PAAS357(Course Name) Film Commentary

Female Images and National Myth

Meng Vue

Literary discourse occupied a unique position in the ordering of Chinese socialist society before the 1980s. As a singularly important type of writing, literature generated a mutually implicated dynamic between state discourses and civic, private, and cultural life. Not only did literature reproduce state policies and enter them into civic or private cultural contexts, it also shaped the national conception of what constituted Chinese social "reality." This was possible, in my view, because during the first few decades of the People's Republic socialist literature formed a field where the state's discourses appropriated public discourse by gradually displacing all possible articulations and representations of the private into itself.

The title of this chapter, "Female Images and National Myth," derives from this feature of Chinese socialist literature. My point is that while socialist fiction can represent "woman" in the conventional sense, it also uses the female image to signify either a certain class or sociopolitical group or the authority of the Communist Party itself. The combination of authentic political identity with womanhood is a double play. On the one hand, the state's political discourse translated itself through women into the private context of desire, love, marriage, divorce, and familial relations, and, on the other, it turned woman into an agent politicizing desire, love, and family relations by delimiting and repressing sexuality, self, and all private emotions. To a large extent, as I seek to demonstrate, female images in socialist literature functioned as a special agent of the state's appropriation of the "public."

Gender and Class

To begin the discussion of female images and national myth in Chinese literature, we may need to take a brief look at two of the most confusing items in the Chinese socialist dictionary: "gender" and "class." While violence against women continued unabated throughout the decades after Liberation, the government's official position, at least since 1942, has been that Chinese women and men were equal. Equality meant that male and female were substantially the same. Under socialism there emerged, in other words, a concept of sameness, or the nondifference of the two sexes. This notion-and it can only be understood as a distortion of the notion of

This article appeared originally in Ershi yi shijie (Twenty-first century) 4 (April 1991 ): 103-12.

Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/chapter-pdf/109884/9780822396840-008.pdf by NEW YORK UNIVERSITY user on 20 January 2018

Female Images and National Myth 119

the equality-lodged itself in the socialist state and was embedded in a range of policy formulations. Nondifference, combined with the unshaken power of the male discursive tradition, produced a vague and paradoxical literary line on gender issues. Hierarchies accruing within male and female images persisted in Chinese literature; they were never really challenged by images of gender, be it a matter of sex equality or the more compromised notion of sex identity. Earlier notions of male-female relations, however, were no longer available to represent sexual or gender differences, because officially no such differences existed. And so the question arises: what do male/female hierarchies mean if they have nothing to do with gender difference?

An analogous paradox appeared with the concepts of a proletarian class and its class struggle. Class and class struggle had for decades been the basic modality of literary and historiographic narrative, telling the myth of a Chinese socialist nation-state, past, present, and future. Those were the terms bracketing the way the state defined itself and its activity, and they depended on their binary opposites, the bourgeoisie and its counterstruggle for their existence. The problem is that China had no historical experience of capitalism, save in a few cities and for a very short time. By 1956, with the means of production and all significant private property in the hands of the government, it was nearly impossible to locate a tangible bourgeoisie. Each of the many successive "criticism" movements subsequently un- leashed in literary circles over the forty years since the revolution has always uncovered "representatives of the bourgeoisie and capitalism." Yet when the period of relaxation came in the 1980s, almost all these "represen- tati ves" were officially determined to have been "misclassified." The irony is clear: China's bourgeoisie was a sham character, an absent enemy. If the "bourgeoisie" was the product of a "misclassification," then certainly the concepts of "proletariat" and "socialism" are also open to question. The ideological opposition of proletariat/bourgeoisie seems consequently to be little more than empty signifiers lacking genuine reference to social relations or to modes of production.

Interestingly, however, terms like gender and class struggle, though extremely problematic and fragile as key concepts for Chinese literature and narrative especially, have repeatedly manufactured and filled in each other's blanks, so to speak; these terms have made each other the referent and have therefore entered into reciprocally enabling relation to each other.

To examine the problematic of gender and class in more detail, I shall take up a popular story of Liberation, "The White-Haired Girl."! Although

1 The story has an archetype and several versions. The earliest was a yangge opera created in the late thirties in the liberated border regions of Hebei and Shandong by teams of writers and musicians doing anti-Japanese war propaganda. The earliest versions were never published. The first printed version of the story is an opera script written by He J ingzhi and Ding Yi in 1942 at Yanan. For the English translation, see Yang Xianyi and Gladys

Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/chapter-pdf/109884/9780822396840-008.pdf by NEW YORK UNIVERSITY user on 20 January 2018

120 Meng Yue

the plot has been repeatedly altered over the years, no one ever tampered with the basic role structure. Xier, the fiancee of Wang Dachun and daughter of Yang Bailao, is abducted by the landlord, Huang Shiren. Xier' s father dies shortly thereafter. Dachun cannot rescue her and leaves the village to join the Red Army. In the Huang household Xier suffers horribly. When she discovers that Huang is about to sell her, she manages to escape and disappears into the mountain wilderness. Years later Dachun returns. The revolution defeats the landlord, and Dachun finds Xier and brings her home. I have sketched a diagram of this plot below.

sender (Yang) = object (Xier) = receiver (Dachuan)

donor (Party) = subject (Dachun) = villain (Huang Shiren)

Given this model, there are many possible ways of developing a narrative. Forinstance, the story can focus on the two male rivals (Le., father versus villain or hero versus villain) bound together by themes oflove and loyalty or hate and revenge. Alternately, there could emerge a women's story, autobiographic or not, which focuses on the heroine's situation, her experience, or conflicts between people of either sex. My point, however, is that with the model schematized above it is almost impossible to construct a narrative that lies outside of concerns with sexuality, sex, gender, and the war of the sexes. The story's most basic framework would appear to be either two men contesting each other over a woman, or a woman fighting off one man by mobilizing another against him. Of course, in "The White- Haired Girl," the hero Dachun escapes from the clutches of the landlord at precisely the moment Xier's father dies. This leaves Dachun with no opportunity to be a sexual rival to the villain. To put my point another way, the possibility of a sexual rivalry between the two male characters present in the narrative was artificially excluded from the plot chain. I find it significant that Xier' s confrontation with the male villain-roughly speak- ing, the whole sequence of rape and the struggle against rape-gets foregrounded in the one place where sexual rivalry might possibly have gotten some play.

