| This dissertation is a study of the ideological representation of women in some selected texts in modern Chinese literature and culture. In this study, the representation of women is not treated as a realistic or naturalistic depiction of women characterized by semiological transparency, but as a literary construction. The representation of women often becomes the dramatization of ideology.; With the representative examples, I suggest that the representation of women dramatizes a variety of social ideological issues: the utopian desire for modernity in the May Fourth period in Lu Xun's Regret for the Past, the competing ideological struggles staged in the female body in Ding Ling's Miss Sophia's Diary, the imagined community of a new nation state in the form of an ethnic woman in Li Ang's Labyrinthine Garden, the demand for social plurality and transgression against socialist norms and institutions through the defiant and rebellious women in He Yi's film Postman, and the postmodern culture represented by the linglei (alternative) woman who adopts a bodily writing in Wei Hui's Shanghai Baby.; In these texts, the demonstration of ideological issues takes the form of representation of women for several reasons: the representation of women expresses what cannot be expressed directly and articulates a new identity that the male characters are trying to construct; women and social ideals can both embody male desires. In consequence, the represented femininity becomes part of the definition of the ideological issues. The desirability of women is based on and assessed by the extent it satisfies the male's need to construct male subjectivity.; Different from the representation of women in the form of male narrative, the self representation of women from the perspective of female narrator works as an agent of resistance against social control and domination. Through a unique female narrative, such as diary-writing, epistolary, or bodily writing, the female narrators have not only tried to focus on female subjectivity and exposed the dark side of patriarchal ideology and institutions, but also created a specific way to break up the external or internalized constraints, and thus to let their inner truth be felt rather than withered. |
