Amy Tan¡¦s The Joy Luck Club and Cristina Garcia¡¦s Dreaming in Cuban propose the matrilineal narrative of woman suffering and spiritual growth. Multiple narrators tell personal stories about the past events to cope with their current concerns and coming difficulties. Their storytelling functions as a way of making sense of experiences and fashioning identity. The first chapter explores how the narrative activity enables the del Pino and Joy Luck women to construct a preferred version of personal experiences. They not only tell stories to create idealized self-images but also live their lives to justify the images. Though they portray themselves as capable women in personal stories, they often appear vulnerable and mentally unstable in reality. Such contradiction results from the traumatic events the women leave untold, and they resist telling partly because of their madness and partly because of their repudiation of the events. The second chapter will examine their traumatic experiences to understand how their emotional problems determine the representation of their personal narratives. Due to the early traumatic experiences, the women develop maladaptive schemas to cope with their negative emotions. The schemas, however, undermine their interpersonal relationships and prevent them from fulfilling the basic needs. While wrestling with their emotional problems, they unwittingly transplant schemas into the next generation. The third chapter examines how certain crucial moments in their lives enlighten the women to have awareness of their schemas at the core of their suffering. The death of the family members and serious mother-daughter disagreements provide the opportunity for the women to move beyond the limited way they used to perceive themselves and others. With an open and positive attitude, they relate the traumatic experiences to understand how their early suffering contributes to their present difficulties and outgrow what has troubled them before.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:NSYSU/oai:NSYSU:etd-0708105-101159 |
| Date | 08 July 2005 |
| Creators | Sun, Chia-chun |
| Contributors | Su-lin Yo, Hsiao-yu Sun, Fu-jen Chen |
| Publisher | NSYSU |
| Source Sets | NSYSU Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Archive |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.lib.nsysu.edu.tw/ETD-db/ETD-search/view_etd?URN=etd-0708105-101159 |
| Rights | unrestricted, Copyright information available at source archive |
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