MOTHERS AND SONS: A GENDER STUDY OF THE MODERN CHINESE WOODCUT MOVEMENT
A Thesis
Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for
the Degree Master of Arts in the
Graduate School of The Ohio State University
By
Erin Elizabeth Publow, B.A.
* * * * *
The Ohio State University 2002
Master's Examination Committee:
Dr. Julia F. Andrews, Adviser
Dr. John C. Huntington Adviser Department of History of Art ABSTRACT
This thesis examines the gender dichotomy apparent in the pre 1937 images of the modem Chinese woodcut movement. The politically charged, overtly activist images are occupied predominantly by men, and young men in particular, while women are almost consistently represented in domestic scenes, as mothers. This gendering of public and private space may initially seem to contradict, or suggest a counter current to, the progressive May Fourth agenda, which only a decade earlier strongly advocated gender equality and urged women to become more independent and politically involved. This thesis has two objectives. The first is an attempt to understand what frameworks lie beneath this gender dichotomy and to question the immediate response to consider the dichotomy conservative. The second is an exploration of why mothers and male youth, rather than, say, fathers and female youth, become inscribed with such national significance.
I argue that these images reflect and participate in the complicated, and often seemingly contradictory, gender issues of the period. The images are subjective expressions of male youth, who not only make up the demographics of the woodcut movement, but are at the very center of national reforms and intellectual activity. It was they whom reformers felt it was necessary to save from the feudal society, and they became the symbol of hope and the future of China. In fact, for them, the individual and national became conflated, as their individual identities and frustrations were often synonymous with modem China’s own identity crisis. And while women’s liberation and gender equality were also significant national issues, they were subordinate to this
essentially male youth/national cause. Similarly, while the mother was a significant
figure - literally and symbolically - for the nation and its youth, and like youth was also
given a certain national iconic status, her own subjectivity and individuality similarly remained subordinate. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I wish to thank my adviser, Julia Andrews, and professor John Huntington for constant encouragement, enthusiasm and intellectual support.
I also thank Ying Chua and Rebecca Twist for their helpful comments and suggestions, Mayumi Kamata for her assistance in printing the glossary of Chinese characters, and Anu Vedagiri for the puja that made this thesis possible.
I am grateful to Jeff Borisch for helping me with various technological and formatting problems and for providing moral support throughout the entire process.
IV VITA
1998 ...... B.A. Art History, Augustana College
1998-2000 ...... Graduate Teaching Associate The Ohio State University
2001-2002 ...... Graduate Associate The Ohio State University
FIELDS OF STUDY
Major Field: Asian Art
v TABLE OF CONTENTS
Abstract ...... ii
Acknowledgments ...... iv
Vita ...... v
L1st. o fF"1gures ...... vu ..
Chapters:
1. Introduction ...... 1
2. Family Reform and the New Youth ...... 7
3. The "Woman Question" ...... 15
4. Mothers and Sons ...... 22
5. Conclusion ...... 33
Bibliography ...... 34
Glossary ...... 3 7
Appendix:
1. Figures ...... 38
Vl LIST OF FIGURES
Figure Page
1. Hu Yichuan To the Front! 1932 ...... 38 Julia F. Andrews and Kuiyi Shen. A Century in Crisis: Modernity and Tradition in the Art of Twentieth-Century China. New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 1998, cat. 99.
2. Gu Wenfang Motherly Love 1936. In Muke jie, vol.3 ...... 39 Banhua jicheng: Lu Xun cang zhongguo xiandai muke quamji, edited by Shanghai Lu Xun Memorial and Jiangsu Ancient Books Press. Nanjing: Ancient Books Press, 1991. Vol.4,1354.
3. Li Hua China Roar! 1936. InMukejie, vol.14 ...... 40 Banhua jicheng. Vol.1, 251.
4. Pan Chengye Pregnant Woman 1934. InXiandai banhua, vol.I ...... 41 Banhuajicheng. Vol.I, 29.
5. Pan Zhao Mother and Son 1935. InXiandai banhua, vol.7 ...... 42 Banhuajicheng. Vol.I, 139.
6. Ye Fu She and the Child 1936. In Tiema banhua, vol.2 ...... 43 Banhua jicheng. Vol.4, 1300.
7. "Xiao jiating xue (Preliminary Lessons for the House-keeping Bride)" ...... 44 Liangyou huabao(Young Companion Pictorial), no.101(Jan1935), p.40.
8. advertisement for medicine ...... 45 Liangyou huabao, no. I 05 (May 1935), p.31.
9. advertisement for Santogen ...... 46 Liangyou huabao, no.102 (February 1935), p.39.
10. advertisement for Momilk ...... 47 Liangyou huabao, no.12 (January 1927), n.p.
11. Li Hua Father and Son 1934. In Li Hua muke ...... 48 vii Banhuajicheng. Vol.3, 741.
12. Kathe Kollwitz Sacrifice From War series 1922-23 ...... 49 Robert J. Fanning. Kathe Kollwitz. Karlsruhe: C.F. Muller, 1956, pl.177
13. Hu Qizao Loss ofa Child 193 5. In Xiandai banhua, vol.13 ...... 50 Banhua jicheng. Vol. I, 240.
14. Lai Shaoqi Child has Died 1935. InXiandai banhua, vol.7 ...... 51 Banhuajicheng. Vol.I, 137.
15. Huang Peili Famine 1935. InXiandai banhua, vol.11...... 52 Banhuajicheng. Vol.I, 209.
16. Duan Ganqing Thread ofDeath 1936. In Ganqing muke, vol.2 ...... 53 Banhuajicheng. Vol.3, 1039.
17. Kathe Kollwitz Outbreak 1903 ...... 54 Fanning, pl.66.
18. Kathe Kollwitz March ofthe Weavers From Weavers' Revolt series, 1897 ...... 55 Fanning, pl.32.
19. Tang Yingwei Forward!1936. cover of Mukejie, vol.4 ...... 56 Andrews and Shen, cat. 85.
20. Li Hua Street Uprising 1936. Mukejie, vol.4 ...... 57 Banhuajicheng. Vol.4, 1371.
vm CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION
In 1929, under the guidance of Lu Xun ( 1881-1936), literary giant and prominent
figure in the May Fourth intellectual movement, a group of young artists began what
would become the modem Chinese woodcut movement. Two years later, a series of
lectures and workshops organized by Lu Xun at the bookstore of his friend, Uchiyama
Kanzo, officially launched the movement. Uchiyama's brother, a woodcut artist in Japan, was invited to offer technical instruction, and Lu Xun introduced the work of various woodcut artists from around the world. Thereafter the artists organized themselves into various societies, collectively exhibiting and publishing their work. Lu Xun continued to play an active role in the movement until his death. He attended the exhibitions of these artists, frequently offered constructive criticism and published for instructive purposes volumes of woodcuts ranging from Japanese ukiyo-e to Aubrey Beardsley to Russian
Constructivism. To a great extent, he set the tone for the developing years of the movement. 1
1 Julia F. Andrews and Kuiyi Shen, "The Modem Woodcut Movement," in Andrews and Shen, A Century in Crisis: Modernity and Tradition in the Art a/Twentieth-Century China (New York: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 1998), 213-214. See also Shirley Sun, Modern Chinese Woodcuts (San Francisco: Chinese Culture Foundation, 1979), 13-21.
