Identity Constructions Of Chinese Australian Females In Love And Vertigo

This thesis is intended to make a research on one masterpiece Love and Vertigo (2000) of Hsu Ming Teo(1970-) who is one of the most prominent Chinese Australian literature female writers. The novel was granted The Australian/Vogel Award aiming to reward Australian writers with their unpublished works in 1999 and in the meantime, it caught mainstream society’s wide attention both from readers as well as the literary critics. Bearing a resemblance to The Joy Luck Club of Chinese American female writer Amy Tan, the novel mainly explores Chinese Australian females’culture and survival status.With regard to the study of Love and Vertigo, some scholars focus their attention on mother and daughter’s completion of life cycles; some sheds light on the effect of Malaysia, Singapore and Chinese history on heroines’identity; While in the light of feminist approach and diasporic culture theory, some critics illustrate the cultural identity issue in the novel. The seemingly exploration of life course actually contributes to analyze the different approaches of rites of passage; the social history research has been taken to be authentic renditions of ethnic heritage and cultural identity exploration from the perspective of feminism and diaspora highlights the process of deconstruction and reconstruction of hybrid identity. In the age of economic globalization and cultural integration presently, an increasing number of migrants among different nations have caused immensely concern on gender, ethnicity and cultural identity. It is worthwhile researching identity loss and construction in a more comprehensive way.This thesis, with the purpose of enrichment and extension of the research on Love and Vertigo, applies postcolonial theory to the introduction that the process of Chinese Australian females’ identity construction undergoes constant and complicated transformation. Simultaneously, Chinese Australian females’double oppressions have also been revealed from the postcolonial feminism’s point of view, on the one hand, they are racially discriminated from the western perspective based on Orientalism; on the other hand, the patriarchal tradition worsens their sexuality status. Tortured by both white hegemony and patriarchy system, they are marginalized into oblivion. The mother and daughter in Love and Vertigo are both subjected to self-loss to certain extent, namely their identity constructions are the problems that Teo intends to explore and dispose in this work.With an overview of the above analysis, this thesis uncovers the heroines’ identity crisis as well as their struggle to construct from the gender, ethnicity and culture perspective. Different identity construction results inspire people that the diasporic minorities’identity construction is a complex and dynamic process and it implies that only live in the third space which belongs to neither the East nor the West, can they survive in multi-culture.