Figuring Modernity:
The New Woman and the Modern Girl in Republican China
Sarah E. Stevens
Abstract
This paper examines the cultural figures of the New Woman and the Modern Girl in Republican China (1911-1949). In addition to reflecting the anxieties arising from a changing gender ideology, these contending images reveal anxieties associated with the concept of modernity and the modern nation project. The New Woman represents a positive view of linear modernity and hopes for a strong future China. The Modern Girl manifests in two distinct ways: as a self-absorbed woman searching for subjectivity and as a dangerous femme fatale who devours the urban male. Both of these manifestations reveal deep anxieties over the alienation and loss that accompany modernity. Literary works by Ding Ling, Mao Dun, Shi Zhecun, and others reveal that the figures of the New Woman and the Modern Girl cross political and canonical lines. They can best be distinguished by their use in depicting the hopes, fears, pleasures, and dangers of modernity.
Keywords
China / gender / literature / Modern Girl / modernity / New Woman / subjectivity
During the first few decades of the twentieth century, contending groups of Chinese intellectuals used the "woman question" as a keyhole through which to address issues of modernity and the nation. Because the process of national invention and the struggle to create a new gender ideology occurred simultaneously in China, the tension between contending ideals of womanhood reveals not only the anxieties associated with changing roles for women, but also the anxieties associated with modernity and the modern nation. Social conservatives supported a cultural ideal of womanhood that accorded with the more traditional ideology of liangqi xianmu (good wife, wise mother). In its modern incarnation, such a notion emphasized women's role as mothers of citizens, much like the eugenic ideal of the jianquan (flawless) women who contributed proper genetics and gestation to children. 1 This paper will examine two distinct images of women found in the Republican decades: the figure of the xin nüxing (New Woman) and the figure of the modeng gou'er (Modern Girl). Both of these archetypes were widespread in literature, film, and pictorial magazines and both were posited in opposition to conservative ideals such as those endorsed by good wife, wise mother rhetoric. At the same time, these two images reflect opposite views of modernity. Taken together, the figures of the New Woman and the Modern Girl reveal tension in ideas [End Page 82] about the modern, the urban, and the desirable during the interwar period in China. In the figures of the New Woman and the Modern Girl, contradictory views of women's bodies parallel contradictory views of modernity itself. As New Women, women stand for the nation and its quest for modernity—modernity understood as an admirable state of civilization, strength, and progress. At the same time, as Modern Girls, women are used to represent fears for the modern nation and the drawbacks of modernity—modernity understood as a state of danger, individual alienation, and cultural loss.
Within this representational schematic, the New Woman stands as a distinct archetype, easily distinguished from the Modern Girl. Often associated with leftist and progressive intellectuals, the New Woman is equated with the positive aspects of modernity. As such, she is educated, political, and intensely nationalistic. Cultural reflections of the New Woman archetype highlight the transformation of a backwards or bourgeois woman into a New Woman, thus representing the necessary transformation of the Chinese nation. In direct opposition to the New Woman, the Modern Girl reveals disillusionment with the promises of modernity. Elusive, fragmented, and cosmopolitan, she is depicted in two disparate manners. The Modern Girl appears as the primary voice in (female-authored) works that explore female subjectivity. In this guise, the Modern Girl expresses the struggle for women to find their voices in a new and changing world. She also appears in works by so-called decadent writers like the xin ganjue pai (New Perceptionists), who objectify the Modern Girl as a femme fatale or flâneuse. In this guise, the Modern Girl expresses male disillusionment with modernity, fears of female subjectivity, and fears of the alienation that accompanies the urban, cosmopolitan world. Regardless of general tendencies for leftist writers to portray the New Woman and for so-called decadent writers to use the Modern Girl, depictions of these two archetypes cross ideological lines and represent fundamental anxieties over modernity. Therefore, the New Woman and the Modern Girl can be distinguished most easily by examining the ways in which the two figures interface with ideas about modernity.
The Republican era (1911-1949) was a period of great social change in China. Officially book-ended by the fall of the imperial system and the founding of the People's Republic of China, the Republican decades saw tumultuous politics, with the Nationalist government waxing and waning in power, the Communist Party growing in importance, warlords wielding power in peripheral areas, and Japan invading China in 1937. The interwar decades were a time when Chinese intellectuals saw China being treated as a second-class nation. At the end of World War I, the Treaty of Versailles ceded former German holdings in China to Japan, instead of returning the territories to China itself, even though China had sent troops to fight with the Allies in Europe. Such unfair treatment sparked [End Page 83] a widespread intellectual uprising known as the May Fourth Movement. Focusing on the need for national strength and modernization, this movement also encompassed widespread cultural and literary innovation. The interwar period ended early in China with yet another trauma, Japan's invasion of coastal China in 1937.
