Postcolonial Feminist Study On The Female Images In Conrad’s Southeast-Asian Contexts Fictions

As one of the finest British writers of the twentieth century, during his nearly thirty years’writing life, Joseph Conrad published totally thirty-one works, including fictions, novellas, short stories, collections, letters and political essays. Though the studies and researches on Conrad abroad are wide, deep and profound, Chinese academic circle is not unfamiliar with Conrad and his works. The wide range and the depth of the studies on Conrad have shown the significance and popularity of Conrad as a great British writer of the twentieth century in China. However, problems exist at the same time. Besides focusing on some same popular fictions and some same study perspectives, these essays generally are not of high quality, for some of them just stay on the surface of the texts rather than digging deep enough to find out the real meaning and intention of these works; some of them even mess up their understandings and misinterpret Conrad’s works because of lacking new and comprehensive information from abroad.Both post-colonialism and feminism are the theories for the oppressed people, the former mainly for the colonized male subject, and the later for the oppressed white females; though they study from different perspectives, both of them concern about those who are subjected to the marginalized and subaltern situation, regarded as "Otherness". The direct production of the combination and incorporation of post-colonialism and feminism is the critical theory of postcolonial feminism, which spends great effort to study and discuss the long suffering history and cruel reality of the Third World women. The issues of the Third World women has been neglected for a very long time, with post-colonialists focusing on the Third World male subjects and western feminists on white female subjects; while post-feminist critics and scholars draw people’s attention to re-recognize and rediscover the true images and realities of the Third World women from the perspectives of race, gender, class, discourse and identity.On the base of some previous researches, the thesis aims at analyzing the female images in Conrad’s Southeast-Asian contexts fictions by using postcolonial feminism, especially Gayatri Spivak’s subaltern theory. The major fictions involved are Almayer’s Folly, An Outcast of the Islands, Rescue and Victory, and some main colored females and white females are the objects of analysis to show how the females in the colonies are constructed as "subalterns" and "others" and how they react to resist the double oppression of colonialism and patriarchy.