| Femininity was and still is an area of important theoretical dispute. Freud's attempts to read the riddle of femininity in terms of female sexuality have been magnets for intense debates within the psychoanalytic and feminist community.; Freud's and Lacan's notions that femininity develops through a growing awareness of lack in comparison with the male have been rejected in favor of the idea of a distinct and autonomous female sexuality. To many feminist theorists, gender formation is attributable to cultural rather than psychical-biological factors. However, more recent feminist critiques have reinstated the body in the project of rediscovering femininity. To Sidonie Smith, anatomy forms the irreducible granite at the core of woman's being. Contrary to constructivisms, which carry traces of Cartesian dualism between body and mind in downplaying the role of the body in sexuality, Alison Assiter advocates returning to a revamped biological view of the essence of female differences.; This thesis is a literary-psychological-cultural study of the female body, subjectivity and sexuality in English and Chinese fictional writings based on Nancy Chodorow's model of the female relational self, Alison Assiter's revamped essentialist notion of female difference and Michel Foucault's theory of cultural constitution of gender identity. Selected for critical analysis are works by D. H. Lawrence, Doris Lessing, Mao Dun, Xie Bingying, Ding Ling, Hualing Nieh, Li Ang, Lin Bai and Chen Ran. Emphasis is placed on the transcultural aspects of the writers in discussing the different portrayals of the New Woman in male- and female-authored works. As shown in this study, despite his biased notions of femininity, Freud's tripartite (biological-psychological-cultural) model of female identity is more well-founded than post-Freud dualistic answers to the vexed question "What is a woman?"... |
