in her works, Amy Tan is also a second-generation immigrant and has various contradictions with her mother.

Amy Tan"s parents came to the United States to escape the war and chaos in China. Compared with other second-generation immigrants, Amy Tan has a more blended family. Her father believed in Christ while her mother believed in Chinese curses and lucks. Amy Tan has been facing more cultural conflicts and contradictions since she was born, which has also intensified her confusion about her own life. Tan said, "I am full of contradictions. ... I am full of wavering questions." Just like Ruth, on the one hand, she is accustomed to the mainstream modern culture in the United States; on the other hand, the Chinese cultural genes inherited from her mother can’t be ignored. The two cultures have completely different ideas in some aspects, making her confused. Her father John was an electrical engineer and Baptist minister which means he came from a decent family and received good education, but unfortunately, he died from brain tumor when Amy was still young, and on the other hand, he believed in the western modern culture recognized by Amy Tan, which may could explain why the roles of fathers are in obscurity in her works on the theme of mother-daughter contradiction.

Her mother Daisy was the prototype of the mothers in her works. Daisy had a very miserable experience. She left four kids in chaos China and one died young, and her mother’s suicide had a profound influence on her so that she often threatened Amy to kill herself in quarrels. Like other conventional Chinese parent, Daisy tended to intervene Amy’s private life and she applied strict education methods, which was ridiculous and unacceptable to Amy Tan who is rooted in American culture and values. The facts mentioned above contributed to the bad relationship between Amy Tan and her mother Daisy. In 1999, Amy Tan"s mother and editor died within two weeks. After losing her mother, like the daughter in the novel, she found something she didn"t know in sorting out her mother"s belongings. She felt guilty for not willing to know her mother.

1.3 Introduction to American Chinese literature

Since the gold rush in the western United States in the mid-19th century, countless Chinese have gone to the United States to pursue their dream of wealth and fortune. However, racial discrimination kept Chinese at the bottom of American society. Even today, this situation has not changed. Therefore, in the mainstream American culture, the image of Chinese is defaced and distorted, thus giving birth to the classic Hollywood image of Fu Manchu. This kind of racial and cultural hegemony makes Chinese felt inferior and Chinese literature deviated from Chinese civilization.

In the second half of the 20th century, the rise of the "civil rights movement" of black Americans triggered a great change in the political and cultural life of the entire American society. A series of ideological trends such as the "feminist movement", "anti-Vietnam war" and "minority rights" converged into a post-modern trend of anti-tradition, anti-authority and anti-center, which were helpful for the Chinese groups who has always been considered conservative, marginal and weak, to attract the attention and earn respect from the mainstream American society. In addition, since the 1970s, Sino-US relation has acquired detente, and the concept of global integration has been gradually gaining popularity. Therefore, American-Chinese literature was widely accepted in the trend of anti-authority and anti-center. American Chinese writers represented by Maxine Hong Kingston and Amy Tan led American Chinese literature to change the situation of mocking and joking Chinese culture and start a new wave of promoting Chinese culture.

American Chinese writers are mostly second-generation immigrants. In terms of psychological identification, they think they are native Americans. They receive American education and pursue mainstream American values. In the eyes of Americans, however, they are Chinese and “others” in American society, so they do not entertain and give enough respect to American Chinese. On the other hand, the Chinese cultural genes inherited from their parents also make them confused and even bring them trauma in cultural conflicts. This is not a problem unique to Chinese, but a common puzzle faced by all ethnic minorities. Therefore, the self-identity of ethnic minorities in mainstream culture is an eternal topic.

2. Literature Review

Amy Tan"s works mainly describe the confusions of immigrant families about their self-identities and the conflicts between two generations due to different culture and age gap. They are important references for the study of American Chinese literature and the living conditions of Chinese communities at home and abroad. With the development of globalization and more and more people going to work and live in the United States, it is of great significance to study Amy Tan"s works to solve the difficulties of ethnic minorities.