1 Post 1949 scholarship has interpreted this stage of the movement as an immediate precursor to Communist art, for after 1937 the woodcut ultimately became the medium of choice for communicating Communist propaganda.2 While certainly not without leftist subjects and sympathies, understanding the woodcut as a "call to arms" does not capture the complexities and broad interests of the movement and its artists. More recently, Julia
Andrews and Kuiyi Shen have argued that the origins of the movement are more avant- garde, with individual and varied responses to modernism, in addition to the more overtly leftist subjects. Indeed, one is just as likely to find a still life with guitar in a Cubist manner or Matisse-like dancing nudes as one would images with upraised fists or sympathetic representations of the oppressed. While for many artists the medium was appropriate for capturing social realities, it was also a new, international, modern and creative medium, ideal for artistic experimentation. Style, likewise without homogeneity, betrays interests in a variety of modernist modes, covering the full scope of Western
European and Russian styles that Lu Xun introduced.3
It was not until after the 193 7 Japanese invasions that the movement became more unified ideologically and stylistically.4 Thus the early phase of the movement retains something of the May Fourth period's ethos. It is characteristic of the period's broad
2 Shirley Sun, "Lu Hsun and the Chinese Woodcut Movement (Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 1974), 1-2; Sun (1979), 48-51. Even the artists themselves, writing after 1949, discuss the origins of the movement in these terms. See Li Hua, Li Shusheng, and Ma Ke, eds., Zhongguo xinxing banhua yundong wushi nian, 1931-1981 (Shenyang: Liaoning Arts Press, 1981). Scholarship has similarly canonized Lu Xun's work as "revolutionary." See Leo Ou-fan Lee, Voices from the Iron House: A Study ofLu Xun (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987)who has revised this interpretation and restored the complexities and art of his literature.
3 Andrews and Shen, 213.
4 Ibid., 224. The movement split along with the Nationalists and Communists, each developing their own styles and agenda.
2 literary and artistic flowering, experimentalism, cosmopolitanism, complex and heterogeneous intellectual and social interests, as well as its deep nationalistic and reform-oriented modernist concerns.
Since the history of the movement and its societies has been fairly well established, and artists' biographies generally outlined,5 I would like to analyze more closely the ideologies that are informing the images of this early period. As Andrews and
Shen have maintained, the dual political and personal interests do not necessarily lead to an either/or method of interpretation. Taking this as a starting point, how were these artists individually involved in the larger-than-life issues and complex transformations in this period? How can seemingly similar, leftist images be interpreted as individual expressions? There are many ways of approaching these questions, by looking at individual artists' works in relation to their biographies, for example. But I think it is also significant to take into consideration their collective identity, that is, as male youth, and how their gender and age contributed to their self-image. What factors, then, led to the construction of their self-image, and how has their self-image, in tum, informed their work?
A close analysis of the vast array of subjects from this pre 1937 period reveals a distinct gender dichotomy: the politically charged, overtly activist images are occupied predominantly by men, and young men in particular, while women are almost consistently represented in domestic scenes, as mothers. Compare, for example, Hu
Yichuan's To the Front (fig. 1) and Gu Wenfang's Motherly Love (fig. 2). Is this
5 For all of this information, see Li Hua, Chinese Woodcuts, trans. Zuo Boyang (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1995); Michael Sullivan, Art and Artists of Twentieth Century China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 80-87.; Li Hua et al, eds; Andrews and Shen.
3 reflective of current perceptions about men's and women's place, about gender appropriate activities? If so, does this gendering of public and private space contradict, or suggest a counter current to, the progressive May Fourth agenda, which only a decade earlier strongly advocated gender equality, celebrated Ibsen's Nora and urged women to become more independent and politically involved? Doesn't this reinforce the traditional
Confucian dichotomy that was under attack?
In this thesis I will argue that, while these images do not exactly reinforce a
Confucian ideal, they do reflect, and indeed participate in, the complicated, and often seemingly contradictory, gender issues of the period. The images are subjective expressions of male youth, who not only make up the demographics of the woodcut movement, but are at the very center of national reforms and intellectual activity. It was they whom the reformers felt it was necessary to save from the feudal society; they became the symbol of hope and the future of China; and they were the chief protagonists of the New Culture and May Fourth movements. In fact, for them, the individual and national became conflated, as their individual identities and frustrations were often synonymous with modem China's own identity crisis. And while women's liberation and gender equality were also significant national issues, they were subordinate to this essentially male youth/national cause. As I will demonstrate, while the mother is a significant figure - literally and symbolically - for the nation and its youth, and like youth was also given a certain national iconic status, her own subjectivity and individuality similarly remained subordinate. This thesis, then, is essentially about two problems. The first is an attempt to understand what frameworks lie beneath this gender dichotomy and to question the immediate response to consider this dichotomy
4 conservative. The second is an exploration of why mothers and male youth, rather than,
say, fathers and female youth, become inscribed with such national significance.
Since my discussion focuses on a larger cultural issue and is necessarily
interdisciplinary in nature, I will be integrating with the visual material scholarship in
literary, sociological and gender studies that have dealt with these same issues.
Throughout, I cite Lu Xun quite frequently, not as an absolute, authoritative voice for the
period, but more so to illustrate how he serves as a vital link between the woodcut
movement and these issues. Their relationship is a significant one, and Lu Xun is in part
responsible for reinforcing their self=nation identity. And presumably these artists would
have been very familiar with his writing. Also, since this thesis investigates a phenomenon rather than the interest of a particular artist or a few anomalous images, I have selected from a rather extensive amount only a few illustrative images. The extremely complex historical background has similarly been condensed to a few key
examples.
The first two chapters, which deal with youth (the generational issue) and the mother (the gender issue), respectively, discuss the construction and development of the ideological underpinnings of the representations we find here; they clarify why this gender dichotomy exists and how it might be interpreted in this particular context.
Chapter one takes the issues of family reform and national salvation as its core topics and outlines the national and familial parameters of identity for these modem youth. Chapter two investigates where the woman fits into this picture, that is, how national salvation efforts and family reform make possible a woman's movement, yet simultaneously limit it. The final chapter, a more detailed discussion of the woodcut movement and its
5 particularities, brings the mother and son together in the analysis of one type of image - the mother-and-son dyad, manifested most frequently in the form of the nurturing mother, as above, and the bereaved mother, mourning the loss of her son.