The Republican decades of the 1920s and 1930s can be described as "semicolonial" and "scientistic." Although China was technically an independent nation, portions of China were under foreign control throughout the first half of the twentieth century. In addition, the nation struggled with colonial attitudes as it confronted the seeming disparity between China and the West. China was thus caught between discursively admiring the West and dealing with the material reality of colonial domination by foreign powers. It is this uneasy bifurcation that leads critics such as Shu-mei Shih to discuss China in terms of semicolonialism (1996, 936). Such a political backdrop led to differing articulations of nationalism and to a variety of responses to Western products, philosophies, and technologies. Within this range of viewpoints, Western science was almost universally applauded as a possible foundation block for modern China. Since, at times, references to Western science during this period have little relationship to "real" Western thought or to actual science, Republican intellectual discourse is best described as "scientistic," not necessarily "scientific" (Dikötter 1992, 128).
During these decades, urban centers were home to a new type of cosmopolitanism that saw the rise of a public sphere and the mass media. In places such as Shanghai, young people congregated around Western-style cinemas, dance halls, and coffee shops. Pictorial magazines such as Liangyou (The Young Companion) and LinLoon huabao (LinLoon Magazine) sold a modern lifestyle that consisted of the latest fashions, make-up, Western brand-name products, Hollywood and Chinese movie stars, and all things urban. At the same time, intellectual discourse found a voice in the rising mass media, as journals, magazines, newspapers, and books were published widely and relatively cheaply for the first time. These cultural products were important public arenas for the display and codification of new body cultures—high heels, new hairstyles, close-cut gowns, Western-style bras, swimming and other new forms of body work. At the same time, representations of women gave rise to two distinct archetypes: the New Woman and the Modern Girl. [End Page 84]
Terms and Derivations: Nüxing, Xin Nüxing, Modeng Gou'er
The term nüxing (literally female sex) came into use during the 1920s, along with the May Fourth birth of colloquial language and new definitions of literature as social criticism (Barlow 1991). Tani Barlow argues that, before this time, women were described by the relational term funü, emphasizing familial and gender roles rather than biological sex. 2 During the May Fourth era of the late 1910s and early 1920s, intellectuals constructed a theory of "new literature," in which writing was associated with realism, with the search for modern subjectivity, and with a call for the Chinese people to resolve the national crisis. The term nüxing came into use within this larger context. Beginning in the 1920s,
Nüxing operated as one-half of the Western, exclusionary, male/female binary. . . . Nüxing and its correlate nanxing, or male sex, acted as a magnet, attracting around its universal, sexological, scientistic core a psychologized personal identity that allowed its possessor to act as the fulcrum for upending Confucianism and all received categories. . . . In particular, colloquial fiction established sex as the core of an oppositional personal identity and woman as a sexological category.
(141)
Barlow argues that the formation of this oppositional term involved the adoption of a universal, scientistic, personal identity based on biological attributes rather than familial or gender roles. This construction also allowed "woman" to become the Other of "man" in a Westernized binary. New fiction was a crucial site for the establishment of this sex-based identity and thus played a key role in shaping the identity of nüxing. The meaning of the term xin nüxing (New Woman or, less commonly, xin nüzi) is closely conjoined with these implications of nüxing and has been the most widely discussed cultural construction within this larger nüxing discourse.
