Construction And Dispelling Of Female Authority

As a famous Chinese American female writer,Amy Tan has published five novels and one essay collection from 1989 to now,in which Joy Luck Club,Kitchen God's wife,Inspiration Girl and Bone Teacher are her autobiographical novels,causing a shock in the American literati and criticism field.In the four novels,what the readers read is all the female narrative voice,like telling the stories in the mother's tone or telling the mother's stories in the daughter's tone.The author describes the life and experience of Chinese Americans in women's perspective and tries to write the fate and psychology of women to build discourse authority by using autobiographical narrative,chapter body structure of traditional Chinese,story-telling and other narrative strategies.As a second-generation Chinese American growing up in the United States,influenced by the Chinese and American culture,family education and other effects,Amy was born with indelible contradictions.Having both male and female temperament,she sympathizes with women while subconsciously shows the recognition of male power.She tries to utilize the discourse rules of female writers to narrate the plot and shape the characters,but inevitably falls into the trap of male discourse at some time,thus dispelling female authority while constructing the female authority at the same time.Based on the theory of feminism narratology and combined with classical narratology,structuralism,imagology and unreliable narration,this paper will discuss the characteristics of female narration embodied in Amy Tan's novels from three aspects,and analyze how the Chinese female characters construct the discourse authority and why the discourse authority dispels.Amy Tan's novels show the mentality of coexistence and contradiction of her male and female bisexual temperament,and create flexible,full-fledged and real round characters.The plot is either black or white,and the narrative voice is not simply a cry for a certain woman.Amy tries to show the complex and contradictory situations faced by women,gradually show the process of self-seeking and female authority constructing,and show the choices they made and the contradiction.With these female characters,Amy Tan completely shows the process of integration and development of the two contradictory temperaments.The introduction part will briefly summarize the feminist narratology initiated by American scholar Susan S.Lanser and generalize the research status of Amy Tan's novels both at home and abroad,pointing out the innovation and research significance of this paper.The first chapter will discuss the narrative voice,mainly from the voices of the narrator and characters,discussing construction and digestion of female discourse authority.Narrator voices can be divided into three types:author narrative voices,personal narrative voices and collective narrative voices.Characters voices embody the conflict between male and female characters.Author narrative voice and personal narrative voice appear in Amy Tan's works,at the same time,the more modern collective narrative voice is also applied.All kinds of these narrative voices are relatively independent,but also complementing each other.Male characters voices and female characters voice are constantly conflicting.All of these successfully not only construct "discourse authority" for Chinese American women,but also reflect the author's potential contradictory feminist stance.The second chapter will discuss the "plot" setting and the "character" shaping in the story.The stories of Amy's novels adopt the binary opposition model as a whole,focusing on the marriage contradiction between wife and husband,as well as the cultural contradiction between the mother and daughter.Through the journey from women's surrender to the marriage to taking the initiative to divorce from the marriage and the journey from daughter's misunderstanding to understanding the mother,Amy sets up a kind of social mechanism and background,which is encouraging,normative and dispersing the female narrative voice,showing her standpoint of sympathizing with women.At the same time,among the characters shaped by the author there are both female rebels and followers,male villains and heroes,which indirectly shows her constructing and dispelling of female authority.The third chapter will expound on the narrative method,based on Booth's Axis Theory on unreliable narrative and combined with Phelan's extension of this theory.It discusses the inadequate coverage on the fact/event axis,the inadequate interpretation on the knowledge/sense axis and the inadequate judgment on the value/judgment axis in Amy Tan's autobiographical novel.The author's inner creative psychology behind the narrative method is revealed,the implied author's ideology norm explored,the strong female personal metaphor behind the unreliable narrative discourse and national allegory embodied in the unreliable narrative discourse analyzed and how the women's authority in this unreliable narrative partially dispelled discussed.On basis of the analysis of the first three chapters,this paper points out the feminist tendency in Amy Tan's novels.She traces the history of the female members of the protagonist family and shows the stories of a group of women outside the mainstream taking the road to independence.Women,especially the "keeping silence"Chinese American women are redefined,the value of their pursuit of female consciousness and their construction of female authority is affirmed.But at the same time,we find that Amy Tan does not adopt the stereotype writing method for male and female characters,which in her novels is not simply contrary.Her own bisexual conflict is reflected in the works directly or indirectly.What she eventually wants is to pursue a bisexual harmony,rather than simply promote the voices of women,which is beneficial for the promotion of women's movement in reality and the equality between men and women.