From Revolutionary Daughters To Original Mothers

Yan Geling, as a Chinese female writer with typical "oriental complex", hasbeen committed to writing about women all her life. This essay takes her experienceoverseas to be a turning point, thus classifies her feminine characters into twocategories: the revolutionary female image before going abroad and the image of theoriginal mother after that. Due to the political and ideological factors, her early workshave an expression of extreme revolutionary idealism thoughts. This is because ingetting the way to be recognized, she sacrificed her natures as a woman. While sherealized the revolutionary faith, she also made herself alienation. Going abroadactually gave her a very good opportunity. Even though the cultural conflicts madeher confused and miserable for a time, it is the conflicts between the two cultures thatlet her works so rich and profound. Western civilizations broadened her sights andvaried her emotions which ascended her works describing the image of women withmaternal spirits among the literal history. Through a consist changing of literalpositions, Yan Geling achieved spiritual identity of her own. In this essay, on the basisof genera ling two different kinds of female images as mentioned above, will also gofurther to discuss the similar characteristics in her works. After sorting out all thefemale images, this essay will finally form an image tree of both daughters ofrevolution and original mothers.This essay can be generalized into4major parts.The first chapter starts with the image tree, and this chapter refines two typicalfemale images based on the different time, method and genre of the creation. Oneimage is daughters of revolution, which is mainly from her early works like Whisperof Women Soldiers, Green Blood, Maternal Grassland, in addition to that, these worksrelated to the memories of her family and childhood. The other image is originalmothers, which is commonly seen in her works after her divorce and going abroad.Such as Siao Yu, Mulberry, The Ninth Widow, Aunt Duohe, The Flowers of the War.Chapter Two is the key of this essay, it displayed the characters picked fromhistory of literature on the basis of chapter one, thus a relatively complete image treeis taking shape. In this part, I will start from two aspects. The first image is daughtersof revolution in her early works. In this part I will find some similar works in thehistory of literature such as Ding Ling and Zhang Jie’s losing their fathers at theiryoung age; Yang Mo’s parents divorce. All these images were created under thesituation of father loss. They looked for the spiritual father through the revolution. The second image is original mothers. Similar works likes Mother long andshanhaiching by Lu Xun, and Xiao Hong’s essays and Zhang Ailing’s essays. In thispart I will use The prototype theory to analysis and date back to the prototype of thetwo images. The prototype of daughters of revolution is Nora, and The prototype oforiginal mothers is Mother earth.Chapter three is mainly discussing the identity through the changes of culturestatus, namely a spiritual identity. I come to this conclusion through Ms Yan’sbiographies. By analyzing her works, I discovered the way that she achieved her ownspiritual identity by telling other peoples stories. First of all, I found that the changesfrom a student studying abroad to an American citizen affected her a lot. Goingabroad is a turning point of her whole life. A qualitative change of not only herpersonality but also her writing had occurred during that period. In addition to that,her works also showed a transaction from doubt on patriarchal authority to thespiritual identity of original mothers which we can tell from The World, Mulberry,The Ninth Widow and her other works.In closing, the two images she had created founded the two image tree,especially the history of original mothers and Xiao Hong’s body writing history. Herdoubted about history and the civilization restructured modern history in character offemale body.