Reorient The Other And The Self:A Study Of Pearl S.Buck,Agnes Smedley And Emily Hahu’s Transcultural Imaginary Identification With Chinese Women

20th-century American women writers Pearl S. Buck, Agnes Smedley and Emily Hahn have an intimate relation with China and Chinese culture in the Republican Era. Based on their China experiences they have generated a vast number of China narratives, which represent Chinese women in the Republican Era. This dissertation studies Pearl S. Buck’s fiction The Good Earth and Pavilion of Women, and her nonfiction Of Men and Women, Agnes Smedley’s autobiographical novel Daughter of Earth, and her nonfiction Chinese Destinies and Battle Hymn of China, and Emily Hahn’s fiction Steps of the Sun, particularly focuses on the construction of Chinese women and white American women in the above mentioned works.How does female transcultural writing represent the other and the white female self? How do white American feminine outlooks circulate, translate and deviate in the transcultural context? How do the female writing subjects identify with their written objects? Does female transcultural writing have any specific poetic features? In order to find answers to these questions, based on Paul Gilroy’s theory of transcultural identification and Shu-mei Shih’s theory of feminine transcultural identification, in light of Jacques Lacan’s concept of mirror stage and Slavoj Zizek’s definition of ideology, a theoretical framework of feminine transcultural imaginary identification is proposed to interpret Buck, Smedley and Hahn’s representation of and identification with Chinese women. Attempts have also been made to discuss the poetic features of feminine transcultural writing in accordance with Julia Kristeva’s definition of poetic language. Lacan, Zizek and Gilroy all notice that the self is formed in its objective relation with the other, but they differ in the dimension of self-other identification:Lacan reveals the formation of "I" in the mirror stage is actually the imaginary identification with the other and thus the othering of the self. Slavoj Zizek believes the subject’s desire towards the object is constructed through the ideological frame and thus the other is the projected self. Gilroy’s double consciousness stands for the splitting of the subject into two conflicting halves, each judging the other by its own standards, and the other is identified as the other self. The three modern white American women cross the boundaries of time, space and nation-state to encounter and have dialogue, negotiate and identify with Chinese women, and they construct the female self in their relation with these women. Their self-construction through and in relation to Chinese women reveals three modes of transcultural imaginary identification, namely the othering of the self, the selfing of the other, and the double self.Buck, Smedley and Hahn, through their works, present the common features of feminine transcultural imaginary identification:their respective feminine outlooks serve as the screen from which they recognize and identify with Chinese women, meanwhile they absorb what they regard as valuable in Chinese women to strengthen or reconstruct the modern female self. Buck’s liberal feminist outlooks, Smedley’s leftist politics and Hahn’s modern avant-garde assertions are the insurmountable horizons in their meeting and identification with different groups of Chinese women. The writing female subjects have made efforts to find the most appropriate literary form to express feminine transcultural identification, consequently, different modes of transcultural identification have emerged in correspondence to specific poetic features such as the blending of narrative and non-narrative in genre, the withdrawal of narrator, and narrative transvestism and double voice in narrative voice.The layout of dissertation is as follows:The introduction presents a literature review of the transcultural writing of Pearl S. Buck, Agnes Smedley and Emily Hahn at home and abroad to foreground the field of research still needed to be done-a study of the transcultural imaginary identification in the life and works of the three writers. Based on the theories of Paul Gilroy and Jacques Lacan, a theoretical framework is proposed to interpret the works involved. The structure and main arguments of the dissertation are also introduced in this section.The body includes four chapters:Chapter one,"Beyond the Pacific Ocean-the Transcultural Experiences of Pearl S. Buck, Agnes Smedly and Emily Hahn", traces back the three modern American women’s China experiences, especially the encounters and dialogue with Chinese women in China in the Republican era, specifically, Buck with Chinese women in the countryside, Smedley with women in Chinese revolution, and Hahn with the old-fashioned Chinese woman in Shanghai.Chapter two,"Chinese Women in Liberal Feminist Vision-the Othering of Self in Pearl S. Buck’s Transcultural Writing", focuses on the image of O-lan in Good Earth, the image of gun-powder women in Of Men and Women, and the image of Madame Wu in Pavilion of Women, and compares their understanding of the relation between female self and family, to show how Buck internalizes the virtues of Chinese women in the reconstruction of a liberal feminist self. Buck crosses the boundaries of fiction and non-fiction in her transcultural writing and adopts Chinese narrative techniques to achieve a better representation of the other.Chapter three,"Chinese Women in Leftist Politics Frame-the Selfing of the Other in Agnes Smedley’s Transcultural Writing", focuses on Mary Rogers in Daughter of Earth, and the women in the Chinese revolution in Chinese Destinies and Battle Hymn of China, and compares their understanding of the relation of gender and class and nation, to show how Smedley projects the self onto Chinese women and constructs the ideal revolutionary woman fighter. She blurs the differences between imagination and reality, and adopts narrative transvestism to express her ideological ideal in the voice of the other.Chapter four,"Chinese Women in the Eyes of Female Modern Avant-Garde-the Double Self in Emily Hahn’s Transcultural Writing", focuses on the old-fashioned Chinese wife Meifeng and the modern American woman Dorothy in the novel Steps of the Sun, to show how Dorothy and the author Hahn identify the other as the self’s traditional double, and how they negotiate, select, and identify between the self and her double. Hahn ignores the differences between fiction and autobiography, and adopts double narrative voice to represent the dialogue and negotiation between the double self.The conclusion illuminates the implications to inter-cultural feminisms of today of the transcultural imaginary identification in the life and works of the three American women writers.