Two Kinds Essay

This Study Guide consists of approximately 38 pages of chapter summaries, quotes, character analysis, themes, and more - everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of Two Kinds.
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Two Kinds Essay

This Study Guide consists of approximately 38 pages of chapter summaries, quotes, character analysis, themes, and more - everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of Two Kinds.
This section contains 2,100 words
(approx. 6 pages at 400 words per page)
Buy the Two Kinds Study Guide

Kate Bernheimer received her M.F.A. in fiction writing from the University of Arizona and is the author of Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: Women Writers Explore Their Favorite Fairy Tales (Anchor Books, 1998). In this essay she discusses the mother- daughter bind and how it hinges on notions of abandonment and identity.

"I wish I were dead," the protagonist and narrator of Amy Tan's "Two Kinds," the young Jing-mei, yells at her mother, watching her blow away in response like a leaf, "thin, brittle, lifeless." In this moment Jing-mei's empty battle for self has been won, though the victory is also a death, symbolized by her mother disappearance from the scene. The crisis between Jing-mei and her mother in Amy Tan's "Two Kinds" is grave and of a classic type of interest to psychoanalytic theorists: the peculiar love/hate entwinement between mother and daughter which hinges...

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This section contains 2,100 words
(approx. 6 pages at 400 words per page)
Buy the Two Kinds Study Guide
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