Female Images In Grand Narratives Of Chinese Contemporary Literature

Chinese feminist literary criticism has been developing into an outstanding academic subject in the last 20 years. Not only has it been paid more and more attention to, but also it promotes the prosperity of feminist writing. A supply of feminist literary criticism monographs have been published continually, more and more thesis and works on female writers appear in the newspaper and journals from time to time. These researches made an approach to the feminist literature and obtained a lot of tangible achievements from the angles of feminist literary history, feminist writing, female psychology, female experience, female role and the construction of feminist criticism. However, most Chinese feminist literature criticisms were confined to criticizing and researching the female writers and their works but lacked of deep clearance and animadversion on the male writers and on their works from the sexual angle, which has always been the main body of literary creation across all the ages. There are only some scattered thesis and few criticism monographs heretofore. The scholars as Li Yang, Lan Aiguo etc. touched on the feminist problems in the novels as Tremendous Changes in a Mountain Village, Li Shuangshuang and The Song of Youth, and put forward some new ideas in their researches. However, these researches only formed a small part in their monographs, and the sexual angle of them was not so clear. If the feminist criticism ignores the male literary works and talks about female literary writings in isolation, it will be scanty of pertinence radically and be involved in the circumstances of soliloquizing, and so to lose the aim of social criticism. Therefore, this article reread the masterpieces of Chinese contemporary literature from the sexual angle, and researched the relations between some kinds of grand narratives with special ideological form & historical background and the topic of female liberation & female role writing.The Socialist Revolution and Reconstruction is a kind of social activity engaged in by the new social subject in the socialist system. In narratology words, it is a kind of narrative put up by particular social subject. This article borrowed the concept of Lyotard's theory of Grand Narratives so as to state one condition of the social & historical context, which entered into a connection with the female roles, in order to achieve the goal of observing the female images in the grand ideological form background.Introductory Remarks: This part mainly demonstrates the genesis of the topic, the internal & external academic background, the researching clew, and the discrimination of the concept of grand narrative.Chapter I The Grand Narratives and Their Female Liberation Narrative in Chinese Contemporary Literature. This part mainly discusses the grand historical background of the contemporary female literary images. We mainly discuss the following topics: 1, revaluation of Chinese tradition with the western civilization as a standard and the origin of Chinese modern grand narratives; 2, the occurrence and connotation of Chinese contemporary grand narratives, which includes revolutionary history narrative, agricultural cooperation narrative, intellectual narrative, post-revolutionary-history narrative; 3, female liberation narrative in grand narratives. (1) Female liberation narrative and the modern grand narrative nearly happened at the same time. It is a crosshead of the grand narratives. The neoteric thought precursors subsumed female liberation under the pursuit of modernity at the very start. The women's movement produced problems while it made women threw off the feudal shackles. Firstly, the springing up of modern industry was the economic foundation of female liberation narrative. Women's transformation from traditional roles to modern social roles closely related with that how many employment opportunities the industrial development could offer to women. Secondly, men led female liberation narrative. Thirdly, therefore, there was men's sound in female liberation narrative, i.e. male narrative. (2) The subject of female liberation in New China was also attached to the country's grand narratives. It is a crosshead of the national grand narrative. The provisions of women's lawful rights and interests given by Constitution, the publication of the new marriage law and the women's being extensively mobilized to take part in labor in the socialist construction formed a entire impression that women went out of the families, obtained independence on politics and economy, realized equal remuneration for men and women for equal work, got freedom of marriage and the sexual equality. But the dependency of female liberation narrative also brought along some problems. Firstly, the law could not solve the women's problems in one step. Secondly, women always got the worst of possessing of development resources, and so, they were always in a disadvantage in the matters of education, employment and promotion, etc. Accordingly, in literary woks, women were defined as illiterate, ignorant, unenlightened, in need of inducting and teaching, etc. Thirdly, the public and private dichotomy method of families and society compartmentalized families to private field. The consequence was that women attended to one thing and lost sight of another between family and society. It made them tenser because of their manifold roles. At the same time, it made women's social labor been ignored or degraded. Lastly, the problem of women's tension of manifold roles developed into a problem of contemporary Women of Honor, and so there appeared a large number of Lazy Women in the literary works.Chapter II the Female Images in Revolutionary History Narrative. This part mainly discusses the certain rules relating to the female images stipulated by the fundamental elements of revolutionary history narrative. The revolutionary history narrative in contemporary literature took New Democratic Revolution as the main