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Definition of Tone
The tone of a piece of writing is its general character or attitude, which might be cheerful or depressive, sarcastic or sincere, comical or mournful, praising or critical, and so on. For instance... read full definition
The tone of a piece of writing is its general character or attitude, which might be cheerful or depressive, sarcastic or sincere, comical or mournful, praising or critical... read full definition
The tone of a piece of writing is its general character or attitude, which might be cheerful or depressive, sarcastic or sincere, comical... read full definition
Tone
Explanation and Analysis:
For most of the novel, the mothers and daughters both fail to bridge their emotional distance through words. Both opt for simple, even sentences, narrating their experiences in prose that straightforwardly dissects episodes of conflict. “That night, in my room, I gorged myself,” Lena St. Clair remembers while recalling her tortured attempts to banish a bad neighbor and thereby avoid her mother’s ominous prophecies. “I will tell [Lena] of the baby I killed because I came to hate this man so much,” her mother reminds herself a section later. The Joy Luck Club’s mothers and daughters render their struggles in plain, unemotional vocabulary.
The very evenhandedness of this narrative tone enhances the novel’s emotional resonance. It builds a negative space into the story, often filling moments of sharp loss or estrangement with silence or painful irony instead. Like Lindo Jong’s uneasily silent acceptance of her daughter’s chess rebellion or Ying-Ying St. Clair’s appraisal of Harold’s marble end table, the novel’s muted emotions merely heighten their impact. Rose begins her account of her dead brother, Bing, with an ironic observation at the way her mother uses her Bible as a prop for the coffee table’s leg. “But my mother’s was what devastated me: a quiet, blank look that said she had lost everything,” Jing-Mei reflects on her failed piano performance, quietly stitching significance and sorrow from the fabric of daily life.
Related Themes:
