LANGUAGE IN INDIA

Women as Victors of the Social Milieu in
Amy Tan's China

Sushil Mary Mathews, Ph.D.

Relationships between the Artist and the Society

Sociological criticism is based on the conviction that a work of art is related to the society in which it is created and that the investigation of this relationship will facilitate a better understanding and deepen the readers' aesthetic response to the work. The sociological approach to literature explores the relationships between the artist and the society and examines it in the cultural, economic and political contexts in which it was written or received.

This paper is an intensive study of the novels of Tan, from a sociological approach and also investigates the adaptation techniques which enable the women in the novels to face life in a staunchly patriarchal society.

Embedded in the Chinese Tradition and Culture

The narrative of Tan's novels is deeply embedded in the Chinese tradition and culture. China, from the early sixteenth century to the recent past, is portrayed in the novels of Tan with myriad experiences of the Chinese. The social milieu pictured in the novels and how the women characters transact in this social milieu and emerge victors is elaborated. The application of historical materialism to literary studies is examined and a few other factors that are also considered are the world events, especially wars, the primitive societies, women, marriage, suicide, hunger, religion, sex, education, death, belief in evil spirits, the different society groups and ethics as portrayed in the novels. The sociological study will enable a deeper understanding of the strategic role of the mother in equipping her daughter encounter society and life.

World Events as the Background

The novels of Tan have in its background some world events and a few that were of national interest. Orville Schell's review "Your Mother is in Your Bones" emphasises that the millions of Chinese who were part of the diaspora of World War II, and the fighting that resulted in the triumph of the Communists were subsequently cut off from the mainland and were left to fend for themselves culturally. The Japanese invaded China in 1949 and this war is cited in almost all the works of Tan, as it had a lasting influence on the lives of the people and it had also altered their attitudes to life.

Tan's novels portray the First Sino-Japanese war that was fought between 1894 and 1895. The second war that followed, she pictures, was more destructive and sporadic fighting, lasted on and off throughout the thirties, but large-scale fighting did not begin again until 1937, when Japanese units were attacked at the Marco Polo Bridge outside Peking. In December 1937 Japanese Army units were on the outskirts of the Nationalist capital, Nanking. As many as three lakh Chinese soldiers and civilians were executed, and rape, theft, and abuse were rampant. The Kuomintang had officers who tried to lead the people and the general public hearkened to their words. Suyuan Woo, the protagonist in Tan's, The Joy Luck Club, was the wife of a Kuomintang officer and she received news that the Japanese were close at hand, and that she should escape. She carried all that she held dear to her life, on the way she had to slowly prioritise and leave behind things till she felt she had no strength to go on. When she was certain of her death, she decided to abandon her two daughters by the wayside hoping that someone would take them home. She left money and the address at which the babies were to be returned once the war was over.

New Ideas of History and Identity

Catherine Romagnolo in her "Narrative Beginnings in Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club: A Feminist Study" says, "Like Suyuan, Tan's novel attempts to snip the threads that hold these tightly knitted structures together, unraveling them as it constructs new ideas of history and identity which are at once subjective, personal, and polymorphous"(89). At one point Tan makes a comment that if it had not been for the war with Japan, the people of China would have all been fighting among themselves.

At the time of war, Tan says in her novel, the people who lived in and around Kweilin used to find solace and escape to the mountains there: "We were a city of leftovers mixed together. If it hadn't been for the Japanese, there would have been plenty of reason for fighting to break out among these different people. Can you see it? Shanghai people with north-water peasants, bankers with barbers, rickshaw pullers with Burma refugees. Everybody looked down on someone else. It didn't matter that everybody shared the same sidewalk to spit on and suffered the same fast-moving diarrhea. We all had the same stink, but everybody complained someone else smelt the worst." (JLC 22)

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