Yet, even in such a sex-stereotyped plot, the conflict between the woman Xier and the landlord Huang never appears as a sexual conflict or even as a gendered one. U nUke, for example, the story of "Xi anglin' s Wife," which distinctly represents repression as gender based, Xier does not grasp

Yang, The White-Haired Girl (Beijing: Foreign Language Press, 1954). In 1950 Shui Hua and Wang Bing made the story into a film which was produced by the Dongbei Dianying Zhipian Chang (Northeast Film Studio). During the Cultural Revolution, the Shanghai baliewu jutuan (Shanghai Ballet Institute) produced it as a ballet in a version that subsequently went on to become one of the eight model plays approved for cultural performance.

Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/chapter-pdf/109884/9780822396840-008.pdf by NEW YORK UNIVERSITY user on 20 January 2018

Female Images and National Myth 121

her own position as being that of an exchange object. Instead she elicits sympathy because she has been mis-exchanged.2 Her conflict is never- and, consistent with her character, cannot be-with the male power order itself.

"The White-Haired Girl" emphasizes an event of sexual violence but deemphasizes the underlying code of sexuality.3 This deemphasis has striking implications for ideological discourse. A new terminology of class and class struggle stood by to fill the vacuum. The absence of the notion of sexual oppression allowed the relation of raper and raped, oppressor and oppressed, to be represented according to a model of class struggle, indeed to replicate that mode exactly. The class model is quite simplified, since modes of production are nowhere really in evidence. Therefore, it would probably be more accurate to speak of a rhetoric of class struggle rather than a representation.

A process of transformation in which gender oppression gives way to class struggle can be traced quite clearly in successive revisions of Xier' s image with each new publication of the story. Revision generally took place at two key levels. First, there was a gradual strengthening ofXier' s political instincts, so that, for example, newer Xiers hated the landlord immediately rather than dreaming of becoming one of his wives. Second, there was a gradual erasure ofXier' s body and her sexual situation. In the opera version, realizing that the landlord has lied to her about his marriage, the raped and pregnant Xier follows the landlord and deploys her body to demonstrate his perfidy and the crimes of the old order against her. In the film, however, the camera keeps the pregnancy out of sight while it informs the audience of it and subsequently of the birth of Xier's son. Later, the ballet version accelerated the process of disembodiment to the point that scenes of pregnancy and birth disappeared altogether. By this point, the resurgence of the traditional "good woman" ideal and the political imperative meant that any Xier worth her salt would rather kill herself than suffer the disgrace of rape and pregnancy. Late-model Xiers do not get raped at all: they become mothers but somehow remain virgins. Finally, when Xier's body and sexuality have completely faded from the story, the empty conceptual space is marked by the term "class," and the political code entirely displaces the sexual code as a functioning part of the story. The moment Xier reappears at the "anti-landlord struggle meeting," her image as an op- pressed nonwoman turns into the image of an oppressed class. The previ-

2 "Xianglin's wife" is the protagonist of a Lu Xun short story, "Zhu Fu" (Winter sacrifice). See Lu Xun Quanji (Complete works of Lu Xun) (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1981), vol. 2, 5-23.

3 Baimao nu, directed by Shui Hua, was produced by the Northeast Film Studio in 1951. Shui Hua, Wang Bin, and Yang Ruenshen authored the film script, which is available in Zhongguo dianying juben xuanji (Collected scenarios in Chinese movies) (Beijing: Zhongguo dianying chubanshe, 1959),95-145.

Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/chapter-pdf/109884/9780822396840-008.pdf by NEW YORK UNIVERSITY user on 20 January 2018

122 Meng Yue

ously invisible, absent, transcendental "oppressed class" is fortunate enough to be incarnated in her bodiless image and thus becomes a fleshlike presence in the narrative's framework of class rivalry.

Needless to say, this narrative device in "The White-Haired Girl" is an ideological ploy. It recycles the traditional plot form of desire and realiza- tion, separation and reuniting the family. But it uses that older form to represent the political, symbolic order of class relations, thereby making gender role structure into a basic frame for representing class struggle. In this narrative device we can see the merging of public and private spheres, or, more properly in my view, the suppression of the private beneath the public. Events may occur in a family, between sexual subjects, or even within an individual's psyche, each of these being an archetypal private setting. But the meaning each event communicates is about class struggle; and most importantly, meaning is exclusively about class struggle. The story, the drama, unfolds only at the political and public levels. The only code at work is the political code. In this way the image of a female in a peasant family gets connected with the national myth of liberation.

Not only does Xier's "empty" image offer the possibility of turning the signifier of class struggle into a narrative, but once "Xier" finds its place in the story, the notion of class empowers itself to define the value of the female body and even to generate female sexuality out of itself. At the end of "White-Haired Girl," when the Red Army and Communist Party appear and take over the village, Xier miraculously regains her sexuality. Her once invisible female body reappears. Her lost beauty and youth are restored, her white hair turns black again, and her living space changes back from the wild mystery temple to the house of marriage. She is a woman again. She is a sexual object once more and can hope for happiness, which is why the return is a symbolic event. It joins liberation of women and liberation of class. The resulting pri vate, personal happiness is made the consequence of socialist new society.

