Women used to play the role of wife and homemaker。 Having no job, their major duty was to stay at home with the household。 They were expected to be subservient, diligent, obedient, kind, tender, patient and uncomplaining。 And the men played the role of breadwinners。 They shouldered the responsibility to support the while family。 They were required to be aggressive, prudent, competitive, sturdy and competent thus they could survive or stand out in the competitive society。 Because of the different roles men and women played, women were always treated inferior to men。 But the situation changed。 With the rapid development of industry, more and more women were emancipated from the house。 They found jobs in factories and mills。 They worked as teachers, lawyer, nurses, doctors and sale clerks。 Their financial and social status greatly improved。 Therefore, more and more women became eager to pursue the equal rights between men and women。 They claimed that women were not inferior to men and they should enjoy the equal rights to determine their own lives。 

Surely, born in the transitional period, London had experienced those major social changes。 As an insightful writer, he had probed into those gender issues and presented his thinking about women in his auto-biography, Martin Eden。 In the following part, his attitudes towards women will be analyzed in detail。 文献综述

1。3 Feminist Criticism

Feminism is a range of political, ideological and social movements that share a common goal: to explicate and advance economic, political and social rights for women。 (Beasley, 1999) Feminist criticism is a new development of feminism during the late 20th century。 From 1960s to 1970s, the feminist movement moves from political field to literary arena。 Feminists in that stage assert that women should form female social conventions for themselves by carrying out female discourse, literary studies, and constructing feminist theory。 Therefore, feminists apply the feminist principle and ideology to analyze the ways in which literature portrays the narrative of male domination by exploring the economic, social, political and psychological forces embedded within literature。 (Plain and Sellers, 2007)

The feminist criticism advocates rereading the literature from the female point of view。 It is accomplished mainly in two ways。 Some feminist critics reinterpret the works of male writers with much attention to the women character to inquire into how females are narrated under the description of male writes。 They point out that in a fiction, women are always portrayed mindless entities and the roles of females are often limited to secondary positions for the most part。 They also explore the moral, political and social restriction women traditionally confront。 Other feminist critics reevaluate the works of female writers that are ignored or depreciated by male critics。 Studies like Dale Spender’s Mother of the Novel and Jane Spencer’s The Rise of the Woman Novelist are ground-breaking in their assertion that women have always been writing and their writings can compete to those from men。 

This thesis will apply this theory to probe into the male-writer, Jack London’s semi-biographical work to analyze how women are described under his narration and explore his attitudes towards women。