Muted Figures: Reading the Picture Bride Phenomenon in Julie Otsuka's The Buddha in the Attic and Yoshiko Uchida's Picture Bride

Abstract

[Abstract] My purpose in this undergraduate thesis is to explore the Japanese American phenomenon of picture brides focusing on the topic of silence. In order to do this, two narratives have been selected: Picture Bride (1997) by Yoshiko Uchida, and The Buddha in the Attic (2013) by Julie Otsuka. To pursue this objective, I have examined the role of silence and its connection with race, gender, their interweaving, and the development of a collective memory. After providing a socio-historical account of the events, I present a theoretical framework about silence, highly indebted to King-Kok Cheung's work, a theoretical approach which will later be applied to the chosen texts in the last section. By means of a close reading of the two narratives, I attempt not only to give a detailed literary perspective of the events from the Japanese American point of view, but also to overcome the lack of information about this matter.