2.1 Researches at home

Domestic researches on Amy Tan mainly focus on cross-cultural research, such as cultural conflicts between China and the United States, and cultural identity of immigrant descendants, and there is not much research on the mother-daughter relationship. Many Researchers study The Bonesetter’s Daughter from the perspectives of cultural differences, living conditions, and other sociological issues about ethnic minorities. Some Chinese scholars, such as Liu Liu, have studied the trauma of the characters in Amy Tan"s works and explored the identity reconstruction of ethnic minorities. Su Ying studied the generation gap of Chinese immigrant families.

2.2 Researches abroad

Foreign researches on Amy Tan"s works can be divided into the following three aspects:

First, ethnic studies. The focus of this kind of researches is to explore the living conditions of Chinese ethnic minorities from a sociological perspective, and to study their history, culture, values, etc. The researches from the ethnic perspective deeply explore the marginal status, psychological pressure and living conditions of ethnic minorities in the mainstream society.

Second, feminist interpretation. The mothers of the first generation of immigrants in the novel were all brave people who came to the United States in order to get rid of domestic misfortune and injustice. Some of them fled away from feudal marriage bravely, while others fought against the enemy for the national property. They represented the women"s rights.

Third, research on cultural differences. When Amy Tan"s novels emerged, Chinese culture were hardly known by Americans. The conflicts between mothers and daughters are cultural conflicts. Mothers and daughters in the works are the representatives of Chinese culture and American culture. Through the description of Chinese tradition, the relationships between mothers and daughters, and the end of reconciliations between mothers and daughters, Amy Tan"s novels showed her correct attitude towards culture through the dissolution of American Orientalism. She inherited the mother culture, absorbed the new culture, and finds a balance in cultural conflicts, thus truly realizing the recognition of differences and mutual respect advocated by multiculturalism.

3. The Conflicts between the Mother and Daughter

In Amy Tan"s novels The Joy Luck Club, The Kitchen God"s Wife, The Bonesetter"s Daughter, Saving Fish from Drowning, and The Hundred Secret Senses, there are mothers from China who fled the disaster. With their hopes for a new life, they defected to the United States and formed new families. Although they lived in the United States, they still spoke Chinese, ate Chinese food, educated their daughters with traditional Chinese culture and morality, and their social circle is almost entirely Chinese. In short, these mothers were firmly resistant to Americanization. The daughters lived in the United States, grew up in the American education system and actively integrated into the mainstream American culture. Moreover, in the 1990s, Chinese culture was a marginal culture in the United States. American Chinese people hardly agreed with Chinese culture. They abandoned Chinese culture and wanted to be thorough Americans. Mothers hoped that their children can combine the American environment with the Chinese character, but it was impossible for children in their growing period to reconcile the contradictions between the two cultures. Maxine Hong Kinston once said, "I kept classifying: childhood, imagination, family, village, film, existence", which has caused the confusions on self-identity for children. In addition, the "Chinese character" that many Chinese parents are fond of talking about mainly refers to the traditional Confucian ethics, such as filial piety, modesty, patriarchal center, etc., which deviates from the modern life style of the United States and is even more incompatible with the freedom and belief of personality. As a result, the daughters did not understand the mother"s good intention, and even misunderstood and rejected their mothers’ care. They thought that it was an out dated and autocratic bad habit and an interference in their private lives. Along with the common problems of adolescent children and parents, the mother-daughter contradictions became estrangement.

3.1 Collisions on family

The contradiction between mother and daughter begins with Chinese parents" control over their children, including their control over making friends and studying.

