Women, History, And Family: A Research On Family Novels By Female Writers In The New Era

Since the middle of 1980s, Wang Anyi, Tie Ning, Zhang Jie, Xu Xiaobin have created a series of family novels. These novels with combination of unique understanding of family culture in the family narration intends to disassemble the patriarchal culture, presents the female’s sufferings and vicissitudes, focuses on the stories of female writers’family and unfolds female writers’family consciousness and history consciousness. The thesis consists of five parts including Introduction, Chapter one to three, and a Conclusion.The Introduction elaborates the development of Chinese family novel. Family of female writers in the new period novels subvert the traditional family novel narrative, in the context of multiple culture construction of the women of the family’s story.Chapter One explores the construction of female family pedigree including the content, angle and significance of the construction in itself. Family pedigree in female writers’works in the new period novels is strikingly different from that in the traditional family novels. In their works, females have their own family pedigree, which makes females and males stay parallel in the family.Chapter Two analyzes the writer the image of women and absence of male image in family narrative. Previous family narrative works are mostly written by male writers who have their gender discourse mechanism, tend to enhance the image of men. But the female and male images shaped by female writers differ from those by male writers. Women are present while men are absent in works by female writers in order to establish the subject consciousness of the female.Chapter Three analyzes the historic theme of the family:suffering and redemption. Since the new era writers undertook the writing of suffering and redemption that theme, the author gives an in-depth sight into roots of tragic fate of the women in the social changes. War, revolution, cold, disease, and external factors such as family, the patriarchal culture of repression, and internal factors such as women’s own character flaws can be attributed to their sufferings. In the face of sufferings, women, choose either to flee, or choose death. Have long been bound in the narrow space of female family all their choices blame the traditional culture.The Conclusion part reveals the significance of family novels in the new period. Women have made constant efforts to fight for their own voice, but the limits for the inversion of the patriarchal family discourse patterns.