Abstract
In the premiere issue of Zhongguo nübao (Chinese women’s journal), one of several dozen feminist magazines that flourished briefly in late imperial China, Qiu Jin (1875–1907) conjures up a stark image of the condition of women in China as a “darkness” (hei’an) steeped in ignorance and injustice. The plight of her female contemporaries, she contends, arises not only from the narrow prescriptions of Confucian femininity or the social practices attending orthodox gender roles, but also from the state of self-delusion engulfing women themselves. Having internalized inherited gender ideologies, Chinese women had come to embrace the conditions of subjugation as a preordained social order. Indeed, according to the self-appointed feminist vanguard of late Qing China, the vast majority of Chinese women, or nüjie, were blissfully oblivious to their demeaned status as the playthings (wanwu), slaves (nuli), or chattel of men, to use the pointed terminology of the day. Feminist transformation, in other words, would lie not just in the arena of concrete sociopolitical reform but, crucially, required change at the deepest psychological levels: in order for women to begin to overcome their oppressed existence, they would have to first learn to imagine themselves, their experience, and their future potential in a radically different light.
The Darkness. Darkness is when there is no truth, no knowledge, nor any proper human thought or action. In the chilling context of the darkness, there are a million unthinkable dangers. But the truest danger of all is oblivion to danger; oblivion to danger is the great darkness.
Qiu Jin, 1907
When you’re a woman before there is a language of feminism, trying to understand what it’s like to be a woman, you have no concepts, no vocabulary for even understanding your own situation.
Marge Piercy, 1986
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Notes
Lian Shi (Luo Yanbin), “Fakanci,” Zhongguo xinnüjie (China’s new women), no. 1 (1907): 2.
Charlotte Beahan, “Feminism and Nationalism in the Chinese Women’s Press, 1902–1922,” Modern China 1, no. 4 (1975): 414.
For a much earlier account of feminist publications in China by a woman activist involved in the early Republican suffrage campaign, see Tan Sheying, Zhongguo funü yundong tongshi. More recent Chinese scholarship that touches on the subject includes Liu Jucai’s well-researched Zhongguo jindai funü yundongshi (History of the modern Chinese women’s movement) (Liaoning: Zhongguo funü chubanshe, 1989)
and Lu Meiyi and Zheng Yongfu, Zhongguo funü yundong: 1840–1921 (The Chinese women’s movement) (Zhengzhou: Henan renmin chubanshe, 1990). The latter includes useful profiles of many women activists of the late Qing.
Tani Barlow, “Theorizing Women: Funü, Guojia, Jiating (Chinese Women, State, and Family),” Genders 10 (Spring 1991): 132–160. Using as her primary example a typical late Qing pro-reformist publication, the Xin nüzi duben (New woman reader), Barlow illustrates how women’s loyalties are symbolically realigned from the domestic to the public sphere in stories celebrating traditional Chinese and Western heroines who dedicate themselves, in varying capacities, to the cause of national salvation (jiuguo). She argues that while such narratives might at first appear to represent a radical reemplotment of feminine roles—transgression of the narrow domestic categories of daughter, wife, and mother in which women’s lives were traditionally organized—upon closer inspection it becomes obvious that they are, in fact, merely an extension of conventional gender paradigms into a more public, political sphere of activity. In these stories, as Barlow rightly discerns, women’s participation in national affairs does not replace or even render problematic their traditional duties as wives or mother but rather is depicted as an expression of those fundamental roles. Barlow’s example sharply illustrates the conservative ideological underpinnings of the idealized nü guomin of the early nationalist movement; however, what Barlow fails to address in her otherwise insightful discussion is how feminists wrote very different kinds of narratives of the nation.
An article on modern women’s writing by the mainland feminist critic Li Ziyun, for instance, makes the following claim: “Ding Ling, the leading female figure in modern Chinese literature, might be said to be the first woman to express an awareness of the sexual inequality underlying patriarchal oppression” (300). See “Women’s Consciousness and Women’s Writing,” in Christina Gilmartin et al., eds., Engendering China: Women, Culture, and the State (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), 299–317. Statements like these abound in current scholarship.
Meng Yue and Dai Jinhua, Fuchu lishi dibiao (Emerging on the horizon of history) (Zhengzhou: Henan renmin chubanshe, 1989), 29–35.
See, for, instance, Recheng Aiguoren, Nüzi jiuguo meitan (A beautiful tale of a girl who saves the nation) (Shanghai: Xinminshe, 1902). This short novel retells the story of Joan of Arc, or Jende, and concludes by lamenting the lack of such patriotic spirit in China.
Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion (London and New York: Methuen, 1981), 3–4. Jackson acknowledges the fact that fantasy can provide an outlet for (and thus a sublimation of) subversive social desire, but also stresses its productive potential in generating desire for social change.
For recent feminist analyses of national formations, see, for instance, Mohanty et al., eds., Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991)
McClintock et al., eds., Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation, and Postcolonial Perspectives (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1997)
Parker et al., eds., Feminisms and Sexualities (London: Routledge, 1992).
Timothy Brennan, “The National Longing for Form,” in Homi Bhabha, ed., Nation and Narration (London: Routledge Press, 1990), 44–70.
See, in particular, Dolezelova-Velingerova, ed., The Chinese Novel at the Turn of the Century (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980)
Chen Pingyuan, Zhongguo xiaoshuo xushi moshi de zhuanbian (The narrative transformation of Chinese fiction) (Beijing: Jiuda wenhua chuban, 1990)
and David Wang, Fin-de-Siècle Splendors: Repressed Modernities of Late Qing Fiction, 1849–1911 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997).
Liang Qichao, “Lun xiaoshuo yu qunzhi zhi guanxi” (On the value of the periodical press in national affairs) (1896). Translated in C.T. Hsia, “Yen Fu and Liang Ch’i-ch’ao as Advocates of New Fiction,” in Adele Rickett, ed., Chinese Approaches to Literature: From Confucius to Liang Chi-chao (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), 222–223.
Adrienne Rich, “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Revision,” in On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose, 1966–1978 (New York: Norton, 1979), 35.
A number of scholars have commented on the influence of Sophia Perofskaya as a new female model (not unlike Nora in the May Fourth Era). See, e.g., Fudan daxue zhongwenxi jindai wenxue yanjiushi ed. Zhongguo jindai wenxue yanjiu (Baihuazhuo wenyi chubanshe, 1991), 262–281, which discusses Luo Pu’s Dong’ou nuhaojie (Heroine of eastern Europe) in this connection. For an even more thorough account of foreign models and the construction of the Chinese New Woman around the turn of the century, see Hu Ying, Tales of Translation: Composing the New Woman in China: 1899–1918 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000).
Angelika Bammer, Partial Visions: Feminism and Utopianism in the 1970s (New York: Routledge, 1991).
For instance, although Kang Youwei’s utopian philosophical treatise Datongshu projects a vision of the future in which gender inequalities have been eradicated, there is little indication that women have played a significant role in this achievement. The author’s paternalistic desire to “save” women is unmistakable: “I now have a great wish: to save the eight hundred million women of my own time from drowning in [the sea] of suffering, I now have a great desire: to bring the incalculable inconceivable numbers of women of the future the happiness of equality, complete unity, and independence.” Laurence G. Thompson, Ta T’ung-shu: The One World Philosophy of K’ang Yu-wei (London: Allen and Unwin, 1958), 150.
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© 2005 Amy D. Dooling
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Dooling, A.D. (2005). National Imaginaries: Feminist Fantasies at the Turn of the Century. In: Women’s Literary Feminism in Twentieth-Century China. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403978271_2
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