Less common than New Woman, the term Modern Girl also appeared in literary criticism. Interestingly, the term most commonly appeared in English, even within Chinese texts. The Chinese term modeng gou'er was a seldom-seen transliteration (Liu 1995, 366). The term modeng nüxing (modern woman), as well as another translation of modeng guniang (Modern Girl), were also used in 1930s China (Harris 1995, 72). In Japan, the transliterated term appeared as modan garu or moga, for short. In China, the predominant usage of the English words Modern Girl highlights the cosmopolitan nature of this female archetype. The inclusion of English within a Chinese text was a new feature in the early twentieth century and served as an immediate visual marker of a text's connection to modernity. [End Page 85]
Defining Archetypes: The New Woman and the Modern Girl
My use of the two terms New Woman and Modern Girl will not necessarily follow the uses of these two terms in the literary products themselves. Sometimes, a character might be described in the text or in criticism as a New Woman when, in fact, she most closely abides by the archetypal characteristics of the Modern Girl. In fact, current literary studies often conflate the figures of the Modern Girl and the New Woman. For instance, one critical description of the Modern Girl states:
In stories, essays, films, and cultural debates, modernity made a special appearance as the "modern girl" (often written in English) to which there was no equivalent "modern boy." The Modern Girl had easily identifiable physical characteristics, such as short hair and stylish, modern clothes. She was an urban woman, and often one who attended school to prepare for a career and sometimes immersed herself in love affairs or later worked for social justice. The modern girl had a deep emotional interior, sought meaning from her life, struggled against inequality, and valued her intellect. She paid attention to modern technologies such as hygiene and nutrition and took care of her personal appearance. The modern girl could be fraught with contradictions: looking for love but scorning men, valuing social change but pursuing trivialities.
(Larson 1998, 138)
Like many other examples in Western and Chinese scholarship, this description actually combines the characteristics of the New Woman and the Modern Girl. A failure to distinguish the two figures neglects the ways in which women's bodies were used to enact the struggle between conflicting aspects of modernity. The contrasts between the figures of the New Woman and the Modern Girl illustrate the tensions inherent within the very construction of modernity itself. In addition, recognition of the distinct figure of the Modern Girl can illustrate the fears of female subjectivity that permeated (male-authored) literary texts during the interwar period.
The New Woman and the Modern Girl do share certain physical characteristics, highlighted by the passage above. The construction of the overarching category nüxing (including both the New Woman and the Modern Girl) included signifiers such as "short hair and stylish, modern clothes" and an attention to "modern technologies such as hygiene and nutrition." 3 Physical appearance alone cannot be used to distinguish between the New Woman and the Modern Girl. Instead, the two characters can only be distinguished by a close investigation of their functions within the literary text. The use of the New Woman is always linked to the positive aspects of modernity. She symbolizes the vision of a future strong nation and her character highlights the revolutionary qualities of [End Page 86] the modern nüxing. As such, though the New Woman sometimes deals with the search for female subjectivity, she does so only against the ever-present backdrop of the nation and socially progressive ideals.
In contrast, the use of the Modern Girl highlights the problems associated with modernity and the search for female subjectivity. This aspect of her character appears in several different ways. The Modern Girl is sometimes used by (female) authors to explore the conflicts and fears of the modern woman struggling against society and tradition, lost in the midst of a changing culture. The Modern Girl is also used to symbolize the alienation and fears associated with the new urban lifestyle. In this case, she appears in the guise of a femme fatale who expresses (male) fears of the independent female subject.
The concept of the New Woman was widespread in the United States, Europe, and Japan during the later 1800s. In these nations, the New Woman signified educated, politically aware women who often worked for women's rights agendas (Harris 1995, 64-6; Sato 1993, 266; Silverberg 1991, 248). As Carolyn Kitch (2001) explores in her work on images of women in the American mass media, the New Woman in the United States represented new social, political, and economic possibilities for women. At the same time, although the New Woman was involved in public life, she was often depicted in the home, revealing continuity between the New Woman and the Victorian idea of domestic True Womanhood.
In China, the New Woman of the late nineteenth century was a liminal figure, not fully articulated until well into the twentieth century (Ying 2000). May Fourth intellectual Hu Shi used the word to describe independent Western women in 1918, saying,
"new woman" is a new word, and it designates a new kind of woman, who is extremely intense in her speech, who tends towards extremism in her actions, who doesn't believe in religion or adhere to rules of conduct, yet who is an extremely good thinker and has extremely high morals.
(qtd. in Harris 1995, 64)
Groundbreaking works like Cai Chusheng's 1935 silent film Xin nüxing (The New Woman) further clarified the need for the Chinese New Woman to have a "social conscience in the form of proletarian politics" (Harris 1995, 65).
