A Study Of Female Characters In Shi Wei’s Novels

As a representative of the new immigrant women writers in North America,Shi Wei proposes the" spiritual literature" and continues to cultivate in the two dimensions of female writing and spiritual writing.Her novels are particularly prominent in shaping female images.On the one hand,the subjective female consciousness urges Shi Wei to pour her thoughts on gender culture into female images.By narrating the marriage and love stories that occur inside and outside the family space,she shows the difficult survival picture of women looking for a redemption way in the male wor-ld.The sanctuary of patriarchy and the inspiration of Clhrist are only the deepening of women,who stay in the family,in the trap of Phallocentrism.While hard work in the workplace and dedication in the society give women,who go out of the family,a beautiful blueprint for establishing subjectivity and realizing self-worth.Leaving and returning are closely related to the awakening of female consciousness.On the other hand,the cultural source of Christianity influences Shi Wei giving the Bible archetypes into female images.In particular,the life experience and fate traj ectory of female characters can be combined with the three types of female archetypes in the Bible:revelation,demons and intermediary.Responding to the religious perspective,the human faith is reflected from the image of women,which suggests the survival and fate of women in real life.In addition to paying attention to the relationship between female images and the external male world,Shi Wei continues to explore the spiritual world of female images,showing women’s inner true self from both religious and female consciousness.The awakening of female self-consciousness experienced two tortuous ways of spiritual exploration:from loneliness to guilt and from Eros to Agape.Therefore,it can be seen from the female image of Shi Wei’s novels that the echo and transcendence of female writing,the exploration and deepening of Christian literature,and the similarities and differences of New Immigrant literature in North America.First,based on the family space,this paper combs and classifies female images in Shi Wei’s novels,and uses the criticism methods of feminism and gender research to analyze Shi Wei’s cognition and thinking on women’s self,gender relations and gender culture.Secondly,this paper studies the intrinsic relationship between female images of Shi Wei’s novels and female prototypes of Bible by the myth-prototype criticism theory.Third,this paper explores the religious consciousness and female consciousness of the female images in Shi Wei’s novels through the critical methods of psychoanalysis and cultural studies.Further,this paper summarizes and interprets that Shi Wei makes inheritance and breakthrough in female writing,spiritual writing and North American immigrant literature,in order to deepen the understanding of the cultural significance of female images of Shi Wei’s novels.This essay attempts to make an effort to inspire the research on female images of Shi Wei’s novels,and also calls on the academic community to pay more attention to and affirm the contribution and achievements of Shi Wei on female writing and spiritual writing.