Gender Conflicts And Social Reform

Anton Pavlov’s Chekhov (1860-1904), was a famous Russian novelist and dramatist between the 19th and the 20th century. He was the first Russian writer who boards the peak of the world literature with short stories as his main creation genre, known as one of the three masters of short stories in the world. In the perspective of daily life, Chekhov dug deeply into the society and creates a batch of female images with amazing art techniques which were very popular among readers and scholars. The female images are from different social classes and in almost every walk of life, such as noble misses, rural teachers, village women, maids, Alma, prostitutes and so on, reflecting the real living conditions in Russia. With the research on Chekhov’s life, the paper analyzes the female images in Chekhov’s stories and explores the feminism and its causes. Given the stories’background and the current social phenomenon, the paper also interprets the culture implications and modern significance of the female images in Chekhov’s stories.The first chapter of this paper is the introduction of Chekhov’s stories from the aspects of research purpose, research significance, current research and research ideas. After perusing Chekhov’s stories. The second chapter classifies and discusses the female images of different social classes and different times in Chekhov’s stories in the perspectives of female images without self-consciousness, female images with awakening self-consciousness and female images with established self-consciousness. The third chapter, based on the former analysis and Chekhov’s real life, analyzes the feminism of Chekhov’s stories and its causes. This chapter classifies Chekhov’s feminism under three headings:the sympathy for the miserable conditions of the female, the exposure of the unequal social rules and the anger and sorrow for the compromised women. This chapter also classifies the causes of the feminism as the influence of growing experience, social environment and literature edifying. The fourth chapter profoundly interprets the culture implications and modern significance of the female images in Chekhov’s stories, In the part of culture implications, the struggle and resolution of Russian women in the process of achieving their own emancipation in the reform of serfdom is described and reflected through their attachment and independence in the gender conflict and their surrender and resistance in the social reform. The part of modern significance consists of three aspects:history and reality-the emancipation process and current conditions of Chinese women, ego and otherness-the outside and inside causes of the self-establishing of the contemporary women, and saving and being saved-the saving choices of the contemporary women. Based on the emancipation process of the Chinese women, the fourth chapter inspects the outside and inside causes of the self-establishing of the contemporary women, analyzes their saving choices and guides the establishment of harmonious feminism.