On The Female Narrative Of Zhang Xianliang's Fiction

Zhang Xianliang is one of the most influential writers in the new era. As a "returned" writer, he made a great literary achievement in the creation of novels. He was the first writer to write about the "hunger" and the "sex", so his creation represents a milestone in the history of literature. Zhang Xianliang's success in novel writing can't do without the female image he shaped. However, those female images were not created out of thin air. Instead, they bore the marks of history and time. This paper explored the elements in the novels by Zhang Xianliang which were influenced by the history and time from the perspective of female narrative.This paper was divided into three chapters. The first chapter studied the female images in the Zhang Xianliang's novels. The female images in his novels not only inherited the prototype of" dream of beauty" in traditional Chinese novels, but also developed and transformed it. They not only had the functions of satisfying the down-and-out intellectuals' sexual desire and helping them gain fame and wealth in traditional "dream of beauty" novels, but also had the new function of leading to the " referred to by people" which was needed by intellectuals in the new era who wanted to go back to the power center. " ("referred to by people" means women in the novels of Zhang Xianliang only have the surface significance, but in fact it is the symbol of the people or the public.) Chapter two mainly analyzed the differences in the narration of the same period of history among his three works, namely The Flesh and The Spirit, Rhododendrondelavayi and Half of A Man is Woman written at different stages. These differences were mainly reflected in the change of female images and the change of the heroes' attitudes towards the heroines. In his works, male intellectuals' attitudes towards the heroines were, in essence, intellectuals' attitudes towards the labor and the mass. In 1981, when The Flesh and The Spirit was written, male intellectuals admired and honored labor and the public. They were still skeptical about their own value, so in this novel, the relationship between the hero and heroine was relatively equal. When it came to the 1984 when Rhododendrondelavayi was written, influenced by the Enlightenment, intellectuals began to build the self-consciousness, and the worship of labor and the mass faded away, but it did not completely disappeared. At this time, in the novel, Zhang Yonglin's attitude towards Ma Yinghua was complex and he struggled. While in 1985, when Half of A Man is Woman was written, the new enlightenment movement developed towards a climax and intellectuals' elite-consciousness was established. Intellectuals regarded themselves as the subject and creators of history, while the mass were the object to be enlightened. Therefore, at this time, Zhang Yonglin no longer had love and respect for Huang Xiangjiu and he just needed a grand excuse so that he could betray her with great confidence. Chapter three focused on the analysis of androcentrism in the novels by Zhang Xianliang. Androcentrism in his novels was reflected in the lack of female subjectivity and the narration mode of the novel. His novels mostly were narrated from the male perspective and the female were just narrated, possessing the characteristics of hollowness and symbolization. Androcentrism in his novels was mainly subjected to the influence of androcentrism in the traditional patriarchy as well as the impact of the social context of "seeking the man".