The Vietnamese Concept of a Feminine Ideal and the Images of Australian Women in Olga Masters’ Stories

Abstract

Doing research on Olga Masters’ life and writing helps me to understand the claim that Masters’ writing often deals with many of the Australian women’s matters such as taking care of the family, bringing up the children, building up their agency. Together with my own experience as a Vietnamese woman and helpful discussion with the experts in the field of Masters’ writing, I put forwards a hypothesis that there are any similarities in Masters’ portrayals of Australian women and the Vietnamese concept of a feminine ideal despite of cultural and geographical differences. The current paper investigates how women are portrayed in Olga Masters’ writing from the point of view of Vietnamese traditional perceptions of an ideal woman who holds four essential characteristics: Industriousness, Appropriate Self-presentation, Communication Skills, and Virtue. I will explore the similarities in the reflection of that conception from the two different cultures of Vietnam and Australia. The paper will develop a textual discourse of Olga Masters’ writing and attempt to show how, in spite of oceans apart, women both in Australia and Vietnam struggle to pursue the so-called feminine ideal.