A Gender Study Of The Males And The Females In Yan Geling’s Novels

Yan Geling has been one of the prominent Chinese writers since1990. She started to publish works since1980. Until now, she has published a number of articles, short stories, screenplays, biographies, etc, which have caused a widespread influence in the research community. In her works, women have been the objects of her efforts to portray. She always sets females in the center of narrative, to express her concern for women about their survival, suffering, ethnic, history, and humanity. She is an American Chinese writer, who was influenced by the double impact of Eastern and Western cultures. She has a unique understanding about male or female, mixing both the Eastern and Western cultures. We can not use a simple idea of East or West to interpret her texts, nor for the male or females in her works.My thesis sets her novels as my study, focuses on text analysis, and analyzes gender roles with gender theories and androgyny theory, so as to explore her works’rich implication relationship between the sexes and her gender concept of androgyny. My thesis consists of three chapters:the first is to analyze the male characters’gender roles in the novel. Some of them seem brave, strong, and full of masculinity. However, they are fragile in psychological level, especially in the facing of females, for instance, Fusang’s Chinese husband Da Yong in Fusang, and Jiang Wei in The Maiden’s Name Is Xiao Yu. Besides, some other males have to depend on female in the economy and exhibit feminine characteristics. Yu Ouyang, the leading male character in A Woman’s Epic, and Yang Zhibin in The Girl-Amanda, are men who can’t find their status in the society for the reason that they have failed in the public society. She portrayed the male’s images to show the performance that men rely on women’s, and successfully deconstructed male’s image, which was originally so distinguished in the patriarchal society. The second chapter is to analyze the gender roles of female characters in some novels. Yan Geling portrayed a series of females with masculinity, such as the uncivilized women in old era, who looks weak, and the women in new era with masculinity, who are brave, strong, and intelligent, like Fusang in Fusang, Xiao Yu in The Maiden’s Name Is Xiao Yu, Tian Sufei and Sun Baihe in A Woman’s Epic, and the heroine in No Way Out of the Cafe. They owned men’s mind and got the independence from men in the patriarchal society. The third chapter is to make a study of the binary opposition of masculinity and femininity, and their harmony and conformity, so as to present the new relations between the sexes and interpret writers’ gender concept of androgyny.