The film The Joy Luck Club focuses on the lives of four Chinese mothers and their Chinese-American daughters. The story takes place a few months after the death of June's mother, Suyuan. The mothers and daughters have very different principles, with the mothers still being very traditional from their Chinese upbringing and the daughters being much more "American". The film can be viewed from the perspective of feminist literary theory, since all 8 main characters are women. The women's life stories are told through a series of flashback scenes that deal heavily with female gender roles and expectations of women. While mothers and their daughters grew up in very different worlds, some of their experiences and circumstances are correlated only because they experienced them because they are women. The first mother/daughter pair whose experiences were shown was Lindo and Waverly. Lindo was born and raised in China, where women have very few rights and no say in their future. At a very young age, Lindo was promised by a “matchmaker” to marry a man when she was 15 years old. From the time she was little, she was told that he “belonged” to her future husband and that he was already his property and that she should act accordingly. At 15, she was forced to marry a man she had met a lot, whose face she had never seen and whose age she did not know. She was expected to be a submissive, obedient, and devoted wife who would give birth to a son for the Huang family. After her marriage, her very, very young husband made her understand that he “was the husband and he made the rules” (The Joy Luck Club). When, through no fault of her own, she didn't have a child with him, all the blame was placed on her and she was told if she continued to do so... middle of paper. .... If divorce brings Rose out of her servile ways and brings back her old, strong personality. Finally, the relationship between June and her mother Suyuan is the culmination of all mother-daughter relationships. Growing up, they never saw eye to eye, they were blinded by what they thought the other wanted from them. Every woman thought she had a role to play in making everyone happy. The mothers felt like their daughters were ashamed of them and the daughters felt like they couldn't measure up to the perfect Chinese girls and were therefore a disappointment to their mothers. All women were lost in what they thought was their feminine place in society. Works Cited The Joy Luck Club. Real. By Wayne Wang. Perf. Ming-NaWen, Tamlyn Tomita, Lauren Tom, Rosalind Chao, Tsai Chin, France Nguyen, Lisa Lu and Kieu Chinh. Hollywood pictures. Movie.