梁 颖

　　A Body, Voice, Room, and Life of My Own—Daring and Defying Dames Speak Up

　　梁 颖

　　Author:Liang Ying, female, native place: Rongcheng city, Shandong province, associate professor at graduate school of translation and interpretation, Beijing Foreign Studies University. Ph.D. in comparative literature at Purdue University, USA (2008). Major research areas: translation, English composition, American literature, comparative literature.·In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Janie doesn't know she is a black until she takes a picture with white kids at 6 years old. In Light in August, even abolitionist Joann thinks of Joe as a "negro" as if that word has an essence to it. In fact, when Brown told the marshal that Joe was a nigger, "it's like he [Brown] knew them then. Like nothing they could believe he had done would be as bad as what he could tell that somebody else had done" (98). When the dietician tells the matron that Joe is a nigger, the matron "backthrust in her chair", she glares at the dietician and says " I don't believe it!" She cries. "I don't believe it" (132)! When Joe told Bobbie that "I got some nigger blood in me" (196), Bobbie then "lay perfectly still, with a different stillness" (196). Every time the hint or suggestion of Joe is a black is sent up in the air in the book, there is mixed response: doubts, questionings, disbeliefs, and half-beliefs. But even a sheer lie becomes a truth if repeated 1 000 times. In the end it is Joe himself that helps spreading the rumor as if he is f aunting his possibly mixed blood. And the townspeople, for instance Brown, links Joe's name to his racial identity and then to his behavior (33, 98). For instance, Joe's murder of Joann is explained, in Brown's mind, by his racial heritage. One of the questions Faulkner poses in this book is: when does someone know whether he is black or white? The answer he offers: when society tells him.

　　Similarly, gender is also less a biological identity than a social construct. And the def nitions of gender are always set. To quote Brown again, there is "abstract man" (274) as well as abstract woman. In Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! Mr. Compson remembers that years ago they in the South made their women into ladies. Then the war came and made the ladies into ghosts.

　　It is an irony that, rendered "other" by the townspeople, Joe sees women as his "other". Joe learns early, from the dietician and from the McEacherns, about the "difference" between men and women. Being used to the generalizations about women, in his interactions with Joann, Joe seeks to understand her in prescribed terms of female behavior. He is amazed that these categories do not hold. For instance, once he goes to the house "boldly" (236) and assumes "she'll run" (236), and only to f nd she doesn't f ee. In fact Joann has

　　a dual personality: the one the woman at f rst sight … the other the mantrainedmuscles and the mantrained habit of thinking born of heritage and environment with which he had to flight up to the f nal instant. There was no feminine vacillation, no coyness of obvious desire and intension to succumb at last.(234-235)

　　Consequently Joe switches between seeing Joann as "like all the rest of them [women]" (241) and "My God. How little I know about women, when I thought I knew so much" (235).

　　And so gender is less male or female than, for instance, masculine or feminine. It is socially imposed. It is an invention, a result of culture and ideology. To quote feminist Simone de Beauvoir, "you are not born a woman: you become one". To be a woman is to be defined by the society: daughter, sister, wife, mother, sister, widow (according to her relationships with men); virgin, whore, mistress, spinster (in terms of her sexual relationships to men); wombs and sexual objects and parts (in terms of her bodies). Accordingly, there are many cultural assumptions about women and their gender roles. For instance, the domestic role for women is managing the house and raising the children and women are supposed to have compassion and ability to help others.

　　Yet to be a self, to define oneself as a subject with an independent inner life, was, to quote Emerson, the goal of human consciousness. In literary works, the painful self-searching, selfrecognition, or self-creation is one of the most dramatic themes. The essential quality for the purpose of this study is a comparative study of f ve literary works: William Faulkner's Light in August (1932), Kate Chopin's The Awakening (1899), Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) (Chapter 2 and6), Willa Cather's My Mortal Enemy(1926), and Mary Wilkins Freeman's The Revolt of Mother (1891), with a main emphasis on the first three works. The study aims to investigate how the female characters quest for selfhood, how they negotiate their identities within the community and culture at large, and how these writers explore / redefine / re-inscribe / reconfigure cultural constructions of femininity.

