A Study on Feminist Awareness in the Novels of Fang Fang

This essay explores aspirations and expectations of women’s rights, the sympathy for and reasons for women’s destinies by analyzing the forms of expression and tracing the ideas of feminist awareness in Fang Fang's novels in terms of feminist wishes in survival predicaments, struggles in literature fields, and feminists’ pursuits in daily life, with highlighting the standout points of a number of feminist researchers, Bourdieu's Literature Field theory and Otto Weininger’s Sex and Character theory. As a prominent Chinese writer, Fang Fang has always been renowned for her meaningful and substantial literary creations. Her novels have depicted various social phenomena and have exposed current problems and people's attitudes. From the early White Dream, White Smog to Scenery, My Start is Also My End, Splendid Peach Blossoms, Implication, My Grandfather in My Father's Heart, to A Heart Penetrated by Thousands of Arrows, Personal Sorrow of Tu Ziqiang: In this series of outstanding works about the inner worlds of unimportant figures, she has revealed the impacts and changes which time imposes on women’s destinies and life courses. Fang Fang has depicted very distinctive female images in her novels with feminist ideals such as independence, self-esteem and self-reliance. Much of their resistance and struggles failed at last, but the difficulty and desperation depicted made their dreams extremely valuable and the novels brilliant. We may take One Person's War, by Lin Bai. and Personal Life, by Chen Ran, as representative works for women to comprehend and explore their female identities. Fang Fang's novels have not only portrayed women recognizing their objective social statuses, but also have displayed their self-transcendence and self-fulfillment. In China, Feminism was first termed ‘feminine ideology;’ the evolution of which is meaningful. Zhang Jingyuan explained, in Contemporary Feminist Literary Criticism, “I think that feminism and feminine ideology reflected two phases of the women’s liberation movement. The early feminist political struggles focused on objectives of winning fundamental rights and complete entities that men had obtained. Struggles of women involved combating legal, educational, cultural and productive injustice against them. These struggles continue up to now. In the literary field, it involves efforts to make their voices heard by the public, and make works from female writers and critics read by people. Female struggles also involve acquiring works for women’s education and rights for feminist critics. In this sense, it is a ‘doctrine for women’s rights,’ a cause of struggles for women to acquire equal rights. If we emphasize ‘Sex’ in feminism, we enter the post-structuralism of gender theories. The translated works we collected are Dr. YING WANG, Associate Professor and Fellow of Institute of Literature, Chinese Academy of social sciences, Beijing, 100732, China. Email: [email protected].