The Discourse And Gender Of The May 4th Novels With The Theme Of Love And Mariiage

Feminism originated from the western feminism movement in the mid 19th century. The western feminism movement was started by the western females struggling for equal rights after their coming to their senses. It achieved far-reaching impacts by revealing the source of females' subordination through criticizing Androcentrism and the society. The theories and works of the western feminism movement were gradually translated and passed to China and played a role in China's female emancipation in the May 4th Movement to some degree. In comparison, the female emancipation of the May 4th Movement was proposed by male enlightener accompanying with the anti-feudal movement rather than proposed by females themselves. So as a part of the national liberation movement, female emancipation still showed male's practical demands for country and nation's liberation. During the existing works, researchers mainly focused on summarizing female writer's awareness of consciousness, analyzing female writer's personality, revealing the existent straits of the females and their struggling for equal rights and resistance with arranged marriage after their awakening in female writers'works.I find that the intellectuals in that period not only supported the idea of anti-feudal or anti-tradition, but also pursued the rights of human liberation and personality liberation when collecting data. During the declaration and appeal of the'Liberation', the issue of female emancipation was proposed. As one of the most important event in life, marriage was taken as the target when the intellectuals criticized the feudal family system. The voice of freedom of marriage and love could be found everywhere, reflected in the literatures by too much works with the theme of love and marriage. The works with the theme of love and marriage may better reflect both male and female's real desire and experience in the changing period of society. Therefore in this work, the focus was put on the novels with the theme of love and marriage in that period. This paper took male and female's pursuit of love and marriage as the breakthrough point and explored the effect of gender on male and female writers'narrations by the distinct utterance in their works. Except the introduction and conclusion, this work was separated into three parts progressively. The differences between Chinese Feminism movement and the western were discussed in the introduction to state the social character of female emancipation and Androcentrism in the May 4th movement, which acted as a good basis for the following chapters. In the first chapter, the characteristics of female emancipation in that period were analyzed by the cause and process of female emancipation together with their reflections in the theory and works. From the characteristics of the writers'utterance, Chapter II first explored the Chinese characteristics of utterance, then analyzed the authority of male utterance and the inferior female utterance, and finally noticed the female's efforts to insist on their utterance. Chapter III analyzed the representation and application of this characteristic discourse in the works. It discussed the sense of gender underlying the characteristic utterance by the rebellious attitude of females, the pursuit for love and sex and the situation of females in the new and old marriage style. The conclusion part summarized the impact of gender on their discourse.