An Exploration of the Female Image in the "Jiangnan Trilogy"—Taking "Flower" and "Utopia" as an Example

: In "Jiangnan Trilogy", Ge Fei takes the Zhejiang Meicheng family as the background and writes the story of five generations who fight for the "peach blossom garden" in their hearts in different identities aat different times. On the one hand, in the process of continuous resistance and struggle, they show the deep metamorphosis of women's spirit, and at the same time, they are all failed idealists full of tragedy, in this level of shaping, Grieve uses a lot of imagery to imply the final ending, and this paper focuses on exploring the "flower" and "utopia" imagery and women's writing. This paper focuses on the combination of "flower" and "utopia" imagery in women's writing and then explores the deeper connotations.


Introduction
Each era has its propositions, and each person has his propositions.Intervening in major propositions with a smaller pattern is a typical feature of Ge Fei's writing [1].From "Peach Blossoms on the Face of Man", "Mountains and Rivers in the Dream" to "Spring Ends in the South of the Yangtze River", the century-old dream is centered around three women, and the author writes about social changes and the destruction of the "peach dream" from the grand narrative of one hundred years, or when there are compliments, as in the case of this trilogy, the writer writes about the changes and the destruction of the "dream" from the grand narrative of one hundred years.The author writes about social changes and the destruction of the "Peachland Dream" from the perspective of socially sensitive women.From the point of view of the grand narrative of one hundred years, there are times when they are happy, such as the flower house which has appeared in the trilogy, and from the point of view of their destinies, there are times when they have an outburst of the sense of "self", but the end of the story is a swift and sudden death.Lu Xiumi cannot be understood by the public, Yao Peipei cannot be understood by society, and Pang Jiayu and her husband cannot understand each other.Grievance presents all of them and then brings them to a cruel end.Just like the island in the novel, the lake is trapped by the lake all year round, no one can reach it, leaving only endless sighs and nostalgia.
Just as the images of "flower" and "utopia" appearing repeatedly in the text will eventually lead to disillusionment, beautiful but indistinct, the individual's continuous pursuit and attempts can only be the never-ending end.In this paper, try to analyze the images of the three main female characters in the text and explore the symbolic meaning of typical imagery.

Ideal Revolutionary-Lu Xiumi
The first book, Peach Blossom with a Human Face, is, from a character point of view, an epic poem about the struggle for love, growth, and revolutionary ideals of the heroine Lu Xumi, whose historical archetype is the female revolutionary Qiu Jin.This is a peach blossom-like face of a Jiangnan woman who grew up in a high-walled house with traditional female characteristics, and it is hard to think that she would have revolutionary ideals at the beginning of the 20th century.At the same time, the author's use of dramatic descriptions adds to the legend of her destiny.Her father's blueprints of the Peach Blossom Garden give her a vague sense of another immense world, while Zhang Jiyuan brings light to Xiu-mi's closed world, and Lu Xiu-mi's idealism is the result of the revolutionary ideology of Zhang Jiyuan and the other revolutionaries, which is based on the Peach Blossom Garden ideals of her father, Lu Kan.Later, Xiu-mi has only ideals and revolution in her heart, trying to fulfill her utopian ideals and thinking of a great rural revolution, but in real life, there is no such thing as a place without absolute malice, and the fate of failure is inevitable.In the end, the utopia that Hidemi has spent her whole life building breaks down.When the dust settles and she returns to her hometown, she takes a "vow of silence" and spends her days pruning flowers and plants and reciting poems and scrolls, to free herself from her destiny and to spend enough time in silence to scrutinize her own life.
Among the heroines of the trilogy, Xiumi has the most delicate character and the richest experience, and she has a deeper understanding of life in the midst of breaking and rebuilding over and over again.Unfortunately, the tide of history overwhelms everything with great force, and the ideals and pursuits, struggles and fights, pain and suffering of the revolutionary -Xiumi -become insignificant.She felt that she was an earworm lost among the flowers.Everything in life was humble, trivial, meaningless, but not to be disregarded or forgotten [2].

