A Comparative Study of Chinese and Western Classical Tragedies from the Feminist Perspective of Subject Construction: Female Characters in Medea and Leifeng Pagoda

Abstract

As representative texts of classical tragedies from the West and East, Euripides’ Medea and Fang Chengpei’s Leifeng Pagoda, though born out of vastly different cultural and historical contexts, reveal a remarkable ideological isomorphism in their portrayals of female figures. Both plays dismantle the traditional tragic narrative of female “submission and sacrifice” and reconstruct the possibility of women as cultural subjects. Medea challenges patriarchal structures of marriage and kinship through radical defiance, while Bai Niangzi resists Confucian ritualism and legal-moral constraints through subtle and persistent opposition. Their rebellion against predetermined fate and social discipline manifests on three levels: the awakening of subjectivity, the display of rational agency, and the enactment of resistance. This paper examines the implicit mechanisms of gender construction within these classical tragedies, aiming to provide new theoretical support for the cross-cultural applicability of feminist critique.