6 CHAPTER 2
FAMILY REFORM AND THE NEW YOUTH
Towards the end of the Qing dynasty, as reformers analyzed China's current dilemma - that is, how, with her impressive history, she had "fallen behind" the rest of the world - and sought to remedy the situation, the Confucian system received the brunt of criticism. Now abstracted and simplified to anything considered traditional and oppressive, Confucianism became the scapegoat for China's backwardness vis-a-vis the modem industrialized West and Japan. Because modernization involved an attempt to construct a new identity, distinct from China's "traditional" identity, late nineteenth and early twentieth century reform efforts were to a large extent anti-Confucian cultural movements. 6
This especially affected the family, and youth and women, in particular, were considered to be enslaved by the Confucian family system: youth submitted to elders and ancestors, women, depending on her station in life, to her father, husband or son.
Throughout the movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, these two groups came to play a prominent national role, and their emancipation was considered integral to national salvation and modernization. Thus oppressive familial moral codes,
6 R. Keith Schoppa, Revolution and Its Past: Identities and Change in Modern Chinese History (Upper Saddle River, Prentice Hall, 2002), 161-164; Frank Dikotter, Sex, Culture and Modernity in China: Medical Science and the Construction ofSexual Identities in the Early Republican Period (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1995), 147.
7 manifested in the forms of filial piety, female chastity, arranged marriages and foot binding, were radically challenged and criticized as obstructions to national progress.7
Lu Xun's 1918 essay, "What is Required of Us as Fathers Today,'' is one such salvation minded plea for a reform of the Confucian family system. His main criticism is that filial piety, the traditional formula on which generational relationships in the family had been constructed, is backwards and prohibits national progress. Because filial piety is advantageous to parents and ancestors at the expense of youth, it is antithetical to the
"laws of biology." Instead ofrequiring youth to always venerate, feel indebted to and burdened by their elders, he argues, it is the parents who should devote themselves entirely to the next generation, for they are the future and should surpass their parents in order for society to progress. In keeping with this approach, parents should strive to understand their children, guide and educate them through development and ultimately emancipate them. 8
Lu Xun's essay is clearly informed by evolution, which had been introduced to
China in the late nineteenth century and was widely accepted as a universal truth.9
Consistent with this understanding,, Lu Xun takes evolution to be the absolute and universal, against which the historical and cultural relativity of Confucianism is tested.
7 Susan Brownell and Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom, "Introduction: Theorizing Femininities and Masculinities," in Chinese Femininities/Chinese Masculinities: A Reader, ed. Brownell and Wasserstrom. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 90. The advent of Marxism further motivated attack on the family system, although the cause of Marxist family revolution was reversed, i.e. the understanding in the Chinese context was that the traditional family system had to be destroyed in order for China to industrialize (rather than destruction of family system as a consequence of industrialization). See Susan Glosser," 'The Truths I Have Learned': Nationalism, Family Reform, and Male ldernitity in China's New Culture Movement, 1915-1923," in Brownell and Wasserstrom, 127.
8 Lu Xun, "What is Required of Us as Fathers Today?" in Lu Xun: Selected Works, Vol. 2, translated and edited by Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1980), 59-64
9Dikotter, 2-3.
8 As Lu Xun writes, "Judging by the animal world, our first duty is to preserve life, our
second to propagate it, and our third to improve it (in other words, evolution). All living
creatures behave in this way, and fathers should be no exception." It is the way oflife and
the biological world to move forward and upwards:" ... the later forms oflife are always
more significant and complete, hence more worthwhile and precious; and the earlier
forms oflife should be sacrificed to the later." If parents follow these biological laws,
"not only are they free from selfishness; they may even sacrifice themselves to enable
their progeny to advance along the road of development." 10 Rather than having children
for selfish reasons, which Lu Xun argues, the traditional system encourages, love and
instinct, which are natural and universal, encourage self-sacrifice. In other words, the relationship between older and younger generations should take this form because it is natural and according to biological law, not because it is written in a text or because tradition dictates it as such.
Put in this perspective, Confucianism is not only being called into question and radically challenged, it is proven to be antithetical and a hindrance to the path of
evolution and, by extension, national progress. It is backwards, not forward-looking; it is an artificial system which emphasizes continuity, while evolution is natural, with change and progress inevitable. This is precisely why evolution was so appealing to intellectuals, and why social Darwinism had a similar impact on reform efforts. Huxley's
Ethics and Evolution, translated with a nationalistic agenda by Yan Fu, was especially widely read, with Lu Xun among its many readers. As these reform-minded intellectuals viewed the current national predicament, China was far from "fit" in the Darwinian sense
10 Lu Xun, 59-61.
9 and doomed to become extinct. But through a chance misunderstanding of "natural
selection," it was also believed that China could make herself fit. Absolute faith was then
put in evolution, for it promised progress; retrogression would not be possible once China
found the right path. 11
This Darwinian paradigm, in addition to offering a definite and unquestionably
progressive future, also enabled the construction of a modem, continuous and linear time,
distinct from the dynastic, cyclical time. A new concept of time and the consequent
sense of living in a new time or era are in part responsible for defining modernity. 12
Indeed the New Culture and early May Fourth movements were characterized by a
constant and optimistic search for newness, for it denoted that this was, in fact, a distinct
era, and by definition it promised progress. The adjective "new" (xin) was a frequently
occurring one, found in the appropriately titled "New Culture Movement" and especially
in the titles of journals, such as New Youth, The New Woman, New Century. 13 The
woodcut movement itself is often preceded by the characters xinxing (newly arisen), and
certainly part of the appeal of the woodcut was its apparent novelty. 14
11 James Reeve Pusey, Lu Xun and Evolution (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), 10.
12 Dikotter, 8-9; Leo Ou-fan Lee. Shanghai Modern: The Flowering ofa New Urban Culture in China, 1930-1945 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 43; Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread ofNationalism (London: Verso, 1991 ), 22-31. Anderson calls this "homogeneous, empty time." It is a secular time and a concept of universal simultaneity that is at the root of both modernism and nationalism.
13 Leo Ou-fan Lee (1999) 44; Christina Kelley Gilmartin, "Introduction: May Fourth and Women's Emancipation," in Hua R. Lan and Vanessa L. Fong, eds., Women in Republican China: A Sourcebook (London: M.E. Sharpe), x-xi.
14 Andrews and Shen, 214. Not completely aware of the history of the medium, the artists considered the woodcut modern, since the sources for their inspiration tended to be avant garde European art.
10 The evolutionary path and the related hope placed in a future time legitimized the
emancipation of youth and their central place within national salvation efforts and modernization, which Lu Xun's essay boldly pronounced. Chen Duxiu, Lu Xun's
contemporary and a fellow writer, who similarly hoped to eradicate the Confucian family
system in the name of progress, expresses more explicitly the rhetoric of youth typical of this period. In his quintessential 1915 essay "Call to Youth" from the journal New Youth
(Xin qingnian) he proclaims:
Youth is like early spring, like the rising sun, like trees and grass in bud, like a newly sharpened blade. It is the most valuable period oflife. The function of youth in society is the same as that of a fresh and vital cell in a human body. In the processes of metabolism, the old and rotten are incessantly eliminated to be replaced by the fresh and living ... .If metabolism functions properly in society, it will flourish; if old and rotten elements fill the society, then it will cease to exist. 15
Once again, the biological justifies the necessity of youth to China's future, while the older generation, "old and rotten," is - also by necessity - surpassable.