The extra person who knows what's next--Yao Peipei
Yao Pei Pei, the heroine of Mountains and Rivers into Dreams, is a "redundant person" swallowed up by the idealistic political fervor of the era.Both of her parents were forced to end their lives due to specific political reasons, and after she was adopted, she lived a humiliating life as a parasite to her next of kin.In a politicized era like the early 1950s, her specific origin made her carefully protect herself in a self-marginalized way, looking at life with a cold eye.Yao Peipei lived in a filthy social environment and did not possess the ideals of family, country, and world like Lu Xiumi, but only longed for inner freedom.She has always wanted to escape from reality, away from life, and escape to an isolated island to live in seclusion.This is a fantasy paradise, indicating her disgust, fear, and escape from reality, as well as the repressed romantic ideal temperament within her.The difference in form cannot conceal the similarity in spirit, and she is so much in tune with Tan Gongda (Lu Xiumi's youngest son), who is practicing his dream of a paradise, an idealist who inherited the utopian temperament of the Lu family from birth and is devoted to the practice of utopia.The two are attracted to each other at first sight, but their dreams are not realized until the last moment of their lives.
Yao Pei Pei is a borrowed product from the Lin Daiyu model, and she is not suited to the reality of the time.She was a "redundant person" rejected by reality, with her pride and persistence, but unable to do anything about the cruel reality [3].She was abandoned by the flood of society, so she had no choice but to die, and after her death, as her body was unclaimed, she was sent to a medical school to be admired and dissected.Her life of fleeing and falling is all about kowtowing to the political era that mercilessly devours the individual's emotional freedom.

Epileptic sinker -Pang Jiayu
Focusing on the social reality since the 1990s, at the center of the era when material wealth is devouring spiritual wealth, and in the face of bubble fantasies brought about by the fast-developing economy, Pang Jiayu is a paradoxical and poignant gathering of the spiritual dilemma of modern people.The young romantic woman "Li Xiurong" meets the sentimental poet Tan Duanwu (Tan Gongda's son), which is the beginning of love, but later "Li Xiurong" changes her name to "Pang Jiayu", which is full of money and desire, and is not without vulgarity.Pang Jiayu", the competitive "Pang Jiayu" and Tan Duanwu, the self-possessed nobleman, become husband and wife.The opposite spiritual worlds and states of life lead to the dislocation of their lives, with the husband pitying and abandoning Pang Jiayu, and Pang Jiayu despising and mocking her husband's incompetence in reality, making them more and more distant from each other, and their indifferent kinship and crisis-ridden careers are exactly what she needs.The indifferent relationship between the relatives and the crisis-ridden career is the tragedy of her material significance which is close to the pulse of the times.
Pang Jiayu is sometimes sober, she is dashing, capable, thunderous, and runs her career and family in an organized manner; and sometimes crazy, she is scared to death by the superstitious words of the old man who tells fortunes.Throughout her life, she kept on catching up, to blend in with the current of the times.Pang Jiayu is a sacrifice of the times, carrying the other half of the male sky with her thin body, but under the squeeze of secular life, everything is in trouble, love is dissolved, and the idealistic dream collapses.

"Flower"-a beautiful phantasmagoria on the image
Ge Fei has injected his own strong personal emotion into the imagery of Jiangnan Trilogy to achieve the effect of "empathy", reflecting the beauty of rich and deep imagery [4].The image of female characters has variability, they are either delicate or charming or pure or vulgar, and the flowers are in a variety of forms, pavilion, and the characteristics of the female image are similar to the use of "flowers" on behalf of women is extremely apt.For example, in "Dream of the Red Chamber", the "Twelve Hairpins of the Golden Horse", different flowers represent the character traits of different characters.Author Ge Fei also uses the same technique to portray women.

Lu Xiumi-peach blossom
Peach blossom here firstly refers to the "peach blossom" in "Peach Blossom with a Human Face".The poet Cui Gu of the Tang Dynasty used "human face" and "peach blossom" together to create a beautiful scene in his poem "Question on the South Village of the Capital City", making people see a woman with a pretty face and a beautiful bright peach blossom contrasting with each other.The poet Cui Gu of the Tang Dynasty used the words "human face" and "peach blossom" together in his poem "Question on the South Village of the Capital City" to create a scene in which a woman with a pretty face and a beautiful, brightly colored peach blossom are reflected in each other's eyes.The peach blossoms are fresh in color, beautiful in form, and fragrant, making them a perfect comparison for a delicate woman from a large family in the south of the Yangtze River.
The peach blossom here also has its cultural meaning.In Chinese culture, "peach blossom" is related to the peach blossom garden, which is a utopia in a Chinese context.Grievance's placement of the thousand-year-old Chinese "dream of the peach blossom" on Lu Xiumi not only makes the "human face" and the "peach blossom" imagery match but also leads the theme of the novel to a deeper level: the paradox between the fragility of the "dream of the peach blossom" and the hope it represents.Lu Xiumi, after returning to Puji from prison, once lamented that her life was like a peach blossom, that the blossoming and failing of the blossom is just a cycle of time and story, and that there will always be descendants who will step on the footsteps of their predecessors over and over again.Gefei's borrowing of this mood, whether it is a metaphor for the novel's love or a reference to the "utopian ideal," symbolizes a fragile and fickle emotion, from the initial "peach dream" to the pursuit of several times, and then finally into the loss of This makes the ending of Lu Xiumi and the collapse of the "Peachland Dream" seem "sorrowful but not sad".

