Relocating Maternal Subjectivity: Storytelling and Mother-Daughter Voices in Amy Tan's <i>The Joy Luck Club</i>

Abstract

Since the advent of "feminist recuperation of mother" commencing in the 1970s, one of the heated inquiries underlying the development of feminist maternal scholarship is a preoccupation with maternal subjectivity and the mother-daughter relationship initiated by one of the keynote feminist maternal theorists, Marianne Hirsch, in the late 1980s. In tandem with such a feminist concern, this paper seeks to investigate how maternal subjectivity, filtered through a psychoanalytic feminist contention of "intersubjectivity" as elucidated in Jessica Benjamin's The Bonds of Love, can possibly be envisioned, articulated and synthesized in the mother-daughter voices delineated in the literary creativity of Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club. Locating Tan's The Joy Luck Club within a feminist matrilinealism in connection with a Chinese American matrilineal tradition and a white Western matrilineal discourse, I attempt to demonstrate the resourcefulness of the "Amy Tan phenomenon" in providing an alternative to a feminist approach to maternal subjectivity. Viewing the use of storytelling between mothers and daughters in Tan's The Joy Luck Club as a trope for matrilineal reclamation, I also interpret it as a site of substantiating Benjamin's intersubjective theory. While Benjamin's theoretical premises illuminate an interactive and constructive reading of Tan's text, I also argue that the mother-daughter stories and voices, as mapped out in Tan's experimentation with femininity and creativity, re-examine, expand and even challenge Benjamin's theoretical topos in The Bonds of Love.