Feminist Consciousness In Ding Ling's Miss Sophie's Diary And Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway

Prior to the May Fourth Movement, women in China, suffering from the fetters of feudalism, used to be marginalized and reified as the non-humans. The rise of women writers headed by Ding Ling, generally regarded as a mark of women's efforts to resist their tragic fate, caused quite a stir in modern Chinese literary circles. Miss Sophie's Diary, in its bold challenge of traditional taboos and its resolute breaking of patriarchal cultural fetters, installs almost unprecedentedly the female as the agent of their own fate, breaking the firmly established myth of male as the dominant in social discourse in two thousand years of Chinese history. The image of women has since changed from that of the narratee to the narrator, and women has since existed as a distinctive group instead of as an object to which men project their desires.As a 20th century novelist, Virginia Woolf is both an inheritor and an innovator. Both her life and work bear distinct marks of feminism. Woolf transcends the limits of her time and both her life and work transgress the realms traditionally reserved for man. As one of her masterpieces, Mrs. Dalloway marks the maturity of her fictional creation. Woolf displays her unique art not only in her foregrounding of the feminist consciousness of the protagonists but also in her subtle rendering of the monologues to reveal the inner workings of her characters.Both Ding Ling and Woolf strive to recover the voice of the female in their respective texts. This dissertation focus on a comparative study of the two protagonists Sophie and Clarissa, and by combing cultural criticism with textual analysis, seeks, hopefully, to illuminate the female consciousness as embodied in the texts of the two authors. The dissertation argues that the characterization of Sophie and Clarrisa are situated in disparate social-historical background and different life experiences of the authors with different class orientations, and that both Sophie and Clarrisa experience a unique process of questing for the female identity that seems to attest to the feminist consciousness of the authors. To further explicate our understanding, a contrastive analysis of the narrative art of the two authors is offered at the end of the dissertation.