up going back to her uncle’s home again after Chunsheng claims the end of their love, and dies depressingly. Chunsheng cannot stand for Zijun’s focus on chores, such as cooking and keeping a dog, Ahsui, and four chicks. After losing his job, Chunsheng feels annoyed with the dog, Ahsui, and gets rid of it by pulling it into a pit. However, he does not understand Zijun’s sadness. He even blames Zijun for his break up with his old friends and old life styles. In his notes he complains, “Now I had to put up with all these hardships mainly because of her sake—getting rid of Ahsui was a case in point. But Tzu-chun (Zijun) seemed too obtuse now even to understand that.”
Indeed, he never thinks about Zijun in his daily routine. When Chunsheng had a job, Ahsui was Zijun’s only companion, and housekeeping was all the things Zijun choose to express her love for Chunsheng by been a good wife and housekeeper. Chunsheng complains because Zijun’s is not living like a more progressive woman. Zijun grew up in an old family, so she automatically accepts the traditional wife’s role with Chunsheng. Actually, Chunsheng realizes this before they live together, “In matters life this, Tzu-chun (Zijun) probably hadn’t yet freed herself entirely from old ideas.” In fact, the causation of Zijun and Chunsheng’s break up, according to Lu Xun’s talk to his students at Beijing Women’s Normal College in 1923, was the old social system.
What Happens After Nora Leaves Home? He (Lu Xun) pointed out that a Chinese Nora would have only three choices: to starve, to “go to the bad,” or to return home to her husband. After awakened, Nora needs money to evade such choices. … How would women get money in China’s society? Only by obtaining their full economic rights, both inside the family and outside in the world at large. … Only by struggle, by long, slow, patient struggle.
“Nora” is not necessarily a wife who leaves her husband; she represents many progressive women of the 1920s. Unfortunately, the Chinese society was still asleep in the meantime. It was not prepared to support the modern women. During the 1920s, even a man was hard to be employed and there were limited occupations for women.
In contrast to Lu Xun’s characterizing women figures through plot development, Ding Ling directly depicts women’s inner souls in her stories. According to Spence, in the story Diary of Miss Sophie, published in 1928, Ding Ling portrays a “bored, ill, fretful, self-pitying, cruel, and emotionally uncontrolled” woman. Ding Ling utilizes the form of a diary to reveal Sophie’s liberated thoughts on love triangles among Weidi, Ling Jishi, and herself: Weidi loves her, she knows that; she is attracted by Ling Jishi’s handsome appearance; but Ling Jishi is a beau, a playboy, not worthy of serious consideration.
Sophie may be capricious to the people around her, such as Weidi, Ling Jishi; however, she is frank to her heart. She writes in her diary on December 24,
I’ve always wanted a man who would really understand me. If he doesn’t understand me and my needs, then what good are love and empathy? Father, my sisters, and all my friends end up blindly indulging me, although I never have figured out what it is in me that they love. Is it my arrogance, my temper? Or do they just pity me because I have TB? At times they infuriate me because of it, and then all their blind love and soothing words have the opposite effect. Those are the times that I wish I had someone who really understood. Even if he reviled me, I’d be proud and happy.
Although Sophie needs love badly, she does not accept a love without understanding. Without understanding and mutual consent, the love is pale, and she even despises the “grandstand affection.” She knows herself well through constantly digging into her deepest soul by writing a diary. On January 10, she continues,
I understand myself completely. I am a thoroughly female woman, and women concentrate everything on the man they’ve got in their sights. I want to possess him. I want unconditional surrender of his heart. I want him kneeling down in front of me, begging me to kiss him.
Sophie is a liberated woman who professes profound thoughts on love. She believes that a sexual appetite is normal; there is no need to deny it. In her diary on January 12, she comments on Yufang and Yunlin’s “asceticism,”
I can’t help scoffing at her (Yufang) asceticism. Why shouldn’t you embrace your lover’s naked body? Why repress this part of love? How can they (Yufang and Yunlin) be so preoccupied with all the details before they’ve even slept together! I won’t believe love is so logical and scientific.
