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Chen Hengzhe's Fiction of Aurality : the New Feminine Strategy

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Chen Hengzhe's Fiction of Aurality : the New Feminine Strategy Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 現代中文文學學報 Volume 4 Issue 2 Vol. 4.2 四卷二期 (2001) Article 3 1-1-2001 Chen Hengzhe's Fiction of aurality : the new feminine strategy Janet NG City University of New York Follow this and additional works at: https://commons.ln.edu.hk/jmlc Recommended Citation Ng, J. (2001). Chen Hengzhe's Fiction of aurality: The new feminine strategy. Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese, 4(2), 63-86. This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Centre for Humanities Research 人文學科研究中心 at Digital Commons @ Lingnan University. It has been accepted for inclusion in Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 現代中文文學學報 by an authorized editor of Digital Commons @ Lingnan University. Chen Hengzhe's Fiction of Aurality: The New Feminine Strategy Janet Ng Published in 1918 in New Youth (Xing qingnian), Lu Xun^ 新青年魯迅 ''Diary of a Madman" (Kuangren riji) has been often regarded as 狂人日記 the first modern Chinese vernacular short story, heralding the May Fourth literary revolution. However, a year prior to its publication, another short story by the woman writer Chen 陳衡哲 Hengzhe (1890-1976)—"One Day" (Yiri)_ appeared in Students 一日 Abroad in America Quarterly (Liumei xuesheng jikan), a journal 留美學生季刊 edited by Hu Shi and published in the United States. Although 胡適 this is a generally known fact, Chen's connection to the beginning of modern Chinese literature seems to have impressed few literary historians. At most, her story is considered a minor experiment that preceded, but had little to do with, the great reforms that swept through the Chinese literary scene in the 1910s. Often she is relegated, perhaps derogatorily, to the category of l,woman writers."1 Her achievement is quickly dismissed as immature experimentation, or as an anomaly in the general development of literature of the period. I reassess Chen’s work in this essay, not because there is any intrinsic value in her being "first," but because I believe that "One Day" marks an important moment in modern Chinese literature. It represents the beginning of an alternative to the early twentieth-century realist perspective that had dominated thinking about fiction-writing since the late Qing. Chen's story is in the form of a first-person narrative, which became a major characteristic of early May Fourth literature; it was also an 1 1 Qiao Yigang argues against identifying Chen's works as 喬以岡J “feminine writing，” a generally vitiated category, because they are often seen as being limited to domestic and personal topics. However, in doing so, she actually confirms existing prejudice (Qiao 1993: 196- 201). Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 4.2 (January 2001): 63-86 ©2001 Lingnan University 64 Janet Ng especially significant form for women writers at the time. "One Day” is nothing less than a proto-text of both May Fourth fiction and women’s writing. Early May Fourth women writers were often considered as being unable to write "realistically" by critics of their own times. Even today, such attitudes influence our reading.2 In truth, it is not that women do not write realistically; they apprehend reality differently and thus record it differently. Having suggested that, I must stress that I am not arguing that women are essentially different, but that realism defined during the May Fourth period was both a perspective and a form of writing inaccessible to women for social reasons, thus they had to devise a different way of perceiving things and writing about them. In fact, the vernacular language reform that began in 1917 opened up a venue of expression that was capitalized upon by women writers. The reform not only changed writing on the level of language use, but also destabilized a certain traditional notion of representation. This new method of representation is demonstrated in “One Day,” which contributes to the development of a modern form and displays a particularly feminine strategy used to overcome the obstacles to women’s writing. An enormous amount of effort has been made to study the fledging interest in the first-person narrative at the time. Often, the importations of Freud's writings, the l-Novels from Japan and literary Romanticism and Expressionism from Europe, especially 茅盾廬隱論 2 Mao Dun (1896-1981)， for example, in the essay “Lu Yin lun” [On Lu Yin] (1934), criticizes Lu Yin's writings as being arrested on the level of the personal. Even today, many critics still have reservations about the achievements of women writers. Qiao Yigang, mentioned above, is an example. Rey Chow has argued valiantly against such a kind of discrimination. She points out that “virtuous transaction” is a form of negotiation between women and their society and this negotiation