Ⅰ.Body of One's Own

What it means to be a female self and what constitutes this self? A frequent motif of literature by women, though not necessarily about women unfortunately, is the connection of the female body with the selfhood. Historically the female body is always negatively constructed. It is gendered "female" and rendered weak, passive, self-denying, and self-sacrificial. Yet even in modern ads, there is still basically only one body type preferred —the waif look or the waif - made - voluptuous - look.

　　When we first see Edna in The Awakening, because the sunshade doesn't protect her skin when she swims, " ‘You are burnt beyond recognition', he [Leonce] added, looking at his wife as one looks at a valuable piece of personal property which has suffered some damage" (44). Thus her husband possesses her body, treating it as a "property" and such possession already signifies something other than the body: a wife.

　　Yet this characteristically ignores the possibility of women desiring their own bodies. The female self is not just an object of male desire but also a subject of desire. The bodies are their own and should be subject to their own desires. Edna awakens in a summer resort "out of a life-long, stupid dream" (168) and of the many awakenings she experiences, quite a few involve her sense of the body. For instance, herself — awareness begins with the sense of touch. The sea's "sonorous murmur reached her like a loving but imperative entreaty" (56). When she hears the piece she entitles "Solitude", there comes "before her imagination the f gure of a man standing beside a desolate rock on the seashore" (71). And he is "naked" (71). This imaginary figure is erotically charged with Robert's presence, and as such it is the best image Edna can give to her own body, naked and full of desire.

　　When she was in the middle of drawing once, she recollected the summer resort and "a sudden current of desire passed through her body, weakening her hold upon the brushes and making her eyes burn" (109). And in the end when she walks down the beach, she stands naked in the open air, and as she walks into the sea, "the touch of the sea is sensuous, enfolding the body in its soft, close embrace" (176). Also, all these experiences of the materiality of her body occur in moments of intense privacy, whether indoors or out. It thus appears that Edna is using her body as a site of resistance against the gaze or possession of the masculine other, and a release and assertion of the self.

　　A conspicuous motif throughout The Awakening is the contrast between Adele, the exemplary motherwoman, and Edna who, "in short", is "not a motherwoman" (51). Culley defines mother-woman as those who "idolized their children, worshipped their husbands, and esteemed it a holy privilege to efface themselves as individuals and grow wings as ministering angels" (10). Adele, who is the picture of sensuous beauty, has given her body to her role as mother-woman by her biennial pregnancies. But Edna decides to "give up the unessential" and "never sacrif ce herself for her children" (175).

　　Joann in Light in August "by day" would be "calm, coldfaced, almost manlike, almost middleaged woman … without any feminine fears at all" (258). Yet after Joe becomes "the lover of her spinster's bed" (232), Joe watches "her pass through every avatar of a woman in love" (259). However, Joe also recognizes Joann's masculine qualities during their sexual encounters but he succeeds in at least making her a woman of her at last. "I have taught her that, at least" (236), Joe claims. Nonetheless, it should be noted that Faulkner does not turn the whole gender roles upside down in depicting Joann, because although Joann undergoes sexual awakening and seems totally obsessed in it, she is also "trying to…She's trying to be a woman and she dont know how" (240).

　　Love of one's body is particularly, a recurrent presence throughout slave narratives. This may have something to do with the plight of a black woman as the object of sexual exploitation by a white man and the conventional disassociation of black with beauty. Nanny in Their Eyes Were Watching God uses very disgusting metaphors to describe the female body and its function. She describes herself as a "cracked plate" (Lamb Vol. 3,14), and she doesn't want to "die easy thinking maybe de menfolks white or black is makin a spit cup outa" Janie (Lamb Vol. 3,14) or "usin' Janie's body to wipe his foots on" (Lamb Vol. 3,12). Nanny thus not only expresses the hard hierarchy of the world, but her extremist view reveals her self-loathing and lack of racial identity, which may be related to her and her daughter's bitter experiences though. Janie loves her body and doesn't buy Nanny's speech, and she thinks Nanny's words make her f rst kiss "like a manure pile after a rain" (Lamb Vol. 3,12).

