A Study Of The Female Voice In Yan Geling’s Novels

Yan Geling(1958-),a Chinese American writer.So far,she has written 24 novels,14 collections of short stories,and several essays and scripts.As a female writer,Yan Geling has always devoted herself to giving voice to women in her creation,and novels have a special and important position among them.Compared with works of other genres,Yan Geling has portrayed a large number of female characters in his novels,revealing the marginal status of women in social life,promoting the awakening of female subject consciousness,and better expressing women’s own voice.Therefore,this thesis takes Yan Geling’s novels as the research object,analyzes the female voice expression mechanism in his novels,explores the feminist consciousness behind it,and explores Yan Geling’s normal expressions under normal social order to convey female voices,and to use reasonable and unreasonable phenomena.The writing concept that arouses social reflection,in order to provide a better understanding of Yan Geling and even the whole feminist literature,and provide reference materials that can be used for reference.The thesis is divided into three parts: introduction,body,and conclusion.The body is divided into three chapters:The introduction first sorts out the research status of Yan Geling’s novels,finds the gaps in the research,seeks more suitable theories,and makes a more practical analysis of the works,and more in-depth exploration of the connotation of the works.Voice for women is the core feature of Yan Geling’s novels.However,because Yan Geling is a hidden feminist expresser,her female voice is deeply hidden in the historical memory of the Chinese nation,and is contained in the fate of small people in the grand historical background,so that it is often referred to by researchers’ ignore.Therefore,this thesis focuses on the female voices in Yan Geling’s novels in order to fill the gaps in this research field.As one of the founders of feminist narratology,Susan Lancer’s theory of female voices corresponds exactly to the expression mechanism of female voices in Yan Geling’s novels.Therefore,this thesis borrows Susan Lancer’s theory and divides the narrative voices in Yan Geling’s novels into author-type narrative voices,personal narrative voices and collective narrative voices.In different novels,Yan Geling chose these three different narrative voices to realize the construction of female discourse and the transmission of female voices according to the different needs of theme expression and characterization.The first chapter analyzes the author-type narrative voice in Yan Geling’s novels.The author-type narrative voice is the most used narrative voice in Yan Geling’s novels,and it is also the narrative voice that is the easiest to win the author’s discourse authority.As an implicit feminist expresser,Yan Geling often adopts a "neutral" author-style narrative voice to cover up her female identity.On the premise of first obtaining the author’s discourse authority,Yan Geling speaks for women from an objective and fair standpoint.The author-type narrative voices in Yan Geling’s novels can be divided into two types: public and hidden.First of all,in works such as "Grassland of Female" and "The Criminal Lu Yanshi",Yan Geling uses an open authorial narrative voice,directly intervening in narrative as a neutral and extra-story narrator,focusing on literature and Social relations,direct dialogue with the respondent,showing the ethical tendencies and attitudes of the implicit author,and criticizing the patriarchal society’s repression of female creation or development with direct author authority.At the same time,it shows the cognitive differences between the sexes in the way of transgender writing,and obtains discourse authority through partial elimination of male authority.Secondly,in works such as "The Ninth Widow" and "The Flower and the Boy",Yan Geling uses a concealed author-style narrative voice,combining his own life experience and real life experience,and presents it objectively and truthfully as an implicit narrator.The second-sex life normal of women in the normal society expresses the seemingly reasonable but unreasonable phenomenon in the mainstream society of patriarchy,wins fictional truth with the true but not deformed female voice,and gains the authority of the discourse writing for women.The second chapter studies the personal narrative voice in Yan Geling’s novels.Compared with author-type narrative voices,there are not many works in Yan Geling’s novels that adopt personal narrative voices.There are only a few articles such as "A Female Soldier’s Whisper","Human","No Way Out Cafe" and so on.Personal narrative voices cannot directly obtain the author’s discourse authority,but because this voice usually comes directly from the female characters in the work,especially the female protagonist,it can often be regarded as a direct expression of the female voice,in terms of expressing feminist emotions and consciousness.It has an advantage that other narrative voices cannot match.This type of work usually has the following characteristics: First,Yan Geling uses the female subject’s private speech to express publicly,the self-analysis of the individual spiritual world narrates the female consciousness to the public,and expresses the female subject’s social voice;secondly,Yan Geling and Woolf’s stream of consciousness writing correspond to each other.A suitable way of writing across time and space is to explicitly express the decentralized thinking formed by women in social conventions in female writing,and to show female characteristic cognitive methods;in the end,the female independent subject voice expression in Yan Geling’s text reflects the current women.Consciousness of ism,that is,Yan Geling used text creation to show the awakening and development of Chinese feminist consciousness,such as subject independence,sexual consciousness and political consciousness,etc,hoping to awaken the conscious liberation of the self-subconsciousness of each female subject,and promote the normalization of the society’s concept of feminism Cognition.Chapter Three discusses the collective narrative voice in Yan Geling’s novels.Collective narrative refers to a narrative behavior in which a certain size group is given narrative authority;this narrative authority can be obtained through multi-faceted,interactively empowered narrative voices,or through a certain Individual voices clearly authorized by the group are fixed in the text in the form of words.Lancer divides collective narrative voices into three types: the "single-speech"form in which a certain narrator speaks on behalf of a certain group,the"co-speaking" form in which the plural subject "we" narrates,and the "rotational"form in which individuals in the group speak in turns."form.In Yan Geling’s work"Fang Hua",Xiao Suizi’s "single words" represent the collective narrative voice of"we" in the art troupe,highlighting the kindness and greatness of He Xiaoman,who is at a marginal position,in an ironic way;In Fusang,the plural subject "we" as the"fifth generation of immigrants" narrates the story of the first generation of immigrants Fusang in a "co-speaking" way,reflecting the fate of several generations of Chinese through the personal experience of a woman;The narration of Sun Likun’s story in various official and non-governmental versions in White Snake complements each other in the form of "wheel talk",showing the whole society’s repression and incomprehension of the homosexual community.The common feature of these texts is the care for certain marginal women(such as hero women,immigrant women,firework women,and homosexual groups).The collective voice in this type of work is sometimes used as a direct presentation of female voices(such as "Fusang")to speak for marginal women and guide readers to understand and tolerate women marginalized groups;sometimes as a suppression of women’s voices in the entire social environment,In an ironic way,highlighted the difficulties of marginal women groups more strongly,and also made the voice of marginal women stronger.The conclusion part summarizes the female voices in Yan Geling’s novels,and points out that Yan Geling differs from other feminist writers in two characteristics:First,Yan Geling makes female voices in the realistic description of daily life,rather than through some deformed characters and weird events;the second is that Yan Geling’s novels have rich cultural and life details,rather than theoretical interpretations that are separated from cultural traditions and social realities.Yan Geling uses normal writing to convey the voice of women.Her text creation is small and big,expressing that feminist consciousness means the conscious liberation of women’s individual subconsciousness,and demonstrates the importance of feminism in promoting the liberation of human concepts and promoting the progress of social civilization.