幸福空間、區隔女人、才女禁區－初論1960年後廚房空間的性別議題

Abstract

This paper explores the gender issues involving narration of the kitchen space in the post-1960s literary works selected from twenty anthologies: Anthology of Ten Major Contemporary Prose Writers, Anthology of Modern Chinese Novels (I-V), Collection of Prose by Tianxia (I-III), Literary Writings on Taiwanese Food ( I and II , 2003), Anthology of Modern Chinese Literature 1970- 1989 (Volume One, I-IV)-Prose Collection (2003), Anthology of Modern Chinese Literature 1989-2003 (Volume Two, I-III)-Novel Collection (2003), and Fifty Years of Prose Works by Taiwanese Women. This article analyzes the selected works with reference to contemporary social circumstances in order to understand how the kitchen has been used as a space of narration and emotional expression. My study found that in the 1960s female writers wrote about natural sceneries but paid little attention to the kitchen. In the late 1970s when the island was still obsessed with Chinese nationalism, many female writers used food to express homesickness for mainland China. While food was sometimes used to represent local culture, the kitchen was still ignored. In the 1980s, with the emergence of middle-class women, the kitchen became a space that distinguished a housewife from a working woman. The early 1990s saw a new wave of change in ideas regarding gender and saw the appearance of culinary literature. The kitchen was presented as a place of affection in articles on gourmet food; it was also treated as a forbidden zone for women of intellect in numerous works.