Research On The Images Of Women In The Workplace Novels Since The New Century

Workplace novels have been developing for the ten plus days.Its evolvement is coincided with the transition of Chinese economic system and the expansion of Chinese middle class.In some workplace novels,the leading role is usually a highly educated workwoman in her thirties.Authors of these novels are usually “insiders” of the workplace life,and have based their novels on their own experience.Therefore,those novels can fully grasp the subtlety of female emotions and the hidden pain of those white-collar workers in their seemingly fascinating working life.This paper believes that the female characters in workplace novels are rich in cultural implications and aesthetic value.In addition,those characters are worthy of analysis.With more attention paid to workplace novel,the understanding of it could be deepened,previous study in this field further developed,and benefits added to workplaces in real life and the world beyond.On the basis of a general understanding of workplace novels in the 21 st Century,this paper mainly analyzed the female white-collar workers in those novels.It not only defines and depicts those office ladies in workplace novels with more precision,but also conducted analysis of them from multiple perspectives such as sexism,consumptionism and class analysis.First,this paper views the image of female in working place from the perspectives of sociology and literature,to discuss the background of its origin and to compare it to the image of female in officialdom and female in factories.This paper points out that although working place female are better educated,enjoy more social resources and seek their success through personal efforts,they are in essence “a new type of workers” in their office,and work is the center of their life.To win progress in their career,they fight and suffer in the battlefield of their office,and sometimes,their health is the price to pay.Psychologically,the unlimited expansion of desire and endless pursuit of money and power are their elusive dreams.Fortunately,some of them are not captured by the so-called “success” in their working place,but have their own opinion on the alienation of their work and the value of themselves.This paper then starts from related sociological theories and employs the method of Class Analysis to discuss the economic and social status,consumption and class awareness of working place female.Firstly,this paper states clearly the phenomenon of class division and the widening gap between the rich and poor among them,and then indicates that an elevated taste is their common pursuit.Their consumption favors both “practicability” and “bourgeois taste”.Lastly,this paper concludes with the identity recognition of working place female.On the one hand,they recognize themselves as economically free and therefore with more consumption power than the lower middle income groups,and they’re also aware that they are better educated and more civilized.On the other hand,they can’t identify themselves as “middle class”.They are expecting a job that satisfies their needs beyond livelihood but the realization of their value.In this job,they hope they can enjoy more free time and a better life.This paper also inspects from the viewpoint of gender awareness and adopts the methods of case analysis and comparison analysis.It points out that most working place novels with male leading roles are dominated by the harsh workplace value of “winner takes all”,which is very “manipulatively masculine”.Also,female characters in those male workplace novels are usually simplistic and flat,while workplace novels that features female characters would give emphasis to the understanding of ecofeminism and strive to make a difference from male chauvinism and to go beyond it.This paper discusses the reasons behind different workplace female characters by probing into different cultural values and aesthetic tastes of male and female writers as well as varying reader expectations.Last,this paper examines workplace novels in the context of consumption culture.With the surge of popular culture,workplace novel writers write to satisfy readers’ needs and therefore to realize their own economic interest,and after the glorification of publishers and the hype in popular media,workplace novels became the popular literature genre.Workplace novels create a series of workplace female characters.In text,these characters lead and push the storyline of romance;economically,their consumption of “symbolic commodity” in novels fulfills the readers’ expectation of themselves,and therefore they are the embodiment of readers’ self-identification;culturally,female characters and even female writers themselves are modeled as the ideal female in male ideology to attract more readers.The creation of workplace female characters not only offers guidance and warnings to workplace female in real life,but also cast doubt of the authors on the traditional role of female in workplace,thus expose the dark side in workplace.