Beloved And Joy Luck Club Essay, Research Paper

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 that motherhood in the Chinese culture is seen differently than we may be normally used to. In Beloved, the story is set in 1873, a time when slavery still existed in the Southern states and escaped slaves in the “free” North could still be taken back to the plantations in the South. The main character, Sethe, managed to get three of her children out of the South and into Ohio, and also escaped while pregnant to the North. However, to protect her children from being taken back to the South and made slaves, she killed one, and attempted to kill two others. Her actions in the novel cause the reader to question how good of a mother she really is. In both of these novels, common roles are played by the mothers to do what they think is best for their children. Through these novels we are given two views of motherhood, but not before we see the similar goals and responsibilities, including providing for and protecting their children, that the mothers have.

During the beginning of a child’s life, the mother is the only one that can provide for all of its basic needs. Later on in their children’s life, a mother also wants to provide them with her wisdom and advice. In Beloved Sethe travels to Ohio, having recently given birth to one child, and about to give birth to another. Her goal is to get to her first of these to children so that she can give her baby her milk. Sethe wants her babies to be given their mother’s milk. It is very important to her because as a child she was not raised by her own mother. None of the plantation children were. She only saw her mother working in the fields and did not have any interaction with her. One time, her mother took her out of the way to show her a mark that was put on her, and explained that that was the way that Sethe would always know her mother by (61). She barely was nursed by her mother and never received what she now had the opportunity to give to her children.

Additionally, the character of Baby Suggs in Beloved also played a role in providing for her children. 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. In effect, they were all her children. Through her sessions of preaching in the woods, Baby Suggs seeks to provide her “children” with those things that she thinks they have lost over the years. She gives them hope and feelings of understanding. However, most of all she gives them the tools to love themselves for everything that they are. They have gone for so many years having everything taken away from them. She acts as a mediator for their feelings, and an outlet for them to express themselves freely.

Similarly, the mothers in The Joy Luck Club each want to pass on something to each of their daughters. Each of the mothers in the novel has endured difficulties in their journeys to the United States. 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. The culture shock makes growing up a hard thing for the girls, feeling that they need to meet the standards of their parents and American society. Through their stories, each of the mothers has their good reasons for moving to the United States. Each of them hopes one day to be able to explain to their daughters all of the good intentions that they had for them. 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. Also, they hope that they would be able to give their children a better education and less trouble by raising them in America.

In the same manner, the duty of a mother to protect her child is also important. However, in these two novels we see the mother’s view of protection in two different ways. First, in Beloved, Sethe has escaped from slavery. But the law has not yet outlawed it altogether. Slaves that are in the free North can still be tracked down and taken back to the South. Since Sethe has escaped, and with her babies, schoolteacher from the Sweet Home plantation comes after her and her children to take them back to the South to be slaves. Yet Sethe refuses to put her children through what she went through. In her eyes, he children would be better off dead than having to go trough what she did as a slave. So she does just that, tries to kill her children before schoolteacher can get to them. Only one of the children dies, Beloved, and her spirit returns to haunt the house, both as a ghost and in human form. In Sethe’s eyes, this course of action was the only way to protect her children. As their mother she could not let them be taken away, and what she did was her way of protecting her children.

Likewise, the Chinese mothers of The Joy Luck Club want to protect their daughters from the hardships that they had to withstand. Suyuan had to leave her children on the side of the road. An-mei had to witness her mother being disrespected and disregarded as only a Fourth-wife. Lindo was forced into and arranged marriage where she had no say in her future, and Ying-Ying was part of a bad marriage and drowned her baby.