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1.2 The Hungry Daughter
The Hungry daughter, Hong Ying’s autobiographical novel, has been generally recognized as her best work. It was published in 1998 in British Bloomsbury Publishing PLC and attracted a lot of readers. So far, it has been translated into more than 30 languages. This book focuses on the difficulties women met in 1960s and 1970s. Influenced by foreign feminism movement, China is also gripped by a feminist upsurge. It becomes more and more important to study literature about women’s experience. Some scholars already define Hong Ying as a feminist writer and label The Hungry Daughter as part of female literature. This paper, however, tries to put emphasis on how the females in Hong Ying’s works grow up mentally.
2 Literature Review
Contemporarily, China’s female consciousness is gradually awakening with the continuing impact of the foreign feminism movement and the domestic thought liberation. At the same time, feminism begins to rise. Influenced by that, a large number of outstanding feminist writer appear in the domestic literature, among which Hong Ying is one of the most outstanding representatives. Thanks to her unique and creative works, Hong Ying attracts widespread attention in our country, being regard as the first of the ten famous female writers. She also becomes a minor celebrity in foreign countries for she once won the Roman prize for literature. Overseas critics have often compare Hong Ying with Jamaica Kincaid, Toni Morrison and V•S Naipaul.
Domestic researches on Hong Ying’s literature are increasing because of her rising influence. It is found that those researches mainly focus on the theme of feminism and female consciousness. For example, Du (2010) points out that Hong Ying obviously prefers female heroines since the protagonists of her three main works are all females. Zhou (2013) maintains that Hong Ying describes a lot of female images to awaken female consciousness and to explore the way to female independence and equality. In spite of the common understanding of female images, different scholars have different ideas about how Hong Ying emphasize her strong feminism. Some scholars try to analyze the theme of her novels based on the text. Hong Ying often put emphasis on the theme of female growth in her novels while she describes her personal experience. The female characters in her works are always suffering, but they have the courage to pursue for what they really want with the spirit of persistence. Finally, they go beyond the limitation of growth and create a powerful self-identity (Zhang, 2013). Some scholars, on the other hand, analyze how the plots are set. Wang (2012) propose that Hong Ying create many female characters who suffer a lot. She reveals the awakening of feminine self-awareness by the resistance and courage of the heroines and their bad endings. The characters in Hong Ying’s works, usually suffering physically or mentally, are eager to change their situation at all cost. It is evident that the female consciousness is awakening and the values of females are changing (Song, 2012). Also some scholars analyze those novels on the basis of a specific theory. For example, Zhu (2005) points out that female writers’ works are just similar to “dancing in the mirror” because they are often marginalized in literary creation. Therefore, Hong Ying builds women’s self-image with unique female consciousness, perspective and discourse. Above all, the growth of the heroines in Hong Ying’s works is worth studying.