The Interpretation Of Female Body In The Kitchen God’s Wife

Amy Tan is a famous Chinese American woman writer. After the publication of her first novel The Joy Luck Club in 1989, Tan became a new bright star both in American publishing and in literary circles. In 1991, Amy Tan published her second novel The Kitchen God’s Wife, which was honored as Tan’s second triumph. This novel was a bestseller in America at that time and received considerable praises from both the critics and the readers.This thesis takes The Kitchen God’s Wife as the text for analysis, interpreting the female body writing from the perspective of "body" and concluding that women could realize the freedom of body and spirit through body rebellion. In traditional criticism of female writings, much attention is paid to women’s rebellion against men for equality, usually from the perspective of racism and feminism. For few cases, the focus is on "human being" and its characteristics. Rare domestic research is found to study the "body" in Amy Tan’s work, not to mention the systematic study of female body and female liberation. The exploration of female body in Tan’s work is therefore of academic value. This thesis advocates "people-oriented", especially "body-oriented" ideas and holds up a feminist flag. It is an attempt to combine body with feminism, aiming to provide new perspectives into this novel.This thesis consists of five parts. Chapter One briefly introduces the author Amy Tan, the novel The Kitchen God’s Wife and the relevant literary reviews. Chapter Two discusses the theories, including Michel Foucault’s theory of docile and disciplined body, Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s body phenomenology and Simone de Beauvoir’s feminist theory of "the second sex". Chapter Three and Four are the main parts of the thesis, in which the female body writing involved in the novel is analyzed from biological and cultural aspects. Specifically, Chapter Three, based on Beauvoir’s theory about the biological data of female destiny, analyzes female body from the following three biological aspects:the growing female body, the sick female body and the dead female body; Chapter Four, based on Foucault’s disciplined body theory and Beauvoir’s feminist theory, explores the female body from a patriarchal and feminist perspective. Chapter Five concludes the significance of interpreting female body-to help women to discover the value of their bodies and to realize the liberation of female bodies and spirits.