The New Woman is thus recognizable because of her revolutionary nature, her devotion to the larger cause of nationalism, and the fact that her search to find self-identity is inevitably bracketed within the larger nationalistic struggle. Markers of the New Woman include her involvement in the leftist political struggle and her pursuit of a Western-style education. Her pursuit of "new love" emphasizes the relationship between freely chosen marriage and social improvement, rather than dwelling on [End Page 87] issues of personal fulfillment or sexuality. She evinces a central dedication to national struggle and the pursuit of modernity—modernity understood as a linear progression towards a strong and bright China. The New Woman is usually the central female figure in leftist and realist writings, which largely make up our received canon of modern Chinese literature. As such, the New Woman has long been treated in Chinese and Western scholarship as the most crucial image of women in the 1920s and 1930s. Indeed, her appearance is quite important and marks an era in which women were envisioned to be equal political participants and given public roles as citizens in a new China. Since she is a canonical figure, the New Woman is the subject of considerable scholarship. The Modern Girl, on the other hand, occupies largely marginalized texts and has only recently been acknowledged as an important figure. Several contradictory images of the Modern Girl appear in literature and criticism and this paper will attempt to show how these images can be reconciled into one coherent archetype. Before proceeding to examine the Modern Girl, I will give one example of a literary New Woman: Meilin in Ding Ling's "Shanghai, Spring 1930" ([1930] 1989b).
"Shanghai, Spring 1930" was written as Ding Ling began to emphasize class and social relationships within her literary works. One of the only canonical women writers in modern Chinese literature, Ding Ling's career followed a distinct path, leading from early stories exploring female subjectivity and sexuality to later works emphasizing communist beliefs about class and revolutionary struggle. Her early stories, focusing on the modern lifestyle of young women, met with great critical acclaim within the parameters of the May Fourth tradition. In the early 1930s, after Ding Ling joined the Communist Party, her writing underwent a radical change and became unabashedly political (and non-gendered in the process). After the Nationalists killed her husband and she fled from captivity to the Communist base in Yan'an, Ding Ling followed Mao Zedong's dictum to emphasize politics, peasants, and the Party. Her earlier works were then criticized by the Party as examples of bourgeois, self-absorbed writing that neglected the central issue of nationalism. Those early works were considered too autobiographical, too personal, and therefore somehow shameful. Throughout the rest of her career, Ding Ling rose and fell in political favor. Much of the criticism she received was directed at her personal life, her sexuality, her relationships, and her identity as a woman. Ding Ling's story, "Shanghai, Spring 1930," belongs to this latter category of works and consists of two parts, only loosely connected to each other. "Part One" tells the story of male revolutionary Ruoquan, his bourgeois writer friend Zibin, and Zibin's lover Meilin. Central to the story is Meilin's transformation into a New Woman. At the beginning of the story, Meilin is a passive, elitist woman who has "simple charm and [End Page 88] delicate beauty" and "an aura of tranquility derived from never having had to worry" (118). Meilin's personality and taste is completely shaped by the influence of her older lover, who proudly keeps her in an expensive lifestyle. Through contact with Ruoquan and his invigorating ideas about political and class struggle, Meilin begins to realize that she is dissatisfied with her life. Reflecting on her relationship with Zibin, Meilin realizes that she has "worshipped him" to the point of "throw[ing] over everything for love" (145-6). By the end of the story, with Ruoquan's revolutionary example in front of her, she realizes that her life is frivolous and she needs a radical change in focus. Meilin "wanted to be with the masses, to try to understand society, and to work for it" (133). Towards this aim, she joins the Communist Party, finds immediate comfort in the presence of her new comrades, and begins to volunteer her time at the Party office. The story ends with Meilin participating in a mass May Day movement, while Zibin—left behind physically, intellectually, and politically—laments: "Oh, such a woman, so gentle and soft. Now she too had abandoned him to follow the masses" (138).
Meilin is a perfect example of the New Woman archetype. No longer satisfied with being an adored and adorned young woman, she has discovered the key to self-fulfillment in a larger political cause. She represents the optimism associated with belief in the linear process of modern nation building. Such an example of the New Woman contrasts directly with the depiction of Modern Girls such as Miss Sophia, found in one of Ding Ling's earlier works, "Miss Sophia's Diary" ([1927] 1989a).
Existing in tension with the New Woman, the Modern Girl is a cosmopolitan figure who celebrates the superficial aspects of modern life, while at the same time symbolizing the alienation of modernity. Sophisticated and elusive, the Modern Girl appears in two main guises. In some texts, the Modern Girl appears as a female character actively seeking love, romance, and subjectivity. In other texts, the Modern Girl appears as a sinister and dangerous figure—a distant siren, luring the unwary and ill-prepared male subject to his ultimate demise. These two sides of the Modern Girl are not contradictory. Instead, it is in the dualistic nature of the Modern Girl that her role in expressing modern anxieties is most clear.
