Crying Of Despair In The Jail

As a Chinese writer traveled in the US between1950’s and1960’s, Bai Xianyong began his attempt on female portraits on the basis of profound understanding of western and Chinese cultures. He portrayed the unique beauty of Chinese women in a subtle and delicate manner, and was daring enough to break the traditional taboos to search the possibilities of female emancipation, which, to some degree, were progressive to the current society. There were obvious features in his female portraits. He set women in a existential dilemma where they could not step out and were in a deeply desperate mood. By literally basing on Bai’s novels and using the theories of femalism criticism, extentialism, psychology and narratology, the paper is to discuss the fictional existential dilemma of these women, and analyze the meaning of Bai’s exploration of female existential dilemma and his views of women behind his creation. The paper consists of the following five chapters.The introductory chapter presents the causes of the subject selection, hackles the studies of Bai’s works, and concludes the research purposes of the paper. The second chapter, in the perspective of women self-consciousness, discusses the split of ego between ideality and reality caused by women’s unsatisfied ego-needs in dilemma, and the insensibility of their self-feelings caused by escaping from the sense of split. The third chapter, by coping with the outer relations of the consciousness among women, the others and the society, probes into the conflicts that women encounter in the gender relations, and the desperate struggles to solve the dilemma of conflict and confusion. The forth chapter explores the profound meaning of Bai’s exploration of female existential dilemma:Writing what women encountered nihility to revolt against despair, and highlighting female subject in his writing. The paper and then reveals Bai’s unique view on female as well as his newly opened literary writing female.