The Bonesetter's Daughter Critical Analysis

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Amy Tan’s The Bonesetter’s Daughter is about the relationship between mothers and daughters and the importance of understanding one’s life stories. The novel is divided into three parts, wherein the first part we meet Ruth Young and learn of her tumultuous relationship with her mother, LuLing. The second part is a memoir written by LuLing about her own childhood and the titular bonesetter’s daughter. The final part of the novel ties the three generations of women together in strong, but difficult mother-daughter relationships. It is undeniable that the relationship between each set of mother and daughter is a key point in the novel, and Ver Ann Goh asserts in her essay “Mother-Daughter Relationships In The Identity Formation Of The Daughter’s In The Bonesetter’s Daughter” that it is the mothers that form the identity of the daughters in adulthood. On the other hand, the spirit of Gu Liu Xin, the dead grandmother, threads throughout the novel, and Xiumei Pu’s, “Spirituality: A Womanist Reading Of Amy Tan’s The Bonesetter’s Daughter” claims that it is spirituality that forms the identity of the women in the novel. Though both critical analyses recognise the growth and influence the women in The Bonesetter’s Daughter face, Pu’s …show more content…

In the discussed analyses, Goh is able to recognise the power mothers have in setting the course of their daughter’s lives whilst Pu attributes it to spirituality. It would be foolish to completely disregard the spirituality rooted in the women’s inner self and ancestry, but the novel does not provide enough conclusive evidence to attribute spirituality as the driving force in shaping the identities of the women. A reader may take The Bonesetter’s Daughter and apply it to their own life, learning to acknowledge the efforts of immigrant parents and native ancestry, building a more valid ethnic identity for

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