However, as you will have noticed, the power that the class struggle narrative gains from the field of gender and sexuality depends on joining two myths: the myths of class victory and of women's liberation. To preserve the effect, a narrative must carefully prevent these two myths from collapsing. When they present a poor fit, as in "The White-Haired Girl ," the tasks of the narrative include mobilization of a broader and more violent repression of what are distinctively private sexual issues. The particular example I have in mind is Ding Ling's The Sun Shines Over the Sanggan River.4 The novel, which takes land reform as its stage and represents the paradigm of class struggle in China, includes a love story between Chengren, the poor peasant and Communist Party member, and Heini, the

4 Ding Ling, Taiyang zhao zai Sanggan he shang (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1949; reprint, 1951).

Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/chapter-pdf/109884/9780822396840-008.pdf by NEW YORK UNIVERSITY user on 20 January 2018

Female Images and National Myth 123

niece of the local landlord. Heini's love for Chengren develops under the influence of the women's liberation movement in the countryside, and he is her hope for escape from strict patriarchal control. Their young, innocent love, however, highlights a conflict: class struggle (public) renders mar- riage (private, a gender question) impossible.

Unlike Xier, Heini does not embody an identification between the will of women and the exploited poor peasant class. Heini's dual identity as a member of an exploiting class and as a repressed woman gives the author an opportunity to criticize either or both notions. However, as the narrative unfolds, the opposition of Heini's gender identity and her class identity, of the individual's private will and the demands of the class struggle, neither stand still nor disappear. Ding Ling dealt with the apparent contradiction quite adeptly: she had Chengren and Heini forsake their love. The narrative also adroitly deleted conflict by giving a new oppositional identity to Heini. Although she is technically the niece of the landlord, according to the narrator, her position in the landlord family is close to slavery. The dramatic conflict between Heini's niece identity and her slave identity is substituted for the gender/class conflict, and when the narrative selects slave as Heini' s genuine identity, the problem the solution is supposed to solve changes drastically. The obstacle preventing Heini from loving Chengren is no longer class struggle per se but rather the people's ignorance of her true class status. Thus impasse turns into delay, the product of simple misunder- standing, and the arrival of satisfaction is once again assured. The conflict- ing demands of gender and class that appeared irreconcilable at the beginning are revealed in the end to be nothing more than a false alarm.

The novel operates within a shifting system of identification in order to secure the symbolic power of class. More than Heini' s sexual value and happiness ride on the matter of her correct political identity. The happy ending for land reform in general, and the village specifically, is contingent upon the resolution of a single question: among three systems of identifi- cation-gender, kinship, and politics-which is truly decisive? Can the true political identities obscured among complex kinship relations ever be correctly located? The villagers' first attempt at land reform failed because one leader did not make a correct diagnosis. The land reform (and thus national, social revolution) cannot claim victory until the political, public class structure is uncovered beneath kinship or private relations. In this understanding, land reform becomes a great drama of recognition, in which kinship as a code of private life is doomed to be swept away by the truths of the objective class structure.

The symbolic relation between public and private is totally refigured in such love stories and female images. In literature, at least, this revised connection is neither a conflict, as the relation between public and private has long been conceived in the West (i.e., an oppositional binary), nor a

Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/chapter-pdf/109884/9780822396840-008.pdf by NEW YORK UNIVERSITY user on 20 January 2018

124 Meng Yue

separation, as was once de rigueur in the Chinese tradition. Rather, the socialist relation was one of absolute hierarchy: not a hierarchy of two independent layers but one built on the order of "conscious" and "uncon- scious." That is to say, the lower layer is prevented from being questioned, known, or even seen, since it is not supposed to exist. Upon this political unconsciousness of the female body and sexuality, of gender and kinship status, the empty notion of class was constructed as one of the few nonverifiable signifiers in the socialist terminology. It is upon this same political unconsciousness that the image of the liberated woman, or, to use a cliched phrase, the "daughter of the Party ," has continuously functioned for thirty years as bearer of the Party's transcendental authority into the family, love, and the whole personal sphere. In fact, it is very difficult to imagine how, without this gender image, the socialist myth of class struggle or liberation and the state's ideological control over every private comer of intellectual life could possibly have been maintained in the Cultural Revolution. This may explain why, though there are so many strong women characters and female images in socialist literature, none of them ever speaks a word for their sexuality.

Nation as Class

Through the female image, the notion of class usurped the signification of gender status and sexuality. Even so, numbers of women wrote literary works, particularly during the 1950s, a full decade after the film version of White-Haired Girl appeared. What sort of relationship did these texts establish between the gendered subject (if such a thing existed) and the notion of class? How, in other words, was the correlation between writing self and the "imagined public" (as the state defined it, i.e., workers, peasants and soldiers) manifested in women's Writing? As I shall clarify shortly, women's writing of this period shows a great effort to diminish the imaginary conflict between serving the public or nation and preserving women's individuality and femininity. Often texts create situations for the female protagonist in which she sacrifices or diminishes her individuality and femininity in order to serve that public. At the same time, however, individuality and femininity are indispensable, since the author must employ them in order to achieve the desired narration. In other words, the activity of writing was to a degree a process that blurred the individual's will to serve the nation and blended it into her own desires and life choices.

The decade of the 1950s saw transformation in economic and cultural realms, most importantly in the nationalization of private property and the institutionalization of ideological remolding (gaizao). As is well known, ideological gaizao and the great cultural and political movements of the sixties and seventies were all based on the theory of class struggle. When one asks how and why the sham terms "class" and "class struggle" were

Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/chapter-pdf/109884/9780822396840-008.pdf by NEW YORK UNIVERSITY user on 20 January 2018

Female Images and National Myth 125

constructed and what such linguistic entities meant in a culture without capitalism, one comes eventually to rest on two notions that lie beneath class: the ideas of the nation and of the cultural agent. Movements classified as class movements in the past performed national closure rather than working on behalf of any real class goal. Targeting "representatives of the bourgeois class" launched attacks against autonomous cultural elements, never anything as concrete as a class representative.

