Comparative Study Of Female’s Bildungsroman Focusing On The Cuckoo Is Tweeting And The Bluest Eye

Bildungsroman is a type of novel which depicts the suffering of internal struggle and hesitation as well as awakening in a growing period from childhood to adolescence and from adolescence to adulthood, as a literary genre with a long history, the defination of Bildungsroman reflects a feature of ambiguity and instability due to its emergence and development background which varies from societies, histories and cultures around the world. Thus,the uncertainty of defination anticipates trouble in defining literary works as Bildungsroman.This thesis takes The Bluest Eye by the Nobel Laureates for Literature Toni Morrison and The Cuckoo is Tweeting by the korean chinese writer Xu Lianshun as the study subject. It makes a close text interpretation and also Parallel studies on the similar growing up narrative by taking advantage of social psychology and feminist theory. The authors potrate a black young girl and korean yong girl at puberty in their respective works. The heroines resemble a similar fate. They both suffered from such misfortunes as sexual abuse and lose of their subjectivities. The truma that can not be cured failed them in the life of the normaland thus led them to madness. The uniqueness of the gender and unusual fate of the subject can not necessarily deny their being catergorized as Bildungsroman, though seemingly they contradicte the defination of traditional Bildungsroman. For, the bitterness of growing environment paved the way to their alienation. The black girl Pecola in the bluest eyes is positioned in a white dominated society. The indifference of families and the contempt of people around reduced her as the other, so as to arose her desire to poses a pair of blue eyes which symbolize the white man. In The contradiction between the desire and its unfeasibility, she generate a fantasies that she already posesed blue eyes and became mad. The high school girl meizhu in The cuckoo is tweeting is living in a society of ethic of Korean which under went drast changes. Her parents’ divorce, mother’s remarriage in south korea, living in aunt’s that has no emotional reliablity as well as her emotion of being lost drive her to such a wish as organizing a family with her mother. The birth of her half brother evaporated all her hopes. lonelyness hunted her to the idea of committing suicide. Although,she failed suicide, she never reburn the fire of life and is trapped in madness. The fate of Pecola and Meizhu stands in sharp contrast to that of Claudia and Yinzhi who grow up with them. Claudia is also a black girl but she owns a healty attitude toward her identity thanks to her families’care and her spirit of rebellion. As for Yinzhi, a good friend of meizhu, she did ever worry for love and future like Meizhu. But she was able to walk out of confusion with the help of her mother.By analyzing the two novels, a conclusion can be drawn as follow.they differ from the traditional Bildungsroman. Other than portraying one single subject of growing up, they picked two subjects with different fate respectively. Through anylysis, It can be known that the writing intentions of the two authors lie not in the positive attitude toward growing up but to discuss the environment in which the subjects grow up. The heroines’s madness has close ties to their growing environments which are mirrors to the authors growing environment. The two authors both intend to reflect unjusticy of the societies by depicting the difficulties in the growth of young girls from weak groups. By doing so, they ring the alarm bell to call for people’s attention.