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Title |
Imagining Native Places in Taiwanese Women’s Literature :With a Focus on Chen Xue‘s The Child on the Bridg |
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Author |
Shirouzu, Noriko Wang, Tzu-Wen (Translator) |
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Professor, Faculty of Education and Human Sciences, Yokohama National University PhD student, Graduate school of Humanities and Sociology, The University of Tokyo |
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Abstract |
In this article, I interpret The Child on the Bridge from the perspective of “women’s imaginings of native places,” and discuss how the experiences of her native place at a night fair resulted on the one hand in indelible confusion in the process of her self-understanding, but later had a great influence in her acquisition of a perspective that understands identity as a constantly changing process and attaches importance to its compositeness and plurality. Chen Xue’s novels have reflected the course of her psychotherapy over a long period of time, and it could be said that with The Child on the Bridge, when she became able to objectify her memories, rebuild her memories of her parents, and share memories with others, that is to say, when she became able to bring some sort of order to these confused memories and affirm her current self as a fluid and pluralistic entity, she finally gained the opportunity to repair relations with her native place and her parents. The Child on the Bridge highlights the heterogeneity of women’s experiences of native places through the depiction of the experiences of her mother and herself pertaining to sex and gender in their native place. |