The idea of the nation can be traced back to the 1910s and 1920s. After failing several times to prevail against the imperialist invaders, Chinese intellectuals suddenly recognized the crises of nation and culture facing them in the form of Western modernity. Inspired by the October Revolution in Russia, intellectuals began introducing Marxism and socialist theory into China. In doing so, they sought to connect the notion of an exploited class with that of an exploited people and a deprived nation as a means of legitimating China's use of the term "proletarian" to describe its own international position.5 To achieve the conjoining of class and nation, the intellectuals employed the mediating idea of the collective, implied in the terms "class," "people," and "nation." This idea of the collective, which only Marxism offered, was one of the very few acceptable units of analysis that allowed the Chinese to conceptualize their historical situation. Marxism's prediction ofliberation and the victory of the proletariat offered a utopian vision in which the Chinese majority, a comparatively powerless and weak proletarianized mass, would eventually create and deliver a better society and a better, more just world order. This utopian vision of class struggle allowed Chinese intellectuals to believe that they had discovered the solution to the national crisis.

The conflation of the Marxist theory of class and the collecti ve national victory led later to the fusing of concepts that would otherwise have remained distinct: "collective" was fused with "totality," "public" with the "state," and "people" with "party." Nationalists and Communists alike claimed legitimacy by offering to represent the people. But such represen- tation of the people slipped into appropriation, either by concealing the existence of classes (the Nationalist policy) or by abusing the concept of class (the Communist practice). Under the socialist nation-state form, the notion of class became a theoretical and practical tool for homogenizing the field of the people and transforming it into a mass. Class struggle became a form by which the nation was constructed as one, rock-like, powerful, undifferentiated whole. Through the claim of proletarian leadership, the notion of class enabled the party to authorize itself as absolute, the exclusive political representative of the nation.

5 See Li Dazhao, "Fa E geming bijiao guan" (A comparison between the French revolution and the Russian revolution); "Shumin de shengli" (A victory of commoners); and "Boersheweike de shengli" (A victory of bolshevism) inLi Dazhao xuangji (Selected works of Li Dazhao) (Beijing: Renmin chuban she, 1962), 101-4, 109-11, 112-18.

Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/chapter-pdf/109884/9780822396840-008.pdf by NEW YORK UNIVERSITY user on 20 January 2018

126 Meng Yue

The other idea lying dormant beneath class, the notion of cultural agency, first emerged during the Yan'an period. A misconception arose there between the dominant social structure and the cultural agency of Yan'an literary criticism. Mao Zedong's slogan "Literature serves the workers, peasants and soldiers" perpetuated the notion that different literary forms were the property of various classes.6 So, for instance, the working and oppressed classes owned the local literary forms, while modernist writing was considered the province of the bourgeoisie. The upshot was that criticism eliminated distinctions between structural rivals (in the class context, between the bourgeoisie and proletariat) as it did between professions, cultural traditions, modes of writing and so on at the national level. Differences between cultural agents and agencies were frequently mistaken for class conflict even when the relations of produc- tion, having long been nationalized, no longer marked its artifacts with a class signature. The class-inflected concept of nation and the notion that culture and literary forms represent class interests made possible criticism and development in the field of socialist literature. A realm of the "public" came into being. There the people, state, and party became exchangeable elements of one whole. Culture, on the other hand, became a field of endless struggle.

As to the question of women's writing, I tum now to Yang Mo's Song a/Youth (Qingchun zhi ge).7 I selected this text not only because it was so famous but also for the way that it trapped itself, very typically for its time, in a specially constructed sphere of the "public." I start with two connec- tions, or similarities, that Yang Mo's novel shares with prerevolutionary literary traditions. First, Song a/Youth is reminiscent of the autobiographi- cal focus that woman writers in early-twentieth-century Chinese literature employed. There the implied author identified with the viewpoint of the female protagonist and thus with a specific gender stereotype and gendered situation. This usually involved a young woman seeking freedom and eventually making choices between her ideal and her gender role. In this tradition we find Ding Ling, Bai Wei, Su Qing, Eileen Chang, and others. Second, the plot structure of the novel also reminds us of the sub-genre of the Bildungsroman or rewritings of it, since each of the protagonist's experiences turns out to have contributed to her maturation. In Chinese literature, this subgenre generated many works expressing the lonely individual's mental exile against the broad background of the national crisis, and thus the genre itself is informed by intellectuals.

In a literature crammed with images of the national majority and with

6 See Ding Ling et aI., eds. Wenyi lilunji (Collection of essays on literary theory), in Yanan wenyi congshu (Literature of the Yanan period series) (Changsha: Hunan wenyi chuban she, 1984).

7 Yang Mo, Qingchun zhi ge (Beijing: Zhong guo qingnian chuanshe, 1958).

Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/chapter-pdf/109884/9780822396840-008.pdf by NEW YORK UNIVERSITY user on 20 January 2018

Female Images and National Myth 127

Party heroes, very few works are written about individual intellectuals, particularly individual intellectual women. Song of Youth, as one such rare text, represents a style of writing that does not derive from the national standard. Rather, the novel begins like some women's writing in the 1920s and 1930s. An educated young woman, having rejected the marriage her parents arranged for her, cuts off relations with her family and starts wandering about in "society," struggling to achieve independence. She falls in love and marries a university lecturer, Yu Yongze, who had once extricated her from a situation where local gentry had planned to "contrib- ute" her to a warlord. She splits with Yu Yongze because she is attracted to Lu Jiachuan, a communist, and to his politics. After that she journeys back into society, this time armed with political ideals. Borrowing Jurij Lotman' s model, or, better, Teresa de Lauretis's reconfiguration of Lotman, the female protagonist Lin Daojing is the "mobile character," whereas the men in the story are "immobile characters." While the woman pursues her goal and becomes mature, the male characters represent various plot spaces, positions, or personified obstacles that she must enter, pass through, and emerge from. Moreover, the narrative's end appears to depend upon Lin's choosing among the male characters--choosing, that is, where to direct her desire, although at the same time she is herself the object of male desire. To an extent, Yang Mo's role structure in the novel is a gender reversal ofthe Lotman-Lauretis model.8

