Translated Abstract
From the last few decades of the twentieth century, the Chinese-American literature and the African-American literature have become the mainstream literature in the United States of America and attracted more and more attention from both the critics and common readers. As a representative of the Chinese-American literature, Maxine Hong Kingston published her first book—The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts (1976), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for the best work of nonfiction. As a representative of the African-American literature, Alice Walker published an epistolary fiction, The Color Purple (1982), which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1983. Both these two books fall to the genre of bildungsroman, depicting the process of the female protagonists’ pursuit for their subjectivity. Therefore, it would be quite interesting to study and compare the growing-up experiences of Maxine and Celie and to see if there exists a common rule which might guide the fight of the minority females.
Driven by this idea, the author of the present thesis first employs Jacques Lacan’s subjectivity theory as theoretical basis to analyze and compare the heroines’ growing-up processes. The study leads to the following findings.
First, at the beginning of their lives, both Maxine and Celie are in pre-mirror stage. Since the ethnic minority females are regarded as Others in the patriarchal family and the male-hegemonic society, the female protagonists can not know themselves completely or correctly. Living under the double oppressions, they lack the consciousness of subjectivity.
Then, with the passage of time, both Maxine and Celie come into the mirror stage. Through appreciating their mirror-images, they begin to distinguish themselves from the other people and realize the meaning of their existence as independent individuals. Through identifying with the females who are successful in fighting against the domineering authorities, both Maxine and Celie determine to grow up into women warriors fighting for their subjectivity too.
Next, the heroines’ pathways of seeking for subjectivity are full of zigzags. One of the most tremendous challenges is the absence of their mothers. The lack of mother’s love brings great frustration to the heroines and makes them lose the direction of life. However, every coin has two sides. Thanks to the absence of the mother, both Maxine and Celie have to stand on their own feet and accelerate their pursuit for subjectivity.
Finally, when they enter the Oedipus stage, the heroines first identify with the Father (the authorities, or the name-of-father) and try to imitate the behaviors of the authorities. However, the patriarchal society can not allow the females to share equal rights with the males. Therefore, the females must subvert the Father. Both Maxine and Celie take a peaceful way to get rid of the oppression of the Father and establish a new regulation in which the females and the males live harmoniously together.
Lacan regards psychoanalysis as a process of sexuation. Therefore, to some degree, the heroines’ quest for subjectivity is also the process of seeking their gender identity. The establishment of the heroines’ subjectivity has proved Lacan’s postfeminism opinions: A person’s social gender is influenced not only by his/her biological gender but also by his/her choice. Whether a woman has speaking right is an obvious standard to judge whether she has subjectivity. If a female takes on the responsibility to choose her life style rather than follow the arrangement of the patriarchal culture, she will live freely with an independent identity. Therefore, the woman that is prescribed by the man-centered society does not exist.
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