Women in Lu Xun's "Selected Stories" and Amy Tan's "The Joy Luck Club"

CHIN2400 essay, S2 2006


Female characters play a significant part in both Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club and the short stories of Lu Xun. William Lyell notes that women make up the second largest group of characters that appear in Lu Xun's short stories and suggests that Lu Xun had a fondness for women, embodying them with kindness and humanity, traits his male characters often lack[1]. Amy Tan's book The Joy Luck Club is all about women and, in contrast to Lu Xun's stories, narrated by women. The authors also differ markedly in the style of characterisation they employ, which can be traced back to the restraints of the different genres they worked in, the different audiences their work appealed to and the different purposes they had for writing.

Nature of characterisation

Working in the genre of the short story, Lu Xun is usually makes no more than brief sketches of his female characters. These women in the third person, usually through the narrator or another male character, and they range from being the focus of the story to supporting characters hovering in the background, or mere literary function, serving as mouthpieces to communicate as realistically as possible those details which are somehow hidden from the narrator or other characters. The amount of detail that Lu Xun fits into his sketches also varies. Where women are the central characters in the story they are not necessarily also described explicitly. It is often left up to the reader to infer a sense of personality from the circumstances and events the character is entangled in. Where the women are not the central characters they are often left as outlines, perhaps just a name or a short description.

Although Amy Tan's characters, like Lu Xun's, are contained within a series of short stories, the stories that combine to form the novel The Joy Luck Club are interlinked and interdependent. Characterisation is almost the entire purpose of this novel. Society and place are just backdrop to the personal drama of the individual lives of four ex-patriot Chinese mothers and their Chinese-American daughters. With the exception of Suyuan Woo, each woman's story is told by herself, in the first person. The similarity of the general shape of their lives and the manner of storytelling means that the four older women and the four younger women tend to collapse into one older woman and one younger woman to the first-time reader. Amy Tan's characters are also reflective and introspective – they question their situation, identity and relationships with other characters, unlike the characters in Lu Xun's stories, whose inner thoughts the reader is not privy to at all.

Types of characters

In a broad sense, the women in Selected Stories are a passive, unreflective lot, victims of traditional society, swept along by events without questioning their lot. Tthe women of The Joy Luck Club are much more active, introspective and in charge of their destiny. Unlike Lu Xun's characters The Joy Luck Club women are a homogeneous group with respect to their social position and background. In Selected Stories the characters may be much less detailed, but they come from a far wider range of backgrounds than do Amy Tan's women. However their social position does not necessarily dictate the type of character Lu Xun creates for them.

Selected Stories

Although Lyell, in his analysis of Lu Xun's fictional work, lumps all women characters together in the one category, differentiating only between the men (whom he classifies as either intellectuals, service people or peasants)[2], there do appear to be several distinct types of women in Lu Xun's short stories. There are nosy neighbours, tragic women and unbroken women[3]. There are also women who are not really characterised at all, but appear as sort of conceptual placeholders – the conventions of realism demand that they exist, but not that they differentiate themselves from a stereotype. Some of the characters are predominantly literary devices whose sole purpose appears to be transmitting vital story details.

Hsiang Lin's Wife (“New Year's Sacrifice”), Fourth Shan's Wife (“Tomorrow”) and Ah Shun (“In the Wine-Shop”) are all examples of tragic women. Hsiang Lin's Wife and Fourth Shan's Wife are central characters in their respective stories. With the exception of Fourth Shan's Wife, whose son dies, each woman dies in during the course of the story – Ah Shun succumbs to tuberculosis, while Hsiang Lin's Wife dies “of poverty”[4]. All of these women are presented as virtuous, their selfless dedication to hard work benefiting others more than themselves. Neither Hsiang Lin's Wife nor Ah Shun are presented to the reader directly and often the circumstances they find themselves in are further detached from the reader by being told through another character in the story, whose speech is passed on to the reader through the narrator.