Although Lin's mobility is initially predicated on her rejection of the male dominant order, it ends not in a broadening or a continuation of the modern tradition of women's writing but rather with a displacement of it. The novel never gives a revealing picture, as for instance Zhang Ailing's Qing Cheng Zhi Lian had, of the conflict between a single woman's fortune and the fate of the whole nation or whole civilization.9 Nor does it offer anything like an occasion for self-reflection on female desire under the shadow of male discourses, as "Miss Sophie's Diary" had.1O Rather, the gendered role structure of Song of Youth emerges in order to be offered in tribute to the state.

The plot makes the symbolic offering of tribute plausible through the mediation of nationalism. National crisis brings about a split in the gendered eye we suppose Lin Daojing to possess because of what she has seen. When Yang Mo introduced the Japanese invasion of northeast China,

8 Jurji Lotmon, "The Origin of Plot in the Light of Typology," trans. Julian Graffy, in Poetics Today 111-2 (1979): 167-84. Also see Teresa de Lauretis in Alice Doesn't (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 118.

9 Eileen Chang, "Love in a Fallen City," in her Chuan qi (New romances) (Shanghai: Zhongguo liangyou tushu gongsi, 1946), 152-84.

10 See William Tay, ed., Xiandai Zhongguo xiaoshuo xuan, vol. 1 (Taipei: Hong Fa Press, 1989),339-91.

Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/chapter-pdf/109884/9780822396840-008.pdf by NEW YORK UNIVERSITY user on 20 January 2018

128 Meng Yue

all male characters, each of whom had previously presented a possible marital or sexual choice to Lin Daojing, begin to shift away into schematized representations of different political forces, possible political positions. At this moment in national life, men who had posed sexual threats to Lin come to be seen as traitors of the nation, while Lin's husband, Yu Yungze, who earlier had saved her from death at the hands of a feudal warlord, now turns away from the nation's future out of anticommunist pique. Given these unpalatable options, Lin's "desire" finally focuses on revolutionaries: Her concern for the impoverished class becomes inextrica- bly identified with the Party's concern for the national majority. In other words, as soon as the nation enters any symbolic scene, all Lin can see in the male characters she meets are political signs.

Interestingly, though perhaps not surprisingly, following the Japanese invasion the question of the mobile female character Lin Daojing' s m;u- riage draws closer and closer to, finally merging with, the question of which political force will legitimately dominate the nation's future. Her true love, fittingly in terms of the nation's interests, turns out to be a Communist Party member who devoted his life to the proletarian revolution; her last marriage is also to a Communist Party member. The key point here is not political ethics but the textual-political strategy the novel employs. Yang Mo used the gender issue to assure the Party's political strength and subsequently its absolute authority in the name of the nation.

Let us now turn to the other connection, that is, Song of Youth's echo of the earlier intellectual Bildungsroman tradition. The maturation of the protagonist through real and symbolic travel is a stereotype in prerevolu- tionary Chinese literature, a pattern for individuals and particularly intellec- tuals. A similar process of displacement of this tradition occurs in Song of Youth. Here I find it useful to draw a comparison between Lin's case and that of Jiang Chunzu, a similar character in Lu Ling's 1947 novel Sons and Daughters of the Landlord, a novel which also takes the Anti -Japanese War as its background. Each novel tends to cast its characters in a symbolic manner. In Song of Youth, this dimension is constituted as a space of political struggle, formed out of the characters' class identities. In Sons and Daughters, the field for symbolic meaning is rooted in the author's consideration of Chinese intellectuals' "spiritual aspects" and their spiritual role in modern society. But despite the shared tendency to allegory, the two authors, Jiang Zhunzu and Yang Mo represent character's relationships inside the plot spaces in very different ways and place their protagonists into very different roles. 11

Sons and Daughters situates Jiang Chunzu so that his "I" self or personal identity is problematic. He has grown up in a large, partly

11 Examples of literary work that recapitulates this pattern are Qi Tong, Sinxheng dai (The newly born generation) (Congqing: Shenghuo shudian, 1939) alld Ye Shengtao, Ni Huanz/li (Shanghai: Kaiming shudian, 1930).

Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/chapter-pdf/109884/9780822396840-008.pdf by NEW YORK UNIVERSITY user on 20 January 2018

Female Images and National Myth 129

dispersed traditional family, where traditional forms are in a state of collapse. There is the father, a representative of the old authority; the older brother, who is too weak to fight against the traditional system and goes mad; the second brother, who is the family rebel and a social reformer; the sisters, who maintain traditional elegance which is increasingly irrelevant; and a sister-in-law, who is keen on procuring money and power. Although he does not identify with anyone of his family members, Jiang meets people even more "other," outside the kinship unit. He encounters, for instance, both interpersonal and spiritual sociocultural spaces and socialities that are different from his own world of soldiers and workers who possess desire and vitality but who lack education-the "mass," silent and enduring, who have strong unknown capacities, and so on. He confronts the wilderness, both in actual natural settings where he must fight to live and in the symbolic space of nothingness he must pass through on his' way. The series of plot spaces repeatedly form for Jiang Chunzu a world of others and of otherness, providing him the tangible conditions of social dislocation. He realizes gradually that in the disintegrating society, under the pressures of war, poverty, and conflict, his dislocation has provided him a space to think and to feel what is occurring in the land.