My use of the term Modern Girl thus encompasses the Modern Girl discussed by Republican literary critics and also new uses of the terms femme fatale and flâneuse in Western scholarship. All Modern Girls are ultimately concerned with the alienation of the modern subject and the search for self-identity within a rapidly changing society. This broader understanding of the term Modern Girl more fully reflects the tensions within ideas of the modern, the national, and the cosmopolitan during the Republican era. [End Page 89]
The Modern Girl: Praying Mantis or Mirror-Gazer?
The Chinese Modern Girl can be related to global female archetypes that frequented the early twentieth century. In the United States, the impact of the domestic science movement, the ideal of companionate marriage, and the beginnings of the "feminine mystique" in the 1920s existed alongside the disappearance of the New Woman and her political promise (Kitch 2001, 8-12). This disappearance was marked by a shift towards images of women as beautiful yet dangerous, tempting yet cruel. Images of the New Woman were replaced by images of the beautiful, dangerous, woman-consumer—images that can be more closely related to China's Modern Girl. These images include the well-known flapper as well as the "Gibson Girl," an upper-class status symbol portrayed as an enigma in constant conflict with men (41-4). Gibson's famous illustrations included women examining tiny men under microscopes, women flying men attached to long strings like kites, and powerful women juggling small male figures.
The Japanese modan garu, or moga, shared many characteristics with the Gibson Girl. Prevalent in the 1920s, the modan garu existed as a "commodified cultural construct" with a distinctive body culture (including short hair and long, straight legs) and a character that was at the same time aggressive, erotic, and anarchistic (Silverberg 1991, 240-3). In opposition to the cerebral Japanese New Woman, the Modern Girl reflected changes in daily life and urban culture during the interwar period. Symbolizing the modernism phenomenon, the Modern Girl in both China and Japan was intimately related to the rising popularity of mass women's magazines, Hollywood movies, and the most superficial aspects of modernity. The above characteristics of the Gibson Girl and the modan garu resonate with depictions of China's Modern Girl in the guise of a femme fatale. In fact, the origin of the femme fatale side of the Modern Girl can be traced back to Franco-Japanese images such as those found in the works of Paul Morand, Gustave Flaubert, Pierre Lot, and Tanizaki Jun'ichiro (Shih 1996, 947-8). A 1928 issue of the Japanese journal Shincho contained a roundtable discussion of the modan garu that agreed on the following characteristics: 1) she is not hysterical, 2) she uses direct language, 3) she has a direct and aggressive sexuality, 4) she scoffs at the idea of chastity (she changes men like she changes shirts), 5) she can be poor, since clothes are inexpensive, 6) she is liberated from ties of class and gender, 7) she is an anarchist, 8) she accosts men when she needs train fare, 9) she has freedom of expression (gained from watching movies), and 10) compared to her, the modan boi (modern boy) is insignificant (qtd. in Silverberg 1991, 250). [End Page 90]
How do these global images of the Modern Girl compare to the Chinese construction of the archetype? One side of the Chinese Modern Girl—the femme fatale or praying mantis side—is closely related to the flapper, the Gibson Girl, and the moga. However, China's Modern Girl is distinct from Western and Japanese images because she also manifests as a mirror-gazing woman seeking to find herself—her subjectivity, her sexuality, her independence—within the confusion of a changing modern world. Both manifestations of the Modern Girl, both the praying mantis and the mirror-gazer, reflect the potential alienation of the modern individual, positing fears of modernity on the bodies of literary female subjects and objects.
In 1931, literary critic Qian Qianwu aptly described the mirror-gazing Modern Girl in an article claiming that "Ding Ling is the most skillful at introducing the character of the Modern Girl (Qian [1931] 1982, 226; here and throughout this section, italicized words appeared in English in the original). He specifically comments on the short story "Miss Sophia's Diary" and claims that Ding Ling has created a new type of female character. According to Qian, the Modern Girl is a jindai nüzi (contemporary woman) who is city-centered and has all the characteristics of the shijimode bingtai (fin-de-siècle malaise). He identifies six characteristics of the Modern Girl. She is 1) very selfish; 2) overly emotional and easily moved to laughter or tears; 3) often tired, frustrated, and made pessimistic by the people and situations surrounding her; 4) depressed in activities; 5) mired in obsessive and unproductive thinking; 6) suspicious, irritated, and lost in a "mystical delirium" (227). Additionally, Qian Qianwu goes on to state that the Modern Girl seeks bodily pleasures. In depictions of this mirror-gazing Modern Girl, romantic love is used as a trope for personal liberation. Note that this use of love is in direct contrast to love in the world of the New Woman, where romantic love must always be rejected in pursuit of political liberation.
