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Mother Archetypes In Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club

614 Words3 Pages

Amy Tan’s autobiographical novel employs four different stories where mothers and their daughters retell in meetings their personal experiences on their relationships with one another. In this way, all mother characters are portrayed with their distinctive characteristics as the text follows. Suyuan Woo is one if the mothers and the most important one, as she created “The Joy Luck Club”, to which the tittle of the novel is attributed to. Tan depicts her typical human experiences of being good, terrible and a good-bad mother. Archetypical “characters display stereotypical personalities, behaviors and characteristics regardless of how unique they may appear at first glance as, character archetypes are used by many writers as devices to help present a story” . Therefore, this essay will investigate to what …show more content…

The essay will also tackle three characteristics of the Mother archetype, such as life giver; maternal solicitation and sympathy; terrifying and inescapable. This archetype is also related with the concepts of “fertility and fruitfulness” . Whereas a contrasting characteristic related to this archetype includes being terrifying and inescapable. These above-mentioned characteristics will be the subtopics in which the main body will be divided. Such distinctive features are depicted in Amy Tan’s novel The Joy Luck Club, where four mother characters are described in varied ways, depicting the possibility of them being classified as part of a literacy archetype- The Mother. Of these four mothers, it was decided to analyze Suyuan Woo, as she may be considered the “main” mother of the novel, creator of The Joy Luck Club. As Suyuan passed away before the narrative starts, everything told of her characteristics is remembered by her daughter in flashbacks, increasing the interest to investigate on

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