(For Song of Youth, dislocation is an unacceptable condition since a woman cannot go public or entertain contact with nonkin others on an equal footing, be they commoners, politicians, or professors. Lin Daojing's journal of dislocation unfolds not on a public social1evel but rather on a domestic and private one. Hers should have been a feminist journey; she is, after all, fighting social forces and agents that are trying to transform her into one man's private possession. But in the unfolding story all feminist possibility is eliminated. The narrative appears to assume that dislocation from the masculinized domestic order, though undertaken at her own choice, leaves her bereft of mirror, community, and thus meaning. Having assured this, the novel then kills off Lu Jiachuan, the Communist Party member Lin had earlier felt attracted to, transforming her relation to him into a sublime one. The channel of her idealized relation allows her to emancipate herself from the spheres of the domestic and private.

(The tricky part of the narrative, without which the myth could not be constructed, lies in the fact that it leaves no room open for a public or imagined public other than the one offered by the Communist Party. In so doing, the novel displaces the public with an idealized image of the state. The novel implies that no other possible bridge could exist between a woman and the public sphere except that of the party and its political identifications. In the end, the problematic relation of woman and party disappears, having been subtly displaced by the coordination of female image and the state. The erasure is obvious in Song of Youth. It is particularly acute when we recall that the history of women's participation in public life did not start with coordination between the state's public and

Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/chapter-pdf/109884/9780822396840-008.pdf by NEW YORK UNIVERSITY user on 20 January 2018

130 Meng Yue

the female image. Long before Song of Youth there were women who invented their own perspectives and influenced public opinion. 12)

In his travels, the hero of Sons and Daughters may fail to find a position or a given plot space. He may also fail to narrativize "who am I" in terms' of preexisting identities. But the very act of understanding and his denial of a stable identity has already shaped his role into that of pursuer of truth and ideals. Well inside this role he finally achieves an "ideal," an "I" who elevates his soul to cry out his willingness to know the truth and thus invents himself as the ideal of the intellectual.

An important feature of Lin's relationship to plot space and to other characters, and thus another significant difference between the two novels, lies in the factthatotherness in Song of Youth is never accepted as necessary. Indeed, it cannot even survive. "Others" like Yu Jingtang and Yu Yongze, tum out to be evil traitors; "others" like lower-class people come to represent the ideal model Lin seeks for remolding herself so she can become just like one of them. Unlike that of Sons and Daughters, the world of others in Song of Youth repeatedly divides and is redefined according to the criteria of political allegiance until the otherness itself falls apart and is replaced by two monolithic, opposite categories: the "enemy" and "us." Given the strict "enemy versus us" division of the plot spaces, Lin's "maturation" is reduced to a simplified identification with the only available ideal subject position, that of the national collective. In the end, she succeeds in becoming one of "us," a comrade, facing "them," the enemy, but never an "I" or a "self," nor a gendered individual, nor even an intellectual.

The difference that separates dynamics of self/other in these two novels suggests a transition to a completely reversed representation of the relationship of nation and citizen. In Sons and Daughters the individual seeks an ideal coexistence with the nation's strength. Song of Youth, on the other hand, presides over a devaluation and even elimination of the gendered individual in favor of the nation. Arguably, Sons and Daughters of the Landlord is among the last works continuing and broadening the legacy of individualism during the national crisis, while Song of Youth represents the prototypical drowning of the individual eye in the blind and turbulent sea of nationalism. 13

12 I am thinking ofSu Qing, the journal writer, who worked in the mid-forties in occupied Shanghai. The Shanghai journal Tiandi was the means of communication between her and other women like Eileen Chang. Of course, readers consumed her work for different reasons. Su Qing even wrote an article against the public opinion's condemnation of a woman who had been sentenced to death for killing her husband. See her Huanjin ji (Silk washings) (Shanghai: Tiandi chuban she, 1944) and Yishi nannu (Food and sex) 1945 (Shanghai: Tiandi chuban she), and Shishui ji (Flowing water), which she printed herself. See as well Eileen Chang, "Wo kan Su Qing" (My impression of Su Qing), in Tiandi 19 (1945).

13 Lu Ling, Caizhu de emu men (Sons and daughters of the landlord) (Chongqing: Xiwang chuban she, 1947).

Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/chapter-pdf/109884/9780822396840-008.pdf by NEW YORK UNIVERSITY user on 20 January 2018

Female Images and National Myth 131

If, as I am arguing, the gendered viewpoint and the self-consciously individual role of intellectuals are both stored in literature and are thus textual traditions (which in their relations to nation and nationalism are different from Western individualism and gendered writings), then this blindness in Song of Youth is truly significant. What Song of Youth really shows is a process of displacing the textual legacy. This process of displacement takes place through a dynamic relation of personal identity and the intellectual's role, between the female image and the gendered division. Lin, and maybe the author, Yang Mo, too, retain the identity of intellectual and the outlook of the single woman. Or, to put it another way, they persist in viewing from the perspective of gendered individuals; but the author/protagonist by no means plays either role exclusively. The novel breaks with the tradition of Chinese women writers because it deprives the protagonist of the gendering eye. It diminishes the role of intellectuals, making the category into a mere shell of identity. Song of Youth undertook, through the very process and performance of its own authoring, a textual confiscation that can only be interpreted as a symbolically deliberate effort to sacrifice the perspectives and conventions of all writing selves to the state. The reason Song of Youth is so important is its success. The novel accomplished the destruction of textual traditions, the elimination of literary possibilities, and in so doing effected what would become a typical symbolic action for socialist Chinese literature.

