Da Roza, "Re-imagining the site of the feminine: A rediscovery of Zhang Ailing's fictional works," 2003

George A. Da Roza, Ph.D.

Abstract (Summary)
Several Chinese literary critics have acclaimed Zhang Ailing (1920-1995) as one of modern China's most accomplished and most admired fiction writers. Her writings did not customarily reflect the wider social implications of war ravaged China but rather peered into the souls of individuals who shared a common humanity. She examined the transient agonies and fleeting pleasures as men and women maneuvered their way through the labyrinth called life. She wrote to contest structures that held women and men prisoners and she challenged the myths of gender and sexual interplay perpetuated by these structures.

This dissertation re-examines Zhang Ailing's corpus of fictional works beyond the current studies available and argues that Zhang's conscious use of characters and city subvert traditional paradigms of understanding gender and their interplay. The introduction presents to the reader Zhang Ailing, her history, her critics and her own sense of her position as a writer. The first chapter examines Zhang's works as she reconstructs the myriad expression of woman, breaking away from the traditional reading of woman as the bipolar constructs of virgin or vamp. The second chapter looks at Zhang's use of mimicry and masquerade as tactics whereby her female characters are able to maneuver and create for themselves a position of authority within a male dominated power structure. The third chapter studies Zhang Ailing's use of liminality in which Zhang repositions woman not as the object of desire but rather as the subject of desire that allows for possibilities and transformations. The fourth chapter explores Zhang's discourse on the dynamics of inter-gender and intra-gender complexities within the economy of marriage. The fifth chapter looks into the function of the city as part of her "uneven contrasts" technique that creates unfamiliar landscapes that offer a different reading of Hong Kong and Shanghai. The dissertation concludes that Zhang's re-visioning of "woman" and gender simultaneously conforms to and subverts the expected patriarchal literary standards and thus establishes her as an early Chinese feminist literary voice. It finally discusses the project's other concerns for the future study of Zhang Ailing.

Advisor: Cheung, Dominic