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Gender Roles In Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club

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It is no secret that China had denigrated its women for thousands of years. Within their patriarchal society, women had been placed on the bottom of the society and had been in this position ever since the early times of Confucian's teachings. This honored philosopher searched for organization in the family's roles and created a place of the male patriarch to be the controller of the family and women to only be a small happiness (Abraham). Since then, Chinese women were stuck into many unhealthy relationships with no means of escape. Amy Tan shows these flaws of China's patriarchal system in her novel The Joy Luck Club. Through four sets of mothers and daughters, Tan uses short stories to show the similarities and differences between the Chinese …show more content…
As Chinese women were treated like property, a matchmaker and their family picked out a boy for them to marry at a very young age. As the character Lindo Jong talks about wanting to find her own true love, she says that " instead, the village matchmaker came to [her] family when [she] was just two years old” (Tan 43). By the age of two, Lindo's future was already cemented, and she would have no means of gaining independence in her relationship. When she was old enough to leave her family and move into her husband's house—at the age of twelve—she became their slave (Tan 48). Her mother-in-law made her cook and clean all day and would say, "How can a wife keep her husband's household in order if she has never dirtied her own hands..." (Tan 50). Lindo was the property of his family, so she became the mother-in-law's cook and cleaner and would have to bend to her will. Amy Tan’s " novel inscribe[s] various discourses, both traditional (for example, patriarchal ownership of women, the sacredness of motherhood) and resistant (as in the desire for independence)" (Braendlin). As with the traditional Chinese idea of men having ownership of women, Lindo is helpless in her life. This traditional belief created horrors in women’s relationships because the husband and wife were not treated as equals. Although Lindo craves to have her own

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