Gender Dialogue: 20th Century Chinese Women and Literature

Author: Huang Lin, Wang Guangming / Country: Mainland China
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2001-06-01
Features: Wang Guangming: The issue of women's liberation and feminist literature in China is indeed closely related to the modernity of modern China, or the modernity of 20th-century China. However, when it comes to such a broad issue as modernity, it can be examined from both a morphological and a structural perspective. If viewed from the perspective of modern morphology, modern phenomena indeed represent, throughout human history, a farewell to traditional social orders and even a rearrangement of new orders in terms of socioeconomic systems, knowledge and ideological systems, individual and collective psychological structures, and corresponding cultural institutions. If viewed from a structural perspective, the issue of modernity involves three domains: Firstly, it can be considered a domain of modernization. The concept of "modernization" actually implies more about the transformation of political and economic systems, specifically the shift from an agrarian society to a modern industrial and commercial society. Secondly, it belongs to the domain of cultural modernism. In this domain, people's entire knowledge and ways of perceiving the world have undergone significant changes and adjustments. For example, the way Picasso perceives the world, Van Gogh perceives the world, Kafka perceives the world—all differ from the way 19th-century realist and romantic writers perceived the world. Let alone modernist writers like Beckett and Camus, whose ways of perceiving the world have changed. This is from the perspective of modernism. Additionally, if viewed from the domain of modernity, modernity involves more the psychological or structural relationship between individuals and groups, as well as changes in cultural institutions, cultural nature, and forms, along with the modes of cultural dissemination and production. It leads to a transformation—constantly awakening people to a conceptual change in their perception of the world and a change in their awareness of their existence in society. However, I believe we must also note a distinction: the modernity process or the nature of modernity in the West is not entirely the same as that in China. For example, in the West, it primarily replaced the past theological faith with an industrial and commercial spirit. In China, it replaced the belief in the "Heavenly Way" with humanism. I don’t know if you see it this way?
Huang Lin: Industrial production originating from the West has led to the extreme development of cities, and urban development has made people realize their own power while also causing significant changes in human relationships, thereby liberating Western people from the great darkness of theology and leading them into a secular, human-centered world. The industrialization of Chinese society has developed under the influence of Western industrialization, so I believe the modernization process of Chinese society faces problems very different from those in the West. This makes the modern experience of Chinese people different from that of the West. Such a passive modernization process has made Chinese people face, first and foremost, the influence of Western modern discourse. We are achieving our modernization while encountering and referencing Western modern discourse, so we are faced with the challenge of liberating ourselves from feudal society while also completing the transformation of our society under the feeling of external invasion and oppression. The liberation of Chinese people in the 20th century differs from the liberation of Western people from the darkness of divinity. It simultaneously faces the liberation of a nation from the shadow of other powerful nations and the liberation of individuals from the oppression of feudalism, the "Heavenly Way," theocracy, clan power, and patriarchal authority—some pyramidal pressures and structures. The formation of such a secular society in China has gone through nearly a century of history and still exhibits a pluralistic, multi-scale, and multi-state phenomenon. Therefore, the experience of modernity in China is both multi-layered and multi-state. As for discussing the modernity of Chinese people, I think it is a very complex and thorny issue.
Wang Guangming: The complexity of discussing modern phenomena and modernity lies in the fact that when discussing modern phenomena, it is multi-layered. In cultural phenomena, modernity can also be divided into several other layers, such as modernism. Modernism is an elite discourse, an discourse world within the circle of scholars, writers, and artists. For example, from Nietzsche to Foucault, from Sartre to Milan Kundera, as well as painters like Van Gogh and composers like Arnold Schoenberg. As an elite discourse, their modernity is reflected in their resistance to industrial society. As another form of modernity, there is the universal, continuously rising popular culture movement since modern times. Such popular movements, including many social movements in China, such as the Cultural Revolution, are also very important events in modernity. In social reality, they constitute changes in the forms of people's life behaviors and ways of perceiving the world. Even the feminist movement or feminist literature we are discussing now are connected to elite discourse and popular rebellions, so modernity is a very complex phenomenon.
Huang Lin: Whether it is elite discourse or popular events, their characteristics all manifest as the awakening of human subjectivity and the struggle for human rights. Habermas, based on Kantian philosophy and thought, established the principle of subjectivity, which is a very important principle when we discuss modernity today. After the separation of religion and metaphysics, human spiritual activities revolve around three domains—science, morality, and art—developing autonomously, serving as the rational foundation of human life. This is a modernity principle of self-searching. Another modernity principle is the self-affirmation principle mentioned by American philosopher Richard Rorty, which means placing hope in people and nations rather than in transcendental gods and authorities. Existing elite discourse or popular events all present such modernity principles. The difference lies in that the subjectivity of the elite has a reflective characteristic, while the subjectivity of the masses is more impulsive and appears blind. Therefore, when people discuss modernity, they often use certain elite discourses to discuss the characteristics of modernity. For example, when discussing how Kafka is modern, we might talk about various artists. As for events like the Cultural Revolution in China, we might prefer to treat them as props or as a terrible national madness rather than observe them correctly within a modern perspective. In reality, Kafka and the Cultural Revolution share a common modernity characteristic. Similarly, feminist movements, as an inevitable extension of modernity and an inevitable emergence of modern experience, are also products of the social modernization process. Due to the awakening of human subjectivity, the struggle for human rights, and the awakening of women as half of humanity and the struggle for women's rights, feminist movements and the awakening of feminist consciousness naturally arise. And all of this naturally manifests in feminist literature as ideology.
