Women and Writing in Modern China 9780804764001

Citation preview

WOMEN IN

AND

WRITING

MODERN

CHINA

WENDY LARSON

Women and Writing in Modern China

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS STANFORD, CALIFORNIA

Stanford U niversicy Press Stanford, California

© 1998 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University Printed in the United States of America CIP

data appear at the end of rhe book

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My research on women and writing began while on a Research Fellowship at the Center for Chinese Studies of the National Central Library in Taipei during the summer of 1990. While working at the library, I collected and read a number of difficultto-obtain journal articles from the 1920s. I thank the center for its warm support. In 1990, a research grant from the Center for the Study of Women in Society at the University of Oregon provided much-needed course relief so that I could devote myself to this work. I thank the center for its help. Major financial support for this book came from the Center for Chinese Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, which generously provided me with a fellowship to conduct research during the 1990-91 academic year. I am grateful for the opportunities to discuss my work with scholars there and to participate in the conferences and events sponsored by the center. I also thank the Fulbright Commission, which made it possible for me to teach and do research at the Institute of East Asian Studies at the University of Aarhus in Denmark during fall semester of 1991. During that time I was

VI

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

able not only to meet European colleagues and discuss my work with them, but also to present my work in Aarhus, Copenhagen, Heidelberg, and Leiden, where I got the invaluable benefit of enthusiastic and constructive comments from students and faculty. My work could not have been done without the scholarship of a number of people, many of whose articles and books are cited here. Whether I agree or disagree with the arguments being made, I have tried to put this scholarship to good use. I am delighted that research in premodern studies focusing on women and writing has developed in such exciting ways, and in particular I want to thank Maureen Robertson and Dorothy Ko for their fine research, without which I would have a great deal more trouble figuring out how traditional and modern discourses interact and function. In the modern field, I want to thank Bao Jialin, Tani Barlow, Rey Chow, Dai Jinhua, Li Youning, Lydia H. Liu, Meng Yue, Qiao Yigang, Sheng Ying, Zhang Yufa and many others cited in this book for their excellent and often provocative scholarship. A special thanks goes out to Yi-tsi Mei Feuerwerker, who boldly broke into American scholarship with her early book on Ding Ling and an even earlier pioneering article on women writers in the 1920s and 1930s. My heartiest gratitude goes out to my colleagues here at the University of Oregon. Without their support and patient criticism, I could not have finished this book. I particularly want to thank Bryna Goodman, whose detailed reading and kind critique of an early draft provided the basis for extensive revision and rethinking of several key concepts, and whose overall enthusiasm for the study of modern China has been an inspiration. Richard Kraus, whose work on culture and the state has provided me with a model, encouraged me to struggle on when I was about to give up, and in a lengthy critique identified gaps in my historical presentations and logic. Maram Epstein conscientiously and generously read manuscript drafts of this book and offered written and oral suggestions that helped me crystallize concepts that had been

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

VII

floating rather too freely in the text; Maram also gave her time to help with difficult classical translations and helped me think through my references to premodern novels. Stephen Durrant also helped with translations from the classical; without his warm encouragement and kind assistance I could not have included many of the early documents that make the topic of moral virtue in modern China so interesting. I thank Richard Gunde at the Center for Chinese Studies for his fine editing. I also thank Anne Wedell-Wedellsborg, of the University of Aarhus, an astute reader, friend, and colleague, whose own work has provided inspiration for mine. I could not ask for a better group of friends and scholars to work with. Finally, some material in this book has been previously published in much different form in two articles: "Female Subjectivity and Gender Relations: The Early Stories of Lu Yin and Bing Xin," in Liu Kang and Xiaobing Tang, eds., Politics, Ideology, and Literary Discourse in Modern China, Duke University Press, 1993, pp. 124-43, and "The End of fonii wenxue: Women's Literature from 1925 to 1935,'' Modern Chinese Literature (Spring 1988): 39-45 (reprinted in Tani E. Barlow, ed., Gender Politics in Modern China, Duke University Press, 1993, pp. 58-74). W.L.

CONTENTS

Introduction I.

Women, Writing, and the Discourse of Nationalism

2.

Woman, Moral Virtue, and Literary Text

44

3-

The Body and the Text

84

4-

The New Woman and the New Literature

131

5-

Women's Writing and Social Engagement

166

Conclusion

198

Notes

209

Bibliography

237

Index

257

7

WOMEN IN

AND

WRITING

MODERN

CHINA

INTRODUCTION

This book investigates how, in twentieth-century China, two modern concepts, the new woman and the new writing, joined in a protracted cultural debate over what and how women should and could write. It is by no means a comprehensive study of women writers nor of their writing or the issues they confront, but rather a study of how, under the umbrella of the modernizing nation-state, two producers and indicators of modernity work within Chinese culture. 1 In modernizing nations all over the world, women's education and culture came to stand for the health and strength of the nation and, at the same time, traditional literatures came under attack by those who demanded art for art's sake and the rejection of previous contexts of morality or religion. Two theories of modernization, women's liberation and the autonomous aesthetic, defined the parameters within which writers and critics discussed, debated, analyzed, and contested women's issues and literary issues. In each culture, however, the specific development of gender and literary discourses produced a different trajectory. While acknowledging that changes in literary

2

INTRODUCTION

discourse early in the twentieth century fundamentally altered the nature of Chinese literature, this book focuses on the specifically gendered meaning of writing rather than the development of new aesthetic concepts in themselves. 2 Modern China was heir to an almost two-thousand-year-old textualized discourse about women and to a social system that placed women of elite households in a distinct and relatively rigid position within the family. While yin/yang theory simultaneously developed two different gender meanings-one which equalized the masculine and feminine and defined disorder as an imbalance of the two, and the other which produced gender as a hierarchy, with male as good and female as bad-Confucian doctrine also developed, both as a textual tradition and as acts and behaviors of daily life, the notion of separate spheres for women and men. In theory and often in practice, women were supposed to remain in the inner quarters, while men could function outside the household as well and had access to positions within government and literary culture; women were supposed to restrict themselves to relationships within the family and kin circle and define themselves as wives, mothers, and daughters, while men were free to function both within and without, acting as husbands, fathers, and sons and also as friends, literary connoisseurs, and government officials. Throughout the Ming and Qing dynasties, women's virtue, or nude, developed as a physical ordeal, with a number of bodily restrictions such as chastity and confinement, and mutilating practices, the worst of which was widow suicide. Physical trial was the essential, orthodox marker of femininity, and its acting out was described and theorized in a long textual tradition. While there were physical practices of virtue for men, they were not canonized as extensively as they were for women, nor did they constitute a marker of masculinity. Counterposed to de was cai, or literary talent, a transcendent quality that contained a variable content of profound lyricism, deep intellectuality, and analytical skill.

INTRODUCTION

3

As the common phrase nuren wucai bian shi de (for women, lack of literary talent is a virtue) implied, even though both men and women were known for virtue and literary talent, many more women than men were canonized for their virtue and many more men than women were acclaimed for their literary talent. Thus de and cai were, to some extent, exclusive and gendered concepts and social forms that implied a different ontological status for women and men. De was a physical trial of self-sacrifice that possessed and expressed powerful symbolic meanings, while cai gave its practitioners access to, and represented them as working within, transcendent emotional and intellectual spheres. This well-developed and somewhat antagonistic relationship between women and writing influenced the focus of modern concepts. The debates that erupted in China in the first two decades of the twentieth century directly addressed the social structures, cultural norms, and emotional training that caused women to insert themselves disadvantageously into the family, where overdetermined ideas of moral virtue, they then believed, trapped and limited them. While Western imperialism and its modern cultural notions of individual freedom and choice became the absolute context and perhaps instigator of this debate, or became considered the standard against which Chinese society must be judged, certain crucial areas, such as the critique of chastity, the Chinese family, and heterosexual marriage were specific to traditional discourse. In particular, because women's moral virtue had long been constructed as a physical practice, the female body took on a heightened significance, and sex, singlehood (refusal to marry), and physical education became widely debated. Whereas the traditional constrictions imposed on the female body became a context of struggle in many developing nation-states, in China literary texts often addressed specifically Chinese issues. Although national strength demanded a ~trong female body to represent it, a number of stories by women presented the female body as an obstacle to fulfillment or a form weakened by sickness or death.

4

INTRODUCTION

Rather than emerging as a powerful indicator of national health, as the modernizing discourse demands, in fiction by women writers the female body carries in it the old, antimodern meaning of moral virtue through physical ordeal, and thus must be effaced. In particular, the body is antagonistic to the woman who writes, the woman whose body is generally weakened or erased through suicide. Whereas in premodern China there also were women who wrote and men who, so to speak, performed virtue, a wealth of evidence shows that by the Qing dynasty, literary talent was gendered largely as male, and the development of virtue as a physical ordeal for women had consolidated into reified social practices such as chastity and widow suicide, acts not in any way att~ched to men. Literary talent, therefore, entered the modern era as male, and the mere participation of women as writers did not create a niche for them. Although the new woman in theory should have faced no obstacles to becoming a writer of the new literature, the categories of moral virtue and literary talent were strongly gendered. A cultural bias against the combination of woman with literary talent meant that the two modernizing discourses of the autonomous aesthetic and women's liberation, when put together, produced a problematic result. In critical discourse, many critics and commentators argued that women naturally lacked skill in written language and had minds (and bodies, it was implied) too concrete to produce excellent literature. In other words, women's "nature" that emerged from the bodily tradition of the performance of virtue was physical, material, and concrete, rather than transcendent and intellectually profound, as the concept of literary talent, or cai, implied. The stories of some women writers recognized this discrepancy and focused precisely on the spot where women were inserted into contexts that mechanistically or routinely turned them into performers of female virtue. These contexts were heterosexual love and the familial role of wife and mother, which were not sus-

INTRODUCTION

ceptible to erosion even by the modern ideas of romance and freedom of choice in love. Although many women wrote about love, which in their stories usually failed, some contemplated altering the basic physical framework of relationships, and proposed in their stories new associations that did not reconfigure traditional ideas but rather established women in novel material surroundings involving untraditional relationships. Thus rather than redefine the marriage bond as a modern and equal love relationship, or the mother's role as an educator who understands and transmits to her children modern knowledge-both possibilities that would impose standard modern ideology on culture-some writers proposed unconventional relationships: sustained singlehood, nonsexual friendships between women and men or women and other women, love bonds between women, and other nonfamilial liaisons in the workplace and society at large. Because this approach implicitly recognized the physical nature of women's subordination and fixed on the material conditions of their relationships, it acknowledged the bodily practice of moral virtue as its discursive parameter. As I discuss in Chapter 2, from the Qing dynasty on and perhaps even earlier, there were some who defended and promoted women as writers. Early in the twentieth century, Xie Wuliang constructed the Chinese literary tradition as basically feminine (Xie Wuliang 1916), and in the late 1920s a number of literary historians and critics wrote books that reconfigured the entirety of excellent Chinese literature as feminine, claiming the field of cai for women and branding as impostors the men who wrote in a feminine voice, a much-admired poetic tradition. This attempt to reconstruct the literary field was complicated, however, by socialist literary ideology, which defined good literature as social engagement. Thus, just as the lyrical past traditions began to be utilized in a cultural privileging of femininity, leftists rejected this writing as excessively emotional, elite, and trivial. The representative cliche of literary change in the post-May Fourth period

6

INTRODUCTION

was the switch from love to revolution, a transformation that disallowed a gendered position within the field of cai. Paradoxically, the liberatory socialist position, which imposed a nongendered standard secretly gendered as male, corresponded in at least one way to the Confucian doctrine of separate spheres. My analysis fixes on the two traditional concepts of cai and de as central to the modern meaning of the woman writer in Chinese culture, not because the woman writer has specific and identifiable characteristics, but because she emerges from and functions within certain cultural forms, practices, and discourses where the principles of moral virtue and literary talent are constantly invoked, if not always directly acknowledged. While the autonomous aesthetic in literature and women's liberation are important ideologies of modernity, their trajectory in a given locale depends on the cultural field that preexists them. What emerges from the interaction between the modernizing ideology and the existing culture is not so much a hybrid or a pastiche but a unique creation that then becomes the specific and modern cultural debate over women and writing, feminine styles (nuqi) in writing, lyricism and realism, psychologism, and social engagement. Aesthetic conflicts proceed on the basis of this political struggle.

I.

WOMEN,

WRITING,

AND

THE OF

DISCOURSE

NATIONALISM

The world of women's education must develop a great deal. Women's learning is, after all, the basis of education, so naturally when women's learning develops, will there be any need to fear that the nation's people will not be learned? If the nation's people are learned, is there any need

to

fear that the nation will not be strong?

Beijing nubao (Beijing women's newspaper), September 8, I906

The Chinese feminist movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, according to many scholars and critics, was no different than many other third-world feminist movements: it was initiated by male intellectuals and discursively enveloped within the development of modernity and its seminal political structure, the emerging nation-state. Peter Zarrow argues that until 1907 "virtually all Chinese feminism was nationalistic," concerned with the ways in which Chinese women were impeding the nation from progress (Zarrow 1988: 796). Even when He Zhen and other "anarcho-feminists" separated feminism from nationalism, women's issues were still closely tied to social reform, and the ultimate goal of reformists remained the liberation of all (p. 797). 1 In China as in other nation-states developing in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the two categories of women and literature were important sites for the construction of the modern nation. For women, the modernizing concept was women's liberation, a notion that restructured society through demands that women be educated and in some cases incorporated

8

WOMEN, WRITING, AND NATIONALISM

into political, economic, and legal institutions. The autonomous aesthetic-literature as art, with its own rules, generative power, and sphere of self-sufficient and profound meaning-was the modern theory of literature. This theory demanded not only respect and awe from the educated or those with pretensions to knowledge, but also its own group of academic specialists to teach and interpret it. As two of the foundational ideologies of cultural modernity, women's liberation and the autonomous aesthetic continue even today to exert unremitting pressure on Chinese society, contesting alternative concepts such as the socialist ideal of literature as reflecting and directly engaging with society and social problems. Like democracy, which continues to be the overt global standard when political regimes and events are evaluated, and science, which privileges universality and downplays the significance of local difference or indigenous approaches to phenomena and knowledge, cultural modernity insists that issues concerning women and literature be evaluated against the claims of women's liberation and the autonomous aesthetic or constituted within these conceptual boundaries. In China to this day, women's issues are a topic of constant debate and scholarship; the focus remains on the very idea that women should be liberated and the definition of liberation itself, whether certain forms of thinking, language, and social participation are both liberated and uniquely Chinese-female, and how "feminism" applies to China. 2 Socialist theories of literature, often conveniently joined with traditional ideas of wen yi zai dao (literature as a vehicle of morality), backed by the official power of the Communist party, reigned for many years; despite protests and debates, those who supported independence and creativity in literature (the autonomous aesthetic) were in a minority. In the post-Mao era, however, the nature of art or pure literature has been a maiit concern within Chinese literary circles and Chinese poets and novelists are now acclaimed or condemned with reference to the standards of the autonomous aesthetic: originality, independence, and

WOMEN, WRITING, AND NATIONALISM

9

creativity. 3 Furthermore, the entire Maoist canonical approach to literature, which demoted the autonomous aesthetic to be subservient to political and social concerns, with the death of Mao has come under wide attack and in most contemporary journals has been virtually displaced. However, even though the two discourses of the modernized woman and the new literature emerged simultaneously as seemingly essential for building the nation-state, China's own literature and gender relations developed unique historical tracks as they interacted with global conditions. Particular historical and cultural meanings, institutions, and social practices developed, yet they were constrained and circumscribed by intellectuals, social commentators, news broadcasters, writers, scientists, politicians, and journalists in China and all over the world who took seriously women's liberation and the autonomous aesthetic, either in rejecting them or in fighting for them as the new standard and truth. This chapter evaluates scholarship on literature, gender, and nationalism, and appraises its applicability to early twentiethcentury Chinese society. It also links together the idea of the modern Chinese woman with new ideas about education, morality, and textual learning that emerged simultaneously in China. Because China, unlike many other traditional societies, possessed a long, rich textual history, the question of how women would be educated and how they would learn and utilize both classical texts and modern knowledge was complicated. In modern times, the relationship of women to the massive textual corpus of the past, as well as to modern disciplines such as science, social science, psychology, and study of Western literature, had to be rethought and reworked. This chapter also discusses gender meaning in traditional China, with the goal of unraveling some contradictory and enigmatic evidence concerning women's social positions and behaviors. Although some aspects of women's experience in China and the West may appear similar, we cannot assume that

10

WOMEN, WRITING, AND NATIONALISM

Chinese gender meanings are or were identical to those of the industrialized West. The following discussion utilizes the work of many scholars to probe exactly what the differences are and how they operate in the modern era.

Women and Literature: To and From a Healthy Nation

Over the past twenty years, scholars have widely discussed nationalism, nationalism and literature, nationalism and gender, and nationalism and sexuality. Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread ofNationalism (Anderson 1983) has been particularly influential in inspiring many contemporary debates on these subjects, as has been Homi K. Bhabha's collection of essays by various authors, Nation and Narration (Bhabha 1990), a key text in the study of nationalism and literature, and the essays collected in Woman-Nation-State, edited by Nira Yuval-Davis and Floya Anthias (1989), and in the anthology Nationalisms and Sexualities (Parker et al. 1992). Much of this scholarship, which tries to come to terms with the meanings of gender and nationality over the last hundred years, recognizes both to be virtually undefinable relational terms. Thus, much as the two sexes conventionally define themselves reciprocally, national identity is determined not on the basis of its inherent qualities but in relation to oppositional or complementary categories. Nationalism, then, becomes a "variable cultural artifact" that changes with context, historical circumstances, gender, and a number of other variables (Parker et al. 1992: 5); or, according to Anderson, "nationality, or, as one might prefer to put it in view of that word's multiple significations, nation-ness, as well as nationalism, are cultural artefacts of a particular kind," in which the imagination of their constitution is the supreme definition (Anderson 1983: 13). Putting it another way, the behaviors, roles, and languages through which people act out nationalism are deter-

WOMEN, WRITING, AND NATIONALISM

II

mined by their concept of nation, which in turn is determined by a number of constantly changing variables and relationships between these variables. Nation, like woman, is a changing discursive construct and a historical material reality. Among the many meanings that the nation-state contains are gendered realities and expectations for women and men. Anderson points out that the nation, imagined as a community, is a "deep horizontal comradeship" conceived of as a fraternity in which sexual politics plays itself out through concepts of fraternity, power and time, and racially determined semen (pp. 16-26, 40). Yet it has taken feminist theorists, working on the assumption that all parts of reality are gendered, to push the meaning of fraternity toward recognizing the concept of nation itself as gender-based (Radhakrishnan 1992: 79). As my introductory comments to this chapter show, late nineteenth-century writing (in China as elsewhere) generally considered the nation the overarching category under which gender was subsumed as important but secondary. R. Radhakrishnan asks why the politics of nation typically overtakes the politics of woman, turning nationalism into a macropolitical discussion bur the women's question into a local discourse. Ultimately Radhakrishnari somewhat tautologically finds that "in the context of nationalism, it is precisely because the women's question was kept from achieving its own form of politicization that it was so easily and coercively spoken for by the discourse of nationalism" (pp. 78-80). 4 Along the same lines, the contributors to Nationalisms and Sexualities and others find that in many developing nations, the tropes of woman-nation as woman, woman as national mother, woman as an ideal of femininity, woman as dutiful daughter of the nation, bad women as good slaves to save the nation-..:were repeated even though cultural conditions radically differ. Despite cultural difference, these gender constructions were part of the modernizing ideology of the initial nation-states and thus an obligatory framework in the development of subsequent nation-states.

12

WOMEN, WRITING, AND NATIONALISM

For literature, Anderson (1983) explicates the process of writing the nation that creates national identity, showing how literature, as well as politics, economics, science, and other aspects of culture, participates fully in nation-building. The unique role of literature is to create stories, narratives in which imaginary national characteristics develop through characters and their actions and become part of citizens' consciousness of themselves as national subjects. Yet, while admitting that literature often functions "as a signifier of national identity or heritage," Simon During claims that literature also canonizes texts that do not legitimate nationhood (cited in Anderson 1983: 138). Concepts of culture and nation merged in early nineteenth-century Europe, a "scene of individual cultures chasing after nationhood." Although culture often implies a fixed identity, nation implies a position in history and politics (p. 139). Simon During describes nationalism as a practice that allows at least postcolonial cultures to resist cultural and economic imperialism; at the same time, the postcolonial novel has limited ability to resist nationalism, because "the interplay between subjectivity and representation, which dominates the postcolonial novel, seems to have less force and direction than its societies deserve" (p. 152). What During argues is that the postcolonial novel represents both the forced collaboration and cultural change that has resulted from colonialism, and resistance to it, but that the represented resistance takes a relatively weak position. During's analysis gives credence to the view that while resistance is possible and indeed probable, modernity implies that non-Western cultures must negotiate with institutions and cultural norms from the West. Agreeing with other scholars that as nationalism develops in Europe each country comes to feel it must have its own kind of cooking and its own kind of woman which then resemble each other, During alludes to the way in which women become the essentialized objects of national characteristics. Like Anderson, During mentions but does not plumb the relationship between nationalism and gender.

WOMEN, WRITING, AND NATIONALISM

13

During's discussion points to the apparent "freedom" of literature, which contains both narratives of nationality or nationbuilding and those of resistance or those seemingly unrelated to the larger issues of nation. This freedom, however, also illustrates how literature becomes an autonomous art that is beholden more to its own "rules" than to any overt relationship to the state. At the same time, this autonomy appears to be generously allowed by the state itself, which in some cases even supports it through financial awards or grants. While Anderson's work may be criticized for its overall framework, it has brought the discussion of nationalism and literature into the forefront and convincingly shown that for the nation to be imagined requires a fundamental conceptual change particularly relevant to the study of literature. This change involves replacing a particular script-language offering "privileged access to ontological truth" with a new development: the vernacular as the language of both spoken and written truth (Anderson 198r 40). Literature, once it is written in the approachable vernacular, can create the fictions that "seep quietly and continuously into reality" (p. 40). This is facilitated by a change in the concept of text, which becomes print-as-commodity, a form that allows the reader to perceive the general detail of a world moving ahead through simultaneous occurrences (p. 40). The primary vehicle of this fiction is the newspaper, which utilizes the literary convention of imagined linkage: much as in a novel, when a popular story disappears from the pages of a newspaper, readers do not believe that the actuality it represents is gone or its actors dead. Just like a novelistic character whose story is moving along even when the pages do not indicate it, the lost "plot" will eventually reappear. 5 The imagined community that results from the "convergence of capitalism and print technology on the fatal diversity of human language" is called nation; when the national state becomes the norm, it then can be imagined without everyone speaking the same language (pp. 49, 123). 6

I4

WOMEN, WRITING, AND NATIONALISM

Recently, Prasenjit Duara has challenged the primacy of the nation-state as a category and also Anderson's focus on print capitalism as the primary mechanism that allows people to imagine a community. In reference to China, Duara argues against the "assumption of modern consciousness as a unified epistome marked by an epistemological break with past forms of consciousness," and discusses a model of political community based on elite culture, in which barbarians could participate through education and imitation, and another model based on the primacy of Han ethnicity (Duara 1995: 782-87). Yet although Duara believes it is not self-consciousness but the "world system of nation-states," sanctioned as the sole representative polity, that is the novel and powerful modern political and cultural form, he still recognizes that the "ideology of the nation-state system has sanctioned the penetration of state power into areas that were once dominated by local authority structures" (p. 792). Thus the modern nation's cohesion comes from definitions of race, religion, and language through which the national self is characterized. Although Duara makes a valid point in showing that self-consciousness of political unity, which in China predated modern times, may not be the quality that determines the modern nation-state, he does not undermine the idea that the nation-state is a virtually compulsory modern political form. Investigating minority discourse in the People's Republic of China, Dru Gladney has found a tight relationship between gender and national meanings. Gender hierarchies in the dominant Han culture are reproduced in representations of minority cultures. Through images and other aspects of this discourse, the Han assign to themselves the categories of modernity and masculinity while assigning to minorities the past and femininity and at the same time placing Han culture in the objectifying position of gazing at a vulnerable, eroticized, and feminized minority culture. In murals, postcards, picture books, and paintings, a disproportionate number of images of minority peoples are pictures

WOMEN, WRITING, AND NATIONALISM

I5

of minority women that both eroticize them and imply that if they accept Han technological and social civilization, they can emerge from a timeless past into modern life (Gladney 1994). Thus for the Han, minority women represent the backwardness of minority culture, and by contrast they themselves appear modern: the crucial question of identity that this discourse addresses is not who are the minorities, but who are the Chinese. Both of Duara's models, one of incorporating the minorities into a national discourse of unity and the other of maintaining Han supremacy, are integrated into this contemporary nationalizing practice. In this cultural discourse, backwardness and a marginal position are associated with women, and modernity and its orthodox values of science and progress are associated with men. Clearly, there is a powerful if complex relationship between gender meanings and the ongoing construction of the nationstate. Equally significant is the autonomous aesthetic, or the concept of art functioning in an autonomous realm. In a comprehensive study of how the perception of independence is created in the artistic field, Pierre Bourdieu details how for the French consumer, meaning in art and literature is produced through a long process of training by which one learns to treat art and literature as autonomous (Bourdieu 1984). This means that French consumers allow in artists a "refusal to recognize any necessity other than that inscribed in the specific tradition of the artistic discipline in question" (p. 3). 7 Bourdieu argues not only that perception of value in art is the result of lengthy formal and informal instruction that educates the viewer in a code of interpretation, but also that this instruction hides in it hierarchically organized differences in class, race, and gender. He traces the development of the autonomous aesthetic to the modern art movement in France from around 187o-8o, which created a "collective conversion" of our perception of art that allowed us to see abstract, nonrealist, and. nonnarrative painting as valuable (Bourdieu 1993: 2.39). After that conversion is complete, our under-

I6

WOMEN, WRITING, AN!J NATIONALISM

standing of art and art museums "all goes without saying," for we have naturalized this relatively recent historical change (p. 257). Not only the arts of painting and sculpture, but the literary field also contains the idea of the autonomous aesthetic, with the trained referee to decide who is a good writer, the notion of universal value, and the divorce from moral or religious value as its overriding validity. Bourdieu (1996: 47-112) demonstrates how a critical aspect of the emergence of the literary field is the development of the autonomous aesthetic. Because the literary field eventually functions as the reverse of the economic field, the quick success of some writers marks them and their work as inferior in the eyes of critics (p. 83). Although the bohemian lifestyle is available as a recognized artistic alternative to commercial success, a writer with inherited money or other means of support has an even better chance of being able to devote him or herself to the craft long enough to succeed. As each genre develops its autonomy, it grows farther from the others. Furthermore, the symbolic credit poetry, the novel, or theater possesses is in an inverse relationship to economic profit (p. 115). The acknowledgment of universal essence in literature and art comes at the cost of a "double dehistoricization" of the work and the gaze, both of which were once a particular experience "very situated in social space and in historical time" (p. 285). Some in-depth discussion of the autonomous aesthetic as it concerns literature in another modernizing country will illustrate how the paradigm succeeded in radically influencing and to some extent displacing older ideas. In Belated Modernity and Aesthetic Culture: Inventing National Literature, Gregory Jusdanis demonstrates how Greek intellectuals both promoted and fought against the new concept of literature and the autonomous aesthetic, with its armies of specialists and tightly controlled borders that allow only the trained to speak. In Greece as in many other locales, modernization initiated two tendencies. The first was the worship

WOMEN, WRITING, AND

NATIONALISM

17

of the foreign and the ancient, and the second was absorption of a nineteenth-century European concept of literary history, as described by Robert Jauss: "to represent in the history of literary works the idea of a national individuality on its way to itself" (cited in Jusdanis 1991: IIJ, 120). By the time literary criticism entered Greece in the late nineteenth century, it had existed in Europe for over a hundred years. The assumptions of this aesthetic were transmitted in texts written by European critics of Greek literature and translated into Greek; these critics isolated literature from society and treated it as art, analyzing its literary qualities and tracing its evolution in terms of the local tradition (Jusdanis 1991: 120). 8 Jusdanis claims that "Greek critics may also have had these aims, but for them literature, in the extended or limited meaning, was still part of the nation's politics" (p. 120). Because some persist in viewing literature as a national activity in which all-not only experts-may participate as critics, Jusdanis argues that the theory of the autonomous aesthetic has not reached its ultimate development in Greece. However, he also emphasizes that this modern ideology-the autonomous aesthetic-is so absolute that it is just a matter of time before it triumphs. Jusdanis's work is significant for my study in two ways. First, despite their very different traditional cultural configurations, both China and Greece have a history of literary practice that in the modern period began to be perceived as old-fashioned and began to be challenged by new ideologies. Although the results of this challenge may not be identical, the ideas that enter to collide with the past are basically similar. Second, in Jusdanis's approach to analyzing the specificity of modern cultural forms, modernity can be thought of as possessing some fixed elements, which include ideas about art and literature originally developed in Europe. While I sympathize with those wishing to include in the concept of modernity as many political, economic, and cultural alternatives as possible, to regard as modern anything that exists in the twentieth century does not provide us with a meaningful

18

WOMEN, WRIT! NG, AN 0

NAT! ON ALIS M

analytical category. It is more useful to assess modernity in its characteristic expressions and claims: democracy, progress, science, the autonomous aesthetic, gender equality, human rights, and capitalism. These notions may not be adopted everywhere or express themselves in exactly the same way, yet they powerfully exert continual pressure on local or traditional concepts, social structures, and practices. For the purposes of analysis, although within social practice modernity becomes a positive value, its explanatory power as a concept is increased if it is regarded not as a value but as a historical stage that now, in some locales, is already changing. As Jusdanis points out, after modernity comes postmodernity, when "the collapse or the conflation of the autonomous spheres organizing human activity" causes the disintegration of boundaries between culture and state and radically alters many of the beliefs and practices of modernity (p. 164). More recently, Jusdanis has questioned the relationship of national culture to the global culture emerging in transnational companies, product and brand recognition, and the media, and has reevaluated how culture in modernizing countries follows a specific trajectory. Jusdanis argues that in nations where nationalism developed with a sense of "belatedness," or a never-ending desire to catch up with advanced countries, people must both modernize and protect their ethnic culture from a modernization so deep that a sense of nationality disappears. Under these conditions, culture becomes a "productive force rather than a compensatory means of acquiring absent ideals," pushing society from a perceived backwardness toward something more advanced (Jusdanis 1995: 43). Culture, Jusdanis seems to imply, is not just follow-the-leader: its contradictory nature as both national and international, both historically specific and global also can produce a unique response to the uniform pressures of modernity, allowing those who live under "catch-up" material conditions to develop something different. Perhaps because he has been criticized for not permitting the subaltern to speak or the subaltern's

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culture to possess agency, Jusdanis has backed away from his original position and now emphasizes the foundational creativity of culture rather than its necessary expression of modern forms. Yet there is no inherent contradiction between the two positions. While the basic framework of modernity in the form of democracy, science, capitalism, and its underlying notions of progress, individual rights, and objectivity, spreads throughout the world and must be confronted by non-Western cultures, the response is not uniform nor the result entirely predictable; both are dependent on what went before. Because modern literature in the broad sense-with its new structures of time and occurrence as described by Anderson-was central in the development of nationalism, the bilingual intelligentsia, with its access to reading, writing, and publishing, occupied the vanguard. Intellectuals went abroad to study and read and translate other literatures that gave them models of the nation elsewhere. Chinese intellectuals, the zhishifenzi who came to replace the wenren of premodern China, emerged as a group at the end of the nineteenth century. Through their voluminous writings they challenged the Confucian view of dynasty and ruler with concepts of the modern nation-state. 9 The patriarchal loyalism that stipulated that a Chinese man must serve only one dynasty was eroded and replaced with a nationalism concerned with the survival of the culture and the people and with the welfare of the nation over the small group such as the clan or faction (Young-tsu Wong 1989: 3, 22). An important example is the work of Zhang Binglin (1869-1936), an influential intellectual who considered history to be the soul of the nation and sought from it a Chinese culture that was subjective, relative, and uniquely Chinese (p. 56). Zhang's interest in reconstructing the national language, and his refusal to accept Esperanto, were based on a belief in a crucial national essence (guocui) that should be fostered and developed to ensure cultural difference (Hao Chang 1987: 119; Young-tsu Wong, 1989: 145). As a vanguard intellectual, Zhang

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attempted to construct a modern yet national language and use it to create a thoroughly modern Chinese culture. Whereas Zhang worked for general cultural rejuvenation, other male intellectuals all over the world fought for the liberation of women as they promoted their new social and personal visions. The pattern of male intellectuals promoting women's rights prevailed in virtually every culture moving toward the modern nation-state form. 10 Intellectual men often were joined by smaller numbers of intellectual women who expressed their own visions through essays, poetry, and sometimes military or social action; in China two well-known examples are He Zhen and Qiu Jin (1877?-1907). Yet progressive men were often at the core of early women's liberation movements, enveloping the meaning of gender change within the liberatory tropes of modernity and the strengthening concepts of nationalism. In Korea, Yu KilChun, who had visited the United States, advocated equality in the name of children, home, and country. In Egypt, Rifaa Rafii El-Tahtawi (1801-71) supported women's education and attacked sexist social practices. In Turkey, Mustapha Kemal (1881-1938) recognized and applauded the role Turkish women played in the nationalist struggle. In Japan, Iwamoto Zenji in 1885 argued for the virtual equivalence of the modern nation with women (as did Tan Sitong in China), claiming that "the condition of women is such that Japan cannot be considered a civilised or cultured country" (Jayawardena 1986: 218-19, 49, 35, 230). In each of these examples, to which many more could be added, the constrained circumstances of women are made to signify-in totality-an anemic national culture. For this reason, women's issues are, in Radhakrishnan's terms, a micropolitics within the overarching macropolitics of nationalism. One way of understanding this subordination is to recognize that in Europe, nationalistic movements originated not as a simple and already complete idea of nation but as a package of many imaginings, one of which was the imagination of woman as an equalized citi-

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zen of the new order. In the words of Yuval-Davis and Anthias, "the central dimensions of the roles of women are constituted around the relationships of collectivities to the state" (YuvalDavis and Anthias 1989: 1). What was important was the relationship of women as a group to the state and the way in which their gender represented or embodied aspects of the state. Although modernity means the pervasive influence of certain structures and practices, the expression of modernity's ideologies does not follow a mechanistically determined route, but is influenced by the particular past of each culture. In China the demand for pure literature, or literature as art, is again today-as it was in the May Fourth era-an important framework for debate, but in the late 1920s it faded under increased socialist demands for an engaged literature. Although the powerful Creation Society adopted as its motto "art for art's sake" throughout the 1920s, even earlier there were also cries for literature with a reformist agenda, and many believe that the traditional literary ideology of wen yi zai dao (literature as a vehicle of morality) to this day has not been totally displaced. While many people accepted women's education as long as its goal was to prepare women for motherhood and in this way improve the nation's people, women's incorporation into public political, economic, institutional, and military life was, and in many locales still is and may always be, an incomplete project. For example, communist organizers in China in the 1930s believed that in order to gain the cooperation of peasant men they had to tone down their liberatory rhetoric for women. More recently, some scholars have characterized the Maoist dictum of "women holding up half the sky" not as a plea for gender equality, but as a pronouncement of a state with the covert goal of harnessing women's productive power and gaining their absolute loyalty and cooperation. In Lydia H. Liu's words, "the category of women, like that of class, has long been exploited by the hegemonic discourse of the state of China.... In the emancipatory discourse of the state, which always subsumes woman under the

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nationalist agenda, women's liberation means little more than equal opportunity to participate in public labor" (Lydia Liu 1993: 55). Thus modern practices and institutions are not absolutes that must and will be actualized, but are dominant and powerful modes of thinking and structuring realiry that can be rejected, accepted, struggled against, and molded into experience-but that must be addressed by each culture. Part of my object in this book is to trace exactly what emerges from this process, and to recognize both the contestations of modernity and the ways in which local discourses influenced modern practices. At the same time, because modernity entails mandatory confrontation with specific political, economic, and cultural forms, I regard the contestations not as either pure resistance or capitulation, but as negotiations, initially often carried out by the educated who speak on behalf of the emerging nation. Anderson shows not only how nationalism arose, but also how the bilingual intelligentsia argued for it. In colonial territories, traditional culture often was attacked by English-reading schoolboys, who had access to "modern Western culture in the broadest sense and, in particular, to the models of nationalism, nationness, and nation-state produced elsewhere in the course of the nineteenth century" (Anderson 1983: 107-9). Almost every response to imperialism contained the schooled critical gaze directed at one's own national traditions as weak and inferior. Yet what happened to the modern ideologies when the new nationstate strengthened, in some cases surpassing the economic abilities of the older nation-states on which it was modeled? That cultures have challenged some ideologies of modernity is amply borne out in the histories of new nation-states, which responded to the discourses of the early nation-state yet distanced themselves from specific applications of, for example, the autonomous aesthetic or women's liberation that have become more firmly entrenched in the industrialized West. A few well-known examples illustrate the kinds of negotiation that have taken place

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and also the way in which modern ideologies continue to coerce older practices. In the Salman Rushdie incident, for example, we clearly see that some Islamic traditions rejected the autonomous aesthetic and its primary notion of freedom of expression, maintaining that literature must function only within the conceptual boundaries of the religious nation-state. Rushdie's critics could attack him from the stance of cultural difference and accuse him of succumbing to and even aiding Western cultural imperialism. Yet that Rushdie wrote his novel as a challenge to the religious definition of text, that the threat his writing represented was serious and real enough to provoke the death sentence against him, and finally that Western governments, presses, and security forces rallied around and protected him all show how the autonomous aesthetic, with its primary values of freedom of expression and creativity, persistently coerces other concepts of how texts should relate to the nation and the person. Another example is discourse in Japan, a country that from some perspectives (including standard of living, corporate development, and health care) is one of the most modernized nation-states in the world. Contemporary Japanese intellectuals promote freedom in art, or the autonomous aesthetic, and the "right" of free speech, yet many reject a women's liberation that demands an equal role for women in business and government institutions and instead endorse raising women's educational levels to one of the highest in the world largely for the sake of motherhood and national development. This contestation of the liberatory meaning of women's rights does not eliminate the framework of the debate, however, indicating that women's liberation, like the autonomous aesthetic, is an overwhelmingly powerful idea. The recent multiculturalism movement in the United States, which requires sensitivity toward difference and a refusal to engage in overt cultural imperialism, has made it difficult for intellectuals to evaluate women's position in Japan, or to articulate what the Salman Rushdie incident is "really" about. While oppo-

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sition to modern free speech or Rushdie's radical, unorthodox critique seems overly condescending, the realization that we all live in culturally specific places with their own indigenous logic calls into question the demands for freedom in art, women's liberation, the very concept of literature as art, and all other ideologies, which must now be regarded as local, not universal. Nowhere has the argument become more contradictory than in the debate over clitoridectomy in Mrica; absolute cultural relativism puts one in the position of tolerating and, many say, implicitly condoning the practice, but politically engaged opposition means the imperializing imposition of a modern view of a woman's "right" over her body. Modernizing nation-states have come under pressure from world organizations such as Amnesty International, which investigates conditions in all countries against a universal standard; international prizes and awards such as the Nobel prize for literature, which demand an individual creativity that can be translated into English and recognized by a Western committee; and international conferences, where participants must respond to queries that implicitly ask them to evaluate their culture against naturalized historical values. Pressure also comes from international companies and wealthy educational institutions that sponsor scholarships and grants, and from huge economic institutions such as the World Bank. At the level of daily life, modernity's ideas are transferred and promoted by the exchange of students and scholars, travel and tourism, and the mechanisms of culture, such as television, film, newspapers, journals, books, and computer and telephone technology, especially the Internet, the World Wide Web, and fax machines. Behind such pressure is the international politics of competition for material and symbolic resources at all levels, from national to individual. Gregory Jusdanis's initial analysis of literature in Greece and also in Germany-both nation-states that developed a form of cultural nationalism-implies that modernity does have domi-

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nant forms, and to the extent that these forms are not expressed in a culture at large, modernity is simply "belated." In such cultures a full-blown theory of the autonomous aesthetic, or of women's liberation, both with an elaborately developed code of rights and requirements, will eventually emerge, although it is impossible to predict when. Jusdanis argues, then, that the modern is the worldwide reality of the European nation-state, which demands others be like it in order to engage in commerce and war and which considers its political, educational, economic, social, and military concepts (presented to the rest of the world as "reforms" and "liberation") to be the truth. The multicultural discourse of origins, purity, and preservation can hinder or promote specific practices, but it does little to constrain the militaristic politics of ethnic or national cultural identities. On the contrary, such discourses often work in the service of nationalisms, where they can be used for or against any practice or representation. 11 In investigating exactly how the ideas of the modern woman and modern literature unfolded in China, and the dialectical relationship between them that shaped the debate surrounding women's writing and the woman writer, I argue that although these two seminal values of modernity-women's liberation and the autonomous aesthetic-have significantly altered literary ideas and practices in the modern period, they have interacted with powerful traditional and modern notions to create a context of women writing that is unique.

Modern Women and Modern China Intensively, the study of art and literature and other branches of intellectual subjects is to be made more thoroughgoing; and with the help of the modern scientific method and the equipment of the modern library, a Chinese woman will find that if she is to be a genuine artist, poet, or scholar, she will have to dig much deeper and climb much higher than her predecessors, because ... the ... mountains of

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the modern intellectual world are much [more imposing] ... than those of the old world in China. In short, the Chinese woman is now being transformed from the cultured lady of the home to a world citizen: and where there was only one cultured woman to perhaps a thousand ignorant ones, now the light of knowledge and opportunity for developing one's talent is casting its rays on an ever-widening area; and the time may soon come when the other thousand inhabitants in that dark region will also be enveloped in those illuminating ways.

Sophia H. Chen, The Chinese Woman and Four Other Essays

In the late Qing dynasty and the modern period, reformist intellectuals imagined a different Chinese society, one sometimes defined by national, linguistic, or cultural boundaries and sometimes by the elimination of such boundaries. Much of this envisioned reconstruction of China came not only from reevaluating national culture and traditions, but from imagining a world of nations, languages, and societies in which Chinese culture functioned as an equal. A recurring topic was the critique of sexual relations and the status of women. Through this critique, out of which developed educational and other institutions that sought to change women's social roles, early modern intellectuals positioned women as symbolic of China's lack of power, authority, and prestige as a modern nation-state. The content of active intellectuals' attempts to redefine women, men, and culture is well known and formed the selfcritique that characterized Chinese culture in the early twentieth century. Liu Shipei, married to the well-known women's activist He Zhen, imagined total equality between women and men, with the state caring for children (Hao Chang 1987: 178). Tan Sitong attacked the family as a virtual prison for women and claimed that it reduced women to a subhuman status (p. 101). In his 1897 Renxue (On benevolence), Tan created a utopian principle, tong (interconnectedness), in which Confucian relations were broken down and "lust" no longer was considered evil. 12 Tan criticized a tradition that punished women for lust and yet enshrined them

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as the essential site of physical beauty. Kang Youwei (1858-1927), in his Datong shu (Book of great harmony), completed aft~r the 1898 Reform movement, tore apart the basic social fabric by eliminating from it the family and the long-term wife-husband relationship, proposed a uniform clothing standard for men and women so that women would no longer be forced into physical objectification, and described at length the suffering of women under Confucian traditions. 13 Kang decried Chinese social practices as inherently unequal and argued that discrimination against women must be eliminated before a utopian society could be realized (p. 61). In his 1896-97 essay "Bianfa tongyi" (General discussion of reform), Liang Qichao (1873-1929) produced a strong argument for women's education, claiming it would allow women to take part in productive labor and thus avoid oppression, expand their vision and make them qualified to work in the professions, help them better educate their children and thus benefit the entire nation, and improve prenatal care. And in a harsh comment that shows how shockingly central the "woman's issue" was to the developing nation-state, Tan Sitong wrote that "to the extent that Westerners as well as Manchus and Mongols did not practice foot-binding, they were justified in establishing dominion over China'' (p. 91). The ideology of the modern nation-state that developed in late Qing and early Republican China demanded "military and fiscal modernization, which, in turn, requires an unprecedented intervention in to extract the needed resources" (Duara 1991: 74; see also Fitzgerald 1990: 326, Mayfair Yang 1988: 419). The expansion and worldwide penetration of the nation-state, according to Prasenjit Duara, is explained and justified by the "emancipatory language of modernity: in the claim that it is a political form that is radically different from previous states in its ability to represent all of the people, and through mastery of the true nature of reality, bring progressive material growth" (Duara 1991: 74). Referring to work by John W. Meyer, Duara shows that new states do

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not start with a fresh slate, but are influenced by the prevailing world order (Duara 1991). Young-tsu Wong also has shown how the so-called nationalism of imperial China was actually a patriarchal loyalism to the dynasty and how the new nation-state model implied "a shift of focus of loyalty from the ruler to the nation" (Young-tsu Wong 1989: 2). This involved a greater emphasis on the health of the national culture than on that of the ruler or the dynasty. 14 Under the influence ofWestern sources and domestic changes that demanded a new view of society, late Qing reformists wrote essays critiquing Confucian tradition and developing new ideologies of the person-within-society. These intellectuals built their nation-state partially through a gender discourse that reoriented women in relation to kinship structures and other aspects of Confucian ideology. 15 The clarion call for the transformation of women sounded by Tan Sitong, Kang Youwei, and Liang Qichao continued in the pages of early twentieth-century newspapers and journals such as Tianyi, Jingzhong ribao, ~nguo gongbao, Zhongguo xinniijie zazhi, Dongfong zazhi, and Niizi shijie. Many articles emphasized the physical and mental suffering that girls and women endured under the Confucian system: female infanticide, footbinding, forced prostitution, malnutrition or starvation in harsh times, lack of education and thus the impossibility of producing income, and subservience to fathers, husbands, and sons. Other writers concentrated on the ideologies and discourses that seemed to support and extend an oppressive reality. In the women's press, or newspaper writing for and often by women, we can see the clear enveloping of women's issues within national concerns. Women's newspapers flourished in the early years of the twentieth century. The first was the Shanghai paper Niixue bao (Journal of women's studies), founded in 1902 and edited by Chen Xiefen (Beahan 1975: 389). Chen supported women's education, which she divided into the three categories of moral, intellectual, and physical, with physical education as

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the most basic because it could overturn the male ideal of feminine beauty in physical weakness (p. 390). This monthly newspaper was followed by a rash of others, including Nuzi shijie (Women's world) in 1903, edited by Ding Chu'o; Zhongguo nubao (Chinese women's journal) in 1907, edited by revolutionary martyr Qiu Jin; a second Nuzi shijie in 1907, edited by Chen Rujin; and Zhongguo xin nujie (Journal of the new women of China) edited by Luo Yanbin. The Beijing nubao (Beijing women's news), edited by Zhang Zhanyun and the only daily at that time written by and for women, also appeared in 1907. Finally, the paper Tianyi, edited by He Zhen, was published in Japan in 1907. 16 Charlotte Beahan shows that the editors and writers of these papers "believed that their feminism was an integral part of nationalism" (p. 401), and she traces how writers located various topics-women's education, anti-Manchuism and women's contribution to revolution, the denouncing of antiwoman practices such as concubinage and footbinding, women and citizenship, the textual enveloping of women within a negative literary tradition, and the poverty of women workers-as parts of the larger trope of the nation and its weakness. Beahan also points out, however, that one famous writer and activist, Qiu Jin, alone "did not phrase her arguments in terms of the national interest," but separated women's issues and national issues, arguing in favor of "self-sufficiency almost purely in terms of its contribution to women's feelings of self-worth and self-respect and to the enhancement of their position within the family" (p. 401). I? Yet generally the women's press was nationalistic. Directly and indirectly, women journalists and essayists implicated the Chinese literary and scholarly tradition in the subordination of women. In 1907, Zhen Shu wrote "Niizi fuchou lun" (On women's revenge), critiquing the selfishness of men in coopting research and study for themselves and thus establishing a masculinist discourse that promoted men's interests and demoted

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women in every way. 18 Zhen attacked Confucian practice and ideology, especially the long-revered and highly textualized theory of chastity and female martyrdom passed on and consolidated from Han through Song Confucianism and right up into the present. Zhen blamed all orthodox texts; not merely the Confucian classics, but dictionaries such as Shuowen jiezi and classical and poetic commentaries all formed elements in the "Chinese academic tradition" that, Zhen claimed, was more powerful than the law in oppressing women (Zhen Shu 1907-8: 28-30). Here Zhen referred to beliefs about women's nature and social and familial role that not only existed in canonized texts, but were so generally accepted as to work without explicit recognidon. 19 Female and male reformists circumscribed their demands for women's education, participation in government and social affairs, and the abolition of Confucian notions of chastity and role within the context of the healthy nation (see Ono K.azuko 1989: 47-92). In the article "Lun Zhongguo zhi shuairuo niizi bude ci qizui" (On the weakening of China and women's inability to protest), Hu Bin complained that because she was a woman, she was not granted the right to exist independently and to give up her life for her country, a privilege she believed foreign women already possessed. "From now on, all who are women like me will regard China's disasters as their own and China's corruption as their own .... I want each of my comrades to struggle, and not let go of their responsibility, and China will survive!" 20 Writers like Hu Bin embedded women's rights and responsibilities within an overarching concept of nation, in particular national weakness, expressing the notion that women's liberation is a kind of ideological modernity. 21 The cridque of Chinese women's social position initiated by Qing reformers intensified immediately before the May Fourth movement. In his essay "Kongzi zhi dao yu xiandai shenghuo" (The way of Confucius and modern life), published in 1916, Chen Duxiu (1879-1942) attacked Kang Youwei for trying to es-

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tablish Confucianism as a state religion, and presented a strong case for women's participation in government, free social interaction among men and women, and elimination of the expectation of female chastity (Chen Duxiu, 1916). Writing three years later, in his "Zhanhou zhi funii wenti" (The post-war women's problem), Li Dazhao (1888-1927) defined women as a specific class. 22 The article analyzed problems that arose in this "class" because of World War I. For example, during the war women took over many jobs formerly done by men, and after the war they were reluctant to relinquish the jobs that allowed them earning power and independence; because women did not have strong unions, however, they were unable to prevail. Li's solution to the many problems, presented in a list of eleven items, was to allow women a social status equal to that of men by granting women participation in government, economics, military and police organizations, and the professions, extending government support to widows and their children, and equating the status and function of fathers and mothers within the family and men and women in the realm of morals. In some Western countries, the notion of women's development and liberation became conceptually separated from that of the nation-state, or more accurately, women's liberation included an antistatist stance, assuming an individualistic posture of selfreferential development and liberation that sometimes set itself explicitly against nationalist goals. 23 Yet we can see that when modernist notions of women's liberation or feminism entered China through translations, they generally were "confined to China-asnation: changes were needed ultimately not for the sake of Chinese women but for the sake of Chinese wealth and power" (Zarrow 1988: 796). Early feminists promoted a nationalistic feminism, focusing on imperialism or social problems such as the unequal distribution of wealth between women and men, which led to the dependence of women on men and the impoverishment of the nation's citizenry. 24 This approach to gender viewed women as

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the most disadvantaged of a group of oppressed peoples, all of whom would benefit from the liberation promised by modernity and science. Moreover, all oppressed peoples, once liberated, could contribute to national construction. Because as a group, .women were thought to be the lowest of the most disadvantaged (for example, a poor peasant woman was worse off than a poor peasant man), they stood as a symbol of all that was wrong with undeveloped nation-states. Within this gendered national discourse was the implication that if women's lot could be improved by elevating their status and giving them a way to support themseives, they would be the equal of men and ultimately the nation would benefit. Endorsed by Marxists, this social understanding of gender became orthodoxy in leftist ideology by the 1930s, and held subservience to result more from economic and class problems than from historical gender constructions. Gender differences, then, were made to disappear into class differences, which became the paramount social structure against which the leftists struggled.

