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Overview
Ranging from interviews with contemporary writers, to historical accounts of gendered writing in Taiwan and semi-colonial China, to close feminist readings of individual authors, these essays confront the degree to which textual stategies construct notions of gender. Among the specific themes discussed are: how femininity is produced in texts by allocating women to domestic space; the extent to which textual production lies at the base of a changing, historically specific code of the feminine; the extent to which women in modern Chinese societies are products of literary canons; the ways in which the historical processes of gendering have operated in Chinese modernity vis à vis modernity in the West; the representation of feminists as avengers and as westernized women; and the meager recognition of feminism as a serious intellectual current and a large body of theory.
Originally published as a special issue of Modern Chinese Literature (Spring & Fall 1988), this expanded book represents some of the most compelling new work in post-Mao feminist scholarship and will appeal to all those concerned with understanding a revitalized feminism in the Chinese context.
Contributors. Carolyn Brown, Ching-kiu Stephen Chan, Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang, Yu-shih Chen, Rey Chow, Randy Kaplan, Richard King, Wolfgang Kubin, Wendy Larson, Lydia Liu, Seung-Yeun Daisy Ng, Jon Solomon, Meng Yue, Wang Zheng
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822396840 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 02/15/1994 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 320 |
| Lexile: | 1400L (what's this?) |
| File size: | 1 MB |
Read an Excerpt
Gender Politics in Modern China
Writing and Feminism
By Tani E. Barlow
Duke University Press
Copyright © 1993 Duke University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-9684-0
CHAPTER 1
The Language of Despair: Ideological Representations of the "New Woman" by May Fourth Writers
Ching-kiu Stephen Chan
The deepest longing of human existence is ... the longing of man for selfhood, the longing to transform the narrow peak of existence into a wide plain with the path of life winding across it ... But every longing fulfilled is a longing destroyed. Georg Lukács Soul and Form, 1910
It took her five weeks to learn that my work could not be restricted by regular eating hours.... My appetite was much smaller than before, now that I was sitting at home all day using my brain, but even so there wasn't always even enough rice. It had been given to [the dog] A Sui.... So there were only the hens to eat my left-overs. It was a long time before I realized this. I was very conscious, however, that my "place in the university," as Huxley describes it, was only somewhere between the dog and the hens. Lu Xun "Regret for the Past," 1925
In the turbulent times of the May Fourth cultural movement in modern China, the search for a new subjectivity was carried out quite frequently in terms of capturing, in a new form, the identity crisis of the "new women" [xin nüxing]. Yet the control of this form was everywhere disciplined by the intellectual (male-centered) self, whose own dilemma of identity tended to be posited in relation to the alien, repressed, but emerging "other" of the woman in question. Such attempts to give "form" to women's identity during the early stages of China's modernization were common not only in the works of female writers like Ding Ling, but more so (though perhaps less ostensibly) in the works of leading male writers like Lu Xun and Yu Dafu. Mao Dun's early fiction seemed to occupy an ambiguous position somewhere in between, as most of his female protagonists were left, characteristically, between suffering a complete collapse of consciousness in an outpouring of emotions and resigning to the total silence of solitude and despair.
However, for Mao Dun, as for Lu Xun and Yu Dafu, the woman's sense of solitude and despair, her gesture of resistance and revolution, indeed the totality of her consciousness—all these could find a channel of expression only through a voice that spoke in the grammar of the dominant discourse of crisis, be it the voice of a solitary outcast (in Yu Dafu), the voice of a half-inert, half-sympathetic bystander (in Lu Xun), or the voice of a cool, calm and ultimate revolutionary (in Mao Dun). The result was a mimetic movement toward the (other) self, toward some possible formations of female subjectivity that contributed to the aesthetic dimension of modern Chinese representation nothing less than a labyrinth of discursive modes.
