The Joy Luck Club Themes

In The Joy Luck Club, most of the transformations are accomplished through a combination of understanding and life circumstances. As the daughters in this novel grow up, their understanding of thei...

In The Joy Luck Club, friendship is critical, rocky, competitive, but always loyal. The women by turns seem to hate each other and can’t seem to live without each other. Friends are definitely pe...

In The Joy Luck Club, linguistic barriers are a huge reason the mothers and daughters continually misunderstand each other. The daughters were all born in the U.S. while their mothers are Chinese i...

The four older women in The Joy Luck Club have very firm notions about America—some positive, some negative. For the most part, the mothers appreciate the female independence which America allows...

The Joy Luck Club is anchored firmly in this Chinese-American world, where the daughters are too American for their mothers' tastes, and the mothers are too Chinese for their daughters'. What this...

Much of the actions and the decisions made in The Joy Luck Club are based on looking forward into the future. The four mothers immigrate to America in a large part because they have a vision of the...

Sex in The Joy Luck Club is one means of differentiating the lives of the mothers and daughters. The mothers experience sex primarily as a means of producing the next generation, as the obligation...

The mothers in The Joy Luck Club grew up with an incredibly restrictive idea of what it meant to be a woman. The model wife and daughter-in-law was an obedient, filial woman who worked hard, bore m...

The most important familial connection within The Joy Luck Club is the relationship between mothers and daughters. From the perspective of the mothers, a mother passes on her strengths and weakness...

The idea of identity in The Joy Luck Club is one that is adaptable, yet fundamentally unchanging. In China, identity was based on your family’s social status, who you marry, which number of wife...