Virginia Woolf

Life is not a series of big lamps symmetrically arranged, but a luminous halo, a semitransparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. It is the task of the novelist to convey this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirits, whatever aberration or completing it may display, with as little mixture of the alien and external as possible.

Mrs Dalloway

To the lighthouse

A room of one’s own

Joy Luck Club

Trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel.

A family portrait and history rendered in subjective depth through selected points in time

Clash of the male and female sensibilities in the family (Mrs. Ramsay as a means of equipoise and reconciliation)

Four mothers, four daughters, four families whose histories shift with the four winds depending on who's "saying" the stories. In 1949 four Chinese women, recent immigrants to San Francisco, begin meeting to eat dim sum, play mahjong, and talk. United in shared unspeakable loss and hope, they call themselves the Joy Luck Club. Rather than sink into tragedy, they choose to gather to raise their spirits and money. "To despair was to wish back for something already lost. Or to prolong what was already unbearable." Forty years later the stories and history continue.

With wit and sensitivity, Amy Tan examines the sometimes painful, often tender, and always deep connection between mothers and daughters. As each woman reveals her secrets, trying to unravel the truth about her life, the strings become more tangled, more entwined. Mothers boast or despair over daughters, and daughters roll their eyes even as they feel the inextricable tightening of their matriarchal ties. Tan is an astute storyteller, enticing readers to immerse themselves into these lives of complexity and mystery. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Sexism

Sexism is a problem common to both Chinese and American cultures, and as such they are encountered by most of the characters in the novel. In China, for example, Lindo is forced to live almost as a servant to her mother-in-law and husband, conforming to idealized roles of feminine submission and duty. Because An-mei’s mother is raped by her future husband, she must marry him to preserve her honor; whereas he, as a man, may marry any number of concubines without being judged harshly. Indeed, it is considered shameful for An-mei’s mother to marry at all after her first husband’s death, to say nothing of her becoming a concubine, and An-mei’s mother is disowned by her mother (Popo) because of the rigid notions of purity and virtue held by the patriarchal Chinese society. Ying-ying’s nursemaid tells her that girls should never ask but only listen, thus conveying her society’s sexist standards for women and instilling in Ying-ying a tragic passivity.

In America, the daughters also encounter sexism as they grow up. Waverly experiences resistance when she asks to play chess with the older men in the park in Chinatown: they tell her they do not want to play with dolls and express surprise at her skill in a game at which men excel. Rose’s passivity with Ted is based on the stereotypical gender roles of a proactive, heroic male and a submissive, victimized female. Lena’s agreement to serve as a mere associate in the architecture firm that she helped her husband to found, as well as her agreement to make a fraction of his salary, may also be based on sexist assumptions that she has absorbed. Tan seems to make the distinction between a respect for tradition and a disrespect for oneself as an individual. Submission to sexist modes of thought and behavior, regardless of cultural tradition, seems to be unacceptable as it encompasses a passive destruction of one’s autonomy.

Lindo’s Red Candle

husband’s family. In order to free he When Lindo Jong is married, she and her husband light a red candle with a wick at each end. The name of the bride is marked at one end of the candle, and the name of the groom at the other. If the candle burns all night without either end extinguishing prematurely, custom says that the marriage will be successful and happy. The candle has a symbolic meaning—the success of the marriage—within the Chinese culture, but within the story it also functions as a symbol of traditional Chinese culture itself: it embodies the ancient beliefs and customs surrounding marriage.

Lindo feels conflicted about her marriage: she desperately does not want to enter into the subservience she knows the wedding will bring, yet she cannot go against the promises her parents made to her rself from the dilemma, she secretly blows out her husband’s side of the candle. A servant relights it, but Lindo later reveals to her mother-in-law that the flame went out, implying that it did so without human intervention. By blowing out the flame, Lindo takes control of her own fate, eventually extricating herself from an unhappy marriage. Thus, the candle also symbolizes her self-assertion and control over her own life.

It is important to consider the candle’s original symbolism as a sign of tradition and culture, for it is by playing upon the traditional beliefs and superstitions that Lindo convinces her mother-in-law to annul the marriage. Her act of blowing out the candle would have been meaningless without an underlying, pre-established network of belief. Thus the candle, first a symbol of tradition, then of self-assertion, ultimately comes to symbolize the use of tradition in claiming one’s own identity and power.

        The second sex  (Simone de Bearvoir)

‘NO, WOMAN is not our brother; through indolence and deceit we have made of her a being apart, unknown, having no weapon other than her sex, which not only means constant warfare but unfair warfare – adoring or hating, but never a straight friend, a being in a legion with esprit de corps and freemasonry – the defiant gestures of the eternal little‘NO, WOMAN is not our brother; through indolence and deceit we have made of her a being apart, unknown, having no weapon other than her sex, which not only means constant warfare but unfair warfare – adoring or hating, but never a straight friend, a being in a legion with esprit de corps and freemasonry – the defiant gestures of the eternal little slave.