From The Other To The Others

The twentieth century witnessed a flourishing of American women's fiction which has given full expression to the life experience of women in general, and which has become the focus of literary criticism owing to the rise of feminist criticism in the 1970s. But up till now, few studies have explored 20th-century American women's fiction as a whole concentrating on such issues as women's existential status and subjective awareness. Using western feminist literary theories and other relevant philosophical thoughts as guides, this paper attempts to trace the life course of American women in a modern patriarchal society via scrutiny of the texts of 20th-century American women's fiction so as to propose some references for the general cause of women's liberation.According to the different expressions of women's subjective awareness and existential status in the fiction, and the different social historical backgrounds, this paper will divide 20th-century American women's fiction into three periods and discuss them respectively in three chapters.Chapter One is awakening and revolt. This chapter concentrates on the subjective awareness and existential status of women displayed in the works of women writers such as Charlotte P. Gilman, Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton and Willa Cather, at the turn into the twentieth century. This period, similar to the Lacanian 'mirror stage', was one when women awoke from a long voiceless chaos and began to make themselves heard. But unlike the Lacanian infant, women of this stage refused to identify with the image of the 'other' forced on them by the patriarchy. Instead, they tried their best to reject such an identity. Since women's literary creation and their subjective awareness were mainly based on personal experience, women's opposition against the patriarchy used to take place within the home or a certain society; and the opposing objects were usually such moral confinements as womanhood, maternity etc., imposed on them by the patriarchy. Lacking a positive self-model, women's selfhood was chiefly expressedin the form of deserting the home, escaping the patriarchy and seeking equality with men.Chapter Two is bewilderment and searching. Women's self-orientation suffered a great retrogression during the pre-and-post World War Two period, which was the result of patriarchal oppression, but which did not lack women's own causes. After an analysis of works by such writers as Tillie Olsen, Mary McCarthy, Carson McCullers and Silvia Plath, this chapter concludes that women were likely to slip into an 'androgynous' identity while they were striving to negate their identity as the other, to seek equality with men and to get into the symbolic order of the patriarchy. Embodied in women only, this androgynous identity did not bring women to the harmonious idealistic realm for both sexes which Virginia Woolf had expected. On the contrary, it bound women with double fetters: women could not get rid of the traditional domestic role while striving hard to play a social role that had long been taken by men. The pressure from this double role made it all the more difficult for women to resist the domination of the patriarchy. Therefore the exhausted run-away Nora experienced once again a loss of the self and a confusion of the future. Then many women took refuge in the traditional role for women. Those who insisted on looking for a position in the patriarchal symbolic order were doomed to suffer.Chapter Three is subverting and constructing. The second upsurge of the women's liberation movement in the 1960s and the subsequent bloom of feminist criticism woke women once again out of 'the feminine mystique'. Women's subjective awareness reflected in works since the 1970s began to confirm the identity of the other. Women no longer see gender discrimination simply as opposition between the individual male and female, for individual males could also become victims of the patriarchy. The horizon of women's vision was then adjusted to the areas of racial discrimination, class contradiction, eco...