The voices of mothers and daughters as "a double voice," articulated by Marianne Hirsch, one of the keynote feminist maternal scholars in the late 1980s, captures the full spirit of Western feminists' preoccupation with the literature of matrilineage[1] in conjunction with an ongoing feminist pursuit of retrieving maternal subjectivity. The literary representations of mother-daughter voices in contemporary matrilineal narratives open up a new chapter in the recent feminist development of repositioning maternal subjectivity from a feminist liberal and individualistic stance - mothers as individuals and subjects of their own - to that of a feminist intersubjective one. This repositioning sheds new light on a feminist revisit of relationality in the field of feminist maternal scholarship.[2] The integration of mother-daughter voices as "a double voice" bespeaks the mother-daughter relationship as merging and interdependent. But this "double voice," which elicits "a multiple female consciousness," also indicates "the story of female development" with the co-presence of two subjects (mothers and daughters) encompassing both resonance and differences in their interactions with one another.

In contemporary feminist theory, feminist psychoanalysis in particular, Jessica Benjamin advances her rendition of intersubjectivity to describe a state of empathetic attunement in the early mother-child relationship. Although the mother-child model Benjamin uses in her book, The Bonds of Love, does not refer specifically to a mother-daughter one, her contention of intersubjectivity that accentuates both the individuality and the doubleness of two subjects, that of a mother and of her child, affords an illuminating way of looking at mother-daughter voices as "a double voice." In contemporary women's fiction, Amy Tan, has been for the past decade an acclaimed and prolific writer on mother-daughter relationships. In her creative experiments with storytelling - in particular, in her international bestseller, The Joy Luck Club - Tan explores mother-daughter voices consistently and persuasively.

This paper attempts to strike a link between Benjamin's and Tan's works by investigating how maternal subjectivity, filtered through a psychoanalytic feminist viewpoint of intersubjectivity, can possibly be envisioned, articulated and synthesised in the literary creativity of mother-daughter voices. Benjamin's psychoanalytic tenet, founded upon a crucial developmental stage in early mother-child relationship, does not coincide exactly with Tan's delineations of adult mother-daughter relationships at a much later life stage of this female development. However, Benjamin's adaptation of psychoanalytic relationality into a feminist intersubjective attunement with the (m)other[3] provides a constructive and dynamic reading of the mother-daughter dialogic writing in Tan's novel.

My selection of Tan's The Joy Luck Club serves two main purposes. One is to demonstrate the resourcefulness of Tan's creative writing in accordance with Benjamin's intersubjective theory, where they both cast light on different feminist approaches to maternal subjectivity. The other is to argue that the mother-daughter stories and voices, as examined in Tan's experimentation with femininity and creativity, also re-examine and expand Benjamin's theoretical topos in The Bonds of Love. My investigation into this topic will be divided into three main parts. Firstly, outlining the theoretical configuration in The Bonds of Love, I will elucidate how Benjamin conceptualises the core concepts of intersubjectivity as applied in her insightful observation of the early mother-child relationship. Secondly, I will introduce Tan's adaptation of Chinese talk story in her use of storytelling between mothers and daughters as a trope for matrilineal reclamation, and then offer a close reading of Tan's text. Finally, I will compare Benjamin's and Tan's works, focusing on how their different explorations of intersubjectivity generate a new avenue for the working and reworking of feminist discourse on maternal subjectivity and matrilineage.

I. Jessica Benjamin's Intersubjective Theory and the Mother-Child Relationship

Jessica Benjamin's perception of intersubjective theory is a breakthrough in psychoanalytic research into the pre-Oedipal mother-child relationship. Working from the theoretical paradigms of well-known psychoanalytic theorists,[4] Benjamin adds social interaction and interpersonal dimensions to the existing, classical psychoanalytic model of intrapsychic theory, in which each individual is considered as a separate unit with a complex internal structure. One of the basic assumptions of intersubjective theory, according to Benjamin, is that an infant has the ability and the intention to differentiate from and relate to the outside world from birth and there is always an active, responsive interaction going on between the infant and her/his parents or other adults. Unlike Freud's "oral drive," where the relationship between a baby and a caregiver is only founded upon the satisfaction of basic needs like food and comfort and the caregiver is usually objectified as the breast to cater to the baby's desires, the intersubjective theory focuses more on the social element of this early human relationship, such as "the curiosity and responsiveness to sight and sound, face and voice" between the two parties (16). Moreover, diverging from Margaret Mahler's separation-individuation theory where an individual self's development into an autonomous and independent being relies on a separation from a symbiotic relation with the (m)other, the intersubjective theory reinforces the growth of the self in relation with the (m)other (17-18).