In creating the larger critical category of the Modern Girl, the above descriptions must be merged. Both the praying mantis and the mirror-gazer are actually the same female archetype viewed from two opposite perspectives. All these characters must be recognized as aspects of the same Modern Girl. When their central sameness is recognized, the crucial role of this archetype in revealing contemporary anxieties about modernity can be seen clearly. The Modern Girl is experiencing a crisis in subjectivity and self-identity, aptly described by Qian Qianwu above. Thus, when she appears as the subject of a literary work, the reader experiences her mirror gazing: her obsessive self-oriented thinking, her emotionality, and her confusion over modern life. When the Modern Girl appears as an object within a literary work, however, she manifests herself externally as a femme fatale who preys upon the urban man. [End Page 91]
The femme fatale is well described by Heinrich Freuhauf in his work on urban exoticism. Fruehauf describes the prominent role of the femme fatale as follows:
She is the twilight figure who evades clear-cut boundaries. Strong, self-confident, and far more adaptable than her male counterparts, she alone is capable of mastering the dangerous game of the urban labyrinth. Although this feature makes her enviable even in the most moralizing portrait, she almost always remains a cryptic and unscrupulous being.
(1993, 160)
The femme fatale is often portrayed by New Perceptionists as a praying mantis devouring the befuddled urban man. Writers like Liu Na'ou and Ye Lingfeng appeal to this praying mantis image in their depictions of the fetishized Modern Girl's mouth. Liu Na'ou's descriptions of the mouth as both edible (like a cherry or pomegranate) and deadly indicate a simultaneous desire for and fear of the Modern Girl (Lee 1999, 194-6). Elsewhere, Liu Na'ou states "this girl loves me as if she could swallow me in one mouthful" (qtd. in Lee 1999, 196). In Ye Lingfeng's Unfinished Confession, the narrator echoes these oral metaphors in his fixation on a Modern Girl's mouth, compared to "two protruding scarlet petals" ([1934] 1988, 346). When the male offers the Modern Girl a cigarette, she leans over and takes it between her scarlet lips: "'I'd rather be a cigarette!' I could not help saying that while inserting the cigarette between her lips" (345-6; trans. in Zhang 1996, 219). In addition to the clear sexual imagery of the phallic cigarette penetrating the lips, this passage reveals something about the allure of being devoured.
Shu-mei Shih claims that works by Liu Na'ou and other New Perceptionists "saw the Westernized 'Modern Girl' as a desirable embodiment of anti-patriarchal, autonomous, urban, and hybrid modernity" (1996, 935). This explanation of the Modern Girl as a wholly desirable symbol of modernity is misleading. In addition to symbolizing the lure and desirability of the cosmopolitan lifestyle, the Modern Girl represents deep-rooted fears of modernity. In particular, the Modern Girl reveals (male) fears of women liberated by modernity and seeking to become the subject of their own lives. The Modern Girl also demonstrates (male) fears of the loss of individuality experienced in the increasingly cosmopolitan, industrialized, and urban landscape of modernity.
It is in the Modern Girl's representation of these male fears that the two sides of her character—as an introspective female subject searching for her identity and as a dangerously desirable femme fatale—are most clearly recognizable. Revealed from the first side, the Modern Girl is preoccupied with self-expression, both in terms of sexuality and subjectivity. Written from the opposite side, the Modern Girl is depicted from the point of view of the men who are seeking to conquer her—and who, in so doing, are attempting to gain or regain a sense of control, masculinity, and male subjecthood within the context of modern alienation. [End Page 92]
An examination of Ding Ling's Miss Sophia and the femme fatale in Liu Na'ou's "Two Men out of Time" ([1929] 1990) reveals that these superficially different characters in actuality are but two sides of the same modern-girl coin. In Ding Ling's classic story "Miss Sophia's Diary," Sophia is a quintessentially modern woman struggling between self-loathing and self-love, between traditional expectations and modern freedom. The story is told through diary entries that clearly reveal her self-absorption. Confined by tuberculosis and forced into long periods of introspection, Sophia narrates her thoughts, feelings, and encounters with various friends and visitors. One visitor, Weidi, is a puppy-like admirer who dotes on Sophia, to her immense irritation. In turn, Sophia spends a great deal of time dwelling on thoughts of Ling Jishi, another male visitor who is both elusively handsome and somehow repugnant. The centrality of the quest for self-identity in Sophia's story is well symbolized by both her incessant diary writing and her narcissistic mirror gazing (Liu 1991, 31-2).