After the May Fourth New Culture Movement, people’s minds were awakened, and started to think about true love. Before Ding Ling, there was no direct depiction of a woman’s deep thoughts on love. Therefore, Sophie, the protagonist in Ding Ling’s story is a “bored, ill, fretful, self-pitying, cruel, and emotionally uncontrolled” woman. Her first self-consciousness awakening afflicts her, and there is no one who understands her. Just as Lu Xun metaphor of the “iron house” reveals,
Imagine an iron house having not a single window and virtually indestructible, in which there are many people soundly asleep who are about to die of suffocation. Yet form slumber to demise—it does not cause them to feel the sorrow of impending death. Now if you raise a shout to wake up a few of the relatively light sleepers, making these unfortunate few suffer the agony of irrevocable death, do you really think you are doing them a good turn?
Sophie awakens and seeks her true love. Unfortunately, the person, Weidi, who loves her, does not understand her; another person, Ling Jishi, who attracts her, is beneath her love, because his “precious, beautiful form” “resides such a cheap, ordinary soul.” With extreme disappointment, she sighs in her March 28 diary,
In the course of my life, my desire for people to understand and sympathize with me has been too strong, which is why I’ve felt such bitter despair for so long. Only I know how many tears I’ve shed. … Life sneaks on. Death too. Oh, how pathetic you are Sophia (Sophie)!
In the story Miss Sophie’s Diary, Ding Ling uses the first person point of view and focuses on a woman’s liberated mind. This writing style was new to Chinese writers, but reflected well a woman’s awakening of self-consciousness in the 1920s. However, in 1932, Ding Ling shifted her focus on women in her fiction Net of Law. Rather than show the oppressions on woman by the traditions, according to Barlow, Ding Ling showed,
[S]exual oppression within class oppression, and she goes to great lengths to show that men are not the agents of women’s oppression but merely the immediate instruments of the oppressors. The Party of the Proletariat has, of course, the responsibility to remedy society’s ills. What seems remarkable in this story, nonetheless, is Acui’s exaggerated passivity. In Net of Law, Ding Ling goes out of her way to deny historical agency to the female subproletariat.
In this fiction, there are two ordinary couples, Acui and Gu Meiquan, Xiaoyuzi and Yu Axiao. The two women are from the same city and become intimate friends. The men work in same factory. Both Acui and Xiaoyuzi are virtuous women, especially Acui. Acui loves children, and different from the local women who “cursing loudly” and “be angry” in “everyday conversation.” Simply, she is a “woman with a pleasant personality and good looks.” Nonetheless, in the context of flood, the poor people, such as Grandma Wang even curses Acui for taking her business of washing clothes. “You’re all no-good, cheap stuff. You witch, with all that smelly face cream!” These sore accusations grieve Acui and result at her miscarriage. Xiaoyuzi tries to comfort her, but fails to do so. In addition, due to Yu Axiao’s purposeful elimination of opponent (Yu does not tell the accountant of Gu’s reasonable absence), Gu Meiquan loses his job. The men break up their relationship. Under the pressure of being unemployed for a long time, Gu frequently gets drunk, and kills Xiaoyuzi accidentally. Yu greases the police not to close the case and to capture Gu. Gu escapes, and Acui becomes the fall guy. The police put her in jail in order to attract her husband.
Finally, Yu is bankrupt because of the police’s endless extortion, and Acui dies in jail. Ironically, after they lose everything, Gu and Yu reconcile. Gu realizes the root of the tragedy in his letter to Yu.
Axiao!
You probably still hate me and would like to boil my flesh. I, however, don’t feel any hatred for you anymore. … You shouldn’t hate me either, because just as you weren’t the person who caused me to lose my job, I was not the person who killed your wife. … the ones who fired me were the oppressors. … Gu Meiquan did 上一页 [1] [2] [3] [4] 下一页 |
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