　　Lena in Light in August is always comfortable with and aware of her body. Though being under male protection and moving about somewhat freely in "masculine" space, Lena is always identif ed as a potential mother f rst and as such, she cares about her body. In chapter 1 when she climbs slowly down the wagon, she has "inwardlistening deliberation" (15). Later in the same chapter Faulkner uses a whole paragraph describing her listening to the spasm in her body (29) when she eats sardine oil. The paragraph is not only beautifully written, but also carries some ritual-like tones, grave and peaceful. And, as a potential mother, Lena has good appetite thus she also nourishes her new son well. Through Lena, Faulkner suggests that one can challenge cultural gender norms while still celebrating bodily experience. The book begins with the image of the 9-months' pregnant Lena and ends with her comment, "My, my. A body does get around" (507). Lena is strategically figured as both mother and a transgressor of cultural identity norms.

Ⅱ.Voice of One's Own

With the female body being rendered not silent/ silenced anymore, women need to find a channel to let go their voices or retrieve their stolen voices. The five tales under discussion all either use wholly or partly women characters / narrators as focalizers. This is signif cant because theme and technique are always supposed to interact in literary works. For instance, from the very beginning Lena sets the overall tone of the novel by traveling the open road. This is juxtaposed with, in the end, her story is recounted by a furniture repairer and dealer who "told his wife an experience which he had on the road" (494). Thus by juxtaposing a close up with a long shot, with Lena at the center of the picture each time, Faulkner frames the story with an emphasis of eternal progress on the road.

　　Following One of Ours the theme of young struggle dwindles in Willa Cather, because the thought of repeating herself was repellent to her. My Mortal Enemy is narrated through Nellie, so the aspirant is removed from the center and relegated to the frame of the picture, reduced to a narrator's position. Nellie is involved in an identity crisis, but her career aspirations are never told (Greber 93-94). Therefore Nellie as a narrator of the story functions a signif cant part of her own process of initiation. For another instance, the beginning and ending of The Awakening make striking dialogues. Our f rst view of Edna is from the perspective of her irritated husband and the story begins with the image of a parrot in a cage, but in the end Edna's voice and senses take control.

　　Their Eyes are Watching God is written "in the third person, but the voice speaks almost exclusively from within the mind of the woman who stands at the center of the tale, Janie" (Delbanco 191). In fact, what makes this book widely acclaimed (and also widely criticized, ironically) is the essence of Hurston's vision, which is " ‘documentary' and realistic from the point of view of black women" (Delbanco 202). As Curnutt observes,

　　Hurston's narrative voice, first cast in standard English, gradually absorbs the speech style of various characters, including the book's protagonist Janie, until it speaks for an entire community by mingling multiple perspectives in her idiom. Free indirect discourse provides Hurston a tool for fashioning an "authentic narrative voice that echoes and aspires to the status of the impersonality, anonymity, and authority of the black vernacular tradition". (191)

Ⅲ.A Room of One's Own

A woman's rebellion involves much more than merely the assertion of a body or voice. Mother in The Revolt of Motherwants a house for the whole family (though not a room or house for herself) instead of a new barn. Father just keeps silenced and refuses to respond. In the end she got the guts to move the whole family's belongings into the new barn and makes it their new house, When Father questioned for a reason, "she looked up, and her eyes showed the spirit that her meek front had covered [my emphasis] for a lifetime" (Lamb Vol.1,82). The cover / mask that she wears for 40 years is taken off. For the f rst time she acts like a "queen": she "complains", she "talks plain", and she "revolts". She decides to not only just use "loopholes" (Lamb Vol. 1,79) but open "new roads of life" (Lamb Vol. 1,81).

　　Edna in The Awakening begins her awakening outside the house but her desire for freedom doesn't stop at sexual passion that is worked up at the summer resort. Eventually she wants a place outside a home, but she needs her own room at home f rst. Originally, her house is dressed and painted "a dazzling white" (99) to please the scanning eye. And it is Edna's prison, like the image of cage in the f rst sentence of the novel. So she begins to modify the scenes of her existence.

