The Revolutionary Feminine: The Transformation of “Women’s Literature”

Abstract

The previous four chapters demonstrate how categories like “woman” and “the feminine” played a foundational role in the conceptualization of Chinese modernity. In the writings of Lu Xun, Yu Dafu, Zhang Ziping, Guo Moruo, Liu Na’ou, and Mu Shiying, the figure of the feminine supplies embodied concept-metaphors, re-channels affective flows, constructs intersubjective spaces, and finally, produces various modern subjectivities. The writers discussed in these chapters, however, are unexceptionally male. But the (re)production and the (re)imagination of the feminine in modern China was not an exclusive privilege of male writers. Categories like “woman writer” (nü zuojia) and “women’s literature” (funü wenxue, nüzi wenxue, or nüxing wenxue), for example, figure prominently in the cultural project of empowering the feminine. While “woman writer” is a new social identity made possible by the spreading literary market and the booming printing business along with the widespread social reform on women’s education in the 1910s and 1920s, “women’s literature” was fashioned and promoted by the New Culture reformists who harked back to Chinese history and charted a “female tradition” of literature. Although in its early stage, “women’s literature” served as an effective tool in revolutionizing people’s “structure of feelings,” this incongruence between the newness of an identity and the oldness of its associated content predetermined that it had to undergo substantial redefinition, if it was to be continuously employed as a component of Chinese modernity.¹