Life Experience Of Female Characters In Literary Works Written By Representative Female Writers In China And Vietnam In The 80's And 90's Of 20^th Century

Both China and Vietnam have gone through a long period of feudalism,during whichwomen suffered extreme repression and distortion.This provides cultural soil for modernwomen's ideological emancipation and personality development.In the 1980s and 1990s,both countries implemented the Open Policy and economic reform,and meanwhile thereexisted the impact of the feminist trend of thought in the west.In the context of"diversification" and "personalization",female writers emerged in large numbers.Chinese female writers like Zhang Jie,Chen Ran and Vietnamese female writers like Le Minh Khue,Pham Thi Hoai,Nguyen Thi Thu Hue,although they have never met,echo each other over a remote distance through their words,all of them paying close attention to and discussing on women's consciousness,survival,dignity and life.They themselves also enjoy the untested"freedom" by the act of literary creation which elaborate women's life.Zhang Jie of China and Le Minh Khue of Vietnam are both highly representativewriters in the early days of the reform and opening-up for each country.Being in a period ofsocial transformation,they develop a keen sense of social change and a strong sense ofresponsibility.They brought the beginning of feminist novel in the new period.Zhang Jie'snovel The Ark and Le Minh Khue's Minor Tragedy depict the first stage of femaleconsciousness development,namely the process of female seeking for and choice of life.The rk and The Minor Tragedy are very similar in content,both narrating the pursuit for independence of modern women.Abandoning the previous elegant style,the two writers usesharp and passionate words to reveal the plight of modern women and strip female issuesfrom the mainstream discourse in social politics.Although Zhang Jie's The Ark shows her distinct female awakening consciousness,there are always contradictions in the critical spirit of the characters.Le Minh Khue,acontemporary of Zhang Jie,is a writer who faced death on the battlefield.She is good atexpressing the ugliness of human nature in the changing world and helping peopleunderstand each other despite of the entanglement of love and hate with her gentle and calmwriting tone.Both the critical thought in The Ark and the calm style of The Minor Tragedyrecord the consciousness of women at that time.They construct the spiritual process of female self,pay attention to female living condition and destiny,and seek ways for women to communicate with society.Le Minh Khue and Zhang Jie didn't find the answer to female issues from the perspective of history,society and culture,but they subconsciously included these problems in their works,which marks the pioneering significance and enlightenment value of The Ark and The Minor Tragedy.In the early 1990s,the economic boom brought a huge psychological shock to people.Along with it came the rise of consumerism,the recognition of multiple values,the coexistence of opportunities and challenges as well as the mixture of hope and confusion.Female issues were intertwined with other social issues,which made the situation particularly complex.Chinese and Vietnamese female writers,represented by Chen Ran and Pham Thi Hoai,continue the exploration from the perspective of history and culture,ushering in an era of women's self-search and self-examination.Both A Private Life by Chen Ran and The A ngel by Pham Thi Hoai,which are based on the experience of the writers,emphasize upon the physiological and psychological development of women.Both works describe the great influence during physiological changes of heroines excert on their psychology.In The Angel,the heroine stops the natural growth at the age of fourteen so that she can look into the social reality with an alienated life experience.In A Private Life,the heroine NiYouyou enjoys free development physically,but phychologically she suffers from the injury caused by the conflict of various kinds of family and social relations.Although the two stories are different from each other,they both reveal shared thought of the two writers on the meaning of women's survival:women dedicate their lives to what they believe in,not to what they can get.Nguyen Thi Thu Hue is a contemporary Vietnamese female writer whose magnum opus After The Heaven tells the story about the midlife crisis of an unmarried mother and her daughter's repetition of her mesirable life.The mother fails to get a warm family during her long life journey;while the daughter puts her own life under the control of men after entering the seeming heaven of love because of curiosity and desire early in her youth.The mother always keeps a dynamic balance between the responsibility of raising her daughter and the pursuit of love and self.In her inner introspection,she questions the era and the life,and reflects on the significance of women's existence and the value of herself.Instead of ascribing women's failure simply to men,Nguyen Thi Thu Hue turns to the reflection and review on women themselves.Nguyen Thi Thu Hue's serious thoughts on comtemporary love issues scatter in After The Heaven,which shows the depth and breadth of the writer's thinking on women's life and other female issues.Zhang Jie and Chen Ran of China and Le Minh Khue,Pham Thi Hoai and Nguyen Thi Thu Hue of Vietnam are all female writers in the 1980s and 1990s.Despite of difference in writing style,they are highly complementary in terms of their cultural background,elucidation perspective,literary technique and narrative discourse.Besides,all of their worksreflect the development of women's thought and consciousness in a certain period.In thisdissertation,the author explains the significance and enlightenment of different culturalbackgrounds to the survival of contemporary women through horizontal comparison and explores the development of self-consciousness in women's life experience in the context of contemporary life through longitudinal sorting.By probing into the change of female consciousness in the creation of Chinese and Vietnamese female writers,the author expects to help readers understand different creating styles of female writers in the cultural and social context of 1980s and 1990s in China and Vietnam.