My objective in this study is to address the basic question of representation— perhaps the one common message of all realist aesthetics—by focusing on the new images of women as they emerged in specific cultural and historical "formations of despair" during the period immediately following the May Fourth Movement of 1919. As I attempt to reorganize the classical mimetic function of realism around the enunciative performance of language in the Chinese realist discourse, I argue that the modern intellectual wanted desperately to re-present himself via a mutation in the crisis of the "other." At the same time, I am also suggesting that the aesthetic question is definitely a matter of form, but not (in the last analysis) of form alone. Hence, my reading of some of the earliest realist writings in modern China can also be taken as an effort to reconstruct the basic quest for form through what might be called an aesthetics of despair. By approaching the crisis of consciousness from the vantage point of representation—the representation of the "other" by the self, of "reality" by language—I wish to show how the realist obsession with despair is itself an attempt at mediating the contradictions of form. The critical problem I want to lay out is this: Given the complex of conflictual social relations involved in the intellectual's will to implement revolution through various new ways of subjective expression (such as love), how was it possible for the realist form (itself the embodiment of a radical discourse) to capture the totality of that crisis—that despair—without handling the problematic of its own crisis—the crisis of representation?
* * *
Actively participating in the so-called New Literary Movement, progressive May Fourth writers like Lu Xun, Yu Dafu, and Mao Dun all tried to bring home to their contemporary readers a critical sense of unrest and bewilderment they felt as part of their historical experiences, not because they could logically show the public the authentic meaning of history, but because they had compelled them to either accept, reject, or compromise the ways in which their common condition of existence was being represented through the text. And as the social and ideological texture of reality thus exposed to the readers was received at once with pity and with fear, the crisis of consciousness it summoned up for them would turn out to be contained, ultimately, in a discourse of solitude and despair that spoke to the crisis of feminine subjectivity as the "other" question of representation for the dominant intellectual "self."
For everyday events were lived by men and women as history mostly via detours. Often, historical moments were "summoned up" for the collective consciousness without recourse to the normalizing mediation of everyday exercise of power relations. Thus, "history" for the Chinese populace was experienced as collective life when, during the May Fourth era, the dominant culture of the people was being recognized for the first time, by intellectuals and other significant social groups in the urban community, as the actual order of a repressive systematics, namely, the patriarchal hegemony. Reality was now being negatively identified, not as any natural, monologic voice of history, but as the undeniable inauthenticity of an aging patriarch best manifested then in the icon of Confucius himself. What evolved through this collective crisis were not merely the so-called "dark sides" of reality, but the actual formations of what Herbert Marcuse calls in Reason and Revolution a "negative totality." It designates, for Marcuse, the overall (visible and invisible) conditions that help expose the entire structure of reality, the total network of sociohistorical contradictions in which "every particular moment [of crisis] contains, as its very content, the whole, and must be interpreted as the whole" (159). In the light of this problematic, it may be possible to propose that, for the May Fourth intellectuals (among them iconoclastic writers of all sorts), to capture the historical moments of their time was, in essence, to summon up those experiences of crisis/or a new mode of representation, and (thus) as the question of representation itself.
As the Confucian icon crumbled in the turbulent New Cultural Movement motivated by enthusiastic intellectuals of the May Fourth generation, word about a new future for women began to spread. Ibsen's Nora became an instant symbol of rebellion and the immediate spokeswoman, as it were, for an alternative hegemony whose foreseeable future remained unknown, uncertain, and unreal. But all the obstacles notwithstanding, one could still witness the emergence of a critical consciousness that addressed women as repressed and marginal under traditional social relationships. Since such a phenomenon was most unusual in a culture dominated for thousands of years by a hyper-static ethical and political order, the subversive act itself might legitimately be considered the collective response to a major historical crisis. The prominent result was, at the pivotal point of May Fourth, a crisis of consciousness among the new intellectuals, for whom all the passionate urges for change came together in the formation of a normally unethical discourse, one that was written, spoken, and read in the name of Eros, its lack, its excess, and its reason for being, for despair.
