电影《喜福会》反映出的中西家庭价值观的差异(2)
In China, the understanding of this book tends to be the cultural differences between the two countries, the analysis of mother-daughter relationship and the comparison of feminism in the East and the West. At abroad the interpretation of this novel is mainly reflected on the reviews. On March 1989, a lot of praise for book reviews appeared on some important media in the United States, such as Tiger Female by Join Skow in the Times, the Show of Unknown by Doroth Wang in Newsweek, Love Deeply Bone Marrow by Orville Schell in New York Times Book Review. After the 1990s, many American critics have commented that The Joy Luck Club belongs to the marginal culture in an objective and favorable way. They think that Amy Tan inherits and carries forward the exotic rites, family relationship and culture conflict of American-Chinese traditional literature. At the same time, she also rejects Chinese women’s square image to promote the culture blending between Chinese and Western culture.
Being based on the above-mentioned reviews, this paper intends to conduct a research of the different family values between the East and the West reflected in The Joy Luck Club. This paper mainly consists of five chapters. Chapter one starts with the general introduction of this thesis. Chapter two is about the status of traditional families in the two countries, which will present a conclusion on the differences and conflicts about mother-daughter relationship in The Joy Luck Club from different angles and make a comparison and analysis on them. Chapter three discusses different marriage views of the two countries which are embodied in the novel The Joy Luck Club. Chapter four is about family education between the East and the West reflected in The Joy Luck Club. Chapter five presents a conclusion about the whole thesis and analyzes the effective factors to our next generation and national future.
II. Status of Family Members in The Joy Luck Club
Families are the most basic social cells of human society. What’s more they are also fundamental to social stability and development. Therefore, every culture has formed a unique family values in his long-term precipitation history (Luo 69).
In Confucian thought, family values, familial relationships, ancestor worship, and filial piety are the primary basis of the philosophical system, and these concepts are seen as virtues to be cultivated. (Wikipedia, “Family Values,” par. 11)
Filial piety is considered the first virtue in Chinese culture. While China has always had a persity of religious beliefs, filial piety has been common to almost all of them; These traditions were sometimes enforced by law; during parts of the Han Dynasty, for example, those who neglected ancestor worship could even be subjected to corporal punishment. (Wikipedia, “Family Values,” par. 12)
The term “filial”, meaning “of a child”, denotes the respect and obedience that a child, originally a son, should show to his parents, especially to his father. This relationship was extended by analogy to a series of five relationships or five cardinal relationships:
ruler and subject,
father and son,
husband and wife,
elder and younger brother,
friend and friend (Wikipedia, “Family Values,” par. 13)
Specific duties were prescribe to each of the participants in these sets of relationships. Such duties also extended to the dead, where the living stood as sons to their deceased family. This led to the veneration of ancestors. In time, filial piety was also built into the Chinese legal system: a criminal would be punished more harshly if the culprit had committed the crime against a parent, while fathers exercised enormous power over their children. Much the same was true of other unequal relationships. In this novel, the conflicts and misunderstandings between the four pairs of mother and daughter caused by different cultural background are illustrated explicitly. From the cultural point of view, in fact, the conflicts between mother and daughter reflect the cultural conflicts between China and America, especially the different beliefs of family values in this novel (Li 35).
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