Out of the Marginality: The Pursuit of Female Community in Little Fires Everywhere

Abstract

Celeste Ng, also called Wu Qishi, is a new generation of American female writer. While inheriting the traditional writing on culture and identity exploration, she expands her vision to other minority groups in society. Little Fires Everywhere is her most representative work since the publication of Everything I Never Told You. The novel unfolds through two story lines, presenting three marginal women, and they are from different background. This paper integrates the discourse on the marginal man and the theory of community to analyze the predicament of the three marginal women and its underlying causes. It reveals that the author provides a solution for women transcend their marginalized status by establishing a female community. The female community aims at subverting gender, class and social oppression, taking female friendship as spiritual bonds, and Shaker Heights as the space for coexistence, which provides a useful field for marginal women to break through their predicament and find a sense of belonging.