I need to mention here that even though Song of Youth sacrificed its gendered eye and individual self to the nationalist impulse, it was still criticized in 1959 for its "petit-bourgeois" tone. The irony of this criticism lies in what we know occurred and how we can sense the coming disaster. First, Yang Mo's negative textual consolidation turned out to be the only acceptable mode of socialist cultural production. Second, by operating well it deprived itself of its sources, materials, means, and even its very reason for continued existence. Sooner or later, this kind of consolidation had to face a terminal ideological dilemma. Socialist literature and culture had no other available avenue and thus began a process of self-copying; it used existing conventions, sometimes very beautifully, to repeat the same thing over and over. Such repetition became extreme during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (GPCR), when all kinds of conventions, all kinds of media, all kinds of genres and styles were engaged in the mass production of a very few texts, and the authors of such minutely monitored and restricted items were, even so, in constant danger of having the "dunce cap of the bourgeoisie" clapped on their heads. Once creative production had become a simple duplication, to write was to copy and to be copied, and when the only literature we possessed consisted of copies of eight "official" models, there existed no difference separating cultural production from cultural death--dead, yet still self-copying. Reproduction left no room for

Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/chapter-pdf/109884/9780822396840-008.pdf by NEW YORK UNIVERSITY user on 20 January 2018

132 Meng Yue

thought inside hegemonic and totalitarian ideology. It left no room for a nation's literature or culture. The only subject its products were capable of reproducing was the image of the textualized, discursive state machine itself.

Politicized Male Subjectivity

It is interesting that in socialist China the dominant masculinist discursive tradition has changed its position within the literary corpus. I am not saying that male-dominant discourse did not exist before, but rather that it now works in ways that are very different from before. What I find unique in contemporary Chinese literature is the total reversal of the "strong man! weak woman" model and its replacement with female characters who are often "superior" to surrounding male characters. The communist women leaders in the yangbanxi serve as extreme examples. Of course, this kind of character has its traditional conventions and archetypes in classical Chinese literature, for example in famous works such as "Hongxian nu" (The white snake), and "Yangmen niujiang" and so on. 14 Yet there is a very crucial difference between the classical and contemporary "strong woman" types. In the classical literary formula, the strong or active woman character served to release literati anxiety because the texts where they appeared were generically coded as sexual and were produced to bring metaphorical pleasure (both erotic and nonerotic) to the writing male subject and his male audience. The male literatus symbolically escapes from the highly demand- ing cuI tural self-image which his class status imposed by imagining himself turning into a woman, yet never assuming any of her burdens. In contem- porary literature, however, the superior female archetype is for the most part a censor of forbidden desires and pleasure. This new twist on the strong- woman archetype indicates a radical adaptation of male discourse in the socialist period.

Two short stories from the 1950s, "Party Membership Dues" by Wang Yuanjian15 and "Snow in March" by Xiao Ping,16 are among the first few fictions where the female image holds a superior position to that of the male narrator, which suggests a starting point for our analysis. Both stories share the same narrator/narrated, man/woman relationship. "Party Membership Dues" relates the story of an ordinary young woman, a young mother, who

14 For "White Snake." see "Bai niangzi yongzhen leifeng ta," in Feng Menglong, ed., Qingshi tongyan (Taibei: Ding wen shuju, 1974). Also see Menghua Guanzhu, Baishe zhuan qianhouji (The story of white snake) (Guangyi shuju; reprinted Beijing: Zhongguo shudian, 1988).

15 Wang Yuanjian, Dangfei (Beijing: Gongren chuban she. 1956).

16 Xiao Ping, "San yue xue," (Snow in March) from Jianguo yilai duanpian xiao shou xuan (Collection of short stories since 1949). vol. 3 (Shanghai: Shanghai wenyi chupanshe, 1980). 207-240.

Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/chapter-pdf/109884/9780822396840-008.pdf by NEW YORK UNIVERSITY user on 20 January 2018

Female Images and National Myth 133

saves "my" life and from under the guns of the enemy preserves the Party's property; the enemy retaliates and she is arrested and killed. When this event occurs in "my" spectacle, "my" narrative position in relation to the woman starts to change. She rises from the horizon of the narrative point of view into an elevated angel, and her image shifts from that of a common Party member and ordinary woman ("common" or ordinary because of her youth) into a communist saint and martyr. "Snow in March" undertakes a similar translation ofthe male/female, narrator/narrated relation. After her death, the male narrator who once was her leader has become her memorializer, the teller of her heroic tale, even her own surviving daughter's teacher.

The exchange of the male/female and narrator/narrated position can be read as a symbolic event. In it, the female changes from "my" (the narrator's) gendered, hierarchized "other" into "my" equal, or political mirror image. Although she has multiple identities (mother, wife, and Party member), the woman chooses to die a Communist Party member rather than to live as a woman and mother. In other words, she herself already seems to have denied her own gendered identity. The narrator, of course, who completes the heroine's image and who witnesses her as she sacrifices her woman self, actually destroys every chance facing and describing a woman, a gendered sexual "other." Instead, since "we" share the same identity, Party member, the identity of narrator/me and narrated/she is suddenly absolutely clear in the telling of the story's narrative. To an extent, the heroine's unsexed image is an empty, improved "I." It is empty because she is not a flesh-and-blood person but a political name, and it is improved because her name is realized in her Party membership and her position in relation to the Party is the very best, the most unquestionably correct one available-a position "I" and everybody should identify and eagerly maintain.

No doubt, while emphasizing the ungendered woman and making her a subject position with which "I" can identify, the male narrator also suppresses his own gender. Narration in the two stories displaces not only the gendered other but also the male/female relation itself. In this way, the male narrator strips his own subjectivity of its sexual difference and sublimates himself into a political subject construction. The process must be difficult, since we find the constant need for suppression of sex difference in socialist literature. I assume that this uneasiness is what stimulated the gradual development of the strong woman in literature, a figure that emerged out of the earlier ideal and into an image of authority and law, a representative of Party's rules and exemplar to the miseducated, abased, derogated male character.