　　Sometimes want of a house effects a lot of changes in a woman's life, some of which could be radical. Joe once observed: "there was something def nitely rootless about him, as though no town nor city was his, no street, no walks, no square of earth his home" (31). This holds exactly true to Lena. It is when Lena is about to be literally crowded out of the home (she is sharing a leanto room with 3 of her brother's children), that she falls for Brown (Interestingly enough, both Lena and Joe learn how to open and close a window without making a sound, and eventually both run away through a window). Faulkner doesn't stress how much Lena wants a room, but there are some innuendoes in the book such as when she visited Doane's Mill, she wanted to walk in instead of riding, because she believed "that the people who saw her and whom she passed on foot would believe that she lived in the town too" (3-4).

　　Janie's grandma decides to marry Janie to Logan who has "his often-mentioned 60 acres" (Lamb Vol. 3,14). Logan is a solid, stable citizen but his narrow goals and his inability to see Janie as a separate person stifles her (Lamb Vol. 3,10). Janie "knew now that marriage did not make love. Janie's f rst dream was dead" (Lamb Vol. 3, 15).

　　In "My Mortal Enemy", Myra proudly leaves her uncle's house without hesitation when she elopes with Oswald. Three times through the story Cather describes the place where Myra and Oswald live in New York. The f rst is their magnif cent brownstone house and it forms a sharp contrast to the third—their apartment—hotel. We don't know whether to keep a grand house does cost their fortune, marriage, or even Myra's life, but at least since we know Myra is weak for luxury, she may have indulged her extravagance regardless of their economic status. Thus Cather directs her direct thrust at the materialism rampaging throughout contemporary society.

　　Sometimes if one is not a native to a piece of land, a house of his own is significant in that it is not just a wish to be out of monotony and restriction of domestic life, it also establishes one's base and downplays one's foreignness. One thinks of Edna being an outsider in Creole society and Lena moving to Doane's Mill at 12.

　　Joann is also a foreigner in Jefferson because of her Northern backgrounds. But she already gets a large house from legacy. But this house "no white person save himself [Joe] had entered in years" (259) and in the house "for twenty years now she had been all nigh alone" (259). Having Joe as a lover, she "never invited him inside the house proper. He had never been further than the kitchen, which he had already entered of his own accord… And when he entered the house at night … he felt like a thief" (234).

　　Sometimes the notes [from Joann] would tell him not to come until a certain hour … [Sometimes] for a whole week she forced him to climb into a window to come to her. He would do so and sometimes he would have to seek her about the dark house until he found her. (259)

　　But after Joann was pregnant, Joe "noticed now how, as though by premeditation, they met always in the bedroom, as though they were married" (263). "No more did he have to seek her through the house; the nights when he must seek her, hidden and panting and naked, about the dark house or among the shrubbery of the ruined park were as dead now" (263). "Joe thought, Here it comes. She will say it now: marry. But I can at least get out of the house [my emphasis] f rst" (265).

　　墩台翻模施工依靠钢板的至支架固定平台，通过对塔吊的合理应用，缓慢提升平台和模板。施工人员在平台上下两层对模板进行安装、卸载、扎筋等多项工作，各个施工环境的质量必须要达到工程的要求标准。从以往的施工经验来看，墩柱模板通常都为大体积钢模，并且会被分为三节。浇筑混凝土时，除了要一次性完成浇筑墩底作业外，其余部门的浇筑可以通过循环翻升方式完成[1]。建筑完第三节钢模后，通过合理的方式将工作平台提升，将第一节和第二节拆除，完成相应的安装工作，再展开相应的施工，在该期间要确保结构的稳固性，在浇筑混凝土，对于该施工环境要反复进行，直到工程竣工。

　　Thus Joann's "large house" (226) has become a way she creates a new meaning for herself, within the repressive margins of the stereotyped Jefferson; a place where she can assert and exercise power; and a place of both isolation and involvement. There are striking parallels between Joann and Emily in "A Rose for Emily", but ironically Joann is killed by her enigmatic lover in her house while Emily kills her lover in her house. Power is the ground of all human relations.

