Writing and transformation: In search of female subjectivity in modern Chinese women's fiction.

摘要

This dissertation addresses the relationship between women's writing and female subjectivity in twentieth-century China by examining three prominent women writers: Ding Ling (1904--1986), Zhang Ailing (1920--1995), and Wang Anyi (b. 1954). They each represented a distinct era in which women were particularly active in literary creation and other cultural activities. Each was controversial in her respective period.; The four stories selected for discussion are among the less frequently studied works by the three writers. Ding Ling's "Amao guniang" (A Girl Amao) and "Yige nuren he yige nanren" (One Woman, One Man) articulate the pain of confusion and entrapment that women experience in encountering a rapidly changing society, thus introducing into the discourse of the New Woman an image that subverts the notion of hope and independence advocated by male intellectuals in the 1920s and 1930s. Despite her avowed "apolitical" stance, Zhang Ailing's "Chenxiangxie: Di yi lu xiang" (Aloeswood Ashes: The First Burning) allegorizes a woman's self-prostitution in a fallen nation and depicts a group of people in colonial Hong Kong who suffer from a sense of homelessness and from the identity crisis of being neither Chinese nor British. In critiquing the socialist rhetoric on women as Party activists and model housewives, and the recently resurfaced female discrimination and exploitation in China, Wang Anyi's Jinxiugu zhi lian (Brocade Valley) creates a fantasy world, in which the female protagonist has achieved her sexual and spiritual fulfillment through an extra-marital relationship.; Since subjectivity is influenced by and, to a large extent, structured within the discourse of politics and ideology at a particular time, analysis of the stories in this study necessarily involves the exploration of social and political elements as cultural imperatives in shaping female consciousness. Through textual and intertextual readings, this study demonstrates that Ding Ling, Zhang Ailing and Wang Anyi are all searching for meaning as woman writers and each chooses her own approach to address the women's question in China in her time. These female writers consciously create female subjectivities that challenge the national politics and the dominant ideologies concerning women and literature, women and China, and women and modernization.