Gender in Premodern China In the last twenty years, although a great deal of research on gender in different cultural environments and historical situations has been published, scholars still disagree about the characteristics of gender structures in China-at any given time, in any given class, in any given place. Recent scholarship has made feminists wary of cross-cultural comparisons that find only similarities, but differences also raise the distasteful possibility of exoticization, or of using another tradition as an Other against which to center and define the self or a dominant culture. Nonetheless, recent scholarship on intellectual traditions in the Song, Ming, and Qing, and on well-cited literary and historical texts that approach gender issues, has given us much more with which to work than was available only a short time ago. According to Alison H. Black, in Chinese cosmology and

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Confucian thought, gender was not a primary ontological category. While claiming that Chinese metaphysics is "explicitly gender-oriented," Black still finds it difficult to "track down the significance of gender within correlative cosmology" (Black 1986: 168-69). Despite quotations from the Shijingthat women are unteachable and bring disorder and clear statements in the canonical Liji that women are inferior, when Black investigates the Yijing and further debates on yin/yang attributes, she finds that in Chinese metaphysics in general gender was not a primary organizing concept. Bao Jialin, however, traces two primary strands of yin/yang cosmology, one that is clearly gender based and differentiates men and women through an elevated/base opposition, and the other that is not. Bao's purpose is to track down the relationship between the idea that men are elevated and women are base, which is expressed repeatedly in texts throughout Chinese history, and the systematic development of yin/yang philosophy. Referring to research by yin/yang scholar Wang Meng'ou, Bao quotes eart'y references (dating from y8o B.c.) to yin/yang as a system for organizing and explaining natural phenomena such as earthquakes, and texts of the Warring States period that link yin/yang and human affairs (Bao Jialin 1988c: 37). Han scholar Dong Zhongshu constructed a detailed connection between yin/yang and human interaction that included the idea that yin is female and base, and yang is male and elevated. While his system was relational in that males in the position of son would be yin to their fathers' yang, the relational character was not absolute: women were not only encompassed within the relational structure as fu (kinswomen), but were also marked as essentially yin and base. Furthermore, Dong's elevation of yang meant that a harmonious relationship between yin and yang-the fundamental complementary nature often associated with yin/yang cosmology in the contemporary West-was not necessary either in the natural world or in human relations. The important thing was that yang always should prevail (p. 40). 25

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In analyzing Liu Xiang's influential text Lienii zhuan (Biographies of notable women), which based its gender theories on Dong Zhongshu's system, Bao Jialin shows that the text carried on the notion of yin as base or lowly and yang as elevated or lofty (p. 41). Other Han texts described meteorological phenomena as specifically and negatively influencing women (p. 41). Ban Zhao's Niijie (Admonitions for women), which was often invoked as the most basic text for women, advised women to understand and embody their lowly and weak essence, part of their nature from birth. Ban Zhao utilized yin/yang philosophy to illustrate her idea that yang's virtue was strength, and yin's utility was weakness: "What is valued in men is strength, what is beautiful in women is weakness" (p. 42). Bao Jialin lists example after example of how negative qualities of weakness and destruction were gendered in a female yin while positive qualities of strength and creativeness were gendered in a male yang. At the same time, many texts insisted on the equality and complementarity of yin and yang and regarded both as good. This was especially true of much later Song and Ming idealist philosophy (/ixue). Within this tradition, what produced disorder (/uan) was not an excess of yin, but an inharmonious or unbalanced relationship between yin and yang. While he did not explicitly construct a yin/female/negative versus yang/male/positive dichotomy, the famous philosopher Zhu Xi did imply that in theory, yin and yang are complementary, good, and equal, but in social practice, "good and evil can be called yang and yin, and can be called male and female" (p. 45). Zhou Dunyi agreed when he wrote that disorder originated with women. These negative connections to women were repeated in many Ming arid Qing texts (pp. 45-46). Bao Jialin traces further solidification of yin/female/negative ideology to the late Ming, when Jesuits entered China and challenged Chinese notions of gender, inner/outer space, and the general philosophical ordering of reality. Bao quotes a number of

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sources that show how late Ming scholars believed Western ideas to be exactly opposite of what now became "Chinese" ideas; in Western culture, they believed, women ruled over men and went "out" to function in the social world of politics and culture. Thus to reinforce an already long tradition of positing yin/female/negative against yang/male/positive and to identifY it as Chinese was an act of cultural definition against a threatening outside force, and an early response to imperialism. These ideas were extended even more widely to the social sphere, including practices such as the inner/outer separation of female and male spaces and functions, the constriction and hiding of i:he female body, and the submission of females to males in almost all kin roles (pp. 47-48). By the twentieth century, yin/yang theory was being used in both ways: to sustain and continue the traditional subservience of women within the household, and to argue that this subservience was a perversion of the "original" complementarity and equality of yin and yang. In 1916 Xie Wuliang argued that yin and yang should be equal: In heaven and earth there is one yin and one yang, and the way of human life is one male and one female. In antiquity male and female were equal, in medieval times males were valued and females debased, and in present times male and female equality is being promoted. The equality of male and female in antiquity is a natural law; the valuing of males and debasing of females in medieval times is an issue of power; in present times, equal power between males and females is once again promoted, and this is the dawning of a selfevident truth. In ancient times so-called husband and wife had the original meaning of equals, so it is said that qi (wife) is qi (completeness). (Xie Wuliang 1916: 50) According to Tani E. Barlow (1989), the emphasis on gender polarity apparent in intellectual discussions of the "woman's problem" (jimu wenti) was a Western import. In the 1920s writers of

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NAT I 0 NALlS M

romantic stories about women fell under the influence of European bourgeois culture. In particular, Flaubert's Madame Bovary mapped out the confused, romantic, and sexualized characters later appropriated by Ding Ling in her early fiction (p. 27). Thus Barlow argues that the Chinese womanhood that Ding Ling constructed was a Western narrative about eroticized female characters who cannot escape from their consciousness. As the Communist party consolidated. its power, Barlow claims, it substituted the idea of a nation made up of units (guo) for the concept of the family (jia), eventually replacing the monarch-minister and fatherson bonds with those of state-citizen and parents-children but leaving intact the relationship of husband-wife. 26 In her 1994 article on fonu (woman), guojia (state), and jiating (family), Barlow argues that in late imperial gender discourse, there is no one prediscursive category of "woman" that produces the "woman." Rather, Barlow claims, yin/yang [involves] differentiated positions: not two anatomical "sexes," but a profusion of relational, bound, unequal dyads, each signifying difference and positioning difference analogically. A nil is a daughter, unequally related to parents and parents-in-law. A xiaozi, or filial son, is differentially unequal to mother and father, yin to their yang. A fo is a wife, tied in a secondary relation to her husband. A xianfo is a wife who, grasping the powers visited upon the secondary yin term, masters through familiarity with protocol. (Barlow 1994= 259) Thus according to Barlow, in the twentieth century new narratives indicated "differential positionality" (p. 261) and the modernfonu, a statist category, as well as the niixing, a sign ofWesternization, emerged. 27 Barlow's elaboration of the yin/yang relational nature of what Westerners regard as gender categories can be useful in deciphering many aspects of late imperial and modern gender pracrices,

WOMEN, WRITING, AND

NATIONALISM

37

and in preventing us from readily incorporating Chinese categories into our naturalized Western beliefs. At the same time, however, her exclusive focus on the complementarity of yin and yang does not explain all of Chinese gender practice. As Bao Jialin and others have shown, along with the tradition of relational structures that informs so many narratives is another more essentializing practice of gendering, present in the application of yin/yang theories to the social world and in the long textual tradition that associates women with a set and ritualized behavior, language, and social context. These overwhelmingly negative references to women cannot but constitute an essentialization of female qualities-as weakness, darkness, stupidity, inferiority, and so on. While many texts refer to women as mothers, wives, and daughters, sometimes they call them nuren or nuzi (woman or girl), as in Confucius's famous reference to the difficulty of dealing with nuzi and xiaoren (petty people). This nuzi is neither a biological construction nor a familial or kin category, but rather was a term for essential femaleness. Even taking into account that the Chinese state was modeled after the family and the relationship of the male subject to the ruler was metaphorically similar to that of the wife to the husband, this relational structure does not mean that women's position was as variable or flexible as that of men. In terms of social practice, it is difficult to ignore that a man could unquestionably engage in a wide range of non-kin and nonfamilial activities, while a woman who tried to do likewise would be criticized, barred, or symbolically enveloped within a debate about the propriety of her behavior. The social practices available to men included political and economic activities outside the home, friendships with men outside the family, extramarital sexual relationships, scientific inquiry (gewu) and philosophical work (both were also open to women, but only if the object were to complete a dead husband's work), teaching, publication of literary texts, and much more. 28 Thus a philosophical system that holds the positions of men and women to be com-

38

WOMEN, WRITING, AND NATIONALISM

plementary or relational can only partially explain the reality of Chinese society. Are traditional Confucian bodies truly "unstable," as Barlow states (1994: 259), even if there is no originary biological notion incorporated into the feminine marking of the body? While granting Barlow's implicit point that Westerners may see gender hierarchy and opposition where something else was actually at work, an overwhelming wealth of textual material suggests that some kind of essential gendering also was taking place. As Keith McMahon shows, even in the classic beauty-scholar romances where a woman moves up through the social hierarchy, she does so by assuming a superior position in the gender hierarchydressing as a man, for example. 29 She never assumes a nonfemale position-a third, ungendered position-but always a male position. Dorothy Ko also explains that while examples of gender inversion in literature blurred the boundary between inner and outer characteristic of the idea of separate spheres, these examples did not weaken the notion of separate spheres for men and women, but rather reinforced it: "the ease with which these girls reverted back to their female identity was indicative of the casualness with which temporary transgressions of gender boundaries were regarded" (Dorothy Ko 1994: 141). The Five Classics (wujing)-the Shijing (Book of poetry), the Shujing (Book of history), the Yijing (Book of changes), the Liji (Book of rites), and the Chunqiu (Spring and autumn annals)have throughout the imperial period represented the core of Chinese learning for elites. Students studied each of the classics for a year or more. In his research on these texts, Richard W. Guisso uncovers a severely negative and biased view of woman that he attributes to male misogyny. Analyzing entries in the dictionary Shuowen jiezi, Guisso finds that the negative attributes associated with characters with the female radical outnumber by a factor of three those with positive attributes (Guisso 1981: 52). Guisso summarizes Confucian values as contained in the classics:

W 0 M E N , W R I T I N G , A N D N AT I 0 N ALI S M

39

The Confucian solution to male-female conflict was therefore threefold: separation of function, acknowledgment of hierarchy, and the idealistic injunction that mutual love and respect would be infused into the relationship. Behind all three was the assumption that the female was inferior by nature, she was dark as the moon and changeable as water, jealous, narrow-minded and insinuating. She was indiscreet, unintelligent and dominated by emotion. Her beauty was a snare for the unwary male, the ruination of states. Woman unrestrained was a disturbing influence in the cosmos ... [but] guided by the male creative principle, the thunder over the lake, her better qualities would surface. (pp. 57-58) In their discussion of gender in Fuchu lishi dibiao (Floating out from the surface of history), Meng Yue and Dai Jinhua claim that from start to finish, the family centered men as its sign, standard, and primary organizational element (Meng Yue and Dai Jinhua 1989: 6). At the same time, the family was much more significant in women's lives than in men's, because men had access to a nonfamilial social life (pp. 6-7). Thus Meng and Dai define the family as a "special control system" set up explicitly for women. It was within the "human walls" of family and clan that women were virtually imprisoned (p. 7). Therefore, although Meng and Dai recognize the categories of daughter, mother, wife, kinswoman, and daughter-in-law (nu, mu, qi, fo, xi) as both relational and ontological, they insist that such positionality holds true only for women and not for men, and thus is not true positionality. When situated within society at large, equal relations have been replaced by a clearly hierarchical system that constructs women as innately inferior (p. 10). The canonical Liji (Book of rituals), Yili (Rites and rituals), and Lunyu (Analects) separate foren (women, kinswomen) and ren (humans) as two distinct concepts, put women (nuzi) under men (nanzi) as those who must be taught by men, and equate the two notions of Ju (kinswomen) and Ju (obeying) (p. 10).

40

WOMEN, WRITING, AND NATIONALISM

Thus there is no real parallel between fu (woman, kinswoman) andfu (man, husband): Furthermore, from "man" (nrtn) comes husband (ju), and it is complete male self-realization: in becoming fu he gains a certain power and social trust in relation to others, as the head of a household. But when "woman" (nil) becomes kinswoman (fu), she loses all self-realization ... , she disappears in others' shadows, eliminating her difference and entering the social order.... The meaning of "human" (ren) in "human relations" (renlun) does not include women, but on the contrary, excludes and eliminates women. (pp. 10-u) Dai and Meng trace the systematic displacement of women through the special discursive codes of literature, the masculinist use of the female voice, and the construction of the female sex by poetic and natural imagery, commodification, and eroticization. It is not only China where gender meanings are complex and contradictory. In the nineteenth-century West, there was no consistent way of constructing gender; rather, the "woman question" was elaborated differently in different countries. In Great Britain and the United States, important issues were social and legal: struggles to get the vote, to overturn laws that granted men nearly exclusive control over property and people, and to enter maledominated institutions and professions. Europeans, on the other hand, developed notions of womanliness that highlighted and celebrated sexual difference and worked toward complementarity between men and women. Rather than insisting that women enter male professions, they criticized the nature of social institutions (Offen 1988: 123-24). We now believe that the word feminism should be written feminisms, a word that better accounts for the variety of experiences and expressions that fall under the category. Many feminists have had difficulty interpreting the Swedish writer Ellen Key-in China a widely translated essayist-because her focus on motherhood makes her appear almost

WOMEN, WRITING, AND NATIONALISM

41

antifeminist by some definitions (pp. 124-25). Karen Offen points out that "relational feminism represents the dominant line of argument prior to the twentieth century throughout the Western world ... [proposing] a gender-based but egalitarian vision of social organization" (p. 135). However, many U.S. scholars still embrace the Anglo-American individualistic tradition of feminism, which "placed political priority on enactment of the Equal Rights Amendment and on dismantling the gender-stratified educational system and economy that disadvantaged women through occupational segregation" (p. 137). This is partially a legacy of the U.S. and British feminist intellectuals' downplaying of sexual difference in the 1920s, a trend criticized in France as foreign and a threat to "French visions of womanliness" (pp. 143-44). Because well into the twentieth century "sexual dimorphism" was fundamental to thought in France and because the French viewed the family rather than the individual as the foundation of society, they rejected the individualist approach as unfeminine (p. 145). Therefore, until the publication of Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex in 1949, feminists in France seldom identified "physiological difference and the sexual division of labor predicated on it ... as a primary instrument of women's oppression" (Offen 1988: 147). However, despite differences in the unfolding of what women's liberation should actually mean, it was the necessary context of modern social life and debate. Arguments by early Chinese male "feminists" such as Ye Shaojun, Zhou Zuoren, Lu Xun (18811936), and Mao Dun show that while both trends of feminism were influential in China, it was a more individualistic feminism combined with socialist or revolutionary ideology that gained the upper hand in the early May Fourth period. The ideology of the individual subject and women's capacity for distinctively human ren'ge (character/personality) so widely debated in May Fourth journals, plus the reformist critique of the Confucian family, made it almost impossible for emerging leftists to identify

41

WOMEN, WRITING, AND NATIONALISM

women's role within the family as a position from which to initiate a retheorization of woman. 30 Leftist theory, and Communist party social practice, in the 1930s downplayed gender as a significant category, replacing it with more emphasis on class struggle. Ding Ling (1904-86), who did not begin writing until the late 1920s and who claimed that she altered her approach toward women and writing by 1930 to accommodate her developing leftist beliefs, still continued to work with gender issues until she was criticized in 1942, and to some extent even after. Socialist criticism throughout the 1920s and into the 1930s demanded that women abandon the individualistic "modern girl" role and write women into a new, relatively ungendered relationship with society. Yet the debates over gender in the early twentieth century are complicated: what was at issue cannot easily be separated into influences from the West on the one hand, and the rich and provocative social practices, narrative representations, and naturalized ideologies inherited from the Ming and Qing dynasties on the other. Whereas many traditional Chinese concepts of gender situated both women and men in their relational contexts and emphasized their functions as wives and husbands, mothers and fathers, and sons and daughters, outside these relational concepts was a more essentialized weltanschauung that framed women as destructive, weak, submissive, and inferior. Because of this elaborate historical accumulation, although Western ideas of individualism and individual rights, freedom, and personality penetrated China early in the twentieth century, the "modern girl" who appeared in May Fourth fiction was more than just a Chinese version of these abstractions. In the modern girl character, we can see not only ideas ofWestern individualism, but also the result of investigations into both the position and definition of women in China within the family, and into concepts of femininity, physical self-sacrifice, and moral virtue that developed contemporaneously. At the base of the traditional Chinese structure of gender was moral virtue, or de. Summed up in the popular saying nuzi wu

WOMEN, WRITING, AND NATIONALISM

43

cai bian shi de (for women, lack of literary skill is a virtue), moral virtue for women became a physical practice that contained, restricted, mutilated, and even effaced the body, a self-sacrificing trial that constituted itself against a masculinist literary field known as cai, literary talent. In the modern cultural debate, women's virtue, with its own set of demands and restrictions, focused on the body and its concrete, physical meanings as defined through its manual labor within the family, hygiene and sanitation, sexual behavior, fashion, and human relations in all spheres. The literary field, although complicated through the use of feminine metaphors to represent relations of domination and submission and thus appearing to have a powerful feminine component, was transcendently masculine. Furthermore, each area became newly marked as a special public arena that could signify the nation's power and prestige. In the process, some writers sought to remake women, traditionally separated and cloistered in the family, through modern hygiene, nutrition, and education. The result was to be a Chinese woman that could be brought out and presented to the world on behalf of the nation. At the same time, these writers took up modern literature by adopting the "international" form of poetic free verse, novels, and short stories. The literary field and the modern woman thus became the site of a debate that revolved around the inclusion of women writers, feminine styles, and female topics in an arena that was becoming globally significant in the sense that it involved positioning China in a worldwide power hierarchy. The following chapter investigates the constitution of the feminine, moral field against the masculine, literary field, and the physical meaning of modern female moral virtue.

2. WOMAN,

MORAL

VIRTUE,

AND

LITERARY TEXT

As a state-identified being, the selfof the male citizen is fully unfolded and made complete. The state is the arena that calls upon and sustains the individual's commitment

to

universal ethical life, satisfying

expansive yearnings through the opportunity to sacrifice "on behalf of the individuality of the state." ... To preserve the larger civic body, which must be "as one," particular bodies must be sacrificed.

jean Bethke Elshtain, "Sovereignty, Identity, and Sacrifice"

During the Qing dynasty, when literati engaged in an extended debate about textual training for girls, Yuan Mei elicited angry denunciations for his heterodox views on gender and literary talent and his poetry school that accepted girl students. The issue of textual training for girls became more pressing when missionaries set up schools for girls and when Chinese intellectuals published controversial translations and books on education for girls. It was within the context of the national humiliation caused by the Opium wars that the intelligentsia learned that the victors, previously dismissed as barbarians but quickly reappraised as they wrestled the mantle of civilization away from China, seemed to live by a set of gender meanings that allowed women not only a different social role, but also access to the entirety of national learning. By the early twentieth century, when nation-states were forming all over the world, Chinese social critics working on the "problem of women" (fonu wenti) often fixed on issues that recognized a certain historical background: in premodern Chinese traditions,

WOMAN, MORA!. VIRTUE, AND LITERARY TEXT

45

de (moral virtue) functioned as a female sphere of knowledge and self-presentation against cai (literary talent), a transcendent male sphere of knowledge and self-presentation that included complex issues of education and learning. 1 Whereas some aspects of the delcai relationship were restricted to elite culture, many extended into society at large. The combination of two discursive categories, that of woman and literature, in the practice of women's writing (nuxing wenxue, nuzi wenxue, or funu wenxue) transgressed both the sphere of de and that of cai, and became a radical modern alternative, promoted by a number of reformist critics. 2 Reformers presented woman/literature as "modern" and attacked woman/morality as a remnant of the past. However, the issue was hotly contested precisely because the traditionally sanctioned contradiction between (feminine) moral virtue and (masculine) literary talent came to the surface in the idea and work of the woman writer. The reformists' promotion of women writers and women's literature should be viewed as a promotion of modernity, with its typical dissatisfaction with a past that can only be set right with new culturalpractices. Yet it was not only that. The modern gaze, which looked back and found fault with the past, focused on the specifically Chinese social traditions of de and cai, which carried gendered meanings that had the potential to extend their influence into modern life.

"De" and "Cai':· Moral Virtue versus Literary Skill And, while it is not true that none of the virtuous and model ladies of China are literate and cultivated, srill, the best of rhem are immersed in poetry, content with brush and ink [rather than useful skills and moral principles]. Words about sighing over old age and lamenting sorrow fill the women's quarters; phrases about spring flowers and the autumn moon abound in ink on paper. And the poorest are buried in stories from fiction and popular rhymes. Their fathers and elder

46

WOMAN, MORAL VIRTUE, AND LITERARY TEXT

brothers have failed to guide them according to their inclinations. On the contrary, they consider these [literary pursuits] useless and prohibit them .... Let us rescue 2oo,ooo,ooo prisoners from the dungeons, eradicate the foul and absurd customs of more than 2,ooo years, propagate the Way of the Sage, and restore our great utopian commonwealth [ Ta-t'ung]. Alas, China, do not impoverish yourself by stopping up

talents and stifling intelligence! Kang Tongwei, "On the Advantages and Disadvantages ofEducating Women" [All bracketed words are in the English translation. K'ang T'ung-wei r898.}

In an article on women and literary talent during the Qing, Liu Yongcong invokes the saying that "Moral virtue is superior to literary skill" (de zhong yu cai) to explicate the meaning of cai for women. Through numerous references, Liu argues that although cai sometimes referred to general skill, it usually meant literary talent or wencai (Liu Yongcong 1988: 122, 128). The gist of Liu's research is to show that for both women and men, cai was often considered a liability that could result in poverty, misfortune, or early death-thus the opposition between cai and ming (life)-but for women, cai was especially dangerous and something to be avoided. De was definitely preferred (p. 127). Thus in Fushen liuji (Six chapters of a floating life) by Shen Fu (r763-r8o7), the early death of Shen's wife, Chen Yun (r763r8o3), became an example of what could happen to women with excessive literary talent. Chen's death also elicited criticisms of excessive emotion between husband and wife and highlighted the conflict between cai and de for women (pp. 134-35). Cai was valued, but it entailed a sacrifice, especially when women aspired to it. To show that the concept of cai was only with difficulty associated with women, yet that this view at the same time was contested, Liu quotes Cainu shuo (On talented women) of Chen Zhaolun (I?00-I77I): "It is commonly said that women should not gain fame from literary talent, and those who do gain fame from literary talent will often suffer misfortune. I hardly think so. On its own, fortune is not easy to gain, and hard to hold"

WOMAN, MORAL VIRTUE, AND LITERARY TEXT

47

(p. 136). The ability of de to suppress and fight against cai in women is brought out in Liu's quote from Ye Huang, who claimed that women with cai became melancholy and pathetic, and would, if their cai was further developed, sink into melancholic oblivion; thus "it is necessary to suppress cai with de" (gu cai bi zhen zhi yi de) (p. 136). 3 Other scholars who have considered women's culture from late Ming to mid-Qing times have focused on the meaning of the woman's voice in poetry and the way in which it subverted or appropriated the dominant discourse, turning it toward new ends. 4 Late eighteenth-century polemics on the correct interpretation of classical texts grew into discussions on the meaning of writing, and approached another, more general topic: the relationship between the proper woman and proper writing. Although it may have originated much earlier, by the late Ming the saying that lack of literary talent was a virtue for women (nuzi wu cai bian shi de) became widely quoted. This oppositional situating of literary talent or cai and moral virtue or de continued through the Qing up into the twentieth century. 5 Part of the difficulty in associating virtue with talent was in the public nature of talent. The practice of cai could result in the dissemination of texts and, in that sense, cai allowed its practitioners to go out, thus crossing the boundary of the inner/outer dichotomy that stipulated structured social interactions between women and men and separate spheres for men and women in architectural arrangements, clothing, education, and family relationships. In the story of the woman poet Xiaoqing, Ellen Widmer shows how celebrity became a problem for a woman, bringing dishonor and misfortune onto herself and her family (Widmer 1992: 132). Susan Mann traces how Zhang Xuecheng's famous attack on Yuan Mei, Fuxue (Women's learning), used the public nature of literary display to invert the meaning of talent. Zhang claimed that because men were overly ambitious for fame (ming), their talent was corrupt and the dao of their writing was inau-

48

WOMAN, MORAL VIRTUE, AND LITERARY TEXT

thentic. Women, on the other hand, were not caught up in the game of public honors and thus expressed a purer and more lofty meaning. Zhang claimed that wherever official honors are proffered, the wise and the talented will vie for them. In that sense, the scholar pursues learning for the same reason that the farmer tills his fields, and there is nothing at all unusual about it. But a women's writing is not her vocation, and so when a woman happens to excel as a result of her own natural endowment, she need not compete over style, nor be stirred by the promise of fame and reputation. (Quoted in Mann 1992: 44-45) Zhang blamed the decline of women's literary culture on the creation of the Palace Music School (jiaofong si) during the Tang, when "women were transformed from literary subjects into objects of male desire" (p. 47). In her discussion of the "female voice" in poetry, Maureen Robertson finds in poems written by men the voyeuristic eye and the presentation of sexualized and romanticized suffering, narcissism in women, and fetishized boudoir furniture, clothing, and objects (Robertson 1992: 69). These "literati-feminine" voices also can be found in the poems of women writing during the Tang, such as the three major poets Li Jilan, Yu Xuanji, and Xue Tao. Robertson argues that during the late Ming and Qing, women poets utilized various strategies to negotiate with this apparently feminine yet masculinized, or male-feminine language, including rewriting image codes, neutralizing the gaze within the boudoir, marking new topical territory, and shifting the voice in friendship poetry addressed to women (p. 82). Martin W. Huang also has written about the conventional use of female figures to "project a male literati author's anxieties," a practice that constructed an analogy of marginality between deserted wives and the literati (Martin W. Huang 1995: 78). Thus just like a wife or concubine "who had to vie with other wives/concubines for her husband's

WOMAN, MORAL VIRTUE, AND LITERARY TEXT

49

favor, a minister had to compete with other ministers for the emperor's favor" (p. 79). Because of this concubine complex, poets often adopted a feminine voice and created a literary tradition of politio-erotic lyricism (pp. 79, 81). The question of women's education and its ability to establish cai or de as the underlying theory of women's existence is taken up by Dorothy Ko, who points out that the debate on women's virtue and talent intensified exactly at the time when more and more women were becoming educated and transgressing the boundaries between inner and outer (Dorothy Ko 1992: 9; see also Handlin 1975). Ko argues that the opposition between cai and de was only one vision of women's education. A new theory, emerging through mother-daughter relationships in the inner quarters, viewed cai and de as mutually reinforcing, and produced a literary practice that differed from the prevailing logic: "In real life, the inner-outer boundary was constantly being trespassed or redrawn. Women's education was a powerful impetus to such negotiations between domestic and public space, or between male and female domains. It is no accident that the rationale for and contents of women's education were among the most contested issues in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century China. As we shall see, this debate was linked to efforts to redefine womanhood, or a woman's natural calling" (Dorothy Ko 1992: 14). Yet even if the meaning of the public presentation of women's literary writing was changing, there were still many references to families burning man~scripts written by women (because writing was not a woman's calling); indeed manuscripts were often inscribed with the words "rescued from fire" as a reference to their unsuitability for publication (pp. 18-19).6 Whereas writing for self-amusement or to alleviate grief was more acceptable (but still dangerous in its ability to distract women from household chores), public writing was less so. Recently, Dorothy Ko has continued to investigate the meaning and practice of writing, specifically as performed in the sev-

50

WOMAN, M 0 RA L VIRTUE, AND LITERARY TEXT

enteenth century by Jiangnan wives and daughters of scholarofficial families. While Ko cites many examples of women writing and emerging publicly as writers, she emphasizes how this in fact reinforced the Confucian doctrine of separate spheres, and comments that the times were changing so rapidly that it is difficult to assess the influence of these writing opportunities on women (Dorothy Ko 1994: 65). Because Ko is arguing against a notion of the women's world as "cloistered, monochromatic, or repetitive" (p. 15), she emphasizes the "positive image of the woman writer" (p. 51) that. emerged from the urban world of reading and writing where, she believes, gender boundaries were blurred. Part of this image came from the elevation of feminine characteristics, such as serenity, as the basis of true and pure poetry (p. 62). At the same time, however, Ko believes that the woman writer's positive image is difficult to interpret. From hindsight, the impact of the urban print culture can only be described as a paradox. On an individual level, some women gained parity with men in the world of learning and literature; the opposite is true on a systemic level, where the promotion of the woman writer served only co reinforce the prevalent premise of gender distinctions .... The rise of the woman reader-writer, in other words, was a sign largely of the strength of the Confucian gender system, not its demise. The educated woman brought her new cultural resources to the service of her supposed natural duties of motherhood and moral guardianship. With the support and promotion of the new woman as erudite mother and teacher, the underpinnings of the gender system became even more solid than before. (pp. 66-67) Although Ko's work provides some evidence to show that within a limited environment, constrained by place and class, some aspects of the cai/de opposition may have been changing or may not have been absolute to begin with, her work as a whole sup-

WOMAN, MORAL VIRTUE, AND LITERARY TEXT

51

ports my argument: through the Ming and into the Qing, and right up to the modern period, the concepts of cai and de contained, as theory and practice, gendered and counter meanings. The contradictory meanings of de and cai continued into the twentieth century, where they interacted with gender ideas that developed through China's increasing contact with Japan and the West. In one of the earliest systematic twentieth-century expositions on male-female equality, Jin Yi's Nujie zhong (Bell of women's world) in 1903, the author pointed out that the so-called deficiencies of women all resulted from their lack of study, which prevented them from producing cai, and from their lack of social interaction, which disallowed them from engaging in appropriate activities. 7 Jin Yi blamed the historical loss of the nation ( wangguo) on the Chinese and their customs, including the doctrine of male and female separation (Bao Jialin 1988b: 276). Jin Yi criticized the physical nature of the definition of women, including footbinding, make-up and decoration, and elaborate hair styles, all of which sapped female energy and wasted time, advocated equality for women and men, and encouraged women to go abroad to Europe and America to study (pp. 276-79). Another example of a critique that implicitly recognized the physical nature of gender ideology as applied through ideals of self-sacrifice was that of Qiu Jin, who in her newspaper Zhongguo nubao encouraged women to dedicate their bodies to revolution and promoted natural feet, freedom in marriage, women's education and independence, women's militia, and women's physical education, and attacked the standard of morality applied to women. Anxiety about educating and training women in the powerful traditions of textual learning meant that the earliest schools opened for women were run by Western missionaries rather than Chinese. This fact was a potent symbolic statement: women's education and rights were promoted by the masters of military power and industrial technology and those who, through privileges gained under unequal treaties, were well established in their

52

WOMAN, MORAL VIRTUE, AND LITERARY TEXT

cultural mission in China. Women educated at missionary schools often framed their work within the traditional concepts of feminine self-sacrifice, but their work itself differed radically from that of women in the past. The first group of Chinese women to travel to America for higher education had graduated from missionary schools in China, and they saw their study to become doctors in American medical schools as a kind of feminine service, a form of piety. Their work impressed reformers, who referred to them as examples of how female education could rectifY problems in China. The second group, which was in America around 1900 to 1915, included many who became teachers and tried to "live up to the modern version of the good mother/virtuous wife ideal (xianqi liangmu)" (Weili Ye 1994: 316). Only with the third group, who were students during the May Fourth New Culture movement, did the issues of moving into careers formerly thought of as exclusively male become central to the women's study. 8 In their devotion to the feminine virtue of service and working against the notion of gender equality, which they regarded as antifeminine and antisocial, the early group ofWestern-educated women doctors identified strongly with the central ideal of female virtue, physical self-sacrifice. In 1912, Ida Kahn (Kang Aide, 1873-1931) wrote a story, ''An Amazon in Cathay," that favorably contrasted a nurse in a missionary hospital to a woman soldier, and in 1907 Jin Yunmei (1864-1934), also an early doctor, wrote an article praising the conventional feminine virtues but adding to them strength and keenness (Weili Ye 1994: 322-23). 9 Considering that soon after the Republic was founded in 1911 the Army Ministry disbanded women's troops and prohibited their formation, it is not surprising that even before, there was a taboo against women soldiers. Even so, a division of women was put together by Wu Qingshu and fought successfully in Nanjing and Hangzhou. 10 The prohibition on women in war did not extend to nursing, which was regarded as a female occupation. In an article published in English in 1934, the writer Sophia H.

WOMAN, MORAL VIRTUE, AND LITERARY TEXT

53

Chen (Chen Hengzhe, 1890-1976) discussed her impressions of the missionary influence and culture she experienced when she was younger, and recorded her strong distaste for the cultural chauvinism and condescension she saw in the missionaries. 11 Chen credited missionaries with three kinds of influences: the restorative, the evolutionary, and the revolutionary (Sophia H. Chen 1934: 29). In her description of a missionary meeting in New York that she attended, Chen described her rage at missionaries' portrayal of Chinese women as totally lacking culture (p. 45). "Instances like this," Chen wrote, "happened over and over again during my six years of study in the U.S.A. until they succeeded in strengthening the prejudice that had already existed in my mind against missionaries; though strange enough, Christianity itself had at the same time succeeded in convincing me that it was really one of the greatest moral forces in the history of mankind, as well as being one of the greatest religions in the world" (p. 46). When Chen returned to China, she saw missionary efforts there as full of both honest idealism and a disdain for native culture. The woman writer Bing Xin (1900-?) adopted a similar view in her story "Xiangpian" (The photograph), which showed the contradictory love/hate ambivalence of two Chinese university students in America, Tianxi and Shuzhen, toward missionaries in China (Bing Xin 1934). Tianxi, who studies theology, speaks with disgust about the way missionaries called him to the front of the room in class to show "the kind of Chinese youth our education there has produced" (p. 251). Tianxi and Shuzhen nationalistically reject the missionary belief that China is a barbarian land without culture (p. 252). The 1906 play Niizi aiguo (Women love their country), by Liang Ji, centered on the establishment of a school for girls and showed that the notion of cai for men and de for women still functioned as active social knowledge. 12 The heroine of the play, Lu Youkui, worries day and night about the fate of China and is determined to set up a girls' school to help raise the educational

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level of the populace and bring into play the productive energies of half of the nation. She begins with a speech: My family name is Lu, my name is Zhidao, my zi is Youkui, I am from the county of Qishi in China. 13 Unfortunately my parents have passed away and I only have one older brother, a school graduate (hongmen xiushi). Because he saw that foreign countries were rich and strong, and our country was being severely harmed, he prepared his resources and went abroad to study, leaving me alone at home. Although I am a woman (nuzi), I want to do something extraordinary. I hate it when people say the likes of women are terribly base. I believe women also have five sense organs and four limbs and are equally capable and intelligent. 14 Why should they pass their days parasitically immersed in make-up, clothes, and hair ornaments? Why can't they accomplish great things, as men do? Because of this I have cherished a determination to learn about the conditions of other countries. Unfortunately my China is weak and impoverished, and oppressed by foreign countries. The commoners of my country, not realizing calamity was coming, were as if asleep in a dream. The thought of it tortures one. (Liang Ji 1906: 2-3) Lu Youkui's protest shows that although the conventional logic of assigning useful and important social action to men was the norm, a new mechanism, that of setting a global context, required that women's abilities and roles be reevaluated. Within this "awakening," a common metaphor for the new perspective that military defeat and semicolonialism had brought, China's past was regarded as a mystifying sleep that had suppressed everyone's national instincts. To awake required questioning China's hermetic traditional educational system, especially the hoary notion that formal learning must be for boys alone. 15 Through this basic perception of difference between traditional native culture and a technologically superior modern alternative-repeated in many

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countries-the modern girl and the old-style girl, the Westernized girl and the Chinese girl, the shy, demure, obedient girl and the bold, wild, self-promoting girl, the literate girl and the illiterate girl, the girl with braided hair and the girl with short hair came into being in countless novels, stories, and plays. When girls' schools other than those run by missionaries finally became available, the focus of the debate became exactly what girls should be taught and exactly what their relation to the canonical texts of the past (then being reevaluated for their possible contributions to modern China) should be. Many Chinese-educated women writing early in the twentieth century believed that women's educational curricula should prepare girls to play traditional roles in the family, a notion supported not only by cultural norms, but also by the government. In the 1905 educational guidelines laid out by the Qing court, women's education (niixue) was listed under "methods for family education" (Chen Dongyuan 1965: 249). Two years later, the Ministry of Education set up 36 regulations for women's normal schools and 26 for girls' primary schools (p. 249). Chen Dongyuan categorizes the explicit goals of the women's normal schools-to prepare teachers for girls' primary schools-as within the tradition of "good wives and virtuous mothers" (p. 249). The moralistic content of women's education and the prescribed framework of separate spheres was clearly stated by the Ministry of Education: Women's moral virtue (nude) in China has an illustrious history. As for the Way of women becoming kinswomen (fu) and mothers, all classics and histories, all early Confucians have written about it at length. Now as we teach women students at normal schools, we must first attend to this. In service, we must strive not to go against China's historical ritualistic training and customs of feminine deportment, and establish chastity and purity, obedience and benevolence, modesty and tranquillity, diligence and frugality and all

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beauteous virtues. First, the false theory of wanton freedom-such as not respecting the separation between men and women, choosing one's own mate, or engaging in political meetings or discussions-these must be strictly eliminated and not allowed to become customs. (p. 249) The texts listed as appropriate for women were classics of women's moral virtue, illustrating Chen Dongyuan's claim that the concept of education for women consisting basically of moral training changed only very slowly during the twentieth century. Chinese women educated in the West often were equally as adamant as men or as those educated in China that women should restrict themselves to domestic or nurturing careers. Writing in 1910, Ruby Sia, a Chinese student in the United States, claimed homemaking to be the profession of women and the goal of their education, just as other more public-oriented training prepared men for their professions. Margarate Wang, who gave a prize-winning speech at the 1909 Chinese students' summer conference in the United States, established home and country as the arenas where women should fulfill their abilities, and Esther M. Bok focused on education in preparing women to be "better mothers and homemakers" (Weili Ye 1994: 326-27). In 1907, the Ministry of Education issued regulations that defined female education as "a means to strengthen traditional feminine virtues"; these rules remained in effect for several years (p. 328). Even much later, in 1931, P. S. Tseng (Zeng Baosun), founder of a girls' school in Changsha, supported education in homemaking and discouraged girl students from pursuing the same studies and goals as boys: "Instead of realizing that true equality lies in each developing along its own line, [girl students] try to approximate the male standard of thought and life, thus turning themselves into pseudo-males" (P. S. Tseng 1931: 289). Hu Binxia, editor of Funu zazhi from 1916 to 1919, in 1913 gave a talk to women students at Cornell College in which she contrasted the self-sacrificing woman of yesterday with the self-

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centered woman of today. Hu described herself as a combination of both. Later, Hu became much more critical of the traditional family structure, and wrote and published articles on hygiene, child rearing, and other subjects (Weili Ye 1994: 331-32). The issue of women's education-both its content and its purposecontinued to inspire vigorous debate, and although the debate was not always on literary issues, the contrast between cai and de was often the context of discussion: it remained taboo for women to enter the self-promoting, outer sphere of cai. In a 1915 editorial in Funu zazhi entitled "Lixiang zhi niixuesheng" (The ideal girl student), the writer (using the pseudonym "The female historian Piao Ping") pointed to the many reasons why girl students were hated, feared, and despised. Central among them was students' ability to contradict the common opposition between literary talent and moral virtue by transgressing the inner/outer boundary. They did this by writing love letters in English that their parents could not read or censure, and by "knowing Chinese yet using it for incorrect purposes" (Piao Ping 1915: 1). 16 Girls used the medium of another system of representation to steal away from parents the ability to define their daughters' life roles; through writing, they wrested from their parents control of the very inner arena in which girls were supposed to remain, and ensconced themselves in love relationships, where the transgressive "freedom of choice" reigned. Piao Ping argued that although girl students knew their ABC's, they did not understand zhi hu zhe ye, the particles that indicate Chinese literacy (p. 2), and this ignorance was similar to their desire to be free and participate in government even though they could not yet handle daily affairs. In this discussion, the oncedebated issue of whether girls should be trained in Chinese texts, indicated in this article by the succinct zhi hu zhe ye, was effaced by the new learning, which opened a wider "outside" area to women and thus posed a greater threat. The inner/outer configuration, integral to Chinese gender relations, became reconfigured

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to include the West and its offending ideologies. Piao Ping complained that women should be educated so that they can organize and manage their families and produce patriotic ideas. The key to this nationalistic endeavor was training girls in basic guoxue, the national learning, and only secondarily allowing ouhua, or Europeanization (p. 2). Just as guoxue was once prohibited to women as public and thus masculine, ouhua became the outside and public practice and knowledge, demarcating guoxue as a more cloistered, more easily controlled learning. Although Piao Ping argued that girl students should not participate in politics when they were in school, i:hey should learn about guojia (nation) and shehui (society) so that they would be able to enjoy limited participation in society later in their lives. Furthermore, girl students should learn to understand the importance of taking over the job of raising children and managing the family so that men would have energy to concentrate on national affairs, now reconstituted as the inner national affairs within an outer international field. Naming the many books of the last two thousand years that delineated what women should think and how they should act, Pan Yuekun (1915) demonstrated how previous concepts of education for women or nuxue (women's learning) ignored two valuable concepts, zhiyu (mental education) and tiyu (physical education), and instead promoting a purely morallearning. 17 Pan believed that in traditional China there was the model and ideal of mental and physical education of boys, but for girls moral education was the norm. Thus few women in Chinese history were lauded as nucai (women of learning), Pan wrote, but xianfo (wise kinswomen) were widely rewarded and recorded. 18 In other words, the morality-inflected category of xianfo was much more productive for women than the sphere of cai, and women of learning were only created and recognized with difficulty. The conceptual problems involved in combining the female gender with literary talent were solved in a number of ways, from the absolute rejection of traditional ideas on morality and women

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to more moderate solutions. You Guifen, with Pan also a student at a girls' school in Guangdong, proposed a structure that kept women in the traditional relationship to morality and yet permitted them to be part of modern society. You's strategy was to turn the objects of female virtue, originally husband, son, parents, and parents-in-law, into the nation (guojia). You also injected every aspect of the phenomenal world, all human relationships and portentous historical events, with the same kind of logic that sustained moral virtue: Moral virtue is to the human collective as the primal qi is to the ten thousand things. Heaven and earth take form in the primal qi and the ten thousand things take form between heaven and earth. Moral virtue differentiates humans from beasts. Thus although heaven produces talent (cai), those of talent will not necessarily become superior humans (junzi), for it takes education to form them. The world truly needs talent, but those of talent will not necessarily become superior humans, fo~ first they require the education of women to nurture them. Actually, we consider the primal qi to be the mother of the heaven and earth, heaven and earth to be the mother of the ten thousand things, and women, then, to be the mothers of the nation's people (guomin). Now, when heaven gave birth to people, these creatures were without learning and without teachers, so who would be aware, who would understand? If people had no education, then talent and wisdom would decay within the heart and bosom.... When the children of the Rang and Yi people are born, they make the same sound. But after they grow up, their languages are different. It is teaching that makes this so. If such alone is the law of teaching, then how could it have no root? And where is this root? It is moral virtue. But alas! From the time China introduced and established learning for women, the vast majority cast aside the root and

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pursued the branch. They studied the superficial and frivolity became the fashion. They did not consider that moral virtue would decline and that appearances alone would exist. Truly they have diminished the spirit of education. The most extreme of these mistakenly identifY "freedom" and stupidly boast of "equality." They believe that coercing marriage on the basis of love is to be civilized! They overturn morality, destroy virtue, throw ethical relationships into disarray, and revolt against reason. Gradually their falsehoods are transmitted from one generation to another so that humans and beasts are no longer distinguished! Truly they harbor the calamity of destroying the state and annihilating the race .... Now, for a nation to exist between heaven and earth, it must have that upon which it is founded. In the teachings of China for several thousand years that which has constituted the spirit for establishing the state is nothing other than moral virtue! ... As for the relationship between moral virtue and humanity, when it encounters parents, it becomes filial piety; when it encounters the nation, then it becomes loyalty; when it encounters husband and wife, then it becomes duty; when it encounters younger brothers, then it becomes friendliness; and when it encounters friends, then it becomes trust. Following upon the particular event, it obtains a name. Although there might be a thousand names, in reality it is one thing. Moreover, when the mountains contain jade, then the trees and grasses will be moist. If rivers hide pearls, the banks will not dry up. If the body receives flavors and tastes, the sinews will be fleshy. And if the heart is moistened by moral virtue, the natural disposition and passions will be pure. Thus, if smoke is reduced, then the fire diminishes; if ice is broken, then the water flows; if one's natural disposition is chaste, then passion melts away. If passion flares up, then one's natural disposition is destroyed. Therefore, it is the natural disposition of the forest to be quiet, and that which

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puts it into motion is the blowing of the wind. It is the natural disposition of water to be pure, and that which muddies it is the stirring of the current. It is the natural disposition of women to be chaste, and that which corrupts it is the confusion of desire. The body possesses desires much like a tree possesses bugs. If a tree harbors bugs, then it will bore away at itself. And if a body possesses desires, then it will slay itself. Thus, when bugs flourish, the tree is cut down. When desire flares up, the body is lost. This is impeccable logic. If one only takes moral virtue as the drug for chasing away bugs, and as the ax for chopping down desire, then I would not believe it if branches and leaves did not prosper and good fruits grow. Looking at it from this point of view, if the state wants the people all to have moral virtue, then it must begin from all having wise wives and good mothers. But wise wives and good mothers are truly the product of managing women's education. Transformation depends entirely on this. Formerly, the mother of Mencius chose the [best] neighborhood and broke her loom to encourage learning. And Meng Guang wore a [barbarian-style] mallet-shaped chignon and behaved with frugality to assist her husband. Since ancient times, wise wives and good mothers always have come forth from the realm of virtue. Otherwise, it was like Lady Zhuo and [Sima] Xiangru, or Lady Jiang and Younger Brother Duan. In the one case a young woman at the stove brought a shame that has provided a famous example for a thousand generations. In the other case a doting mother destroyed her son and fomented the calamity of rebellion. How could these two people have been women without learning and without talent? What a pity that their moral virtue was insufficient and that they created such a serious calamity as this! Oh indeed, let it be a warning! (You Guifen 1915: ?-8) 19

