Title: The Dialogue between “Spirit” and “Flesh”: A Probe into the Relationship between Mother and Daughter in L’Ingratitude from the Perspective of Unnatural Narrative

Abstract: Ying Chen, a Chinese-Canadian female writer in french, fictionalizes in her novel L’ingratitude the story of a rebellious daughter, Yanzi, who challenges institutionalized motherhood and intends to deconstruct patriarchal centralism with her “matricide” behavior. Ying Chen constructs an unnatural story world where the boundary between life and death is blurred. Yanzi’s death and the separation of spirit and flesh not only make the dying ghost become the participant and promoter of the story waiting for Yama’s transport to get a “new life”, but also become the narrator who breaks the traditional ethical constraints, examines and boldly speaks about his life experience from birth to death. Thus, a dialogue begins between the “spirit” who has rational consciousness but has lost its body, and the “flesh” who exists but has lost its free will. This article will focus on the unnatural narrative characteristics of the novel from three aspects: the infinite cycle of event sequence, the disembodied character separated by spirit and flesh, and the bold ghost narrator, and explore their role in revealing the absence of female subjects and the alienation of parent-child relationship in the novel.

Keywords: Ying Chen, L’ingratitude, unnatural narrative, mother-daughter relationship, female subject construction

Author: Qi Feng, Lecturer, Research Center of Literature, Education and Cultural Communication, School of Chinese Language and Literature, Guizhou Normal University, Guiyang, Guizhou, China.

DOI: 10.19967/j.cnki.flc.2024.04.004