The Shift Of Female Body Consciousness In Wertenbaker's Plays

As an outstanding female playwright,Timberlake Wertenbaker(1951-)puts females into different social backgrounds to disclose female survival conditions and development by combining her multinational life experiences.The thesis explores female bodily experience in different social contexts and the shift of female body consciousness with the development of the society in the perspective of body consciousness by taking a close reading of Wertenbaker's plays: The Grace of Mary Traverse,The Love of the Nightingale and The Break of Day.The development of female body consciousness depends on female abilities of perceiving and performing bodies.Female body consciousness is an important issue of female development and experiences the shift with social development.The improvement of female body consciousness contributes to ameliorating female bodily practice and promoting the harmonious development of gender relations.Based on the ideas of “somatic self-knowledge”,“somatic subjectivities” and“will and freedom” in body consciousness that is put forward by Richard Shusterman,this thesis analyzes the shift of female body consciousness that is manifest in Wertenbaker's three plays: The first chapter mainly discusses fatuity of female body consciousness.Females in The Grace of Mary Traverse are analyzed within the social environment where female bodies are belittled.Influenced by objective conditions and subjective cognition,female body consciousness has become stereotyped.In the second chapter,the thesis explores germination of female body consciousness in The Love of the Nightingale and discusses female body subjectivities.When females perform their bodies to show body subjectivities,they find that disabilities in female bodies are rejected by pragmatic bodies.There is a great disparity between male and female body strength,which hinders females from performing bodies flexibly and developing female body consciousness further.Weak bodies make women inferior to men,which causes deterioration of gender relations.In the third chapter,females in The Break of Day reconstruct their body consciousness,strengthen the feelings of being empowered and develop determined body consciousness.Females makedifferent choices of motherhood.Maximized freedom is achieved when women perform their bodies,thus various body activities help women develop their body consciousness and treat gender relations more reasonably in order to achieve harmony between genders.In the conclusion part,factors that influence the shift of female body consciousness are analyzed,approaches to improving female bodily experience are studied and contributions of the improvement of female body consciousness to developing the harmonious relationship between genders are explored.This thesis aims to discuss the shift of female body consciousness in Wertenbaker's plays,exploring the factors that influence female bodily experience and the development of female body consciousness by analyzing the shift of female body consciousness,guiding females into treating own bodies properly and valuing the development of female body consciousness.