The Uncanny in Woman and Nation: A Psychoanalytical Reading of Hualing Nieh’s Mulberry and Peach

• Main Authors: Han-Ting Chen, 陳涵婷
• Other Authors: Shu-Ching Chen
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2009
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/43686920149256647599

碩士 === 國立中興大學 === 外國語文學系所 === 97 === Hua-ling Nieh’s Mulberry and Peach delineates the diasporic journey of a Chinese female. Because of the political upheaval and chaotic domestic war in the modern China, the protagonist is forced to displace from China to Taiwan and America. However, as each of her geographical relocation in a new country only repeats the social and political persecution she encounters in the previous one, she starts to experience psychological inconsistency in order to cope with the unavoidable mental and physical abuse. Through the writer’s employment of a double female narration in her tactical juxtaposition of Mulberry’s journals with her alter ego Peach’s letters, the readers are led to not only inspect the protagonist’s two divergent reactions to the atrocity of nationalism and patriarchy but also witness a violent negotiation between the two personalities. It is in response to the controversy of whether the novel’s open ending and moral ambiguity do justice to upholding female autonomy and accusing the female subjugation that woman repeatedly faces in the social-political fields that this thesis attempts to observe the uncanny relationship between woman and nation in Hua-ling Nieh’s Mulberry and Peach. From the perspective of the uncanny, the protagonist’s geographical relocation and mental transition become both a protest and subversion against the oppressive status quo. On one hand, Mulberry’s story reveals that woman’s plight under patriarchay is a phenomenon that transcends national boundaries. Her traumatic experience of schizophrenia can be read as an indictment to the nation-state with its patriarchal ideology that prospers at the expense of its female national. On the other hand, Peach’s unconformist behavior and transgressive thinking as an outlaw disrupt the paternal demand of genderalization and frustrate the national pedagogy of subjectivization through ideological (system of gendered education) and actual (system of law enforcement) coercion. Her so-called insanity ironically mocks a male-dominated nation whose endeavor to contain and control its female nationals by means of domination and restriction only drives them mad.