• ISSN: 2382-6282 (Print); 2972-3108 (Online)
    • Abbreviated Title: Int. J. Lang. Lit. Linguist.
    • Frequency: Quarterly
    • DOI: 10.18178/IJLLL
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HOME > Archives > 2026 > Volume 12 Number 2 (2026) >
IJLLL 2026 Vol.12(2): 139-145
DOI: 10.18178/IJLLL.2026.12.2.646

Deconstruction of the Myth of Woman——A Comparative Study of Female Images in The Modern Context in Jia Pingwa’s The Country Wife and Faulkner’s A Rose for Emily from the Perspective of Existential Feminism

Qionglin Liu* and Yu Sun
School of Foreign Studies, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi’an, China
Email: jolin@mail.nwpu.edu.cn (Q.L); sunyu@nwpu.edu.cn (Y.S.)
*Corresponding author

Manuscript received November 28, 2025; accepted March 20, 2026; published May 28, 2026

Abstract—William Faulkner’s A Rose for Emily and Jia Pingwa’s The Country Wife both depict the transformation of women from passive acceptance of patriarchal oppression to forms of active resistance, revealing each writer’s attempt to dismantle the male-constructed “myth of women”. While this study draws on Simone de Beauvoir’s existential feminism to examine how Emily and Darky move from “immanence” to gestures of “transcendence”, it also extends beyond a unidirectional application of Western theory. By placing Beauvoir’s concepts in dialogue with a Chinese case situated in the context of Reform-era social transitions, this paper demonstrates how Chinese cultural thought—particularly notions of relational subjectivity and gradualist transformation—offers a critical counterpoint to Beauvoir’s Western binary framework of Subject/Other. Thus, the comparative analysis not only illuminates the different cultural and ideological foundations behind Faulkner’s and Jia’s deconstruction of gender essentialism but also shows how the Chinese text enriches and complicates the theoretical implications of existential feminism.
 
Keywords—existential feminism, the other, immanence, transcendence, being-for-itself

Cite: Qionglin Liu and Yu Sun, "Deconstruction of the Myth of Woman——A Comparative Study of Female Images in The Modern Context in Jia Pingwa’s The Country Wife and Faulkner’s A Rose for Emily from the Perspective of Existential Feminism," International Journal of Languages, Literature and Linguistics, vol. 12, no. 2, pp. 139-145, 2026.

Copyright © 2026 by the authors. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited (CC BY 4.0).


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