Ⅳ.A Life of One's Own

A few remarks here about what The Awakening does special, compared to the other four tales under discussion. Chopin insists on woman's full possession of a voice, room, and a life of one's own. Since art is an expression of the self, often times the subject of a female artist is employed in literary productions. This establishes a strong link between The Awakening and To the Lighthouse. To furnish a little detail, Edna's evolution as an artist coincides with the process through which she frees her selfhood which has been squeezed and devalued because of gender. So the tale is also about the awakening of female artistry. One dilemma of Edna that makes direct dialogues with To the Light House is: Edna's attempt to paint Adele (both her friend and model) realistically and this brings to the foreground the problems of painting without objectifying Adele.

　　When Edna refuses to attend her sister's wedding, her father accuses her for lack of sisterly and womanly consideration. But Edna seeks to develop a bond with other women. Edna begins an intimacy with Adele, a relationship she had never experienced. Later, with Reisz, Edna seeks a different kind of intimacy, one based on aesthetics, even intellect. But to get an idea of how Chopin gives complexity to the subject of female bonds: Edna undertakes to fulf ll her promise to see Adele through the throes of childbirth, only to come back and f nd that Robert is gone. Edna then walks to the beach in the last act of the book and decides "she would never sacrif ce herself for her children" (175). Is this because Edna witnesses the torture of Adele's childbirth? But as she walks deep into the sea, she thinks of Reisz who says "And you call yourself an artist! What pretensions, Madame! The artist must possess the courageous soul that dares and def es" (177). So Edna is still not daring and defying enough?

Ⅴ.Is the time ripe yet

Joe isn't the only enigmatic figure in Light in August: Joann reveals a series of paradoxes also. She functions as a caretaker, which is gendered female, by providing Joe food, loaning him her cot, and giving him a cabin to live in. Yet she also makes Joe feels as if "struggles physically with another man" (235) in sexual intercourses. She has lived for twenty years alone but after her interactions with Joe, she "not only had changed her life completely, but that she was trying to change his too" (271). Joann has always been ostracized by the townspeople because she does not accept certain definitions of people or the strict orders and yet she doesn't break the domestic stereotypes when she wants Joe "to take over all her business affairs — the correspondence and the periodical visits —with the negro schools"; "to have complete charge, and she would be his secretary, assistant" (268). She claims that blacks are the same as white folks, yet she doesn't question the rigid ideology of race. Instead, she asks Joe to go to "a nigger school" (276); "learn law in the office of a nigger lawyer" (276); "tell niggers" that he is "a nigger too" (277). As mentioned above, Joann is divided between a passive, repressed outer self and a strong, assertive, yet possessed inner self.

　　At first Joe is confused. He switches between resignation (Joe thinks "My God, it was like I was the woman and she was the man" (235)) and frenzy (He is "talking to her, in a tense, hard, low voice:‘I'll show you! I'll show the bitch " (236)). Joe is particularly irritated by Joann's assuming powerful positions in sexual relationships. Back into his early life in an orphanage, Joe is raised as a white boy. He has an unsuccessful sexual initiation by a black girl. But it is not the success or failure of the sexual encounter that is important here, but the fact that Joe's intended participation in it underscores his position as a white boy. This identifies him as the powerful one in future racial and sexual relationship. Femininity and blackness are intertwined for Joe. Yet later on, his experience with Bobbie strikes him a deadly blow and triggers his more-than-a-decade wandering life. Marriage with Joann would mean "ease, security" (265) for the rest of his life, but the prospects of inferior positions in both racial and sexual battlegrounds completely possess him. Joann understands all this and says: "then there's just one other thing to do." Joe replies: "There's just one other thing to do" (281).

　　Joann died because she can't escape the traditional entrapments of race and gender that characterize conventional Southern thinking. Thus Joann's tale is actually supporting rather than subverting the norms of her society. In contrast, Edna and Myra's death highlight the tragic implications of being bound to a f ctionalized role or image and yet painfully aware of the limitations of the self. As observed by Delbanco, there is "a universal disjunction between the limitless human imagination and the constrictions within which all human beings live their lives" (206).

