The Kitchen God’s Wife d’Amy Tan : Représenter les ombres de la guerre, vers un questionnement des normes

Abstract

This article analyzes to what extent, in Amy Tan’s novel The Kitchen God’s Wife (1991), the representation of violence during the Second World War and the Second Sino-Japanese War is linked to a questioning of dominant historical and literary norms. It underlines the omnipresence of war references and the difficulty for the characters to tell about their past; it also highlights the portrayal of Western countries as Orientalist colonial powers. This study notably focuses on the strategies used to articulate unspeakable war horrors into words. The various historical references interact with the representation of domestic violence and of gender-related traumas, which turn into metaphors of war violence in a mirror effect. This is attuned to a criticism and a deconstruction of both the myth of the war hero and andro- and ethnocentric rules. The war thus turns into a topos of active resistance and of a challenging of dominant norms. The historical context is the initial trigger leading to the liberation of the protagonists. The heteroglot and transtextual war narrative, and its transmission from mother to daughter, then lead to ethno- and autogenesis processes, break the silence imposed on minorities, and revise the norms of metanarratives and historical representation.