Once repressed, the language of despair—despair as the root of existence, despair as the cause for life—now erupted through layers of institutional and ideological dominance to appear in the formation of a new ethic and a new culture. It gave rise to an alternative discourse that might have contributed to women's new entry into history. Yet despite its revolutionary momentum, the eruption, in effect, also became the very sign of continual disruption. For given the all-pervasive constraints of the traditional hegemony, insertion into an order of legitimacy need not necessarily allow the "new woman" to represent her own identity in, much less to liberate herself from, the presiding Law of the symbolic Father, whose ultimate logos was once embodied, for the Chinese, in the figure of the Dragon. Indeed, it is my belief that even such radical iconoclasts as Lu Xun, Yu Dafu, and Mao Dun must have lived their lives struggling amid the contradictions between the deep sense of alienation they felt before the symbolic Dragon that guarded the entrance to every existing institution and a corresponding sense of alterity—the irresolvable complex of will, passion and frustration experienced in their attempts to overcome that alienation, to dismantle that institution, and to rationalize that very despair.
Lu Xun, for one, provides us with a perfect case in which contradictions were multiplied, rather than simply resolved, in the text. As the leading writer of his time, Lu Xun's strong concern for the status of Chinese women was in line with his ruthless criticism of the repressive practices of traditionalism as a whole. Yet despite his persistent commitment to help cure the disease of the Chinese mind, Lu Xun could never separate the ethical drive and historical mission to implement social changes from his own private dilemma of consciousness. Such a dilemma was caused by the inner dialectic of faith and anxiety that constituted the identity crisis for the majority of the May Fourth intellectuals. It was this crisis of split consciousness, of phantom reality, that caught the Chinese writer—as a socially committed individual—between the will to hope before a dawning future of revolution and the recourse to despair as the only remaining powerhouse in the twilight of history. This being understood, it would be easier to comprehend the fact that, after such prominent works as "Zhufu" [The new year's sacrifice] had possibly set the norms for a realist fiction in modern China, Lu Xun should choose to end, more or less, his career as a writer of fiction by publishing a unique volume of prose poems, Yecao [The wild grass], in which moments of intensified despair were highlighted.
In another development, the subjective condition of despair had been so desperate for Yu Dafu from the very beginning that it would readily subsume any potential energy left for actual explorations into more manifestly social dilemmas. Hence Yu's formulation of an autobiographical mode that magnified what was equal to Lu Xun's split consciousness in an idiosyncratic fashion. In a significant way, the works of both writers, whether realist or otherwise, had paved the way for a discourse that appeared, on one level, to have disrupted the dominant discourse on women, only to end up, on another level, undermining the initial attempts of subversion as a result of an unforeseen problem, that of representation. It is little but hindsight for us to suggest today that the misguided practice of the May Fourth iconoclasts was partly rooted in their failure to posit a concrete historical as well as textual place for the new women of China. But for the intellectual iconoclasts writing at that particular juncture in history, where contradictions were lived as part of everyday reality, the paradox of representation was a fundamental and critical one. Their choice was most difficult to make—between representing the symbolic liberation of women and disrupting the dominant mode of discourse that had initiated the very act of subversion in the first place. As a writer and a social witness of the new women's history, one's stand was feeble indeed—his place (as Lu Xun would have suggested), possibly somewhere between a few scrawny hens and an old, lonesome dog.
The fragility became even more threatening when the position to take was one on the emotional reality of women. Caught at the margin where rationality met irrationality, women's role was habitually normalized and contained within the male-centered network of domestication and accommodation. What concerns me in the following analysis is the textual organization of the (male) intellectual "self in relation to the (female) emotional "other"—that act of representation that may now be recognized as an objectifying process of the identity crisis rooted in the collective unconscious of the May Fourth writers. Taken as the first step toward any reassurance of selfhood, objectification is a central function in the dialectic of form and consciousness. To objectify is to divest oneself of, to part with, one's self, one's consciousness. The alienated form subsequently evolves as the alterity of consciousness, whereas the wholeness of self is maintained on the basis that it has successfully expelled that which is less coherent and "other" than self. Thus, any possible transcendence of self is to be achieved in its very negativity. In other words, mediation through objectification consists in the process of containing the uncertain (the oneself: herself) in the certain (the one's self: his self).