　　Edna in The Awakening insists upon development and realization of her self and rejects the false definitions that have been imposed upon her: Leonce's wife and possession, a self-less mother-woman, a great artist, or merely the mistress of Robert or Arobin. Yet Edna can not or will not return to domestic captivity, nor can she suffer social (or self?) — castigation if she denies her duty to her children and becomes a free-lover. She has nowhere to go except waters of the sea. Indeed, Chopin's f rst choice of a title was The Awakening "A Solitary Soul". Not knowing where one f ts in a social order means not knowing who one is, and that fate is worse than knowing that one belongs on the bottom, so to speak. One immediately thinks of Joe. Among the last images that f ash through Edna's mind as she is swimming out to drown are her military father, her married sister, and the young off cer whom she desired from a fanciful distance. Black suggests that, "Even in death she can not escape reminders of the cultural patterns that formed her—patriarchy, marriage, and promises of romantic love" (108), which are all illusions. "With uncompromising realism, wry irony that exposes the gulf between the illusions and realities of her character… the novel tests society's assumptions about women" (Black 113). The final images when Edna drowns herself even include that of a chained dog, and Chopin may offer an ironic contrast to Edna's will to or pursuit of freedom here.

　　Cather read The Awakening when it was published in 1899 and found the novel so disturbing. Indeed, the danger of romantic love, which is the main theme of My Mortal Enemy, in certain respects, stands in opposition to the advocate of emotion above money, which is represented in The Awakening. Yet if Cather is a cool-eyed realist writer, regarding the romantic quest with skepticism, Chopin seeks a fusion of the domestic novel with romance, a f ctive system with realistic story.

　　Edna and Myra get trapped in the struggling between the illusions of romance and f ctive gender roles and the uncompromising realities, Joann on the contrary, intrinsically, can't shake off realistic yet conventional gender assumptions. Both The Revolt of Mother and Their Eyes Are Watching God record the taming of an independent spirit and the female characters' challenge of patriarchal / cultural norms. Janie accepts Nanny's argument because Janie thinks to herself that "Nanny and the old folks had said it, so it must be so" (Lamb Vol. 3., 14). She decides that "she would love Logan after they were married", though anyhow Janie goes on inside to wait for love to begin. We will have to wait a large part of the book before she awakens and takes the action. Likewise, Mother created by Freeman successfully engages a battle, yet this is achieved under the condition that she also successfully maneuvers the largest possible area that is available to her.

　　Our perceptions of identities and social roles are gradually, if not radically, altered. And the point in here is not about whether gender differences can or should be eliminated, but instead, whether gender assumptions cab be bridged or transgressed.

　　It is through Lena in Light in August we can at least get hopes up. First, Lena does offer notable challenges to several social gender norms, as already explained. Faulkner asks us to read Joe's story with pity for what he suffers, but none of the tragic events he experiences, viewed objectively, is of such crushing magnitude as to make free choice or free action practically impossible. It is only when Joe's memory transforms these past events into inescapable obsessions that he becomes truly doomed by them. Thus "Memory believes before knowing remembers" (119). In the first few pages of Light in August, Lena's past is recounted and fate could hardly have been less kind to her. Yet far from obsessively reliving these events, Lena merely says, "that's just my luck" (6), and moves on. The traditional assumption of the male being the stronger of the sex is f opped up.

　　Lena also travels and Armstid comments that Lena walks the public country without shame. Yet her seemingly pointless or shameless traveling is contrasted to Joe's confused wandering. Gradually Lena attaches to it the notions of ceremony and permanence. This emphasis of progress instead of f nish is demonstrated by an image "like something moving forever and without progress across an urn" (7), the image of which is repeated in Faulkner's novella "The Bear".

　　Yet this is not to say that Lena completely rejects standard female gender roles or fails in her maternal duties. In fact, her tale can be interpreted as a positive response to cultural gender roles as she both adheres to and transgresses them. She and Joann get pregnant approximately around the same time, yet her embrace of maternity and domesticity awakens sleepwalkers like Byron, Hightower, and gives meaning and order to the desolate large house of Joann, just like what the jar Stevens places in Tennessee does. By contrast, Joann's obsession with marriage bonds and gender and racial stereotypes costs her and her baby's life. Lena also always wishes to unite the nuclear family. Even at the end of the novel, when Lena clearly understands that Brown is a scoundrel, she continues to say that she is seeking the father of her child because it offers her a cover to continue traveling. "She released him [Brown] by her own will, deliberately" (432) and said aloud, "Now I got to get up again" (432). With such a voice hopeful and assured, we may close this study.