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Moral virtue existed for both men and women, but for men it involved relationships of national, familial, and personal significance, whereas for women moral virtue found its sole outlet in the family. What You Guifen argued against was the new "women's education," or a defining relationship between women and texts that would displace and supplant an older knowledge in which excellence was determined by submersion in moral virtue. Although there were texts that related the content of this virtue, and together these texts formed niixue, or women's learning, virtue was promoted less through textual study than through example. Thus it was not contradictory that an important aspect of moral training for women was that they abstain from textual learning or production, or minimally that they eschew the outside world of published letters and scholarship. For men, modern education brought up the threatening possibility of the total collapse of Chinese textual knowledge; for women, this collapse was compounded by the replacement of de, moral virtue, by cai, literary talent, formed through formerly male textual study (now thought of as guoxue or nationallearning). 20 The revolutionary meaning of training women in guoxue, an educational practice that put them into a male sphere, was somewhat contained by reframing it within the context of the family. The ongoing intellectual attack on the traditional family structure, in the May Fourth period blamed for many of China's ills, made this link between women and national learning less jarring as a modern practice. 21 You Guifen's polemic brings up every aspect of moral virtue that made it such a powerful and enduring concept in daily life. Based in family relationships, moral virtue extended into the natural world, determined the outcome of history, formed the basis of women's education, and modified the body's desires. Furthermore, because moral virtue arose from the female body's "natural disposition" to be chaste, it was actually nothing but an extensively expressed and uncorrupted essence of f~maleness. It was

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sexual desire, under normal situations controlled through family and relationships, that destroyed moral virtue. In 1918 and 1919, Funu zazhi ran a series of articles on the problems of coed university education. 22 Initiating this discussion, Wang Zhuomin used the notion of gender-specific job training to outline the rationale either for separate university education or simply for no university education at all for women. In the past, Wang claimed, jobs for women included only literature, painting, (traditional) medicine, music, needlework, weaving, and handiwork, "none of which needs university training" (Wang Zhuomin 1918a: 3). 23 Of all of the jobs that required university training, women were suitable only for wen (literature and other jobs where writing is the primary task) and yi (medicine). Even so, "we seldom see women writers, women journalists, or women secretaries; it is much more suitable for women to become doctors, pharmacists, and midwives" (p. 3). With literature and the text-based professions excluded, none of these jobs required university training. 24 Wang argued that "our country's society has never learned from the strengths of others' scholarly disciplines, and there is no need to do so now; if women have any profound learning at all, it is because they engage themselves in work appropriate to women. Most of them do not need a university education" (p. 3). The other reasons why women and men should not study in university together included moral issues, the distraction of sexual attraction, and the danger to the school's reputation. On the positive side were economic savings, the fact that "advanced" countries had coed schools, and social progress that could result from women and men both receiving the same university education. In this essay and others, literature is seemingly contradictory, both widely available to women and something at which they did not excel, both one of the most respected "creative" fields and also meaningless pleasure and entertainment. Women's literary abilities, or lack of them, entered the discussion·as part of an attempt

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to separate the inborn natures (shengxing) of women and men. Another contributor, Tian Ying, argued that in order to find out what women should study, one should begin with their difference from men. Through difference, Tian claimed, one could see that after the age of ten, girls and boys should not have the same kind of education. Tian situated the discussion within scientific discourse, and sometimes as biological and essentialist, pointing out "facts" to support his argument: women have more fat in their bodies than men, in places where food is abundant more girls are born, girls mature physically faster than boys, boys undergo more bodily changes than girls, men have more red corpuscles in their blood than women, women have a smaller lung capacity than men, men use up energy but women conserve it, men are active and women are quiet, men's emotions are stronger than women's, and women must use devious methods to fight danger because they have little physical strength (Tian Ying 1915a). Tian's elaboration of the modern physiology of gender led to a discussion of moral and mental differences, which in turn became the basis for judgments on literary abilities and activities. Again moral virtue was a key. Tian defined male moral virtue as the relationship between men and society; its characteristics were loyalty, bravery, public-mindedness, duty, and diligence. Female moral virtue he defined as the relationship between women and men; its characteristics were tranquillity, calmness, chasteness, and agreeableness (p. 1). Women's moral essence included cruelty, sympathy (to the point of sympathizing with criminals), a tendency toward empty talk, a weak notion of duty, a uniquely feminine concept of reputation, and an excessive concern with self-benefit. Few women were naturally bright. Rather, women tended to be weak in creative power (and thus produced little literature and art), they clung to the old, they were superior to men at assimilation, they were good at observation bur not analysis, they had a particularly feminine concept of ethical behavior, they were more patient than men, and because they had the power to

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reproduce, or bear children, they had sacrificed intelligence (Tian Ying 1915b). Tian negotiated the issue of literary excellence by limiting women's abilities to the oral: From ancient times the writings of the inner chambers all use the beauty of limited lines, or the marvelousness of a single part. Those who are good at it utilize the beauty of the entire structure .... As for women and their fame in recording lines by means of noting the scenery and customs of each place, most of them do so through observation of human feelings. There are few who possess any depth of national feeling (guoqing). This is enough to prove that women's intelligence is slanted toward the concrete and deficient in the abstract. Women are good at speaking and men at writing. This proves that in the areas of spoken language and writing there is a difference in men's and women's knowledge. Spoken language makes more use of concrete concepts while writing exclusively uses abstract concepts. Excellence at speaking comes from a tendency toward the concrete. (p. 6) Tian claimed that women's tendencies to deal with the concrete, to function solely with reference to human emotions, and to be incapable of abstract thinking resulted in limitations in two areas: the national and the literary. Because of these tendencies, Tian believed, women had little national feeling and could not write. Tian's categorization of women's tendencies sprang from concepts of moral virtue. Tian demarcated de as a mental and symbolic circumscription that extended into every part of women's essential nature. In particular, the physical performative aspect of de limited women's skill in abstract and transcendent thinking, and this in turn completely disqualified them from cai, or writing. At the same time, however, cai was emerging in China as a once-traditional field of education and textual skill that could be

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reworked to become valuable in the modern world; as critics attempted to remold women's discursive identities to become modern, they entered a contradictory area. Whereas some held fast to moral virtue and its emphasis on self-sacrifice and domestic service as the only valid ideology of women's social being, others worked out various compromises that allowed women to become educated and even to function within the national arena. As the different uses and means of the term wenxue and wen indicated, literature and textual training, now complicated by foreign learning, became a contradictory site that both admitted female participants and yet denied them the most prestigious rewards associated with high literary accomplishment. Kang Baiqing, a critic who brought in the new global context as a rationale for rejecting the chastity/lust (zhenlyin) dichotomy on which Wang Zhuomin based his critique, rebutted Wang's argument that women and men should not be at the same schools and worked to disarm these two most significant behavioral categories of moral virtue. Kang wrote that "civilized" peoples or races (minzu) despised lust but did not value chastity. Rather, there was an intermediary position between chastity and lust, where "there exists the ladder of neither chastity nor lust" (Kang Baiqing 1918: 3). Kang opposed the Chinese tradition of chastity, but described women's nature in most areas as deficient. & for literature, however, Kang took a revolutionary stance: Women's learning of the present time carries two thousand years of historical roots and is the result of being passed down through various schools. It is full of the characteristics that come from isolation. We should try to discuss women's literature of ancient times. From the time of the Han, the Wei, and the Six Dynasties China has never lacked for women writers. Other than two or three writers of well-known classics, they all become famous through poetry. Their literary minds run in four channels which can be summed up as:

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praise of things, laments of the inner chambers, sorrow at parting, and mourning death. From this we can see that the literary hearts of women writers in ancient times were overflowing and overflowing again. This is for no other reason than they were closed off, cut off from contact with the world. They had contact with no one except their female relatives nearby, so they could only see things close to their female relatives nearby. The so-called wise mothers of ancient times could feel the solitude of being left behind. Writers among the so-called virtuous wives of ancient times could write rhymes of many laments even without anything being wrong. (pp. 5-6) Kang tried to demonstrate that women were active in poetry and wrote from their own lives, reflecting their isolation from social affairs. Women's deficiency here became their virtue; because of their isolation and the emotional distress it produced, they were able to excel in poetry, generally regarded as the most emotive form of writing. In two other articles (Wang Zhuomin r9r8b, 1919), Wang Zhuomin took issue with Kang Baiqing's rebuttal by insisting that not even Western nations have a term for the place between chastity and lust that Kang hypothesized; zhen and yin were absolute categories. According to Wang, in desiring society to replace "morality" with "freedom," Kang's goal was to barbarize China. Wang rejected Kang's literary discussion as irrelevant to contemporary students. Kang followed up with yet another thorough rebuttal, this time focusing on the definition of terms. Using both Chinese and Western sources, Kang carefully pointed out discrepancies between cultural viewpoints. The significant terms were wenming (translated by Kangas civilization), guoyu (translated as hyperbole), xianmu liangqi (wise mother and virtuous wife), zhen (with two meanings, one Chinese and one Western, translated as chastity), yin (lust), buzhen buyin (neither

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chaste nor lustful), ziyou hunyin (free marriage), nannu jiaoji (interaction between men and women), and shishi qiushi (to seek truth from facts). Another key term, and one around which the debate turned shortly after this time, was pingdeng ren'ge (equal human character/personality). Using the English terms "industrial democracy," "the working people's revolutions," and "the revolution in Russia," Kang moved into the internationalist framework within which terms and concepts such as zhen either were branded as conservative and Chinese, or were discussed as akin to, but more backward than, similar Western concepts (Kang Baiqing 1919). 25 The context of this exchange illustrates both the international framework against which Chinese concepts became the inner realm of knowledge, and the way in which the terms themselves were dislocated from their earlier meanings. Furthermore, the implicit goal of the exchange between Wang and Kang was to imagine a strong China, which shows how pervasive was the nation-state concept in structuring social life and how powerful the connection between gender meaning and the nation. At the same time, the debate exemplifies the negotiation of existing concepts of gender and social behavior into modern practice. Kang Baiqing, for example, could not even find a word for the new area between chastity and lust that he proposed. What emerged as a particularly sensitive area that could transform women's deficiency into a virtue while also breaking open the area of textual learning was literature, which Kang redefined in such a way that it was not only open to women, but was actually subject to women's mastery. The revolution in gender concepts continued to break down the doors barring women's way to education, but the structure of education, including curriculum and goals, remained different for women and men. In 1916, students were admitted to Jinling, a missionary-run higher education institution for women in Nanjing. Two years later, the Beijing Women's Normal School was

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upgraded to become the first Chinese-run college for women (Borthwick 1985: 82). Because Cai Yuanpei insisted that the rules of Beijing University did not prohibit women students, they were admitted in 1920. Three years later, there were over one hundred women in institutions of higher education in China (Duiker 1977: 64). Although women were admitted to higher educational institutions, the purpose of their training was still to make them better at the conventional roles associated with female moral virtue. Writing in 1926, Liu Xunyu compared women's schools to a lacquered mirror box in which students were confined for the same reason mothers bound their daughters' feet: to make them more marriageable. The basic reason for this situation, Liu implied, lay not in the university classes themselves, but in the prevailing attitude that textual study was the best thing possible for boys, but virtually meaningless for girls. Higher education was meaningful for a woman only insofar as it increased her desirability as a marriage partner (Liu Xunyu 1926). In other words, women were gaining learning in order to produce themselves not as caizi or cainu in its more general sense of an educated and talented person, which would be the ostensible reason for training, but as fu, women within the family. A revealing conservative response to educational reformers' retheorization of women's learning, and one which sought to preserve literature as a significant enterprise, equated moral virtue with a specifically Chinese tradition of literature. As discussed earlier, this argument recast premodern Chinese literature as the new "inner" knowledge, with the outer knowledge coming from the international intellectual community. Describing the Chinese genres of literature-poetry (shi), classical writing (guwen), poetic songs (qu and ci), fiction (xiaoshuo), and tales (chuanqi)-as incredibly beautiful, Shao Zuping delineated the relationships between dynasties and literary form, and at the same time decried the reformers' turn to other, non-Chinese forms, their reliance on the vernacular, and the new punctuation (Shao Zuping 1922: 2).

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According to Shao, when Japan adopted material science from the West the result was the depravity and lustfulness (yin) of its aristocracy and the social mixing of its women and men. Shao argued for the uniting of Chinese literature with moral virtue, which in turn must be shown through a particularly Chinese gender relationship. Many of the debates carried on in critical journals spilled over into fiction as well. Chen Hengzhe (Sophia H. Chen) was China's first woman professor and also wrote and published fiction. 26 In her story "Luoyisi de wenti" (Louise's problem) published in 1928, Chen described the love between two budding scholars, Louise and Walter (Chen Hengzhe 1928b)Y Walter, a 40-year-old accomplished professor of philosophy, is attracted to Louise, a 24year-old student of philosophy, because she is highly intelligent and thus an "extraordinary woman." Louise and Walter meet in her last year of college, when she is preparing for graduate study. She begins to worship her professor, and he encourages her adulation. The two become engaged, which leads Walter to realize for the first time that "besides scholarship, there are other meanings to life" (p. 101). Little by little, however, Louise starts to have doubts about their relationship. Her main objection is that Walter is and has been independent, in life and in scholarship, for a long time, yet if she were to marry him, she would become dependent. Should someone come between them, Louise would be left floundering. Louise sums it up thus: "You should know that marriage is a big problem for women. When you men marry, all you do is add a bit of economic responsibility, but it does not obstruct your scholarly work. But when women marry, the situation is not the same: household management, education and care of childrencan other people take care of this?" (p. 106). Louise breaks off the engagement and goes on to become a well-known philosophy professor at a women's college. Walter marries an unscholarly woman, but one whom readers can identify as modern because

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she is a physical education instructor. Walter writes a letter to Louise telling her that although his wife is a good woman, because she has no scholarly tendencies, there is a void in their relationship. On second thought, however, he decides to keep this "secret" to himself, and sends her an upbeat letter casually mentioning that although his wife, Minnie, is not a scholar, she is a "good companion for a scholar" (p. 121). When she herself is over forty and well established as a scholar and professor yet is still unmarried, Louise falls into a dream and later is haunted by a dream ghost. In her dream, Louise is married to Walter and is the mother of two children. She and her husband are sitting on the porch; it is the first night of summer, and the scent of flowers perfumes the air. Louise is overwhelmed by a sense of pleasure and satisfaction, and knows her husband must be feeling the same. When she reveals these feelings to Walter, however, he isn't like himself at all, but a coarse stranger who just stares at her. Waking up, Louise finds herself at home, with one of her books, recently translated into German, fallen from her hands to the floor. Although at this moment she awoke, she still lay there lazily, too lazy even to pick up the book that had fallen to the ground. In this second, her life experience flooded her heart. She reflected to herself, if that coarse man in the dream turned into Walter, then how attractive could that dream life be? Then she suddenly felt the loneliness of her present life. And she looked at the mark of her success-her writing-but it was strange; in the past a book that could make her happy and satisfied, make her heart leap, now had turned into a pile of waste paper that could not inspire her interest. (pp. 125-26) The dream ghost keeps questioning Louise about her life. She knows the dream-like feeling is an illusion, but even so Louise falls into confusion and despair, realizing that although she val-

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ues what she has-reputation, accomplishments, scholarly work-her life "lacks" something that is necessary to "lubricate the dryness and worry of the soul" (p. 127). Louise solves the seemingly absolute dichotomy for herself by using a metaphor of the mountain and the lake to grant both her real life and her dream life material validity; the mountain, while majestic, cannot have the lake's ability to give leisurely pleasure. Thus both Louise and Walter live with their lack, a condition which becomes their mutual secret. Chen Hengzhe constructed the "problem of Louise" as not only a contradiction between a career and the family, something that became and for many remains the central contradiction of women's social life in the West, but also as a contradiction between scholarly and textual accomplishments on the one hand and love, family, and children on the other. Walter marries a modern woman, a physical education teacher, and thus is able to enjoy all of the advantages of modernity except one: an intellectual relationship with a woman. Louise is barred from a modern love relationship if she wants to persist in intellectual, textual, and scholarly work. The "problem of Louise" is precisely the contradiction between woman and writing. Like men, women can be writers and scholars, but unlike men they must relinquish their claims to love or qing, long constituted as the most important feminine realm. Walter's wife has love, but does not have the intellectuality that writing implies. While Louise faces a clear material choice and thus "lacks" the thing she does not choose, Chen Hengzhe must infuse Walter with the desire for a scholarly woman in order to portray him as lacking. 28 Whereas this portrayal of a male desire for an intellectual woman may appear false or unreal, it accurately reflects the situation of many well-known male intellectuals of the 1920s who were caught in arranged marriages with women who lacked the education necessary to be considered "modern." Lu Xun, for example, did not formally dissolve his marriage, but he

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did enter into a liaison with Xu Guangping, who had been his student and who became his lifelong partner, intellectual companion, and collaborator. What appears unequal in Chen's story is not the intellectual level of the woman at her meeting with the man, but her ability, working within the physical demands of the household, to pursue intellectual work. While Chen's story deals with a woman as a scholar rather than as a writer of literature, it can be understood as relating to the problem of women and writing when the prestige of literature as an integral part of an elaborate elite system of textual production is taken into account. What is problematic is the relationship between women and this system, which in the story is shown to be supported by women's labor outside the system but within the household. Louise's equal participation, which is barely a realistic possibility, would not only destroy Walter's ability to be a top scholar (he would have to take up his share of household duties), but it most likely also would alter the nature of the textual tradition itself, which while in the control of elite men, made broad use of the female voice, feminine metaphors, and gender tropes. Literature and scholarship, or more generally writing, are presented as fundamentally masculine fields. Along these lines, the contemporary scholars Meng Yue and Dai Jinhua analyze literature as a masculinist discourse even more powerful than the law in its ability to create and transmit an oppressive discourse of woman. The textual focus on female beauty in traditional literature is a good example of how literati constructed female images to express and concoct their own desirenot sexual desire strictly speaking, but the desire to objectifY and possess women, and the simple right to desire (Meng Yue and Dai Jinhua 1989: 15-16). What is shocking about this tradition, according to Meng and Dai, was its consistency over hundreds and even thousands of years. Symbolic of literature's ability to construct a beautiful yet oppressive image was the transformation of the female foot; after passing through literary reconstruction,

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the deformed physical foot was lost and what appeared and reappeared was the magically evocative "golden lotus" and the "lotus step" (p. 15). Meng and Dai identifY traditional literature, and more broadly textual work, as a central discursive technique by which men manipulated and imaged women in order to give materiality to men's own subjective construction. Thus the participation of women as literary producers in this tradition could not easily be sanctioned. In short, in the early twentieth century and before, the conceptual categories of woman and literature were to some degree oppositional, a situation based on a perceived moral content (de) of woman-physical, concrete, and self-sacrificing-that was not in tune with the talent (cai) implied in literature-abstract, transcendent, and self-promoting. This configuration was produced historically, in references and discussions in numerous texts, and entered the common sensibility in various customs and in simple phrases such as nuzi wu cai bian shi de. 29 Female morality contained a starkly physical aspect: the demand that in daily life, women enact, embody, and perform morality through physical ordeal. Furthermore, the female body, which writers traditionally had portrayed in many literary guises (the eroticized denizen of the boudoir, the self-sacrificing female martyr, etc.), became central to the redefinition of the modern woman/literature paradigm. A hotly disputed and symbolic aspect of female bodily practice, both in traditional and modern times, was the requirement of chastity.

The Question of Chastity Chastity required that a woman be a virgin before marriage, have sexual relations only with her husband during marriage, and not remarry or have sexual relations should her husband die or leave her. In many times and places, a woman who lost her

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chastity through rape could be criticized for not committing suicide out of shame, or, as in the case of Xiang Lin's wife in Lu Xun's Zhufu (The new year's sacrifice), could be assumed to have survived because she did not put up enough resistance. In either case, the result could be the humiliation of the woman and her family. Because chastity, unlike other physical performances of virtue, was theorized as solely applicable to women, it is an excellent prism for separating the various meanings of embodied female virtue and analyzing the relationship between this traditional de and modern ideologies of writing. In her study of female virtue, Katherine Carlitz writes that although the main topics common to the Lienu zhuan (Biographies of notable women) can be found in Han dynasty texts, by the Ming, the "cultural vocabulary" had changed, foregrounding the husband-wife relationship and emphasizing its correspondence to the ruler-minister relationship (Carlitz 1991: 121). The central evidence of this shift is that whereas "in the Han Biographies ofNotable Women a small number of strong-minded wives die to bring errant husbands to their senses, by the time Ming scholars wrote up the Yuan dynastic history, half the widows eulogized had committed suicide upon the death of their husbands" (pp. 121-22). This emphasis on the female body's physical effacement in the name of moral virtue was also accompanied by an increase in reports with lurid detail: a filial daughter eats the maggots infesting her mother-in-law's bed; a faithful widow avoids remarriage by tattooing "fidelity" (jie) all down her arms; another keeps for forty years a handkerchief soaked in the blood her husband coughed up when he died .... Debauched mothers-in-law drive their pure daughters-in-law to suicide; good daughtersin-law not only make soup of their own flesh to feed their mothers-in-law, as filial sons had always done; they also breast-feed them. (p. 122)

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In emphasizing the ordeal that virtue had become by Ming times, Carlitz shows how de was not solely a state of mind, a theory, or a way of speaking, but a physical practice that demanded the mutilation and possibly the effacement of the body. The trials that a woman had to endure to preserve a threatened chastity included disembowelment, dismemberment, and ultimately suicide. 30 One of Carlitz's main points is that "the social organization of art-and the increasing skill of the illustrators-affected the way women's virtue was imagined." Carlitz points out that pictures depicting virtuous women undergoing physical ordeals became increasingly beautiful, sentimental, and delicate as the Ming progressed (p. 121). Because illustrations were becoming more common in fiction and drama, the morality texts for women were "assimilated to the traditions of entertainment and connoisseurship" (p. 127). Thus the fine books produced to recognize female virtue, complete with lists of donors, were used to boost the prestige of a family and were also transformed into artifacts in the connoisseurship of women. The images of virtuous women, produced in books and thus intertwined with the textualized traditions of literature, established an oppositional yet complex gendered connection between writing and female moral virtue. Writing either idealized women's physical sufferings in a masculinist discourse of connoisseurship, or promoted their bodily effacement through moralistic tales. The tension between a textual system that supported and extended itself as overwhelmingly masculine and de as overwhelmingly feminine was also evident outside literary pursuits. C. Fred Blake finds the sacrifice and duty exemplary of feminine virtue to be the ideological underpinning of footbinding, which he connects to writing. In an example that provocatively puts into a parallel relationship the footbinding of women with writing for men, Blake notes that in Henan, a girl having her feet bound may have received from her mother a writing brush, a "powerful symbol of masculinity and the world of civil affairs"; once the girl's feet were

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formed into a brushlike shape, she could give the shoe pattern to "the man in her life to use as a bookmark and an antidote against bookworms" (Blake 1994: 68r). Blake further comments that footbinding "put women's embodim~nt of virtue (de) on par with the 'power of virtue' implied in male 'talent' (cai)-and, most important, it made the 'power of virtue' entirely feminine" (p. 68r n5). Thus elite females and males experienced self-realization, or "becoming their respective bodies in relationship to others," quite differently; the boy's self "focused on the locutionary and literary power of the word," while the girl's self-realization "required her not merely to become, but to 'overcome her body' by restricting the space it filled" (p. 681). When Blake comments that the power of virtue had become feminine, he shows how women's lack of official and public access to cai made de more concentrated as a feminine practice. Footbinding was the gendered practice that for girls corresponded to immersion into texts for boys, because the "age when girls started to have their feet bound coincided with the age when boys moved out of the women's quarters to enroll in lineage schools or begin instruction with private tutors" (Dorothy Ko 1994: 149). The implements used in footbinding were those used in the women's world-nail clippers, needle and thread, and scissorsand were associated with women's traditional work. In an even more direct tie between the textualized literary tradition and women's virtue, T'ien Ju-k'ang discovers that in Chinese economic and cultural centers during the Ming and Qing dynasties, there was a positive correlation between the numbers of female suicides and the number of juren, or diploma holders for the lower levels of the examination. 31 Although T'ien interprets these findings to indicate a relationship between "females' destruction of their own life and the wounded feelings of males" who could not progress to the higher degrees (T'ien Ju-k'ang 1988: 145), they also indicate the association between female suicide and the construction of a textual tradition by lower-degree

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holders. T'ien points out that the cult of female chastity gained momentum during the Qing dynasty (p. 126) and early on was promoted by famous scholars such as Gu Yanwu and Huang Zongxi (p. no). T'ien's work demonstrates how the process of petitioning for the rewarding of virtuous women, which was consolidated during the Ming, made scholars' services indispensable. T'ien believes that the formalization of the tradition in moralistic exegeses promoted and encouraged the practice. He concludes that "without the existence of frustrated scholars, the cult of female marital fidelity would not have developed to the great extent that it did" (p. 102).32 In his research on chastity in the Qing dynasty, Matthew H. Sommer (1996) shows how without adequate property, a widow had little chance of remaining chaste. If a widow were a member of the propertied elite, however, her chastity-her ability to avoid penetration by a man-was so important that it bestowed upon her a "right" belonging to few Chinese women: the right to resist marriage (p. 86). Sommer notes that in 1803, when former guidelines were relaxed, a women could qualify for the status of a martyr even if she had been penetrated, showing how the meaning of chastity changed. What was once simply an objective fact became an issue of intent and its purity (p. 81 n6). From my point of view, this development also indicates that chastity became more of an abstract female quality rather than an act or behavior; women's chastity, in other words, was increasingly naturalized. By the early twentieth century, You Guifen's claim that it was "the natural disposition of women to be chaste" made perfect sense (You Guifen 1915: 8). In parts of China, the requirement of chastity for women was invoked throughout the first half of the twentieth century. Even during the May Fourth period, chastity was still commonly practiced, especially in rural areas. Because of its severely unequal and seemingly antihumanistic (and thus antimodern) demands on the female body, like foodbinding chastity became a hot topic of dis-

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cussion and an issue on which reformists focused. In 1918 Hu Shi (1891-1962) wrote "Zhen cao wenti" (The issue of chastity), which criticized the double standard of chastity, and took the discussion one step beyond contextualizing women's issues with overt reference to society and nation toward viewing the "women's problem" as one of the relationship between two people, an approach that became popular in novels of the late 1920s that took love as their theme. Chastity is not an individual matter, but is something between people; it is not a one-sided affair, but a two-sided business. If a woman respects a man's love for her, is intent on following this road and unwilling to love another, that is chastity. Chastity is the attitude of one "person" toward another "person." Because of this, men should have the same sort of attitude toward women. If men cannot likewise return respect, they are not worthy of receiving this kind of treatment. 33 Hu Shi staked out a position that individual rights should be granted consistently to both men and women and he implicitly insisted that chastity must no longer be viewed as a practice of female virtue, but a as modern marker of human rights, an act that should be accepted, if at all, of free will and equally by both sexes. Lu Xun's famous article "Wo zhi jielie guan" (My views on chastity and martyrdom), published in 1918, found fault with Kang Youwei's promotion late in life of chastity for women. Lu Xun especially emphasized that chastity could not aid the nation as Kang Youwei insisted it would, and rejected the view that saving the nation was the responsibility solely of women. Thus both Lu Xun and Hu Shi transformed the overarching theme of "saving the nation" that had informed most gender discourses at the time into a developing discourse of the individual, where chastity became not mandatory but one act among many, each of which could be freely selected or rejected.

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To many May Fourth writers, Western humanism, with its focus on individual rights and privileges, seemed an exceptionally useful weapon in the fight against Confucian practices.-' 4 Advocates of women's rights found it particularly potent in fighting the neo-Confucian demarcation of separate inside/outside realms that barred women from acting outside the household. 35 In his article "Niiren ren'ge wenti" (The problem of women's personality/character), Ye Shaojun (1919) compared the terms nuren (woman) and ren (person) to expose the large, oppressive discrepancies between the social and personal implications of the two terms. 36 Ye's main question was that of ren'ge, which women, if they indeed are ren, should possess. Ye defined ren'ge as "a type of spirit that an individual within a group should have. In other words, it is the kind of spirit that will let one be an independent and complete pari: of a group. In order to be independent, one must allow one's abilities to develop fully; in order to be complete, one cannot blindly follow, but must love the truth. These are the conditions necessary to realize ren'ge" (p. 124). Ren'ge was both abstract and concrete; it was what allowed the individual to maintain his or her identity separate from the group, yet it was this independence that also made the group function better. Ye framed the question in reference to individual essence, arguing that although women were part of the mass of humanity and thus should have ren'ge, they traditionally had neither independence nor completeness, and therefore, with a few recent exceptions of highly educated and progressive individuals, they did not possess ren'ge. A crucial term in Ye's delineation of ren'ge is rensheng guan, lifeview. Ye argued that because women had been confined to the household, not allowed to participate in outside affairs or thought, and denied opportunities to study and to speak publicly, they did not have a distinctive view of life and thus their "love for truth" gradually faded. Women's "innate" characteristics, here blamed on the seclusion of women dictated by the Confucian no-

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tion of separate spheres, are highly negative in Ye's view. What he constructed as a distinctly human quality, the love of truth that results from independent thought, was denied to women, who were defined either as "someone else's person" (wife, mother, daughter), or as a machine that men could manipulate (buy, sell, exchange) at will. Since Ye identified childbirth as the physical reality that anchored masculine ideologies of oppression, he suggested that childbirth be reconstructed as a sacred service to society at large rather than to men and implicitly, to family and the cult of ancestry. Society, then, must repay this service by extending to women all the privileges that conferred ren'ge rather than turning women into servants. Ye ended his essay by advocating change for the benefit of the entire group. Thus, underlying his humanistic approach was a focus on the health of the nation. Women would bear children not to carry on the male line, but for the good of society, a reconfiguration that would break kinship bonds and establish women as equal partners in the production of modern society. Ye believed that the destruction of the Chinese family system, with its ancestor worship and parental control, was necessary for women to gain ren'ge; practices of moral virtue, enveloped within the family structure, were what prevented women from becoming whole persons. The awarding of official honors to chaste and virtuous women c.ontinued well into the twentieth century. In 1917, the Republican government established criteria for determining eligibility for a presidential commendation. A woman could be honored for "being a good wife and mother, for twenty years of virtuous widowhood, for not remarrying after her fiance's death, and for resisting or atoning for rape by suicide" (Borthwick 1985: 82). Chastity, then, was an officially and personally performed aspect of femininity sanctioned throughout society by award and recognition. The value of chastity-the most feminine and symbolic part of women's virtue-was quite different than that of literary skill

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for men. Chastity was profoundly physical: it demanded foregrounding of the female body and its function, space, position, and role. It invaded all aspects of a woman's bodily existence, including her relationships with kin and non-kin; her sense of her body in terms of sexuality, appearance, and demeanor; and her every behavior. As an ontology, chastity had personal, familial, and national significance. In this sense it possessed, for women, a metaphorical meaning that was also unchanging in contentself-sacrifice and service through physical ordeal-and thus constantly functioned as a belief and practice rather than a means of analysis, thought, or critique. Literary skill, however, was only partially an ontology, to the extent that one aspect of the traditional discourse of texts and literati was a kind of self-development (xiushen)-but even more importantly was an intellectual discourse that contained a variable content. 37 In literature, topics changed and styles were numerous. A practitioner could express himself and his intellectual acumen through these changing topics and styles and through various literary outlets. Thus those whose self-realization came through textual practices had access to the transcendent values of society and nation, and at the same time their writing could create, critique, and re-create not only themselves but also society and nation. By the twentieth century, the doctrines of separate spheres, of female chastity, and of women's unsuitability for the public roles of writer and critic had long been under attack, but as we have seen, they retained considerable power in· official life, where awards were given and educational goals set, in intellectual debate, and in daily life, where traditional ideologies merged with the new modern ideals. In the 1920s, women were writing and becoming known as writers, and their work was published in an increasingly supportive critical environment. Yet the constitution of writing as transcendent and male, and of woman as concrete, limited, and full of being, persisted in their work. Women writers problematized the female body, drafting characters for whom the

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body was an obstacle that demanded extraordinary solutions, such as excessive illness, effacement in suicide, or death. The relationship of a woman to other women and men, particularly in the bodily and emotional aspects of love and sexuality, were primary topics, because these physical relationships, and even women's relationship to their own bodies, produced different meanings for women and men.

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Love and Marriage, Sex and Singlehood "The lovers appeal to the nation to bless their affairs, in the same way that the nation appeals to love as its legitimate ground."

Doris Sommer, "Love and Country in Latin America: An Allegorical Speculation"

Chinese writers of the 1920s and 1930s, both female and male, were interested in a romantic love unlike that presented in the traditional novel or the contemporary Mandarin ducks and butterfly novel. Whereas the butterfly novel, which always dealt with romance, presented social issues that later became common subjects of discussion-such as the contradictions between the modern and the traditional woman-it framed love relationships within the beauty-scholar paradigm of older novels. What this meant for women characters was that love generally evolved within the strong, restraining context of moral virtue and domestic life, while little was said about the new context of workplaces,

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schools, social and political engagement, travel abroad, and simple friendships between people who were not kin. Furthermore, while May Fourth fiction was generally critical of social divisions and traditional society, butterfly fiction did not seriously question class and gender hierarchies (Link 1981: 34). Comparing butterfly fiction and the modern short story or novel, the major difference in portrayal of love is not only thematic, but also stylistic. Written in Tang dynasty guwen style, Six Dynasties pianti form, or the traditional vernacular, butterfly novels followed set plots and stages of romantic involvement. Such novels were distinguished by characters with extraordinary qualities-always cai for men and chastity and beauty for women-and supersensitivity, as well as a well-developed elaboration of qing, or love, the clash with a cruel fate, and the eventual destruction of the relationship (p. 65). Modern short stories and novels generally highlighted the domestic role of women only to criticize it, and took the new environment as the crucial setting for the development of a new ideology of love. As in butterfly fiction, this new love had a national significance, but it was marked by distinctly modern qualities: introspection in the lovers, escape from traditional lifestyles and restrictions into the love relationship, confrontation of social problems, and above all, a love for which everything, even the lovers' own happiness, must be sacrificed. Fiction throughout the 1920s and 1930s revealed a longing for an ideal society based on the principles of science and love, much as did Chinese student culture in the 1930s. Educated people's desire for love was based in part on its promise of a pure relationship that could somehow exist outside the entangling, rigid forms of "ideological control, parental authority, societal interference, or financial pressure" (Wen-hsih Yeh 1990: 258). Although in her study of student life in China of the 1930s, Wen-hsin Yeh focuses on brotherly rather than romantic love, the latter was an even more important theme in writings about male-female and femalefemale relationships. Women writing modern literature persis-

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tently struggled to figure out exactly what the new ideology of love meant for women and their lives. Their stories and novels commonly depicted a hesitant, confused woman who cannot act out a strong love bond or relate it to national goals, or who is confused about the meaning and value of love. Women writers found contradictions in the social and filial demands of moral virtue, which survived even in the new educational and social environments, and romantic love, which required a personal loyalty that became a metaphor of national loyalty. In their fiction, they turned again and again to the topic of love, which gained for some of them an early reputation for boldly striking down conventional male-female relationships based on traditional family values. The emphasis in their writing, as in that of other cultures, on love and romance, or narratives of desire, was crucial to the creation of the modern person. Their stories often revolved around a relationship between passionate personal bonds and passionate national bonds, which could be overtly depicted or simply implied. Yet in Chinese women's fiction, pure passion was a gendered proposition, for the specifically Chinese practices of moral virtue, the writers demonstrated, quickly corrupted women's emotions. Love, then, became a duplicitous promise of modernity, both in its possibility for realization in personal life and in its model of purity and loyalty that was supposed to mark the relationship between the modern individual and the state. In an enlightening discussion of literary romances in Latin America, Doris Sommer (1993) claims that "passion and patriotism are no less than the productive, mutually fecundating bedfellows that engendered the modern citizen and subject.... Romance was fuelled by a patriotic, productive mission; and patriotism claimed legitimacy as the result of unfettered, natural desire" (p. 29). In Latin American novels about the desire of youthful, chaste heroes for youthful, chaste heroines lay a paradox symptomatic of nationalism: cultural features that seem most specific and important for national celebration were often typical of

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other nations too, and even modeled on them (pp. 30-31). Contrasting Latin American novels with the English novels described by Nancy Armstrong (1987), Sommer argues that rather than empowering feminine domesticity by separating it from masculine politics, the Latin American romance "took advantage of the tangle to produce a secure knot of sentimentalized men" (Doris Sommer 1993: 33). Sommer brings together Michel Foucault's writings on desire and Benedict Anderson's on the nation to show how the insecure antimonarchical state founded a self-legitimizing discourse in erotic desire, which became "the trope for associative behaviour, for unfettered market relationships and for nature in general" (p. 34). Like "some jealous lover, the state punished disloyal affections" (p. 34). Anderson explains the unimaginable self-sacrifice associated with nationalism as a spiritual investment-in Europe the investment was in Christendom-that was deflected flatly and evenly onto a territory with clear borders, and contrasts this with the monarchy's definition of itself as a center with porous borders. The self-sacrifice demanded by nationalism parallels that demanded in the love relationship, which insists that love must come before any other desire or commitment and even before the health and happiness of the lovers. Sommer connects Foucault's sexual body and Anderson's national body, and ferrets out the intriguing moments in the two scholars' work when each seems to intuit the other's focus. Redefining allegory as a "loomlike" relationship between two narratives, where threads of the story double back and construct themselves on former loops, Sommer finds "a metonymic association between romantic love that needs the state's blessing and political legitimacy that needs to be founded on love" (p. 37). This kind of allegorical relationship covertly juxtaposes the love pursuit against the national pursuit. In romances that had clear national significance, the characters and the readers railed against the social inequities that prevented the happy, long-term con-

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summation oflove: "desire weaves between the individual and the public family in a way that shows the terms to be contiguous, coextensive as opposed to merely analogous" (p. 41). In modern China, an important aspect of romantic love was the physical relationship between two people, which itself had to be redefined. No longer could love and sex be subservient to the family and to moral virtue; they had to exist on their own terms and, like literature, in accordance with their own "rules," many of which ran counter to moral virtue. Love's rules included respect for a number of modern values (individual desire and passion, idiosyncratic behavior from the loved one, and so on) and above all for love itself, which meant the refusal to allow the competing desires of the members of one's family to ruin the love relationship. The many articles on "sexual morality" published in 1920, 1921, and 1922 gave witness to the effort of reform-minded intellectuals to reconstitute the meaning of sexual relations in Chinese culture: from the traditional husband-wife relationship based on subordination within family roles and hierarchized within a metaphor of relationships within the kingdom, into a modern alliance based on love (lian'ai). 1 The inquiry into love and sexuality included a discussion of love between women, a much more transgressive possibility than heterosexual love. In 1925, after the debate on love and sex had raged for several years in intellectual journals, an article by Furuya Toyoko on love between women in modern schools was translated and published in Funu zazhi. Furuya regarded the new love to be a result of institutions such as school and factories and their new living arrangements-the dormitory-where women lived together in a way unmediated by kin relationships and uncontained by the moral framework of the family. Love in such circumstances, according to Furuya, was spiritual and lofty, yet actually was an imitation of heterosexual relations, with the more "feminine" women attracted to the more "masculine" women and vice versa (Furuya Tyoko 1925: 1069). Furuya also argued that the basis

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for such love was the teacher-student relationship, because in modern education emotional ties between student and teacher, which were uncalled-for in traditional education, were necessary in order for learning to be truly successful (pp. 1067-68). Furuya was careful to insist that while love between men may be "homosexual," between women it was spiritual, moral, and nonphysicaJ.2 The severe breach that the mere possibility of a lesbian relationship could effect in moral ideology was evident in insistent claims that love between women was pure and nonsexual. A recognized and celebrated lesbian relationship naturally would be unacceptable within traditional morality, because it would destroy yin/yang complementarity as well as Confucian kinship structures, separate spheres, and the subservience of women within the home. Within modern ideologies, however, physical relationships among women also infringed on many cherished ideas. For example, the love bond, although emerging out of equal and free desire of both women and men, was supposed to lead to the establishment of the patriarchal household with the man as head; obviously, this was impossible with two women in love. Even more significant, the metaphorical equivalence of romantic love and the nation would put women in an all-female relationship into an ambiguous position when they came to represent the nation, as they did in the various symbolic roles they played in cultural life. 3 If a woman-woman relationship embodied the citizen-state relationship, the state's power, formerly represented by the male head of household, weakened, and the selfsacrifice and loyalty demanded on its behalf disappeared. Yige niibing de zizhuan (Autobiography of a woman soldier), by Xie Bingying (b. 1906), described the author's relationships with other women in school as based on love and devoted several pages to the way in which her classmates fell in love with her. 4 These love affairs were carried on through letters, conversations, and perhaps physical relationships, although this possibility is only intimated. As an apparently much-desired love object, Xie

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became close friends with two women, and the news spread around the school. Called the Eternal Triangle, the women spent a great deal of time together and became so obsessively involved with each other that they fell prey to the conventions of love, such as jealousy, suspicion, and protestations of eternal fideliry. When one woman became jealous, Xie tried to send her away. '"No, I will not go away from you. I will love you always, and even if you do not respond to my love, I will still love you until death,' she insisted resolutely, and cried" (Xie Bingying 1986 [1936]: 78). Xie formed other "literary" friendships with women based on love, and once was dragged into a room and locked up with a woman who professed to love her. Although in this instance no physical relationship took place, in Xie's writing the expectation of sexual expression between the two women is obvious: "This is not my room. How can I sleep here?" I said in a rude manner. "This is as good as your room." "What nonsense you are talking!" "Because Miss Chen's bed is as good as your own, aha!" They snatched away my shoes and pushed me into the bed. Good heavens! "Look how much Miss Chen is in love with you. She has been following you for ages!" "Why should Miss Chen love me so much? I don't even know her!" I wasn't afraid to offend Miss Chen's feelings. "But she has known you for a long time, and has fallen in love with you and been dreaming about you many, many times," and there was general laughter. (p. 8o) Intimations of sexual activiry, secret devotion, professions of unrequited love, and the presence of the well-intentioned matchmaker to bring the two lovers together all reproduce the conven-

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tions of a modern, obsessive love relationship. The narrative draws no overt links between this passion and national fervor, but the love relationships take place in a school for women, a context of modernity that involves new associations outside the family. This love occurs between women rather than between women and men and illustrates the kind of relationship that gave rise to a heated debate on women's liaisons. Articles on singlehood, or the commitment to resist marriage and lead a single life, also appeared regularly in the 1920s and illustrated the strong social resistance to allowing mature women to live outside of marriage. What was at stake were not just explicitly moral issues, but also the supposed effects of singlehood on women's bodies and minds, issues encompassed within modern symbolic practice. In "Fei dushenzhuyi" (Against singlehood), Peng Daoming (1926) claimed that singlehood could lead to "same sex love" (tongxing ai) and that unmarried women often went insane. While insisting, along with many others, that intense love between women was platonic, Xiao Jiang (1926)argued that school life promoted potentially dangerous friendships among women and that educated women could easily end up as "old virgins" who tended to displace their love for men onto such things as a career in science, love for animals, or travel. Furthermore, Xiao believed that single women developed a high level of skill in language and had unusually weak bodies. These articles listed the disadvantages of refusing marriage, and strongly argued against singlehood because it hurt women, men, and society. These discussions represented conventionally accepted views, as -can be seen in fictional characters in works by women writers. Xiao Jiang's women with weak bodies but strong linguistic skills resemble the weak-bodied women diary or letter writers that Lu Yin (1899-1934) and Bing Xin (1900-?) so often created. Women such as these, the authors seemed to say, were an affront to the healthy females demanded by the healthy nation. In these fictionalized women, bodily strength and the ability to speak ap-

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peared to be locked in a dichotomy, with subjectivity and intellect effacing the strong body but allowing for the dominance of other, undesirable tendencies, such as singlehood or strong femalefemale friendships. Romantic love was often a central trope for personal liberation in stories and novels of the late 1920s and early 1930s. In the work of women writers, however, love became an ambivalent and sometimes fantastic illusion, a paradox that was supposed to create a strong woman working toward national unity but never lived up to this promise. Lu Yin's novel Nuren de xin (The heart of women), published in 1934, is a love narrative in which the female protagonist, Supu, tries to dedicate herself to love but for a variety of reasons is unsuccessfui.S Because it is a romance with national and international meanings underlying the narrative, I will summarize and discuss the story in detail. The novel begins with Supu's friend Liyun in love with the married Haiwen for three years and now, with his divorce from his first wife having been officially approved, finally about to marry him. Thus readers are initiated into the world of modern romances, in which true love is supposed to conquer all. Liyun's story is not told in detail, but we find out that she is bravely willing to sacrifice her reputation and family's approval for love; in this, we see, is a model for the modern woman. Supu, however, cannot live up to this standard, and time and again she flounders as she tries to live according to the dictates of modern love. Supu married Heshi, or Mr. He, a year before, when she was seventeen. She regrets her lost youth and regrets too that she never has been able to feel the bliss she associated with being newly married. She frequently wonders: is this it? After Supu gives birth to a daughter, Heshi leaves for Europe to study. Supu then meets a younger man, Chunshi ("Mr. Purity"), and asks him to tutor her in English. Soon she notices Chunshi's bright eyes; they quote poetry to each other, and the "seeds of mutual attraction'' begin to sprout (Lu Yin 1934: n).

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The chapter titles show the reader that this indeed is a conventional love narrative. The chapters are organized around progress through all the states of the relationship. They begin with "First Meeting," and then progress through "Getting ·Closer," "Soft Confession," "Under the Moon," "Bitter Love," "Rumors," "Going Abroad," "Conflict," "Divorce," "Victory," "Going Home," and end with "Regret." Supu and Chunshi indulge in the usual liberating behaviors of love, flirting with each other, drinking wine, arranging overnight outings, losing themselves in thought, daydreaming, writing letters, asking for understanding, and all the time they both wonder "what is a woman's heart?" Supu reasons that she should not be beholden to her husband's feudal ways, but should possess her own desires and character (renge). At the same time, she often worries about her child, who is staying with mother (p. 40). When Supu receives a letter from her husband gushing about his friendship with a German woman, however, she gains the courage to continue her relationship with Chunshi. Chunshi is possessed by a pure, untainted, enduring love, and confesses to his friend Zhang Lin (who cannot help but admire the expressed sentiment), "I am willing to sacrifice my individual happiness for holy, pure love. I only hope to nurture a flower of life, growing amid dry, lonely human beings; I myself do not necessarily have to enjoy it" (p. 57). Although love here, like citizenship, is not something to be enjoyed but something for which one must sacrifice, for Supu, a similar expression does not seem possible. She writes to Chunshi: Dear Chunshi, My heart is full of joy that in this world I have met youa pure and true youth. I am so proud. Yet at the same time I have the responsibility of being a wife and a mother, and do not know when I will escape these chains.

