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Metaphors
Definition of Mood
The mood of a piece of writing is its general atmosphere or emotional complexion—in short, the array of feelings the work evokes in the reader. Every aspect of a piece of writing... read full definition
The mood of a piece of writing is its general atmosphere or emotional complexion—in short, the array of feelings the work evokes in the reader. Every aspect... read full definition
The mood of a piece of writing is its general atmosphere or emotional complexion—in short, the array of feelings the work evokes... read full definition
Mood
Explanation and Analysis:
The Joy Luck Club delivers a tense, emotional reading experience that is balanced by a lightly humorous touch. It wryly engages with Chinese tropes, some crude and others comically frank.
When her daughter returns home with racist charges from classmates, Lindo Jong owns up to the insults and explains that “we do torture. Best torture.” Upset at her “jack-o’-lantern” eyes, Lena St. Clair tries purposely enlarging them—opening them very wide “until I could see the white parts.” She attempts to make herself more beautiful; her father mistakenly interprets the look as fear. In stereotypical Asian fashion, the Joy Luck Club women aggrandize their daughters and measure their children’s talents against each other. Such is the case of An-Mei Hsu’s account, in which her daughter “hear[s] nothing but music” when washing the dishes. “It’s like you can’t stop this natural talent,” she explains, just before Jing-Mei botches her piano performance at the youth talent show. Tan finds fun in the various vulnerabilities, disappointments, and expectations of her characters.
Such passing remarks supply comic relief in a work marked by heavy, and often violent, forms of loss. Each of the Joy Luck Club’s members bear scars of their own, and this sense of grief ripples through the generation that follows them. Trauma never quite leaves: Ying-Ying St. Clair kills her newborn son when her womanizing husband abandons her, and this bad karma trails her across the Pacific. Lena’s younger brother is stillborn, casting an oppressive resignation over her family for the rest of her childhood. When the Japanese invade Gwilin, Suyuan abandons her children by the roadside before giving birth to Jing-Mei in America. Each of the mothers suffers under the ghostly baggage of previous lives.
Neither are the Joy Luck Club’s members able to ease their daughters’ sense of placelessness and confusion on American soil. The mothers fail to express their love and share their sorrows with their children. The children—Waverly, Lena, Rose, and Jing-Mei—likewise struggle to understand their parents. While all four stories reach something close to a resolution, The Joy Luck Club largely bears a weighty and melancholy emotional undertow.