　　【Works Cited】

　　Black, Martha Fodaski. "The Quintessence of Chopinism." In Lynda S. Boren and Sara.

　　deSaussure Davis[Eds.]. Kate Chopin Reconsidered: Beyond the Bayou. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992.

　　Chopin, Kate. The Awakening and Selected Stories. New York: Penguin, 1984.

　　Chopin, Kate. The Awakening: An Authoritative Text, Contexts, Criticism. Margaret Culley (Ed.). New York, 1976.

　　Curnutt, Kirk. Wise Economics: Brevity and Storytelling in American Short Stories.

　　Moscow, Idaho: University of Idaho Press, 1997.

　　Delbanco, Andrew. Required Reading: Why Our American Classics Matter Now? New York: Farr, Straus and Giroux, 1997.

　　Faulkner, William. Light in August: The Corrected Text. New York: Vintage International, 1990.

　　Greber, Philip. Willa Cather. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1975.

　　Lamb, Bob. English 351: American Literature Survey from 1865 to the Present. 4 Vols.

　　West Lafayette, USA: Purdue University course-pack mat.

　　（自己的身体、声音、房间与生活——烈焰玫瑰敢做敢言）本论文比较五部美国文学作品——福克纳的《八月之光》、肖邦的《觉醒》、赫斯顿的《凝望上帝》、凯瑟的My Mortal Enemy、弗里曼的The Revolt of Mother 中女主人公追求自我，在生存空间和文化背景下协调自我身份的故事。本论文从女主人公对自己身体、声音、房间、生活的探索，分析作品如何重新定义并书写女性的文化建构。作品中女性的身体成为抵抗男性凝视和占有的斗争之场；身为母亲的女性努力跨越着母亲的身份定位；女主人公们作为全知或限知视角呼喊着她们的声音。其中的三位女主人公是悲剧结局。《八月之光》中的Joann无法摆脱现实中和传统中的身份定位；《觉醒》中的Edna和My Mortal Enemy中的Myra一方面活在理想的身份定位的幻想中，另一方面又意识到个体的局限性。女性文化定位是文化产物，而非天生，在现阶段虽不能完全消除，但需要我们逾越并挑战。女性角色 母亲—女人 中心视角梁颖，山东荣城人，北京外国语大学高级翻译学院副教授，美国普渡大学比较文学专业博士（2008）。主要研究领域为翻译、英语写作、美国文学、比较文学。This is a comparative study of five literary works: William Faulkner's Light in August (1932), Kate Chopin's The Awakening (1899), Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) (Chapter 2 and 6), Willa Cather's My Mortal Enemy (1926), and Mary Wilkins Freeman's The Revolt of Mother (1891). This study aims to investigate how the female characters quest for selfhood, how they negotiate their identities within the community and culture at large, and how these writers explore / redef ne / reinscribe cultural constructions of femininity. The study consists of four parts: body of one's own, voice of one's own, room of one's own, and life of one's own. The f ve tales under discussion all tell women's body as a site of resistance against the gaze or possession of the masculine other, and a release and assertion of the self. The women in several tales under discussion are strategically f gured as both mother and a transgressor of cultural identity norms. The five tales all either use wholly or partly women characters / narrators as focalizers. Among the f ve, three tales end tragically. Joann intrinsically can't shake off realistic yet conventional gender assumptions. Thus Joann's tale is actually supporting rather than subverting the norms of her society. In contrast, Edna and Myra's death highlight the tragic implications of being bound to a f ctionalized role or image and yet painfully aware of the limitations of the self. The study argues that gender is less a biological identity than a social construct. And the point is not about whether gender differences can or should be eliminated, but instead, whether gender assumptions cab be bridged or transgressed.gender role mother-woman focalizer