Yao Peipei-purple clouds
The color purple represents beautiful fantasy and melancholy, and this is evident in Yao Peipei.When Lu Xiu-mi passed away from Angina under the coneflowers, Ge Fei shifted the scene to Yao Pei-pei riding a brand-new jeep to the Puji Reservoir on the mountain road, and Yao Pei-pei was the one who continued Xiu-mi's "dream of a peach garden" for the rest of her life, who always wanted to run away and live in seclusion on a dreamy island.Tan Gongda, who is devoted to the construction of Puji, has yet to recognize the nature of ideals divorced from reality and is destined to rewrite a history of blood and tears along the path his mother has taken.Yao Peipei's melancholic temperament is reflected in her disgust, fear, and avoidance of reality.In a letter to Tan Gongda, she expresses her self-pity: "I am an orphan and have no relatives in this world.""Orphan" is both her objective identity as a loner and her spiritual barrenness as a social outcast.
The repetition of the imagery of Ziyunying represents the dream of Yao Peipei, who is far more sober than Tan Gongda, and Ziyunying is a reflection of her fragile life and the phantom of her dream.When the story develops to "Mountains and Rivers in Dreams", the second-generation heir of "Taoyuan Dream" has even lost the right to hide.Under the sleazy and dirty power tactics, the living individuals can't resist the "dark clouds covering Ziyunying", and the only thing that will bring about a new life is to enter into the dream with Ziyunying all over the place.The only way to bring about a "society without the death penalty, without prison, without fear, without corruption" is to have purple clouds all over the place when you are dreaming.

Pang Jiayu-water lily
Water lilies are different from lotus flowers, which represent the noble sentiments of the literati, while water lilies represent more of the cleanliness, non-pollution, and compassion of the Buddhists.Here lies the author's strong satire on reality.The surface satirizes the social phenomenon, no matter it is the white pollutants floating on the Yangtze River, or the officials' faces taking sides without regard to the people's livelihood everywhere, all of them embodying a great contrast.The author's deeper satire is the change of Pang Jiyu, one is the Pang Jiyu who has lost himself under the cultivation of the social environment and is as dirty as all the social conditions, and the other is the Pang Jiyu who has come to his senses and purified himself before his death, letting go of the worldly ties, just like the original "water lily", whose tragic experience is just as Tan Duanwu writes Like the purple water lily written by Tan Duanwu, Pang Jiyu's tragic experience represents deep suffering and frustration.During social change, she holds up half of the sky while gradually losing herself, with a strong sense of tragedy.Ge Fei's use of irony in the imagery of "water lilies" successfully provokes readers to empathize with Pang Jiayu, which is thought-provoking.The author reveals the social change from a keen female perspective.By comparing the different characters of Pang Jiyu before and after, she expresses her concern about the plight of women in the new era under the change of their identity and connects the society that exudes the atmosphere of "the last days" with the absurd and miserable destiny of Pang Jiyu, which reflects the author's helplessness in the change of the society and her deep compassion for the degradation of the human nature.The author's compassion for the helplessness of social change and the depravity of human nature is reflected.

Femininity meets utopia
Women's innate sensitivity to the environment is conducive to reflecting social changes, and the withering away of their birth and the changes of the times are also inherently compatible.From "Peach Blossoms on the Face of Man", and "Mountains and Rivers into Dreams" to "Spring Ends in Jiangnan", Ge Fei has portrayed a series of soft, clear, and resilient women, who from being born in misery to daring to fight against their destiny, who are rich in idealism but burdened with fatalistic inheritance, and who fall into the quagmire again and again in the face of the uncontrollable external world and irreversible drastic changes of the times, and who are either plunged into the practice of utopian history, consumed by the utopian era or suffer from the pain of disillusionment of ideals in the post-utopian era.They either commit themselves to the practice of utopian history, are swallowed up by the utopian era, or suffer from the pain, confusion, and struggle after the disillusionment of their ideals in the post-utopian era.They are physically and mentally broken, and different forms of death are their common end.The loss of the real utopia leads to the inevitable fate of the individuals who live in it.Grievous faces the fragile nature of human beings and the disorganized spirit of the situation, and amid his criticism, he is tempered, and amid his grace, the characters gain in their loss [5].Through the writing of the inevitable tragic fate of all women, he demonstrates that the utopian dream and practice, whether it is about the collective or the individual, whether it is about the entity or the spirit, falls through, disintegrates, and goes up in smoke.

Conclusions
Ge Fei once said "I want to describe the individual in the history of modern China for more than 100 years.I hope that when the reader reads it, he can find himself inside the work and see his soul."In the long course of history, people have often pursued ideals with passion and conviction, and the search for an ideal world has never been interrupted.In the three women, everyone can see their shadows.The author calls for the restoration of human nature by showing their sensitive and resilient hearts and independently facing the phantom of utopian ideals that contradict the ideals and the reality, as well as the spiritual perplexity of the broken ideals.