Based on extensive research into this earliest development of human relationship where "infants do not begin life as part of an undifferentiated unity," Benjamin emphasises that the critical issues involved are "not only how we separate from oneness, but also how we connect to and recognize others; the issue is not how we become free of the other, but how we actively engage and make ourselves known in relationship to the other" (18). Benjamin does not attempt to negate and undermine the classical psychological model of separation and individuation but instead proposes and advocates the existence of other processes of human relationship. To elucidate this relational paradigm further, Benjamin's summarises the intersubjective theory in the following passage:

The intersubjective view maintains that the individual grows in and through the relationship to other subjects. Most important, this perspective observes that the other whom the self meets is also a self, a subject in his or her own right. It assumes that we are able and need to recognize that other subject as different and yet alike, as an other who is capable of sharing similar mental experience. Thus the idea of intersubjectivity reorients the conception of the psychic world from a subject's relations to its object toward a subject meeting another subject (19-20).

What Benjamin has illuminated from this intersubjective view is the recognition of the other as being "also a self, a subject in his or her own right" which counteracts and even balances the objectification of the (m)other in the object-relations theory. One key concept, which activates this operation of self-in-relation is what Benjamin has named "mutual recognition, the necessity of recognizing as well as being recognized by the other" (23). In Benjamin's opinion, this has been largely unexplored in major psychological theories. In contrast to the notion of self-development as defined by a linear and gradual progression from one phase to another, recognition is required throughout all stages and events. More significantly, this concept of mutual recognition entails the recognition of resonance and differences between self and the other (22-23).

When applying this notion of mutual recognition to the context of a pre-Oedipal mother-child relationship, Benjamin asserts, "the child has a need to see the mother, too, as an independent subject, not simply as the 'external world' or an adjunct of his ego" (23). To make explicit her statement about maternal subjectivity, Benjamin continues to argue that the mother not only functions as a mirror that reflects back what the child sees in himself or herself, which self psychology has misinterpreted as the concept of "maternal mirroring," but also as "something of the not-me" (24). Indeed, Benjamin's concept of "maternal mirroring" is linked to the above-mentioned idea of the coexistence of likeness and difference in this earliest human relationship. That is to say, only through a mutual recognition between self and the other as both independent and sovereign subjects can meaningful and healthy identities be established and developed. As Benjamin maintains, "the need for a theory that understands how the capacity for mutuality evolves, a theory based on the premise that from the beginning there are always (at least) two subjects" (24).

Nonetheless, the achievement of such an intersubjective state which Benjamin terms "mutuality" is full of tension in a culture which values individualism, as manifested in Hegel's master-slave dialectic and classical psychological premises. This cultural praise for "our subjective feeling of being 'the center of our own universe'" (25) naturally leads to a social system of domination and submission on which a master-slave relationship is based. In order to maintain an equal, dynamic and interactive balance of the two on which mutuality is built, Benjamin introduces attunement, the "pleasure in being with the other" to the scene (31-33). This feeling of being affected is not associated with the process of destroying the other in fantasy, as perceived in Winnicott's concept of "transitional objects" (36-42). Neither is it analogous with the state of "one subject regulating another" and its subsequent internalization as indicated in internalization theory (45). As Benjamin concludes, this key insight of combining resonance and difference culminating in being with one another "breaks down the oppositions between powerful and helpless, active and passive; it counteracts the tendency to objectify and deny recognition to those weaker or different—to the other"(48). By linking the idea of attunement with the subversion of a binary schemata—master/slave, subject/object, man/woman and so on—Benjamin goes on to explain, using Milan Kundra's term "co-feeling," that it is "the ability to share feelings and intentions without demanding control, to experience sameness without obliterating difference" (48).

Although Benjamin's gains her intersubjective theory from research findings on parents and infants, an interesting and illuminating parallel is evident in one type of literary representation — that of matrilineal narratives. In The Joy Luck Club, Tan uses storytelling as a literary device to convey and substantiate the existence of an intersubjective relationship between mothers and daughters in the text. This intersubjectivity established between mothers and daughters can be discerned in certain episodes and scenes of mother-daughter mirroring when they look at each other’s faces and reflections in mirrors and photographs. Yet even though Tan's mother-daughter writing resonates with Benjamin's paradigm of intersubjectivity, Tan goes beyond the existing psychoanalytic framework to present a more complex and dynamic poetics of mother-daughter voices. In what follows, I will demonstrate the extent to which the storytelling technique serves as an apt literary form to fully demonstrate this intersubjective model.

