The Image Of The Split Self Anna In The Golden Notebook By Doris Lessing And The Image Of The Split Self Ni Ao'ao In Si Ren Sheng Huo (A Private Life) By Chen Ran: A Comparative Study

Both the English novelist Doris Lessing and Chinese writer Chen Ran are well-known in English or Chinese literature. Born in Persian, Doris Lessing is remarkable for her courageous exploration of the problem of her time with varieties of perspectives and innovation of writing techniques. During more than half a century's writing career, she has published an enormous body of works and has thus evoked workable repercussions. As her representative novel, The Golden Notebook, which brought her world-famous fame, was published in 1962, coincidentally when Chen Ran was born in Peking. The Golden Notebook relates the heroine Anna's spiritual evolution from split to reintegration. Its publication brought her international fame and solidified her position as a central figure in contemporary English literature. Free Women, a highly polished conventional novel written after notebooks, relates Anna's block in writing and the disillusionment of her problem, while the notebooks, which are the raw material forming the content of Free Women, relate at length Anna's life from different perspectives (her disillusionment with writing, with the Communist ideal as well as love), resulting in her fragmentation as well as her final reintegration.Chen Ran who is a Chinese contemporary writer has published numerous short stories and won a number of literary prizes in China, including the first "Contemporary China Female Creative Writer's Award". Her first novel-length novel Si Ren Sheng Huo(A Private Life) translated into English by John Howard Gibbon was published in 1996, and it relates a growing-up story from the inside the coming-of-age of a young woman, Ni Ao'ao, who lives in a Chinese metropolis in a time of great change. Narrated retrospectively, the novel follows Ni Ao'ao's emotional and sexual development from the age of about eleven to the age of thirty.Both the heroines Anna in The Golden Notebook and Ni Ao'ao in Si Ren Sheng Huo(A Private Life) have experienced a fight with themselves and with the natural world. Both of them have gone through psychic breakdown and split in their contemporary period, as Ni Ao'ao states more succinctly elsewhere: "I am a fragment in a fragmented age" and as Anna says to her friend Molly "As far as I can see, everything is cracking up." According to this, the author of this thesis tries to find something in common and some in different between the two characters in the two novels which have the same theme: female image of spilt self. This thesis is based on the same theme and based on Lacan's and Freud's depth psychology to compare the two heroines' similar and different process from fragmentation to wholeness, appearing in the form of ego in narcissism, in self-sadism, in self-introspection and in the consciousness of salvation as well as comparative literature methods.The thesis consists of six parts as follows:Chapter one is the brief introduction to The Golden Notebook and Si Ren Sheng Huo (A Private Life), the survey of the positive and the negative critical responses to them, the assumptions as well as methodologies of this thesis and finally the contributions and a brief explanation of the significance of this thesis.Chapter two is the analysis of the similarities and differences of narcissism consciousness of Ni Ao'ao and Anna from their descriptions of portraits, descriptions of environment, descriptions of language, descriptions of interior monologues, imagination and so on.Chapter three is the analysis as well as comparisons of the two heroines' consciousness of self-sadism from the narrations of their loving affairs with men, the narrations of color, and descriptions of dreams. This chapter consists of two aspects. First, self-destruction; second, death consciousness.Chapter four is the analysis of the self-introspection of the two split heroines. Through scanning their bodies as well as their female friends' bodies in front of the mirror, they arouse their female consciousness and have found outlet of self-identification. Considering men as the mirrors of women, women will re-recognize and introspect themselves.Chapter five is the comparison of the consciousness of salvation between Anna and Ni Ao'ao. After they have experienced psychological and spiritual breakdown, they try to save themselves by seeing the doctors, by the guidance of men, self introspection as well. Although not all what they have done are the same, ultimately, they begin to realize their roles in the world, to accept the truth they always resist and so are they willing to be one in the world.Chapter six is the conclusion. It sums up the main idea discussed above and analyzes the comparisons between two different living backgrounds and cultural situation as well as the writers' different literature backgrounds. It also states the limitations in the process of writing this thesis and the questions to be further researched.