The Research Of Female Body Writing On Pearl S.Buck's Chinese Novels

As a female writer who has won both the Pulitzer Prize and the Nobel Prize in Literature,Pearl S.Buck had lived in China for almost 40 years.She claimed that Chinese was her first language.She has created a lot of representative and unique female images and this is propulsion for the writing of Chinese women's living status under China's modern historical context.In China's recent academic context,researchers gradually started to focus on body and also noticed that body has recorded many historical details which have once been neglected.Thus the supplementary function for the research of history has made body become a new route for the deeper understanding of the world and especially for the comprehension of women.The female images in Pearl S.Buck's Chinese novels has always been the center of related researches,but to dig the signification of the female images at the point of body has never been found.So the research area of this thesis is to focus on the female body writing of Pearl S.Buck's Chinese novels and to make up for the lack of her research.This thesis chooses Pearl S.Buck's five Chinese novels: The Good Earth,The Mother,East Wind and West Wind,Pavilion of Women and Imperial Woman as the research content,and comb and classify the female body in them.Use the theory of Marxism,body,feminist criticism,aesthetics,etc.to analyze the female body writing with the help of close reading.Try to broaden the literary significance and cultural meaning and intimate the thinking about the current living situations of Chinese women through the research of the female body writing in those novels.The content of this thesis is divided into six chapters.Chapter one offers the background,status,significance of this research.The main part of this thesis is from chapter two to chapter five to study the female body writing in Pearl S.Buck's Chinese novels from different perspectives.Chapter two traces back to the traditional Chinese Goddess,and interprets the metaphor relationship between Goddess' s fertility function and the earth's fertility function.Based on this,the next part of this chapter discriminates two kinds of fertility bodies: the body regarding fertility as a duty,the aching body of giving birth.It manifests that women in Pearl S.Buck's novels show little doubt about fertility.It also reflects the cultural attitude of Pearl S.Buck that fertility is the essence of women.Chapter three exhibits two common types of suffering female bodies in marriage: the so-so body,the abandoned body and two types of ideal bodies in marriage: the quitting body,the body in true love.This reflects Pearl S.Buck's marriage attitude that women should get rid of gender performativity and seek true love.Chapter four chooses aesthetic point of view to study the female bodies in the novels.It starts from the traditional aesthetic concept to emerge the development of modern Chinese female body aesthetics.The development from advocating the three-inch Golden Lotus to canonizing the natural beauty of the female body,exhibits Pearl S.Buck's endorsement of female natural aesthetic conception.Chapter five goes into the category of power and analyzes the power body in Imperial Woman in three aspects.It manifests Pearl S.Buck's attitude that female can also control power and the seeking for power should balance the desire between power an d other desires.The sixth chapter is the summary of the previous analysis.It uses Marxist theory to analyze the writing contexts and meaning of Perl S.Buck 's novels.It mainly analyses the formation of Pearl S.Buck's body writing characteristics from t he perspective of history and culture.And it also reveals her novels' meaning to current female culture and female literature from the theory of Marxist alienation theory and well-rounded person theory.