The Agentic Force of Clothing in Amy Tan’s The Valley of Amazement

ABSTRACT In The Valley of Amazement, Amy Tan readdresses the mother-daughter relation through depicting a story about courtesans at the turn of twentieth century. In the novel, Tan designs different styles of garments for her characters and explores the significance of clothes. More than quotidian objects, the garments in the novel can exhibit agency on both social and individual levels. Using new materialism’s concept of matter as vibrant and agentic, I argue that clothing as one element of the narrative diffuses its materiality through its colour, style and texture and acts in assemblages. Like the new materialist Jane Bennett, who considers things in terms of the sociopolitical, I also question how clothing functions in a social context, specifically in exploring how it encodes social conventions and social changes at the turn of twentieth century in Old China and how it reveals cultural differences and acculturalisation in Tan’s novels. Furthermore, I examine how it intra-acts with the heroine, Violet so as to reveal the bi-culturality and indeterminacy of Chinese Americans.