The Female Body Consciousness In Snow Flower And The Secret Fan

Lisa See is a famous Chinese-American female writer in contemporary American literature.Since the 1990 s,Lisa See has always adhered to exploring Chinese history and culture,and she has written most of her books centered on this theme,thus providing a window for western readers to understand Chinese history and culture.She was also elected as the National Outstanding Women in 2001 by the Chinese-American Women’s Union for her outstanding contributions in literature.In 2002,on the basis of some experts’ researches on Nvshu and her own field survey in China,Lisa See created the novel Snow Flower and the Secret Fan,a novel about female friendship.Snow Flower and the Secret Fan is the most influential work of Lisa See so far.It is precisely because its unique theme of the Nvshu culture was firstly presented in literary works.Because of the unique female culture generated by the Nvshu culture,the novel has attracted the attention of western feminist critics once it was published,and the creative writing method of combining history with literary fiction in the novel by Lisa See has also won the unanimous praise of the critics.This thesis mainly explores the female body consciousness contained in Snow Flower and the Secret Fan.The thesis is divided into three parts: introduction,main body and conclusion.The introduction part mainly introduces the author Lisa See and her works,makes a summary of the researches on Snow Flower and the Secret Fan at home and abroad,and illustrates the body consciousness theory applied in this paper.And then,on this basis,the research task and structure of this paper are proposed.The main body is is from Chapter two to Chapter four.From the perspective of body consciousness,the main body discusses the different body experiences of women under the influence of different social contexts and the resulting different female body consciousness.And then,on this basis,it analyzes how the heroine Lily reconstructs her own female body consciousness under the influence of different social contexts.Among them,the second chapter mainly discusses the female body consciousness in the feudal society of China and takes the group images of women in Snow Flower and the Secret Fan as the objects of analysis.Under the feudal society,women’s body were despised and they were forced to accept the stereotyped body consciousness to restrain themselves.The third chapter mainly discusses that under the influence of the Nvshu culture,women can recognize and form a new female body consciousness because the Nvshu culture brought the kind of body experiences that were different from feudal culture.The fourth chapter mainly elucidates that Lily reconstructs her body consciousness under the influence of these two kinds of female body consciousness.Although Lily had seen the harm of feudal ideology on women’s body,Lily forced herself to assimilate the stereotyped body consciousness under the feudal culture to gain more benefit even at the expense of her body due to the limitations of the times.However,after she fully realized that she had become a victimizer of women,she also recalled and adopted the body consciousness acquired from the Nvshu culture.She took Nvshu as her spiritual consolation,and taught the next generation of women to avoid repeating the same mistakes made by her.The fifth chapter is the conclusion.The conclusion part summarizes the impact of different social contexts on forming the female body consciousness and discusses the specific ways for women to improve their body practice.In the meanwhile,this part expounds the contribution of the improvement of female body consciousness to women’s self-growth and to the development of harmonious gender relations.