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- Herausgeber: GRIN Verlag
- Sprache: Englisch
Examination Thesis from the year 2011 in the subject Didactics for the subject English - Literature, Works, grade: 1,5, University of Augsburg (Neue Englische Literaturen und Kulturwissenschaft), course: New English Literatures, language: English, abstract: The relationship between a mother and her children has been a prominent topic in literature ever since the genre of written fiction has become popular in the past. Mother figures from Jocasta in the ancient Greek tragedy King Oedipus and Gertrude in the Shakespeare classic Hamlet to Norma Bates in the 20th century suspense novel Psycho, to name but a few, have thrilled the audience as well as given critics a diverse subject to deal with. One reason for this ongoing fascination over centuries of literary production may lie in the extraordinarily complex relationship structure which can be developed between a mere dyad of people who happen to be mother and child. Yet, another reason for the perpetual re-invention of the issue can be found in its apparent comprehensibility: every human being has a biological mother and gets socialized by at least one focal person of reference which enables them to relate to the fictional stories easily. The unique quality of mothers in this process – as plain as it sounds – still is their ability to bear children, and by this act to establish an irreplaceable link to another human being. In the twentieth century, the socio-anthropological development has created a myriad of new possibilities and demographic changes that consequently were to find their way into literature and even have created new genres. Due to “significant shifts […] in attitudes towards sexuality” (Allan 10), technological advance, and demographic changes, a whole new range of potential life-styles has evolved since the end of World War II. This involved deconstruction of a traditional middle-class myth, namely the breaking up of the nuclear family’s near-monopoly position has ultimately led to an “increasing diversity occurring in family and household patterns” (Allan 10). Consequently, issues like working mothers, single-parent families, step-families, or same-sex couples adopting children have also enriched literary production of the past fifty years. Additionally to this, the increase of migration to the western industrialized societies has caused a development of a wider ethnic diversity than before the turn of the century. Especially in the United States of America this influx of new potential authors became the cornerstone of a prolific process which has been producing works apart from American mainstream literature and still continues to do so.[...]
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011
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1. Introduction
The relationship between a mother and her children has been a prominent topic in literature ever since the genre of written fiction has become popular in the past. Mother figures from Jocasta in the ancient Greek tragedyKing Oedipusand Gertrude in the Shakespeare classicHamletto Norma Bates in the 20thcentury suspense novelPsycho,to name but a few, have thrilled the audience as well as given critics a diverse subject to deal with. One reason for this ongoing fascination over centuries of literary production may lie in the extraordinarily complex relationship structure which can be developed between a mere dyad of people who happen to be mother and child. Yet, another reason for the perpetual re-invention of the issue can be found in its apparent comprehensibility: every human being has a biological mother and gets socialized by at least one focal person of reference which enables them to relate to the fictional stories easily. The unique quality of mothers in this process-as plain as it sounds-still is their ability to bear children, and by this act to establish an irreplaceable link to another human being. In the twentieth century, the socio-anthropological development has created a myriad of new possibilities and demographic changes that consequently were to find their way into literature and even have created new genres. Due to“significant shifts […] in attitudes towards sexuality”(Allan 10), technological advance, and demographic changes, a whole new range of potential life-styles has evolved since the end of World War II. This involved deconstruction of a traditional middle-class myth, namely thebreaking up of the nuclear family’snear-monopoly position has ultimately led to an“increasing diversity occurring in family and household patterns” (Allan 10).Consequently, issues like working mothers, single-parent families, step-families, or same-sex couples adopting children have also enriched literary production of the past fifty years. Additionally to this, the increase of migration to the western industrialized societies has caused a development of a wider ethnic diversity than before the turn of the century. Especially in the United States of America this influx of new potential authors became the cornerstone of a prolific process which has been producing works apart from American mainstream literature and still continues to do so. Speaking of American literature after all, the term only on first glance seems easily applicable to all writings composed inside the borders of the United States. Because of its historically grown status as a“nationof immigrants” (Koven & Götzke 1),it is difficult to point out one specific “American” culture,hence a consistent national
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literature (see Gray xi). The one population group which used to shape and likewiseclaimed to be the definition of the term “American mainstream” was naturally the pre-vailingwhite and English-speaking majority. It was not until the 1960s that this WASP1-centered structure slowly started to finally open up and consequently the idealistic conceptof the “melting pot”got at least partially revived (see Koven & Götzke 11). So alongside of the postmodern mainstream, a branch in American literature hasbegun to thrive which Gray calls the development “towards a transnational nation”(553). He further points out that what all forms of“writingin contemporary America share is their condition: their presence in a permeable space where nations and culturesmeet” (Gray 564).
