A Comparative Study On The Male Characters In The Works Of Oscar Wilde And Bai Xianyong

British writer Oscar Wilde and Chinese writer Bai Xianyong both are influential in the literary world.Wilde is still popular as he passed away over a hundred years.And Bai Xianyong is renowned at home and abroad for his works with the characteristics blending the cultures of the West and the East.The works of these two writers have their own styles,representing the two cultural characteristics of China and the West.Nevertheless,unfortunately,there has been no comparative study on these two brilliant writers so far.The study of the masculinity emerged in the West along with the study of the feminism.In China,the related research is still in its infancy with few papers and works.This paper takes the male characters in the two writers’ works as the research object,and tries to analyze the male characters from the perspective of the masculinity theory put forward by Raven Cornell,an Australian scholar.Raven Cornell claims that the gender is not only a physiological attribute,but also a social relationship.She studies the different types of masculinity and the reasons for its formation.She proposes that masculinity develops dynamically and will be affected by various factors such as the social and emotional relations,historical conditions,social environment,personal experience etc.Based on Cornell’s definition of masculinity,this paper makes a comparative analysis on the male characters and the writing theme of the two writers.On the one hand,from the perspective of the masculinity,this paper proposes that these male characters have some commonness:most of them have the feminine tendency,they have different degrees of identity confusion in their gender and national identity,and most of the them belong to the marginal male in the society.Of course,there are also some differences between them:in Bai Xianyong’s works,the male characters are more diverse images,they have clear sexual orientation,and comparatively warmer views on love.While in Wilde’s works,the male characters are vague in images,and they are mostly marginal men.On the other hand,from the perspective of the writing theme in their works,even though they both focus on those hegemonic men,but the connotation is different,the different fate of the characters fully reflects the different writing concepts of the two writers——the aestheticism upheld by Wilde and the humanism upheld by Bai Xianyong.Men are simply regarded as the representatives of the power when feminism research is rampant in the contemporary era.It should be figured out that there are men of various genres,some of them are marginal men and are not recognized by the society.Some are as weak as those male characters in the works of the two writers.Even those powerful men also have their soft sides.Therefore,this article attempts to demonstrate the diversity and complexity of the male characters with the help of Raven Cornell’s theory.It aims to provide a more comprehensive perspective for the analysis of the male.Just as Raven Cornell once said,a new understanding of the role of men can help build a society where men and women are equal.An analysis on the similarities and differences of the male characters from amasculine perspective can broaden the research scope of the two writers,and is of great significance for the study of the evolution of male characters in Chinese and Western literary works.As we all know that a literary analysis is also a basic skill for Chinese international teachers.A comparative study of Chinese and Western cultures will help deepen the understanding of both Chinese and Western languages and cultures,and thus enrich the teaching content of those Chinese teachers who teach oversea students Chinese.