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That night you sighed so many times over this, and although I had no words at the time, my heart dripped blood. Ah, Chunshi! In this fragmented society, unfortunately we are the extreme sacrificial victims. But Chunshi, please forgive me; although I have a southerner's blood, and a tender yet tough nature, I am a celestial horse that refuses the bit. I have passion, I have dreams, I want to be in the vanguard of the times! Chunshi, this is what I think. Please believe me! In this world, only you can actualize the life of my inner heart! (pp. 59-60) Supu feels that even these fiery words do not seem to express her meaning (p. 6o). Chunshi also is about to leave for America, and Supu hears that rumors of their affair are floating around. After visiting her mother and child for week, she takes off for America with Chunshi. In America, Supu feels adventurous, but misses her daughter. Slowly, she begins to interpret her own actions as irresponsible rather than impassioned. She decides to distance herself from Chunshi and try to reconcile with her husband. Supu tells Chunshi that she will visit Heshi in Europe and see if he has a girlfriend; if he does, she will get a divorce and return to Chunshi. Supu's feelings and decision dash with Chunshi's notion of love: "But Chunshi," Supu said with wide-open, moist eyes, "if when I get there I get along with Heshi very well, our friendship for this life will be considered over ... so I hope you won't just think about these romantic days together. After I go, I want you to forget me, and also go meet some other women, so if I really don't come back, you can go off and happily marry someone else!" "What is that supposed to mean!" Chunshi looked a bit angry. "I really don't understand women's hearts!" ''Ah! Darling [in English in the original], don't be angry. God

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created women and gave us extra emotions, so we became so indecisive like this. And even more, there's the social system that puts special pressure on women, and they can't help but have so many worries!" "Oh," Chunshi said, sweat rolling off his head one bead at a time, "Supu! Either you're crazy or I'm dreaming." "No, I'm not crazy and you're not dreaming. This is just the real, true way of this world." (p. 105) When Supu arrives in England, she finds her husband distant and uncommunicative, but he insists that he was only friends with the German woman. This revelation fills her with guilt until she discovers letters written in German kept in his drawe~. After accusing him of duplicity, Supu begins to study German-to learn an entire national language-so that she can decipher the letters. One day she comes home to find the letters burned, in her mind proving his unfaithfulness. Supu gets a letter from Chunshi, who writes that he has met a Ms. Jin and needs to know her decision. Supu and Heshi decide that as educated, modern people, they should just go ahead and get a divorce. Heshi is inexplicably melancholy. Chapter ten, "Victory," tells the story of Supu's return to America and her marriage to Chunshi. Heshi tells Supu that since they are now neither lovers nor husband and wife and can be truthful, he can admit that although the German woman was once his lover, he is no longer involved with her, but has another girlfriend. Supu tells Heshi of her relationship with Chunshi. When Supu returns to America, Chunshi confesses that he made up the story about Ms. ]in just to scare Supu, and he would be willing to wait a lifetime for her. They decide to get married, but anticipate opposition from Chunshi's parents, especially because Supu is no longer chaste. Supu is not as elated as Chunshi and somehow feels jaded about everything. An American writer witnesses their wedding; Chunshi finishes his Ph.D., while Supu just

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continues studying whatever she wants and helps him type his dissertation. When they return to China, Supu decides they should separate and wait for one year, then decide how they feel. She hears that Heshi is back and is still melancholy, and she herself feels distressed, as if her heart is bound by ropes. Chunshi explains to Mingshi, his older brother, what has happened. Mingshi is silent, but his wife responds: Open a page from history and take a look. From ancient to modern times how many women have not feared the reproach of society? It is hard to blame women, this is just society's especially harsh demand. I think Sister Supu's heart must be very miserable now. She wants to be in the female vanguard of society, but she is not brave enough, so her behavior is impossible to grasp. This is a sickness of the times, Brother Chun! If only you can help her to fight her way out of this tight spot, your future will be bright and glorious. (pp. 141-42) Supu cannot get over her confusion and goes to meet Heshi in Hangzhou. It is too late, however. Heshi cannot stand the thought of his wife having lived with another for two years and tells her to be happy that she has someone who loves her and to take advantage of it. Still, Supu writes to Chunshi and breaks off their relationship. The novel ends with Supu crying day and night and thinking over a letter from Chunshi imploring her to be brave; she starts to feel there is hope and asks that God bless them. Lu Yin's novel contains many allegorical links between romantic love and the implied new, strong China. Both Supu arid Heshi are in-between characters who are educated as modern citizens but cannot actualize themselves in that role. While he seemingly is open to a liberatory love and sexuality, Heshi does not sense freedom in love, and we see no representation of his desire. Supu

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loves a young man who cares little for social convention, does not hold her previous marriage against her, is willing to accept her child, and has a Ph.D. and is ready to go to work-in other words, an imagined modern male national citizen-but she also cannot liberate her thinking and still feels the effects of social castigation. Readers clearly see that a lack of social progress holds Supu back; because we do not have access to Heshi's mind or thoughts, his vague sadness appears to come only from his failure in love. Only Chunshi, who is younger, can live as a modern, liberated, actualized lover. While stylized patriotic sentiments do not appear directly in the novel, a sense of traditional society and its limitations permeates the characters' feelings. The modern love relationship can come to fruition only outside the national boundaries of China. Within China, rumors swirl as the powerful agents of destruction, and are especially potent in restricting the "modernity" of women who try to love. To this extent, Lu Yin believes if China were different, Supu and Chunshi could live happily together, or even better, Supu would not have married the cold and moody Heshi in the first place. The novel's greatest moments of passion and desire come in letters written between Supu and Chunshi, especially as Supu imagines herself to be a pioneering woman of the new era. This social contextualization of desire is stronger than any longing she has for Chunshi; what she wants is not love itself, bur love's impetus and power that will allow her to act as a modern woman and thus blaze the path of nonconfining relationships. Although Lu Yin makes no general statements about the undesirability of marriage itself, it turns out that even the ideal marriage proffered by a liaison with Chunshi does not offer Supu the prospect of a fruitful modern life. Lu Yin's most striking representation of the connection between romantic love and the love of nation is her portrayal of China as a restricted place, bound by the past, that without reform cannot support true love. In America, the biggest dilemma

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confronting the lovers is how to find two rooms close to each other and affordable-a problem they easily solve. The lovers' time in America is described as golden and their return to China as going back to a much more repressive reality. Not only does Supu waiver under the pressure of her relatives to give up her own desire and be a good wife and mother, but she also internalizes this sort of morality and is unable to escape from it totally even abroad. Thus she effectively carries China with her wherever she goes. Yet an interpretation of the novel as a nationalistically significant love story along the lines of Doris Sommer's analysis of Latin American novels would be problematic. Whereas to some extent Supu's weakness in the face of social life in China and her inability to withstand pressure from parents and society cause her vacillation, Heshi's plunge into melancholy is only partially socially based. In Nuren de xin, Lu Yin created three types of modern, loving intellectuals: the lover pure and true (Chunshi), the traditional man ready for an extramarital fling but unable to visualize and enact a China modernized by love (Heshi), and the female infected by the compromised "heart of a woman" (Supu). Sommer describes the "sentimentalized man" created in the Latin American romance that, unlike the English novel investigated by Nancy Armstrong, did not separate the domestic and political sphere or empower woman by assigning her authority within the household. Rather, the passion and giddiness of love and sentiment seeped into the political realm and some of its actors, producing the sentimentalized man. This tradition apparently had a counterpart in China, but the reality was quite different. Although the tradition of sentimentalized men was strong in classical Chinese poetry and fiction, and some extremely literary, poetic male characters are scattered throughout modern literature of the 1920s, they are not necessarily infected with love sickness as were the Latin American characters. The feminization of desire and pleasure was a well-documented trope in traditional Chinese

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literature and was politicized through an allegory that turned the subservient position of the court poet into that of the vulnerable woman. The link was not always between a sentimentalized man and woman who were passionate for each other, but between the man and the literary traditions, or the man and the political order, in which anything or anyone out of favor was represented as feminine. This trope is well documented by Wai-yee Li, who describes the development of a concept of qing (love, emotions, passion, sentiment) in poetic literature and argues that the gendering of the ruler-subject relationship, once initiated in the Li sao (Encountering sorrow, ca. third century B.c.), was retroactively applied to explain the poems in the Shijing (Book of poetry) and became standard in Chinese literature (Wai-yee Li 1993: 19). Li quotes Yang Xiong to illustrate the way in which especially in the poetic genre of fo, the beauty of women and writing became conflared: "Or put it this way: a woman has beauty; does writing have beauty also? The answer is yes. The worst thing for a woman is to have her inner beauty beclouded by cosmetics; the worst thing for a piece of writing is to have its rules and proportions confounded by excessive rhetoric" (p. 19) 6 The implied duplicity of feminine or literary beauty, with its "inner" and "outer," true" and "cosmetic" possibilities, is further complicated by the way in which "feminine self-adornment unfolds through the interplay of seduction and instruction, which renders it morally much more ambiguous" (p. 19). Thus the "feminine element" can represent either the true moral way or the "way of concubines (qiefo zhi dao)," which uses "devious ploys of self-abnegation to please, flatter, and seek favor" (pp. 19-20). Wai-yee Li further analyzes the subsequent "internalization" of notions of real and false beauty, morality, and writing in the royal prince himself, who then embodies the psychological complexity of conflicting ideas (pp. 33-34) The sentimentalized men in Chinese literature were intricately intertwined with idealized meanings of femininity that included

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prolonged suffering (for men, not at the hands of women but of political leaders), high literary sensibility, delicate and sensitive emotions, and poetic expression. When acting politically, men also could take on the negative traits of women and in their dealings with officials or rulers appear duplicitous or two-faced. In her study of seventeenth-century women writers, Dorothy Ko (1994: 84) identifies the cult of qing as a means of elevating feminine values in romantic and sexual love. When critics praised women such as Xiaoqing as excellent poets with a true basis in qing, however, they often called into question the poets' authenticity and insisted they must be male because otherwise they could not be so talented: scholars generally assumed that women's verse was inferior to men's (pp. 96-97). Furthermore, the image and writing ofXiaoqing and other female poets could be interpreted as another metaphor for the rejected scholar-official, an interpretation that Wai-yee Li describes as beginning with the Li sao, or incorporated as an object of pleasure for a male-centered connoisseurship of qing (pp. 101, 107). It is difficult, therefore, to regard the cult of qing as an elevation of feminine values. Although qing is associated with femininity, it empowers the male much more than the female, in whom it is regarded more as a flaw. The archetypal sentimentalized man of Chinese literature is Baoyu of Hongloumeng (Dream of the red chamber). To describe Baoyu, author Cao Xueqin created the famous term yiyin, "lust of the mind," a quality that exceeds erotic lust. Yryin contains the character yi, which means meaning or intent, and expresses an intellectual desire. The second character, yin, is lust, a totally unintellectual concept and a word commonly used to describe immoral women and also sometimes men. Thus the combination of yi and yin is as contradictory as the mixture of cai and de. A fracture in heaven causes Baoyu to be infected by extreme desire and lust of the mind; he embodies the notion that desire "is rooted in flaw" (Wai-yee Li 1993: 204). Those who suffer from an excess of qing exhibit a fundamental lack, which simultane-

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ously is a flaw and a mark of superiority that functions with reference to the realm of emotions and literary expression. This condition-shot through with femininity as it is-remains particularly male. Baoyu reaches at least a few moments of enlightenment (juewu) while the women are in no way enlightened, only understanding (zhijue), and are unable to relinquish their selfconsciousness, a precondition for enlightenment (p. 221). These differences between modern love and qing were recognized by those who wrote tracts on love in the first half of the twentieth century. In Zhongguo fonii de lian'ai guan (The love concepts of Chinese women), Wang Pinglu claimed that traditional China was simply too misogynistic to support true love. Wang cited the historical approval of emperors who disregarded their wives and took many concubines; the case of Zhuangzi, who not only did not express grief at his wife's death but sang and beat on drums; and Confucianism's long disdain for women to conclude that "the old moral virtue of China dearly is the hidden reef [that obstructs] love, and if there is not a basic change, the problems of love will never be solved for Chinese women!" (Wang Pinglu 1932: 50-51). Throughout the book, Wang argued that what Chinese women had experienced in the past was so far from love that they really had no concept of what love meant or how it should be achieved. The biggest culprit in obstructing women from gaining access to a liberating love was moral virtue, which forced ritualized behavior and relationships on women and disallowed spontaneous affection (pp. 44-45). Wang also blamed literature, with its objectification of women for men's pleasure, for this state of affairs (pp. 39-43). Because he believed that Chinese women did not understand love, Wang therefore outlined strategies that could liberate women from the dictates of morality and help them proceed with the mechanics of love. These included how to initiate a relationship, how to deal with love in its early stages, how to get engaged, how to deal with divorce, how to handle problems associated with triangular love af-

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fairs, and how to cope with falling in love with a relative (pp.

59-67). Wang's treatise clearly situates love, as opposed to qing, as a modern idea. Wang identifies qing as associated with and contaminated by the entire corrupt past of China, which must be displaced in order for love in the guise of the new woman to appear and reinvigorate the emotional life of the Chinese people. Furthermore, love is gendered, being much more significant for women than for men. As the agents and beneficiaries of love, women were in a special position both to indicate and to promote national health in the form of their own psychological and emotional well-being and by extension, that of everyone else. Lu Yin's modern Nuren de xin concerns love, but its most idealized male character is not a traditional sentimentalized man. Rather, it is Chunshi, a younger intellectual who completely embodies the theory of love and who can move logically toward the future without hesitation or despair. Chunshi has prepared for the modern future by studying and falling in love without respect for the conditions of his love object; in other words, he does not care that by any traditional standard Supu is not the ideal wife. She is older and clearly not a virgin (indeed, she is married and has a child). Moreover, she is relatively educated and independent and thus perhaps willing to assert her own needs as equal or superior to his. Chunshi is an empowered Jia Baoyu who accomplishes the goal of becoming a sentimental lover untainted by sentiment's conventional sadness. Unlike Baoyu, Chunshi does not need to be persuaded by an ambitious father to "take the examination," but on his own combines study and love with the ultimate goal of working for the new China. In Sommer's terms, polis and eros combine flawlessly in this idealized character. But for the woman character, there is no such possibility. The negative characteristics of a sentimentalized man are to be found not in Chunshi, but in Heshi. Lu Yin does not present the interior mind of Heshi, whose excursions into relatively unre-

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stricted foreign love and study fail to empower him. Unlike Supu, Heshi is little bothered by rumors and social pressure, but feels personally affronted that his wife has lived with another man. Although readers cannot see into Heshi's thoughts, they can compare him to the successful modern man, Chunshi. Chunshi is completely devoted to love, whereas Heshi is reticent. Chunshi is open to new behavior by women, whereas Heshi is bound by traditional notions of propriety and property. Carrying out the novel's mission of bringing the love narrative to China, Chunshi falls in love with a Chinese woman, while Heshi is involved with foreign women. Heshi's inability to carry out the agenda of love within the context of China-Chinese national and personal bodies-eliminates a possible opening into the trajectory of modernity. Because China is still a restricted place, Chunshi and Supu must escape to become true lovers, but in so doing they are in essence effecting a Chinese plan: their ultimate goal is to return to China, live and work there, and through their actions alter and improve China. Heshi's involvement with foreign lovers means that he does not comprehend the potential of love for modernizing the Chinese nation and subject. When Heshi tells Supu that he cannot stand the thought of her having lived with another man, we realize that he cannot see beyond the limits of traditionalism, that metaphorically he enjoys the freedom of wearing a Western suit abroad but changes back-especially in his relation to women-into traditional clothing at horne. Heshi's liberatory love can flourish only outside the national time and space of China; his melancholy comes from this sense of dislocation and alienation.? Just as he is unable to help himself to reach a satisfactory love relationship, he will be unable to help China reach its goal of modernization. Heshi insists that Supu continue to embody the old virtues of chasteness, and therefore he cannot conceive of her as possessing a body "liberated" from Chinese female morality. By contrast,

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Chunshi sees Supu as unreasonably stuck in the old ways and encourages her to move toward a modern love. Caught between these two visions of what a Chinese woman should be, Supu vacillates: therein lies the "heart of a woman'' described by the title. Except for her vacillation, Supu does not have an essential nature or desire. We see, however, that Supu can be passionate only when she subscribes to the modernized view of herself in the female vanguard. This enflamed emotion emerges in her letters to Chunshi and in her claim that only he can bring out her inner life. The emotions associated with Supu's compulsion to return to Heshi are those of caution, responsibility, surrender, and weakness. The basis of Chunshi's unproblematic ability to study and to disregard the festering claims of traditional social values such as the chastity and monogamy of women and filial piety is his pure and total acceptance of love as the only significant prerequisite for happy male-female relationships. Chunshi's trajectory is to become a professor at Beijing University and, we assume, transmit the kind of new learning he has attained in America, and his notion of non-traditionallove, to the students of China. Although Supu does not prepare herself to teach in a university, we can assume that she also can accede to love's modern power if only she can suppress the "heart of a woman." What exactly is Supu's problem? The novel brings up the disconcerting situation of a woman who has all of the advantages of modern life, but can avail herself of none. Supu cannot love purely and directly only partially because Chinese society will not allow it. Her biggest problem is that she has internalized the values of moral virtue, and reproduces them as a self-induced containment and restraint. Moral virtue exacts from women a strong self-sublimation exactly at the point when th~y enter into heterosexual relations and their body's symbolic meaning becomes paramount. For women, therefore, love cannot be a reliable foundation of personal modernity nor equal participation in the national effort.

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Many writers and critics thought free love, or the ability to choose one's partner based on love, to be an indisputable aspect of modernity and powerfully urged it on women in numerous books and tracts. Yet love is mostly a female arena: it does not appear to have the same invigorating potential for men as for women. The modern, nationalistic view of love-one that demanded total commitment and suppression of hesitation or any consideration of practicality or traditional values-was expressed clearly in the first ch~pter of the male writer Ma Guoliang's Gei nurenmen (For women), a didactic treatise written around 1930. Entitled "Lian'ai" (Love), the chapter is an exposition of the way love should be for women and the personal qualities women must have to succeed at love. Ma argued that winning a man's love was not difficult, but gaining his respect was, and for this a woman did not need profound learning or great wealth, but a lofty integrity (gaogui de pinzhi) and a distinguished character/personality (weida de ren'ge) (Ma Guoliang n.d.: 4). Like Lu Yin, who portrayed love as hard for a vacillating women such as Supu, Ma Guoliang believed that love was only for the brave and the daring, not for the shy and retiring (pp. 7-8). The price one must pay for love was love itself; any notions that it might lead to glory or material benefit must be excluded (p. 9). Love was a sealed, self-sustaining idea that contained and projected a sense of purity and dedication. Furthermore, Ma claimed that true love arose from a great xingge, one's nature or temperament: ''A great nature can be produced in many different people's hearts, no matter if rich or poor. Therefore, if you love someone, you just love him/her, as long as he/she loves you and you believe it will be so forever, and as long as he/she has a great nature. Other than this, you need be concerned about nothing" (p. 10). Love thus described was a transcendent emotion that alone could overcome all differences and on its own produce energy; it required no input of time, effort, or calculation. Abstractly, however, love required the willingness

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to sacrifice everything: "Love bravely, when you love. Women who truly can love must set their minds to sacrifice everything for love! Love is love, it is independent, it does not belong within the scope of the customs of social morality; the customs of social morality are simply the customs of social morality, but love, love is simply love. They are not related and cannot sanction each other" (p. q). Ma went on to write that love and social morality formed two separate universes that were often contradictory (p. 19). Yet whereas Ma would appear to be promoting love as something to be pursued at the cost of family and social mores and as radically incongruous with traditional moral virtue, the rest of his book showed how women must and should act in a family, in regard to children and daily life, travel and entertainment, eternal romance, conflicts, and jealousy. Thus contradictorily, love was added to women's concerns and enclosed within the shell of moral institutions, not promoted as a structural replacement for former responsibilities. In chapter eight, "Jiankang" (Health), of the supplement Zai gei nurenmen (For women again) in the same volume, Ma linked personal physical health to that of the family and nation, and lamented the weakness of the nation's people (woguo ren) (p. 243). In his preface (dated 1933) to the supplement, Ma wrote that his original volume had been reprinted four times in two years. This suggests that this kind of book, which both promoted a new kind of romantic love for women and yet constrained them within older values and familial structures, was quite popular. Returning to Sommer's inquiry into the Latin American romance and comparing the Chinese love novel Nuren de xin written by a woman to the texts she describes, we see that while Lu Yin identified social inequities that prevent the long-term consummation of love, she centered the problem as more a women's issue than one of the cruelty or restrictions of society at large. The reason love could not be happily consummated was that women's placement in Chinese society at the point of relationships was the

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same site that inscribed them, emotionally, mentally, and bodily, into the practices of moral virtue. Thematically, romantic narratives expressed and investigated the meaning of love in gendered terms, and linked it with parallel modern national concerns. The narratives developed the psychologies of female and male characters by showing them in obsessive love relationships. Characters' traditional or modern natures developed in their love behaviors. As Lu Yin described, a romantic literary persona also developed, an innate link between love and literature (as between qing and poetry) that was available only to male writers, empowering them to appeal to women for love. Calling herself an "expert on describing male-female love," Lu Yin claimed that "those who have not been through the baptism of love have not really lived" (quoted in Lu Jun 1995: 25556). At the same rime, she metaphorically compared women to flower vases: both are decorative items that make men feel more· comfortable. Lu Yin wrote short satirical narratives showing how men proclaimed themselves to be literary geniuses who need love, preferably the love of many women, and through this strategy got what they want from women (pp. 261-63). In "Niiren de chulu" (Women's way our), Lu Yin argued that "the family is organized by men and women, and both should be responsible for family economics; as for housework, both men and women should have responsibility.... So I believe that the way out for women from now on is to smash the cage of family and go out into society, escape from the puppet family and go out to live the life humankind should live. They must be not merely women, but also people, and this is my only slogan" (pp. 255-56). Lu Yin believed that so-called gender differences were not natural; if society were equal, the only differences between men and women would be those based on the person rather than on gender characteristics (p. 268). Lu Yin's fiction and essays showed relationships and the body's symbolic and physical positions as central to morally based gen-

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der discourses. Gender meanings changed through the creation of new relationships and the implications of women's physical position within them; these relationships were often but not exclusively those between women. Lu Yin's stories illustrated how all heterosexual relationships and the familial and kin associations that result from them trapped a woman in a web of reified social meanings, no matter what her desires. Yet the woman-woman relationship raised the possibility of a liaison condemned by society at large as immoral, antisocial, inherently inferior, or perverted and lustful. The problem with relationships between women, Lu Yin's stories implied, was not that they in themselves were wrong or bad but that they were socially unacceptable. At the same time, however, the social censure that women endured in unconventional relationships elicited from them internal restrictions and hesitations. In this emphasis, Lu Yin foregrounded the social aspect of these friendships while simultaneously constructing a gender-based ethics of personal desire and fulfillment. Throughout her work, Lu Yin contrasted two kinds of relationships: non-kin friendships among women-traditionally not allowed within the masculinist category of "friendship"-and the male-free lifestyle to which such friendships could lead if they were socially allowed, and conventional heterosexual relations, which in her stories insinuate women into damaging positions and roles. Although many critics believed that friendships among women that emerged from the modern education system could result in singlehood, the widely condemned all-female system of relationships that they insisted must not replace the male-female system of marriage, Lu Yin persisted in portraying deep friendships among women and the exclusion of men from women's social and personal life as beneficial and natural. 8 Singlehood, critics argued, posed dangers to women, including insanity and a tendency toward violence, and pushed men toward crime. Lu Yin, however, portrayed powerful friendships between women that had none of the negative effects critics so feared and that

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were a valuable alternative to relationships between women and men. In developing options to accompany or potentially replace the categories of daughter, mother, and wife, Lu Yin focused on nonkin relationships as a locus of power and identity. Although the category Yu Lin had in mind may to some extent have been an emergent bourgeois self composed of personalized desire, deep subjectivity, and individuality, Lu Yin's writing subtly presented a subjectivity formed through interactions in social relationships. This self differs radically from the essentialized or isolated self portrayed in such stories as Yu Dafu's "Chenlun" (Sinking). In "Chenlun," the protagonist forms himself within the confines of his mind, and his fantasies are constructed through a series of interactions with other people in which he either rejects their approach and ideas or perceives himself as rejected by them. Foremost in the individual's construction of his self is the power of his mind to create a threatened sense of unity and existence, with which he resonates to conceive himself as autonomous and oppositional. This literary portrayal develops the interior mind as deep and productive, and the self as an independent consciousness more powerful in its ability to exist and consistently reproduce itself in isolation than in social relationships, which exist to situate the character and delineate boundaries around him. In "Chenlun," this construction of the autonomous, troubled, and critical consciousness is a function of national weakness, and emerges against the military and economic power of an outsider, in this case Japan. A similar ideology of the interiority of self and its relationship to society marks "Shafei niishi de riji" (The diary of Ms. Sophia) by Ding Ling (1904-86), but with significant differences. 9 Sophia produces herself through writing, and at the center of her writing is her lost relationship with her "sister" Yun and her musing about her relationships with her friends and lovers. Like the protagonist of "Chenlun," Sophia rejects much of the exterior world

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and its devaluing of individual desire through social restrictions, but she continues to center relationships as essential to her selfconsciousness. The young student in "Chenlun" goes out into the world but carries in his mind a bubble of self-containment, whereas Sophia exists largely within her room and writing, but continually brings into it her thoughts, ideas, and interactions with other people. Thus the production of self occurs not against and through rejection of relationships, but with a recognition of relationships as central. Not only social relationships, but also the relationship between the modernized female body and the newly proposed woman/text combination is an important aspect of the debate about physical education that dated from the 1910s and before. In later stories written by women in which the body is effaced so that the protagonist can produce a text, often a diary or letters, the body appears as an impediment to creativity. Because it was through the body that women were physically integrated into relationships, unless a new context of relating could be established, the body was an obstacle. Thus freedom from the body allowed women to imagine a separate realm where they could exist and interact outside the traditional codes of women's moral behavior. The new woman, therefore, was contradictory. While she was the means through which love would strengthen the nation, she also was linked to traditional qing and thus was a weakening and corrupting impediment to modernity. At the same time as she had to pursue vigorously the emotional future, she also had to uphold the familial structures of the past. Pulled in two different directions, the new woman's body contained the potential both to promote and to hinder strength and power.

Physical Education and National Vigor In 1918, attendees of the fourth annual conference of the National Federation of Educational Associations put forth sugges-

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tions aimed at strengthening the nation. Among them were the teaching of science, the opening of industrial schools, the teaching of the principles of citizenship, the establishment of young men's clubs to cultivate patriotism, and the promotion of physical education. 10 The rationale for physical education was that citizens must be prepared for life in a world of warring nations. For men, physical education was part of military education. The Boy Scout movement in China progressed so rapidly and gained so many members that by 1919 the Ministry of Education stepped in to control its growth and redirect its goals toward public and national loyalty rather than obedience to militaristic regulations (Peake 1932: 84-85). Qinghua University was one of the first Chinese universities to strongly emphasize sports, because "school officials were loath to perpetuate the stereotype of the Chinese being the weakly 'Sick Man of East Asia'" when their students went abroad to study (Wen-hsin Yeh 1990: 213). Students were notallowed to accept scholarships to go abroad until they passed rigorous physical tests. Ma Yuehan, who headed Qinghua's Physical Education Department, convinced good students to join sports teams. Wen-hsin Yeh summarizes Feng Youlan's attention to the results of this training: Feng Youlan recalled how, during the years he was a graduate student at Columbia, he would instantly spot the considerable differences in personal appearance between the alumni of Beida [Beijing University] and Qinghua. Qinghua graduates tended to be aware of their physical selves and attentive to their personal appearance, according to Feng. They walked briskly. They seemed at ease in Western-style clothing. They were younger looking and cheerful. Beida graduates, by contrast, were laggardly, solemn, and gray. Feng Youlan's observations were corroborated by these famous lines widely circulated among women students of Beijing in the 1930s: "Beida students show their age; Shida [Beijing Normal University]

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students are poor. For an ideal match find yourself a Qinghua man." (pp. 214-15) Feng Youlan's comments indicate that physical education had become a visible and effective performance of symbolic national health. 11 They also strikingly show how the movement for physical education easily became enveloped in the traditional notion of women finding a good husband rather than in the modern notion of women regarding themselves as agents and exercising their own bodies. For women, physical education was theorized by the state not as paramilitary training, bur as a form of personal cultivation with national implications. One of the strongest early female advocates of women's physical education was the nationalist martyr Qiu )in, who argued against the notion of weakness as an asset for women and for an equivalence between the strong female body and the strong nation. After Qiu )in returned to China from studying in Japan, she went to her native Shaoxing and set up a physical education school for women that eventually was called the Datong Physical Education School. The school also offered military-style training (Bao Jialin 1988a: 372). In two articles published in 1923, Xie Siyan compared Chinese attitudes toward women's physical education with archaic Western practices that banned physical education for slaves: ''As for our country's [attitude] toward women, in what way does it differ [from this attitude] toward slaves?" (Xie Siyan 1923b: 2). The goal of women's physical education, Xie stated, should not be that of Lycurgus, namely to produce healthy soldiers, but should be something that not only transcended the turning of women into weapons of war, but also transcended the functional meaning of production itself: If you promote women's physical education in order to allow women to live independently, that also is not right. Why? What allows life to be independent is work; the goal of work is production, yet the goal of physical education is not only

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production.... The goal of women's physical education is to create a totally healthy person in body and mind. In other words, women's physical education is not for the purpose of allowing them to eat (independence in life), nor for production. (p. 3) Although Xie seemed to be creating a rationale for women's physical education that centered on personal well-being, toward the end of the article he discussed how after the First World War, people in Germany, France, and Japan became more interested in physical education, especially for women. In Xie's article, physical education is a modernizing movement that aligns China with militarily powerful nations. To be modernized and to indicate the national health of China, women's bodies must be strengthened and must represent China in the performance of international bodies of state. Xie's discussion quickly switched to an analysis of women's bodies themselves, and their relationship to physical education. Xie emphasized that during their menstrual periods, women should have little or no physical education, because the uterus's engorgement with blood may cause it. to tilt backward. Xie also condemned women students for wrapping their breasts tightly to prevent them from showing through their clothes, comparing this to footbinding. Women students, according to Xie, were reluctant to let male teachers know when they have their periods; this and the issue of proper clothing were important concerns for physical education. The two visible signs of female difference, menstrual blood and developed breasts, Xie used to create and mark difference from an implied standard of male physicality. While criticizing Chinese concepts of beauty that elevate weakness, Xie contextualized the issue as one of modernity, taking place in the new-style school and in the international environment of world war and athletic competition. Another critic, Yan Wei, supported women's physical education by using the dichotomy of spirit and body to create the Chi-

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nese or, more generally, Asian female body. Physical education, which promoted regular menstrual periods, solid bone structure, and female beauty, and facilitated childbirth, also improved the spiritual mentality of the "Eastern woman," who was traditionally "obedient, chaste, etc. in character" and given to extremes in emotion (Yan Wei 1923: 8). Women's physical education should be less active than men's, and concentrated on small and curvaceous movements. Physical education produced sexual difference as the naturalized native, gendered body, and as indicative of the particular qualities of Chinese womanhood. The new standard of beauty that substituted strength for weakness had to be accepted in order for women's physical education to become possible on a large scale. In a second article, Xie Siyan branded beauty according to traditional Chinese notions as "sick beauty." Beauty traditionally meant "a willow beauty who was too weak to bear the weight of her clothing and unable to stand the wind," and never implied strength or power (Xie Siyan 1923 a: 12). In an interesting juxtaposition of literature and national power, Xie blamed literature for promoting concepts of sick beauty, showing how culturally it overvalued literary skill and undervalued a strong body. The physical body and literary skill appeared to be in an inverse relationship, with a weak body indicating an abundance of literary skill: "In my country's literature, each genre is well developed; what is unfortunate is that most literati and literary gentlemen like to describe sick postures in their poetry collections. Su Dongpo was a humpback, but because he wrote beautiful poetry, his ugly humpback posture was often called immortal's bones. Right up until the present time these concepts have not changed" (p. 13). While recognizing and promoting cultural and historical difference, like Yan Wei, Xie chastised "Easterners" for their concept of human beauty, or rather for their lack of such a concept, and mentioned the Olympic games as a standard to emulate. 12 For critics, the main problem with China's notion of the sick

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beauty was that it could "simply result in the death of the nation and the obliteration of the race" (p. 14). According to Xie, such a fate already had struck down other nations. Spain used to be a first-rate nation but now has deteriorated greatly. Although there are many reasons, those who are knowledgeable say that [the Spanish] demanded that women emphasize slender fingers as the only element of beauty. That is why the nation has arrived at today's disastrous situation. Ha, ha, the slenderness or plumpness of a finger can decide the prosperity or decline of a nation; isn't that a bit extreme? No, not at all. Think carefully: if you want fingers to be slender, the whole body must be slender; if you want the whole body to be slender, it goes without thinking that you don't exercise; naturally, it is even more obvious that if you don't exercise, your body will deteriorate. Not only will your body deteriorate, but the children you give birth to will be weak. Thus the nation's people (guomin) will be unhealthy, and the wonderfully prosperous Spain falls from the best nation in the world to number three. Humph, but don't just lick your chops talking about other people and not worry about yourself.... You probably know that in our country in ancient times "The king of Chu liked thin waists to the point where many starved to death." ... We want to stop the tendency to go toward the road of sickness and death, and we must loudly call out turn around ... turn ... turn, toward the living road of physical education! (p. 14) 13 Traditional texts, especially literature, were responsible for enshrining weak and sick female beauty. The tiny-waisted female body evident in poems, novels, and plays, often sick from melancholy and heightened poetic sensibilities such as those of Lin Daiyu in Hongloumeng, was integral to, as well as a cultural product of, a sustained literary discourse. Within these texts, Xie implied, because a weak female body indicated lofty literary sensi-

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bilities, the connection between literary talent (cai) and the body must be reworked. As I have shown in Chapter 2, moral virtue for a woman meant willingly submitting to and actively seeking out terrifying physical ordeals such as starving, suicide, cutting the flesh, binding the feet, and other forms of mutilation. In texts about footbinding and in the relationship between scholars who enshrined them and the practices themselves, these ordeals contrast with the idealizing, transcendental power of writing. For the modern period, Xie outlined in both Chinese and English the characteristics of the "physical education beauty": unity, variation, regularity, proportion, and symmetry; body proportions were shown by a mathematical formula, illustrating how scientific discourses expressed themselves through the body. Physical education could be described and delineated using the language of science, which entered the lexicon as a form of modern knowledge capable of reconfiguring traditional ideals of weakness. In the 1920s, women fiction writers focused on the female body, a scrutinized and physically obvious site of cultural meaning. Sometimes in their writings the female body disappeared or diminished, and other times it actively interfered with the protagonist's attempts to act upon her desires or realize her goals. In "Luoyisi de wenti" (Louise's problem), author Chen Hengzhe displaced the scholarly, textually engaged Louise with a physical education teacher, who succeeds in becoming the fulfilled marriage object while the female scholar is left loveless. Within the story's framework of intellectual pleasure and attraction, it seems almost impossible to value the physical woman (she never actually appears), and indeed she cannot fully capture Walter's admiration and involvement, yet she ends up as his wife. Louise, whose consciousness is the focus of the narrative, wants to establish herself through scholarship and writing and be valued for those skills, but she does not succeed in transforming her textual skill into personal happiness.

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In an article based on the Kyoto Conference of the Institute of Pacific Relations in 1929, Chen Hengzhe brought up the question of Chinese women, calling it a "great social problem" (Sophia H. Chen 1931a: 311). 14 Chen found the "women's problem" most representative of the "vital moral problems that face present day China," and held that the Chinese family functioned exactly like a state, with a supreme ruler (father or, less commonly, mother) and a bureaucracy (sons, daughters, daughters-in-law) that worked like a machine (pp. 311-12). What motivated the family was not love between husband and wife, but "the moral obligation of all members toward one another" (p. 312). The burdens of this system fell inordinately on women. Because this moral demand on women for sacrifice is so great, so imperative, and so mortifying, ... it reduces the lot of a woman to that of a mere moral slave: she may be patient, but she can never enjoy life; she may be willing to suffer, but she can never be happy; she may swallow the tears and try to smile, but she can never produce genuine laughter. And when the women of a nation are unhappy, not only as individuals, but also as mothers and wives, the whole nation cannot be happy. (pp. 312-13; my italics) Chen argued that Western culture, with its demand for a small family based on love, individualism, freedom, and various emotional, economic, and intellectual rights, produced desires that addressed the needs all young people, but in particular the needs of young women, physically defined as they were by the ideologies of virginity and chastity. As part of the rewriting of female moral virtue as adverse to modern life, Chen showed how love will spread out from women into the family and eventually to the nation. Through this reconfiguration of desire, moral virtue will be displaced. Hu Naiqiu elaborated on Chen Hengzhe's concerns in an essay outlining the categories and details of presenting oneself as

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modern. The first was physical education, which could change the way "Chinese viewed women's beauty as being so weak that one could not stand up to the wind" (Hu Naiqiu 1931: 21). This encouragement to be weak eventually caused Chinese women to become coquettish, Hu asserted. Other routes to modernity included liberating the body of restrictions; following good sanitary practices; seeking self-determination, knowledge (especially practical skills and modern knowledge), and simplicity in adornment; and possessing the "spirit of a citizen" (p. 24). Some of the early stories of Ling Shuhua (1900-1990) confront the contradiction between the traditional cultural value of a weak and helpless female body and the modern, robust woman. 15 The new Western notion of male/female physical dichotomy compromised and complicated the modern woman: modern values, while insisting on female strength, emphasized men's physical strength and insisted that in polite social convention and ritual-opening doors, carrying packages, lifting objects-men must recognize and enact (produce) men's strength and women's weakness and assist women. Contradictorily, the new woman should both be strong and express weakness in relation to men, a quality that is shown in Ling's well-known story "Xiuzhen" (Embroidered pillows). The Mistress of the story is a traditional woman attempting to move up the social ladder through marriage. She uses as her symbolic matchmaker the pillows she embroidered, which represent her skill and hard work, and the vulnerability of her position. The Mistress's frail body, which weakens under the concentration and persistence that the embroidery work demands, must throw itself into this work while removing from the pillows any physical traces of the exertion, such as sweat (Ling Shuhua 1925b). The pillows, making the rounds as a sign of the Mistress's marriage value, function as a substitute for the woman's body. The woman is alienated not only from the labor and the results of her labor, but especially from the site of her body's insertion into the social

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process, or the hierarchical social place where her productive relationships will be established. Like the pillows, her physical being is both valued and scorned, and cannot actualize itself as a desirable object outside the commerce of introductions, evaluation, and marriage. In contrast, the servant girl Little Niu apprehends the pillows not symbolically but as beautiful physical objects that are the result of skilled labor. Little Niu, the daughter of the Mistress's servant Zhang, is a bundle of dirt and sweat: as she works, the Mistress is nervous about Little Niu's potentially contaminating presence. Not only is Little Niu a threat to the purity of the pillows, but she is also a physical reminder of the labor the Mistress invests in the embroidery. It is this labor that is effaced in the exchange process. From the point of view of Zhang, Little Niu's mother, the Mistress herself seemed to have sprung from the pages of a book: "When I used to listen to people telling stories and saying that this or that girl was so elegant that she must be clever and smart, I always thought those were just tales from the mouths of storytellers speaking from books. I never thought they really existed. And this girl, like a delicate scallion, has such a hand! That embroidered bird can charm you to death!" (p. n). The Mistress embodies a traditional notion of femininity as willowy and ethereal, while at the same time she must physically labor to bring herself out of the textualized trope of a feminized woman and into actual material existence. If she recognizes the physical labor that is necessary for her to carry out the social transaction toward which she aims, the Mistress loses the literary image of a cultured woman and decreases her exchange value. By adding the very physical servant and her daughter, and describing their appreciation of the pillows for their innate beauty, Ling Shuhua highlighted a telling contrast: that between the woman invented through the literary portrayal of weakness and vulnerability, and the real physicality and labor that such an abstraction effaced. Similarly, Dai Jinhua and Meng Yue pin-

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point the literary transformation of the painfully bound foot into the term and practice of the "golden lotus," with its aura of connoisseurship and elegance. What Ling Shuhua's story implicitly critiqued was the textual re-creation of the physical ordeals of virtue into honor, a process that hides the bodily labor expended in this construction. In "Chicha'' (Drinking tea), Ling Shuhua focuses on Fangying, a young woman of leisure who is starting to have social interactions with men and women outside the family. When her friend Wang Shuzhen brings her brother, Wang Binxian, to visit, implicit taboos about men and women being together worry Fangying, but she reminds herself that now women and men can be just friends. She vows to master this new social situation and learn how to be friends with a man, but because she feels that Wang Binxian flirted with her the night before at the movies, she cannot help but fall in love with him. The story's comment on the female body comes at the end, when Shuzhen innocently chats with Fangying about her brother's upcoming marriage: It's really funny; Chinese people are either thinking about food or marriage. Ever since my brother came home from abroad people have been inviting him to tea or for meals. One day the Huangs-the Huangs of Shifangqiao-invited my brother to the restaurant Rainhall, and I went along. Their second daughter has a crippled foot. I'm sure you've seen her before; if she is sitting down you can't tell, but when she walks you can see it. Whenever she moved on the grounds, going up or down hills, crossing bridges or opening doors, my brother helped her, and my brother also carried the things she was holding. This was nothing, but suddenly the Huangs sent someone over to tell my brother to ask her hand in marriage. My brother thought it was absurd. Of course he already was engaged to Ms. Zhang abroad, but even if he wasn't, would he be willing to marry a crippled

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girl? But then that person from the Huangs said if he didn't care about her, why did he help her and wait on her, flirting with her like that? When my brother heard this he was both angry and amused. He said men waiting on women is the most common convention in foreign countries. Fangying, don't you think it is funny? (Ling Shuhua 1925a: 24) Ms. Huang's crippled foot-which can be seen as the bound foot reinterpreted under modern discourse-becomes the site at which Chinese and foreign, traditional and modern are contrasted. Fangying realizes that Wang Binxian's flirting with her was also nothing but "foreign conventions" that appear quite different when deciphered through Chinese standards. Like the Mistress of "Xiuzhen," Fangying is trapped within a traditional understanding and sense of her body (although intellectually she knows it as modern), and must relearn how to act as well as how to interpret. According to Chinese views of male-female physical relationships, Wang Binxian's polite attempts to assist the Huangs' second daughter appear as overt and significant flirtatiousness. Although Wang understands Chinese conventions and should know about the meaning of his behavior, Ling Shuhua does not allow us access to his mind, but instead focuses on the significance of physical codes for women. For the Huangs, Wang's behavior turns out to be cruel and misleading; for Fangying, it is a reminder that as an educated young woman, she must learn to reorganize and understand by the new codes of physical behavior and at the same time develop a complex knowledge of how the old and new can be manipulated. Ling Shuhua pinpointed male-female relationships as the turning point for an individual, the place where one would be initiated into a social position that implied an entire life orientation and a set of unchangeable interactions with parents, in-laws, and others. For Yu Dafu's protagonist in "Chenlun" (Sinking), failure to establish a relationship with a woman in Japan represented a

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national weakness, but for Fangying, the male-female relationship was an interaction where a woman would be inserted into the moral codes that indicated, for her, a position that would determine all significant aspects of her existence. Wang Binxian may have learned a code of male chivalry that he followed with respect to Ms. Huang, but to the initiated it clearly was only a code. As his sister pointed out, Ms. Huang's crippled foot would prevent him from taking a serious interest in her even if he did not have a fiancee abroad. This was evidence that the old and new codes could be exploited as desired. Ling Shuhua showed the constructed nature of the new code and the way in which it became a strategy to further Wang Binxian's interest, by portraying him as modern and progressive but still unchanged in his basic thinking. The crucial fact is that according to either traditional or modern notions, Ms. Huang's foot prevents her from being a desirable love object. The female body continued to possess a high level of symbolic meaning even for Wang Binxian, this supposedly modern man. This variable physical code disadvantaged not the men, but all the women, not only the traditional Ms. Huang but also the modern Fangying. What is intriguing about Ling Shuhua's work is not only that it illustrated the effect of imperializing and modern cultural ideas as they interacted with traditional notions, but that it located the meaning and behavior of the female body within social relationships as a key area of traditional and modern transactions. Furthermore, her work identified both the old and the new as disadvantageous to women because they shared a similar focus on the body as producing meaning. According to modern reinterpretations, traditional moral ideology constructed a female body that was restrained, confined, and mutilated, yet modern discourse continued to center the female body as a site women must labor to produce themselves as desirable for men, as a site upon which men could perform their modernity while the women themselves remained symbolically and actually crippled.

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Effacement and the Female Subject Chen Hengzhe's Louise, who is stymied by the contradiction between the intellectual and talented woman and a sexual and emotional relationship with a man, had precursors before the twentieth century. In a provocative and compelling analysis of eighteenth-century beauty-scholar romances, Keith McMahon traces the development of the "superior woman" and concludes that there was a contradiction between physical sexuality and this woman: "where there is the superior woman, there is no sex" (McMahon 1995: 124). The women portrayed in these romances exceeded men in literary talent and other skills and had monogamous or nearly monogamous relationships with their husbands (p. 99). The husband often was "an effeminate scholar-poet who in effect yields his right to polygyny (except in limited form), and allows women to take the superior and active role" (p. 99). The wife became a "talented female scholar" and her relationship with her husband was similar to the friendship between two literati men. While the woman attained this superiority by cross-dressing and writing like a man, the man did no such thing in return, or if he did, it was only as a performance of erotic complicity (p. 99). Novels that presented this narrative of the superior woman demanded the "rationalization and de-eroticization oflove" (p. 102). Examining the stories along a continuum from the chaste to the erotic, McMahon finds that in general, stories that centered on women were more chaste, and those that centered on men were more erotic (p. 106). According to McMahon, a woman gained superiority only by being allowed to act as a man, and a man became inferior when he relinquished his sexual right to many women, or the right to polygamy. When the women in these narratives acted like men, they confused everyone around them and blurred gender boundaries. The elevation of a woman to the superior position, which may not be defined solely as literary skill but surely included literary skill as a critical component, entailed an effacement of

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physical desire and of the ability to function within a system of physical sexuality. The essence of femaleness in these stories was lack of talent and the inferiority it implied, and the quintessential female position was as a fully embodied physicality. To allow a woman to accede to the transcendence of talent was to disempower the man and take away the mark of femininity from the woman, essentially disembodying her as female. 16 Chen's fictional Louise is an excellent example of this: becoming a professor means that she excels in textual and scholarly work, or possesses cai and is a superior woman. That Louise is denied the satisfaction of a modern sexual union in marriage illustrates the continuing power of the premodern ideology that marks cai as basically male. When claimed and expressed by a woman, cai defeminizes her and disassociates her from sexual life. Through fictional narrative, women writers represented the physical effacement of the woman with literary talent, a creature whose body appears unable to sustain the burden under which it toils. Although in fiction and essays writing had the ability to exceed ordinary experience, because this transcendent emotional and intellectual nature must be possessed by one with talent, it appeared almost beyond the reach of women without physical effacement. In her article "Chuangzuo de wojian" (My views on literary creation), Lu Yin claimed that the essence of art is subjectivity and insisted on the validity of representing individual experience (Lu Yin 1921a: 19). She argued that the writer is an extra-sensitive person who has a responsibility to fight his or her way "out of darkness into light" and to avoid driving young people to suicide (p. 21). Although Lu Yin herself was a woman who wrote, in her fiction she seldom depicted women as spiritualized authors. Nevertheless, women could assume the position of the writer if their role was mediated through the letter or diary. Stories published in 1922 by Lu Yin and Bing Xin are examples of the mediated fiction by which women connected their gender to writing. Lu Yin's story "Huoren de beiai" (Someone's

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tragedy) appeared in the same year as Bing Xin's "Yishu" (Posthumous letters). Both are stories of women writing to friends; in both, a woman who is sick writes to a friend and then either commits suicide or gets sicker and dies. These stories present two aspects of the relationship between women and literature in the 1920s. The first is that in order to be associated with a woman in a story or novel, writing must appear in mediated forms such as the diary or letter, rather than in a direct representation of the creative transcendence of fiction or poetry. The second is that within this mediated context, the female body appears as an obstacle to fulfillment. "Huoren de beiai" concerns Yaxia, a woman who writes letters describing her emotions and life. 17 When she sees that her friends have divorced, and she herself is not interested in having a love affair either with her married admirer or with the friends of her brother who pursue her in Japan, Yaxia decides life is an insignificant toy to be played with. All of her correspondence with old friends indicates to Yaxia that the social world is evil and soiled. She takes action and leaves for Japan, where her brother is studying, but finds Tokyo noisy, irritating, and constrictive. Although she experimentally involves herself in three or four areas of social life, there is no place for her to work successfully. The aristocratic, made-up, false appearance of women in the Association for Far Eastern Peace contradicts the clean, pure image Yaxia expected, and she sees little hope of alliance with them. Politics offers little opportunity because it functions in a corrupted world; even though the socialist whom Yaxia and her brother visit is pure and idealistic, his house is surrounded by police. Religion appears as a world that may hold some interest for Yaxia's self-construction, but lack of faith prevents her from seeing it as more than a comfort when she is sick. Anxiety makes her ill but she cannot stop thinking. Even though she wants to keep a diary, Yaxia finds herself blocked from writing. After Yaxia pours out her feelings about these obstacles and difficulties, we discover from a post-

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script that she has jumped into a lake and died, leaving only a book, Sheng zhi mi (Riddle of life). Her corpse is never found; hence the body is totally effaced (Lu Yin 1922). 18 Bing Xin's "Yishu" are letters written to "Bing Xin," which implies that the author is using mediated fiction to write to herself.1 9 This self-contained structure of author-to-author illustrates even more concretely either the difficulty Bing Xin actually had of allowing her writing out of the metaphorical home, or her desire to portray this problem. In the text, Yuanyin is convalescing in her aunt's house at the seashore. She wants to write but cannot. Even when she does succeed in writing some scenic description, she usually burns the draft after a few days, echoing the Ming dynasty references to texts written by women being "rescued from the fire" (Dorothy Ko 1994: 18-19). More than Lu Yin's Yaxia, Yuanyin is almost pure subjectivity. Her body endures only as a sick emblem of her illness and is completely unable to act. The scenes around her exist only to stimulate her emotions. 20 When her aunt asks what style of calligraphy she uses, Yuanyin replies that it is her own and comments that writing's purpose is only to communicate meaning. The relationship between the material traces of writing on the page and its meaning is similar to that berween Yuanyin's body and her mind; in both the material form is denied or effaced so that abstraction and meaning can take priority. In a letter, Yuanyin emphasizes the purely subjective nature of her existence and the (ultimately restricted) freedom it brings her in writing: "You have brought up the issue of 'literature' but this topic is too big. I truly am unworthy of discussing it, and even more, I dare not discuss it. Bing Xin, you must firmly remember that when I discuss things, I only use my own personal standard. Of course, this standard is extremely crude and unmeasured. But in correspondence with close friends, it doesn't make any difference, we can say anything we wish" (Bing Xin 1922a: 9). Yuanyin's body is sick, and above it stands the literary field as a superior overarching topic. Her heightened emotions, however,

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imply literary sensibilities, and bring into the referential field. a long traditional history of overly sensitive literary minds in both men and women. This stance does not allow Yuanyin to theorize directly about the nature of literature unless she writes her ideas in letters, inserting them into the feminine medium of "women's talk," polite and delicate, and then into recollections and impressions of friends and relatives (p. n). Neither Lu Yin nor Bing Xin created a woman writer as protagonist, but rather constructed women who wrote letters. The long-honored literary trope stipulating that the writer is more intuitive and sensitive than the commoner or official was put into practice in these writers' construction of both male and female authors. Yet both Lu Yin and Bing Xin magnified this trope in the women letter writers, whose bodies were effaced through illness, inactivity, and suicide. 21 What becomes clear is that portraying a direct and unproblematic relationship between women and writing is paradoxical. Not only does the female body appear to stand in the way of such a depiction and ultimately demand effacement, but writing itself is unapproachable unless a mediated form is used. Such a construction speaks both to the body's power as an indicator of femininity and to writing's potency as a transcendent masculinist field. In the anti-footbinding movement, in training for hygiene, in physical education, and in fashion, bodies-in particular women's bodies-became an object of research and lengthy discussion, and served to indicate the state of Chinese culture within the international community. During the May Fourth period, women and suicide was a common topic of discussion, but it generally centered on the suicides of women with traditional parents forcing them to marry against their will. In these stories by Lu Yin and Bing Xin, however, it was women writers whose bodies were destroyed through illness, through extreme weakness, or through their own intervention. The worst and solely female-gendered form of bodily efface-

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ment was widow suicide, which with chastity was, in premodern times, often supported by otherwise liberal politicians and scholars. For example, Chen Hongmou, a provincial governor early in the nineteenth century, strongly supported the ideal of virtuous widowhood. Qing officials often celebrated chaste widows by establishing tablets or arches in their honor, or by giving monetary awards (Rowe 1992: r8-r9). Chen viewed the chaste widow cult as a way of establishing and continuing proper social relations and civilizing people in border regions. 22 He also regarded it as a way to prevent the commodification of women, who often were sold again into marriage by their natal family after their first husband died. Chen was ambivalent about this destructive and strictly female form of bodily effacement-widow suicide-but the practice was actively supported by other leading intellectuals, such as Huang Zongxi and Lu Shiyi (p. 20). In order to connect this tradition of bodily effacementwhether in chastity, illness, suicide, or melancholy that leads to death-to literary writing, it is necessary to remember the diametric opposition of the essential female virtue, de, and literary talent, cai. 23 Furthermore, it is important to note that even though differences in class, family, education, and so on make each woman's experience unique, de is a discourse with clear physical denotations and one that makes strenuous demands on the body. By the nineteenth century, de had accumulated a long tradition: sequestering women in the inner quarters, a place with its own emotional and erotic culture; hiding the female body from the "outside" world; footbinding; physical servitude to father, husband, and son; refraining from sexual relations before and after marriage (chastity); monogamy; cutting and mutilating the female body in the name of filial piety; and widow suicide. De contained an extensive set of practices, in other words, aimed at placing the female body into specific social and relational positions and expressing, indicating, and solidifying the woman's role in publicly recognized forms.