To analyze the functioning of the objectifying mode in the representation of self as other, we shall now look more closely at a few examples taken from works by the three major writers mentioned earlier.
* * *
In Lu Xun's "Shangshi" [Regret for the past], Juansheng is the first-person narrator who, in a series of notes, attempts to look back into and redeem the essence of his life during a period shortly after the outbreak of the May Fourth Movement, when he has just turned from a follower of "new thoughts" into a poor writer trying to sell manuscripts in support of a family of two. Juansheng begins his notes with these words: "I want, if I can, to describe my remorse and grief for Zijun's sake as well as for my own" ("Shangshi" 110; "Regret" 197). The past, it seems obvious, is here remembered as much to represent his loss of a sense of honor and dignity in life as it is to regret, to rearticulate, that loss as the loss of his wife Zijun. Disillusioned by the mundane life they shared after an initial moment of glory at the outbreak of the May Fourth cultural revolution, Zijun eventually left their home and soon died without her husband knowing. Her "disappearance" is typically represented in the story as Juansheng's loss of someone whom he had first inspired with revolutionary zeal (before their marriage) and from whom he had subsequently alienated himself (after their marriage). As the more stirring moments of the revolution had passed, it became more and more his belief that while he was plunging hard into life, exhausting his brainwork in the desperate hope of filling their stomachs, the woman he loved had simply begun to drift further and further away from a "meaningful" course of life. To his great disappointment, Zijun's life was now being preoccupied with none other than dogs, hens, and other domestic trivialities. Hence, right before he was to realize his then much-relocated "place in the universe," Juansheng tried to rebuild the integrity of his self and re-articulate the dignity within his ego by drawing upon the agony of which she, his wife, was apparently the cause:
Then there was the never-endingbusiness of eating every day. All Zijun's effort seemed to be devoted to our meals. One ate to earn, and earned to eat; while A Sui and the hens had to be fed too. Apparently she had forgotten all she had ever learned, and did not realize that she was interrupting my train of thought when she called me to meals. And although as I sat down I sometimes showed a little displeasure, she paid no attention at all, but just went on munching away quite unconcerned. ("Shangshi" 119; "Regret" 205)
Now Lu Xun never explicitly tells us what Zijun was supposed to have learned, and which, according to Juansheng, she had then completely forgotten. And it need not be argued that Juansheng might actually be justified in his recognition of the change Zijun had undergone. The point, though, is to see the ideological function of the text revealed in the representation of that change.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Gender Politics in Modern China by Tani E. Barlow. Copyright © 1993 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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Table of Contents
Foreword / Howard GoldblattIntroduction / Tani E. Barlow
The Language of Despair: Ideological Representations of the "New Woman" by May Fourth Writers / Ching-kiu Stephen Chan
Invention and Intervention: The Female Tradition in Modern Chinese Literature / Lydia H. Liu
The End of "Funu Wenxue": Women's Literature from 1925 to 1935 / Wendy Larson
Woman as Trope: Gender and Power in Lu Xun's "Soap" / Carolyn T. Brown
Virtuous Transactions: A Reading of Three Short Stories by Ling Shuhua / Rey Chow
Images of Subjugation and Defiance: Female Characters in the Early Dramas of Tian Han / Randy Kaplan
Female Images and National Myth / Meng Yue
Writing with Your Body: Literature as a Wound--Remarks on the Poetry of Shu Ting / Wolfgang Kubin
Harmony and Equality: Notes on "Mimosa" and "Ark" / Chen Yu-shih
Three Interviews: Wang Anyi, Zhu Lin, Dai Qing / Wang Zheng
In the Translator's Eye: On the Significance of Zhu Lin / Richard King
Yuan Qiongqiong and the Rage for Eileen Zhang among Taiwan's Feminine Writers / Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang
Taking Tiger Mountain: Can Xue's Resistance and Cultural Critique / Jon Solomon
Feminism in the Chinese Context: Li Ang's The Butcher's Wife / Sheung-Yuen Daisy Ng
Political Evaluation and Reevaluation in Contemporary Chinese Fiction / Margaret H. Decker
Contributors
Index