The Ability Called Love: The Women in Chen Yingzhen’s Writing

Abstract

Chen Yingzhen has portrayed numerous women in his novels, most of whom are not the main characters of the stories, but only form the background of Chen Yingzhen’s protagonists. These women are kind-hearted, sincere and accustomed to endurance. At the same time, they have an inextricable dependence on the opposite sex, and it seems to Chen that there are no women in the world with independent tendencies. In this way, women are perpetually subjected to the dictates of male discourse and become marginalized in a patriarchal society. This study summarizes the family identities and artistic images of Chen Yingzhen’s common female roles, analyses the characteristics, aesthetic intentions and ideological expressions of Chen’s design of women’s roles. Furthermore, it interprets how women get rid of the constraints of the “ability to love”, realize gender awakening and construct their own subjectivity from the fertility imagery of Chen Yingzhen’s literary works. The aim is to make the women’s literary images in Chen Yingzhen’s works visible and to stimulate contemporary readers to think about women’s narratives and rights.