The social construction of female selves in the fiction of Li Ang, Wang Anyi, and Amy Tan (Taiwan, China)

This dissertation investigates how female selves, who are situated in the context of Chinese culture modulated by different social circumstances, are formed and develop themselves in the fiction by three contemporary women writers from different regions: Li Ang (Taiwan), Wang Anyi (China), and Amy Tan (America). The investigation is made by using the feminist theories of femininity-as-construction and the heterogeneity of women to illustrate constructionalist insistences that women are subject to cultural influence and historical change, that women are not stable or universal objects or categories (Diana Fuss), and that the element of "particularity" must be taken into consideration in order to access the overall reality of women (Elizabeth V. Spelman).; This dissertation contains three main arguments: (1) Li Ang explores how women are caught in sexual power relations to pinpoint the element of sexuality in the formation of female selfhood; she attacks phallocratic culture and society for frustrating female self-development, questions the validity of traditional femininity, and calls for the cultivation of female mind and the establishment of a new womanhood; (2) Wang Anyi in her "trilogy of love" traces the strong will of women to realize themselves in love and sex back to social and political suffocation, and she also displays an intensive concern for women's anxiety about life and an implied critique of the policy of "sexual sameness" in Chinese socialism; (3) Amy Tan's novels highlight the symbiotic mother-daughter relationship and the reciprocal female bonding, the motherly empowerment and the sisterly cooperation; she focuses on the female identity shaped by female solidarity and self-reliance so as to assert that the mother-daughter bond defines and sisterhood affirms female selves.; The three writers identically demonstrate that female selves undergo ongoing transformation with the change of the constituents of their selfhood. Like their women characters, they have also transformed themselves with the changes of their own external and internal circumstances in their creative process.