Unsettling Victimhood and the Ethics of Pain: Grammars of Suicide in Last Words from Montmartre and Fang Si-Chi’s First Love Paradise

Abstract

This thesis examines the persistent narrative affinity between female victimhood and self-annihilation in modern Taiwanese literature. It examines why women’s suffering is often represented through narrative trajectories that culminate in suicide, and how literary texts may intervene in this seemingly naturalized logic. To address this question, the study proposes the concept of grammar of victimhood, a framework that focuses on cultural and narrative structures that render suffering female bodies recognizable as perceived victims and repeatedly position suicide as a legible or even expected ending.The thesis focuses on two widely discussed works: Chiu Miao-chin’s Last Words from Montmartre and Lin Yi-han’s Fang Si-Chi’s First Love Paradise. Through close textual analysis informed by narrative theory, performance studies as well as the ethics of spectatorship, this study examines the mechanisms each text applies to mobilize existing cultural grammars while simultaneously exposing their contradictions. The first chapter traces the inherited discourses of chastity and literary romance that organize the narrative conditions under which victimhood becomes legible in the texts. The second chapter shifts to writing as a performative act, analyzing how the authors’ curated staging of narratives reshapes the reader’s expectations and disrupt the grammar that links suffering to self-annihilation. The thesis concludes that while neither text fully escapes the cultural scripts that frame female victimhood, their writing practices reveal the instability of those grammars. By inhabiting and intensifying the grammar of victimhood, these works expose its internal tensions and open interpretive space for understanding female suffering beyond the narrative inevitability of self-destruction.