Sophia's diary reveals her bouts of self-love and self-loathing. To the reader, she is clearly preoccupied with issues of subjecthood, vacillating between taking pleasure in expressing herself and feeling pressured to conform to social norms. These qualities mark Sophia as a Modern Girl in the sense that Qian Qianwu notes—selfish, emotional, frustrated, depressed, obsessive, lost in a mystical delirium, and pursuing bodily pleasures in order to forget her anxiety. However, if the reader were not privy to Sophia's diary and had only external knowledge of her character, Sophia would actually appear as a so-called femme fatale. For example, if Weidi were relating Sophia's story, his account would center on incidents like the following diary entries:
Weidi came over after lunch. The familiar hurried sound of his leather shoes carried all the way from the other end of the corridor and comforted me, as though I'd suddenly been released from a suffocating room. But I couldn't show it. So when he came in, I simply glanced silently at him. Weidi thought I was peeved again. He clasped my hands tightly and cried, "Sister, Elder Sister!" over and over.
(Ding 1989a, 51)
When this honest, open man [Weidi] was here, I used all the cruelty of my nature to make him suffer.
(54)
I told Weidi about my new "philosophy of life." And, true to form, he did the only thing instinct gives him leave to do—he burst into tears. I watched impassively as his eyes turned red and he dried them with his hands. Then I taunted him with a cruel running commentary on his little crying jag.
(62)
Sophia plays with Weidi's emotions ruthlessly, torturing him with the power of his love for her. Only the reader is privy to her remorse and self-hatred after such episodes: "[O]nce he'd left, there was nothing I wanted more than to snatch him back and plead with him: 'I know I was wrong. Don't love a woman so undeserving of your affection as I am'" [End Page 93] (54). Sophia's diary entries make her motivations clear. She torments Weidi out of deep-seated feelings of self-hatred, confusion, and disgust for her life. To Weidi, however, she must appear to be one of those praying-mantis women, forever laughing and scorning capture, darting about in the modern world of love and romance while her male admirers are rooted to the ground in despair. 4
In the same way, the overt actions of femme fatales such as those found in the works of New Perceptionists like Liu Na'ou, Shi Zhecun, and Mu Shiying reveal but one side of the complete Modern Girl. In Liu Na'ou's "Two Men out of Time" two urbanites known only as H and T vie for the attention of an unnamed woman, moving from one cosmopolitan cityscape to another. This love triangle is further complicated when the woman deserts both men for yet a third date. H and T believe that the unnamed woman of their desire is cruel, toying with their affection, using and abandoning men without care, viewing them to be as easily interchanged as letters of the alphabet. If readers of "Two Men out of Time" were able to enter into the subjectivity of the female character, however, they might find an interior monologue very similar to that of Miss Sophia. Outside viewers see the woman as uncaring (or even malicious in her contempt for the men who pursue her). In the same way, Miss Sophia often appears cruel and vengeful to her admirer Weidi. The difference between these two figures is merely one of perspective. Ding Ling's Modern Girl displays her subjectivity and thus reveals her personal battles with modernity and the concept of self. Liu Na'ou's Modern Girl is revealed from the perspective of male characters who view her as an object that symbolizes their own despair. Unable to understand the subjectivity displayed by the so-called femme fatale, the male characters project their frustrations, fears, and anger onto the woman. The dual images of the Modern Girl—the obsessive, emotional woman and the hardened, praying mantis—are thus reconciled into one coherent female archetype, differing only because of the perspective granted the reader (and perhaps the writer).
Sex and the City
One discursive link between women and modernity is forged by the frequent placement of female literary characters within the urban landscape—the quintessential site of modernity. Symbolizing both the city's dangers and its pleasures, nüxing is usually an urban woman. Specifically, the New Woman is often geographically located in the city, while the Modern Girl is actually defined by her ambiguous relationship to urban, modern life. Examination of several New Women and Modern Girls from literary works of this time shows that both figures are clearly linked to an [End Page 94] urbanized female ideal. At the same time, the relationship between each archetype and the city reveals some of the tensions surrounding ideas of modernity.