In The Bonesetter"s Daughter, the first contradiction between Lu Ling and Ruth was making friends. During Ruth"s childhood, Lu Ling found a dirty girl near their home. The girl"s name was Teresa. She had two missing front teeth, a scar on one knee, a lot of dirty fingerprints on her skirt, and she also ate candy picked up from the sidewalk. As a mother, Lu Ling was worried that her daughter might be infected with germs, so she warned her daughter not to play with her because she had many bacteria. But as a child, Ruth did not have so many scruples. She liked Teresa. This kind of control over children"s interpersonal communication lasted to Ruth"s adolescence. 17-year-old Ruth made a friend named Lisa and also formed the habit of smoking and hanging out on the beach. Lu Ling naturally linked smoking with Lisa. Subconsciously, she felt that her daughter had been brought down by this girl named Lisa, so she opposed the two girls" association. Each time Ruth came home late, she would ask discontentedly, "Did you go out with that Lisa again?" Later, the conflict broke out when the daughters made boyfriends. Mothers did not support them to make non-Chinese boyfriends, fearing that their daughters would be tricked and abandoned in the sexually open American society.

Family conflicts also existed in the mothers’ cultivation of the daughter"s talents. Different from ordinary western families, eastern families pay attention to the education of their children, especially their studies. Mothers hoped their daughters became better people and got better development. In The Joy Luck Club, Suyuan cleaned the piano teacher"s room to get a chance for her daughter to learn piano. Lindo vigorously trained Waverley to play chess and was proud of her daughter and showed off to everyone she met. However, the daughters who were bound by their mothers eventually rebelled and erupted.

The most typical mother-daughter conflict was the mother"s interference with her daughter"s privacy. From the Chinese mothers’ point of views, children must be obedient and subject to discipline. Parents had more social experience and never make wrong decisions, so everything must be under their control and supervision. For example, Suyuan said to her daughter in The Joy Luck Club that there were only two kinds of daughters, those who listened to adults and those who did not listen to adults. Only one kind of daughter can live in this house, and that was the obedient daughter. However, Lu Ling"s practice was even more inappropriate. She chose to peek at her daughter"s diary. She learned her daughter"s recent situation and favorite songs from her diary, not language communication. Ruth, unable to defend herself, wrote a huge “stop” on the title page of her diary. These concerns which seem natural for eastern parents were invasions of their privacy for daughters who accepted western mainstream culture.

3.2 Collisions on sex ethics

In Amy Tan"s novels, most mothers experienced miserable marriages or witnessed their own mothers" miserable marriages. Therefore, they actively intervened in the marriage of their daughters, fearing that misfortunes would recur to their daughters. In the sexually open mainstream American society, they worried that their daughters will not be cherished and respected by American men, and they were even more afraid that their daughters would be philandered and abandoned. However, in the eyes of the daughters who pursued independence and freedom, such interference is superfluous.

However, it turned out that due to the hidden cultural differences, the daughters did not handle marriage and gender relations very well. After Rose got married, due to racial differences, she unconsciously became a husband-centered person with no personality. She tried to transfer the docile traditional wife of the Chinese family to the western family but she failed. However, Lina was superstitious about the independent spirit and believed that the AA lifestyle with her husband was avant-garde and reasonable. As time went by, she gradually realized that this was not a way of life, but that her husband was arbitrary and selfish and did not love her at all. Mothers did not agree with the notion of sexual openness. They toughly believed that women should be more reserved and self-loving, otherwise men will probably take them seriously.

4. The Reasons of the Conflicts Between the Mother-Daughter Relation

Amy Tan"s novels are autobiographical. But as a typical second-generation Chinese, she showed the perplexity faced by all ethnic minorities in the United States. The contradictions are not only caused by the cultural conflict, but also by political, economic and other factors.

4.1 The mothers and daughters rooting in different cultures

First, in terms of family order, mothers believed that children should respect and obey their parents. In the novels, mothers from China brought traditional Chinese values to the United States. They thought they should make decisions for everything and their children must obey them. For example, in The Bonesetter"s Daughter, Lu Ling warned Ruth not to go to the beach after school and not to hang on with Lisa again. When her daughter found out that she was peeking at her diary, she began to equivocate and resolutely refused to admit it. However, she would still think that daughters should not keep secrets from their mothers. However, children who grew up in American culture believed that they shared equal status with parents. They resisted the interference from their mother.

