Abstract
This study undertakes a critical inquiry into the powerful connections between emergent feminist ideologies in China and the production of “modern” women’s writing in the period spanning the demise of the last imperial dynasty and the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949. Proceeding through a series of primarily formal and historical analyses of literary examples drawn from a variety of narrative genres, I accentuate both well-known and under-represented literary voices who intervened in the heated gender debates of their generation and historically contextualize the formal strategies used in imagining alternative stories of female experience and potential. My analysis investigates two overarching questions: first of all, how the advent of enlightened views of gender relations and sexuality influenced the literary practices of the small elite of modern-educated “new women” who made their debuts in the cultural public sphere at the time, in terms not only of narrative content but also the narrative forms and strategies they deployed, the readership they sought to address, and the publication venues of which they availed themselves. Second, it analyses how, in turn, these representations themselves attest to the various ways in which early twentieth-century female literary intellectuals engaged and expanded contemporary social and political concerns by self-consciously writing women into stories of national salvation, social transformation, and revolution.
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Notes
Charlotte Beahan, “The Women’s Movement and Nationalism in Late Ch’ing China” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1976)
Elisabeth Croll, Feminism and Socialism in China (New York: Schocken Books, 1978)
Phyllis Andors, The Unfinished Liberation of Chinese Women: 1949–1980 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983)
Judith Stacey, Patriarchy and Socialist Revolution in China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983)
Margery Wolf, Revolution Postponed: Women in Contemporary China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1985)
Christina Gilmartin, Engendering the Chinese Revolution: Radical Women, Communist Politics, and Mass Movements in the 1920s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).
See, for example, David Der-wei Wang, “Feminist Consciousness in Modern Chinese Male Fiction,” in Michael Duke, ed., Modern Chinese Women Writers (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1989), 236–256
Stephen Chan, “The Language of Despair: Ideological Representation of the ‘New Woman’ by May Fourth Writers,” Modern Chinese Literature 4 (Spring and Fall 1988): 19–38
Rey Chow, Woman and Chinese Modernity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991)
Yue Ming-Bao, “Gendering the Origins of Modern Chinese Fiction,” in Lu Tonglin, ed., Gender and Sexuality in Twentieth-Century Chinese Literature and Society (Albany: SUNY Press, 1993)
Sally Lieberman, The Mother and Narrative Politics in Modern China (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998)
Kam Louie, Theorizing Chinese Masculinity: Society and Gender in China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
Lu Tonglin, Gender and Sexuality in Twentieth-Century Chinese Literature and Society (Albany: SUNY Press, 1993), introduction
Meng Yue, “Female Images and National Myth,” in Tani Barlow, ed., Gender Politics in Modern China: Writing and Feminism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993).
Critics who have explored these issues include: Ma Ning, “The Textual and Critical Difference of Being Radical: Reconstructing Chinese Leftist Films of the 1930s,” Wide Angle 2, no. 2 (1989)
Lydia Liu, “The Female Body and Nationalist Discourse: Manchuria in Xiao Hong’s The Field of Life and Death,” in Angela Zito and Tani Barlow, eds., Body, Subject, and Power (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994);
Zhang Yingjin, ed., “Prostitution and Urban Imagination,” Cinema and Urban Culture in Shanghai, 1922–1943 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999).
Feminist scholarship is also transforming the study of literature and culture prior to the twentieth century, as scholars challenge the stereotypes of “traditional Chinese women.” Recent studies include Ellen Widmer and Kang-i Sun Chang, eds., Writing Women in Late Imperial China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997)
Dorothy Ko, Teachers of the Inner Chambers: Women and Culture in Seventeenth Century China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994)
Susan Mann, Precious Records: Women in China’s Long Eighteenth Century (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997)
Susan Mann and Yu-Yin Cheng, eds., Under Confucian Eyes: Writings on Gender in Chinese History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).
This rhetoric of equality seems to have contributed to the overly idealistic assessments by nonspecialist Western feminists of the achievements of the women’s emancipation movement in China in the 1970s. See, e.g., Sheila Rowbatham, Women, Resistance, Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1974)
and Claudie Broyelle, Women’s Liberation in China (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1977).
For an overview of the recent developments in the women’s movement in Mainland China and the legacy of state-sponsored feminism, see Naihua Zhang, “Discovering the Positive within the Negative: The Women’s Movement in a Changing China,” in Amrita Basu, ed., The Challenge of Local Feminisms (Boulder: Westview Press, 1995), 25–57.
Since the late 1990s, a number of doctoral dissertations (several of which have now been published) have been completed, which focus on modern Chinese women writers from feminist perspectives and in so doing contribute to the paradigm shift that the present work calls for. Noteworthy recent publications include Liu Jianmei, Revolution Plus Love: Literary History, Women’s Bodies, and Thematic Repetition in Twentieth-Century Chinese Fiction (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2003)
and Tze-lan D. Sang, The Emerging Lesbian: Female Same-Sex Desire in Modern Chinese Literature and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). See also Nicole Huang, “Written in the Ruins: War and Domesticity in Shanghai Literature of the 1940s” (Ph.D. diss., Los Angeles, UCLA, 1998); Megan Ferry, “Chinese Women Writers of the 1930s and Their Critical Reception” (Ph.D. diss., St. Louis, Washington University, 1998); Wang Lingzhen, “Modern and Contemporary Chinese Women’s Autobiographical Writing” (Ph.D. diss., Cornell University, 1998); and Wang Jing, “Strategies of Modern Chinese Women Writers’ Autobiography” (Ph.D. diss., Ohio State University, 2000).