often colors their work. However, in her argument, women are still seen as passively receiving the influence of the dominant society or, at the most, using their ingenuity to clandestinely deflect some of the weight of the oppression (Chow 1993: 90-105). My discussion here asserts that the identifying characteristic of women's writing is the use of a strategy that is fully feminine. Chen Hengzhe^ Fiction of Aurality 65 via the translations of the Creation Society writers, are used to account for the rise of this new “subjective writing,3 My discussion is not to challenge these “influence studies” or to deny the enormous presence of Western and traditional literary cultures in the development of modern Chinese literature.4 Similarly, I avoid referring to individual psycho-biography, personality, or talent as explanations of a writer's creative affinities; such arguments seem strangely persistent in the study of women’s writing. My emphasis here is to look at how social and intellectual situations facilitate the receptivity of a particular form of writing. “One Day,” written while Chen was a Boxer Indemnity scholarship student at Vassar College, is about a day in the life of a few first year women students at, one assumes, an American university. It is made up of transcriptions of dialogues among these students. There is no coherent narrative structure: events unfold “inadvertently” through the students’ seemingly random and spontaneous conversations. As Chen puts it in her preface: This story describes several trivial incidents in a day in the life of new students in a dormitory at a women’s university in the United States. As it has no real structure or purpose, it should be taken merely as a straightforward sketch and not as a story. The description, however, is faithful to reality and is sincere, and since it is my portrait drawn from life, I feel I should preserve it. (Dooling and Torgeson 1998: 92)5 3 There has been a plethora of “influence-studies” with regard to modern Chinese literature, beginning with Bonnie McDougall (see Zhang 1992; Lee 1990). Leo Lee stresses the influence of European thinkers such as Bergson and Darwin on the development of modern Chinese thought although, in contrast to Zhang, he argues against the actual influence of Freud. In Mainland Chinese scholarship, such “influence-studies” are even more impressive (see Yan 1991; Tang 1992). 4 Marston Anderson has explored the traditional literary consciousness, acknowledged or not, of modern writers (Anderson 1985: 76-92). 5 The translations of “One Day” used in this essay are based on 66 Janet Ng Based on her autobiographical experience, Chen takes us through the events of a single day in college. Chen begins with the morning bells that awaken the students, “Dong! Dong! Dong! Seven o'clock" (91). She then chronologically relates the experiences of a typical student in the course of a particular day, from struggling to get out of bed in the morning, to rushing to classes, to being embarrassed in class from lack of preparation, and to pulling an all-nighter to finish homework. Through the conversations among the characters, Chen also reveals to us the nature of the students5 friendship, their interests and activities, and the gossip that lend spice to their otherwise quotidian lives. A striking feature of Chen's story is its entirely speech- motivated character. There is neither description of characters nor scenic settings. Its only non-dialogic element is the periodic announcement of time. The switching of scenes in the story is not affected through any natural transition or based on plot necessity. It is marked by the striking of clocks, signaling the end to particular temporal periods. The narration begins with the sounding of morning bells at seven, and ends with that of bedtime bells at ten in the evening when they retire. The advancement of the plot is dependent on the presence of the characters, literally on the page, who talk to each other. When the characters retire, the story naturally comes to an end. The periodic announcements of time occur outside the activities of the story and function to provide an external skeleton to the otherwise desultory writing. The artificial chronology and temporal markers imposed from without thus frame the dialogues among the students and propel the writing forward. As a result， although there is very little in terms of plot in “One Day,” there is nevertheless a clear notion of beginning and closure. In this context, the announcements of time are there more for the benefit of the readers than a plot necessity. On first reading，Chen’s story has little resemblance to a story in the conventional mode. It is formatted like a play, though it lacks an obvious plot or central characters. The fluidity of subject-positions—voices relaying each other in a chain of speeches—makes this work appear to be lacking in coherence Dooling and Torgeson (1998), with some modifications.
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