Exploring Mother-Daughter Bonds in Amy Tan's 'The Joy Luck Club'

“A mother is she who can take the place of all others, but whose place no one else can take.” (Cardinal Mermillod). A mother plays an integral role within the entirety of the family unit, caring and nurturing the children, loving her spouse, and fulfilling her responsibilities in and out of the house. However, despite loving everyone in her family equally, a mother tends to form a unique and special bond with her daughter. Since before the times of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley, Maria Theresa and Marie Antoinette, and even St. Anne and Mary the mother of God, the importance of the mother-daughter relationship is evident throughout history. The importance of this bond between mothers and daughters plays a key role in today’s society and acts as a common theme seen in literature. In her novel, The Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan stresses the importance of a strong, functional mother-daughter relationship. The emphasis on the necessity of this relation presents itself through the bonds present in An Mei’s family.
The most vivid example of a mother-daughter bond in Amy Tan’s Joy Luck Club lies in Part 1 when An Mei describes the relationship between her mother and her grandmother. Despite numerous rants of vicious criticism by her grandmother Popo, An Mei’s mother goes to extreme measures to care for her when she falls ill, “My mother took her flesh and put it in the soup. She cooked magic in the ancient tradition to try to cure her
By thoroughly illustrating the effect of a mother-daughter relationship in real life scenarios and examples throughout The Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan successfully presents her idea that the bond between a mother-daughter pair needs to be healthy and virtually unbreakable. Therefore, Amy Tan’s message presented by her novel will forever hold a prominent position in moderate literature and modern