Patricia Yaeger, Honey-Mad Women: Emancipatory Strategies in Women’s Writing (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988). This engaging book argues that while the trope of the silenced, muted, or lost female voice has been central to feminism’s critique of women’s relation to language and writing in patriarchal culture, it has also become something of a liability to feminist scholarship.
Scholarship in Chinese tends to engage a much wider range of writers. See, e.g., Bai Shurong, Shiwei nüzuojia (Ten women writers) (Tianjin: Chunzhong chubanshe, 1986)
Meng Yue and Dai Jinhua, Fuchu lishi dibiao (Emerging from the horizon of history) (Zhengzhou: Henan renmin chubanshe, 1989)
Qiao Yigang, Zhongguo nüxing de wenxue shijie (The literary world of Chinese women) (Wuhan: Hubei jiaoyu chubanshe, 1993)
and Wang Jialun, Zhongguo xiandai nüzuojia lungao (A discussion of modern Chinese women writers) (Beijing: Zhongguo funü chubanshe, 1992). The current flurry of re-publications of pre-49 literature, especially from the 1920s to 1940s, has also dramatically facilitated access to a much broader range of early women writers. Recently issued collections include the multivolume Minguo nüzuojia xiaoshuo jingdian (Fiction classics by Republican era women writers), Ke Ling, ed. (Shanghai: Guji chubanshe, 1999) and Zhongguo xiandai cainü jingdian wencong (Collection of literary classics by modern Chinese literary women), Fu Guangming, ed. (Beijing: Yanshan chubanshe, 1998).
Maria Lauret, Liberating Literature: Feminist Fiction in America (London: Routledge, 1994).
Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979).
Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Writing Beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of Twentieth Century Women Writers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985).
Elaine Showalter, A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977).
Rosalind Coward, “Are Women’s Novels Feminist Novels?,” in Elaine Showalter, ed., The New Feminist Criticism (London: Virago, 1985)
Rita Felski, Beyond Feminist Aesthetics: Feminist Literature and Social Change (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989)
Anne Cranny Francis, Feminist Fiction: Feminist Uses of Generic Fiction (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990)
Ann Ardis, New Women, New Novels (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990)
Gayle Greene, Changing the Story: Feminist Fiction and the Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991)
Maria Lauret, Liberating Literature: Feminist Fiction in America (London: Routledge, 1994)
Eve Taylor, The Domestic Revolution: Enlightenment Feminisms and the Novel (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000)
Anna Wilson, Persuasive Fictions: Feminist Narrative and Critical Myth (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2001).
There are striking parallels between the early formation of Chinese feminism and feminist movements in other Asian countries that also developed alongside anti-imperialist nationalist movements. Kumari Jayawardena’s groundbreaking study of Third World feminist movements shows that male nationalists often took the lead in advocating reform for women. See her Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World (London: Zed Press, 1986). For another useful cross-cultural perspective on non-Western feminisms, see also Amrita Basu, ed., The Challenge of Local Feminisms: Women’s Movements in Global Perspective (Boulder: Westview Press, 1995).
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality Volume I: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Press, 1980), 101.
In his article “The Seeds of Change: Reflections on the Condition of Women in the Early and Mid Ch’ing,” Signs2 (1976), Paul Ropp examines this and several other examples, which he suggests are proof that the origins of feminism in China are not simply Western in nature. For other attempts to uncover a feminist consciousness in late imperial literature, see the collections Anna Gerstlacher et al., eds., Women and Literature in China (Bochum: Studienverlag Brockmeyer, 1985)
Ellen Widmer and Kang-i Sun Chang, ed., Writing Women in Late Imperial China; and Marina Sung, Narrative Art of Tsai-sheng-yuan: A Feminist Vision in Traditional Confucian Society (Taiwan: Chinese Materials Center, 1994).
Vera Schwartz, The Chinese Enlightenment: Intellectuals and the Legacy of the May Fourth Movement of 1919 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 116.
Alice Jardine, Gynesis: Configurations of Woman and Modernity (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 25.
Chang-Tai Hong, “Female Symbols of Resistance in Chinese Wartime Spoken Drama,” Modern China, 15 (April 1989), 149–177.
The need to address historiographic conventions as a part of feminist literary scholarship has been raised by numerous critics. For an excellent discussion of these issues, see Margaret Ezell’s Writing Women’s Literary History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993).
Wendy Larson, Women and Writing in Modern China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 166–197.
Edward Gunn, Unwelcome Muse: Chinese Literature in Shanghai and Peking, 1937–1945 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980).
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© 2005 Amy D. Dooling
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Dooling, A.D. (2005). Introduction: Women and Feminism in the Literary History of Early Twentieth-Century China. In: Women’s Literary Feminism in Twentieth-Century China. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403978271_1
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