content. The revolutionary history narrative were victors' recalling on the history. It is their common pursuit to construct epic, grand vigor in the main front and fundamental tone with high spirits, In the dichotomy of front and back, major and minor, women were divided into the back and the minor in the nature of the case. The illegibility and vacillate of women's class attribution also brought difficulty to them to enter grand narratives. Therefore, guide & new women became a general narrative formulation. In the classification of front and back, major and minor, women needed the aids of sex to confirm their identity. They also needed the aids of love to express their anxiousness to enter the main society tortuously. They couldn't overstep their authority. They were always in a state of being led. Both their appearances and bodies strenuously suited the new requirements and new standards. The New Women in revolutionary history narrative certainly displayed new temperament and new spiritual outlook. However, there were more regulations of grand narrative other than women's free-will choice.Chapter III the Female Images in Agricultural Cooperation Narrative. This part mainly discusses the influence upon female images, which was exerted by agricultural cooperation movement. Agricultural cooperation narrative showed the country's transformation from a system of private ownership to public ownership and the process of the peasants' acceptation. The main subjects of agricultural narrative were the following contradictions: private or public, individual or collective, poor & lower-middle peasants or landlords & rich peasants, going this way or that way. In the national agricultural cooperation narrative, women entered it as pure labor force. This made the female writing presented the following phenomena: Firstly, it offered a kind of new female images such as Li Shuangshuang. Li Shuangshuang's contradictions between the social roles and the family roles were neglected deliberately. Public canteens were held up not for female liberation. Women won no rights from it. Women went back home again as soon as the pubic canteens broke up. Secondly, it offered a block of laggard female images that were gluttonous and lazy. Those who couldn't endure the burdensome labor and household affairs became Laggard Women. Thirdly, independent new women like Xu Gaixia were weeded out in the process of narration. Fourthly, women became the hidebound implicate-women with small feet—in the process of establishment of cooperatives. Fifthly, it was widely involved with the relation between marriage, breeding, health and women's labor, which closely-related with women's bodies formed a cranny in agricultural cooperation narrative.Chapter IV Female Images in Intellectual Narrative. This part mainly investigates women's narrative function in rising and fading process of intellectual narrative after the Cultural Revolution. Intellectuals' grand narrative began to be constructed after the introduction of the reform and opening policy. Before the Cultural Revolution, as the target of being reformed, intellectuals lay in a fringe position being suppressed and couldn't construct grand narrative. Since the reform and opening, intellectuals became the leading role of new enlightenment campaign. They continued to take over the modern grand narrative that began while May Fourth Movement and experienced the resplendence in 1980s and the decadence in 1990s, represented by Zhang Xianliang's works and Jia Pingwa's Decadent City separately. The subject of intellectual narrative was the contradiction between civilization and ignorance, and the subject was embodied in the relationship between intellectual men and ignorant women. Women undertook the following functions in it: to renovate the heroes' bodies and mentalities when they encountered difficulties, to be the objects of their conquering and surpassing themselves, to be the objects of their corroborating, affirming, appreciating themselves when intellectual narrative decayed.Chapter V Female Images in Post-revolutionary-history Narrative. This part mainly discusses women's role transformation in revolutionary history narrative and family narrative under the circumstances that deconstruction and construction mingled. The family narrative in contemporary literature was always both the history of family and the history of revolution. The two clues crisscrossed. The subject of revolution closely contacted with the fate of the family's up and down. A background of post grand narrative was so formed, which took family ethics as its main line, took the cotemporary revolution as background, both deconstructed and constructed. Different from the preceding two grand narratives' revolutionary discourse, religion, ethics, morality discourses entered the knowledge frame of narratives. Women degraded from the main line of family ethics once again, concluded with following the traditional women. The recalcitrant women had formidable fates. In the construction of maternal family, women could not contend with the system of male chauvinism because women were excluded from the process of historical culture just as a kind of biotical being.Conclusion. This part concludes the following aspects in the grand narratives: the problem of the gender relations, the difficult circumstances of female writing, the female experience as a gap and symptom in grand narratives. The epical hero in grand narratives was only an empty signifiant. Its pure spiritual direction resulted that women could only enter grand narratives by their biologic traits-as the opposite of the spiritual traits, and so, women had seldom subjectivity. It conduced the difficult circumstances of female writing that they lost themselves when entering grand narratives and fell into permanent darkness when turning back to the biologic state. However, female experience still formed many Symptoms in grand narratives. This article alleges to construct a kind of Small Narrative on the basis of female experience.