II. Storytelling and the Poetics of Mother-Daughter Voices in Tan's The Joy Luck Club

Tan employs storytelling as a powerful narrative strategy to enable her characters, who are from a minority ethnic group, to reconstruct and make significant and coherent the histories and life stories that they might have lost or forgotten after their emigration to their new adopted country, America. Storytelling seems to bridge the rift between the past and the present. It thus appears as a survival skill with which the older generation of immigrants articulates and authenticates the essence of their own existences and selves, and then passes that on to the younger generation to sustain and perpetuate the cultural identity of their motherland (Huntley 15). From the viewpoint of feminist matrilinealism, storytelling is an essential literary device which allows the once silent mothers, the Joy Luck Club mothers, to voice their long hidden secrets of suffering and victimization and to transform them into an affirmation of their own strength and perseverance as survivors. More significantly in some cases, by means of telling stories to each other, both mothers and daughters can not only discover their own voices but also reclaim and redefine their own selves (Foster 209).

What is different about Tan's storytelling is that it is cast in the form of talk story — a form of Chinese oral tradition. Linda Ching Sledge defines talk story as

Notably, despite the liberating aspect of talk story that allows the Chinese American immigrant mothers to be freed from being silenced and stereotyped, the mothers and daughters in Tan's novel do go through their agitated moments of struggling with their miscommunications and misunderstandings. The main causes for their sense of disfranchisement are the disparities widened by their different cultural perspectives and identities, Chinese and American, and also by their use of languages, Chinese and English. Many instances occur in the novel when the Joy Luck mothers cannot articulate fully their meanings and true intentions with their fractured English. The Joy Luck daughters also misread and misinterpret their mothers' messages because these American daughters lack a satisfying command of Chinese language. In some cases, the daughters perceive their Joy Luck mothers as the racial (m)other whose thinking and behaviours are encoded in the stereotyped imagery of American imperialist discourse or orientalism (Ho 161-71). Nevertheless, it is also the working out of their miscommunication and misunderstanding in the process of talking story that makes the Joy Luck mothers and daughters understand one another and forge their connection.

What has been pointed out with respect to the functions of storytelling in Tan's text is that storytelling enables Tan's mothers and daughters to find their own voices and selves, especially as this storytelling is performed in the mode of Chinese talk story. This discovery of their voices and selves is important because it leads to an assertion and recognition of their own subjectivities. In the process of telling stories, a sense of mutual recognition is also required and involved. In other words, the storytelling can only become meaningful when the two parties, the teller and the listener, are totally devoted to each other. The act of storytelling is built upon mutuality in which the acts of telling and listening are conducted simultaneously: one cannot work without the other. The teller is the one who narrates and the listener is the other who listens, but this is an interactive and dynamic process in which the two parties are creating meanings, and neither party is passive. In many respects, the relationship between a teller and a listener is analogous to that between a mother and an infant. To quote and reinforce Benjamin's argument, this relationship is founded upon "the premise that from the beginning there are always (at least) two subjects" (24). In The Joy Luck Club, Tank evokes themes of mutual recognition and self-confirmation alongside the progress of storytelling.

However, some of the stories told by either mothers or daughters are not addressed to their daughters or mothers. Tan's mother-daughter writing does, therefore, require that a reader conduct a responsive and interactive reading to establish a dialogic of voices between mothers and daughters. That is, the intersubjective scheme also operates between author and readers or between readers and the text. In the rest of this section, I will continue to explore how Tan centers the themes evolving out of the mother-daughter storytelling on the mutual need between mothers and daughters to recognise and affirm each other, and what Tan's mothers and daughters have done to achieve this.

The Joy Luck Club is a collection of sixteen stories told by four pairs of mothers and daughters. Basing her book on her experience with her own mother, Tan creates in her fictional characters many different facets of the mother-daughter relationship (Pearlman and Henderson 24). Situated in and between two different cultural contexts, four mothers, Suyuan Woo, An-mei Hsu, Lindo Jong and Ying-ying St. Clair are Chinese women who emigrated to America before the revolution in China in 1949. Their daughters, Jing-mei Woo, Rose Hsu Jordan, Waverly Jong and Lena St. Clair, are second-generation Chinese Americans, brought up in America. The whole book is divided into four sections entitled, "Feathers from a Thousand Li Away," "The Twenty-six Malignant Gates," "American Translation," and "Queen Mother of the Western Skies." The first two sections are narrated by the three mothers except Suyuan Woo, whose voice is represented by her daughter Jing-mei Woo instead due to her absence caused by her recent death. The third and fourth sections are the American-born daughters' stories. Although the mothers' and daughters' stories occupy different physical space in the text, their stories are closely linked by the relationships between the women.

