| Edith Hope, the heroine created by Anita Brookner(1928-) in her Booker McConnell prize—winner Hotel du Lac (1984), is a discreet, lonely and thoughtful writer. She yearns for love and marriage. However, she eventually remains spinster and becomes "invisible". Song Lian, the central character produced by Su Tong in his novel Qi Qie Cheng Qun (Wives and Concubines, 1989), with beautiful wishes enters marriage. Yet, she is caught in physical and mental pains and bloodless killing between sisters. Shocked by the mysterious secrets of Chen family, Song Lian becomes a madwoman from a pure and lovely "lotus" girl. Such two characters of female intellectual not only cause their creators' special concerns, but also arouse critics' interests of interpretation. Generally speaking, the fact that Edith's longing for love and her lonely life goes throughout the novel leads to the studies of her unhappy ending as the result of romantic emotion. The seeming tag as a concubine leads to interpretation that Song Lian's madness is due to her dependence, corruption and revenge. The present study on Edith Hope in Hotel du Lac and Song Lian in Qi Qie Cheng Qun (Wives and Concubines) will be made from the perspective of the marginalization of two images of the talented women.Both of them are produced in the 1980s and share the intelligent females' similarities. They are sensitive and thoughtful, have self—consciousness, experience suffering in depression and resistance and cannot escape from the fate of being marginalized by society. But, they are different because they are created in different cultures. The connotations of "literariness, similarity and heterogeneity" embedded in the comparability between two images of female intellectuals make the present study possible.The full academic significances of this thesis will be explored through analyzing differences in sameness and sameness in differences and cultural elements embodied in two images of the female intellectuals. It is expected to explore the literary generality and specificity in dealing with the same issue of the marginalization of the educated women in different nations and cultures. The term narrative in this thesis is used in a broad sense—text itself is narrative. Second, the term marginalization refers to the socialized process of becoming or being made marginal. In the present study, Song Lian is not taken as a real concubine but an image of the modern intellectual woman. Her identity as a concubine is just a historical coat covered on Song Lian.The thesis is arranged as follows:In Chapter One, the present study will be put forward on the basis of a brief introduction to researches on Edith Hope and Song Lian. Chapter Two will analyze their longings for true love. Edith searches for the "ideal love" under the spirits of the final care. For Song Lian love means "being loved" concerning mainly for family enjoyment under material elements. Their failures result from the fact that their desires for love and marriage to go together are neither shared by the others nor accepted by society.Chapter Three will discuss their resistance and embarrassment. Edith Hope suffers in silence and remains being self, while Song Lian fights in perplexity and looses being self in resistance. Unlike Song Lian, whose discomfiture comes from frustration of vitality, Edith's embarrassments mainly come from social prejudices against spinster and the educated women. They are marginalized because they violate the socialized images of women prescribed by culture and patriarchal society.Chapter Four will attempt to explore their unhappy endings partially due tosisters' hostility. Edith is more sensible and calm than Song Lian. Through associating with sisters, Edith analyzes and thinks about women's behaviors while Song Lian directly engages in horrible wars between sisters. Such reality threatens the sisterhood the feminists have suggested and advocated. Whether an independent and unmarried writer with androgynous minds or a dependent, rebellious and mad university student, both cannot escape from the fate of being marginalized by society. They are construct of new female identity and the result of foreign and Chinese authors' penetrating criticism on the present society. Such construct is merely "fictional authority" and cannot shake the foundation of patriarchal society. However, their voices allow no negligence. Similarities between them result from the fact that the educated women images are criticism on modernity. Differences between them mainly result from the fact that one is created in the postmodern context in the west and the other is created in a new round of Chinese culture in transition.In the present thesis, female intellectual images will be discussed primarily applying to the critical methodologies of feminism, psychoanalysis and narratology from the perspective of the comparative literature.Although Anita Brookner has gained international reputation, she is a new face to most of the Chinese readers and to Chinese literary critics. Until present, it is the first study on two images of the educated females Edith Hope and Song Lian in a comparative literature context. It is expected that the present thesis should be a helpful attempt to achieve dialogue between foreign literature and Chinese literature and to explore common literary nature and poetic nature. It is also expected that the present thesis draw the common concerns for living plights of female intellectuals in real world. Confined to information and interpretation on culture and literature of different countries, the shortcoming is inevitable. The further research is expected to consummate.
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