Yi-tsi Mei Feurwerker comments that the women in Lu Xun's short stories are doubly subordinate, being both women and poor[5]. Furthermore, they are subordinate as female characters. In the case of Hsiang Lin's Wife, the important details of her life are broadcast to the reader and the other characters in the story by other female characters, such as Old Mrs Wei, before Hsiang Lin's Wife has the chance to speak for herself. However the tragic women are not necessarily passive women. Hsiang Lin's Wife repeatedly runs back to the Lu family, the first time in an attempt to escape a bad marriage and second time in an attempt to escape pauperism. It is hinted at that Ah-shun finally succumbed to illness in part to escape a bad marriage. And Fourth Shan's Wife leads a menial but independent life, supporting herself and her son on her cotton spinning. But ultimately, while they may have a measure of initiative and independence, these women are not free from the traditional society and mean-spirited people that seem to conspire together to bring about their downfall[6].

But not all the central women characters in Selected Stories are tragic. Ai-ku (“The Divorce”), Mrs Sevenpounder (“Storm in a Teacup”) and Mrs Ssu-min (“Soap”) are examples of characters whose circumstances have not broken them, but at worst made them a little bitter and cynical. These women speak to the reader in their own words, there is no explicit narrator presenting them to us or other character summarising their condition. Their speech comes straight to us, in the case of Ai-ku and Mrs Sevenpounder, in all its crude glory as they berate their husbands and others who have wronged or annoyed them. Mrs Ssu-min is a somewhat more refined person than Ai-ku or Mrs Sevenpounder, being the wife of an intellectual. But her early indications of passive obsequiousness toward her husband are cast in a new light when, after inanely supporting his ranting, she suddenly turns on him to berate him for his nagging at the dinner table and failure to realise his own lecherous intentions in the purchase of the soap[7].

Nosy neighbours are never central characters, but they do come in two different guises, one more inquisitive and the other more informative. Mrs Yang (“My Old Home”), Old Mrs Wei (“New Year's Sacrifice”), Mrs Tsou (“The True Story of Ah Q”) and Ninth Aunt Wang (“Tomorrow”) are all examples of the inquisitive nosy neighbour, whose active participation in events as well as communication of relevant information is a vital part of the story. The dubious honour of nosiest neighbour goes to Mrs Yang of the beancurd shop across the road. While the Lu family is moving out of their home, she wanders over whenever she likes, steals anything that takes her fancy and both gossips about and shares gossip with the narrator and his mother. Old Mrs Wei and Mrs Tsou are sources of information for their scholar-family neighbours. Mrs Wei introduces Hsiang-Lin's Wife to the Lu family, while Mrs Tsou tells Mrs Chao about the fine clothing Ah Q has been peddling around town and which lucky villager got what desirable item at bargain prices.

Informative nosy neighbours have less personality than their counterparts, who often come across as scurrilous gossips. Indeed most of these characters are little more than plot devices to communicate information between characters as realistically as possible. They are often allowed to tell this information in their own words, which does allow a little of their personality to come through. These informative neighbours include the anonymous landlord's mother in “The Misanthrope”, who relates the story of her tenant Wei Lien-shu's last days to his friend the narrator, and Old Mrs Fa, owner of the firewood shop opposite Ah Shun's house, who tells the narrator's friend Wei-fu what happened to Ah Shun in the two years since he last saw her.

The Joy Luck Club

As mentioned earlier, two kinds of characters stand out in The Joy Luck Club – the older generation and the younger. Aside from the fine detail of their lives, the older women, like the younger women, could practically be the same character. All four older women grow up in rural China in relative affluence, suffer misfortune and later migrate to America after having spent some time living in one of the larger cities in China. Once in America they are nearly all reduced to poverty and work menial jobs. They are married and have children in America, including at least one daughter. All four younger women are born in America, speak both Chinese and English and are highly educated with more or less established careers. Each struggles with her cultural heritage and relationship with her mother. Of those who are married, each has relationship problems with their husbands.

The women of the older generation are portrayed as active, courageous, resourceful, insightful and independent. Suyuan Woo organises a mahjong club in war-torn Kwellin, making do with what little she and her friends have to create some joy in their lives. Lindo Jong uses superstition to escape an arranged marriage. Likewise, An-Mei Hsu's mother (although she is not a major character, being told through the story of An-Mei's childhood in China) uses superstition to manipulate her children's circumstances, committing suicide on such a day that her husband will be forced to honour her and favour her children. Of the four women, Ying-Ying St Clair is portrayed as the most passive, but even she goes on to forge her own life and career as a shopgirl before marrying an American and emigrating.