Wang Guangming: Feminist literature belongs to the topic of modernity, which is undeniable. However, in the topic of modernity, there are at least several categories. In the modernization process, for example, some key terms or topics (once mentioned by Liu Xiaofeng) include one represented by Marx on the topic of socialism, and another represented by Tocqueville's thought on free order. Free order is to fiercely uphold individual freedom and strongly maintain primitive individualism. Another topic is represented by Nietzsche's idea of the desiring individual, which is the core of Nietzsche's thought. The desiring individual is considered social in body but natural in desire. Human liberation requires both the liberation of desire and the coordination of social relationships, so it is also a contradictory topic. I think in the topic of modernity, perhaps feminism belongs to the category of Nietzsche's thought background, seeking the liberation of the desiring individual. Of course, from a purely theoretical perspective, this is the classification. However, when placed in the context of China's modernization process, the issue of Chinese feminist literary movement and feminist writing becomes much more complex. Then, in terms of the relationship between society and the individual, and the natural attributes of desire, we still need to make many specific distinctions. I feel that this is not something that can be solved by simple theoretical classification.
Huang Lin: I believe that engaging in dialogue with you and other male critics is a form of reflective work. This dialogue uses "female writing" instead of "female literature," which is the concept I personally adopted in my research on female literature. "Female literature" implies the natural gender of women while also hinting at the idea that female writers' works are "lesser" than those of male writers. "Feminist literature" opposes male-centered criticism with a gender-based approach. The term "female writing," first proposed by Hélène Cixous in The Laugh of Medusa (1975), both designates the female subject and the female text as objects, viewing female writing as a process of production and reproduction. This is the meeting point for subject and object in female literary criticism, no longer facing gender or text or the entanglement of both statically or fixedly, but breaking through the limitations of existing ways of thinking, introducing rhetorical strategies and methods, including fluidity, coordination, and diversity, and focusing on the special study of the production of female texts within their cultural contexts. I believe that by examining the specificity of the Chinese cultural context in the 20th century, we may discover and interpret the characteristics and patterns contained and presented in the creative facts of 20th-century Chinese female writers.
Wang Guangming: Radical feminist theory holds that female writing is a product of the feminist movement, but China in the 20th century has never experienced a feminist movement in the Western sense. The female writing you refer to in 20th-century China focuses on a linguistic practice, and this practice occurs and adjusts within the Chinese context, right? Additionally, I feel that the category of female writing is indeed highly inclusive. Because since ancient times, female language practice, or the act of writing, although constantly restricted by patriarchal society, has never truly ceased. Researchers on female literature have an undeniable responsibility to study how female writing in each historical period is carried out and what characteristics it exhibits. This work has not yet been well carried out. For example, the 20th-century Chinese poet Qiu Jin, who spans two historical periods, wrote poems in her early years that expressed the melancholy and longing of Li Qingzhao, while her later poems expressed ideals and passions for liberation, and before her sacrifice, she left not grand pronouncements but the poignant lines "The autumn wind and autumn rain make people sad." To understand Qiu Jin's poems, one must delve into the context of the modern transformation of Chinese society in the late 19th century.
Huang Lin: Just to understand Qiu Jin's poems, one must examine the original state and changes of Chinese society in the late 19th century, the changes in the situation of Chinese women and their relationship to the national situation, her personal experiences in marriage and her reading horizons, as well as the impact of her involvement in revolutionary activities on Qiu Jin as a woman. When studying 20th-century Chinese female writing, Qiu Jin is an insurmountable barrier. The dual dilemma of nation and gender that Qiu Jin embodies has always been the most concrete context of 20th-century Chinese female writing. This context, combined with the specific life situations and writing conditions of various female writers, manifests as different expressions of complex emotions. For example, Bing Xin transformed her national sentiments into the Eastern cultural commitment of "fragrance of orchids and jade spirit," absorbing Tagore's philosophy of love and the spirit of equality and universal love from Western enlightenment thought. Her problem novels and essays like To Young Readers express ideals of improving society and rebuilding a new image for the nation. In About Women, Bing Xin writes about female beauty in a "way of changing costumes," and it was Bing Xin who earliest discovered the cultural spiritual value of women and gave new cultural positions to women different from traditional ones. I believe that the national issue that troubles and entangles male writers like Lu Xun in the 20th century also affects female writing. We can find the fundamental common point between Lu Xun and Bing Xin—the national dilemma complex. In my view, the fundamental driving force behind the rise of the May Fourth New Culture Movement was the collective consciousness and unconscious desire to escape the national cultural dilemma, which is the underlying tone of Chinese literary writing in the 20th century. It can be called the complex of the third world or the weak nation. Chinese female writing is first constrained by this dominant complex, so the gender complex emerges and disappears with changes in gender circumstances or overlaps with the national complex. The novels of Ding Ling and Xiao Hong are prominent examples. As for Xiao Hong, she is even more profound, painful, and even goes deep into the suffering of the body, so her gender emotions are particularly profound and heavy, or sometimes they may unintentionally overshadow the national complex.