عبدالمحمد موحد

This study involves Celeste Ng’s Everything I Never Told You and Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club both of which belong to immigration literature. Written by Chinese America authors, these two novels concern the issues Chinese American families face in their daily life and mother-daughter relationships. The focus of scholars has been the thematic study of both novels and identity crises in the Chinese diaspora. This research focuses on female identity in relation to narratological techniques. It particularly argues how narrative situation and focalization help in the portrayal of female identity. To answer this question, insights from feminist narratology are borrowed. This research reveals that narrative techniques of narrative situation and focalization are used to portray problems women face in a patriarchal society and shows how these problems affect their female identity. In the study of Everything I Never Told You, the focus is on Marilyn. Ng uses an authorial narrator to enter the consciousness of Marilyn and other characters, which creates an understanding about dilemmas women face after becoming a wife and a mother. Also, Marilyn’s gender role as a daughter shows how patriarchal ideas and expectations from women pressure them and affect their decisions. Furthermore, Tan’s variable focalization and female protagonists’ fictional autobiographies, in The Joy Luck Club, allow readers to see female concerns such as remarriage, abortion, and passive marriages from different female characters’ perspectives. Thus, the effects patriarchy has on women’s life and how they are still fighting against it can be seen though mother’s act of storytelling, which also goes with Freud’s idea of artistic reproduction. This shows how shared concerns rooted in patriarchy in every woman’s life shape part of their identity.