Desire and Disease: Bai Wei and the Literary Left of the 1930s

Abstract

The rewriting of dominant literary history (chongxie wenxueshi) has encompassed important new scholarship on the modern women’s literary tradition. As a result, we are in the process of constructing an ever more nuanced picture of the literary roles of women through the gender relations reshaped by social, ideological, and economic factors in the twentieth century. Yet our understanding of women’s participation in the cultural left of the 1930s, in particular, remains incomplete, dominated by a single paradigm of “subordinated gender politics.” Ding Ling’s (in)famous metamorphosis from New Woman writer to pioneer practitioner of social realism, which ignored the woman question, and Feng Keng’s exhortation to female radicals to forget their gender identity altogether may be symptomatic of the growing ambivalence of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to feminism at the time, but they are not, as it turns out, quite as representative as many have assumed. The following explores the work of the (now largely forgotten) political writer Bai Wei (1894–1983) and analyzes the problem of the relationship between feminist sexual politics and leftist culture of the 1930s. Specifically, I focus on her autobiographical novel Beiju shmgya (Tragic Life, 1936), a somber narrative that traces the vicissitudes of a female intellectual trapped in an abusive personal relationship, including a protracted battle with syphilis.¹ As I will argue, this work consciously defied the trend toward depoliticizing private domestic life (and the so-called women’s issues associated with that realm) evinced in other leftist literature of the 1930s.