Jing-mei's relationship with her mother, Suyuan Woo, can be used as an archetype to demonstrate how Tan employs storytelling to resolve the mother-daughter conflicts and even create an aesthetic form for the mother-daughter voices. In the stories, "The Joy Luck Club" and "A Pair of Tickets," Jing-mei Woo tells of her mother's Demeter-like quest for her lost daughters in China. Recalling her mother's ability to tell her the "Kweilin story" with a different ending each time, which indicates her mother's skill in talk story improvisation, Jing-mei one day discovers the true version of the story. It is the story of how her mother escaped from Kweilin to Chungking during the Japanese invasion of China in 1944. On her way, the mother becomes so exhausted that she has to leave behind her belongings one by one. At last, she gives up her two baby girls. After the mother is rescued, she begins her ceaseless search for her lost daughters. However, Jing-mei's mother does not succeed: she dies without seeing her daughters again (20-26, 281-86).

Jing-mei's mother initiates the weekly tradition of the Joy Luck Club. This is an occasion on which Jing-mei's mother and her three aunts play mah jong and have a feast together. The year Jing-mei's mother dies, she was supposed to have been hostess. Jing-mei, as her daughter, is therefore seen as the best candidate to replace her. But when, at this meeting, Jing-mei is asked to fulfil her mother's life-long wish and meet her mother's lost daughters in China on her behalf, feelings of doubt and confusion arise in her mind. She feels she cannot represent her mother because she does not think that she knows her well enough. The uncertainty Jing-mei feels highlights not only a generational gap between mother and daughter but also a division between two cultural and national identities:

Jing-mei's obedience to her mother's wish compels Jing-mei to fulfil her mother's quest. However, as the story goes on, we are informed that Jing-mei's presence serves not merely as a replacement for her mother. It is also about her own quest for her mother. In the last story, "A Pair of Tickets," Jing-mei makes a trip to China with her father to meet her half-sisters. On this journey, she confronts a conflict of identities, struggling with her doubts about whether she is Chinese or not. But a sense of identification and belonging emerges as soon as she reaches China, her mother's home country:

In Jing-mei's storytelling, we have a daughter's journey to the voices of her mother and herself. Drawing from a similar theme but working conversely, we also have the mother's narration in other Joy Luck stories. Nevertheless, because of the inextricably intertwined lives founded upon mother-daughter relationships, a mother does not necessarily confine her voice to that of a mother but refers occasionally to those of her other identities in the process of interacting with her daughter. For example, An-mei Hsu, the mother of Rose Hsu Jordan, speaks first as a mother in "Magpies":

Lindo Jong, the mother of Waverly Jong, speaks also with the two voices of mother and daughter. Like An-mei, she speaks first as a mother:

This recollection of her childhood moves Lindo to speak as a daughter:

This episode of mother-daughter mirroring expanded at a three-generational level reinforces the mother-daughter anxiety over and struggle with the differences caused by migration. Waverly Jong's conspiracy with her hairdresser, Mr. Rory, to have her mother's hair cut in an American style exemplifies the assimilating imposition of white mainstream American ideology upon immigrants who are racial and ethnic minorities. Aligning herself with such "an 'American mindset'" of disregarding and stigmatising her mother's true identity as a Chinese immigrant, Waverly Jong "sees her mother as 'other,' as 'outsider,' as 'intruder'" (Ho 165). In addition, her response to Mr. Rory's comment on her similarity with her mother as shameful and unpleasant denotes the American daughter's matrophobia, because Waverly Jong's mother, Lindo Jong, is viewed as "the outcast Other" (Ho 165). Interestingly, as this episode is narrated by the mother, we are able to perceive at first hand her reaction to such enactment of racism and classism. Lindo's playing with her two faces, Chinese and American, accommodates her need to both survive and resist. Her display and mimicking of two faces blur the boundary between two national and cultural identities, Chinese and American. They destabilise the west/east, subject/object, and imperialist/subaltern dichotomies. Yet, more significantly, the mother-daughter matrix assists in reconciling such a conflict.

