On The Loss And Construction Of Female Immigrants' Self-identity In Zadie Smith's White Teeth

White Teeth is one of the famous novels of Zadie Smith,who is a distinguished British minority female writer,and it has received many favorable comments since its publication,and Zadie Smith is thus regarded as "the new representative of English literature".As a female immigrant writer,Zadie Smith puts more emphasis on the issue of the hard process of female immigrants,identity construction in the multicultural England,and dedicates a significant portion of the book describing the process of female immigrants' identity construction in the strange land.In recent years,both foreign and domestic scholars do their researches on White Teeth mainly from the perspective of Zadie Smith's ideas of literary creation,the theme of the novel,the cultural issues and many other perspectives.However,few researchers have studied the construction of female immigrants' cultural identity from the theory of feminism.Based on this reason,this thesis will analyze female immigrants,issue of self-identity in White Teeth systematically.Based on Simone de Beauvoir's feminism,this thesis gives a detailed analysis of female immigrants' complete identity construction process—from the initial loss of consciousness of self-identity to the final construction of self-identity,and explores the solutions to the issue of female immigrants' identity.To begin with,the thesis analyzes that because of the white cultural hegemony,the domination of the male culture,discrimination of the white female and female immigrants' self-suppression,female immigrants are in the status of loss of self-identity for a long time.Then,the thesis explores the awareness of female immigrants' self-identity,and mainly analyzes the concrete embodiments of the awareness of their self-identity—suspicion of the white culture,suspicion of the native culture and rebellion against the patriarchal society.Finally,the thesis illustrates the final construction of female immigrants' self-identity.The female immigrants finally become the confident and tough women through their absorption of the white culture and the traditional culture and the final construction of "cultural hybridity".This thesis,based on the analysis of female immigrants' hard process of self-identity construction,can not only make people pay more attention to the non-white immigrants',especially the female minority immigrants' social and cultural dilemmas in the western countries,but also present the importance of cultural hybridity for female immigrants when they dealing with the relationship between their native culture and the white culture.