The Imaginary Construction Of Female Characters In The Novels Of Qing Dynasty

Through a close study of the women images in the novels of Qing dynasty,especially the early and middle periods,this dissertation aims to present the male writers' imaginative construction of females.In the meanwhile,the hidden reasons can be revealed why male writers would like to speak for women,as well as the innermost thoughts of male writers.Except the introduction,the dissertation is divided into five chapters.Based on the three keywords:memory,imagination and history,the first chapter takes the documentary "Yiyuti" and fictional works as examples to explore the connotation of imagination.As a way to perceive the world,imagination can filtrate and reconstruct the individual memories and the collective history,and then construct the writer's own world.Analysis of imagination is equal to reading the consciousness of the self and others.So,compared to the reality of females,analyzing the women images in imagination of male writers may be more helpful to understand the social expectations on women and the way of the writers to perceive the world.The second and third chapters focus on family roles and social roles of women in the novels,and the dilemma that females faced with in the role changing.Firstly,we point out the two aspects of the imagination on women's family roles.On one hand,women in the novels were restricted by the Confucian ethics,on the other hand,they were allowed to keep their capability and personality within certain limits.Secondly,we analyze the formation of termagant wives and widowed mothers who obtained the authority from their husbands.The male writers imaginatively created these abnormal female roles to eliminate nervousness caused by women' arrogation of authority.Finally,we research on the cause of the dilemma women faced with,when they changed their social roles to the family roles.To resolve the conflicts of socialized women,including heroines,swordswomen and female emperors,male writers tried to reconstruct women's viewpoint on love and chastity,and make women abandon their social roles and return to their families.In the fourth chapter,we put an emphasis on males' imagination about female activity spaces,especially the maidens'.These spaces contains boudoirs,gardens and the outside world.In these three kinds of female exclusive or non-exclusive space,male writers depicted the gardens most.This suggests a certain taboo between males and females in Chinese traditional culture.According to the description difference in the novels,it can be found out that there exist some contradictions between the personal expectations and the social expectations on women.The relationship between men and women,especially gender identity,is studied in the fifth chapter.We take the cross-dressing plots in novels such as Jinghuayuan,Xu-Jinghuayuan and Zaishengyuan as points of penetration,and then analyze the difference between men and women on describing the same event.Compared with females' self-description,male writers portrayed the women characters in the novels,not for the women but themselves.Therefore women's voice can hardly be heard in the works of male writers.Previous studies were mostly dedicated to finding out the origin of female self-consciousness awakening,and ignored that the female roles were created by male writers.As a result,these studies usually analyzed the female roles in novels of late Qing dynasty in a sight of simple gender sociology.In this dissertation,we try to provide a new idea in studying the female characters and novels of Qing dynasty.We start our research with the text,combine the theory of psychology,narratology,history and so on,and try to understand the novels better.