This aforementioned space becomes particularly important when authors belonging to a minority group write about experiences of fictional or actual members of their community. Tensions between the possibly stigmatized minority group and the dominating culture are bound to occur in these plots, but also conflicts between the insiders of the respective social sub-segment can be caused by a variety of possible reasons. Two novels that seem almost predestined for an analysis on that score areThe Woman Warriorby Chinese American author Maxine Hong Kingston andNo-No Boyby the Japanese American novelist John Okada. Despite the decidedly different cultural back-grounds of the two protagonist families, their perception by the society they live in is rather undifferentiated. Hence the two protagonists, both of whom were born as children of immigrants from the first generation, have to face similar challenges in their development towards finding their places in society. Because of this in many respects parallel constellation, the two texts actually overlap in most of their important themes and motives, which will be under consideration in the following chapters. Thepaper’smain focus of attention is therefore going to be put on the interaction between the two mothers and their American-born children,and in what way the mothers’ constantpromotionof their traditional cultural conduct impairs their children’s development.Further on, the question will be raised as in how far the mother figures’ actions, their behavior, as well as the way in which they communicate their values and beliefs are bound to eventually make themselves the primary antagonists in their children’ssearch for identity.
1“WASP”is an acronym standing for“WhiteAnglo-Saxon Protestant”.It was first used by the politicalscientist Axel Hacker in 1957 to denote the affluent upper-class part of the American population which had been dominating the social structure of the United States since the early settlement in the 17thcentury. The term then got published and thus popularized by Prof. Edward D. Baltzell in his bookThe Protestant Establishment: Aristocracy and Caste in America(1964).
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In order to set a starting point, the following chapter is going to deal with Asian immigration to the United States and its consequences for the country. Moreover, for a better understanding of the foreign culture, it is also necessary to shed some light on the people who decided to come to an alien and in most cases, hostile society.
2. The United States and Immigration
Throughout her bookAsian American Literature-An Introduction to the Writings and Their Social Context,Elaine H. Kim aptly argues that understanding the social context of Asian-American immigration history is crucial to reading Asian-American writings. While reading a novel without any further knowledge about its socio-cultural back-grounds can certainly be entertaining and rewarding, it would be virtually impossible to render an elaborate analysis of the literary work without further investigation in this respect. Therefore, the following chapter is going to outline the most important milestones in U.S. immigration history until the beginning of the 21stcentury, giving special attention to the ethnic groups of interest. In the process, several themes which are quite relevant to Asian-American literature, like racial discrimination or sense of belonging, will be introduced by providing an overview of the historical development of the Chinese American and the Japanese American communities. The United States of America has been an immigrant nation since the very moment when the first European settlers landed onthe New World’sshores and thus became permanent residents in the 17thcentury. Henceforth, the by all means controversialtopic “immigration”, and how to deal with itas a nation, has time and again been high on the agenda of American politics ever since. The reason for this can undoubtedly be seen in“an especially dramatic way, how race has been socially constructed among immigrants” (Foner 11). Further on, Fonergives a reasonable example to prove the sub-jectivityand negotiability of the term “race”: “Atthe turn of the twentieth century, when nearly all New York city residents were of European descent, recently arrived Jewish and Italian immigrants were seen as racially distinct from and inferior to those of Anglo-Saxonor Nordic stock” (11) -an expression of zeitgeist which from a modern point of view seems almost ludicrous. As a matter of fact, the ever present influx of foreigners frequently used to change in provenance as well as in number over the centuries; and so did the statutory response to the newcomers from all the different parts of the world. From the first law to regulate immigration, which limited the right of naturalization to“free white person[s]”and was passed by Congress in the year 1790, to the
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eventual extension of naturalization to all Asians in 1952, the United States is harking back on a multifarious immigration history (see Foner & Fredrickson 3). This development has found its temporary solution in the 1990 Immigration Act, which has since then permitted 700,000 immigrants to enter the country without racial or other discrimination per year (see CIS).
