Scenes Of "The Female Other": A Study Of Modern Female Drama

The thesis explores on the drama of modern Chinese women writers, analyzes women playwrights and the female characters in their plays, and probes into different artistic forms of the female drama. The dissertation consists of an Introduction and three chapters. Introduction: Part One discusses why the modern female intellectuals chose drama as their saying method. This has three reasons: 1. Play writing can satisfy the female intellectuals' desire of creation. 2. The performance of a play makes a space of speaking and a stage of performance for women. So they can release themselves not only by words and written language but also by voice and oral language. 3. Drama is the most powerful style by which the modern women writers can represent the female exiting state, expose the complex relations between woman and man. Part Two summarizes past and present studies on this topic and comes to the following conclusion: Until now there is no comprehensive study on it. Undoubtedly, the topic is of great significance. With the aid of feminist criticism and dramatic criticism, the dissertation examines the modern female drama from female perspective. Part Three defines the term "modern female drama" , and sums up the development of the modern female drama. Chapter One demonstrates that the earliest female playwrights and their female characters are tragic. A female playwright who writes tragedy is a suffering female playwright. At the same time, plays by female writers frequently ended in female characters' deaths. This chapter has three sections. Section One explicates the necessity of tragic characters and the inevitability of tragic endings in the modern female drama. Section Two points out that, excepting death, "leaving one's kith and kin" is the only way for the awakened young women of the May Fourth era. Section Three illustrates the young women who had left their old-style homes didn't reach their paradise. After they failed to construct new-style homes, they left again. Chapter Two studies comedies of the modern female drama. Section One and Section Two discuss comic elements with the female playwrights themselves. Section Three examines comedies in the normal sense. These comedies showed the witness of the thoughtful female playwrights, and displayed their release of the mind when they went from the sensational realm towards the rational realm. Chapter Three focuses on female dramas in the 1940's.In this period, most female dramas can be categorized as tragicomedies. During the war, the female intellectuals diverged, the contents and styles of their plays changed too. Section One expounds that love is exiled in the mainstream of female dramas in the 1940's. The relations between women and families are replaced by the relations between women and war. Section Two analyzes the women playwrights who are masculine. Section Three analyzes women playwrights who are lived in liberated area.