Identity Construction Of The Females Under Dual-oppressions-A Post-colonial Feminist Reading Of White Teeth

White Teeth, the debut of the brilliant British Jamaican writer, presented to the public a grand picture of the life of the colored immigrants in London, what kind of oppressions they suffer and how they struggle to identify themselves in the post-colonial London. The focus of this thesis is on the identity construction of the women in the novel, which was often ignored by the critics. All the third world women in the novel are suffering the oppressions from the colonial-rule remains and the patriarchal social system which accounts for their identity lose. The women of the first two generations choose a negative way to cope with their identity lose while the third generation girl Irie employed a positive way and finally created herself a hybrid identity. By means of detailed reading of the text in the context of feminism and post-colonialism, the thesis tries to make a study of the women’s identity construction in the novel.The thesis is composed of five chapters. The first chapter is an introduction to Zadie Smith and White Teeth, and the literature review of the thesis. The second chapter is the theoretical bases of the thesis, which includes some main ideas about post-colonialism and feminism. Chapter three is the analysis of the identity loss of the first and second generation women owning to the dual-oppressions. Chapter four is about how the women of different generations reacted to the dual-oppressions and the construction of a hybrid identity in the third generation girl,Irie. The last chapter is the conclusion of the thesis, after a journey full of pains, hardships and the identity loss of the women of first two generations, Irie, the third generation girl finally constructed a hybrid identity and became the girl she chose to be.