Second, due to rooting in different cultures, mothers and daughters encountered many obstacles. Immigrant mothers passed on Chinese culture and expressed themselves in an implicit way, while their daughters learned a direct and self-centered way of thinking under the influence of American culture, making it difficult for mothers and daughters to communicate. When Ruth was a child, her mother seldom showed her a gentle flour. For example, Lu Ling often said that her daughter"s brain was missing a half, which led to her daughter was still felt sad about it in her middle age. Ruth said that she would treat handicapped students on an equal footing with everyone and would not criticize their mistakes. After Lu Ling suffered from Alzheimer"s disease, Ruth wanted to send her to a nursing home. Lu Ling didn"t want to put any financial burden to her daughter, but she expressed it in a strange way, she said those places were all terrible. Naturally, her daughter didn"t know her intention. Unlike Americans, Chinese people are shy to express their care and gratitude to others.

4.2 The mothers having psychological traumas

Amy Tan Shaped a group of mothers who had unfortunate family-of-origin and marriages in the novels. Some of them suffered the misfortunes from the family-of-origin. A family-of-origin is a family in which a child lives with parents when he or she is a minor. The family-of-origin has a great influence on the character and personality of the children, while the depression of the mother is closely related to the anxiety and depression of the children, even they grow into adults, and it is also easy to cause the bad perfectionism of the children. When children who grow up in unhealthy primary families form new families, a considerable proportion of them are disturbed by the harm suffered by their native families when educating the next generation.

Amy Tan"s novels showed the negative effects from the unfortunate family-of-origin on the immigrant mothers, as well as the contradictions caused by the misfortunes suffered by the mothers in their early years. Lu Ling determined to marry the son of the man who killed her father so she had a huge contradiction with her mother Precious Auntie, later Precious Auntie suicided herself in order to protect Lu Ling. Precious Auntie"s suicide had become the spiritual burden of Lu Ling"s life, she lived in the guilt for her mother and her imaginary curse. When Ruth wrote a few words on the ground, Lu Ling thought her mother had appeared so she confessed anxiously to the air. After her husband died in a car accident, she was more afraid of Chinese curses. Every day she feared the arrival of doom and curses, so she was neurotic to protect her daughter from damages, which brought contradictions to her and her daughter. Another part of the mothers suffered the misfortune of early marriages. Winnie, the mother from The Kitchen God’s Wife, was tortured by her husband and came to the United States. She protected her daughter at all times, which was a sign of post-traumatic stress disorder.

Freud believed that what was repressed in the early years did not disappear as a result of the passage of time, but was lurking, and when conditions were in place, those emotions would arise again. Although these mothers had fled China and their original families, the misfortunes and pains they had suffered would be with them throughout their lives. They may had already got out of control in some situations, such as Amy Tan"s mother who once hysterically threatened her with suicide. So, when Ruth learned about her mother"s past experiences through Lu Ling"s manuscript, she felt that everything could be explained.

• 1. The mothers and daughters having different identities

The identity is an important concept in social science, which mainly deals with three questions: Who am I? Where am I from? Where will I go? The differences between mothers and daughters’ egos and identifications in American society and their self-perception also triggered to contradictions. Unlike immigrant mothers, the daughters considered themselves as native Americans. For example, in The Bonesetter"s Daughter, adolescent Ruth shouted that she was an American when arguing with her mother. In the process of mother"s communication with other ethnic Chinese, the daughters positioned themselves as outsiders and bystanders. They never took the initiative to participate in the communication. They didn’t build relationships with Chinese deliberately, and unlike their parents they didn’t have special feeling such as family affection for Chinese.

However, in the eyes of Americans, Chinese Americans are still Chinese. They inherit Chinese culture, and they are ethnic minorities outside the mainstream society, and they are “others” in the society. Americans Chinese cannot completely abandon the influence of Chinese culture on them, which is a dual identity of the “other”, so they are in a dilemma. Chinese parents hope that their children living in the United States can become the perfect combination of "American environment and Chinese character", and this kind of education will put the next generation in the dilemma and contradiction between the two culture from an early age.

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