Ideological justifications aside, practicality also requires that implementing change depend on youth, for they remain untainted by traditions. It is at this flexible stage that new systems and ideologies are implanted and begin to take root. The self is still in the process of being molded, open to new ideas and thus in position to realize transformation. It is too late for adults to change, and consequently, it must be left to the youth.
Youth and the aged often became polarized, which justified criticism of the old system and established ways. But in reality, this did not entail a complete denial of the older generation's significance, for they played a vital role in cultivating the "seed" of
15 Chow Tse-tsung, The May Fourth Movement: Intellectual Revolution in Modern China (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960), 45-46.
11 youth and preparing them for this new path and their new identity. Lu Xun's essay was directed at the parents, not the children, and it defines their role within this new era.
Youth are still immature and need guidance; with nothing other than China's future at stake, it could prove fatal should they wander in the wrong direction. This critical role, in fact, was the one taken up by such figures as Lu Xun and Chen Duxiu, who, a generation older, stood at the critical threshold between traditional and modem China.
This was a role that Lu Xun took to heart, and he remained very committed and dedicated to China's youth, especially to writers and artists. Rather appropriately, his first short-story, Diary ofa Madman ( 1919), which portrays the old, feudal society as cruel and cannibalistic, ends with the oft-quoted cry, "Save the children!" The story implies that children learn these cruel habits from their parents and thereby continue the cycle of cannibalism; only through these children is there hope for a break in the cycle.
Saving the children seems to have become Lu Xun's self-designated life pursuit and responsibility, expressed in many ways, and he supported and acted as mentor of the woodcut movement because the artists were young. In his introductory note to the 1931
Yiba yishe (Eighteen Arts Society) exhibition in Shanghai, he writes:
The epoch is marching on. Works of new, young, unknown engravers are hanging here; with sober consciousness and firm effort, the young artists reveal strong, healthy sprouts among luxuriant vegetation. Of course they are immature, but just because they are immature, hope is on their side. 16
The term for youth, or qingnian (literally "young years"), took on particular significance in this period and, like xin, became similarly steeped in ideology. The woodcut artists, in fact, identified themselves first and foremost, not as woodcut artists,
16 Quoted in Li Hua, Chinese Woodcuts, 105.
12 but as meishu qingnian, or "art youths." 17 It had become a clearly defined category in the twentieth century, and it had acquired connotations that differed from its imperial use.
Originally qingnian ren (literally "person of young years"), which referred to an individual who was coming of age and suitable for marriage, the term defined the individual's stage of life within the sphere of the family. The ren ("person") was later dropped and had come to refer to a group of youth - roughly between sixteen and thirty years of age - within society. They were associated with the new education system and commitment to modernity; they were urban, cosmopolitan, independent from their families, progressive, and not necessarily preparing to get married. Thus their identity and loyalty shifted from the family unit to society at large. 18
But perhaps most importantly, this image was an extremely self-conscious one: self-consciously progressive and counter-cultural. As this might suggest, this self-image clouded a strictly altruistic devotion to the national cause. The establishment of their new identity within a modem, industrializing society was often their motivation for supporting family reform. And as Susan Glosser has clarified in her gender study of the New
Culture movement, individual educational and vocational concerns and desire for socioeconomic independence often took precedence and were even legitimized in the name of national salvation. Take the criticism of arranged marriage and support of the small family (xiao jiating) 19 for example: a happy home is necessary for a well-
17 Li Hua et al, ed. Almost all excerpts from this collection of artists' writing use this term.
18 Jon L. Saari, Legacies of Childhood: Growing up Chinese in a Time of Crisis 1890-1920 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), 62-63; Marion J. Levy, Jr., The Family Revolution in Modem China (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959), 84-90 and 294-8; Dikotter, 146-148.
19 Glosser, 120-1. The xiao jiating, as opposed to the da jiating (large family), was modeled after the Western-style nuclear household, rather than the larger, multi-generational household of traditional China.
13 functioning society, and a loveless (i.e. arranged) marriage affect the wealth of the family, which in turn impedes social progress. That is not to say that youth necessarily had ulterior motives to voicing concern about their national crisis. Rather their own frustrations were easily conflated with the identity crisis of the nation at large, which was going through its own transitions and coming to terms with its own modernity.20
This intimacy between youth and nation is powerfully expressed in Li Hua's rather vividly rendered call to arms, China, Roar! (fig. 3). The figure, bound and blindfolded, grasps for the knife - just out of reach - to cut himself loose and cries out in frustration for emancipation. It is a rather ambiguous image, but as the title indicates, the figure is China. Summing up our discussion nicely, it suggests that his frustrations are the nation's, that his enslavement is a reason for the nation to cry out and take action.
But, more significantly, the figure is male. The term qingnian referred to both men and women, but as the next chapter will discuss, the symbol of youth - especially in its identification with the nation - tended to be male, and woman as a national symbol was constructed much differently.
20 Ibid., 127-8. From an anthropological perspective, it is also interesting to think about this relationship in terms of their shared liminality. That is to say, both are in consciously transitional periods: China between traditional past and a projected future. This "betwitxt and between" stage, as Victor Turner calls it, is a particularly fertile period, one which gives rise to criticism of established norms and even revolution are likely. See Victor Turner, From Ritual to Theater: The Human Seriousness ofPlay (New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1982), 26-28; 47.
14 CHAPTER 3
THE "WOMAN QUESTION"
The nationalistic plea for family reform proved to be both advantageous and disadvantageous to women's liberation. On the one hand, because patriarchy took the blame for China's backwardness, women's issues easily found their way onto the political platform, and they were indeed social and political issues of utmost importance.
One could even say that, to a certain extent, a feminist agenda was built into the late imperial reforms of the family and social systems and the New Culture and May Fourth movements. Indeed many schools became coed; more career opportunities were made available for women, and they were encouraged to replace domestic pursuits with more socially and politically involved activities. But what came to be known as thefunu wenti
(the "woman question"), which referred to the dialogue, debates and efforts concerning women's emancipation and new role in modern China, was typically voiced by men.
Gender issues were inseparable from larger, national concerns, and gender equality and women's emancipation concerned men as much as they did women. 21
Moreover, women's oppression was often appropriated by men to express their own frustrations. Women and youth shared a certain kinship in their oppression, and since women were the quintessential oppressed, their extreme examples could speak
21 Fan Hong, Footbinding, Feminism and Freedom: The Liberation of Women's Bodies in Modern China (London: Frank Cass, 1997), 119-128; Gilmartin, xiv-xvi.
15 more vividly for these frustrations. But the traditional status and image of the Chinese woman, as with the Confucian system that oppressed her, also represented everything that was ailing China and prohibiting her from keeping up with the rest of the world. She was thus simultaneously an object of empathy and a means oflegitimating attack on the tradition.22
This line of thinking also has its roots in the late imperial period, the issue of foot binding being a case in point. In the words of nineteenth century reformer Kang Y ouwei, who advocated the abolition of foot binding:
The bound feet of women will transmit weakness to the children, weakening the bodies of healthy generations ... when the weakness becomes inherited, where shall we recruit soldiers? Today look at Europeans and Americans, so strong and vigorous because their mothers do not bind feet and therefore have strong offspring. Now that we must compete with other nations, to produce weak offspring is perilous.23
The cruel practice of foot binding, as Kang Y ouwei sees it, is a manifestation of the backwardness of the old society; his is a criticism of the traditional system that prevents
China from competing with the West. While foot binding would seem to be an issue concerned, above all, with women, this reform is not directed at improving women's condition for the woman's sake, but for the strength of the nation; her offspring- assumed to be male - are the ones who truly benefit. Interestingly, as later feminists contend, foot binding was a device for keeping women inside and immobile, and thus virtuous and domestic. But it is clear from Kang Y ouwei 's criticism that abolishing foot binding was motivated not by a desire to change women's domestic status, or even to
22 Gilmartin, xvi-xvii
23 Quoted in Hong, 63.
16 emancipate them, but rather to make them better at it, to ensure that they will be better mothers. 24
This issue, albeit an extreme one, demonstrates generally how women factor into the son-nation identity crisis in the later imperial period, and we can also see that our icons have already been formed: women as mothers and nurturers of the next generation and their sons, the children that are raised to be future soldiers and the ones to actively participate in nation-saving. To a significant degree, these earlier reform efforts, and the establishment of these "icons," provided a framework for women's movements in the early twentieth century.
Youth, as I have discussed, could identify with the nation, and their desires could be legitimized. But for women, the question of what was best for the nation (read "sons") often determined her place and status. What was expected of her and what was supposed to concern her (i.e. political issues or domestic work) shifted with current national ideologies. The earlier May Fourth era, motivated by the ideal of equality, certainly emancipated some women from domestic duties. But while gender equality was always an ideal, what "equal" really meant was debatable, and reconciling clear biological differences with this ideal of social equality proved extremely difficult. When evolution came to replace Confucianism, and thus biology became the new interpreter, it could always be (and often was) pointed out that women are the ones who have children; they are made to be mothers and are thus inherently domestic. Since someone has to take care of these children that are to be China's future, this could be interpreted as women's
24 Ibid., 63-65.
17 national contribution. Viewed in this perspective, women's duties to the nation are
"equal" to the men who contribute in more socially and politically active ways. 25
In the 1930s, which brings us chronologically closer to the period that concerns
us, under both the Nationalists and Communists, the domestic woman was the ideal.
Whether it was the Nationalists' relatively conservative agenda to strengthen cultural
roots, or the Communists' future-oriented goal of radical change, strong mothers were
essential. Under the Nationalists, especially during the New Life Movement (1934-
193 7), Confucianism resurfaced as a means of promoting morality and sustaining an
ordered and stable society, which meant that women were again expected to be virtuous
wives and good mothers. This traditional gender-based division of work also
characterized life under the Communists. While women were encouraged to be more
active in the community, their emancipation was not top priority for the party; in fact
Western-derived feminism was even criticized as "bourgeois" and irrelevant to their more
practical agenda. 26
Thus the woman's role was defined by men and by ideology. Constant dialogue
and debate about this dilemma centered on such questions as: What will sustain society
and promote progress? What new image should replace the thin, pale, submissive, foot bound woman of "traditional" China? The questions are actually inseparable.
Throughout this period and its ideological shifts, much attention was devoted to the
fitness and hygiene of women, for the strength and health of their bodies contributed to the strength of the nation. Thus the physical body of woman was taken into serious
25 Dikotter, 25; Hong, 101.
26 Hong, 194-7; 226-36.
18 consideration.27 This relationship between woman's image and her social worth is especially significant to note when considering the representation of women in art, and
Lu Xun himself participated in this dialogue. Though not explicitly about women, a lecture on aesthetics given to the woodcut artists was based on a comparison between the peasant women in Millet's The Gleaners and a fashionably dressed girl in a pin-up calendar. While many aspects were discussed - color, line, subject matter - Lu Xun also pointed out that the peasant women were stronger and healthier, thus more "beautiful," compared to the frail and delicate Chinese women.28 The artists must have heeded this advice; for the most part, their women are rather substantial with a strong presence, not at all frail or submissive. And it is perhaps even more significant that, while they are physical beings, they are not represented as sexualized objects.
They are domestic beings, however, and the representations of mothers are strictly that- maternal: pregnant or breast-feeding, as in Pan Chengye's Pregnant Woman (fig.
4) and Pan Zhao's Mother and Son (fig. 5), or in Ye Fu's She and the Child (fig. 6), clothing their children. To illustrate that this is not something with which only the woodcut artists were preoccupied, the representation of women in the contemporaneous pictorial Liangyou huabao (Young Companion) can serve as an informative counterpart.
The Young Companion circulated between 1926-1945 and was aimed at youth; it contained brief articles on technology and current political affairs, photographic spreads of art exhibitions and sports, and because of its pictorial nature, was in part responsible for visualizing Chinese (and in particular, urban) modemity.29 As such, the
27 Ibid., 78-80.
28 Xu Xingzhi, "Zuoyi meishu jia lianmeng chengli qianhou," in Li Hua et al, ed., 26-27.
19 representations of women should be particularly telling. She does make a frequent appearance among these pages, and in many guises: gracing the cover and interspersed throughout are fashionably dressed young women, and one also finds actresses, nude models and athletes. But more frequently, and especially in advertising are women placed in the domestic setting, such as this article on "Preliminary Lessons for the House keeping Bride" (fig. 7). Advertisements almost exclusively focus on and are directed at mothers: medicine (fig. 8) and tonic food (fig. 9) for children, which their mothers cheerfully and tenderly provide; baby formula (fig. 10) with a very nationalistic message that could apply just as well to the other advertisements: "To strengthen the nation, one must first strengthen the people; to strengthen the people, one must first strengthen the children."30 The Young Companion also includes separate sections that are specifically for women and children, often simply titled something like, "Women's Pages" and include fashion and household tips, or games for children. Despite photos of women in various spheres and activities, the underlying structure seems to reinforce the gender dichotomy and suggests that the remaining contents of the pictorial - worldly affairs and the arts - need not concern women, as if the public world and its various activities were inherently male.
But is this necessarily conservative? Does it deserve criticism from the feminist point of view? Leo Ou-fan Lee argues that the domestic images as displayed here are neither conservative nor contrary to the May Fourth agenda. Rather, the woman's domestic space has become publicized and thus not completely separate from or
29 Lee (1999), 80-81.
30 Ibid, 69-75.
20 irrelevant to modernism, national concerns or international affairs. Mothers and children are given a space, and a significant one, in modernity.31 And I think this gets at the heart of the problem of gender equality. Domesticity cannot be obliterated altogether in a functioning society. Women should not have to deny a domestic role to become a productive citizen; nor should those who choose to remain domestic and find that role fulfilling be criticized by radical reformers; nor should they have to deny femininity and become androgynous in order to be emancipated. The question is, perhaps, not so much one of women's domesticity, but rather how the public and private spheres are connected.
As Zhang Weici aptly puts its, "the way to emancipate women is necessarily to make the family part of society."32
I think the same could be said for these woodcuts. It is rather progressive that these mothers are included at all, considering that she scarcely makes an appearance in the history of Chinese art before this period. She receives recognition - publicly - for the role that she plays. However, that the other women - the athletes, actresses, fashion models - who make such prominent appearances in the Young Companion are not subjects of interests to these artists, reminds us that these are not objective reflections of women as they, but are ideologically constructed. Like the "woman question," which makes public the discourse concerning women's role and possibilities in society, yet limits what she can do and be, the woodcut artists similarly define the parameters of women's inclusion and exclusion.
31 Ibid.
32 Zhang Weici, "Emancipating Women by Reorganizing the Family," in Hua Lan and Vanessa Fong, eds., 26. Originally published in Weekly Review, no. 34, August 10, 1919.
21 CHAPTER 4
MOTHERS AND SONS
A mother, however significant her role may be, is never represented alone, and hers is a role necessarily defined by another - in this case always either specifically a son or androgynous child, never a daughter. I have already discussed why mothers and sons are significant socially and politically in this period of transformation, but the consistent, repeated and almost iconic representation of mother and son, a pair which is perhaps the most widespread and symbolically rich image in the history of art, lends it an allegorical significance and suggests other layers of meaning. This chapter will analyze this type of image, from both the son's and the mother's perspective.
A Freudian interpretation for these images immediately comes to mind, and it is not altogether improbable if we consider that May Fourth writers were interested in
Western psychoanalytic theories, and the Oedipus complex makes a frequent appearance in literature.33 While I do not wish to dwell on the full psychoanalytic implication of this reading, I do believe that it is a valid interpretation to a certain extent. Most applicable to my purpose here, using the Oedipus complex as an interpretive structure takes to a deeper level the key issues of male identity and modernity.
33 Sally Taylor Lieberman, The Mother and Narrative Politics in Modern China. (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998), 51-75.
22 As Sally Taylor Lieberman has interpreted it, the May Fourth movement itself is vaguely Oedipal: young men rebel against their fathers (Confucian tradition, the past) and
become obsessed with the mother (the natural and biological, that which is generative and
capable of producing).34 At its broadest level of application, what May Fourth intellectuals may have found appealing in the Oedipus complex is that it can give meaning to China's radical break with the past. As I have discussed, much nation-related reform was played out within the realm of the family, and the relationship between tradition and modernity was interpreted in familial terms. 35 Both are issues fundamentally concerned with the relationship between father and son. Like filial piety, the Oedipus complex is a way of encoding and interpreting relationships between older and younger generations. In light of the antagonism towards and criticism of the old system, Oedipus may have been an appropriate substitute for a conceptual familial model: it does not hold continuity and preservation of tradition as the ideal, but rather suggests that rebellion and change are inevitable, and it thus fits more closely with the
Darwinian paradigm.
More relevant to my gender study of the woodcut movement, at the individual level, the Oedipus complex is specifically concerned with male development and identity.
Even though women (as the mothers of these men) play a pivotal role, it is a significant one only in that it shapes male experience. Similarly in the May Fourth context, mothers
- both naturally and ideologically constructed - are central to the development of China's
34 Ibid., 51-54.
35 Ibid.
23 sons, but they play no independent role within the national drama, and their individual development is inconsequential. 36
To what extent and how deeply Freud is informing these images is difficult to say.
I only wish to point out that this reading is possible, and it becomes all the more interesting to consider this when looking at the woodcut movement and its particularities.
With its youthful artists and Lu Xun as older mentor, the movement replicates something of a familial structure, and it would not be surprising to find traces of the patterns here.
Appropriately, Lu Xun's relationship to these artists is typically described by both artists and scholars in paternal terms, and he is given such appellations as "Father of the
Woodcut Movement." 37 But in one rather revealing example, the relationship has also been expressed in an explicitly maternal way. In an essay in response to Lu Xun's death in 1936, the artist Cao Bai writes:
Lu Xun is the one who gave us the most milk and blood .. .In the end, you can't call back our Lu Xun. It is as if all of China's youths had suddenly lost their mother - lost our mother ... Our mother nurtured us with milk and blood for seven years ... 38
In light of what has been discussed thus far, it should not be too surprising to find Lu Xun conflated with the mother. Because of the new dichotomy now established- mother=nature=modernity and father=culture=tradition - if these youth are to express their admiration for an elder, it would be as a mother, for his maternal-like love: Lu Xun did not represent a traditional figure against which to rebel, but rather one who guided
36 Madelon Sprengnether, The Spectral Mother: Freud, Feminism, and Psychoanalysis (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 2-3.
37 Lee (1987), 186-189; Sun (1979), 11.
38 Cao Bai, "Lu Xun xiansheng he zhongguo xinxing de muke," in Li Hua et al, eds., 161-170.
24 and helped them grow. In sum, his paternal aspects are denied while the maternal are embraced.
That it is the biological role of the mother that Lu Xun has presumably fulfilled does seem a bit surprising, however. But since the mother is analogous to nature, Lu
Xun, in order to be maternal, must provide the equivalent, symbolically of course, of this biological need that the youth have. Cao Bai emphasizes the two substances, milk and blood, that represent what is particularly admirable and idealized in mothers: nourishment and sacrifice for the offspring. But what are Lu Xun's milk and blood? They could vaguely and generally refer to his compassionate and selfless guidance and support. Or we could mine the symbolic richness of these substances and seek to understand more fully the layers of Lu Xun' s relationship with these youth. The milk, or nourishment, may be the art and literature he introduced, published and translated to replace the
"coarse grain" (to use Lu Xun's words) that China's children had been fed. In that case art and literature, as food, are fulfilling and necessary for growth. As for the blood, Lu
Xun also thought of himself as a martyr figure, since he devoted so much of himself to helping the youth. The theme of sacrifice appears frequently in his short stories, and he often sympathized with such figures as Christ and Prometheus.39
These two roles of nurturer and martyr may have carried other connotations during this time. This was a psychologically complex period for Lu Xun. In general, it was darker and much less idealistic and optimistic than his earlier May Fourth years; he
39 Lee (1987), 188-9. Lu Xun's interest in the Christ figure would be worth closer investigation, especially considering his fascination with the bereaved mother. Is the son China's salvation? If so, what does his death mean? Franz Massereel's woodcut series, Die Passions eines Mensch, a favorite of Lu Xun's, conflates the execution of a worker-revolutionary with the crucifixion of Christ. And, especially worth noting for the purpose of this paper, the series begins with the worker's pregnant mother.
25 had given himself completely to saving the children, but ultimately had neither received sufficient gratitude nor seen his efforts come to fruition as he had hoped. But at the same time, the launching of the woodcut movement coincided with his entry into fatherhood.
This parental role was apparently a very fulfilling one for him, and one in which he was very much involved. His fatherly love extended out to many others, and this personal experience may have inspired a resurgence of parental devotion. 40
Motherhood, like women's oppression, was then also something that could be appropriated by men. This is most clear in Lu Xun's essay, "What is Required of Us as
Fathers Today," in which he describes the ideal for his new father in very maternal terms.
In fact, he does not even comment on what the mother's new role should be. Apparently, it is assumed that mothers naturally do what is now expected of fathers. She must simply continue to behave like a mother, while fathers should strive to become loving, nurturing and self-sacrificing like a mother. 41 For example, Lu Xun writes, in arguing that it is natural to care, selflessly, for the young, "it will never occur to a village woman ... when she is nursing her baby, that she is conferring a favor."42 An interesting visual analogue to this is Li Hua's Father and Son (fig. 11), a very rare representation of a father holding up and interacting lovingly with his son. Motherhood, then, is essentially an ideal, an abstraction that can just as easily describe a father.
Lu Xun's interest in the mother figure as a universal, nurturing life force extended to the visual arts. Among his vast and eclectic artistic interests, he was especially
40 Ibid.
41 Lieberman, 33.
42Lu Xun, 62.
26 enthusiastic about German lithographer and engraver Kathe Kollwitz (1867-1945), who took as the primary subject of her work the mother figure. Lu Xun considered her "the only woman artist whose works are worth our sincerest understanding.'''13 Her mothers are strong, nurturing and protective, capable of wrestling death and uniting to fight against oppressive forces, and they are also bereaved mothers who mourn their deceased children. Lu Xun also saw in Kollwitz herself a strong mother figure, and one with national significance:
With the profound love of the all-merciful mother, she vented the sorrows, protests, anger and struggles for all those who have been insulted and injured. Her subjects are mainly suffering, hunger, wandering, sickness and death. But there are also cries, battle, unity and excitement.44
Lu Xun undoubtedly felt a kinship of sorts between Kollwitz and himself: they lived amidst similar social circumstances, shared social sympathies, and both placed faith and hope in the younger generation, devoting their life and work to save the children.
But regarding this last similarity, Kollwitz did so literally and Lu Xun metaphorically - and therein lies a key difference. Lu Xun was saving his children from the oppression of
China's feudal, cannibalistic past, emancipating them from the cycle, while Kollwitz fought to preserve life from destruction of any kind.
The artists and scholars point to the similarities and the direct stylistic and ideological influence of Kollwitz' art.45 But I think this apparent literal/metaphorical difference deserves some more attention. The first Kollwitz print to be reproduced in
43 Sun (1974), 126.
44 Ibid., 133-4
45 Wang Guanquan, ed. Lu Xun yu meishu (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin meishu chubanshe), 144-155 summarizes Lu Xun's introduction of Kathe Kollwitz' art to the woodcut artists, similarities between their social circumstances, etc.; Sun (1974), 128-134; Sun (1979), 18-21.
27 China is particularly telling: Sacrifice, 46 the first in her War series (fig. 12), depicts a sorrowful mother reluctantly giving up her child, holding it up against an obscure blackness.47 Lu Xun had chosen this image as a memorial for Rou Shi, a young writer and friend, who was also a revolutionary martyr. Of this, Lu Xun writes:
In 1931 - I forget which month - in the first volume of the recently banned journal, Beidou, there is a woodcut; it is a mother, with grief-stricken eyes closed, and she holds out her child. This is the first in Kathe Kollwitz' War series. The title is Sacrifice, and it is the first of her prints to be introduced to China. This woodcut is one that I am selecting as a memorial for Rou Shi, my student and friend. He introduced foreign art and literature and was especially fond of woodcuts ... Recently at Longhua he and five other young writers were executed. At the time it was not recorded at all in the newspapers. They probably did not dare, perhaps also were unable, to record it. However, a lot of people understand that he is no longer with us, because this is a frequent matter. Now, there is only his blind mother. I know that she thinks her beloved is still in Shanghai translating and proofreading.48
It is clear that the son is symbolic of China's youth and that the mother is a sympathetic figure for Lu Xun. In his own stories the bereaved mother, who becomes something of a stock character, becomes a means of playing this out: the mother is often the tragic victim of a cruel society, and the loss of a son warns that China's future may be in peril.49 The New Year's Sacrifice (1924) is a classic example of the former. The protagonist, who is known only as "wife of Xianglin,'' is twice married and twice widowed, and then to add to her grief loses her only son to a hungry wolf. Her grief is
46 The original German title, Das Opfer, can mean victim, offering or sacrifice; the Chinese translate it as xisheng (sacrifice).
47 Martha Keams, Kathe Kollwitz: Woman and Artist (Old Westbury, New York: The Feminist Press, 1976), 169. Keams interprets this dark shape as a womb. The heads of the mother and child are moving out from this space, which suggests that "they are in an unnatural position outside it." Hence, this sacrifice is disrupting their natural bond.
48 Yang Caiyu, ed. Lu Xun cang hua xinshang (Xibei daxue chubanshe, 1999), 52-53.
49 Lieberman, 26.
28 mocked by the people in her village; she is tormented with stories they tell of the suffering she will endure in her afterlife because of her remarriage (then considered shameful); and because of her misfortunes and inauspicious circumstances she is forced to live as a beggar and ultimately dies alone. Tragic to the extreme, she suffers from the forces of patriarchy and the Confucian family system, and Lu Xun uses her to expose these cruelties of society.50
A much more allegorical representation of the bereaved mother is constructed in
Medicine (1919). The Hua family son is dying of tuberculosis, and as a cure, his parents buy a steamed bun soaked in the blood - as it turns out - of a recently executed revolutionary. It fails to cure him, and he dies. At the cemetery the mothers of both the revolutionary martyr and the ailing son simultaneously come to visit the graves and mourn their sons' deaths. The sons are, of course, symbolic of China: the ailing China and the revolutionary who dies (in vain, however) to cure the sickness. Even the surnames of the two families, Hua and Xia, are symbolic: as a compound, they form the ancient name for China. Despite the failed effort of the revolutionary, the coming together of the two mothers at the end perhaps offers hope for China to save herself. 51
The image of the bereaved mother is also a prominent one among the woodcut artists, undoubtedly influenced by Kollwitz' Sacrifice and encouraged by Lu Xun's own interest in the image. But what did this image mean to the artists? While Lu Xun had a
50 Ibid., 196-202, provides a very complete analysis and innovative interpretation of this story. Critics have lauded Lu Xun's use of irony and the male narrator to contain a potentially melodramatic display of feminine emotionalism within a masculine, rational structure. Lieberman argues that, contrarily, the power of the story lies within the disruptive and unsettling effect this feminine suffering has on an otherwise realist text. Perhaps some parallel could be drawn with the woodcuts, given the similar structure: suffering mothers within an essentially masculine and realist framework.
51 Lee (1987), 66-68.
29 considerable influence on their art, he was not the one who created these images. Did the artists see the bereaved mother from the son's point of view, just as Lu Xun adopted the mother's perspective? If so, are these self-referential, or more abstractly about China's future? The images themselves do not provide simple answers. Hu Qizao's Loss of a
Child (fig. 13) presents us only with the mother's grief, leaving the rest of the story to our imaginations; Lai Shaoqi's simply and crudely rendered Child has Died (fig. 14) is similarly ambiguous. Huang Peili's Famine (fig. 15) and Duan Ganqing's Thread of
Death (fig. 16) at least point to some specific causes - war, natural disaster and execution.
Despite some minor differences, all have adopted the same type of representation for this subject: the woman holding the limp child's body in her arms, taken out of the context in which the death actually occurred. Again, I think this formula lends the images a symbolic significance, which abstracts and removes them somewhat from any specific event or personal experience. But because the artists are able to read into this mother-son pair and reinterpret it, the image becomes personal - personal in the sense that their collective identity, as male youth, finds meaning in it. This role contributes to the construction of their self-image. Thus I think it is safe to assume that the dying or dead sons are self-referential, in much the same way that Li Hua' s China Roar! is.
One could be critical of Lu Xun' s and the woodcut artists' interest in Kollwitz' work. First of all, it seems to be a selective one. Kollwitz also represented women as revolutionaries. The female figure in Outbreak (fig. 17), who is inciting this uprising, is based on Black Anna, a sixteenth century woman who organized a peasant rebellion in
30 southern Germany.52 In the March ofthe Weavers (fig. 18), a mother carrying her child marches right along with a group of men raising their fists. 53 In contrast, one will only find men as the leaders and initiators of rebellion among the Chinese woodcuts, evident in such images as Tang Yingwei's Forward! (fig. 19) and Li Hua's Street Battle(fig. 20).
For Kollwitz, the struggle between feminism and motherhood was a personal one for her, and one which she spent her life working out in her art. 54
Secondly, their adaptation of the bereaved mother could also be subject to criticism. A maternal subjectivity emerges from her work; she really was a mother and had also lost a son and a grandson in two world wars, personally experiencing the bereavement Lu Xun and the woodcut artists appropriate. Lu Xun was probably fully aware of her biography, for he made serious efforts to study her life and work. This conflation of private, personal suffering and larger national issues and events may have made her work all the more appealing. Her personal pain - a mother's loss of a child, one of humanity's greatest tragedies - becomes universalized and allegorical, a typed figure. Maternal subjectivity becomes co-opted, and in the end, it is about the son, the male future, and not the mother.
But one cannot entirely dismiss Lu Xun's own personal grief. He can identify with the mother on this level, too: he had nurtured and raised these writers and artists, with hope in their potential, and he had seen many of them die during these chaotic years:
It's not the young who are writing obituaries for the old, but during the last thirty
52 Kearns, 84-85.
53 Sun (1974), 80. The Weavers' Revolt series was on exhibition at Uchiyama's bookstore, so Lu Xun and some of the artists would have been aware of this image from the beginning.
54Kearns, 85-87.
31 years, with my own eyes, I have seen the blood of so many young people mounting up that now I am submerged and cannot breathe.55
Should this interest in the bereaved mother, then, be criticized? The reinterpretation and redefinition of fatherhood makes space for the mother, but ultimately her subjectivity is left out, and her grief becomes merely symbolic.
55 Sun (1974), 128.
32 CONCLUSION
The intention of this study has not been to either criticize or celebrate these images or the movement itself, but rather to understand them from another perspective.
The issue of identity, especially as it is constructed by gender and national ideology, is indeed a complicated one, and one worth investigating. It would be easy to criticize the subordination and appropriation of women and the conservatism of supposedly progressive reforms. But that would deny both the real progress that has been made for women and the complexities of gender identity for both men and women. The point remains that these images were created by young men. It proves more fruitful to investigate what was really involved in the construction of their self-image (familial, socially, nationally, artistically), the expectations, possibilities and limitations of such an identity, and its ultimate expression.
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36 GLOSSARY
Cao Bai tf 8 Duan Ganqing ~#'ff Gu Wenfang il::>zJJjj Hu Qizao mJt~ Hu Yichuan m-Jll Huang Peili ~:f:{f;fLl Lai Shaoqi ~d>M Li Hua**-' Liangyou huabao ~l:ZIE~ Muke jie *~ijJf- Pan Chengye ti~~ Pan Zhao ti BB qingnian w~ Tang Yingwei m~fl Tiema banhua ~'~~ Xiandai banhua ffl 1-t~ 1f xin~ Ye Fu ff:7(
37 APPENDIX
FIGURES
Figure 1. Hu Yichuan, To the Front! (1932)
38 Figure 2. Gu Wenfang, Motherly Love (1936)
39 Figure 3. Li Hua, China Roar! (1936)
40 Figure 4. Pan Chengye, Pregnant Woman (1934)
41 Figure 5. Pan Zhao, Mother and Son (1935)
42 Figure 6. Ye Fu, She and the Child (1936)
43 £ the House-keepmg. B ride" ("Xiao jiating xue ") Figure. 7 · "PreliminaryLiangyou Lessons huabao, or no. 101 (January 1935)
44 Figure 8. advertisement for medicine Liangyou huabao, no. 105 (May 1935)
45 Figure 9. advertisement for Santogen Liangyou huabao, no. 102 (February 1935)
46 Figure 10. advertisement for Momilk Liangyou huabao, no. 12 (January 1927)
47 Figure 11. Li Hua, Father and Son (1934)
48 Figure 12. Kathe Kollwitz, Sacrifice from War series (1922-23)
49 Figure 13. Hu Qizao, Loss ofa Child (1935)
50 Figure 14. Lai Shaoqi, Child has Died (1935)
51 Figure 15. Huang Peili, Famine (1935)
52 ! l l .1 i
Figure 16. Duan Ganqing, Thread ofDeath (1936)
53 Figure 17. Kathe Kollwitz, Outbreak (1903)
54 Figure 18. Kathe Kollwitz, March ofthe Weavers from Weaver's Revolt series (1897)
55 Figure 19. Tang Yingwei, Forward! (1936)
56 Figure 20 · Li. Hua, Street Uprising. . (1936)
57