The Joy Luck Club 1049run throughout any family must seem clear to the
small group, and the reaction to the murder makes
it clear that Christy is a man to be reckoned with.
He has done what they, perhaps, have fantasized
about doing. However, the townspeople are not
members of his family, so his crime, unlike the
ones they guessed earlier, does not threaten them
directly.
When Christy confesses to having murdered his
father, he takes on a heroic quality to the gathered
assembly. He is offered a bed for the night, and the
possibility of a relationship with Pegeen is in the
offing. Since Christy has only confessed to killing
a family member and not a stranger, he poses no
danger to the villagers. Indeed, the next morn-
ing, a crowd of village women bring gifts to him.
These reactions are certainly not what we might
expect toward a violent murderer. In act 2, however,
things take a turn for the worse when Old Mahon,
Christy’s father, shows up. He is proof that Christy
is not guilty of any crime and therefore, somewhat
ironically, not capable of any heroic attribute.
In towns and villages of any size such as the one
in Synge’s play, family violence will occur. Comedy
provides us with a safe distance for examining our
own headstrong characteristics. However, Synge
understands that when violence takes place close to
home, or when it becomes too personally threaten-
ing, then we react negatively, just as the villagers do
toward Christy. In act 3, after Christy and his father
fight again, and Christy appears to have truly mur-
dered his father, the townspeople are ready to hang
him, or at least hand him over to the authorities.
The only thing that has changed is that the potential
murder has occurred in their presence, and now they
are bonded to the crime as Christy is. They now
experience guilt.
In a wonderfully absurd encounter, the towns-
people turn on Christy. He has been their champion,
the Playboy of the Western World, but now he has
fallen to the status of a coward and villain. The
ridiculous nature of the town’s reaction highlights
the idea of violence in the play. When townsfolk
considered Christy a patricide, he had standing and
admiration; when his interaction with his father
reveals him to be just like all the others, he can no
longer maintain a heroic attitude. Synge demon-
strates that we all experience this dichotomy when
responding to violence. First we delight in it, then
we categorize it as sport. Finally, when we see how
ordinary our violent heroes are, we cast them off.
Comedy seeks to overturn our world and help
us to laugh at the countless problems that we face.
Synge’s comic masterpiece is no exception. The
Playboy of the Western World disarms the violence that
threatens family life by revealing its inherent absur-
dity. For instance, Christy escapes the village only to
carry his story of the Playboy of the Western World
to other parts of Ireland. He intends to exploit his
time in the little rural community and reinvest him-
self with the glory that he had there. We can only
expect that the village will send word of the falseness
of his exploits whenever they have a chance. Just as
his father followed him to County Mayo, word of
Christy’s deeds threatens to follow him wherever he
goes. The cycle of his arrival, his story of violence,
his glory, and his fall are sure to be repeated in each
place he visits. In The Playboy of the Western World,
Synge points out that violence and our reaction to
it replicate Christy’s cycle. Only by laughing at vio-
lence can we hope to disarm it.
Arthur RankinTaN, amy The Joy Luck Club (1989)
Published in 1989, Amy Tan’s first novel, The Joy
Luck Club, was hugely successful. Praised by readers
and critics alike, the book sold millions of copies
and stayed on the New York Times best-seller list
for nine months. The book, coming 13 years after
Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior,
set the stage for the blossoming popularity of Asian-
American writers that began in the mid-1990s.
Although not strictly autobiographical, many
of the stories in The Joy Luck Club are inspired by
events in Tan’s life, as well as the lives of her mother,
grandmother, and assorted relatives. Each of the
seven narrators tells the stories of the eight women
in the novel ( Jing-mei “June” Woo tells her own
story and her late mother’s, too) in prose so rich
and dense with meaning that it sometimes reads
like poetry. The 16 stories woven together in Tan’s
novel tell a story of heartbreaking mother-daughter
conflicts. The stories are further remarkable because