A Study Of Two Major Female Characters In Lin's Novels

Lin Yutang was a bilingual writer with high reputation, who did tremendous contribution to introducing Chinese culture to the western world. Throughout all his life, he wrote many English novels, among which six novels employed female images as the major characters to develop and organize plots. Among the six, Moment in Peking, A Leaf in the Storm and The Vermilion Gate, entitled as Lin's trilogy, are the most well-known and the most frequently-discussed among scholars.On account of a lot of female characters created in Moment in Peking, A Leaf in the Storm and The Vermilion Gate, female characters were once the focus of scholars'study. In general, those female characters, especially the major female characters in Moment in Peking, were often studied and discussed respectively from the perspective of feminism. Lin was often criticized over his portray of Chinese women for his male discourse and the lack of vivid psychic description. And the female characters, especially Yao Mulan in Moment in Peking, were often remarked as being detached from reality.Among the trilogy, A Leaf in the Storm was actually the second volume of Moment in Peking, and they should be regarded as a whole. The two novels were mainly based on the historical background of anti-Japanese war then. And many true historical figures and events were interwoven into the plots. They manifested a kind of intertextuality with the history then. By now scholars seldom interpret those female characters by taking into account their intertextual relation with history then. And more often female characters in the two were studied separately and seldom explored by combing them together. The significance, conveyed through the potential link among the two female characters and their relevance to the history of that time, is likely to be ignored. Employing the interpretative strategy of New Historicism, this thesis is to explain that the two major female characters foregrounded the situation Chinese women were face with, and that what their experience projected was that women liberation was an irresistible historical trend at that time. And at the same time, they were the speakers for Lin's ideas on Chinese women liberation movement. Lin maintained the helpful role of Chinese traditional culture for women on the way to struggle for liberation. And what's more, he conveyed the discourse from China to the West that the great Chinese people were confident in defeating Japanese invaders.The whole thesis contains three parts, Introduction, Conclusion and the four chapters as the main body. Introduction gives the survey of the research done by scholars on female characters in Lin's trilogy and Chinese women liberation and then accounts the reason of choosing this project as my thesis and at last introduces the structure of the whole thesis. Chapter one introduces the ideas of New Historicism on the relation between history and literature and their interpretative strategy. Chapter Two to Three study and analyze the two major female characters respectively by combining the relevant historical materials and research of scholars to expound that the two foreground the typical situation and problems Chinese women of their time were confronted with. Chapter Four will combine the two female characters together to explain that they two, as a whole, foregrounded that Chinese women liberation was an irresistible historical trend and manifested Lin's ideas on Chinese women liberation. Conclusion summarizes the research conducted in the thesis, its contribution to the research on Lin's works, and point out the plan research for future.