“The Fairy of Tea”: Women and Tea Culture in Elizabeth Gaskell and Yu-hui Chen

• Main Authors: Yao Hsiao, 蕭瑤
• Other Authors: Ya-feng Wu
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2019
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/wd7b94

碩士 === 國立臺灣大學 === 外國語文學研究所 === 107 === This thesis investigates tea’s roles and its influences on the formation of women’s identities in Elizabeth Gaskell’s 1854 novel North and South and Yu-hui Chen’s 2014 novel The Merry Leaf. By focusing on tea as food, commodity, and ritual, I explore tea’s different cultural representations in England, China, and Taiwan, and intend to illustrate the significant contribution of tea to the development of women’s self-identities. Although written in different eras and set in opposite corners of the world, both stories happen in the latter half of the nineteenth century, when global trade was thriving. In this way, tea as a valuable commodity and a daily necessity plays a significant role in people’s daily life. By playing double roles, tea wields its power in both the public and private spheres to temporarily elide boundaries between genders, classes and nations, and to construct women’s self-identities. Through being responsible for making or producing tea, the female protagonists are provided with the chance to develop their own self-identities and to a certain extent elevate their status in society. Women are given the dominant power in the tea-related places such as tea tables and tea mountains in English and Chinese tea cultures. This thesis offers a closer look at tea’s established discourse in the late nineteenth century context by examining tea’s involvement in women’s cultivation of new identities.