beloved and joy luck club
Motherhood is a journey that women embark upon in life and endure many struggles, hopes, loves, fears and worries, and opportunities. As a mother, the responsibilities come long before the child is brought into the world. A woman is a mother from conception, and must nurture and care for her child from this point forward. As her child grows up, she can only do her best to give every ounce of love and care she has to make her child's life better. Mothers have many responsibilities including protecting and providing for their children. In most recent years our view of motherhood has altered from the "stay-at-home mom," but has altered even more from what a mother was two hundred years ago. How motherhood is viewed also changes by culture. Ethnic background plays a major part in the role that mothers play. In the novels The Joy Luck Club, by Amy Tan, and Beloved, by Toni Morrison, motherhood is shown from two very extreme situations. In The Joy Luck Club, the story line is about four Chinese mothers who have immigrated to the United States, and their American-raised daughters. The reader witnesses what a role the differences in culture play for the relationships between these mothers and daughters. We see through The Joy Luck Club
In the same manner, the duty of a mother to protect her child is also important. She acts as a mediator for their feelings, and an outlet for them to express themselves freely. They each want the best for their daughters, but difficulties arise when they realize that they are raising their daughters in America and Chinese customs are difficult to get them to adapt to. An-mei had to witness her mother being disrespected and disregarded as only a Fourth-wife. Through their stories, each of the mothers has their good reasons for moving to the United States. However, in these two novels we see the mother's view of protection in two different ways. None of the plantation children were. Each of them hopes one day to be able to explain to their daughters all of the good intentions that they had for them. They have gone for so many years having everything taken away from them. She only saw her mother working in the fields and did not have any interaction with her. In moving to a new country, the mothers had hoped to provide their daughters with more opportunity, a better way to live and less oppression because they are women. Her actions in the novel cause the reader to question how good of a mother she really is. Baby Suggs was Sethe's mother-in-law, but when it came to the African-American population of Cincinnati she had a motherly role for everyone. Likewise, the Chinese mothers of The Joy Luck Club want to protect their daughters from the hardships that they had to withstand. So she does just that, tries to kill her children before schoolteacher can get to them.
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