For the United States of the 21stcentury the weight of immigration is unbroken. According to the latest U.S. census, which got published in the year 2003, more than eleven percent of all citizens were foreign-born. Together with their children, who mostly are born and raised inside the United States, this segment constitutes over onefifth of the American population-with a tendency to increase in the long-run (see Malone, et al. 1-12). The number of people who claimed their ancestry to be Asian in the 2000 census was about twelve million people or 4.2 percent of the total population, also with a prospect of rapid growth in the near future (Barnes & Bennett 3).
2.1 From Gold Mountain Laborers to Model Minority: The Chinese
The reasons for people to leave the country where they have been born and raised are manifold.Migration theorists speak of “push” and “pull” factorsthat persuade common people to take the extreme deprivations, hazards, and costs of turning their back on their home country. As stated in Koven and Götzke (5),“push”factors are related to the im-migrants’country of origin and include “[u]nemployment,political repression, religiouspersecution, loss of wealth, natural disasters, poor housing, and exploitative landlords”. The opposite is true for the “pull” factors whichadd up to the allure that the country of destination embodies for the migrants. Hence,common “pull” factors include “favora-blejob opportunities, better living conditions, religious freedom, political freedom, access to better education, access to better medical care, and family ties” (Koven & Götzke 5).
Certainly a lot of those factors played a role for the first Chinese immigrants who settled along the west coast in the middle of the 19thcentury. Still, the most salient reason to come toGum San,or“thegold mountain,” as the Chinese metaphorically called the United States at that time, was the news of rich diggings and good wages which“firedthe imagination of young men who were unable even to find the next mealin their homeland” (Gall& Natividad 42). As the majority of these young men used to be relatively unskilled laborers or peasants, many of them got exploited by companies that tried to maximize their profits with the indigent and virtually helpless venturers.
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The work the Chinese got recruited for was mainly tough, physical labor; they had to“extract metals and minerals,construct a vast railroad network, reclaim swamp-lands,[…] and operate highly competitive, labor-intensivemanufacturing industries in thewestern states” (Wang 299).The objective of enduring these exertions was clear and shared by all the young Chinese,namely to “advance their […] economic well-beingduring their sojourn and to return to their ancestral villages to enjoy the fruits of theirlabor during retirement” (Wang 299). Nonetheless, althoughmany of theimmigrants’glamorous expectations did not turn out as hoped-for,it was still possible for “[a] work-erin Gum San earninga dollar a day” tohelp their left-behind“Gold Mountainwives”or even “anentire clan by sending part of his wages back to hisvillage” (Gall & Na-tividad43).
Meanwhile, conditions have taken a turn to the better. The winds of change for the Chinese started to blow during and after the years of World War II. As the number of American-born children had significantly risen in the Chinese communities since the 1920s, the U.S. government began to see the Chinese Americans as potential work force. Along with being drafted into all branches of military service, the Chinese Americans eventually got the possibility to work in defense-related industries where they“excelledin science and technology and made substantial inroads into new sectors ofthe labor market during the war” (Wang 307). In 1952, the “McCarran-Walter Act”eliminated race as a bar to immigration and finally made naturalization possible for all ethnic groups. Ten years later, President John F. Kennedy ushered a new era when he claimed that U.S. immigration policy should both be fair and generous, and made the following statementin Congress: “It is time to correct the mistakes of the past and worktowarda better future for all humanity” (qtd.in Gall & Natividad 51). In the years leading up to the turn of the millenium, a new influx of highlyskilled scientists and engineers from China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong got recruited by the leading U.S. research centers, the rising high-tech industries, and not least by universities (see Wang 307). It seemed like the once so deprived and mistreated Chinese had ultimately found their way into the American society, and even had even become a“model minority”. In fact, the “model minority”stereotype, which has been created and fiercely maintainedby the media since the 1960s is a misleading one since the “highly celebrated intellectuals […] have little, politically, economically, or socially in commonwith the direct descendants of the prewar Chinese communities in big cities” (Wang 307). The effects of this bifurcation of post-war Chinese American society are still visi-