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In Qing discussions of cai, we can sec that a possible function of writing among elite women in the relative seclusion of the home was to forget, overcome, and transcend the physical and emotional misery of misfortunes such as widowhood (Dorothy Ko 1992: 19). As long as writing was kept within the home and not allowed as a socially accepted and embodied activity for women in the outside arena, elite women considered it an appropriate practice that could allow them to resist and attenuate the pervasive influence of moral virtue. Modern writers represented the effaced female body in many ways. Chen Hengzhe, Lu Yin, and Bing Xin did not merely portray a weakened body as indicating literary genius, a trope that also appeared in the work of male writers. More importantly, their attempt to force the female body to exist simultaneously as the writing body, in other words the woman writer, itself produced a contradiction. More positively, authors forayed into unknown territory by erasing a morality-inflected body that could, if allowed to persist in its physical form, have forced women characters into traditional relationships and meanings. In these stories by women authors, the body appears to betray the female characters and disallow their personal and social embodiment as women who write. The discourses of women and love, marriage, and singlehood, as well as the national implications of an innovative, physically strong body for women, showed that these complicated, textualized areas created a new physical being for women, albeit one that could always be co-opted by manipulators such as Ling Shuhua's Wang Binxian. On the one hand, this discourse centered the new woman as emblematic of the Chinese nation; on the other hand, women writers found this model, when embodied as an intellectual or writing woman, impossible to actualize. The emphasis on physical practices as determining a woman's nature was not merely a practice of modernity, but also in a different way a predetermined condition within the Chinese tradition.

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Thus the effacement of women's bodies through a complex relationship to Literary tropes and social relationships (Ling Shuhua), to scholarship and textual work (Chen Hengzhe), to the psychological influence of moral virtue and its constraining relationships (Lu Yin), and to literary writing itself (Bing Xin and Lu Yin) reveals how the female body carried with it into modern times the contamination and antiliterary ideology of the physical woman modulated, tempered, and toned through moral virtue. The very image of Ling Shuhua's Mistress leaped out from the pages of a book; she had to hide the labor she expended to market herself upward. Chen Hengzhe's Louise struggled but failed to attain both love and an intellectual career. The psychological difficulty of Lu Yin's Supu displayed her unconscious loyalty to traditional moral virtue. And both Bing Xin and Lu Yin produced women writers whose bodies underwent effacement. Cai and de continued well into the twentieth century as fundamentally masculine and transcendent, and feminine and embodied discourses. Although women authors illustrated the obstacles that prevented them from easily combining cai and de in the woman writer, they also proposed inventive and creative solutions. An example is bodily effacement not only as a character's failure to succeed as a woman writing but as a necessary step that would metaphorically, if not in physical reality, introduce an incisive metaphysical exploration into some novel literary forms. The following chapter examines women writers' further venture into new constructions of the modern woman and the modern writer, and focuses on the question: what should women write?

4· THE

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Reformers trying to envision the modern woman writer to some extent recognized and took into account the underlying obstruction of moral virtue, with its emphasis on embodied restriction and physical mutilation of women. On the positive side, some viewed these constraints as an advantage that would permit women a more trustworthy insight into human emotions and thus literary expression. Others, conflating the feminine voice in poetry with the historical woman, regarded female circumscription as in itself productive of a high-level literary sensibility. On the negative side, still other reformers claimed that women had become composites of unsavory female qualities of the past, lacked the independence necessary for literature, and had acquired an artificiality and narrowness that precluded them from developing a true literary voice. Women writers themselves, however, adopted a fourth perspective: in the 1920s they posited women and literary writing as gendered dichotomies, with literature holding the male position. By the late 1920s they began to explore the physical and emotional sites of female limitations.

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They concentrated on the relationships that implicated women in society and the family and on unconventional associations that women could form to experiment with new relationships. This chapter moves beyond the problematic relationship between the female body, with its connotations of perfomative moral virtue, and a transcendent writing, and turns to the link between the new woman and the new literature and its construction among literary theorists and historians, social critics, and writers of fiction. Although many critics hailed the emergence of women's literature (fonu wenxue or niixing wenxue), women writers themselves recognized the difficulties that entrapped them within past paradigms. Thus very early, in the 1920s, when women writers wrote about authors, they wrote about male authors, and they did not depict a direct, unproblematic connection between women and literature. In the late 1920s, however, women writers began seriously to dissect the conditions of their confinement and p~oposed new associations and relationships that had the capacity to alter their physical and mental surroundings. Women writers found heterosexual relations, or the joining of men and women in the family, to be the material conditions of their inability to write, and it was these material conditions that produced the mental and emotional complications involved in establishing themselves as writers. In her investigation into the eighteenth-century Chinese body and its formation as a site of centering and the "surfaces and boundaries that produced certain subjectivities and bodies as sources of signification and the texts that constructed those subjectivities and provided them with historicity" (Zito 1994: 103), Angela Zito fixes on the two discourses of textuality and filiality (wen and xiao), which she describes as the "fetishizing of writing and the nurturing of sons" (p. 114). Locating wen as the practice that produced both body and text, Zito shows how the notion of boundary is important for women's social lives, confining them to their domestic existence, binding their feet, cutting them off

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from textual production, and at the extreme reducing them "to the 'metaphorical' axis of the 'inscribed upon'" (p. 120). It was with this metaphorical and physical notion of boundary, formerly codified in the idea of separate spheres, that modern writers confronted as they struggled to establish a new perimeter within which women could live and work. The division of male and female worlds into separate spheres was not just a separation of space, but an extensive and pervasive social and personal ideology sanctioned by a ubiquitous classical tradition of texts. Canonical tracts of human relations such as the Liji (Book of rites) equated the "outside" to functioning as a male: "From the age of five, a boy and a girl would not sit together or share a meal. He would seek instructions from an outside teacher; she would follow the teachings of a female teacher.... He should not discuss aftairs of the inner sphere; she should not discuss affairs of the outer sphere" (Dorothy Ko 1992: 14). The inner = female, outer = male formula was expanded by Song neoConfucianists, who elaborated Zhong. Dongshu's interpretation of the social aspects of yin/yang bipolarities and prescribed architectural rules for the layout of dwellings that demarcated and deployed gender-based separation of space. By the seventeenth century, "the doctrine of separate spheres had been firmly established as the natural order of society and family" (Dorothy Ko 1994: 15, my italics). Several scholars have pointed out that the difficulty with a woman writing was often not entirely because writing itself was unwomanly, but because it could lure a woman out of the cloistered, domestic space into the outer sphere of men. Although writing could be sustained as a private practice, if it came to the attention of someone who wished to take it "out," the author or her family could easily lose control of the text and their reputation. Even if a woman's education was justified in the name of motherhood, a woman's knowledge of written language and the ability to record and send words into the outside world repre-

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sented a transgression of boundaries (pp. 16-17). Yet as numerous Ming and Qing references to the danger posed by women writing imply, although writing may have been thought subversive mainly if it were used by women to violate the inner/outer boundary, at some point writing itself, when done by a woman, became suspicious. Writing implied outerness, the exact quality demanded of the modern woman, who was supposed to enter-if carefully and with some restraint-the formerly male worlds of education and social affairs. Thus the combination of the conceptual categories of woman and literary writing presents its own historical trajectory and contradiction. Because the gendered discourse of moral virtue contained an antiliterary bias, the very combination of woman and literature into a conceptual unit required the construction of a new ideology. 1 In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a limited but influential number of women recreated by discourses of national strength and useful citizenship broke through many inner/outer structures, going out of the domestic space to establish themselves as doctors, teachers, factories workers, politicians, and more. Nonetheless, the combination of the two categories of woman and literature created problems specifically related to the traditional gendering of literary talent as male and moral virtue as female. This history made the splicing together of women and literature quite different from new junctions in other areas. Thus the modern areas where women worked, or woman in politics, woman in economics, woman with a career, woman becoming educated, woman in law, and woman as manual laborers, were different from fimu wenxue or nitxing wenxue. Politics, economics, careers, education, law, and labor, although part of the outside or male sphere, were not as explicitly marked and theorized in intellectual culture as male, and were not formed through a historical relationship against cai, or literary talent. 2 These domains were not overdetermined by a long tradition of opposition with physically enacted moral virtue. Thus fimu wenxue implies

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not only writing by women, but as developed by critics in the late 1920s and early 1930s, writing that through style, topic, and structure was gendered as female. Funu wenxue not only meant that women would participate in literature as they could in politics or education, but that they would infuse their unique subjectivities, histories, and experiences into the literary text, and change how writing functioned, what and who it represented, in essence what writing was.

Two Categories: Woman and Literature In 1916, Xie Wuliang (1885-1964) published Zhongguo funu wenxueshi (The history of women's literature in China). This was the first long work that comprehensively studied "women's literature" published in the twentieth century. After teaching at Cungu xuetang (Academy to preserve the ancient) in Sichuan and Sichuan guoxueyuan (Sichuan academy for Chinese studies), Xie took up the post of editor at Zhonghua shuju in Shanghai, where Zhongguo funu wenxueshi was published. 3 He published widely on the Shijing, poetry and poetic theory, prose stylistics, Confucian and Buddhist philosophy, literary history, and women. This wide range of scholarship shows Xie to be trained as an old-style intellectual well versed in all types of Chinese letters. Xie's writings on women also include Funu xiuyang tan (Discussions on the cultivation of women). 4 Zhongguo funu wenxueshi was written in classical Chinese, and according to Xie, because access to information about women writers in the Qing dynasty was relatively easy to come by, he did not need to repeat it in this volume. The historical coverage of the book, therefore, ended with the Ming dynasty. Many of the collections or individual works to which Xie referred were no longer extant at the writing, and were known only through references to them in other works, but many poems were available and Xie reprinted them. Xie also reprinted and discussed anonymous poems· historically attributed to women writers. His

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book emphasizes poetry and utilizes the format of a brief introductory discussion for each period followed by discussion of individual women writers and works. Xie strongly supported combining the categories woman and literature, and attempted to carve out an ancient history to validate the combination. He not only claimed that women were prolific writers, but that they actually created many forms of literature. The five-character-line poem did not, he claimed, as scholars imagined, originate with Su Shi or Li Bo, but with much earlier women writers, many of whom were nameless in history (Xie Wuliang 1916: 54). Xie believed that much of the Shijingwas written by women, but this fact either was altered or disregarded by later scholars (pp. 11-12). In his introduction, Xie took an explicitly social stance in explaining the domination of men over women. Women's oppression was in no way biological or natural, but social; it was only with the consolidation of Confucianism that the original equality of men and women became perverted (p. 1). Xie argued that during the Zhou dynasty, women writers were common and supposedly had equal status with men writers, but after the Zhou, women's writing declined. Referring to more enlightened equality between the sexes that he believed characterized foreign countries, Xie pointed out how women were able to counteract the system of literary production and prestige. For example, women sometimes managed to sneak into the civil service examinations, or utilized their role as prostitutes to write poetry, resulting in the highly admired tradition of courtesan poetry (p. 2). In an analysis similar to that of later scholars such as Ye Shaojun, Xie traced women's oppression to Confucianism's increasing tendency to relegate women to the inner chambers, something that he claimed in no way denied that women were equal or superior to men in innate literary skills. Xie Wuliang's work was pioneering for the way in which it coupled literature and women based on women's skills and unique

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conditions. In short, it implied that literature itself had an underlying affinity with femininity. Although such alliances had been invoked in Qing discourses on women's learning, Xie's argument constituted the discussion as nationalistically modern, taking as his background the entirety of Chinese literati practice, which had been criticized for the last thirty years, and placing women at the top. Xie thus implied that if women's skills had been recognized and nurtured, China would be a much better place. In his references to foreign countries and their gender and literary traditions, Xie also established a modern context of internationalism, where Chinese practices must be compared to others. A few years later, in another early piece on women's literature, Zhou Zuoren asserted women's right to write and the necessity of women writers working from their own experience. Unlike the work of Xie Wuliang, however, which implied that women possessed innate literary skills and that literature itself may be fundamentally feminine, Zhou's theorization of gender subsumed it entirely within issues of class, social, and national struggle (Zhou Zuoren 1921). 5 Zhou's argument was more about the social position and rights of women than about literature. Although it implicitly defined women as those who as a group had been subjected to the most damaging social circumstances, it claimed that these conditions also extended to poorer men as well and constituted a general social phenomenon. 6 Zhou's article was one of many that emphasized women's potential contributions to the emerging nation-state. This emphasis sprang from the belief that public "progress" of women's rights would contribute to a more highly developed and internationally competitive national entity.l The protagonists of stories by Lu Yin, Bing Xin, and Ling Shuhua often were wives, mothers, and daughters. 8 Other characters, however, engaged in "modern" relationships of friends or lovers. In the late 1920s and early 1930s reformers criticized the traditional flavor or conservatism of writing that depicted women in boudoir or familial roles, favoring the depiction of friends or

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lovers as new and as producing the modern woman. In other words, critics saw the first stance as reproducing tradition and the second as producing modernity. In stories, essays, films, and cultural debates, modernity made a special appearance as the "modern girl" (often written in English) to which there was no equivalent "modern boy." The modern girl had easily identifiable physical characteristics, such as short hair and stylish, modern clothes. She was an urban woman, and often one who attended school to prepare for a career and sometimes immersed herself in love affairs or later worked for social justice. The modern girl had a deep, emotional interior, sought meaning from her life, struggled against inequality, and valued her intellect. She paid attention to modern technologies such as hygiene and nutrition and took care of her personal appearance. The modern girl could be fraught with contradictions: looking for love but scorning men, valuing social change but pursuing trivialities. But where did she come from and why was she such an important figure in literature of the 1920s and 1930s? In her reading of Ding Ling's Muqin (Mother), "Shafei niishi de riji" (The diary of Ms. Sophia), and other texts, Tani Barlow (1982) analyzes the modern girl syndrome as Ding Ling's attempt to replace a Chinese model of human relations with the Westernized primacy of the bourgeois subject. In another article, Barlow argues that although in late imperial China the term fonii signified female family members, in the twentieth century the term, now contrasted with the modern term niixing, and lost its former meaning and came to indicate a statist category (Barlow 1994: 254-55). Reading the work of provincial governor and essayist Chen Hongmou (1696-rnr), Barlow shows that for Chen, what genders a person are the "differential kin linkages" that position people in relation to each other (p. 256). Barlow believes that the body in Confucian discourse carries a "general instability'' and what seems to be gender is actually "yin/yang differentiated positions" (p. 259). Thus while "(good) women in the jia did effect

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social relations outside the family, no position existed for female persons (or male persons, for that matter) outside the jia's boundaries" (p. 259). Rey Chow questions Barlow's reading of Ding Ling's work because it organizes the writing "along a gradually ascending scale, with her maturity as a writer measured in terms of her ability to abandon the subjective, Westernized, 'merely' feminine concerns of her early writings for the 'more important' ones of political revolution and sinicized consciousness" (Rey Chow 1991: 162). Chow grounds her objection in her personal and feminist understanding of modern Chinese writers and in a reading that makes use of Freudian psychology to comprehend the minds of early twentiethcentury writers (p. 162). She objects to Barlow's interpretation, which she reads as a reaction to universalizing Western feminism and its insistence on the centrality of sexuality. Shifting the analytical emphasis from textual discourse to psychology, Chow demands that the reader view the sexuality expressed in Ding Ling's and Bing Xin's stories as a foundational modernity, not as an imported construct. Sophia should not be read as an immature woman "unable to move on to a broader vision of reality" (which is also how leftist critics of the late 1920s, 1930s, and later read her) (p. 166). Rather, because Sophia is inspired to write by her memory ofYun, she gains a kind of agency (both is moved and moves) and reverses "the positions of the subjects and objects of love" (p. 169). This position is not that of the weak loving woman, but is a new loving woman, an alternative aesthetic that marks the "subject's entry into cultural identity" (p. 169). In Chow's analysis, because "feminine self-sacrifice was the major support of traditional Chinese culture," as China encountered historical trauma in the early twentieth century, woman stood for "China's traumatized self-consciousness" and became "a dialectic of resistance-in-givenness that is constitutive of modernity in a nonWestern, but Westernized, context" (p. qo). I interpret the phrase "dialectic of resistance-in-givenness" to refer to modernity in non-

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Western countries that stipulates both an acceptance of certain modern institutions and cultural practices and a resistance that is necessary to maintain and integrate aspects of indigenous culture. The interpretations and arguments of both Barlow and Chow are useful in helping us understand who the modern girl was: where she came from and how her image participated in the production of Chinese modernity. It is hard to deny that Barlow's models of bourgeois femininity, introduced to China through European novels, did not produce images in China like those in Europe, although they surely were not identical. Because this was the process of modernization for many developing nation-states at that time, however, basic ideological changes were part of the economic and social transformations of modernity, and not just imports from abroad. While recognizing the Westernized context of modern life, which establishes itself in new educational, economic, scientific, and institutional structures as well as cultural and interpretive (literary, psychological, gender) values, this very condition is constitutive of modernity in non-Western contexts. Under modern conditions, there can be no essentially Chinese model to which to return, and moreover practices that were once different should be thought of not as foreign, but as the backbone of Chinese modernity itself. In focusing on the continuing significance of premodern ideological paradigms, I have moved toward another question: how can we investigate the differences between historically determined gender concepts in twentieth-century cultures while recognizing and taking into consideration the powerful referential framework of global modernity? Furthermore, how can we prevent difference from being only that, and allow it to inform and construct our understanding of the power relations in culture? Kaja Silverman's Male Subjectivity at the Margins offers a solution. In a detailed analysis that brings together psychological theory and a historical, discourse-based approach, Silverman locates the dominant fiction of twentieth-century Western ideological reality in the

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unity of the family and the perceived adequacy of the male subject (Silverman 1992: 15-16). In psychological/symbolic terms, this unity is based on "the alignment of phallus and penis"; when this alignment falters, we all suffer from "ideological fatigue" (p. 16). Like Althusser, Silverman situates ideological faith outside consciousness, but she insists that it is also inside the psyche, passing for reality and thus commanding the subject's belief (pp. 17, 21). The categories of male and female are the dominant fiction's most basic binary opposition, and the positive Oedipus complex-through which the male child must renounce the mother to accede to the father's position of power and the female child must experience cultural lack and devalue her own sex-is the main fictional structure (pp. 34-35). However, perhaps in a recognition of diverse family structures around the world, Silverman is careful to point out that the Oedipus complex is not the only possible reaction to the ideology of the family (p. 40). For Silverman, the dominant fiction-shown by Anderson to be worked out through literary narrative and constitutive of nationness-forms "the stable core around which a nation's and a period's 'reality' coheres." The "collectivities of community, town, and nation," she argues, "have all traditionally defined themselves through reference to that image" (pp. 41-42). The family structure embodies male identification with power and privilege, yet oppression from class, race, ethnicity, age, and other things, as well as historical trauma, can threaten this identification with power. Taking a stance within heterodox ideologies such as feminism, Marxism, and gay sexuality threatens reality for a majority of people and generally encumbers the male subject (p. 49). Silverman traces the traumatic effects of World War II on male subjectivity, defining historical trauma as "any historical event, whether socially engineered or of natural occurrence, which brings a large number of male subjects into such an intimate relation with lack that they are at least for the moment unable to sustain an imaginary relation with the phallus, and so withdraw

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their belief from the dominant fiction" (p. 55). Her analysis, however, is dependent on the particular history of the Western family and kinship relations, and nowhere does she imply the universality of her model. In fact, the opposite is true: Silverman explicitly limits her analysis to discrete historical periods, here post-World War II American culture. Despite its specificity, some parts of Silverman's analysis of the dominant fiction of social life can be fruitfully applied to modern China and perhaps to any culture "traumatized" by imperialism. What defines women's position, both in traditional China and in Silverman's work, is its relationship to men and the family. For a time, this defining relational aspect of women's lives became an advantage, as Xie Wuliang and others recouped it as a modern literary ideology that valued emotional depth and introspection, qualities they believed resulted from women's restriction to the inner sphere. Yet in the late 1920s and early 1930s, leftist critics attacked women writers' lack of immersion in society and inability to write about the lives of actual women. Their insistence that writers focus on social and national issues was partially what Barlow (1994) outlines as a substitution of nation (guo) for family (jia), in which leftist critics continued marking the family as a bastion of conservative ideologies while encompassing women within a modern framework that established them in similar hierarchical relationships with the state. 9 Until leftist ideology took hold, however, beginning in the late 1920s, and to a large extent even beyond that time, women writers focused on relationships between women and women or men and women, which shows that they were primarily concerned with this relational aspect of human interaction. In his article on Chen Hongmou, William T. Rowe underscores the powerful and widespread Chinese belief in the ontological value of social roles. For Chen, social roles were not really variable, but equal to one's essential nature (zhi xzng) (Rowe 1992: 3). It was through her role that a woman was subjected to the

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"three obediences;' (sancong), which stipulated that she follow the wishes of her father, husband, and son; the relational quality of her "essential nature" is clear (p. 5). Whereas Chen Hongmou advocated literacy for women, he stressed the importance of the family as a building block of society and promoted strict segregation of the inner and the outer (p. 13). By highlighting Chen's belief that roles are not readily changeable but constitutive of identity and essence, Rowe has provided a perspective on gender meanings that reveals why familial and kin relations remained a significant framework for women writers in the modern period. The dominant context of social life for women was their position relative to family members and other kin; in the modern period added to this were other environments where women were beginning to function outside the family, such as the school, the factory, and numerous social institutions that put them into contact with non-kin men and women. Even in these spheres, in the relationships that women formed with others, especially other women, sometimes they followed the model of heterosexual love affairs or the familial or kin ties of sister or cousin. The May Fourth movement attacked the Chinese extended family as the foundation of traditional and destructive ideologies of the self, but even when women writers created protagonists like Ding Ling's Sophia, who exists largely in her own egocentric and socially unengaged mind, they continued to situate them within a relational context and made their deep friendships or the memory of such ties significant in determining their consciousness. The work of Barlow, Rowe, and others helps us understand why this relational context-even when extended outside family and kin and metaphorically constructed in terms of social relations-was so important to women writers. Socialist critiques of women writers began around 1922 with Cheng Fangwu's attack on Bing Xin for being socially unaware, only a few years after women writers had began to publish in modern journals such as Xiaoshuo yuebao. As Chapter 5 of this

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book shows, intellectuals constructed the "defects" of women's writing as clearly feminine and demanded a socially engaged literature that did not privilege individual subjectivity or personal relationships. The contradiction for women writers was clear: what was feminine was not literary. Although individual stories by women may have contained realist elements, if we were to construct a list of 1920s writers thought to be "realist" at the time or today in contemporary China, women writers would rarely appear, if at all. Not until the late 1920s did women begin to follow the guidelines of leftist social engagement and change their themes, styles, and approaches. The opposition between the individual and society is basic to romantic fiction. Male writers Guo Moruo, Yu Dafu, and Xu Zhimo all developed a literature of the self and a literary discourse of individual subjectivity. 10 Along with romantic fiction and poetry, realist or naturalist fiction with an emphasis on "disclosing" social poverty and structures that led to suffering was published throughout the 1920s. In an early article that theorized the relationship between the new woman (xin nuzi) and the new literature (xin wenxue), Liu Linsheng identified society as the context of the liberated woman, someone who had shifted her loyalties from the family to this larger unit. The liberated women was one "who serves society and can be independent; it can be said that she (nuxing) has the means to solve 'human problems"' ( Liu Linsheng 1919: 2). Liu believed that because women had no true independence within the institution that was the focus of their life, the family, they could not independently create their own literature, but could only imitate men's works. Although women's literature (nuzi de wenxue) should have its own "characteristics," its requirements-realism, clear separation from the old poetry in theme and image, use of the vernacular, understanding of Chinese and foreign literature-were the same as those for literature written by men (p. 3). In other words, although Liu could conceive of a positively constructed modern women's literature, it

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had no clearly articulated, gendered characteristics to distinguish it from modern literature written by men. A few years later Zhou Zu6ren took this definition further by delineating the kind of literature the new woman should write: Because of the many restrictions of the past, women have a major disadvantage: they are misunderstood by others and they generally do not understand others themselves. In this regard, the study and writing of literature could have a great effect. There are quite a few women poets or women novelists in the world but we can say there are almost none who can truly express women's sad song.... From this time on women should make use of their own art and literature to express their true emotions and ideas and get rid of thousands of years of misunderstandings and suspicions. (Zhou Zuoren 1921: 8) Zhou implied that because they had been the victims of erroneous portrayal in texts by men, women should write not about society at large, as men did, but about themselves and thus cause the true woman to be revealed. Zhou argued that previous representations of women in texts appeared as a hugely influential, socially sanctioned lie. The truth would be represented in the new literature to be written by women and about their own lives, feelings, and beliefs. In Zhou's analysis, because women had not lived according to modern criteria, which emphasize individuality, freedom, emotional depth, and expression, they had not been able to produce themselves as writers. What Zhou proposed for women writers was a gender-specific subject position: the woman writer. Male writers also took on the task of representing the new self, but it was a generalized modern self without a foregrounded gender. In premodern literary culture, although many texts contained references to the incompatibility of women and literary pursuits, women's vulnerable, erotic subjectivity was a staple of poetic images. Many kinds of literature portrayed women's feelings or con-

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structions of what was believed to be a woman's emotional being; this writing was not supposed to be indicative of a specific woman, however, whose allegiance to the dictates of morality should keep her writing inside the household. 11 Critics in the May Fourth movement quickly identified and criticized this feminine image of innerness, and connected it with what they saw to be the negative traits of women, including jealousy, gossipiness, and duplicity. Liu Linsheng also pointed out the melancholic and lustful images of women in the old literature and called for a new women's writing of realism. Liu as well as others conflated old poetic literature written by men but taking the feminine voice with all writing by women, and also went one step farther to identifY this very writing as the women's literary tradition of the past. Thus the "problems" of excessive lyricism, melancholy, and a represented weakness or victimization, which were abundant in poetry, became a specific trait of women's writing and also of women's subjective state of mind. Liu Linsheng specified the harmful aspects of women's subjectivity as extreme emotionalism (as illustrated in the Shijing), a tendency toward melancholy and sadness, and in particular a sense of artificiality. It was the last, Liu believed, so out of step with modern demands of mimetic representation or truthful soul-searching, that made women unable to establish themselves quickly as modern writers. Because Liu found artificiality to be basic to women's personalities, a switch of emphasis from the "new woman," who still carried the contamination of women's negative essence, to the "new literature," with its demand of realistic portrayal, would propel women toward a more natural emphasis on social engagement. With the new literature pressuring women to function differently and to focus on practical issues and true-to-life representations, Liu argued, women's innate bad characteristics would be unable to prevail and women would be forced from artificiality and decoration into reality and substance. Although the discussion of women and literature flourished

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during the May Fourth era, in fiction written by women where a protagonist is a writer, the implicit innerness of the women's literary persona persisted. Women writers depicted obstacles to writing in characters who experienced blocks, in the pervasive presentation of mediated forms such as the diary or letter, in plots where extraliterary circumstances prevented a woman from devoting herself to writing, and in stories where protagonists were male, not female, writers. Never did they depict women who were directly and unproblematically writers. Before 1925, stories about literature (generally poetry) written by the two most prolific women writers, Lu Yin and Bing Xin, generally had a male writer as protagonist. When the woman-who-writes appears in stories of the 1920s, it often is as someone who writes letters and diaries. In a way that mediated between the public nature of literary talent and the private nature of women's virtue, letters and diaries formed a screen that paradoxically hid modern female subjectivity as something private to be valued, and yet also made it a focal point for the public audience. 12 Under these conditions, women's "subjectivity" as represented in literary texts became for critics a contradictory issue and an unsatisfactory basis on which to construct a novel or short story. In leftist critiques in the late 1920s and early 1930s, women as well as men-or even more than men-could be attacked for constructing female characters in the traditional framework of erotic desire, weakness, and passivity. 13 To portray women's subjectivity as a detached and isolated emotional state could produce the modern romanticized woman character, but ran the risk of linkage with the old poetic "literati-feminine" image that Maureen Robertson (1992) identifies as a dominant literary trope. 14 This image signified weakness and traditional ideas. Leftist critics branded both female and male writers who constructed heightened, tormented, and sensitive literary sensibilities as the essence of writing as socially unaware, uninvolved, and elitist. Critics condemned those who used the subjective form of diaries and let-

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ters as not only divorced from social problems, but also as continuing and promoting what now became the restrictive, sexist lyricism and feminine voice of old-style poetsY In representations of female subjectivity, the sexual meaning of being inside, enclosed, tabooed, forbidden, restricted, and not on public view correlated with the interiority of the mind that was being "exposed" through a mediated form. De and its innerness could nor comfortably bridge over to cai and its outerness: women's modern entry not only into literature but into society at large was not accomplished without a great deal of contestation. The modern school, a physical site of a powerful symbolic breakthrough for women into the formerly male arena of education, also was a place where girls and young women came together in nonfamilial relationships. Friendships that developed at modern schools were both confined and fomented by rules, locked doors, and conceptually by the glory of learning in service of the nation; as references in fiction to schoolgirls testify, the friendships, links, and mere presence of groups formed at the new-style schools were threatening to the families of these girls and to society at large. The debate on singlehood illustrates how cultural commentators criticized female-female relationships outside kin categories as damaging to women and to the social fabric at large and also as sexually perverted. Turning the sexual relationship between men and women away from either a traditional husbandwife or a lustful connection and toward a modern love was difficult with male-female relationships, but as pervasive worries about lesbianism or singlehood indicated, female-female friendships were far more suspect. 16 Some stories from the early 1920s directly addressed the hidden contradiction between femaleness and literariness. In these stories, the masculinist transcendence of writing prevented a woman from being presented as a writer, or her writing presented as valuable or worth saving. In other stories, the material difficulties of a woman trying to be a writer in a society that had no

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mechanisms by which women could sustain themselves when they wrote showed that relentless social pressure to marry and conform could destroy the physical context necessary for writing. Although throughout the May Fourth period a simultaneously positive and negative discourse on emotions and writing associated women with literature, the most prolific women writers linked literature's transcendent values to men.

The Gender ofLiterary Writing: Male In Lu Yin's first story, "Yige zhuzuojia" (A writer), the writer has renounced family, friends, and society, and lives alone in a hotel with nothing to comfort him except books and paper. Like many writers depicted in fiction at this time and similar to the typicalliteratus of Song times discussed by Patricia Ebrey (199r 33, 41), he is sensitive and easily moved by scenery or emotions and so devoted to literature that he prefers books even to a decent quilt. In the three years he has lived in the hotel he has not so much as received a letter, let alone any corporeal visitors. This existence is shattered only when his former girlfriend, now married to a man with a good job, visits him and expresses her regret for having sold her soul for money. She leaves, but sickens and dies, and the writer kills himself (Lu Yin 1921b). In her famous and widely discussed story "Chaoren" (Superhuman), Bing Xin created He Bin, a young man who lives alone, pays little attention to anyone else, and keeps nothing but books in his room. When the moans of an injured servant boy keep him awake at night, He Bin gives the boy money to go see a doctor, and is profusely thanked for his supposed generosity. The servant boy writes He Bin a letter thanking him and reminding him that since all people are loved by their mothers, they thus have love in their hearts, no matter how suppressed it may seem. Thus the superhuman is reawakened to love, innocence, and human suffering (Bing Xin 1921b).

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Bing Xin continued the theme of the detached, transcendent, and superhuman writer in "Ai de shixian" (The realization of love), where a mountain-dwelling poet is able to write only when inspired by the vision of two lively children who pass by his window (Bing Xin 1921a). In "Fanmen" (Anxiety), Bing Xin continued to pursue the problem of the writer's relationship to life or reality, and as in "Ai de shixian" the writer was male (Bing Xin 1922b). 17 "Fanmen" related the mind-set of a young student, away from home for the first time, as he learns how to live without his family. As in many of Bing Xin's stories, the family he has left is an idealized vision of warmth and support. Initially, his best friend is his sister, to whom he writes often. As he studies, the student finds he despises society and looks down on his fellow students as unworthy to comfort him. He knows they regard him as cold and logical but he does not care, and in time he becomes melancholy. His only relief is to pour out his emotions in his letters, which his sister answers warmly. She finds in writing more freedom than in face-to-face speech. In his last letter, the student addresses the nature of literature, the literary field, and the essence of writing, and identifies literature as the vocation of geniuses. As in "Chaoren," literature is contradictory, because it should be both the preserve of genius and also not be left only up to the genius. This is because the genius's own ideas or narrow road will dominate the writing and the writer will try to use emotional machinations to sway the reader to a certain perspective, with the result that "the object of his writing will hazily collapse" (p. 6). 18 In the writer's eyes, the world surrounding the writer, or the vistas of the country and the city, become only a dense structure of literary material that cannot be understood when transformed by the pen (p. 6). Writing is not as effective as having people on the spot themselves, observing the scene. Furthermore, since writers are only a tiny minority of all people, what they write about can represent only a minuscule fraction of experience or nature.

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The student also complains about the comical, empty literary world and the petty people who populate it, wondering if this is the way things have always been or if it is just a modern phenomenon. Situating himself as a writer, the student despises the immateriality of writing and wants to sink into nature or reality: the hearts of fishermen and farmer women (p. 7). When he writes to or thinks of his sister, the student dissolves into tears. In these stories, both the study and the writing of literature indicate transcendent hypersensitivity, intelligence, idiosyncrasy, and suppressed but powerful emotion. Literature is romanticized and detached from common life, but that separation threatens to harm literature and its producer. The writer must walk a thin line between immersion in everyday affairs, where he would lose his artistic perspective, and isolation, where he would sharpen his sensitivity by rejecting routine, but risk losing vitality and a perceptual edge. In each story, although the author is female, the writer is male. In their juxtaposition of the writer and the love of a woman (mother, sister, or lover), Bing Xin and Lu Yin associated what is female with what is literary only oppositionally. Even though in their writing literature is filled with potential for eliciting feeling, in order for it to remain sacred the writer must contain something cold, isolated, and arrogant. As an idealized construction, however, woman is warm, nourishing, vital, and powerful only through presence, not through her own acts. Association with a woman, either the mother or sister in Bing Xin's stories or the lover in Lu Yin's work, could offer the writer a solution to his loneliness and detachment, but then he must struggle even harder to avoid becoming just an ordinary person. Literature is an abstracted idealization of suppressed spiritual and emotional depth and sensitivity, and woman is a more earthly force that makes emotion and spirituality concrete. The gap between literary text and life that both Lu Yin and Bing Xin formulated so clearly in these early stories also can be

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seen in early romantic works by Yu Dafu and Guo Moruo (18921978). What is stunning about the women writers' stories, however, is their inability or unwillingness to construct a character who is a woman writer, although they themselves were exactly that. What we see instead in their works is clear evidence of a masculine literary discourse that assigns the prestigious category of "writer" to men. In "Yige zhuzuojia," Lu Yin's female character represents a more human lifestyle for rhe alienated, estranged male writer, and in Bing Xin's "Chaoren" and "Ai de shixian," motherly love and its corollary, the lives of children, can move the writer's cold spirit and reignite human love both in the male writer and in his literary text. The ability to philosophize about literature with an implied female listener belongs to the male in "Fanmen." Woman/literature is not equal to man/literature because literature, like its traditional code cai or literary talent, is "secretly" gendered as male. In her later story "Wo de fangdong" (My landlady), Bing Xin explored rhe material difficulty of combining being a woman and being a writer. The protagonist is a young unmarried Chinese man who is studying in Paris. The young man asks his friend, Mr. L, to help him find an apartment (Bing Xin 1945). 19 This task is not easy, but Mr. L locates a perfect place for him, with a beautiful, charming, bright French landlady who is a known novelist and poet and reminds the student of his mother. Although the protagonist is unmarried because his parents have not pushed him, the landlady, Ms. R, is unmarried because she is a writer. "You've strayed from the topic again. Whar I mean is that domestic life is not suitable for a woman writer." I said, "But if the woman ... " Ms. R laughed and said, "If the woman was always sick. ... Listen. When a man gets married, he sacrifices nothing. But when a woman gets married, her work-if she has work-her health, her domestic skills-at least one of them has to go! If I had married, the first thing I

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would have lost was my work, second my health, and finally domestic skills." (p. 81) Ms. R recalls her mother's life of servitude to her husband and children, her sacrifice of her own health, and her fifty-years of ceaseless toil. The protagonist responds, "But, Ms. R, a married woman at least has love," a comment to which Ms. R. replies coldly: "Love? Now that is a hard thing to pin down. What a man calls love and what a woman calls love are not the same at all. It's this way: a man lives for his work-no matter if he calls it work or career! A woman lives for love. She sacrifices everything for it. Of course a man will say, 'Dear, I mustn't let your love down, I must work hard and dedicate myself to my work!' That really is [killing] two birds with one stone!" (p. 82)

The issue of the story is marriage itself, which insinuates any woman in an oppressive relationship involving gendered duties that reproduce the old morality despite the good intentions of both the wife and the husband. Ms. R evaluates the lives of her married friends and concludes that her devotion to writing, which prevented her from getting married, has saved her health. In this story Bing Xin places the female body at the center of the dilemma. Yet because Ms. R is not Chinese, the implied threat of the "woman writer" is one step away from any Chinese practice. At the same time, because the protagonist is a Chinese man, Bing Xin symbolically locates the antiwoman writer discourse as masculinist and in the Chinese tradition of letters. Bing Xin is well known for her stories idealizing family life. Yet her critiques were specifically aimed at the problem of women and career rather than at the family structure itself. Lu Yin, on the contrary, focused on women's formal relationship in the family through heterosexual marriage and hypothesized various kinds

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of associations that would allow women to attain the same level of independence as that granted to men. She recognized the contradiction inherent in pairing the concepts of women's virtue and literary skill, but imagined a world where these two notions could meet.

New Associations I remember once I took a lone boat and floated on the endless sea, Striving bravely toward the soft verdant waves. I remember once I smelled the deep scent of lilies In a garden filled with a spring night's moon. I wore delicate light willow threads, And walked throughout this garden, Seeking the gardener. I remember once in an early autumn morning, a light frost around, I heard the banana and wutong trees chatter to each other I saw the maple leaves, as red as dawn's blush Then, I had to find the goddess who came with autumn. I remember once in a deep valley where no one goes I heard a long low sound flowing out between the stones Then, I tried hard to find the mysterious one who Scattered nature's seeds. But where was the shore? Where was the gardener? Where was the goddess of autumn? Where was the sower of nature? Wandering, despair. Lu Yin, "Panghuang" Stories by romantic writers in the early 1920s were filled with melancholy, despair, and sickness, none more so than those of Lu

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Yin. What increasingly emerged from Lu Yin's stories of the 1920s was a recasting of what had been a floating, poetic melancholy into a powerful critique of marriage as a social institution that oppressed women. Lu Yin experimented with writing about femalefemale relationships as a utopian means of doing away with the implicit hierarchy of heterosexuality. Her stories recognized and investigated a principal means by which women could mediate their environment: questioning marriage and establishing formal and informal female-female relationships not based on the hierarchical heterosexual model. 20 In one story she touched on the lower-class factory life that some urban realist and naturalist writers tried to represent, and in a few stories she broached national issues, but most of her fiction revolved around what happened when women become sexually involved with men, intimately connected with other women, or married to men. In 1923, Lu Yin published the story "Lishi de riji" (The diary of Lishi) and her well-known novella "Haibin guren" (Old friends by the seashore), in which she highlighted the friendship of women who got to know each other at a new-style school. In the first story (Lu Yin 1923b), a woman friend of Lishi believes that Lishi died not from a heart attack as doctors said, but from an illness of the spirit. To prove this, she publishes Lishi's diary. Since the diary is not published by its writer, but only posthumously by a friend, it is doubly mediated: first as a private form of writing, and second as that made public only through the agency of another. Thus the danger of the female-female relationship around which the story revolves, and the transgressive public writing by a women, are muted by being twice removed from the "writer's" (Lishi's and Lu Yin's) own voice. Only in "Haibin guren" did Lu Yin directly present the lives and emotions of young women in intimate relationships (Lu Yin 1923a). Lishi is in love with Ruanqing, a woman whom she has known for two years. She calls their relationship tongxing de ailian le or loving between the same sexes (Lu Yin 1923b: u): this love ex-

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hibits all of the characteristics of male-female relationships except for sexual intimacy, which is never presented. Lishi reports her own and Ruanqing's excitement and anticipation as they make long-term plans for their life together. To express their intimacy and friendship, they wear the same clothes, and Lishi finds that she lives not for herself, but for Ruanqing. When Ruanqing is told that her mother wants her to marry a cousin, she writes to Lishi, "Why didn't you make yourself up like a man and ask me to marry you before?" (p. 13). As for men, Lishi finds relations with them to be unnatural (p. n). When Ruanqing finally writes a letter expressing her view that "love between those of the same sex is not recognized or allowed by society" and urges Lishi to wake up, Lishi decides it is Ruanqing who has sent "that young man, Liwen, whose masculinity is so obvious," to see her (p. 14). She finds his movements coarse and unattractive. She considers herself unlucky because of her undying love for Ruanqing and humans unfortunate because they are divided into two sexes. All of her friends, women and men alike, who have married have become "degraded" through either the necessity of making money (men) or the obligation of devoting all of their time and energy to giving birth to and raising children· (women). In "Haibin guren," friendship develops between five classmates, Lusha, Zongying, Lingyu, Lianshang, and Yunqing. Each woman has a distinct personality that is discussed at length. They take advantage of the strikes at school related to political movements to get together, talk about their pasts, and discuss each other, their classmates, and their favorite topic, qing (love, sentiment). The discussion often centers on the question of who has the most and truest qing (Lu .Yin 1923a: 10). When their parents begin to arrange introductions and marriages for them, these women find that their years of education have changed their ideas, and even though they one by one fall in love with men, they no longer can happily accept society's requirements for women. For Lusha, the most prominent character and the one

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with the least qing, an ideal life is one without men: all of the women living together at the seashore, some teaching, some writing, each acting according to her interests (p. 21). Called "the writer" (zhuzuojia) by her friends, Lusha is generally regarded as the most eccentric of the group. Although the friends' school days provide an interlude in which they may avoid the demands society places on women, and they develop love relationships among themselves, eventually it becomes clear that love between those of the same sex is socially impossible (2: p. 5). Yet when the women marry, they change from lively, interesting people into dull creatures concerned only with trivial social intercourse (2: p. 8). When only Lusha and Yunqing are left unmarried, the two divorce themselves from human affairs by taking refuge in the study of Buddhist texts and the writing of poetry. The difficult relationship between women and literature in the early stories of Lu Yin mirrored the socially condoned sexual relationship of men and women in heterosexual marriage. Through hypothesizing an all-female society or merely friends-only relationships with men, Lu Yin experimented with producing a new social environment, one that defined women separately from men and even more significantly, as people whose sense of self and action did not come from familial relationships. Lu Yin proposed a sensibility that could ~merge only through close and egalitarian friendships among women that did not insinuate them in a predetermined structure. The voice that emerged from the writing of letters and diaries was mediated when considered in relation to the literary tradition: it did not succeed in removing itself from the represented lyrical voice of women in poetry, but well expressed the emotion of and associations between women as lovers or as intimate friends. 21 Lu Yin's critique of heterosexual marriage as damaging for both women and men but more so for women continued through "Qianchen" (Dust of the past, 1924), "Shengli yihou" (After victory, 1925), "Tai jiaoshou de shibai" (The failure of Pro-

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fessor Tai, 1925), "Jimo" (Loneliness, 1926), and culminated in two long stories, "Lantian de canhui lu" (Lantian's record of remorse, 1927) and "Hechu shi guicheng" (Which way is home, 1927). Whereas "Tai jiaoshou de shibai" portrayed a male professor who lectured on women's liberation and modern marriage being pressured by his family into an arranged marriage, the other stories focused on women who had learned through modern education that they had a "right" to freedom of choice and to a selfsupporting career. But these women had no way to enjoy these "rights," worn down as they were by the material demands oflife after marriage. It was this fatigue, so to speak, that forced them to cast aside their earlier ideals. To some extent the theme Lu Yin investigated was that of Ibsen's Nora. In 1923 in a speech at Beijing College for Women, Lu Xun turned the discussion from individual freedoms to social reality by asking where Nora would go if she were Chinese and left home. As Kwok-dan Tam (1984) has discussed, in 1919 the suicides of two women, Zhao Wuzhen and Li Chao, who died rather than submit to the marriages their parents had arranged for them, outraged Chinese intellectuals and initiated a flood of stories and essays about women's subjugation. The question of Nora is still debated today. While Lu Yin persistently questioned the conditions of marriage and heterosexual love, she delved not so much into the social and economic forces that restricted women, but into new relationships and associations that allowed women to perceive themselves as culturally liberated. "Shengli yihou" is the stoty of Qinzhi, who wrote to her friend describing how she went to Beijing to study but eventually, in a concession to emotions, got married. Because the union is based on freedom of choice and the lovers married out of love and without thinking of the future, it is not the traditional familyarranged affair; nonetheless, Qinzhi ends up in a disadvantageous position. Like the mother of Bing Xin's Ms. R, who was worn down by housework, Qinzhi finds herself alone-with her hus-