In comparison to the older women, their daughters are portrayed as passive and confused. Each sees their mother as manipulative, with the exception of Lena St Clair, who talks about how she and her father manipulated her mother, putting words into her mouth when she couldn't express herself. The daughters see their mothers as using superstition against them in their younger years, to scare them into proper behaviour. In their later lives they try to be modern and American, but it doesn't really work out for them. Except for Waverley Jong, real professional success eludes them all. Jing-Mei floats between university studies but never completes a course, ending up as a secretary and then a copywriter. Rose Hsu Jordan marries while at university; her husband goes on to be a dermatologist while she works from home as a freelance graphic artist. She leaves her husband to make all the decisions and have the better career. Lena St Clair also marries a man in a better professional position than herself. She tries to have a marriage of equals, splitting expenses and investments equally, or at least proportional to each other's income. But while Lena's relationship with her husband seems fair on the surface, she gradually realises how she has let him take advantage of her and stifled her professionally, refusing to promote her or make her a partner in the architectural firm they established together.

Relationship of characters to Lu Xun and Amy Tan's purpose

Lu Xun's stories generally try to communicate something about Chinese society rather the plight of any one person it is for this reason that the level of characterisation varies so dramatically. While the actions and natures of the individuals he creates are important, the real focus in on the sum of all the little decisions, thoughts and events that his characters are caught up in. In addition to this, the women he writes about are not unusual or extraordinary people. His readers would already be familiar with the kinds of characters he creates in Old Mrs Wei or Old Mrs Fa and ty leaving a lot of detail about these characters out, they are better matches with the real life women they knew, such the neighbourhood gossips and the poor women and maids they saw going about their business. Having the characters ring true to real life helps convey Lu Xun's message about the absurdity and inhumanity of the society he described and make it more relevant and immediate to the reader.

Amy Tan's characterisation is rich and detailed, but a crucial difference between the characters in The Joy Luck Club and Selected Stories is that the women all start out equal, occupying more or less the same social position as each other, their lives differing only in the details of their experiences. The characters in Selected Stories represent a broader cross-section of society; their personalities are shaped by their social circumstances and the resultant life experiences that go with it.

However Tan's purpose is not to highlight to the reader the passive cruelty perpetuated by traditional society but to introduce to a largely non-immigrant audience the experience of immigrant and first-generation Americans. The readership of The Joy Luck Club may not be familiar with Chinese culture at all, nor have met many people of Chinese descent or background. By exploring in detail the lives of a few women in the context of their family relationships, especially the relationship between mother and daughter, Amy Tan is trying to promote understanding and acceptance of immigrant and first generation Americans to an audience that is unfamiliar with them. It must be said, though, that The Joy Luck Club hardly corrects any misconceptions that a person unfamiliar with Chinese culture might have, but focuses on the women's reaction to hardship and adversity and their loving yet uneven mother-daughter relationships as indicators of a shared, universal human experience to which people of any background can relate.

Conclusion

While women are not usually the central characters in Lu Xun's Selected Stories, they are nevertheless important ones. Lu Xun depicts a range of characters from many different walks of life in his stories in order to show the reader something about the society he was writing about. Lu Xun assumes his audience is already familiar with his characters to some extent and consequently does not give away a lot of detail about their thoughts and feelings. In contrast, Amy Tan focuses on only two kind of characters, mothers and daughters, in order to show the reader their personal experiences of migration and multiculturalism and to create a sense of familiarity and empathy for these characters within an audience that is unfamiliar with them in real life.


Bibliography

Feuerwerker, Y M (1998) Ideology, Power, Text. Stanford University Press, Stanford.

Lu X, trans Yang H & Yang G (1972) Selected Stories of Lu Hsun. Foreign Language Press, Peking.

Lyell, W A (1976) Lu Hsün's Vision of Reality. University of California Press, Berkeley.

Tan, A (1989) The Joy Luck Club. William Heinemann, London.


[1] William A Lyell, Lu Hsün's Vision of Reality, p. 209.
[2] Ibid, p. 140.
[3] “These women have been bent somewhat by the weight of the burdens traditional society imposes on them, but they are far from broken.” William A Lyell, Lu Hsün's Vision of Reality, p. 219.
[4] Lu Xun (1972) Selected Stories, p. 129.
[5] Yi-tsi Mei Feuerwerker (1998) Ideology, Power, Text, p. 83.
[6] Ibid, p. 84.
[7] Wiliam A Lyell, Lu Hsün's Vision of Reality, p. 211