Judging from the stories told by the two Joy Luck mothers, An-mei Hsu and Lindo Jong, we have, similar to Jing-mei's story, the formation of matrilineal narrative extending across different generations. By referring themselves as both mothers and daughters in a female descent line, both An-mei Hsu and Lindo Jong have built up their own matrilineage, creating a herstory of their own lives. Tan's Joy Luck mothers, to a great extent, also participate in what Hirsch has described as "a double voice" (161). The way Tan presents the double voice in The Joy Luck Club is to locate maternity as its center, placing "subjectivity in the maternal" and deploying it as "a pivot between the past and the present"(Heung 601), mother and daughter, and China and America. The significance of this double voice in mother and daughter is that it won’t silence the one or the other; it enables the two voices to speak at the same time. As Hirsch has envisioned, "the multiplicity of 'women' is nowhere more obvious than for the figure of the mother, who is always both mother and daughter. Her representation is controlled by her object status, but her discourse, when it is voiced, moves her from object to subject" (12).

III. Conclusion

The distinct feature of feminist matrilinealism in Tan's text lies in the intersubjectivity and dialogue drawn from the mother-daughter interactions in the process of telling their own stories and presenting their own voices. The scenes of mothers and daughters looking at each other's faces in either photographs or mirrors resemble the moment when both mother and infant gaze at each other's eyes. Although Tan's mothers and daughters also participate in a search for mutual recognition that has been lost in the process of their migration, the intersubjective paradigm represented in Tan's text is far more complicated and in-depth. As I illustrated in the second section of this paper, Benjamin's intersubjective view is drawn from her findings in extensive clinical research, whereas the intersubjectivity of Tan's mothers and daughters is compounded by the interlocking structures of different cultures, identities, and languages. Benjamin's formulation of intersubjectivity is based on her observation of the mother-infant relationship and she emphasises the occurrence of mutual recognition and differentiated identities right at the beginning of this earliest human relationship. Conversely, Tan's novel is concentrated on the relationships between mothers and their grown-up daughters. Tan also complicates Benjamin's theoretical premise by allowing the mothers and daughters in her book to go through a process of development from misunderstandings to reconciliation and then final recognition.

Jing-mei's recognition of herself and her mother does not start right at the beginning; it requires a long journey back to her maternal origin, her motherland China, to accomplish a quest for lost mother and daughters. And the moment of mutual recognition culminates dramatically in the daughters' anxious gazes at their own photograph taken together. Moreover, the coexistence of resonance and difference as a distinct feature of intersubjectivity not only manifests itself in the process of mutual recognition between mothers and daughters; it also happens between siblings. The combination of similarities and differences between subjects occurs when Jing-mei and her half-sisters in China see in each other's eyes duplications of their mother. In addition, some of Tan's mothers also embody this intersubjective characteristic in their presentation of the double voice. That is, self and other are not only dissolved into the figure of the mother but are also extended into different generations of women. In one of the mother-daughter pairs, Lindo and Waverly Jong, the mother-daughter voices are activated and complicated by their possession of the two faces. The mirror scene in the beauty parlor also reverses and reexamines Benjamin's concept of "maternal mirroring." Rather than stressing the recognition of mother-daughter difference in a "maternal mirroring," Lindo’s double voice, which allows her narrative to move between generations, constitutes the mother-daughter desire for sameness. Although the cause for the mother-daughter separation is the display of two different faces, Chinese and American, this sharp difference is also the commonality that unites Lindo and Waverly as they possess these faces.

Storytelling is a reciprocal process that can only become meaningful through the engagement of both parties. The mother-daughter stories need both to be told and heard at the same time. In The Joy Luck Club, sixteen stories told separately and equally by mothers and daughters bespeak, on the one hand, their own separate individuality and subjectivity. On the other hand, the mother-daughter voices as they emerge in the form of storytelling also let mothers and daughters realise their own important roles in sharing a common history, as the Joy Luck mothers and daughters are all involved in recreating a female version of their immigrant family histories and experiences. Tan's representation of maternity as performed in storytelling caters to both motherly and daughterly subjectivity, which suggests a feminist intersubjective bond with the (m)other and a different way of locating maternal subjectivity. Additionally, the intersubjectivity and the dialogue dramatised in mother-daughter storytelling and voices have been transformed into a poetics of mother-daughter writing and creativity, which also invites a constructive and interactive reading for both sexual and racial differences.