The Affective Feminine: Mourning Women and the New Nationalist Subject

Abstract

In “Confessional Monologue” (Chanyu dubai, 1931), the preface to Confessional Collection (Chanyu ji), Yu Dafu (1896 – 1945) wrote about his experience in Japan by likening himself to a mourning woman:

My lyrical periods were spent on the debauched and cruel island governed by a military authority. Seeing my old country being degraded and enduring shame and humiliation in a foreign country, everything I felt, thought, and experienced was nothing but disappointment and sadness. I was like a newly widowed young woman with no energy or courage, grieving and grieving, lamenting and lamenting. It was out of my wailing that that the widely criticized stories collected in Sinking were produced. (1931, 250; qtd. in Shih 119)

If the mnemonic woman helped generate Lu Xun’s writing, as I have discussed in the previous chapter, the mourning woman definitely served as Yu Dafu’s muse. By likening himself to a mourning woman who just lost her husband, the romantic writer built an imaginary relationship to China, which was represented as an absent masculine figure. Yu’s monologue appears at odds with the prevalent model of modern Western nationalism, a model that centers on masculine feelings, memories, and strength.¹