BEYOND STRUCTURE: MIRROR IMAGE THEORY AS METAPHOR FOR HEALING IN AMY TAN’S THE BONESETTER’S DAUGHTER

Abstract

Through the lens of mirror image theory, this article reads Amy Tan’s The Bonesetter’s Daughter (2001) to consider how reflection is conceived as a metaphor for healing in intergenerational trauma and diasporic identity. Tan employs mirror figuratively, not just as a structural device, but as transfigurative tool for the narrative building, character and symbolic development. In examining the divided text, concurrent but independent mother-daughter narratives, and repeated motifs of bones, ghosts and translation within it, this essay argues that healing is realized through the term mirror recognition—the imaginative awareness of an ancestral trauma which crosses cultural and generational barriers. Through such a perspective, Tan’s novel demonstrates that the process of reflection helps to bring together past and present, East and West, so that cultural unity comes into being.