| The twentieth century is the one in which Chinese women were greatly liberated, and the one in which literature by female developed sharply. Zhang Ailing, the famous female writer of the twentieth century, left a large number of works, and a lot of mysteries, too. She was born in 1920s and became well-known in 1940s. She reached the climax of her literature in 1990s. Her life was full of legends and romance. She always confined herself into books and indoors, outside of all the trends. She passed away lonely not in wife or mother capacity, but just in woman and ordinary female writer capacity, which determined that she played a role of a hurried passer-by-an unaccountable one. She lived lonely and died lonely, but her writings started upsurge one after another in people's life. The characteristics of her works are writing in sad tone and using strange and changeful images and full of her own life experience. She shaped a series of female images which were produced in the backgrounds of combining Chinese culture with western culture in 1940s by a woman's instinct and her intelligence. Her writing techniques were unique and she made a thorough psychological analysis. She wrote about the existence state of women conducted by men. She tried to show how these poor women were stuck in a money-knitted net and were destroyed because of their lack of independence and their meanness and weakness. She also tried to make readers be clear of the inconstancy of human relationships by her legendary stories, thus to dig out the origins of social-culture and psychology which led to the historical phenomenon. The age in which she was born was full of value conflicts, but she was deeply conscious. She was brave but at the same time painful when the May 4th Culture Enlightenment Movement started and the value of individual existence was probed. The May 4th Culture Enlightenment Movement promoted the modern female awakeness of "being" and the awakeness of female consciousness. When the female writer was thinking about man's existence value and existence situation, they began to get rid of the thinking mode which was imposed on them by feudal traditional concepts. They struggled to get free of the control of "his" words and attempted to think with " I" as the starting point. It can be said that women liberation was displayed first by recognizing "self", discovering "self" and letting off "self". "May 4th" novels by women showed the features at the very beginning which were different from those of novels by men. When male writers tried their best to write about various kinds of social problems, female writers paid more attention to the individual truth of women and their complicated psychological feeling. Women writers got hold of the optimal opportunity in time granted by the history and rushed out of the situation of being oppressed and persecuted and were unable to hold themselves back to express "self" and denounce the guilt of feudal rite. With the awakeness of self consciousness, female writers were urgent to express their own self as tidewater rushed down when the water-gate was opened. But during this period the female productions were lack of conscious selection of style. And the subject and materials which were related with social problems and family problems became popular at that time. Thus what the female writers faced was what style to be chosen and from what aspects to analyze problems. Because the fresh female writers were not good at displaying self at the beginning, they followed the step of the early authors of diaries and recollections and drew the materials from part of women experience and from realities nearby, which caused their works to be characteristic of autobiography. The female writers' transition to "self" exactly revealed the awakeness and reflection of female consciousness in their productions. We can say this is progress for female literature because they developed a special field. Like most of other female writers after May 4th Movement, Zhang Ailing selected the styl...
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