Androgyny Poetics In Woolf's And Zhu Tianwen's Novels

The utopian poetics of androgyny is embraced jointly by Virginia Woolf and T’ien-wen Chu as a core element of their feminist fiction.From a perspective of deconstruction,this paper aims to expound androgynous metaphor to text and literary form.To unravel the resonance and bifurcation between Woolf and Chu,the paper analyses their triple writing about androgynous character,psychological space-time and narrative innovation through three chapters respectively.Likewise,each chapter is divided into three sections to show cultural interaction between east and west,which is based on history of ideas and comparison of text.Chapter one introduces what gender binary oppositions are and how they are broken by androgyny.The characters in Orlando and Notes of a Desolate Man are given a creative and spiritual sight forward reality due to their bisexuality.They treat the world with same liberated vision but different tendency,which means Woolf and Chu hold distinct opinion on androgyny caused by western hermaphrodite archetype and Chinese Yin and Yang tradition.Chapter two discusses how androgyny formed an evolving method on space-time away from patriarchy,and describes Woolf’s “moments of importance”,which is a balance of subjectivity and objectivity,and Chu’s “psychic time”,which relate to anachronistic ideological utopia.By comparing Woolf’s “Life Trilogy” and Chu’s “Feminist Trilogy”,their life-writing and digression are calling inner truth but reflecting distinct death consciousness.Chapter three accounts for why androgyny poetics break through the narration.Woolf and Chu are experimentalists who review their literary forms and adjust their direction of creation.By interpreting the above text,the poetic novels and biographical novels carry a function of revealing modern experience.As lyric poets in the era of high capitalism,the wanderers with “Chinese eyes” of Woolf and “Lazarus sight” of Chu represent their second perspective in the process of urbanization.Actually,these visions are projected by writers and their literary set who draw spiritual motivation from the aesthetic tradition of the other.Generally speaking,it is because Woolf and Chu’s introspection that they could reconstruct the modern view on gender,space-time and narration.The principal characters in fictions are complex and spiritual,which show readers how to find a bridge leading to interaction between other and us as well.It may arrive at the conclusion that Woolf and Chu explain androgyny poetics differently in their writings but propose a common deconstructed way to express their ideal literary vision.