Critique Essay on the First Section of the ‘Joy Luck Club’ – Presentation of the first four chapters in terms of their context, plot and writing technique– Reflections drawn on the reading of these four chapters
[The author’s name]
Abstract
This paper will present you with the critique essay on the First Four Chapters of the ‘Joy Luck Club’. The essay will present you with an overview of the plot of ‘The Joy Luck Club’ and will emphasize on the plot, narrative technique and characters of the first four chapters. Each chapter is a different story which is combined to the general plot of the book and is in close relationship with each other, all serving the main idea and message that the writer wishes to put across
Key words: daughters, mothers, love, Jing-mei Woo, An-mei Hsu, Lindo Jong, Ying-ying St. Clair
Critique Essay on the First Section of the ‘Joy Luck Club’ – Presentation of the first four chapters in terms of their context, plot and writing technique– Reflections drawn on the reading of these four chapters
[The author’s name]
Amy Tan who is the writer of ‘The Joy Luck Club’, has written sixteen stories strongly bonded between them through a common thematic core. Each story explores the aspects of the relationship developed between a daughter and a mother. There are actually four daughters who give one by one in each one of the first four chapters their own personal point of view and experience as far as their relationship with their mother is concerned.
Jing-mei Woo, An-mei, Lindo Jong and Ying-ying St. Clair are four young women who go back towards their childhood and early adulthood depicting moments of their relationship with their mother.
It is common knowledge that the relationship developed between a mother and a daughter is a love and hate relationship which is not always easy to be interpreted or analyzed.
Reading the four recollections of these four women’s personal stories, the reader sees a writer, a woman writer who seems to have begun an effort with her pen to find her personal catharsis as far as her own relationship with her own mother is concerned.
Jing-mei Woo is a girl whose mother began and established the Joy Luck Club, where nowadays, at the moment of narration she is standing trying to replace her mother’s emptiness caused by her mother’s death. Jing tries to pave her own route in life having in mind the trouble caused by her awareness that she may really know nothing about the woman who gave birth to her. She wonders ‘“What will I say? What can I tell them about my mother? I don’t know anything.’ revealing thus her inner quest which seems impossible to find its treasure land.
Maybe the only way for Jing-mei Woo to approach her mother is serving her post.
The second chapter has the second female name as a title and tells the reader how a scar can be healed. The scar of the second chapter is used both literally and metaphorically. An-mei’s grandmother seems to have had a troubling relationship with her daughter but when she got sick, it was her daughter who saved her life. So the scar was healed with a piece of flesh of An-mei Hsu’s mother. It appears that the writer leaves a window open to how a scar metaphorically speaking can be healed. Even after of years of negligence or lack of attention the reader is given the message that a scar can always be healed.
Lindo – Jong in the third chapter is a woman who is still tortured by not feeling able to find herself. She seems to have entered an endless maze created by the advice given to her by her parents. All this advice seems to have reached a dead end. She says ‘I made a promise to myself: I would always remember my parents’ wishes, but I would never forget myself.’ So another question is risen here by the writer herself. How can love and respect to one’s parents be separated from pressure? Taking into consideration that the writer herself had experienced tremendous pressure by her mother as far as her career is concerned, one can easily understand that the writer here finds the chance to meet her readers with a question of significant importance. Loving somebody who is to be your child may seem a piece of cake, but managing to love your child without limiting his / her freedom is not as easy as it seems. The writer may even want to arise awareness in what parental love is about with more emphasis on the real meaning and nature that a mother’s love is to be about.
In the fourth chapter Ying –ying recalls a festival which has been playing a great role oin her personality’s evolution. During that festival she lost contact with her family. These moments during which she was looking for her parents intrigued her inner need to define and look for herself on her own.
It is this moment of losing contact or touch with someone who is functioning as a kind of compass for your self-definition of what you are to be, who you are and where you are heading to, that the writer highlights here.
Conclusion
Approaching these four chapters critiqually, one could support that the inner interplay developed on behalf of Amy Tan in The Joy Luck Club is a representation of what a writing talent is meant to be. Amy Tan approaches the relationship, the mixed and troubling feelings developed in the soul of people within the context of complex relationships like the ones developed between mothers and daughters, the issue of personal quests developed within one’s self through the presentation of recollections of women.
If memory is to function as a means of correcting ourselves or even better of giving ourselves the opportunity to go after a better chance in their living well, then Amy tan certainly sheds light to the dark tunnel of her readers’ souls.
