Social Status and Gender Roles in Amy Tan’s The Kitchen God’s Wife

Abstract

Females are exposed to social rules and restrictions since the day they are born. These cultural limitations force them to restrict themselves within the box that has been designed for them by the power hierarchies; neither males nor females are born dominant or submissive, respectively, they are taught to be ―men‖ and ―women‖ according to their culture‘s standards. In this research, sociological criticism is applied for the sake of depicting the social and cultural elements in Amy Tan‘s novel The Kitchen God’s Wife (1991), and then psychological criticism is devoted to study the effects of culture on the female characters‘s attitudes and psyche.