The Female Image In Mary Ndiaye's "The Female Chef"

As the first person to win both the Fémina Award and the Goncourt Award,Marie NDiaye is a contemporary female writer and playwright who cannot be ignored in France.Unlike other French writers,she is African descent.Her special cultural identity has caused a confusion in her heart.This identity crisis is reflected in the recurring theme of her works: most of her protagonists are black women caught in a vicious circle of poverty.These vivid female images not only brought praise to the author,but also left her readers and scholars a more stereotyped image: she is a female writer dedicated to writing about the fate and struggle of French women of African descent,and all her works concentrate on the women's struggle in the patriarchal and postcolonial society.In Marie NDiaye's latest work The Chef,unlike the tragic image of African French women in previous works,the writer present to us the story of an ordinary and poor white woman via the voice of her assistant.This change has attracted widespread attention from the media,readers,to scholars.At present,the related research in China concentrates on the works of Marie NDiaye before The Chef,and most of them write about the struggle and tragic fate of African-French women.No one has studied the new work.This thesis aims to analyze the female image in the author's new work The Chef and self-breakthrough of the author,and to introduce the new aspect of Marie NDiaye who has achieved self-breakthrough to the domestic readers and scholars.We hope this thesis could provide a reference for those scholars who major in French contemporary women writers and their works.This article is mainly divided into four parts: the first part introduces Marie NDiaye's literary works and the current status of female chefs in the French workplace,and analyzes the creative background and practical significance of female images in The Chef from a social and cultural perspective,in order to explore why the author created this female image through textual reading and psychoanalysis theory.The second part analyzes the description of the "female chef" and the author's brand-new female consciousness,which aims to explore what is the image of the white female protagonist in The Chef and what theauthor thinks and expresses in relation to the current status of the career women through this female image.The third part will analyze writing style,writing techniques and distinctive writing features of Marie NDiaye,which aims to explore how Marie NDiaye creates this female protagonist.The fourth part will select Marie Ndiaye's Three Strong Women and The Chef to lead a comparative study,and discover the author's self-breakthrough in The Chef,in the hope of digging literature value of the work.This thesis finally concludes that in the The Chef,the author shows readers a vivid image of modern working women by breaking her stereotyped theme of black immigrant women against patriarchal society in previous works,and reflects the author's new thinking about the self-improvement of women as well as her self-breakthrough in her writing career.