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band gone at work all day-and faced with full responsibility for the household. Although she is well off and so can afford to take classes and do some reading, her intellectual work lacks significance. She misses her "life as a virgin" and questions the value of an education that would allow her to realize the inadequacy of her life but not give her an alternative (Lu Yin 1925: 4). The conclusion is that in China, the family structure will wear away even those with the strongest will. "Lantian de canhui lu" is Lu Yin's most powerful examination of the effects of heterosexual marriage on women. Lantian's life is displaced into a book, a record of her misery, found after her death and read by friends. While Lantian escapes from a marriage arranged by her stepmother, she finds herself in limbo and without economic support. Her friends advise marriage, but she is "drunk on the women's movement" and does not wish to sacrifice her personal character and desires (Lu Yin 1927: 5). Finally she falls in love with He Ren, who deceives her and marries someone else; thus she has the additional burden of being unchaste. Because of masculine social privilege, her lover need not worry about his chastity (p. 6). When He Ren's wife comes to tell Lantian that she too has been deceived, because she did not know He Ren had a lover, Lantian concludes: "I immediately forgave all women and cried for them. There have never been any women who were not played with and insulted by men. It seemed I could win over the devil of illness and for a while I had new hope, but I was too weak. If I could shake hands with all the women of the world and help them begin a new era, I could regret the past and still fight for the future" (p. 7). It was not only the new ideologies of love and family coming into China through translations and intellectual discussion that triggered the alternative Lu Yin constructed, but also the changing material conditions of women that placed them in new relationships in factories and schools in urban and semiurban areas. Women worked with women who were not their relatives and

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thus could conceive of and form new associations such as those implied in the category friendship, something in premodern times largely reserved for men. The extrakin roles available to elite men in friendships with other men, in their work as officials, and in literary groups were not equally possible even for modern women. What was available was the friendship that results from shared interests and literary activities, and also the more intimate relationship that results from sexual attraction. While women such as Fangying in Ling Shuhua's "Chicha" recognized the modern possibility of female-male relationships that were the same as nonsexual female-female friendships, such an option was rarely depicted in women writers' stories. It is clear that the view of female-female love and friendship as an alternative to heterosexual family relations extended beyond literature into society at large. For instance, some women set up all-female households that were run by and for themselves. Although it was common for women working in urban factories to quit to get married in their early or mid-twenties, in Guangdong approximately IOo,ooo women workers in silk factories refused to get married at all (Chen Ciyu 1988: 353). Older workers established "master-pupil" relations with incoming young women: the older women would train the younger ones for three months before they would be taken on as paid workers. This relationship was set up privately, without interference from the factory. Out of this practice emerged the so-called women's room (gupo wu), composed of skilled silk workers who lived and organized their lives together. According to their own reports, they lived by strict rules and work assignments and worked equally and in a spirit of mutual help; "thus there emerged a new world different from that of the feudal family" (p. 353). These women were the center of information in the factory. In one case, two women who liked each other promoted the communal life, and even adopted girls to whom they passed on their wealth (p. 353). The refusal to marry was called "not-settling-down-into-a-

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family-ism'' (buluojia zhuyi). If a woman in the group gave in to pressure from her family and did marry, she still refused to live in her husband's home and also declined to consummate the marriage. Friends of the married woman would then purchase a concubine for her husband, and even when the wife returned to her husband's home at holidays, she refused contact and took her own food with the women in her group. Such practices were common in villages of southern Guangdong until the early I9JOs, when poor economic conditions caused many women to lose their jobs and the practice of refusal to marry gradually disappeared (pp. 353-54). 22 In her study of women in the Canton delta from 186o to 1930, Janice E. Stockard traces the development of an antimarriage bias into a demand for "spinsterhood," which "emerges as a more radical practice" than the formerly common compensation marriage (in which a woman who had run away to avoid marriage was forced to return and compensate her fiance) (Stockard 1989: 128). Stockard differentiates a modern form of spinsterhood, which is based on desire for independence and a career, from the traditional forms. The latter included the "heiress-spinster," a woman in a wealthy family who remained unmarried and was supported by her natal family throughout her life, and the "muijai" (little maid) spinster, who worked in a wealthy household, never married, and was treated as an adopted daughter (pp. IJO-p). Stockard points out that although the modern bias against marriage evident in the Canton delta may be couched in terms of independence and career goals, it developed from and is closely related to local practices of delayed transfer marriage once common in the area. The four features of delayed transfer marriagedelayed-marriage houses, girls' houses, boys' houses, and marriage at night-formed an "older cultural complex," most likely of non-Han origin (pp. 171-72). It is this complex that fed into and influenced modern economic and cultural change. We can hypothesize that women could live on their own be-

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cause they had a job and so could support themselves. But the communal and all-female lifestyle they developed was only one of many alternatives they could have followed. What is striking about both Lu Yin's all-female literarily inclined group in "Haibin guren" and these real-life all-female societies is that both marked heterosexual relations as the source of women's downfall. Once a woman began a relationship with a man, whether inside or outside marriage, she placed herself within a circle of practices determined by social custom. And the social custom in question, of course, sprang from concepts of moral virtue. When Marjorie Topley talked to informants in Guangdong about the practice of refusing to get married, she was told that sometimes the relationships between the women were homosexual. One woman assigned a religious meaning to this kind of lesbian liaison by claiming that one of the lovers was a man reincarnated as a woman. By this claim the informant attempted to make homosexual relations fit into socially accepted ideas of heterosexuality (Topley 1975: 76). Informants also made concrete and clear references to sexual practices among women, something that rarely occurs in the fiction of the 1920s and 1930s. For example, Topley's informants used a special term, mo doufo (grinding bean curd), to allude to lesbian sexual practices, and they described a dildo made of silk threads and filled with bean curd (p. 76). Some women claimed that the sisterhoods originated in groups of married women who got together to spy on their husbands and opposed the men's taking of concubines (p. 77). Although groups of women living together were not unusual, polite society criticized sisterhood groups for debauchery, sexual license, and promiscuity (p. 8o). Women who refused to marry recognized their insertion into the rigid relationships of the family as the key to their subservience. By establishing practices that physically removed them from the sites of their submission and by guarding their bodies against connections that forced them to function as wives and

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daughter-in-laws in relation to men, they countered the most obvious moral demand of corporeal resignation and servility. As novels written by women illustrated, the chief symbol and object of servitude for women was the body and its traditionally sanctioned physical moral virtue. By creating for themselves a new environment in which they could establish new relationships-often solely among women-women wrenched the body away from its former meaning and put it in a new sphere of signification. The problem of relationships and their power to insert women into practices of moral virtue was so important that for many writers it overshadowed the concern of how independent women could support themselves. Although Lu Yin rarely dealt with this social issue, in an early story she wrote about the hardships of women in impoverished social conditions outside the family.U Poverty-stricken worlds such as those of the urban factory worker appeared in Lu Yin's story "Linghun keyi mai rna?" (Can the soul be sold? 1921), which focuses on an educated woman's relationship with a female factory worker, Hegu. Hegu recounts to the intellectual how, because of her father's illness, she had been forced out of school and into the factory to work. She labors under the demands of a foreman who regards her body as a machine to be worked for profit, but she is inspired when she looks out the window and sees the young woman walk by. Hegu tells of her long-awaited vacation when she goes to visit her old friends and they tell her she is not herself anymore. She asks the woman, Can our souls be sold? In a scene reminiscent of Lu Xun's famous "Zhufu" (The New Year's sacrifice), the woman's education does not come to her rescue, and she is at a loss for an answer. As leftist critics later pointed out, young female writers such as Lu Yin wrote more about the emotional problems of educated women such as themselves than about the lives of working women. Even in this story, the factory worker Hegu is herself a former schoolgirl and lacks any kind of revolutionary consciousness, finding the mere presence of a "free" woman-one who is

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not trapped by the need to labor in a factory-to be inspirational. To Hegu, still more important than her own degradation in the factory are the comments of her friends, who tell her she is changed. Yet even this story of social engagement, a rare theme in Lu Yin's work, speaks to the fragility of independence even for women who have a job and to the importance of relationships for sustaining a sense of freedom. When one recognizes the underlying attacks on moral virtue and on the primacy of the body as producing meaning for women, women writers' tendency to focus on relationships and subjectivity takes on a new meaning. Rather than being merely the representation of a trivial world of self-absorption, the privileging of female subjectivity becomes a way for women writers to probe the psychological and material boundaries of moral virtue and to propose new configurations. Poetry, generally that written by men, had long granted a represented subjectivity to the female voice, and in the widely read if unorthodox Hongloumeng (Dream of the red chamber), women possessed a purer and truer, if ultimately more limiting, subjectivity than did men. The positioning of gendered subjectivity as the means of creating a woman writer is a particular response to the specifics of Chinese culture in the 1920s and a key to the way in which women and literature were joined together. What women writers implied was that the emotive feminine literary voice could be wrenched away from its traditional implications and reinstated as an ideology quite in keeping with-but different from-the demands of the psychologized deep interior of the modern mind. As Chapter 5 shows, in the 1930s in histories of literature, women critics and historians continued their efforts to recoup the lyricism of Chinese poetry and traditional fiction as essentially feminine and thereby tie women with literature in a basic relationship. In so doing, they redefined most canonized writing as feminine. Although this strategy usually took the form of an analysis of premodern literary forms, it was based on

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the junction between subjectivity and women forged by writers like Lu Yin and Bing Xin. This strategy challenged both the leftist class critique and the paradigm of the modern nation-state under which the same critics demanded that women work. At the same time, the female focus in topic, subjectivity, and style that women had developed in the 1920s was attacked by leftist critics, who conflated it with the lyricism and privileging of emotions over social reality that by this time marked the entire poetic tradition. For these critics, what was significant about the work of Lu Yin, Bing Xin, Ling Shuhua, the early Ding Ling, and many other women writers was not that it analyzed and attacked heterosexual love, or investigated the contradictory combination of woman and writing, but that it elevated qing, or women's emotional relationships, above social problems. In other words, it empowered the lyrical subjectivities of young female students and made women unlikely allies in revolutionary struggle.

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Political developments in the late 1920s changed the May Fourth debate over gender and literature and changed literary and gender practices as well. After 1927, radical women came under at" tack by conservatives in the Nationalist party, and hundreds were killed by soldiers whose superiors rejected the principles of the New Culture movement. 1 According to Cai Chang, women and girls were killed for carrying the physical marks of revolutionsuch as unbound or bobbed hair-that.aligned them with the culturally radical ideas of free love, independence, and self-expression (Diamond 1975: 6-7). Conservative reaction against cultural change culminated in the New Life movement (xin shenghuo yundong), a political campaign launched by Chiang Kai-shek in 1934 that emphasized moral codes as the framework of women's social role and self-definition (p. 8). Although the New Life movement solicited participation from both women and men, its ideology was highly gendered. In 1938, Song Meiling (b. 1897), wife of Chiang Kai-shek, called a conference to outline roles for women in the anti-Japanese struggle.

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Women were to be involved, but in a supportive rather than primary role: "In times of war, men all must go to the front lines to kill the enemy, so the work behind the lines is our responsibility. We must encourage men and let them know that we will use our own methods to support them" (Song Meiling 1939). Chiang Kai-shek's movement "was not merely a crusade against old habits and old abuses; it was more importantly a campaign for the preservation and revival of old values" (Keiji Furuya 1981: 435). 2 The values were li (ritual behavior, propriety), yi (righteousness or justice), lian (integrity), and chi (a sense of shame) (p. 435). The movement involved among other things training groups of students to go out to lecture daily to the public. On March 11 and 17, 1934, mass meetings were held to launch the movement nationwide. Under the New Life movement, women who were engaged in public or political life were harassed. Indeed, during the anti-Japanese war, Chiang Kai-shek rated improvements in animal husbandry as more important than efforts to "awaken" Chinese women (Maloney 1980: 168). In 1941, the Nationalist-sponsored Conference for Women's Work affirmed Chiang's dictate that "it is harmful for women to take part in politics," thus revealing how the Nationalists reinstated and supported the Confucian notion of separate spheres for men and women (p. 169). The movement was not simply a promotion of traditional moral values, however; it presented itself as modern and favored rethinking some formulaic cultural expressions, such as mourning rituals. It also aimed to change the traditional scorn for physical culture by promoting exercise and competitive sports, although it is unclear to what extent these proposed changes applied to women as well as to men (see T' ang Leang-li 1976 [1936]: 258-64). As a spokesperson for women's social role according to Nationalist cultural ideas, Song Meiling gave a number of talks and wrote essays on the subject. Her vision of a woman's social role was much more limited than that espoused during the heady days

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of the May Fourth movement. She situated women within the household, but with a grasp of "useful" modern knowledges and technologies such as literacy, nutrition, and hygiene. While referring to "women's weaknesses" such as a tendency toward empty talk and gossip, Song promoted women's labor only within the home or in selling traditional handiwork such as embroidery (Diamond 1975: 9-10). 3 A book on marriage and family commissioned by the Chongqing Funii yundong weiyuanhui (Committee on the women's movement) in 1943 developed the idea that women's careers should be limited (p. n). Writers such as Han Suyin wrote about Nationalist animosity toward notions such as the equality of women, free love, women as soldiers, and renunciation of chastity (p. 12). Although the New Life movement itself dates from the mid-1930s, its seminal concepts were part of the Nationalist party's ideology much earlier. As early as 1927, the Nationalists promoted motherhood, one of the traditional "three obediences," as the most valuable and self-sacrificing social role for a woman (p. 13). Communist leaders, while reaffirming in theory the importance of the women's movement, retreated from some earlier practices and redirected policy on women during the 1930s and 1940s (Jackal 1981: 84-85). The first change was a redirection of emphasis from attacking the family to supplementing family income through spinning, weaving, and other work. The second strengthened a direction taken by the party much earlier: to encourage women to broaden their concerns from family issues to social and national issues. Chinese Communist Party (CCP) publications in 1938 still recognized and encouraged women's equality with men in all efforts, and the party continued its fight against footbinding and arranged marriages (p. 86). Even at this time, however, the party clearly considered women's liberation secondary to the overall resistance movement. By 1941, party leaders were asking women to avoid family conflict that led to divorce and were encouraging them to preserve the family to liberate it (p. 88).

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Throughout the early 1940s, writers and cadres in Yan' an debated the CCP's handling of the women's movement. A turning point came with the publication of Ding Ling's now famous ar:ticle "Sanbajie you gan" (Thoughts on March 8) on March 9, 1942, to commemorate Women's Day. Ding Ling criticized the party's double standard, its hierarchical and gendered organization, its refusal to recognize the work that women were still required to do at home, and its inability to provide women with opportunities for education (p. 93). The party, Ding Ling wrote, condemned women to perpetual backwardness, blaming them for not marrying but instead devoting their lives to working in society, and also for marrying and not working in society (Feuerwerker 1982: 101). Ding Ling directly criticized the party for failing to make good on its promise of equality between women and men. The party reacted with a barrage of criticism of Ding Ling personally and of the use of zawen, or short critical essays, to critique the party. Ding Ling confessed her "errors" on June n, 1942, at a mass meeting, and claimed that "this article is a bad article" (p. 102). This marked the end of direct criticism of party gender policies and for writers the demise of zawen as a form of cultural critique. In 1943 the party formulated a ne.w policy for women emphasizing production as the main route to liberation (p. 95). In 1946 the party again reevaluated the goals of the women's movement: it downgraded production and moved to the forefront issues such as opening more professions to women, eradicating illiteracy, promoting women in politics, and improving women's material conditions within society (pp. 104-5). The CCP also called on the Nationalist party to improve women's conditions and opportunities within its areas. Although both the Communists and the Nationalists encompassed women's work within the nationalistic military effort, the Nationalist approach to gender and culture sought through the New Life movement to reestablish a neotraditional moral context

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for women. This included an inner/outer code that was less strict than in late imperial times but still basically located women in the domestic sphere. This moral context was promoted both as a continuation of traditional cultural values and as a new modern social ideology that would ensure better functioning of the family through the education of women. Articles by Communist women activists such as Deng Yingzhao and Ding Ling showed that although in practice the Communist party may have softened some of its earlier emphasis on gender as a ground of struggle, it preserved the notion of continually fighting for women's social equality both inside and outside the home. 4 In literature, authors on the right or without strong political affiliation had three choices: align themselves under the larger sign of the anti-Japanese, pro-Nationalist struggle; cooperate with the Japanese; or write works that were overtly socially and politically unengaged. To write critically of social conditions and revolutionary movements would place them dangerously among communist sympathizers. Leftist writers had to take a stance on the social and ideological debates of the late 1920s; they had to denounce their earlier works as naive and bourgeois, move on to write social realism (and stay away from emphasis on individual emotion and elite society), or stop writing fiction entirely. Within the space of a few years, Ding Ling published both "Shafei niishi de riji" (The diary of Ms. Sophia, 1927), a story about a young woman with tuberculosis struggling to figure out her emotional and romantic life, and "Shui" (Water, 1930), a rambling narrative without a protagonist that explored the collective desires of peasants dealing with the ravages of a flood. That these two stories, so radically different in approach, theme, and the underlying concerns of fiction could be published within three years of each other shows the rapid ideological changes taking place within the cultural sphere. For women writers, two trends occurred simultaneously. First, literary theorists and historians situated the gender-specific liter-

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ary sphere developed by women writers in fiction and profeminist critics in cultural theory through the 1920s within the context of the Chinese literary tradition. Thus, the notion of a powerful women's writing, called fonii wenxue or niixing wenxue, was consolidated and intensified. While the terms had been used before, this theorization was radical because it explicitly inverted the traditional dichotomy of de as antiliterary and belonging to women and cai as extraliterary and belonging to men, deemphasizing the physically based de and claiming the transcendent cai for women. Even more to the point, it granted to women a historically sanctioned, overarching, abstract literary consciousness that became the basis for the entire Chinese literary tradition. It told its audience that good Chinese literature was women's literature, even if it often was co-opted and written by men. By latching onto and reinterpreting the "feminine" characteristics of the literary tradition, this theorization continued and expanded Qing and modern attempts to identify lyricism and emotionality with the actual, historical woman. Furthermore, it was modern and hence could both promote women's rights within the nation-state and provide a cultural tradition to represent China. Second, just as one group of critics formed these lyrical characteristics of the past into a positive women's writing, male and female socialist critics attacked this same writing, describing it as narrow, selfish, and egoistic, precisely the faults of the May Fourth movement. Although socialist critics denounced both male and female writers for these "faults," they singled out women's writing as especially and overwhelmingly trite. Such writing, critics complained, was a typical manifestation of women's weaknesses. In other words, in order to move the entire literary field away from concerns with gender and sexuality, critics used a highly gendered and traditional method of isolating negative qualities and assigning them to women. Whereas the first trend tinked "women's writing" to the historical woman in a pos-

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itive way, the second identified it as historically female in a negative way and demanded that women relinquish it.

The Gender ofLiterary Writing: Female In an anaiysis of a seminal literary and historical incident that he believes symbolically circumscribed women in a sphere outside both history and literature, Martin W Huang interprets Sima Qian's part in canonizing the conflation of great literature and great suffering, and shows how the emasculation inflicted on the historian was in effect an admonition to "act 'properly' like a woman and not meddle in the emperor's affairs" (Martin Huang 1995: 8o). Huang's interpretation of this foundational cultural event-an incident frequently referred to since-is that "to produce great literature the author must first be marginalized, or feminized metaphorically if not literally." Taking this logic further, Huang concludes that "all great literature has to be feminine in one way or another" (p. 8o). Sima Qian's famous castration became the condition for good literature, with the powerlessness and vulnerability of the female position becoming the site that nurtured and developed the deep emotion expressed in the Shiji (Historical records). Paradoxically, however, this female position was a symbolic and metaphorical condition of male writers, a kind of suffering available only to those who were or could have been in power but who for generally political reasons were disempowered. It was less often granted to women who wrote, who by nature contained the marginalization and isolation typical of the female social role. Thus Huang's analysis shows how women's role was metaphorized into that of the disempowered man while it simultaneously excluded actual women from the spheres of literature and written history. Although the femininity of literature in the traditional period was largely a matter of lyricism, voice, sensitivity, and disempowerment or vulnerability rather than real women writing and gain-

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ing fame for their texts, it was precisely this argument about the essential femaleness of literature that was debated in the late 1920s. Xie Wuliang's work, which in 1916 had claimed as innate the association between women and literature, anticipated this growing interest. From about 1925 to 1935, several lengthy studies of women and literature, literature written for women, and women writers were published, and many articles on these topics appeared in literary magazines. This rash of publications was the culmination of a long period, dating from the mid-teens and in some areas much earlier, of active debates and discussions on women's role in culture and society. One of the most interesting and comprehensive studies was NUx:ing yu wenxue (Women and literature), edited by one Huiqun and including articles by Huiqun, Hu Yunyi, and Liu Dajie. 5 According to a reference in the text, the book was written in 1928 but published in 1933. 6 Huiqun began by establishing the natural affinity between women and literature, citing as evidence the saying "If there were no women, there would be no literature" (meiyou niizi, jiu meiyou wenxue). She also used the work of Freud to document her claim that the basis of all literary creation was the love between the sexes, which gave rise to artistic emotions. Huiqun wrote of the fixations of Western male authors on women as the impetus behind their work, and claimed that women loved literature to the extent that they would sacrifice their lives for it. Literary art was "more important than life" for women, and was somehow innately and intimately tied to women (Huiqun 1934: 6).7 Huiqun recognized that most canonized literature was written by men, but shifted the impetus for that work to women's actual existence rather than to the metaphorical disempowerment of women that men adopted as a literary stance. Hu Yunyi, in the article "Zhongguo funii yu wenxue" (Chinese women and literature), wrote that the history of Chinese literature expressed a correspondence between woman and literature. According to Hu, Chinese literature was basically feminine

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and lyrical, and even though most famous authors were male, men were impostors when they tried to write: Why do women excel in literature? This actually is not easy to answer, yet there is no need for us to search for a profound and mysterious reason. However, in Chinese literature it is obviously the case [that women do excel]. The alternations within [the history of] Chinese literature are always limited to two tendencies: graceful and restrained, or bold and unrestrained. All literary styles can never stray out of the boundaries of these two tendencies. In considering these two different styles, [it is clear that] graceful and restrained literature is always the orthodox school of literature, and bold and unrestrained literature is a heterodox school. And furthermore, there really is not a large quantity of bold and unrestrained literature. The main current of Chinese literature is totally biased toward the development of the graceful and restrained. Women's literature is really the heart of graceful andrestrained literature. It is truly the most beautiful garden of paradise, and we can see many writers and scholars there using women's language. We see many poets shaking their heads and wagging their tails in imitation of these delicate love songs. We see many literary men taking on the laments and emotions of the inner chambers, describing the soft warmth and emotional attitude of women. Things are even to the point that when seventy- or eighty-year-old men write poetry, they unabashedly try to assume a coquettish voice. No matter what they do it just does not ring true. And these unseemly poems have already garnered great praise ... in the history of Chinese literature. Graceful and restrained, warm and soft literature must be written by women to be really true-if we believe this, and feel it is so in reality, then we can say that women's literature

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is the orthodoxy of the orthodox school of literature. And indeed it is so, for no matter how literary men exert themselves to understand and experience the hearts of women, [their experience] can never be as true as what women themselves understand. No matter how literary men describe the vividness of the lamenting inner chambers, it will never be as perfect as the women's own expression. So as soon as we speak of women's literature, our appreciation and interest immediately turn in a fascinating direction. Because Chinese literature has developed towards the tendency of the graceful and restrained and the warm and soft, and this literature is most suited to a woman's pen, we can say that women's literature is .the heart of orthodox literature. These words may not be far from the truth. (Hu Yunyi 1934: 55-57) Chinese literature was essentially feminine, according to Hu Yunyi's analysis, and women possessed innate literary skill that would have developed if they had been granted an opportunity to use it (p. 68). Furthermore, unless literature fell into thecategory of "bold and unrestrained," it was either written by a woman or by a man assuming the voice of a woman. The claim of Huiqun and Hu Yunyi that the best of Chinese literature was feminine in essence was echoed by Tao Qiuying in Zhongguo fonii yu wenxue (Chinese women and literature), published in 1933. In the second chapter, Tao explained why Chinese women had a special interest in literature: first because both literature and women were a form of entertainment for men, and second because women had been restricted to the inner chambers. Although in ancient times, other than being force-fed with a bit of knowledge from Nu sishu (The four books for women) to consolidate their basic understanding of decorum and ritual (/ijiao), women had little chance to study, it is not true that because of this literary genius was entirely denied to

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women. It is also the case that women often have rich emotions and are naturally endowed with astute intelligence. If they occasionally gain a chance to study, they can develop toward literature. But history and society do not allow them to make a name for themselves through literature, and many restrictions bind them. In society, they do not have the slightest status, nor the slightest ability to participate in society; furthermore, they cannot see or hear the entirety of society. Therefore, although they are interested in literature, they do not seek fame for it in society; they have no social concepts, so they do not establish any social relationships. At the most all they do is express their own emotions to relieve their pain and misery. Even so, in this way they produce very good literary works. (Tao Qiuying 1933: 88-89) 8 Women had an affinity with literature because they have "rich emotions," yet because women had no public social role or function, they were not known as writers. Good literature was not investigation of social problems, but rather the outpouring of emotions. 9 Like Hu, Tao Qiuying excludes the "bold and unrestrained" works that Huiqun identified as springing from the "special literature-sensitive brains of women" (p. 90). Tao also excluded court literature or any type of literary expression that was restricted by li (ritual). Because of the public persona that this kind of work demanded, it was off limits to women. An example of this ritual expression was the ya and song parts of the Shijing, which Tao claimed must have been written by men; the guofeng, however, could have been written by women (p. 100). Tao wrote that the type of literature most unrestricted by ritual and most influenced by free thought and free will was that written by prostitutes or courtesans-women who were relatively unfettered by ritual. Writing by prostitutes was not only the freest and most lyrical, but also the "truest" (pp. 90-91). Because of their low status, concu-

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bines also produced "free" and "true" literature. Tao pointed out that women's literature developed most rapidly during the Qing dynasty, mainly through the writing of concubines (p. 92). The constructions of literature as innately feminine and women as innately literary developed in the work of Huiqun, Hu Yunyi, and Tao Qiuying at the end of the 1920s and into the 1930s are problematic for several reasons. First, the tradition they elevated is the same tradition of lyricism and emotionality that had undergone unrelenting criticism since the May Fourth movement with its sweeping attack on Chinese literary culture at large. Second, the conditions for the production and excellence of this literature, the confinement and separation of women, were precisely the conditions that reformers had been trying to change. And third, after the failure of the first united front berween the Communists and Nationalists in 1927, women writers, as well as men, were forced to make a political choice that would align them with the socially engaged, revolutionary stance of the Communist party, or the inner sphere, restricted stance of the Nationalist party, both of which represented themselves as modern. If women writers agreed that Chinese literature was the tradition of lyricism and confinement, they should have had no difficulty in accepting the Nationalist position on women, yet this position severely undercut their possibilities as modern writers. By simultaneously trying to assume the mantle of tradition and affirm the progressiveness of lyrical and subjective voices, critics ended up contradicting themselves.

The Backwardness ofFemininity In reading essays that interpreted Chinese literature as feminine, it is easy to hypothesize that should "good literature" have been theoretically reconstructed to devalue the lyrical and emotive and to value social knowledge and engagement, women's supposed affinity. for literature would have disappeared. In other

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words, women's literature so reconstructed would have become a victim of the redefinition. The political contradiction of the claims made by Hu Yunyi, Huiqun, and Tao Qiuying in the late 1920s and early 1930s was recognized at the time by the writers themselves in various disclaimers in their work; they saw an affinity between women and literature in the Chinese tradition, but implied that it already was a thing of the past. This recognition did not prevent them from continuing to claim "Chinese literature" as their own feminine creation. In wondering why writing about the emotions of the inner chambers should be considered a defect, Hu Yunyi (1934: 6o) acknowledged a context of contemporary cultural politics. Huiqun introduced a new element, the modern practice of socialism, which redefined the formula that supported "feminism" (joernieshimu or nuquanzhuyi) but did not allow the recognition of the fundamental and enduring social reality of conflict between men and women that feminism claimed as salient to a woman's experience. Rather, she insisted on the impermanence of gender-based conflict: Recently tides of socialist thought are deeply reflected in literature, and the women's movement and socialism have a close relationship. First, I must explain this relationship. The feminist movement is absolutely not just the struggle between the sexes and the expansion of women's rights. It wants to eliminate all obstacles hindering women, and all differences between men and women. It wants to let the abilities and nature of women, which were not allowed expression in the past, express themselves to the fullest .... Thus we can call this kind of movement a "revolution of the mind/heart" (xin de geming). Socialism and the women's movement have always been related issues, and have existed on the same plane. There is no one who promotes socialism but opposes the women's

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movement. There is the search for material equality, and the search for mental equality.... But we must remember that struggle between the sexes does not equal the women's movement. As in all social movements, [for example] the class struggle, it is only one process of social revolution. So women's challenge to men is merely a necessary shortcut in the equality movement between men and women. (Huiqun 1934: 11-12) In her own articles in the book she edited, Huiqun concentrated on documenting the relationship between women and literature in the past. But when she discussed the present ideology of socialism, the delineation between male and female styles, emotions, and experiences that validated her discussion of past literary production no longer was pertinent. For Huiqun and Tao Qiuying the best as well as the bulk of Chinese literature was innately feminine, and women were innately literary. Tao Qiuying even traced this essential bond between women and literature back to the Shang and Zhou dynasties, when society began to circumscribe women and so forced them to give voice to their dissatisfaction (Tao Qiuying 1933: 94). It was precisely women's confinement to the inner sphere that resulted in their unhappiness and their calls for understanding. The qualities of the best literature of the past were identified as feminine: an intensely personal orientation, a delving into one's true inner emotions and experience, and a lyricism that came from lamenting a constricted existence that was socially authorized and systematically debilitating, or what Martin Huang identifies as the inherently marginalized position. Men who attempted to imitate this voice did not have the years of confinement that, in the analyses of these two critics, gave women their unique literary sensibilities. After 1925, it was precisely these "feminine" qualities of writing, although they were not always identified as such, that in-

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creasingly came under fire. Even only slightly leftist critics participated in branding the romanticism of the early May Fourth era as self-centered and narrow, expressing only the emotions and desires of an educated, spoiled elite. Critics and writers called for a new literature of social commitment that denied the validity and importance of individual experience and emotion, substituting for it social and class awareness, knowledge, and especially action. Although these critics usually did not directly attack "women's literature," they rejected the traditional characteristics of women's writing and described women writers as prone to the error of writing in the traditional way. The retheorization in the late 1920s and early 1930s of the works of Bing Xin and Ding Ling, who were once hailed as the most expressive and lyrical of modern writers (Bing Xin) and the most revolutionary and boldest in depicting female desire and sexuality (Ding Ling), shows exactly how application of socialist literary theory caused "women's literature" to become viewed as deficient and undesirable. Not only women writers, but male writers as well went through cathartic changes during the late 1920s and the early 1930s and some, such as Guo Moruo, appeared to radically alter their ideas of the social function of literature and the writer. 10 However, although from 1925 to 1935 leftist critics chastised both Bing Xin and Ding Ling as well as male writers, they treated the women writers differently from the men in one major respect. 11 The characteristics they singled out for attack in the works of Bing Xin and Ding Ling-individualism, an excessively narrow scope and framework, mystifying approach to experience, a lack of social knowledge and awareness, extreme emotionalism, pessimism and doubt, escapism, a poetic and romantic mentality, decadence, emphasis on individual (and especially female) psychology and on various kinds of love and love conflicts-were exactly the qualities some critics identified as indicative of women's literature. Because they had been categorized as women writers writing women's literature, Bing Xin and Ding Ling were faced with ei-

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ther restyling, degendering, and revolutionizing their writing or being categorized as outdated and unprogressive. In other words, by the early 1930s, leftist critics reconstructed not women's literature itself, but its past characteristics as negatively conservative. A good example of a thorough critique of women's fiction is the 1935 book Zhongguo xiandai nii.zuojia (Modern Chinese women writers), in which the critic He Yubo comprehensively analyzed major and minor women writers from the 1920s and early 1930s. He Yuba's interpretation was consistently leftist, and followed socialist guidelines by asking that all writers immerse themselves in society and write about real people. He Yubo pointed out that even though Bing Xin had studied in the United States (presumably a "broadening" experience), she had "never touched the filth of society" (He Yuba 1935: 2)Y Faulting Lu Yin for showing women surrendering to a degraded, parasitic lifestyle after marriage rather than struggling to live meaningfully, He chided her for failing to portray women with the power to resist and women who were working or involved in the revolution (pp. 39, 44, 46). Ling Shuhua, in He Yubo's analysis, knew nothing of "life" and showed no astute observation of society in her work (pp. 50, 55). In a comment that demanded that women detach themselves from the old family and kin categories and recognize the privileged background of many May Fourth writers, He claimed that many of Ling's limits came from her self-definition as a taitai, an elite wife, in this case the wife of a university professor (pp. 56, n). While more positive about Ding Ling's accomplishments as a writer, He Yubo also disliked her portrayal of women as young "misses" who are weak, afraid, and cannot "walk the road of revolution" (p. 92). Such women were hedonistic and yet possessed old-fashioned coyness, according to the author. He Yubo proceeded to attack virtually every woman who had made a name as a writer (p. 94). Whereas Lu Yi (Su Xuelin, 1899-?) was technically good, her ideas and concepts were not, and her women

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characters were still half conservative and imbued with an individualist's lack of social responsibility (p. 126). Lu Yi's ideas of society and nation were "very superficial" (p. 136). Feng Yuanjun (Feng Shulan, 1900-1974), "influenced by old Chinese literature," wrote entertainment literature based on emotions and lacked "rich life experience" (pp. 146, 152-54). Since she failed to bring out issues relevant to society and nation in her work, it lacked profundity (p. 161). Chen Ying (1907-?) wrote movingly but of bourgeois characters wrapped up in hedonism and love and devoid of desire to immerse themselves in life (p. 185). The 1929 novel Nanfeng de meng (Dream of southern winds), by Chen Xuezhao (1906-91), focused on a triangular love affair and was clumsy and disorganized (p. 194). Bai Wei (1894-1987) put forth the thesis that women had no life outside of love-indeed, they equated life to love-and thus were trapped in a "web of love" (pp. 20J, 208). He Yubo criticized women writers, with the exception of Ding Ling, for their inability to understand social organization, a charge that also contained a criticism of women writers' inability to understand the organization of writing. Quoting Rudyard Kipling on the essential progress of narrative fiction, He Yubo wrote that because women lacked literary skill, they often relied on fragmentary narration and imitated or included letters or diaries in their fiction (p. 20). However, if letters as fiction had a clear plot and structure as in the works of Guo Moruo, they could be good literature; otherwise, they were merely a recitation of boring random events (p. 157). He Yubo criticized women writers for their persistent emphasis on women: thq wrote about women from the standpoint of women. Ultimately He Yubo identified this "woman focus" as the biggest problem in their works. Within this already negative context, women writers' tendency to allude to classical literature for its lyrical orientation became part of their desire to write as and about women.

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Taking Bing Xin as an example, He Yubo argued that she wrote old-style poetry (in a new form) because she wanted to make use of the emotional context but not the content of traditionallyrical poetry (pp. 6-7). Bing Xin evaluated phenomena from the point of view of "wives and misses" and limited her context to that of her own feelings or family life (pp. 18, 23). Lu Yin wrote about women's emotions and liked to describe the dignity of the virgin life, frequently extolling the lives of virgin girls and describing the tragedies they endured after marriage (pp. 17, 34, 46). Because Lu Yin focused on the subjectivity of these young women, He Yubo did not see her writing as a social critique, but as an expression of personal pain and sadness with no distinct origin. Such writing also had the "terrible problem" of utilizing incoherent and monotonous diary and letter forms (pp. 47-48). Ling Shuhua wrote "just pretty words" that were not about real life but about the narrow point of view of the married woman of the leisured class, the taitai (pp. 49-53). Her focus on "trivial family affairs" and humor produced useless entertainment literature (pp. 58-60). 13 It was precisely because she herself was a taitai, He Yubo argued, that Ling Shuhua led a narrow life and was incapable of writing significant literature. She even relied on promoting an old view of women as existing only within the three bonds of wife, mother, and daughter (pp. 77-80). Like Ling Shuhua, He Yubo argued, Ding Ling wrote about leisured women, the "young misses" (xiaojie) of "Mengke" and "Shafei niishi de riji" (The diary of Ms. Sophia) who relied on emotions to fortify themselves and had little clear connection to social reality outside their own mind (pp. 96-98). Lu Yi had a problem opposite that of Bai Wei, who was caught in the "web of love": her characters revealed their traditionalism by willingly sacrificing love for filial piety (p. 125). 14 Yuan Jun based her writing on emotion and thus ended up producing entertainment literature in the letter form with no literary value. Hence her scope was narrow, not extending beyond her own position (pp. 155-61). Her

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writing was like a recently let-out foot; despite its gesture toward modern love, it still retained a caizi jiaren feeling and praised the beauty of the old-style woman (pp. 171-72). 15 Although she had studied at a revolutionary college, Chen Ying wrote of bourgeois women's consciousness and focused on unsatisfactory love relationships (pp. 184-87). In discussing Bai Wei, who wrote about lost love (p. 201), He Yubo analyzed the tendency of Bai and other women writers to naturalize the role of women within the family and to implicitly define women's relationship to love as a woman's problem: In a society where men hold exclusive economic and political power, there is an insistent, unchanging concept of woman, who is subsidiary in all ways. That is to say, women's unnat-. ural dependence on men is regarded as natural. If women can find a satisfactory route to take in love, if they can find a good lover or husband, then they will be happy the rest of their lives. But if they can't, they will be miserable to the end of their days, as if they had lost their lives. No matter if in material or spiritual necessity, love is much more important for women than for men, and only in love can women discover their value and sacred responsibilities. Being a virtuous wife and wise mother becomes a woman's profession, even though this sort of theory has been attacked by many. Future society must promote the same rights for women as for men, and broaden women's life from that within the narrow family out into wide society. But there is no choice but to assign the jobs of wife and mother to women, even though there will be many reforms in their work. This is to say that no matter in what kind of society, love will still occupy an important spot in the minds of women. There is no problem with this. We can say that women are born to love. They live and die in love and cannot be without it for a day. (pp. 204-5)

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He Yubo believed it was this gender difference concerning love that Bai Wei emphasized. Her distinctly female approach thus landed her in the "web of love" that prevented her from writing serious, meaningful literature (pp. 216-17). The core of He Yuba's critique-that these women writers did not immerse themselves in life or society, wrote from an elite standpoint, focused on emotions, and incessantly referred back to lyrical traditional literature-was repeated by famous leftist critics such as Wang Zhepu (1933), Mao Dun, Yi Zhen, and Qian Qianwu. Some critics also discussed the alignment of these characteristics with writing not by but for women, showing how in general writing about love, the family, emotions, and subjectivity both was associated with women and narrowed their view as it constituted it. Critics showed the writing of women to be feminine in that it did not take society and nation as its context and trivial in that it centered on emotions within social relations. In other words, a nationalistic framework that emphasized either the struggle against imperialism or social engagement was missing, critics believed. What women writers did best-the subtle exploration of t~e modern demands and forms of moral virtue-disappears when the categories of criticism are only bourgeois or traditional emotionalism or social engagement. Qian Xingcun claimed that most women writers exhibited concrete and easily identifiable faults in their work: In the creative works of most women writers, there are unmistakable latent signs that will show you the author is a woman as soon as you open the book. The most important is that they [i.e., women writers] use passionate feelings as their ink of creation and turn the personalities of their selves from the old era into the center of their characters' personalities. Their works are lyrical and autobiographical, and nothing can depart from their own immediate environment. Emotions are weightier than logic. (Qian Xingcun, 1933b: 255-56)

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Yi Zhen also stated that even though the term woman writer should not exist because "women are neither worse nor better at literature than men," since women's interior lives and relations to society were different than men's, women could describe things that men could not imagine; therefore, it made sense to speak of women writers and women's literature (Yi Zhen 1933: 2-3). Yi separated women writers into three schools: the inner chambers writers, such as Bing Xin, who wrote on love within the confines of lijiao (ritual); the new inner chambers writers, such as Ling Shuhua, who were not entirely restricted by lijiao but still were cautious and not too romantic; and the new woman writers, such as Ding Ling and Yuan Jun, who recorded the "ups and downs of free love" (pp. 4-5). Bing Xin's work shared the main defects of the inner chambers writers in that it was innately conservative (unlike that of men, who were waging a battle with lijiao), emotive, descriptive rather than active, and passionless (pp. 8-12). Lu Yi too shared most of these faults and was a poor writer to boot (p. 14). Like He Yubo, Yi Zhen was gentlest with Ding Ling, whose works were relatively much more passionate, but on the whole he believed none of these writers was very successful (p. 36). Critics reserved some of their highest praise for Xie Bingying's Congjun riji (Diary of a soldier). 16 Although some claimed Xie did not have the talent of Bing Xin or Ding Ling, all praised her for "not singing about the wind and moon," not adopting the melancholy stance typical of women writers, and not indulging in "femininity" (nuqi) (Li Li 1933: 81-82; Yi Zhen 1933: 91). Implicit in these sorts of comments, and even in some women's fiction, was an admiration for the unliterary, masculine world of the military man. Bing Xin's "Meng" (Dream) also recognized the social value of military life, which was so unlike the sedate life of a girl training to be a woman. The story contrasts the quiet and boring life of a girl with the active and exciting life of a boy who could be in the military. Up until the age of ten, the girl wore

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boy's clothing and rode a white horse. She even wore a black uniform with gold decorations when she went with her father to participate in military ceremonies. To this girl, the conventional world of girls appeared restricted and dull: "Girl things were so trivial and boring! When the lights shot into the endless ocean, giving off sheets of cold rays, in the lights' shadows and in the shadow of the flag were two rows of heroic and solemn officers. Amid the clanking of swords and sheathes, solemnly and in order, together they lifted their cups to wish long life to Chinawhy did this scene cause me to shed tears of joy and sadness!" (Bing Xin 1923)_1? After turning ten, she learned to be a girl by putting flowers in her hair, looking in a mirror, saying soft and warm things, and crying often. She wondered if the ocean sky is for poets or for soldiers, and contrasted a tame writing with a wild, physical military life. Bing Xin also wrote about the glory of military life, and its gendered restrictions, in part 2 of"Wangshi" (Past events) (Bing Xin 1924). Through the references in that story we see why critics who sought to demote the lyricism and implied femininity of women's writing regarded Xie Bingying's work as positively transgressive. Scattered throughout the criticism of the early 1930s was the lament that women writers from the 1920s had simply stopped writing (Feuerwerker 1975; Li Baiying 1933: 105; Li Li 1933: 85; Yi Zhen 1933: 36). 18 Ding Ling was one of the few who continued to work; she was joined by a small number of new writers, such as Xiao Hong, in the 1930s. 19 Other critics writing during the 1930s repeated many of the criticisms discussed above. Huang Ying, for example, attacked Bing Xin for her lack of social profundity and compared her unfavorably with Lu Xun. The "progressive" orientation of literature in the 1930s dearly did not lie in investigating gender issues or in constructing a writing gendered through style or topic. Rather, the main literary debates of the time, on ethnicity in form and language, the popularization of literature, literature for national defense, and proletarian liter-

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ature, established the guidelines for discussion. 20 Debate over gendered writing more or less disappeared from the journals of literary societies and discussions of culture. 21

From Love to Revolution As one of the many writers who called for a complete rethinking of literature and its goals in the early 1930s, or a "leveling of the special notion ofliterature" (Feuerwerker 1982: 73), Ding Ling best exemplifies the shift in the late 1920s, encouraged by leftist literary ideology, from delving into subjective, interior consciousness to representing a bleak outside reality to be altered through revolutionary actionY Several of Ding Ling's stories showed a direct conflict between love and revolution-a conflict recognized by Ding Ling herself and her critics. Less recognized was that Ding Ling counterposed the emerging revolutionary creed with earlier, May Fourth definitions of what it meant to be female. 23 Ding Ling became known in literature during the late 1920s, when she published "Mengke," "Shafei niishi de riji" (The diary of Ms. Sophia), "Zisha riji" (Suicide diary), "Amao guniang" (The girl Amao) and other stories. In 1933, Mao Dun linked Ding Ling and Bing Xin by pointing out that in 1927, when "Shafei niishi de riji" was published, readers recognized Ding Ling's talent and regarded her as heir to the legacy of excellent female writing left by a now silent Bing Xin (Mao Dun 1933: 253). Whereas Bing Xin's work was known for its praise of motherly love and nature, Mao Dun described Ding Ling's early work as an exception to this kind of "serenity and refinement" (p. 253). However, Mao Dun believed that Ding Ling espoused May Fourth ideas in "Shafei," and still wrote largely about the psychology of women. "This is a bold description," he declared, "at least for a Chinese woman writer of the time, it is bold. Ms. Sophia is representative of the liberated young woman after May

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Fourth and her psychological contradictions in sexual love!" (p. 253). However, Mao Dun also discussed the inadequacy of this approach for readers of the early 1930s or even as early as the year "Shafei" was published: "But at that time Chinese literary circles were seeking more profound, more socially significant works. The proletarian literature movement was emerging in China. Of course Ding Ling could not long remain outside these trends. Therefore after continuing to write several stories with the psychological torment of women (generally sexual) as the central topic, Ding Ling started to write a novel on the popular topic of 'revolution and love"' (p. 254). The two poles of "revolution and love" emerged as a stronger contradiction in Ding Ling's "Yijiu sanling nian chun Shanghai" (Spring in Shanghai, 1930), with "the author striving to illustrate those struggling and trying to progress in this era' (p. 255). According to Yi Zhen, who wrote "Ding Ling niishi" (Ms. Ding Ling) in 1930, Ding was furthering a long tradition of women writers who focused on portraying some sort of "love" in their works: Under the pen of women writers in the era of Bing Xin and Lu Yi, love was motherly love and the love between husband and wife; in the era of Yuan Jun, it was conflict between the love of a mother and that of a lover. When the era of Ding Ling arrived, love was simply and purely "love." When love reached Ding Ling's time, it was not discussed simply as a common affair. It had already gone a step further, and a purer type oflove was required. (Yi Zhen 1930: 223) "Shafei," which problematized love and refused to repeat the simple "I love you, you love me," or "You love me, I don't love you" formulas of the past, was the representative work to which Yi Zhen referred. It was distinctive, Yi argued, because it accurately portrayed the contradictory psychology of women (pp. 224-25). Because her early stories mostly dealt with love, especially a

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woman's psychology when she was in love, Ding Ling was categorized as a "woman writer." In his essay "Ding Ling," published in 1931, the literary critic Qian Qianwu discussed the theory of the "stance of the modern girl" (original phrase in English), which many critics claimed to be the unique contribution of Ding Ling's early fiction. Qian explained that this stance differed from that of other women writers because it was free of "feudal consciousness" and also in many other ways was typical of an "end of the century" psychology: it included self-confidence, emotionalism and moodiness, dependency, pessimism, weariness, depression, hesitation, inability to concentrate and to pursue a course of action, disorganization, mental fragmentation, doubt, and "mystical delirium" (original in English) (Qian Qianwu 1931: 227). For the writer and the modern girl protagonists of Ding Ling's stories, life was a plaything that must be wasted to the utmost (p. 229). The writer did not "bring out the darkness of society" and sought no explanation or understanding of the way things were, but rather concentrated on searching for fun, good fortune, and freedom. Ding Ling's stories did not depict "objective events in society," but only "subjective desire" (p. 229). Qian marked the beginning of the end of the modern girl era with the publication of Ding Ling's novel Wei Hu. Although the novel revolved around the conflict between love and revolution, Qian argued that it focused on love, and thus was not a totally new work. Protagonist Lijia was a "modern girl who treats life like a play and herself like an actress." Lijia's boyfriend, Wei Hu, was a romantic who had been influenced by the times and began studying socialism. This new interest bolstered his will and turned him into a new person. Yet he could dedicate himself to revolutionary work and escape the lure of Lijia's stifling love only by leaving her and going to Guangdong (pp. 234-35). Qian showed how even though the theme of the novel was love, revolution bested loved in the battle for the protagonist's heart.