The process of establishing the politically authoritarian female image is evident in "Li Xuangxuang xiao zhuan," a comical story about a

Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/chapter-pdf/109884/9780822396840-008.pdf by NEW YORK UNIVERSITY user on 20 January 2018

134 Meng Yue

"backward" husband, Sun, who, with the help of his "progressive" wife Li and the commune leadership, is able to change his world view.17 The story shows Li Xuangxuang to be her husband's superior in intelligence, political maturity, and decision-making ability. As the story begins, because he subscribes to the feudal sexist ideology and does not recognize the Party's supreme position, Sun fails to acknowledge his wife's authority. Their marital discord represents a political confrontation between the authority of the dominant male sex and the authority of the politically dominant power, or in other words between the "law of the father" and the law of the Party. Since in a marital relation a wife may suffer more than the husband when relations between the two are based on sexist principles, she is more likely to take an oppositional position on behalf of the Party. Interestingly enough, although the story initially does oppose sexist ideology in this way, it ends with the husband's growing awareness of the Party's authority. During the process of struggle, however, Li' s effort to establish "equality between men andwomen" turns out to be little more than a strategy of forcing her husband to obey political standards set by the state political apparatus. As soon as the husband acknowledges the Party's authority, embodied in his wife, his sexist discourse begins to sound comical and forgivable compared to his newly regulated social behavior.

The conflict between the law of the Party and the law of the father, or between the socialist and sexist standards of behavior, did not originate in a struggle against the derogation of women. Rather, it emerged out of the Party's desire to dominate all distracting forces, including sexism, since as a minor dictatorship, a local authority, the localized sexist tradition held the potential to splinter or complicate the Party's total control over society and ideology. The comical vision in which Sun gives up his old-fashioned sexist dreams illustrates in fact the Party's victory in the struggle to gain absolute authority. It shows us a mutual consent established between the Party and a male-dominant discourse, disciplined in the crucible of obedience to the Party, a consent which simply replaced the demand for women's equality.

The image of the dominant female made it possible for Chinese socialist narrative to create a special situation for the reconstruction of (male) subjectivity. To some extent, the female image as authority and censor replaced the symbolic father in the Lacanian structure of subjectiv- ity. This reconstructive situation for subjectivity is dramatized in several yangbanxi such as "Longjiang song" and "Duojuanshan." The operas share the same basic structure of the communist woman leader who helps a misguided male character to find correct beliefs. The communist woman sermonizes, criticizes and lectures a male character whom some hidden enemy has placed under its evil control and who is thus prone to committing

17 Li Zhun, "Li Shuangshuang xiao zhuan" from Li Shuangshuang xiao zhuan (The story ofLi Shuangshuang) (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1977),322-366.

Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/chapter-pdf/109884/9780822396840-008.pdf by NEW YORK UNIVERSITY user on 20 January 2018

Female Images and National Myth 135

political errors and finally awakens him to political rectitude. In this narrative, the infantilized male character can always be found in a politi- cized Lacanian moment of presubjectivity. He can never differentiate himself from the political environment, from others and enemies, and he does not know which political category he should identify with or belong to. This suggests a moment similar to the Lacanian pre-oedipal stage, when the infant is not yet aware which sex it will maintain. An important task of the Chinese socialist narrative often lies in bringing the bewildered male character out of this situation and relocating him into a symbolic political order, where he can become a new political subject.

In other words, the superior-man narrative is supposed to reconstruct a male sUbjectivity. To do so and also to meet the requirements of the opera genre, which has many melodies for the female voice but a rather limited number of available roles, the female image makes itself available as the political adult, responsible for the care of the male political infant. In the given intersubjective situation, it is she who provides every condition for the subject's reconstruction. When she speaks the language of the Party, she imposes the name upon the male political infant. When she uncovers and criticizes his mistakes, she introduces the Party's law. Her very existence turns out to be a reflection of the great Other-the Party itself. In this way a new triangle of subjecti vity appears on the stage, where the allegorical drama unfolds and where it ends in the male character's finally being transferred into the Party-centric symbolic order.

Once again there is a desexualizing effect in this reconstruction of subjectivity. Not only is transcendental signifying power of the phallus neutralized, but sexual and gender differences are also excised. The putative female image on the stage actually indicates neither sex. "She" has neither gender identities (mother, wife, lover, etc.), nor body, nor a gender- based perspective. Once he accepts the new triangle of subjectivity, the male political infant is henceforth prevented from becoming a sexual subject, or should I say, he must pay the price of his sexuality to secure a Party-determined subject position. This desexualizing and politicizing of subjectivity, of course, does not mean anything like the existence of woman-dominant discourse, nor does it prove that sexist ideology has disappeared in Chinese literature. On the contrary, although it left no room for male desire or subjectivity, the discourse itself is still a masculinist one. Both its narrative focus and its implied reader-audience do not in any way include women as a gender. There is only one respect in which socialist narratives are different from previously male-dominant discourse. The topic of discourse is no longer how to dominate women but rather how to subject oneself in every possible way to the Party and to the Party's discourse. The unique female images employed in socialist narrative were used to create the dominated men of contemporary Chinese literature and ideology.

Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/chapter-pdf/109884/9780822396840-008.pdf by NEW YORK UNIVERSITY user on 20 January 2018

136 Meng Yue

So my final point concerns the paranoic nature of the whole ideology and state machine. Years after the revolution, the most important effort of cultural production to achieve ideologic control and eliminate distracting difference has achieved only one thing: the survival of a nation totally subordinating itself to the state, in economy, social life, ideology, culture, and personal life. The impulse and its methods are understandable; it is nevertheless paranoid in nature, or at the very least schizophrenic. In this statist totality there were sexes without bodies, classes without people or substance, desire without objects, and production in which nothing ever got produced. Absent enemies loomed, threatening "us" defined only in terms of the slave or the subject. Such paranoia gains its symbolic satisfaction at an extremely high price: it survives and continues because it inflicts on the nation violence, disruptive movements, famines, prison, and blood.

Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/chapter-pdf/109884/9780822396840-008.pdf by NEW YORK UNIVERSITY user on 20 January 2018