The Female Images In The Patriarchal Society

British novelist D.H. Lawrence and Chinese writer Jia Pingwa have long been linked in a lot of similar terms: as the notorious authors of the banned books, the purveyors of unmentionable sex words. The reasons to focus the criticism on these two novels---Woman in Love and The Defunct Capital lie in the fact that the stories of them are set in the similar social and historical background, the transformational period of industrialization and urbanization when the code of ethics is undergoing changes.This thesis is mainly an attempt at textual analysis of both novels of Lawrence and Jia Pingwa from the feminist perspective. Key terms on feminism such as "gender politics", "patriarchy" and "otherness" are adopted as the guiding theories to frame the work. And the most important consulting source comes from two great works on feminist criticism: one is the Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir, and the other is Sexual Politics by Kate Millet. The general view goes like this: our society is a male-dominated world and women suffer from male-dominance in both domestic life and social life. Hence the term patriarchy, feminists hold that gender politics is the customary rule and also a historical problem in the world which consists of men and women. Women may be biologically weak, but it does not mean they are psychologically or culturally fragile. Women are subordinate, an object to satisfy men's needs; as objective as natural things, they are the "other" to men.In addition, this thesis puts the two Heroines into the wide historical setting to explore the effect imposed on the characters by the era of transnational period in two countries, features of the feminism in two countries, and reasons shaped the unique points of the two heroines behind their similar life experience and psychological self-cognition process although they live in the times with 100 years gap and in the countries with distinctive cultures.In a word, women are simply the oppressed in the patriarchal world, searching for a way out. Some fail and become victims of the society; some succeed through constant strife to become stronger; also there is a way to escape from reality----to worship some super-power without knowing the truth---what they follow is just the twisted image of a male character.