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After 1931, critics discussed Ding Ling's later work, especially the story "Shui" (Water), which revolved around the psychology of the group rather than the individual, emphasized class awareness and collective strength, and eschewed promoting gender-specific apprehension of experience, whether group or individual. According to Ding Ling, she used "Shui" simultaneously to criticize and to move away from the revolution-andlove formula prevalent in writing at the time (Ding Yi 1955: 345). Writing in 1932, Ding Ling expressed dissatisfaction at the way her early work always seemed to sympathize with the weaknesses of women, even though she herself had no such sympathy. Throughout her life, Ding Ling refused to admit, despite often severe pressure, that she identified with Sophia and her egocentric, vacillating, manipulative treatment of men and her friends. For several months in 1932, Ding Ling was unable to develop a technique divorced from her previous work and appropriate to the "new content" at which she was aiming (Ding Ling 1932: 105-6). Although after around 1930 Ding Ling generally continued to write of the contradiction between love-which implied an emphasis on psychological interiority, deep emotions, and personal relationships-and revolution-which implied an emphasis on external reality, class and economic forces, and social engagement of the characters-she also retheorized gender meanings. In her work, women's role in modern life was henceforth to be similar to that of men, as much as society would allow it to be; still, in her stories of the late 1930s, such as "Zai yiyuan zhong" (In the hospital), society strongly restricted women. Ding Ling rejected her own past writing as well as much of the early May Fourth fiction that constructed the deeply subjective modern woman. According to Tani Barlow, Ding Ling's turning point came with the story "Shanghai," in which the author boldly expressed her new belief that literature had become "self-indulgent, masculinized, almost masturbatory" (Barlow 1989: 28-29). Barlow argues that

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"Shanghai" illustrated Ding Ling's evolving belief that writing of the past decade was simply bourgeois literature. In this story, Ding Ling showed literature to reproduce itself and its ideologies endlessly. "Shanghai" satirized and criticized a typical kind of story in which a character, generally a male writer, copied a European model of alienation and angst. As for women characters, they were the "hyper-feminine, tortured, essentially sexual creature[s]" familiar to us through Western novels (pp. 28-29). In the first part of "Shanghai," the man Zibin is the writer. Zibin is powerful solely among his young readers, who revere him and seek his guidance. He also is slightly decadent and deceitful, pretending poverty and posturing against social injustice only because it is fashionable. Zibin's lover, Meilin, also is a writer, but is not as well known as Zibin. Ding Ling implied that because she is not an established writer and has not become entrapped in the conventions of Zibin's kind of writing, and because she is willing to work in a factory and gain access to firsthand knowledge of proletarian life, Meilin alone can move toward the category of revolutionary literature. In a parallel couple featured in the second part of the story, neither character is a writer. The woman, Mary, although serious and earnest, is enamored of her self-vision as one loved, pampered, and dressed in fine clothes. Her favorite activity is acting out in public romantic scenarios of jealousy, infatuation, and possession. For her, the problem of how to conduct a relationship with a man is complicated by the gritty political nature of the work of Wang Wei, the male character. More troublesome is that Wang Wei's political activities seem to downgrade her lifestyle, making it appear trivial, and influence Wang Wei so that he has difficulty valuing her as she is. Another problem is just work itself, which takes Wang Wei-the audience for her performance-away from her. The work that lures Meilin and Wang Wei away from first, literary decadence and second, a life of triviality, is not only political in nature. This newly significant absorption in political work also

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proposes a new aesthetics, for femininity as well as for literature. The story rejects the traditional "ambivalence and mystery" of the feminine ideal in favor of clearly expressed purpose and ideals that are scripted on the body's surface in clothing, bearing, general health, and expression (Wai-yee Li 1993: 42). The breach between love (qing) and verbal expression-the "impossibility of articulation in the world of qing"-and thus the endowing of love with mystery, depth, and inexpressibility, is obliterated in the new revolutionary woman, man, and literature (p. r85). This revolutionary discourse demands clarity in purpose and process, and removes any positive gendered meaning in the expressive and mysterious representation of qing. Ding Ling set up a parallel structure where either female or male characters could occupy the two poles of the love-and-revolution dichotomy. Women as well as men are able to devote themselves to social engagement, political work, and revolutionary activity. As Nancy Armstrong has shown, the Western bourgeois woman who develops in literature was not only consumed by love, but also empowered by her newly delineated domestic realm, where emotions reigned in a warm contrast to the cold, outside, political world. The bourgeois woman created and defended a work ethic that contrasted sharply with the luxurious life of the aristocracy. This aspect of the bourgeois woman, so central to the development of many literatures (especially American literature, with its wild, masculine West and tame civilizing woman), did not attract Chinese writers of the 1920s and early 1930s, either female or male, because it would have been at odds with May Fourth criticism of the Chinese family as the primary site of oppression. Bing Xin's work came closest to a valorization of female domestic life, but she eventually sensed her own dislocation from cultural trends and lamented her inability to move her fiction into the new times represented by the 1930s. Antifamily ideology was not a generalized critique that appeared the same in all modernizing countries, but varied from country to country. In China it was specific to the

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position of women and men in the family. Young intellectuals rejected the extended family: its crowded living conditions; mandatory ritualistic expressions of filial piety from the wife; the possibility of abuse if one were a daughter-in-law and wife; the rigidity of familial roles, with their inside/outside mandates; and parents' power to determine the children's future all branded the family as oppressive. This thoroughgoing critique made it unlikely that the domestic woman could become an icon of hard work and virtue. Thus the Chinese woman, unlike the women in the novels of Jane Austen and other Western writers described by Nancy Armstrong (1987), could not become the proud mistress of the privileged interior space, an area that became essential for the modern individual. Ling Shuhua gave us a good example of what sue:h a domesticated woman became in May Fourth China. In "Zhongqiu wan" (Night of the midautumn festival), which revolves around the home life of a married couple, the wife takes great pleasure in constructing a pleasant, attractive home environment for her husband, Jingren (Ling Shuhua 1925c). Jingren also finds joy in noticing the carefully chosen clothing of his wife, the meticulously planned dinners, and the clean home. He sees and enjoys his wife's particular physical charms. But the relationship begins to disintegrate when Jingren, anxious to run to the bedside of his dying adoptive sister-with whom, Ling Shuhua implies, he may have had a mutual, erotic attraction-on this crucial festival night refuses to sit down with his wife and eat the symbolically significant Together Duck. Jingren is too late and the sister dies; in anger he smashes a vase at home, another bad omen. Jingren starts to frequent brothels and infects his wife with syphilis. She miscarries a deformed fetus. The relationship, the marriage, and the household fall apart, and everyone, including the wife's own mother, considers it to be the wife's fault. The wife in this story is only an obstacle to everyone. Her attempts to create a pleasant domestic space quickly disintegrate,

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because, as Ling Shuhua shows, she is nothing but a compilation of dead rituals and superstitions that can destroy true emotions, such as those between Jingren and his sister. The wife's body is metaphorically similar to the home, its purpose and practices so re_ified that it can be easily corrupted. The domestic space does not produce for the woman an invigorating moral, social, or psychological context. Rather, because the family and its household is formally rigid, it destroys her and itself. The deathly contamination of the traditional family structure as seen by intellectuals in the 1920s and 1930s was illustrated most convincingly by Zhang Ailing (Eileen Chang, 1921-95), whose "Jinsuo ji" (Golden cangue, 1943) has become a classic of modern literature. 24 Emphasizing, in its most vivid and unforgettable markings, the bodily effacement that familial morality prescribes for women, Zhang constructed the protagonist Qiqiao as virtually vaporizing under the family's relentless and harsh demands. The family in this text is not just a social practice, but is represented and made physical by a forbidding physical structure of large beams and solid walls enclosing a hermetically sealed household filled with heavy furniture and fabrics. Everything within this household, both material objects and familial traditions and relationships, is solid to the point of permitting no possibility of being moved or destroyed. The family exists not only in its structures, however, or in its terrible rituals, but infiltrates the body and mind of the young woman as a destructive force and an ultimately alienating consciousness. Qiqiao gradually becomes corrupted in her desire for money and her longing to crush others as she has been crushed. Married into the family as a young impoverished woman who could get no better husband than the disabled Third Master, Qiqiao controls the physical environment of her daughter by embarrassing her at school so much that she returns home in shame, and of her son by getting him addicted to opium, thus passing on Zhang's evil Chinese family as if it were breathed in through

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the air. Western ideas, behaviors, and dress, which appear as a possible salvation to the daughter in the form of her Americaneducated boyfriend, vanish as the man discovers that his nostalgic illusion of a warm and nurturing Chinese family is falsenothing but a shell filled with decay. At the end of the novel, Qiqiao marvels that her golden bracelet, which once adorned a plump, charming wrist, could be pushed all the way up to her armpits, showing how the physical ordeal of being a woman in the family has decimated her body while forcing her to destroy the lives of those around her. Although lauded for its skill in depiction, subtle irony, and lyricism in writing, Zhang Ailing's portrayal of a woman physically ruined by her own internalization of the family seems like a throwback to the 1920s, when women writers did not yet dare imagine worlds and associations free of the oppression of females. But perhaps Zhang's story should be regarded as a testimony to the persistence of moral virtue and its structures within the family. Better than those before her, Zhang built in her fiction the physical forms that represented traditional mores and their weighty, oppressive power, and showed how for women such as Qiqiao's daughter, the modern promise of education and love to relieve suffering and create progress was false, unrealizable, and cruel. The dichotomy between a transcendent, male cai ~nd an embodied, physical de appears in Zhang's narrative only as de, a force that has spread out to encompass all aspects of female life and in the process has become weighty and unmanageable and destructive of the possibility of true love, kindness, or any kind of selfless engagement. The story alludes to, but never openly discusses, men's transcendence through texts and outerness, or their ability to go out and exist in a social world, except in Jize's constant flight from the household. 25 Qiqiao's husband, who is crippled and must remain inside, becomes the object of her scorn and the most unmasculine of men. Commenting that she cannot under-

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stand how he even fathered their children, Qiqiao shows how being confined to the inner sphere deprives one of masculinity and even of being itself. The story reads as if de, now nothing more than empty ritual, has taken over the world, diminishing the strength of cai and its liberatory potential for both women and men, but especially for women. Although any kind of true virtue has disappeared, the inner/outer shell that confines Qiqiao is that of relationships within the family, where the dictates of moral virtue force her to remain with those who despise her. Zhang criticizes moral virtue not only because it will destroy Chinese life and thwart modern education and social progress, but also because from the beginning it was nothing but an economic transaction like the one that separated Qiqiao from her natal family and inserted her into her husband's. Zhang shows us a world where talent and the ability to go out is no longer truly evident in daily life. Instead of women gaining access to cai and its liberatory spheres of social life, as reformers had imagined throughout the previous twenty years, men and their world are diminished, having been infected by the limitations of de. If this world is an allegory of China, Zhang is pessimistic about women's future and that of China itself Within this new context, the power of moral virtue is overwhelmingly feminine, destructive, and uncontained.

CONCLUSION

May Fourth intellectuals and their predecessors aimed to overthrow the traditional family. Moreover, women writers identified the family as the source of a social structure that had grown far beyond the confines of the family, in the process infiltrating and deforming the female body. Moral virtue, they demonstrated in their fiction, was enacted largely through women's insertion into heterosexual relationships. Without a modernized family capable of glorifying a socially useful domestic existence for women as it did in the West, and without resort to the lyricism of traditional literature branded as elite and trivial, no overtly gendered position remained for women. At the same time, the family kept women fundamentally subservient to men, and analogously the state harnessed women's labor power on behalf of the nation. By the early 1930s, neither de nor cai was available as a subject position for women. Furthermore, the literary field, a battleground of political ideologies and personal-commitment, had become a hostile environment for both women and men. De, developed and sustained as a physical, female ordeal, rotted away as

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a comprehensive future identity when May Fourth discourse constructed the family as corrupt and limiting. Although the physical ordeal of femininity still existed within this family, it did not produce virtue, but stood as an example of everything bad in the old tradition. The exemplars of the old-style family as it persisted in the modern period were the wives in Ling Shuhua's and Zhang Ailing's work. As for cai, when a feminine-specific writing was isolated and elevated and then criticized, the transcendence and ethereal beauty of literary talent became a liability, for it implied a refusal to engage in social life seriously and to sacrifice style in order to expose and correct social problems. Paradoxically, it also implied feminine weakness. The leftist tradition that continued through the Maoist era allowed only one position, that of the nongendered writer who wrote to produce national unity. Because the nongendering of the writer meant the exclusion of the tradition explicitly identified as feminine, it energized a masculinized ideology. As in the early twentieth century, a nationalist paradigm subsumed gender and weakened the category of woman writer. Today many women refuse the label woman writer, knowing the appellation implies a lyrical, useless nuqi (femininity). They fear being labeled a woman writer means their work will be considered as less serious than that written from the standardized and engaged, implicitly masculinized position of writer. The feminine position has been virtually rejected by many contemporary women writers. In an interview with Wang Anyi, Zhu Lin, and Dai Qing, Wang Zheng persistently questioned them on their views about women, women writers, and fiction by women. Both Wang Anyi and Dai Qing reject the idea of "woman writer" or "women's fiction." Wang Anyi does not want to be studied as a woman writer, and equates being a writer to being a male writer. I think that many women studying Chinese female writers do so because they are feminists. They are interested in you from

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'a feminist perspective.' ... I would not like it if they were interested in me simply because of that. I want equality. I hope they regard me as a real writer.... Some of my views may make feminists think that I am tremendously oppressed by men. I actually just hope to become a writer, like a male writer. (Wang Zheng 1988: 107, 112) Wang Anyi's evaluation of literature by women parallels that of leftist critics of the early 1930s, who argued that women's writing was narrow and overemphasized the emotions. Wang finds the same problem with contemporary women writers: In my view women are fine writers when it comes to delicate things but they don't do so well writing really grand literature. That's because women's literature is less powerful, less expansive in conception .... Usually female writers' work exhibits a narrowness .... My feeling is that for female writers it is too easy to get buried in personal experience; it's too tempting to huddle up in one's own shell and not stop and think about how pitiful she really is. Female writers are more deceiving than male writers, too. She might assume that she is a certain kind of person but actually not be.... Female writers easily fall prey to the problem of just acting.... Male writers are more engaged in things outside the self, social things. Female writers are more concerned with the life of emotions. (pp. 112-14) Dai Qing claims that Chinese intellectual women refuse feminism because "[he trend in China today is just the reverse of what it is in the West. That is to say, China faces the question of whether women should return to the home rather than the question of how to leave the home" (p. 133). Dai also argues that in her work she has sought to "reach beyond gender"; women who want to accomplish something, she claims, must forget about their own gender (p. 138). Dai points out that very few women are academics or scholars, which she believes "has something to

CONCLUSION

2.01

do with learning ability"; she also believes there "are simply more highly intelligent men than women" (pp. 140-41). The interviewer, Wang Zheng, was intent on getting the writers to recognize their work within the framework of feminist debate. In a conversation with film director Huang Shuqing, Dai Jinhua and Mayfair Yang also persistently asked questions that focused on women's issues. Huang is not as adamant as Wang Anyi but often only reluctantly admitted to any focus on women's issues in her work. Concerning the loneliness depicted in Ren, gui, qing (Woman, demon, human, 1988), for example, Dai Jinhua asked, "Is this the loneliness of humankind, or of a woman?" and Huang answered "This is the loneliness of strong human feelings" (Dai Jinhua and Mayfair Yang 1995: 793). Huang mentioned that film character Can Qiuyun cannot achieve a happy marriage, prompting Dai to ask, "Is this a problem only women confront?" Huang replied, "It's the same for both men and women" (p. 794). Dai went on relentlessly questioning Huang, who denied ever having made a "strictly women's film" (p. 797). Yet Huang admitted to some subconscious ideas that could be feminist and generally showed a recognition and acceptance of feminist ideals and an understanding of concepts such as "male power" (p. 805). Yet like Wang Anyi, who believes that being a woman "means getting special favors" (Wang Zheng 1988: 108), Huang Shuqing claimed that "it may be easier for a woman director to come up with money than a man." Moreover, in a very unfeminist way she admitted that she often hires men rather than women to work on her films, because female workers are difficult to work with; they are "too indirect in expressing themselves, narrow-minded, troublesome, and prone to jealousy" (Dai Jinhua and Mayfair Yang 1995: 801, 805). There are at least two somewhat troubling aspects to these interviews, which point up the dilemma of modernity in Chinese culture. On one hand, the interviewers zealously forced the feminist approach on the interviewees in a way that could easily be

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interpreted as cultural imperialism. Although not all the interviewers are from the American academe (Dai Jinhua is a professor at Beijing University), they published the interviews in American journals, indicating that this subject is of interest especially to Americans. The emphasis on questions of equality, subjectivity, masculine discourse, female work conditions, feminine styles, sexual difference, and sexuality comes directly out of contemporary feminist theory as taught in American universities and discussed in American scholarship. On the other hand, the interviewers' approach appears warranted, not only because it brings in the progressive, prowoman ideas of modern life, but also because the material itself seems to demand such an approach. A number of interpretations of this contradictory situation are possible. First, the interviewees could be simply carrying on a traditional antifemale stance that has become historically conflated with the Marxist/Maoist emphasis on class over gender. They tend to regard problems as human problems without regard to gender, and they do not hesitate to assign negative qualities to women. At best, then, they are trapped in a contradictory mission of trying to reproduce women's lives or subjectivity yet regarding that very attempt as narrow or insignificant. They do not recognize feminist approaches because they have been trained to ignore gender oppression, first by a tradition that makes women subservient to men, and then by a Communist ideology that subsumes gender under class issues. Second, Wang Anyi, Dai Qing, and Huang Shuqing could be victims of the interviewers-Westerners or Westernized intellectuals-who, as tools of modernity, seek to convince them that their ideas are backward and wrong. Thus their refusal to admit to the many instances of feminist thought or representation that the interviewers insist upon is a kind of resistance, a vociferous protest against an interpretation of their works that forces them against their will into a discursive world they have not created. Relying heavily on the notion of progress, the interviewers be-

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come nothing but intelligent probes sent out to investigate and order global chaos along the lines of the more modern West. 1 Wang Zheng, Dai Jinhua, and Mayfair Yang all become agents with the unconscious goal of spreading modernization across the globe. My research in this book could also be thus criticized. The third interpretation, the one I believe most accurately describes the situation, combines both of these perspectives and recognizes them as the conditions of modernity in China. According to this interpretation, we all perform roles determined to a great extent by our positions: that is, by our occupation, our avocation, our interests, and so on. Once we choose these positions, we are very much locked into certain behaviors. Scholars of Chinese studies and Westernized intellectuals in general are severely limited in our ability to act outside the notions of modernity and progress. Depending on our roles in our careers and lives, we must set out to defend and promote one or another modern ideology. Those of us in academia scorn the popular defense of human rights expressed in dismay over the mistreatment of Chinese prisoners, support for capital punishment, and rejection of abortion "rights" that comes from the United States Congress and from the public at large, yet we will not relinquish our "right" to sally forth, both in action and in scholarship, on behalf of women around the world. We regard calls for freedom of speech with a great deal of skepticism, yet we demand free access to research archives and materials in China, endanger our Chinese colleagues by quoting their works or engaging in risky discussions while in China, and look forward to reading the novels and viewing the films banned in China but widely available here. Although we know well that individualism and affirmation of diversity are relatively recent ideas and practices, we apply these criteria in selecting graduate students for our programs, in choosing texts to translate and promote, in inviting "dissident" activists to speak, and in condemning China's treatment of its minorities. Through our actions and words, we tirelessly try to convince others of our

2.04

CONCLUSION

correctness, all the time bolstered by the same modern pantheon of ideas that we present to our students as "historically and culturally specific." Optimistically attempting to intervene in the production of knowledge, practice social engagement, and encourage diversity, we see that our cherished ideals reveal our own historically limited and unchosen positions. Just as we cannot give up our convictions, however, Chinese writers and filmmakers cannot escape their historical and personal roles. Wang Anyi's impassioned rejection of overt feminist engagement, her refusal to "see" women's oppression, and her insistence that suffering belongs to women and men equally-all of this appears to us modern readers, whether inside or outside China, not as resistance, but as backwardness. Although American anti-intellectualism and the all-inclusive requirements of multiculturalism demand that Wang's discussion be published in an academic journal and taken seriously by scholars, her answers to Wang Zheng's questions are so full of contradictions that they invite mockery. While admiring Huang Shuqing's more aware (that is, closer to our own) knowledge of feminist analysis and her desire to portray independent women, we cringe when she says she usually puts "males in charge of different divisions" of her filmmaking projects to avoid female problems with jealousy and narrow-mindedness (Dai Jinhua and Mayfair Yang 1995: 805). If Wang Anyi, Dai Qing, and Huang Shuqing are willing to forgo the often substantial support and recognition, both economic and otherwise, that more "sophisticated" works will bring them, they may be able to fortify their "resistance" and travel their "own" road. But the difficulty of this can be summed up in Huang Shuqing's response-"Of course"-to Mayfair Yang's question of whether she would be willing to accept sponsorship of overseas investors for a film that could not be shown in China, but only abroad (p. 801). And even if she were to say "no" to outside recognition, Huang would still be assailed by the more "progressive" critics in China, such as Dai Jinhua, whose very mode

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of questioning implied that a better, more modern representation is available if Huang would alter her focus or simply publicly recognize, in a new way, what she already has accomplished. 2 Barring that, Huang still might give voice to her now-muted feminism if she were to court acclaim outside of China, and in so doing come under the influence of Western images and texts. 3 Few of us can turn down the opportunities of our fields, whether they be recognition or awards for our work, income, chances to study and work abroad, or the possibility of publication in a leading journal. That women writers have been successful in writing and publishing in contemporary China seems to belie the notion that there ever was a contradiction between moral virtue and literary talent, or more generally between women and literature. Yet the reluctance of Wang Anyi, Dai Qing, and Huang Shuqing to be analyzed as women shows that the contradiction still exists. Can Xue, whose radical language and imagery is unmatched in contemporary Chinese fiction, has been attacked by Cheng Yongxin (editor of a well-known collection of avant-garde writing) and Cheng Depei (a critic who writes for the literary journal Shanghai wenxue) as a paranoid and insecure woman whose madness has produced her writing style (Tonglin Lu 1995= 77-78). As Tonglin Lu writes, "her femininity among a group of male writers and critics with an implicit or explicit masculinist ideology becomes a mark of marginality that is related to, but not limited by, gender identity" (p. 79). At the same time, Chinese culture is subject to many of the modern influences that continually remake our lives here as well. Science, that most powerful and prestigious field, is increasingly marked as masculine, while the humanities and literature in particular are becoming more feminine. In universities in the United States as well as in China, science professors are overwhelmingly male. In the United States, although women are barely represented in physics, they have made their way into the ranks of lit-

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erature professors. In China, however, literature and culture have continued to retain some of their traditional masculine prestige. Thus women writers must constantly negotiate a fine line between writing as a man and thereby claiming their own share of the tradition, and writing as a woman and thereby perhaps producing a modern subjectivity but at the risk of demeaning their labor.

REFERENCE

MATTER

NOTES

INTRODUCTION 1.

2.

I have selected the limited number of stories and novels I use in this book from hundreds of possibilities. Those I have chosen by no means exhaust the resources available to demonstrate any theoretical approach. For comprehensive information on women writers and their works, two excellent recent studies are available. Qiao Yigang (1993) has written a 344-page study that introduces seventeen modern writers starting with Qiu Jin, briefly discusses premodern women writers, and outlines literary history and writing conditions in various periods up to 1949. The 1995 two-volume, 1109-page book, edited by Sheng Ying and an editorial board that includes Qiao Yigang, Ma Aru, Yuan Shanmei, and Zhang Chunsheng, covers the entire twentieth century of mainland writers, giving detailed information on women writers and analyzing their texts (Sheng Ying 1995). Both books provide biographical information, historical background, and literary analysis. I have found them very valuable. In emphasizing the autonomy of art as a modern theory, I am not implying that it was the only literary ideology of modern

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China, but rather that it had behind it the force of its development as an overarching discourse in the West. As readers know, socialist approaches to literature quickly gained the upper hand in China and although contested, stayed in place until after the death of Mao, when they began to undergo a slow death. CHAPTER I

I.

2.

3.

4·

He Zhen created the Society for the Reempowerment of Women (nuzi foquan hui} in Tokyo the day after Qiu Jin was executed. Articles in the society's journal, Tianyi, promoted anarchism, revolution in the family and kin system, economic revolution, and female independence. Articles by He Zhen, Qiu Jin, and Jin Yi, published in journals in China, Japan, and Europe, were extremely influential in stirring debate about Chinese women and their social and international position. See Bao Jialin (1988b: 290). For a discussion of the term "feminism" in contemporary China, see Lydia H. Liu (1993: esp. pp. 36-39); also the collection of essays by Yue Shuo (1989: esp. the first section on theory, pp. 1-25). See Bonnie S. McDougall (1993) on the "crisis in creativity'' in contemporary Chinese fiction. McDougall points out that although creativity as a doctrine has a relatively short history, it has been accepted as a standard throughout the literary world. For essays on related topics in the same volume, see Loden (1993) and Henry Y. H. Zhao (1993). Kumari Jayawardena (1986} takes a different perspective and situates feminist movements as an "integral part of national resistance movements" (p. 8) that were "not imposed on the Third World by the West, but rather [were the outcome of] ... historical circumstances [that] produced important material and ideological changes that affected women, even though the impact of imperialism and Western thought was admittedly among the significant elements in these historical circumstances" (p. 2). In other words, Jayawardena highlights the local discourse of feminism-embedded in nationalism though it isas the point of departure for the study of women's movements in

NOTES TO PAGES 13-19

5·

6.

7·

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the third world. Implicit in her stance is the criticism that the scholarly discourse of nationalism and colonialism has taken the subject position away from third-world women, who under this discourse can only endlessly play out their local reactions to Oriemalism. Anderson (1983) notes that radio, invented in 1895, allows a certain bypassing of prim that "summon[s] into being an aural representation of the imagined community where the printed page scarcely penetrated." The radio played a large role in revolutions in Vietnam and Indonesia (p. 56 n27). In this description, Anderson also utilizes the concept of homogeneous, empty time, originally developed by Walter Benjamin. In this peculiarly modern kind of time, everything can go on simultaneously within a society, and we all believe in the simultaneous activity of our fellow citizens. Contrasted to this is messianic time, in which the sense of simultaneity is entirely different, involving the sense of past and present existing in the present, in which events are not linked causally or temporally, bur through an overarching concept such as that of God (pp. 29-31). One of Deng Xiaoping's contributions to Communist literary doctrine was his promotion of the "rules of literature," a code for announcing that writers could move away from their previous tight connection to politics and concern themselves with aesthetics. On the ideal of literary rules and the backlash that this move created in the Anti-Spiritual Pollution Campaign of 1983, see Larson (1989). A similar analysis of the past of Chinese literary texts was carried on in exhaustive searches by Lu Xun to locate a body of classical fiction and its origins, and by Hu Shi, who wrote many essays evaluating the textual past of China and reorganizing it so that it could become, in the modern sense, a "national past." See Larson (1991: 87-112). See Hao Chang (1987); see also Barlow (1991), who argues that intellectual movements in modern China should be contextualized within a politics of culture (wenhua), that Chinese modernity is semicolonial, and that the Chinese intelligentsia "has positioned itself between internal and external others" (p. 209).

212

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12.

13.

14.

i5.

r6.

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PAGES

20-29

Barlow uses the idea of signs (woman, sexuality, self) and zhishifenzi strategies-use of master narratives that are masculine and biologistic, strategies of reversal that change common sense into the Chinese tradition, the construction of heroic polyglot subjects, the representation of the truth in realistic fiction, and the construction and vilification of multiple pasts-to illustrate her thesis that "the zhishifenzi of power speaks the languages of imported Truth ... [a)nd that it why the language of the post-Mao zhishifenzi is a colonial discourse" (p. 226). For an ironic reference to the greater popularity of "women's liberation" among men than women, see Xie Siyan (1923b: 2). Marie de Lepervanche (1989: 51) recognizes this argument when she claims that multiculturalism can "preserve" traditions that are not beneficial for women. Jusdanis's study rejects the idea that there can be a modernized discourse ofliterature that is not formed on the modern concept of the autonomous aesthetic. See Ono Kazuko (1989: 34-39). On the discussion that follows, also see Ono on Kang Youwei (pp. 40-46) and on Liang Qichao (pp. 25-29). To echo R. Radhakrishnan, it is easy to see how the discourse of nationalism overwhelmed the discourse of woman in Kang's thinking. When Kang later decided to promote Confucianism as a state religion, he championed female chastity as a way of aiding the nation. For an elaboration of the new construction of culture ( wenhua) as a field of power within which intellectuals must work, see Barlow (1991). For example, see materials on women in various foreign countries reprinted in Li Youning and Zhang Yufa (1975, r: 173-256). Many of these documents originally were published in late Qing newspapers. On these newspapers, see Beahan (1975). See also the introductory articles run by early newspapers, reprinted in Li Youning and Zhang Yufa (1975, r: 289-94), including articles from Nihi shijie,

Zhongguo xin nujie zazhi, Tianyi, Shenzhou nubao, Nubao, LiuRi nii.xuehui zazhi (Journal of the women's studies society of Chi-

NOTES TO PAGES 29-31

17.

18.

19.

20. 21.

22.

213

nese students studying in Japan), and Nujie. See also He Pingli (1986). Mary Backus Rankin (1975: 59-60) believes that although to some extent Qiu Jin alternated between feminist and revolutionary activities, she "clearly placed revolution ahead of feminist goals .... On the other hand, she believed that women would benefit by revolution .... In the short run, the revolutionary movement offered women the opportunity to join in the great work of saving the nation, and to prove themselves through heroic action, thus earning the right to future equality." It is within this context that Rankin points out the similarity between Qiu )in's death by execution and suicide; Qiu Jin remained at school when soldiers were approaching even though she knew the gesture was futile (p. 6o). See Zhen Shu (1907-8; originally published in Tianyi vol. 3 (July 10, 1907]; vol. 8, 9, 10 [Oct. 30, 1907]; vol. 11, 12 [Nov. 30, 1907]; and vol. 15 (Jan. 15, 1908]). For a discussion of how this unconscious set of naturalized beliefs functions, see Bourdieu (1993), who has coined rhe terms habitus ro describe rhe disposition of someone who has naturalized a number of historically developed beliefs, and field to identify and differentiate the areas where the habitus works. Originally published in jiangsu no. 3; quoted in Li Youning and Zhang Yufa (1975, 1: 403). See also Yi Qin (1975a; originally published in jiangsu nos. 4 and 5, n.d.). Also rhe anonymously published "Gao quanguo niizi" (To all Chinese women), pam 1 and 2, in Li Youning and Zhang Yufa (1975, 1: 410-14; originally published in Eshi jingwen [Dec. 16 and 23, 1903]). As readers know, the "right" of women to give up rheir lives in combat for their country is still being debated in rhe United Stares. Also see Weili Ye (1994) for a discussion of Chinese women doctors who studied in the United States in the late Qing, and rhe way in which "women doctors were empowered by modern Western science" (p. 321). Li Oazhao (1959= 140-45; originally published in Xin qingnian 6, no. 2, [Feb. 12, 1919]). Li also wrote "Fei chang wenti" (Abolish-

214

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NOTES TO PAGE 31

ing prostitution), which likewise attempted to deal with the "women's problem" as a social issue (pp. 168-70; originally published in Meizhou pinglun no. 19 [Apr. 27, 1919]). For a discussion of how middle class writers in England placed gender in a position of primacy by subordinating other social differences, see Nancy Armstrong (1987). Armstrong shows how novels both illustrated and produced the "project of gendering," which acquired great political influence in the mid-nineteenth century. Karen Offen (1988: 136) identifies two traditions in Western feminism: an "individualistic" tradition that "posited the individual, irrespective of sex or gender, as the basic unit," and a "relational" tradition that "emphasized women's rights as women (defined principally by their childbearing and/or nurturing capacities) in relation to men." Anglo-American feminism eventually favored the individualistic tradition, but until Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex was published in 1949, French feminism remained basically relational. As the essays in Yuval-Davis and Anthias (1989) have shown, "feminism" in many other countries is also "relational." Bobby Siu (1982: 104) points out that there are two arguments on women and the nation in the modern period. The first is that national liberation must precede women's liberation; the second is that national liberation is an essential part of women's liberation. Roxane H. Witke (1970) shows how the entire women's movement in China was created through the nationalist movement, itself a result of imperialist invasion. Liang Qichao, Kang Youwei, and early women writers such as Qiu ]in and ]in Yi (]in Songcen) wrote to "prepare women for the revolution," with the goals of aiguo (patriotism) and jiushi (saving the world, remedying the present situation) (pp. 44-45). Witke even claims that heroines in literary works traditionally acted on behalf of personal commitment to individuals while their modern counterparts act collectively on behalf of nation, thus becoming "symbols of their causes" (p. 49). As the articles in the volume edited by Yuval-Davis and Anthias (1989) show, in non-Western countries feminism is almost universally an aspect of nationalistic movements and initially is promoted by

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33- 3 6

2.15

intellectual men as a means of furthering modernity and the progress it implies. Woman as belonging to a category of the oppressed is apparent in Lu Xun's "Zhufu," where Xianglin Sao is not so much a woman as simply one of the most oppressed people in contemporary society. For a discussion of gender in another of Lu Xun's works, see Carolyn Brown (1988), who makes a good case for rhe gender focus of "Soap," but also states that the story's "literary empowerment of women, however, is not for the feminist purpose of examining the power relations between men and women. Rather Lu Xun is contemplating China's future" (p. 65). "Soap" is thus an illustration of the embedding of gender within 25.

26.

a concept of nation. See also Derk Bodde (1991) . Bodde discusses Dong Zhongshu's precept that "the yang is noble and the yin mean" (p. 341), and also the ideas that although yin/yang are often conceived of as complementary, "the yin is hierarchically subordinated to the yang" (p. 100). Dong cited "the alleged cosmic inferiority of the yin to the yang to justify the actual inferiority in Chinese society of woman to man" (p. 341). See also Afshar (1989), who believes that the "affirmation of family as the core .. . of nationhood" in Iran and other countries shows a conflation of family and nation at least metaphorically (p. 117). See also Crowley (1981). Writing on Spain, Crowley underscores the metaphorical equivalence of family and nation, and claims that other than the nuclear family no "autonomous social identity is allowed to stand between the individual and the sovereign state" (p. 90). On the Chinese family, Sophia H. Chen (1934) wrote: " [T he Chinese family] is fundamentally different from the same institution in Europe and America. In the first place, a Chinese family is not merely a love-nest for a man and a woman, but is a state in miniature, and its functions are

27.

carried out by a government with the mother or the father as the supreme sovereign" (pp. 35-36). Both fonii and niixing, as well as niizi and niiren, are terms for "woman." They are used in different contexts and have different connotations that can be obvious or subtle.

216

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30.

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PA G E S

37 - 4 5

As late as 1968, women in Taiwan were still struggling for the "right to maintain friendships and spend their free time with friends" (Diamond, 1975: 17). According to Diamond, in Taiwan women suffer countless restrictions on their daily activities by virtue of how the female role is defined: women cannot travel freely around the country, they must walk and talk in certain prescribed ways, they are subject to the demands of fashion, and they are not taken seriously by their teachers. On how female characters in romances moved up the social hierarchy, see the discussion throughout McMahon (1995); see in particular pp. 108-13 and pp. 176-202 for examples of women impersonating men. The essays in the volume edited by Yuval-Davis and Anthias (1989) show that in most countries, the nationalist movement includes an elevation of the family as the embodiment of national morality and an emphasis on women's education as a way of making women more effective mothers. See in particular articles by Marie de Lepervanche (1989) on Australia, by Deborah Gaitskell and Elaine Unterhalter (1989) on South Africa, and by Deniz Kandiyoti (1989) on Turkey. While the argument for modernizing the country through educated mothers was also made by Chinese such as Liang Qichao and others who favored women's education, reformists vigorously attacked the family as the "newly named enemy of youth and women" (Wicke 1970: 77). Identification of the family as uniquely Chinese and severely oppressive made it the target of criticism in China, whereas in other countries it was recognized more thoroughly as the site where the newly modernized woman could emerge as part of the nation.

CHAPTER 2 1.

Here the term self refers not to the deep, psychologized interior of the mind developed in the West, but to the cultural and historical view of personhood characterized by a person's relations with others, situation in the physical and social space, and acts and behaviors of daily life.

NOTES TO PAGES 45-51

2.

3·

4·

5·

6.

7·

217

Ellen Widmer (1992) argues that the concept of"woman writer" was common by the late sixteenth century. However, because of the difficulty of printing and disseminating work and because of well-known and oft-repeated strictures against women writing, few authors set out to establish themselves as "woman writers" (p. 112). Liu believes that basically the notion that cai brings misfortune is equivalent for women and for men, and that even for men virtue is thought to be superior to cai. However, we can see that throughout the Ming and Qing, women became part of a system that rewarded virtue as an extremely physical and immediate daily life sacrifice, but did not often demand men's virtue. Men were called upon to be virtuous when a woman was not available to take care of the man's parents, or when one dynasty was replaced by another and as a loyalist, a man must declare his allegiance to the fallen power, even when that act endangered him and his relatives. See Liu Yongcong (1988: 142). See the special issue on "Poetry and Women's Culture in Late Imperial China" in Late Imperial China (June 1992): Bruneau (1992), Furth (1992), Dorothy Ko (1992), Mann (1992), Robertson (1992), and Widmer (1992). The authors in the special issue of Late Imperial China disagree on the history and influence of this saying, often quoted in the early rwentieth century. Susan Mann (1992: 54) argues that the saying was, by the eighteenth century, our of fashion , but according to Ellen Widmer (1992: 112), the phrase was used against talented women throughout the Ming and Qing. Ko (1992: 18) notes that wariness about women writing "can be gleaned from the glut of remarks found in Ming-Qing records of a sister or a neighbor who wrote for divertissement but would burn her manuscript afterward, saying that poetry or writing was not a woman's calling." See Bao Jialin (1988b). Bao speculates that Jin Yi was Jin Tianfan of Jiangsu, who had set up Minghua Girls School and contributed financial support to Zou Rang for the publication of Gemingjun (Revolutionary soldier) (p. 276). See also Jin Yi (1904).

218

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14. 15.

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52-58

For a history of women's education from the mid-r8oos up through the early twentieth century, see Lu Shipeng (1988). According to Weili Ye's bibliography, Kahn's story can be found in the Kahn file at the General Commission on Archives and History in Madison, New Jersey. Jin's article, published under the name King Ya-mei, is "As We See Ourselves," and appeared in The World's Chinese Students'journa/7, no. 1 (Sept.): 215-16. See Weili Ye (1994). See Borthwick (1985: 81). See also a number of early articles on women in the military in Zhonghua quanguo funii lianhehui (1991a: 447-86). These are arranged by the province or city in which they were published. See "Influences of Foreign Cultures on Chinese Women" (especially pp. 29-42), and ''A Non-Christian Estimation of the Missionary Activities" (pp. 43-63), both in Sophia H. Chen (1934). According to the preface, the play was performed four days to enthusiastic audiences and received the Silver Award. The publisher (Waicheng xunjing zongting, or Outer City Central Security Office) reviewed the words and songs of the play and felt they were able to "improve customs, a governing technique used by countries in East and West" (Liang Ji 1906 ). The term for China is not Zhongguo but Zhendanguo; Zhendan are the characters for the term first used by Indians to describe China. The five sense organs are the ears, eyes, lips, nose, and tongue. Jin Yi (1904: 289) uses similar metaphors in a foreword to the newspaper Nuzi shijie: "Twentieth century China is dying and weak. Half of the men (nanzi) are asleep as if drunk or dying, how can we speak of the women (nuzi)!" See also Pan Yunyu (1915), who pointed out that in foreign countries women "helped out" in business, military affairs, finance, and so on, and that women's education (the repudiation of the saying which is the title of the article) would allow women to help in making right Chinese society. Pan Yuekun is identified as an advanced student at Guangdong dong shunde fengqun tiangdeng ni.i xiaoxuexiao (Guangdong Shunde fengqun two-level girls elementary school).

NOTES TO PAGES

18.

19. 20.

21.

22. 23.

58-63

219

Here cainu, women with literary skill, are referred to as nu and unrewarded and xianfo, wise kinswomen, are referred to as fo and rewarded. In the term cainu, the concept cai (a learned person) is mediated by nu (woman); if the cai were male the term would be caizi. The term xianfo is related to xianqi /iangmu (wise wives and virtuous mothers). I thank my colleague Stephen Durrant for helping me translate this passage. The collapse of Chinese textual learning as an intellectual basis was frequently discussed in the conservative journal Xueheng. See, for example, Shao Zuping (1922), who virtually equated morality and the Chinese textual tradition. Shao argued strongly against the replacement of the more abstract and metaphysical literature and morality with Western material science. Shao also made a strong case for the superiority of separate spheres for men and women, claiming that they allowed women's character to be respected. Attacking the "realist school" (xieshi zhi pai), Shao wrote that "today's new writers of the realist school have less ability to think than a weak woman" (p. 7). See also Liu Baiming (1923), who described the deterioration of study resulting from modern ideas such as freedom overcoming discipline. Hao Chang (1987: 100) shows that Tan Sitong attacked the family as "practically a prison" for Chinese women; the family also made the father-son relationship unreasonably strict and unfeeling. Kang Youwei also viewed the Chinese family as extremely problematic; at one time he went so far as to argue that the institution of marriage should be abolished (p. 61). By the May Fourth movement, the family was under full-fledged assault, as can be seen in journals such as Xin qingnian (New youth) that were popular with students and intellectuals. See also the many articles in Zhonghua quanguo funti lianhehui (1991a: 73-140). Here wenxue (literature) becomes entertainment or embellishment and differs from the wenxue Wang associates with writers or journalists. Although Wang does not define the kind of writing that requires a university education, by including wen in both categories (one requiring education and the other not), he

(

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recognizes the breadth of the range and application of writing skills. Yi refers to Chinese medicine and yao to pharmacology, both subjects not taught in the modern university. Like wen, yi covers such a wide range of jobs that it can require or not require advanced training. According to one account, the general perception that certain ideas or practices are either "old" or "new" dates from 1907. See Shao Zuping (1922: 1). Chen Hengzhe, originally of Jiangsu, came from a family of academics and officials. Her father was a poet and her mother, who kept virtuously to the inner quarters, a good painter. Chen studied in Cai Yuanpei's Patriotic Girls' School in Shanghai, and later resisted her father's desire that she become engaged by going to live at her aunt's home in the Suzhou countryside. In 1915, Chen went to the United States to study history, where she learned about and approved ofHu Shi's essays promoting the new Chinese vernacular literature. She published her first story in a 1917 edition of a Chinese students' journal, a vernacular tale about American women university students called "Yiri" (One day). She published first in China in 1918. Chen was invited by Cai Yuanpei to teach history at Beijing University in 1920, and thereafter she published a number of historical studies. She continued to write fiction and published collections of short stories in 1928 and 1938. In 1949 she turned down the possibility of immigrating to America in favor of living in Shanghai. See Qiao Yigang (1993: 156-69). It is unclear whether the characters in this story are Chinese with foreign names or foreigners. For a discussion of the story and of Chen Hengzhe's life, see Weili Ye (1994: 337-39). Ye reads the story not merely as a tale of the conflict between career and family faced by the fictional Louise, but also faced by the author herself. See the article by the editors of Zhongguo xin nujie zazhi (Journal of the new Chinese women's world) (Editors 1907), which argues that faced with the onslaught of imperialism, both women and men need cai.

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See also Wolf (1975) and Holmgren (1981). Holmgren investigates the relationship between the two ideas of widow chastity and service to the husbands' parents, and also traces the history of self-mutilation "as an acceptable way of concluding the agreement between a widow and her family that she would abide by the rules of chaste conduct" (p. 183). See also Birge (1989). Birge notes several Song dynasty references to cutting of the flesh by women to illustrate filial piety (p. 337 n5o). Also, although there were no prescriptions against women learning to read and write in the Song, whereas Zhu Xi's Elementary Learning (Xiaoxue) notes that after the age of ten boys were supposed to be tutored in writing and arithmetic, it is silent on the literacy of girls (p. 353). Ebrey (1993) finds that although the notion of separation of sexes was well established during the Song, female chastity was not always observed, and well-known literati promoted reading skills for women as long as they did not extend their interest in literary matters beyond the household. She speculates that footbinding developed during the Song in part because the model for masculinity had shifted from an emphasis on the ability to ride a horse or hunt to the ideals of the literati, who were "elegant, bookish, contemplative, or artistic, but did not need to be strong, quick, or physically dominating" (p. 33). Thus because the Song ideal male was a refined, subdued character, "he might seem effeminate unless women could be made even more delicate, reticent, and stationary" (p. 41). Hu Shi's article is included in the volume edited by the Chinese National Association for Women (Zhonghua quanguo funii lianhehui 1981: 106-14; originally published in Xin qingnian 5, no. 1 (July 15, 1918]). The article by Lu Xun to which I refer below is also included (pp. II5-23); it originally was published in Xin qingnian 5, no. 2 (Aug. 15, 1918), under the pen name Tang Jun. This collection presents a total of 63 articles separated into the categories of "Issues in women's liberation," "Ethics, morals, chastity," "Male and female social interaction," "Marriage and the family," "Women's education," "Women's economic independence and careers," "Children's education," "Population,"

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"Abolishing prostitution," and "Other." The essays originally were published from 1916 to 1922. See also Chen Duxiu (1916). For an example of Western humanism applied to feminism in China, see Luo Jialun (1919). For example, in his article "Nannil shejiao gongkai wenti guanjian" (Views on freedom of social intercourse between men and women), published in 1920, Shen Yanbing (Mao Dun) refers to the book Love and Marriage by Ellen Karolina Sophia Key (18491926) (Mao Dun 1920). Bing Wen, in "Hunyin ziyou" (Freedom of marriage), also published in 1920, refers to Outlook from a New Standpoint by Ernest Belfort Bax (1854-1926) (Bing Wen 1920). In his "Jiating gaizhi de yanjiu" (Research on the change of the family system), published in 1921, Mao Dun refers to the work of several foreign scholars, including Edward Carpenter (1844-1929), August Bebel (1840-1930), Herbert George Wells (1866-1946), Walter Lionel George (1882-1926), Ellen Key, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935) (Mao Dun 1921). I have translated ren'ge as personality/character because neither word by itself seems to represent adequately the term as Ye used it. Ye's discussion of ren'ge implies independence, vision, completeness, and activity (as opposed to passivity). Under the onslaught of antitextual ideologies in the twentieth century, the literary discourse as ontology lost authority and became ambivalent. See Larson (1991).

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See articles published throughout 1920 and 1921 in Xiaoshuo yuebao, and especially Xiaoshuo yuebao vol. 8, no. 5 (May 1922), a special issue on sexuality. A reader of Lu Yin's long story "Lishi de riji" (The diary of Lishi,) also insisted on pointing out that the love between the women depicted in the story is lofty and pure and that Lishi is basically a woman of sentiment. This reader interpreted the story as a comment on the sick society of China. See Tian Xi (1923).

