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Satire
Definition of Setting
Setting is where and when a story or scene takes place. The where can be a real place like the city of New York, or it can be an imagined... read full definition
Setting is where and when a story or scene takes place. The where can be a real place like the city of New York, or... read full definition
Setting is where and when a story or scene takes place. The where can be a real place like the... read full definition
Setting
Explanation and Analysis:
The Joy Luck Club’s nonlinear plot refuses to confine itself within any single time period. The novel shuffles through time as mothers and daughters take to the pages, sometimes shifting from the 1980s to the 1920s or 1940s with little more than a single paragraph break. It traces the backstories of the four Joy Luck Club members. But it also shares the childhood experiences of their four daughters and their attempts to connect with those children now grown. Tan weaves together the voices of mothers and daughters to build a collective experience that seemingly transcends time.
The novel treats location in almost the same way it navigates through decades. Tan moves fluidly between the four mothers’ childhood villages and the mid-20th-century America that their daughters grow up in. It spans Chinese cities wracked by Japanese forces, such as Tientjin and Gwilin, and 1950s San Francisco. The Joy Luck Club’s narrators take the reader from war-torn village homes to the pigeons and bakeries of Chinatown’s back alleys. It encompasses a range of places in a way that feels expansive and jarring.
The novel’s breadth of settings speaks to the often-disorienting pace of historical change and the experience of assimilation. Daughters and mothers grow up—literally—in different worlds. Lindo Jong grows up in a village outside Taiwan and gets an arranged marriage at the age of eight or nine. Her daughter, Waverly Jong, plays in San Francisco’s alleys with her brothers. Tan’s selection of cities and eras informs the intergenerational conflicts that define the novel.
Related Themes:
