Women and Feminism in the Literary History of Early-Twentieth-Century China 1
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Notes Introduction: Women and Feminism in the Literary History of Early-Twentieth-Century China 1. These various renderings of “feminism” can be found in texts from the period covered in this study. While often used interchangeably, they carry slightly dif- ferent connotations. 2. In addition to calling for a radical transformation of Confucian social mores and values prejudicial to women, early feminists also demanded concrete recognition of women’s social and political rights. Prominent among these were the eradication of foot binding, equal rights in inheritance, access to edu- cation and the professions, marital freedoms, including the right to choose one’s own partner and to divorce, the right to vote and be elected to public office, and the abolition of the practice of child-brides, concubinage, and prostitution. 3. 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). 4. 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). 5. Lu Tonglin, Gender and Sexuality in Twentieth-Century Chinese Literature and Society (Albany: SUNY Press, 1993), introduction; Meng Yue, “Female 202 N otes Images and National Myth,” in Tani Barlow, ed., Gender Politics in Modern China: Writing and Feminism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993). 6. 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); Liu Kang, “The Language of Desire, Class, and Subjectivity in Lu Ling’s Fiction,” in Lu (1993); Zhang Yingjin, ed., “Prostitution and Urban Imagination,” Cinema and Urban Culture in Shanghai, 1922–1943 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999). 7. Feminist scholarship is also transforming the study of literature and culture prior to the twentieth century, as scholars challenge the stereotypes of “tradi- tional 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). 8. Documents of the Women’s Movement of China (All China Democratic Women’s Federation, 1952), 41–42. Quoted in Irene Eber, “Images of Women in Recent Chinese Fiction,” Signs 2, no. 1 (1976): 27. 9. 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). 10. 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. 11. 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’ Auto- biography” (Ph.D. diss., Ohio State University, 2000). N otes 203 12. 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. 13. Lu, Gender and Sexuality in Twentieth-Century Chinese Literature and Society (1993), 18. Lu elaborates on this position in her book Misogyny, Cultural Nihilism, and Oppositional Politics: Contemporary Chinese Fiction (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995). For instance, she argues that “in traditional China, a woman could speak only through the voice of her husband, who assigned her the honorable social function as mother of his male descendants. Ironically, in socialist China, the emancipated second sex also remains largely silenced. This time, women must speak though the voice of the new patriar- chal order, the Communist Party” (5). The danger of making such a general claim, in my view, is that it obscures the complexities of feminist discourse in twentieth-century China and erases the efforts by women (and men) to redress the gender injustices of their culture. 14. For instance, in two important critical anthologies on gender issues in modern Chinese culture, Gender and Sexuality in Twentieth-Century Chinese Literature and Society (1993) and Gender Politics in Modern China (1993), only one essay (Rey Chow’s “Virtuous Transactions”) deals specifically with a woman writer active before the contemporary period. Michael Duke begins his edited volume Modern Chinese Women Writers (1989) by remarking that few early-twentieth-century women writers “have been considered the equal of male writers,” and accordingly includes just two essays (on Ding Ling and Zhang Ailing) on pre-contemporary writers. 15. 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). 16. My analysis here takes its cue from the insights of historian Judith Newton, who has shown how feminist critiques of patriarchal history have inadver- tently given rise to a “tragic essentialism in regard to male domination.” See her essay “Making—and Remaking—History: Another Look at Patriarchy,” in Shari Benstock, ed., Feminist Issues in Literary Scholarship