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As discussed in Chapter I, each nation had its own kind of woman and cooking. Moreover, women came to represent the

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nation through tropes of nation as woman, woman as national mother, woman as an ideal of femininity, woman as dutiful daughter of the nation, and bad woman as good slave to save the nation. Xie Bingying (Xie Minggang) was born in Hunan. Her father held the juren degree and was a middle school principal for thirty years. Xie had a contrary personality from a young age, when she opposed footbinding and demanded to study. In 1926, in order to escape an arranged marriage, she enrolled in the Women's Corps of the Wuhan Central Military Affairs Political School, and in 1927 joined the Northern Expedition. Based on her experiences in the Northern Expedition, she wrote Congjun riji (Diary of a soldier). In 1930 Xie enrolled in the Women's Normal College in Beijing, and organized the Beijing Leftist Writers' Union. Later, she taught in various schools and continued to write and publish stories and novels throughout the 1930s and 1940s. In 1946 she began teaching at Beijing Normal University, and in 1948 left China for Taiwan, where she taught at Taiwan Normal School until 1974, when she left for San Francisco. Xie's Yige nubing de zizhuan was originally published in 1936 by Liangyou rushu gongsi and later reissued under the tide Nubing zizhuan (also meaning Autobiography of a woman soldier). The book was translated into English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish, and other languages. See Qiao Yigang (1993: 237-47). In the 1920s Lu Yin (Huang Ying) was as well known as Bing Xin. Born in Fujian in an official's household, Lu Yin was banished to a wet-nurse's home because her birth coincided with her grandmother's death. At age three, she was taken to Hunan, and at age six, when her father died, to Beijing, where she was educated. She taught elementary school in Beijing, Anhui, and Henan. Lu Yin broke off a betrothal to marry Guo Mengliang, who died in 1925, leaving her with a small child. She married Li Weijian, who was ten years her junior, in 1928 and died in childbirth in 1934· Lu Yin was a prolific writer in the 1920s and early 1930s, and produced several short story collections and novels. Her work is known for its melancholic characters and

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bold investigations into love and gender. See Qiao Yigang (1993: 170-86). In a study of literature and love, Zhou Bonai (1984) quotes Zhang Shuxiang: "Male-female love in Chinese tradition does not have an independent and important value and significance. Love is attached to society mostly because of its social function, and without putting on some colorful social jacket it would not be important at all. If individualistic love did not help with social control it would not be valued, and could not be freely spoken of" (p. 32). In Chen Hengzhe's "Luoyisi de wenti" (Louise's problem, 1928b), the love story not only takes place on foreign land, but also between two foreigners (or Chinese with foreign names), Louise and Walter. Weili Ye (1994) reports that the earliest group of Chinese women students who got advanced degrees in the United States became doctors and generally did not marry. Ye believes this choice was influenced by the lifestyle of the single missionary women who ran many of the secondary schools from which the women graduated before they went to America. One of the doctors commented that she was a "product of Christianity, an old maid" (p. 324). Even though these doctors did not marry, they presented themselves as fulfilling the feminine role by devoting themselves to service. Nonetheless, within the context of social change in China, the doctors were "an unprecedented type of woman ... , unmarried by choice to pursue a professional vocation and a calling" (p. 324). China's most famous modern woman author, Ding Ling (Jiang Bingzhi), was born in Hunan in a declining gentry family. After Ding Ling's father died, her mother went back to school and then became a teacher. Ding Ling also was sent to school. When the May Fourth movement began, Ding Ling was a student at a modern school where her literature reacher advocated literary revolution. Ding Ling entered the Yuyun Boys School in 1920 but soon left and went to Shanghai to study at the People's Girls School and later at Shanghai University. Still later she audited the classes of Lu Xun at Beijing University. With the publication

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of"Shafei niishi de riji," Ding Ling became famous for her portrayal of female subjectivity and sexuality. She had a child with Hu Yepin, who was later executed by the Nationalists. In 1936 Ding Ling arrived in Yan'an as a well-known writer. She married Chen Ming in 1942. Before and after 1949 she endured various criticisms and attacks; she was condemned in the Anti-Rightist movement ofr957, stripped of Communist party membership, and sent to do labor for rwelve years. During the Cultural Revolution, Ding Ling was imprisoned and beaten. In 1979 she was rehabilitated, and resumed publishing. Throughout her life Ding Ling did not stop writing, but many of her works were lost. Ding Ling's writing spans many topics and styles, from female sexuality to socialist experiments with collective writing. See Feuerwerker (1982: 1-18). See Peake (1932: 82-85), who traces the strong link between modern education and the promotion of Chinese nationalism. For more on this kind of performance, see Wen-hsin Yeh's discussion of "The Gown, the Suit, and the Uniform" (Wen-hsin Yen 1990: 222-26). Yeh quotes sources that show that young urban people in the 1930s admired campus life in Beijing because of its attractively modern style: large numbers of beautiful women and of men attired in Western suits intermingled at "church services, athletic meets, public lectures, association meetings, editorial reviews, concerts, movies, drama performances, and so forth" (p. 225). Xie claims that Chinese people have concepts of beauty in nature, not in the human body. See also a study of female beauty in China by a Western sinologist, Wolfram Eberhard (1971). Eberhard quotes the seventeenthcentury Li Yu: "Women with delicate hands are bright, those with pointed fingers tips are perspicacious .... A man who judges women only by the smallness of their feet will easily find one with tiny gold lotus feet. But a man who judges women by their hands will only rarely find one with delicate jade fingers .... Delicate and soft, pointed and fine, that is how hands should be" (p. 285). The volume edited by Chen (1931b) also includes an article by

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P. S. Tseng (Zeng Baosun), who is listed as founder and principal of the 1-Fang Girls' School in Changsha (P. S. Tseng 1931). Ling Shuhua (Ling Ruishang) came from a scholar's family in Guangdong but grew up in Beijing. Ling's father earned the jinshi degree in the imperial examinations and was an excellent painter; Ling followed his avocation. In 1920 she entered Yanjing University, quickly switching from the natural sciences to foreign languages. In 1924, Ling published her first stories, which portrayed the difficulties of women living in traditional households. After graduating from the university, Ling worked at the Beijing Palace Museum, cataloging paintings and ancient texts. She married Beijing University professor Chen Yuan in 1927 (Chen later became a representative to the United Nations), and traveled to France and Great Britain, where she settled and taught at London University, Oxford, and Edinburgh. Her stories from the 1920s and 1930s are collected in Hua zhi si (Flower temple, 1928), Nuren (Women, 1930), and Xiao ge'er liang(Two little brothers, 1935). See Qiao Yigang (1993: 278-87). See also McMahon (1994). Here McMahon illustrates how sex and words are oppositional. In the narratives he analyzes, the "chaste couple" in the beauty-scholar romance never have sex with each other, but replace sex with words in poems, letters, and conversation: "instead of being sexual, the intercourse of the lovers is verbal, modeled on the polite medium of the written word, through which the youths pass the test of marriage by the time-honored means of establishing one's worth-poetic expression" (p. 246; see alsop. 229). Lu Yin also wrote an earlier story, "Panghuang" (Wandering, 1923c), about a male letter writer. Although the protagonist, Qiuxin, is as melancholy as the female letter writers, as a teacher he has a much more physical existence than the women letter writers, and must deal with the daily problems of how and what to teach and how to maintain discipline while promoting the "new" idea of democracy. He must even solve physical problems such as where furniture belongs. A reader interpreted the story as very subjective but nonetheless basically about Chinese education. See Fang Zhuo (1923).

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Qiao Yigang (I993: I77) comments that Yaxia's death is an example of Lu Yin's opposition to the darkness of sociery and a good depiction of the vacillating attitudes of May Fourth youth, who felt it was better to die than to live in darkness. With Ding Ling, Bing Xin (Xie Wanying)-fiction writer, essayist, and poet-ranks as one of modern China's most famous women writers. Bing Xin was born in Fujian in a teacher's family. When she was young, she read magazines her mother subscribed to, such as Funu zazhi and Xiaoshuo yuebao. Bing Xin began studying medicine when she attended university in Beijing after her family moved there, but switched to literature and in I9I8 started to write fiction. Writing in I9I9, Bing Xin claimed that "My goal in writing fiction is to influence sociery, so I put all my efforts into describing the bad situation of old families in old sociery, so that people will become aware and will try to improve things" (Sheng Ying I995, I: 66). Bing Xin earned an M.A. at Wellesley in I926 and returned to China to teach at her alma mater, Yanjing University. She married Wu Wenzao in I926. Bing Xin published little fiction throughout the I930s and I940s, but in the I950s wrote and published children's literature. She was attacked as a "black element" during the Cultural Revolution and sent to a socalled May 7th Cadre School in Hubei for manual labor. After returning to Beijing, Bing Xin was active in translation, and after the Cultural Revolution she resumd creative writing. Bing Xin is known for her depiction of motherly love and for her idealization of the good side of family life. See Sheng Ying (I995, I: 64-78). In her "Lijia de yinian" (A year away from home), Bing Xin (I92Ic) takes as her protagonist a young man who leaves home for school, where he becomes very lonely. He frequently writes home to assuage his loneliness but gradually becomes part of his new environment and as he does his loneliness fades. In contrast to Yuanyin, as he makes new friends and participates in new activities, his environment becomes concrete, and his physical relationship to this environment overtakes his subjective understanding of it as alienating or emotive.

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For a rethinking of the meaning of guixiupai wenxue (literature of the inner chambers) that calls for an interpretation of the "triviality" of which women writers are often accused, see Rey Chow (1988). Chow claims that "triviality itself should now be seen as an ironic means of exploring patriarchal ideology, whose limits are made palpable precisely through women's so-called private and insignificant sufferings" (p. 85). Gladney (1994) discusses the social practices that result from the Han categorizing "minorities" as "other," and states that in Han culture, women often occupy this "other" category. In his civilizing mission, Chen Hongmou focused on women as the essential site of moral virtue. Dorothy Ko (1992: 28-31) argues that although a literary education can be justified within the Confucian tradition and although some men promoted a literary education for girls as compatible with virtue, many critics and writers thought literary education and virtue to be incompatible.

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In some limited contexts, the dichotomy was broken much before the twentieth century, although certainly not in the beliefs of the elite in general. During the seventeenth century, some women of elite families "began to speak of poetry and learning as the gateway to immortality for women" (Dorothy Ko 1992: 30). Ko has found examples of women who "became mindful of the place of women writers in history" and "collected, edited, wrote prefaces for, and published women's works for posterity" (p. 31). There are many articles about the relationship between women and these fields, or about women who work in these fields. See, for example, Zhu Hong (1920). Xie later taught at People's University in Beijing and Chengdu University in Sichuan, and worked with Zhang Shizhao at the Zhongyang wenshi yanjiuguan (Central research academy for literature and history). See Liu Shaotang (1981: 403-4). Xie's book must have sold fairly well, since in 1927 the sixth edition was published.

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An example of how a conservative theorist turned women's experience into valuable cultural currency is the article "Ni.izi yu wenhua" (Women and culture) by Mei Guangdi (1922). When Mei argued that even though women were deficient in logic and scientific tendencies, their strong emotional skills made them appropriate guardians of "culture," he spoke for the traditional boundary logic of inside as female and outside as male. In his construction, logic and science functioned as the international "outside" and culture as the domestic "inside." That women belonged to a category of the oppressed is apparent in Lu Xun's "Zhufu," where Xianglin Sao is not so much a woman as simply one of the most oppressed people in contemporary society. Bobby Siu (1982: 164-65) claims that the Chinese Communist Party viewed women from the point of view of class while the Nationalists felt women were a separate group, determined by gender. John Fitzgerald (1990: 328) points out that as "with the Nationalists, there was also a firm conviction among the Communists and their Cominterm advisers that if a sectional interest conflicted with the national interest (meaning the progress of the revolution itself), then the sectional must yield to the national interest." Gender could be conceived of as a sectional interest in this context. For example, see Rey Chow (1988), who analyzes three stories of Ling Shuhua in which "female characters rarely rebel against their traditionally prescribed roles," thus showing how the "feminine 'virtue' of self-sacrifice is a transaction: Chinese women learn to give up their own desires in exchange for their social 'place"' (p. 75). Barlow's analysis of Ding Ling shows, I believe, how these tendencies culminated in the late 1920s in Ding Ling's work as she tried to "resolve the old May Fourth question of what modern Chinese women would be in the absence of Confucianism" (Barlow 1989: 26). On modern writers' appropriation of the concept of "subjectivity" as "the hero's psychological state," which is important to the production of romantic literature, see Galik (1980: 107, and

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the chapter on Yu Dafu); see also Leo Ou-fan Lee (1973). On the way middle-class writers in England subordinated gender to other social differences, see Armstrong (1987). Armstrong shows how novels both illustrated and produced the "project of gendering," a project that exercised great political influence in the mid-nineteenth century. My use of "subjectivity" here corresponds to that discussed by Patricia Waugh (1989) as she presents a feminist critique of postmodernism: "As male writers lament its demise, women writers have not yet experienced that subjectivity which will give them a sense of personal autonomy, continuous identity, a history and agency in the world" {p. 6). Subjectivity in the works of modern Chinese women writers emphasizes the emotional state over depiction of action or scene. Maureen Robertson (1992: 5) shows how in poetry "the dramatized speaking voice is feminine, but the source of this speech is easily given away by the poems themselves, which indicate the eye of the voyeur in their presentation of passive, narcissistic women, romanticized suffering, and their displays and inventories of boudoir furnishings and clothing." As I outline in Chapter 5, it is precisely the diary and letter forms of fiction that critics such as He Yubo dismissed as common and detracting from the integrity of the works of women writers. He Yubo contrasted the use of diary and letter forms in women's works, which he took to be evidence of a lack of literary skill and led only to "incoherent" and "monotonous" stories, with their use in the work of Guo Moruo, where they possessed a "clear plot and structure." In other words, He believed that diaries and letters were more commonly a women's technique, and in women's hands they were a weak and fragmented literary form. See He Yubo (1935: 20, 48, 157). See Robertson's analysis and examples of how '"modes of subjectivity' are conventionally coded into poetic texts which have been understood in much of traditional Chinese literary theory as transparent and full representations of an author's consciousness," and how the speaking voice in the male-authored poem often is a passive, narcissistic, eroticized woman {Robertson 1992: 68-69).

NOTES TO PAGES 147-50

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Lydia H. Liu (1993: 37-38) reports that in the post-Mao era, the term "woman writer" is accepted bur "feminism" is rejected. Liu credits the women who reject "feminism" as identifying the . "-ism" with the masculine power arenas of"Marxism" and "communism" in their attempt to break away from "the totalizing discourse of official feminism." Because the term "woman writer" recalls a lyrical feminine tradition of writing and with the feminine voice in poetry, it may be that women who use it wish to promote difference against Maoist gender ideology. He Yubo (1935: 6-7, 152-54) also criticized women writers for their incessant references to lyrical poetry or fiction, claiming this mode of writing stemmed from women's desire to present themselves as emotional and rhus feminine. There were statutes against male homosexuality in Qing China but none against female homosexuality. Cheng-Zhu neeConfucianism "imposed a strict code of sexual behavior for men as well as for women-with homosexuality being the male version of female unchaste behavior" (Vivien W Ng 1987: 68). Vivien Ng postulates that harsher punishments for male homosexuality may indicate that "perhaps male homosexuality was regarded by the Qing government as a worse evil than female unchaste behavior. Iconoclastic men were more subversive to the stare than immoral women" (p. 69). In his work on sexual penetration, however, Matthew H. Sommer (1997: 141) rakes issue with Ng's conclusions. Sommer believes that Qing inattention to female homosexuality in legal codes indicates that the significant transgressive act is sexual penetration, something nor generally connected with lesbian sexual behavior. Mao Dun (1928a) identified "Fanmen" as a turning point in Bing Xin's stories, a point where her writing began to lose the innocence and purity of her earlier works and became permeated with sadness and an even greater unwillingness to "go out into society." Pagination is very erratic in these early volumes; sometimes each story starts with page 1, and other rimes there are different sections (fiction, poetry, etc.), each starting with page 1. I will give page references as they are in each volume.

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"Wo de fangdong" is in a collection entitled Guanyu niiren, which consists of vignettes about various women Bing Xin had known or encountered. It was published in 1945. Bing Xin's story "Meng" (Dream, 1923) is a strong contrast to Lu Yin's radically social analysis. In "Meng," a girl dreams of her youthful life, when she grew up engaging in "boy" activities such as riding horses, meeting with soldiers, and carrying weapons. When she is older, she is forced to be a "girl" and participate in the "trivial and boring" activities of that gender. Her memories of life as a "boy" are vivid, concrete, and extremely physical. Lu Yin's stories were often split in two and published in two issues. In the discussion below, in references to these stories the second part is identified by "2:" followed by the page number. Kwok-dan Tam (1984) devotes a chapter of his doctoral dissertation to "The Nora Theme in Modern Chinese Fiction" and shows how in the 1930s reformists viewed social reform as the only way to insure equality for women (pp. 218-59). However, it is also possible to interpret the emphasis in the 1930s on social reform as a suppression of gender issues developed by women writers in the 1920s. Tam interprets Bing Xin's 1923 story "Liangge jiating" (Two families) as a rebuke to women who leave home (p. 230). Chen Ciyu mentions that homosexual attraction may also be involved in the unorthodox relationships between women workers and in their refusal to marry (p. 354). Other examples of clearly socially aware stories include Chen Hengzhe's "Wuxia li de yige nlizi" (A girl in Wuxia) and Bing Xin's "Zuihou de anxi" (Final breath). See Sheng Ying (1995, I: 37).

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On this and the discussion below, see Norma Diamond (1975). Photographs of the meetings and student activities are available in President Chiang Kai-shek: His Lifo Story in Pictures (Government Information Office 1972: 22-23). On women and empty talk, see Song Meiling (1938: 56). Song also referred to women's responsibility for helping and influenc-

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ing men, and promoting the New Life movement without regard to political affiliation. See articles from the 1930s and 1940s in Zhonghua quanguo funii lianhehui (1991b). Not only did these writers promote women's work at all levels, but they also discussed the details of the work outside the home that women were already doing. "Huiqun" was married to literary critic and historian Liu Dajie. See her references to her husband in the preface (xu) to Huiqun (1934: 1-2). On page 22, Huiqun writes: "Ibsen was a Norwegian, and was born in 1828 in Skisn. The present year is the hundredth anniversary of his birth." For more on the relationship between literature and women, see Tan Zhengbi (1931). The Four Books for Women (Nii sishu) included Niijie (Admonitions for women) by Ban Zhao of the Han, Nii lunyu (The analects for women) by Song Ruo of the Tang, Neixun (The inner lessons) by the wife Xu of Cheng Zu of the Ming, and Niifon (Models for women) by Liu, the mother of Wang Xiang of the Qing. The collection was compiled by Wang Xiang. Tao Qiuying's emphasis on emotions echoed one of the most widely discussed and, in commentaries, canonized elements of good poetry within the classical tradition. The ensuing discussion in her book that contrasted pure and true emotion with ritualized expression showed how because the category of cai contained the idea of setting forth or putting something out in front of others, it opened itself to the charge of corruption and impurity that was associated with fame. In the fifth chapter of Guo Moruo de wenxue daolu (The literary road of Guo Moruo), Huang Houxing (1981) discussed Guo's radical change after 1925, when he became increasingly interested in Marxism and "revolutionary" literature. For example, even though Mao Dun generally positively evaluated Wang Luyan, he also criticized him for his pessimism. See Mao Dun (1928b: 77). Earlier, in 1922, Cheng Fangwu (1922: 207) also found Bing Xin's "Chaoren" as well as all of her other stories and poems

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flawed by "abstracted narration" that referred back to traditional novels, and by lack of action. This is also the view of Qian Xingcun (1933a). Fang Ying claimed that Lu Yi was similar to other women writers in creating melancholy characters full of motherly love, drunk on nature, and caught in lives of passionate love. Fang commended Lu Yi for trying to overcome the "feminine qualities" of her work (Fang Ying 1933b: 128-29, 148). Qian Xingcun (1933b) echoed this appraisal and criticized Yuan Jun for taking the position of the petty bourgeois intellectual and yet still representing the mentality of women in the May Fourth era. Caizi jiaren, literally "talented scholar and beauty," refers to the stock characters of romantic tales and here implies an old-fashioned approach. This documentary narrative, published in 1928, records Xie's experience in the Northern Expedition of 1927. It is not the same book as her Yige nubing de zizhuan (Autobiography of a woman soldier), which was published in 1936. This story is a good example of the seamless unfolding of the male self into both personhood and national glory under the new nation-state. Feuerwerker (1975) shows how most women writers began their careers early and, unlike Mao Dun, could not make the change into writing about the "broad social canvases," nor escape the "self-indulgent, confessional writing" that focused on women's lives (pp. 145, 159). Feuerwerker provocatively asks: "Is there a distinctly feminine mode of writing, characterized by subjectivism and sentimentality?" (p. 163). Lydia H. Liu (1994) has convincingly shown that Xiao Hong's work was profoundly ambivalent about the positioning of women as national subjects. Published in 1939, ]in ershinian Zhongguo wenyi sichao lun (Chinese literary thought in the past twenty years) by Li Helin (1947) used almost 6oo pages of dense print to record the history of modern Chinese literature. T,he subtopics for post-1925 literary thought included literary popularization, the revolution in language, national defense literature, popular literature of the na-

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188-95

235

tiona! revolutionary war, freedom in literary creation, the ideology of the closed door, mechanization, and factionalization. Gendered literature was not a concern; essentially, literary criticism in the 1930s made no room for consideration of genderspecific writing or experience. Elisabeth Croll (1978) outlines the conflicts between feminism and socialism that developed in the 1920s (chap. 5) and after 1949 (chap. 10). In the 1930s, emphasis on "unity" made some women activists impatient with the lack of progress in solving women's problems. Ding Ling criticized this policy of"unity" in the late 1930s and early 1940s (p. 213) . After 1927, Lu Xun among many other writers reevaluated the importance of literary work. For a discussion of the general hostility toward literature as elite, antirevolutionary, and useless, see Larson (1991: esp. 89-93). Ding Ling's switch from the topic of love to revolution has been insighrfully discussed by Feuerwerker (1982: 52-88). Feuerwerker also notes that from 1930 to 1933 Ding Ling became concerned once again with the "figure of the writer" (p. 69) and abandoned the posture of the zuojia, which implies a creative writer or author, for the wenyi gongzuozhe, which signifies a literary worker "owned" by the public (p. 73) . Tani Barlow (1989) describes Ding Ling's move into revolutionary literary texts as her displacement of her "older project of realizing herself as a woman" (p. 29). Barlow writes that in the 1930s, "Ding Ling stopped writing stories about women with 'female personalities.' In other words, she shifted the location of personality away from sexual essentialism, which argues that women and men differ primarily because sex determines character, that they will always remain estranged by the contradiction of gender itself" (p. 30). Central to Barlow's argument is her belief that in this process Ding Ling created characters defined by class, occupation, kinship status, and other social relationships (p. 32). Zhang Ailing was born in Shanghai in the family of a high-level official. Because they occurred in her own home, Zhang was intimately familiar with the opium-smoking, concubine-raking

236

NOTES TO PAGES 196-205

traditions that she depicts in "Jinsuo ji." Zhang was well educated in piano, English, and literature. In I937 she attended the University of Hong Kong, and began writing when she returned to Shanghai in I942 to live with her mother. She wrote prolifically throughout the rest of her life. Mter I952, Zhang left China for Hong Kong and eventually the United States. Aside from her fiction, she also engaged in scholarship, and is well known for her work on Hongloumeng (Dream of the red chamber). Part of Zhang's fame comes from her lyrical style, which is often linked in flavor to the traditional novel. See Sheng Ying (I995, I: 25.

503-33). Jize, Qiqiao's brother-in-law, attracts her and allows her to develop a fleeting romantic fantasy of escape from the oppressive family.

CONCLUSION 1.

2.

3·

My analysis is not a criticism of these interviewers. If I had conducted the interviews myself, I would have asked the same questions. Wang Zheng (I988: n8) implied the same to Wang Anyi throughout the interview and in a letter that requested clarification about her refusal to admire female/male difference in writing. Along the same lines, Tonglin Lu (I995= 20I n43) comments that "instead of writing as a man, as this male critic [Wang Xiaoming] requires of a woman writer, Can Xue probably needs to acknowledge her specificity as a woman writer more publicly in order to overcome the limitations imposed by the solipsistic nature of her writings." Zhang Yiwu (I994), professor of Chinese literature at Beijing University, believes that the "sixth-generation" Chinese film directors are trying to act differently than the "fifth generation," which often received international funding and recognition. The "sixth generation" is using only local, Chinese funding, concentrating on semipopular topics specific to contemporary China, and avoiding the aestheticization characteristic of the "fifth generation."

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INDEX

In this index an "f" after a number indicares a separate reference on the next page, and an "ff" indicates separate references on the next two pages. A continuous discussion over two or more pages is indicated by a span of page numbers, e.g., "57-59." Passim is used for a cluster of references in close but not consecutive sequence. ''Aide shixian," 150, 152 ''Amao guniang," 188 Amnesty International, 24 Anderson, Benedict, wff, 13f, 19, 87 ami-footbinding movement, 127 ami-intellectualism, 204 Anti-Spiritual Pollution Campaign, 2II

antiwomen practices, 29 Armstrong, Nancy, 87, 98, 193f, 214, 230 an: autonomy of, 209; essence as subjectivity, 124; social organization of, 76 autonomous aesthetic, r, 4, 6, 8f, 22, 212; in France, 15; in Greece, r6-17; in Japan, 23; literary field

and, r6; traced to modern an movement, 15 Bai Wei, r82ff Bao Jialin, 33, 217 Barlow, Tani E., 35-36, 38, 138, 140, 142f, 2II-I2, 235 Beahan, Charlotte, 29 Beijing Women's Normal School, 68-69 Bhabha, Homi K., 10 Bing Xin, 91, 124, 125ff, 129f, 137, 147, 149ff, 153, r8o, r86; "Ai de shixian," 150, 152; "Chaoren," 149f, 152; family life, idealized stories, 153; "Fanmen," 150, 231; "Liangge jiating," 232; life history of, 227;

258

INDEX

"Lijia de yinian," 227; "Meng" (Dream), 186, 232; milirary life and, 187; motherly love and, 188; old-style poetry, 183; social profundity 187; "Wangshi" (Past events), 187; "wives and misses," 183; "Wo de fangdong," 152-53, 232; women letter writers and, 127; work defects, 186; "Yishu," 125, 126-27 Black, Alison H., 32-33 Blake, C. Fred, 76-77 Bok, Esther M., 56 Bourdieu, Pierre, 15-16 bourgeois woman, 193 breast binding, II3 butterfly novels, 84-8 5

cai (literary talent), 3f, 6, 43, 45-74, 124, 196ff, 199; contradictory meaning of, 51; defined, 43; ethereal beaury of, 199; into rwentieth century, 130; lack of as virtue, 47; as liabiliry, 46; opposition berween de and, 49; physical effacement and, 124; practice of, 47; Qing discussions of, 129; transcendence, 199; woman with, 4, 46. See also de (moral virtue) Cai Yuanpei, 69 cainu, 219

Caizi jiaren, 234 Cao Xueqin, 100 Carlitz, Katherine, 75f "Chaoren," 149f, 152 chastiry, 66t; double standard of, 79; during May Fourth period, 78; during Qing dynasty, 78; free selection of, 79; lost through rape, 75; "natural disposition" of, 78; question of, 74-83; requirements of, 74, 78; value of, 81-82. See also de (moral virtue) Chen, Sophia H., see Chen Hengzhe

Chen Dongyuan, 56 Chen Duxiu, 30-31 Chen Hengzhe, 25-26, 70, 72-73, u6-17, 123, 129f, 215; life history of, 220; "Luoyisi de wenti" (Louise's problem), 70-72, u6, 224; missionary influence, 53 Chen Hongmou, 128, 143 Chen Rujin, 29 Chen Xiefen, 28-29 Chen Xuezhao, 182 Chen Ying, 182, 184 Chen Zhaolun, 46 Cheng Depei, 205 Cheng Fangwu, 143 Cheng Yongxin, 205 "Chenlun," 109 chi (sense of shame), 167 Chiang Kai-shek, 166-67 "Chicha," 120-22; Fangying, noff; female body and, 120-21, 122; Ms. Huang's foot, 121f; Wang Binxian, nof, 129 childbirth, 81 Chinese Communist Parry (CCP): gender emphasis, 170; handling of women's movement, 169; publications, 168; women and class, 229; women's conditions, improving, 169 Chow, Rey, 139f, 229 "Chuangzuo de wojian," 124 Chunqiu (Spring and Autumn annals), 38 class: gender vs., 202; view of women via, 229 classical writing (guwen), 69 coed education, 63 Communist women, articles by, 170 concubinage, 29 concubine complex, 49 Conference for Women's Work, 167 Confucian doctrine, 2, 6, 8o; gender

INDEX

in, 33, 50; literary education in, 228; values in the classics, 38-39; women suffering under, 27f Congjun riji (Diary of a soldier), 186 Creation Sociery, 21 Croll, Elisabeth, 235 culture, 17-18; foundational creativiry of, 19; global, 18; intellectual attempt to redefine, 26; national, 18; as "productive force," 18 Dai Jinhua, 39f, 73-74, 201, 203 Dai Qing, 199, 200-201, 204f Datong Physical Education School, 112 de (moral virtue), 3, 6, 42, 45-74, 128, 196f, 198-99; as antiliterary, 171; contradictory meaning of, 51; gendered discourse of, 134; humaniry relationship with, 6o; into twentieth century, 130; for men, 62, 64; opposition between cai and, 49; preference for, 46; self-sublimation and, 104; social/filial contradictions, 86; superioriry over literary skill, 46; united with literature, 70; women's embodiment of, 77; Zhang criticism of, 197· See also cai (literary talent); chastiry de Lepervanche, Marie, 212 Deng Yingzhao, 170 desire, 97; giving up of, 98; love, 85; subjective, 190 Ding Chu'o, 29 "Ding Ling," 190 Ding Ling, 109-10, 138f, 143, r69f, 180, 187, 229; "Amao guniang," 188; as a "woman wrirer," 190; Chinese womanhood and, 36; "errors," 169; life as plaything and, 190; life history of, 224-25; love and revolution conflict, 188; May Fourth ideas and, 188; "Mengke," 183, 188;

259

"new content," 191; revolutionary literary texts, 235; "Sanbajie you gan," 169; "Shafei niishi de riji," 109-10, 170, 183, 188f; "Shanghai," 191-93; "Shui," 170; "subjective desire" and, 190; weaknesses of women and, 191; Ulei Hu, 190; writing time period, 42; "Yijiu sanling nian chun Shanghai," 189; "Zai yiyuan zhong," 191; "Zisha riji," r88 "Ding Ling niishi," 189 Dong Zhongshu, 33 Duara, Prasenjit, 14, 27-28 During, Simon, 12-13 Ebrey, Patricia, 149 education: coed universiry, 63; for girls, 44; guidelines, 55· See also women's education effacement, 123-30; physical, 124, 130; widow suicide as, 128 Elshtain, Jean Bethke, 44 enlightenment, 101 Eternal Triangle, 90 family: as core of nationhood, 215; May Fourth and, 193, 198, 219; organization of, 107; preserving, 168; role rigidiry, 194; as special control system, 39; as state in miniature, 215; structures, 195; women's internalization of, 196; women's relationship within, 153-54; women's role within, 42 "Fanmen," 150, 231 female beaury, 99; real and false, 99; in traditional literature, 73; weak and sick, II 5 female body, 3f, 74; 1920s female writer focus on, 116; constriction/ hiding of, 35; freedom from, 110; in modern times, 130; "natural dis-

260

INDEX

position," 62; as obstacle, 82-83, 125; physical effacement, 75, 129; primacy of, 164; relationship with woman/rext combination, no female strength, u8 femininity, 186; backwardness of, 177-88; as willowy/ethereal, II9 feminism, 40; Anglo-American tradition of, 41; China application of, 8; Chinese male, 41; in contemporary China, 210; as part of nationalism, 29, 31; redefinition of, 178; relational, 41 Feng Yo ulan, III-12 Feng Yuanjun, 182 "feudal consciousness," 190 Feuerwerker, Yi-tsi Mei, 234-35 fiction, 13, 69, 164; 1920s/1930S, 85; butterfly, 84-85; contemporary, 205; Larin American, 86-87; May Fourth, 42, 85, 191; romantic, 144 Five Classics, 38 footbinding, 29, 76-77, n6, u8; anti-footbinding movement and, 127, 168; implements, 77: practice of, 77 Foucault, Michel, 87 Four Books for Women (Nu sishu), 175, 233 fraternity, n "free" women, 163-64 French feminists, 41 friendships, 148, 160; exrrakin, 160; female-female, 160; non-kin, ro8 fu (obeying), 39, 99 funU, 215 funu wenxue, 134-35, 171 Funu xiuyang tan, 135 furen (women, kinswomen), 39 Furuya Tyoko, 88-89 Gei nurenmen, 105-6 gender: boundaries, 50; class empha-

sis over, 202; concept revolution, 68; in Confucian thought, 33; constructions, u; differences, 107; hierarchies in Han culture, 14; of literary writing: female, 172-77; of literary writing: male, 149-54; in premodern China, 32-43; reaching beyond, 200; separation, 133; social understanding of, 32; views during Qing dynasty, 44 gender meanings, 2, 9-10, 44; change through new relationships, ro8; nation-building and, 15 girls: boys vs., 64; education for, 44; footbinding, 77; in literature, 55; modern, 138, 190; as students, 57f Gladney, Dru, 14 graceful and restrained literature, 174-75 Greece: autonomous aesthetic in, q; literature of, 16-17 Guisso, Richard W., 38 guocui, 19 Guo Moruo, 152, 180, 182 guoxue, 58, 62 habitus, 213 "Haibin guren," 155, 156-57, 162 Han culture, 14-15; gender hierarchies in, 14; minority women in, 15 Han Suyin, 168 Hao Chang, 219 He Yubo, 181, 182-83, 184f; criticism of women writers, 231; critique, 185; diary and letter forms, 230; Zhongguo xiandai niizuojia, 181 He Zhen, 7, 20, 26, 29, 210 "Hechu shi guicheng," 158 homogeneous, empty rime, 2II Hongloumeng (Dream of the red chamber), 164 Hu Bin, 30 Hu Binxia, 56-57

INDEX

Hu Naiqiu, ny-r8 Hu Shi, 79· 21! Hu Yunyi, 173ff, 178 Huang, Marrin W., 48, 172, 179 Huang Shuqing, 201, 204f Huang Ying, 187 Huiqun, 173. 175, 178f, 233 "Huoren de beiai," 124, 125-26 individualism, r8o, 203

inner chambers writers, 186 inner/outer configuration, 57-58, 133, 170 intellectuals, 19; attempts to redefine men/women, 26; Japanese, 23; movement in modern China, 2u; promoting women's rights, 20; U.S./British feminist, 41 Japan, autonomous aesthetic in, 23 Jauss, Robert, 17 Jia Baoyu, rooff "Jimo," 158 )in Yi, 51, 218 )in Yunmei, 52

fin ershinian Zhongguo wenyi sichao lun, 234-35 "Jinsuo ji," 195-96, 236 jobs: university trained, 63; for women, 63 Jusdanis, Gregory, r6-r9, 24f Kahn, Ida, 52 Kang Baiqing, 66ff Kang Tongwei, 46 Kang Youwei, 27f, 30, 79 Key, Ellen, 40-41 Ko, Dorothy, 38, 49-50, 100, 133, 228 Lady Jiang, 61 "Lantian de canhui lu," 158f Latin American novels, 86-87 lesbian relationships, 88-91, 162; rea-

261

sons for, 88; sexual practices, 162. See also woman-woman relationships li (ritual behavior), 167 Li Dazhao, 31 Li Jilan, 48 !ian (integrity), 167 Liang Ji, 53 Liang Qichao, 27f "Liangge jiating," 232 Lienu zhuan, 75 Liji (Book of rites), 33, 38f, 133 "Lijia de yinian," 227 Lin Daiyu, II5 Ling Shuhua, n8-22, 129f, 181, 183, 194; "Chicha," 120-22; life history of, 226; story protagonists, 137; "Xiuzhen," n8-2o; "Zhongqiu wan," 194-95 "Linghun keyi mai rna?" (Can the soul be sold?), 163 Li, Wai-yee, 99f Li sao, 100 "Lishi de riji," 155-56, 222 literacy, 143, r68 literary talent, see cai (literary talent) literature: as art, 8, 21; canonized, 173; female beauty in, 73, 172; fiction, IJ; freedom of, IJ; gap between life and, 151-52; gender relations and, 9; graceful and restrained, 174-75; Greek, 16-17; in late nineteenth/early twentieth century, y; love and, 107; as masculinist discourse, 73; modern, 19, 25; for national defense, r8y; in nation-building, 12; philosophizing about, 152; popularization of, r8y; in post-Mao era, 8-9; proletarian, r8y-88; romanticized, 151; uniting with moral virrue, yo; as vehicle for morality, 21; Western, study of, 9; women and, 10-25, 125, 131-65

262

INDEX

Liu Linsheng, 144, 146 Liu, Lydia H., 21, 231, 234 Liu Shipei, 26 Liu Xiang, 34 Liu Xu nyu, 69 Liu Yongcong, 46-47 loneliness, 201 love, 4f; baptism of, 107; conflicts, 180; desire for, 85; emphasis on, 86; as foundation for personal modernity, 104; free, 105; heterosexual, 4, 189; liberating, accessing, 101; literature and, 107; meaning of, 107; between men, 89; modernity and, 86; motherly, 152, 188f, 234; price for, 105; problematized, 189; qingvs., 101-2; revolution and, 188f, 191; romantic, 87-88, 92, 97; in romantic novels, 92; rules, 88; sacrifice for, 106; society and, 184; spiritual, 88-89; as transcendent emotion, 105; true, 105; untraditional relationships, 5; woman-woman, 88-91; women's relationship to, 184; from women to the family, II7. See also romance Lu Xun, 79, 2II, 235 Lu Yi, 181-82 Lu Yin, 91-98, 102-4, 107-8, 124-25, 129f, 137, 147, 149ff, 158-61, 163f; "Chuangzuo de wojian," 124; educated women, emotional lives of, 163; effect of family structure and, 159; female-female relationships and, 155; "Haibin guren," 155, 15657, 162; hardships of women, 163; "Hechu shi guicheng," 158; "Huoren de beiai," 124, 125-26; "Jimo," 158; "Lantian de canhui lu," 158f; life history of, 223-24; "Linghun keyi mai rna?" (Can the soul be sold?), 163; "Lishi de riji," 155-56, 222; marriage and, 155, 157f; Nuren

de xin, 92-98, 102-4, 106; "Panghuang," 154, 226; placement of women, 159-60; "Qianchen," 157; "Shengli yihou," 157, 158-59; "Tai jiaoshou de shibai," 157-58; women and literature relationship and, 157; women letter writers and, 127; women's formal family relationship and, 153-54; women's surrender and, 181; "Yige zhuzuojia," 149, 152 Lu Youkui, 53-54 Luo Yanbin, 29 "Luoyisi de wenti" (Louise's problem), 70-72, u6, 224 Ma Guoliang, 105-6 male writers, 145 Mann, Susan, 47 Mao Dun, 188, 189, 222, 231, 233 marriage, 97; arranged, fight against, 168; delayed transfer, 161; Lu Yin and, 155, 157f; modern bias against, 161; refusal, 160-61, 162; suicide and, 127 "master-pupil" relations, 160 May Fourth movement, 41, 52, 143, 166; chastity during, 78; criticism of Chinese family, 193; family and, 198, 219; fiction, 42, 85, 191; romanticism, 180; women and literature in, 146-47; women and suicide and, 127; writers, 181 McDougall, Bonnie S., 210 McMahon, Keith, 38, 123, 226 melancholy, 146, 234 men: love between, 89; moral virtue for, 62, 64; poetry by, 164; relationship with society, 64; selfishness of, 29; sentimentalized, 98f, 102; women's responsibility for influencing, 232-33; women's unnatural dependence on, 184; women under, 39

INDEX "Meng" (Dream), I86, 232 Meng Yue, 39f, 73-74 "Mengke," I83, I88 messianic time, lll Ming dynasty, 32, 42; women-written texts, 126; yin/female/negative ideology, 34 Ministry of Education, 55f missionaries in China, 53 modernity, I?-I8, 22, I40; at dailylife level, 24; framework, I9; global, I40; ideologies, 2I; love and, 86; in non-Western contexts, I40; seminal values of, 25 mo doufo (grinding bean curd), I62 moral virtue, see de (moral virtue) motherhood, I68 motherly love, I 52, I88f, 234 Nanftng de meng, I82 national feeling, 65 nationalism, wff, 2u; "belatedness" development, I8; development of, Il, 22; feminism as part of, 29, 3I; of imperial China, 28; self-sacrifice of, 87; women issues and, 20 Nationalist parry, 169 nation-building, 12 nation-states, 44; European, 25; modernizing, 24; religious, conceptual boundaries of, 23; system, 14; worldwide penetration of, 27 new inner chambers writers, I86 New Life movement, I66, I68ff newspapers, 13, 28-29, 212 new women writers, I86 nude, 2 nuqi, 6 nliren (woman), 37, 39, 8o, 215 Nuren de xin, 92-98, 102-4, 106; allegorical links, 96-97; characters, 98; Chunshi, Io2ff; Heshi, 102-3, 104; passion and desire, 97; roman-

263

tic love, 92; states of relationships, 93; Supu, 103f; traditional society in, 970 Seeal.soLu Yin nuren wucai bian shi de, 3 Nu sishu, 175, 233 niixing, 2I5 nuxing wenxue, I7I, I73 nlixue (women's learning), 62 Nuzi aiguo (Women love their country), 53-54 "Nuzi yu wenhua," 229 °

°

Offen, Karen, 4I, 214 Pan Yuekun, 58, 59 "Panghuang," 154, 226 Peng Daoming, 91 physical education, 58, uo-22; female advocates of, Ill; goal of, Ill; menstrual periods and, u4; national vigor and, II0-22; sexual difference from, II4; theorized by the state, II2; university emphasis on, III; view of women's beauty and, u8o See also women's education pianti form, 85 Piao Ping, 57f poetic songs (qu and ci), 69 poetry, 69, I35-36, 164; by men, I64; women's voice in, 47f; women writing, in ancient times, 66 postcolonial novels, 12 postmoderniry, I8 premodern China: gender in, 32-43; widow suicide in, 128 °

qi (completeness), 35, 59 Qian Qianwu, 190 Qian Xingcun, I85 "Qianchen," I 57 Qiao Yigang, 209 qing (love), 85, 99f, 156f, I65; male/ female and, 100; modern love vso,

101-2; verbal expression and, 193. See also love Qing dynasry, 5, 26, 32, 42; cai and, 129; chastiry during, 78; discourses on women's learning, 137; gender views, 44; literary talent, 4; women writers in, 135 Qinghua Universiry, III Qiu ]in, 20, 29, 51, 112 Radhakrishnan, R., 11, 20 radical women, killing of, 166 radio, 211 Rankin, Mary Backus, 213 rape, 75, 81 relationships: with female body, no; unconventional, 5; womanwoman, 88-89, 108-9, 155, 162; women with family, 153-54; women with love, 184; women with men, 64; women with state, 21; women with universities, 69 religion, 125 ren'ge, 8of, 222 remheng guan, So revolution and love, 188f, 191; conflict, 188; Ding Ling writing about, 191 Robertson, Maureen, 48, 147, 230 romance, 86, 92; Latin American, 87, 106; narratives, 107; national significance of, 87-88; in novels (late 1920s/early 19305), 92. See also love romantic love, 87-88; love of nation and, 97; in novels, 92, 144 Rowe, William T., 142-43 Rushdie, Salman, 23-24 "Sanbajie you gan," 169 self-development (xiushen), 82 separate spheres doctrine, 133 serenity, 50

sexualiry, 202; lesbian, 162; modern love and, 148; "superior woman" and, 123 sexual moraliry, 88 "Shafei nushi de riji," 109-10, 170, 183, I88f Shang dynasty, 179 "Shanghai," 191-93 Shao Zuping, 69-70, 219 "Shengli yihou," 157, 158-59 shengxing, 64 shi (poetry}, 69 Shiji (Historical records), 172 Shijing (Book of poetry), 33, 38, 99, 135f. 176 "Shui," 170 Shujing (Book of history), 38 Sia, Ruby, 56 Silverman, Kaja, 140-42 Sima Qian, 172 singlehood, 91, 108, 148 sisterhood groups, 162 Siu, Bobby, 214 slenderness, 115 social engagement, 166-97 socialism, 178, 179 sociery: as context of liberated women, 144; life in, 143; love and, 184; Lu Yi's ideas of, 182; women's role in, 167-68, 176 Sociery for Reempowerment of Women, 210 Sommer, Doris, 86f, 98, 102 Sommer, Matthew H., 78, 231 Song dynasry, 32, 149; cutting of flesh by women in, 221; ideal male in, 221; separation of sexes during, 221 Song Meiling, 166-67, 232-33 speaking, 65 "spinsterhood," 161 Stockard, Janice E., 161 Su Dongpo, 114 subjectiviry, 147, 165; emotional state

INDEX and, 230; modes of, 230; sexual meaning of, I48 suicide: loss of chastity through rape and, 75; marriage and, 127; during May Fourrh period, 127; widow, 4, 128 "superior woman," I23 "Tai jiaoshou de shibai," I 57-58 tales (chuanqi), 69 Tang dynasty, guwen style, 85 Tan Sitong, 26ff Tao Qiuying, I75ff, 178f, 233 "three obediences" (sancong), I43 Tian Ying, 64-65 T'ien Ju-k'ang, 77-78 tiyu (physical education), 58 tong (interconneaedness), 26 Tonglin Lu, 205 Topley, Marjorie, 162 Tseng, P. S., 56 understanding (zhijue), IOI United States: multiculturalism movement, 23; woman-educated doctors, 213 universities: first women's, 68-69; Qinghua University, 111; women's beginning relationship with, 69 Wang Anyi, 199-200, 2o4f Wang, Margarate, 56 Wang Pinglu, 101-2 Wang Zheng, 199, 201-2, 203, 236 Wang Zhuomin, 63, 66ff "Wangshi" (Past events), 187 Wei Hu, I90 wen, 66 wenxue, 66, 2I9 wen yi zai dao, 2I Western-educated women, 52-53, 56 Widmer, Ellen, 47 widow suicide, 4, 128

265

Witke, Roxane H., 214 "Wo de fangdong," 152-53, 232 woman-woman relationships, 88-89, 108-9, I62; danger of, 155; non-kin friendships, 108; social unacceptability of, 108. See also lesbian relationships women: acting like men, 123-24; bourgeois, 193; in the Canton delta, I6I; in developing nations, nf; as disadvantaged, 32; doctors educated in U.S., 2I3; feelings of, I45-46; "free," I63-64; as good mothers, 6I; honoring of, 81; literacy for, I43; literature and, 10-25, I25, 13I-65; love between, 88-9I; lustful images of, I46; modern, 2~-32; physical mutilation of, 131; poets, 48-49; politics of, n; radical, killing of, I66; relationship to love, I84; relationship with men, 64; relationship with state, 21; social life for, 143; as specific class, 3I; virtue of, 2f, 43; Western-educated, 52-53, 56, 2I3: as wise wives, 61; writing contradiction and, 72 women's education, 7, 21; argument for, 27; categories, 28-29; curriculum and goals of, 68-69; demands for, 30; guidelines, 55; in homemaking, 56; mental, 58; at missionary schools, 52; moralistic content of, 55; new, 62; physical, 58, 110-22; in textual learning, 51 women's issues, 20, 27; debate of, 8; enveloping within national concerns, 28 women's liberalization, I, 4, 6ff, 9, 22; definition of, 8; light for, 20; in Western countries, 31 women's movement, 7, 178, 210 women's roles, 21, 30; neutralization of, 184; within the family, 42

266

INDEX

"women's weaknesses," 168 women's writing, 45; decline during Tang, 48; "defects" of, 144; femininity of, 185; linked to historical woman, 171-72; love/romance and, 86; about male authors, 132; meaning and practice of, 49-50; narrowness of, 200; not as a vocation, 48; as private practice, 133; public emergence of, 50; for selfamusement, 49; social engagement and, 166-97 women writers: in ancient times, 66-67; contradiction, 129, 144; emphasis on women, 182; female body focus, n6; gender-specific subject position, 145; inner chambers, 186; label of, 199; leftist, 170; May Fourth, 181; modern, 131, 206; new, 186; new inner chambers, 186; passionate feelings of, 185; place of, in history, 228; of poetry, 66; political choice of, 177; positive image of, so; problemizing the female body, 82; prostitutes as, 176; in Qing dynasty, 135; reformist promotion of, 45; social organization understanding and, 182; as spiritualized authors, 124; trends for, I?O-?I; Wang Anyi evaluation of, zoo; in Zhou dynasty, 136

xianfo (wise kinswomen), s8, 219 Xiao Hong, 187 Xiao Jiang, 91 Xie Bingying, 89-90, 186, 223 Xie Siyan, n2-14 Xie Wuliang, 5, 35. 135-36, 142, 173 Xin qingnian, 219 "Xiuzhen," n8-2o; Little Niu, n9; Mistress, II9-20, 130; pillows,

118-19; Zhang, 119. See also Ling Shuhua Xueheng, 219 XueTao, 48 Yan Wei, n3-14 Yang, Mayfair, 201, 203f Yang Xiong, 99 Ye Huang, 47 Ye Shaojun, 80-81 Yeh, Wen-hsin, 85 yi (righteousness), 167, 220 Yige nubing de zizhuan, 89-91 "Yige zhuzuojia," 149, 152 Yijing (Book of changes), 33, 38 "Yijiu sanling nian chun Shanghai," 189 yin (lust), 67 yin/yang theory, 2, 33; human interaction and, 33; relational nature, 36-37; twentieth century, 35 "Yishu," 125, 126-27 Yi Zhen, 186, 189 You Guifen, 59, 62, 78 Young-tsu Wong, 28 Yu Dafu, 109, 152 Yu Kil-Chun, 20 Yu Xuanji, 48 Yuan Jun, 183-84, 189

Zai gei niirenmen, 106 "Zai yiyuan zhang," 191 Zarrow, Peter, 7 zawen, 169 Zenji, Iwamoto, 20 Zhang Ailing, 195-97, 235 Zhang Binglin, 19-20 Zhang Xuecheng, 47f Zhang Yiwu, 236 Zhang Zhanyun, 29 zhen (chastity), 67f Zhen Shu, 29-30 . zhi hu zhe ye, 57

INDEX

zhishiftnzi, 19, 212 zhiyu (mental education), 58 Zhongguo fonu de lian'ai guan, 101 Zhongguo fonu wmxuehi, 135 "Zhongguo funi.i yu wenxue," 173

Zhongguo xiandai nuzuojia, 181 "Zhongqiu wan," 194-95 Zhou dynasry: women and literature

267

bond in, 179; women writers in, 136

Zhou Zuoren, 137, 145 Zhu Lin, 199 Zhu Xi, 34 "Zhufu," 163 "Zisha riji," 188 Ziro, Angela, 132

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Larson, Wendy Women and writing in modern China I Wendy Larson. p. em. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN o-8047-3129-2 (alk. paper)- ISBN o-8047 3151-9 (pbk. : alk. paper) r. Chinese literature-Women authors-History and criticism. 2. Chinese literature-2oth century-History and criticism. 3· Women and literatureChina. 4· Women-China-Social conditions. !. Tide. PL2278.L37 1998 895-109'9289-dcu

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This book is printed on acid-free, recycled paper.

Original printing 1998