In fiction centering on the New Woman, the city is typically a positive background for the New Woman's evolution, as she journeys towards political activism. Revolutionary fiction of the 1920s and 1930s projected hopes for a strong and modern China onto the urban scene. Therefore, in works such as Ding Ling's "Shanghai, Spring 1930, Part One," discussed above, the city of Shanghai has a political life of its own, which contributes to Meilin's transformation into a New Woman. The city is imagined as a bustling arena of political discourse, leftist organizations, and powerful displays of revolutionary fervor, such as the march in which Meilin participates at the story's conclusion. Mao Dun's novel Rainbow ([1941] 1992) tracks the conversion of female protagonist Mei from a pleasure-seeking, confused Modern Girl to a committed revolutionary New Woman. This journey is paralleled by her physical movement from the countryside to the city, the final site of her maturity into political activism. In this way, depictions of the urbanized New Woman glorify the possibilities of modernity for transforming the nation. In contrast, the relationship of the Modern Girl to the city is quite complicated. The Modern Girl is quintessentially a cosmopolitan, urbanized figure of male desire. At the same time, however, because of the inability of male characters to understand her inner subjectivity, the Modern Girl also becomes a figure who represents the dangers of modernity, partially by representing the dangers of the city.
The use of the Modern Girl to represent these urban dangers can be seen clearly in such disparate texts as Mao Dun's Midnight ([1933] 1957) and Mu Shiying's short story "Craven 'A'" ([1933] 1990). Mao Dun's novel Midnight was first published in 1933 and has been highly regarded by both Chinese and Western literary critics as one of the greatest examples of realist fiction in modern Chinese literature. Coming from a leftist political perspective, Mao Dun was a vocal proponent of women's liberation and an active participant in debates over the woman question. Midnight is intricately concerned with questions of Chinese nationalism and the conflicts between modernity and tradition. As such, the reader might expect to find the figure of the New Woman frequenting the pages of Midnight. Indeed, some characters within the text can be appropriately labeled New Women. However, like the New Perceptionists, Mao Dun also reveals conflicting views of modernity, partly through his depiction of the Modern Girl.
Midnight is full of images of Modern Girls who illustrate the dangers of the sexualized, urban woman. In the first chapter, the dangers presented by the Modern Girl are made clear as Wu, the old grandfather from the country, first enters the city of Shanghai. Mao Dun sets the scene for Old [End Page 95] Mr. Wu's arrival with a paragraph that mimics the flow of Wu's visual impressions of the city. In a panoramic description, the reader's attention moves from objects of nature (the sun and the river) to the method of entering the city (the riverboats) to the city itself, Shanghai, making its grand entrance.
Under a sunset-mottled sky, the towering framework of Garden bridge was mantled in a gathering mist. Whenever a tram passed over the bridge, the overhead cable suspended below the top of the steel frame threw off bright, greenish sparks. Looking east, one could see the warehouses on the waterfront of Pootung like huge monsters crouching in the gloom, their lights twinkling like countless tiny eyes. To the west, one saw with a shock of wonder on the roof of a building a gigantic neon sign in flaming red and phosphorescent green: LIGHT, HEAT, POWER.
(9)
The city is introduced with images of steel, warehouses, and tall buildings, under the blazing sign of LIGHT, HEAT, and POWER. The stress on brilliant lights and colors—sparks off the cable car, neon signs on a building—presents a clear contrast to the pastoral image of the sunset-mottled sky. Shanghai is LIGHT, HEAT, and POWER. As quickly becomes evident, Shanghai is also SEX—or perhaps, first and foremost SEX. It is Shanghai's relentless SEX, exhibited by the Modern Girl, which overwhelms Old Mr. Wu.
An old-fashioned newcomer to the city, Old Mr. Wu finds many aspects of Shanghai alarming: "Good Heavens! The towering skyscrapers, their countless lighted windows gleaming like the eyes of devils, seemed to be rushing down on him like an avalanche at one moment and vanishing at the next" (15). Although these urban cityscapes confuse Wu, he becomes truly distressed only after the sight of a Modern Girl. In order to appreciate fully the sight and effect of these images of the Modern Girl, I will quote two passages at length. As Wu rides in the car with his family, he is assaulted by images of modernity and SEX:
All this talk about fashion acted like a needle on the atrophied nerves of the old man. His heart fluttered, and his eyes fell instinctively upon [his daughter] Fu-fang and he saw now for the first time how she was decked out. Though it was still only May, the weather was unusually warm and she was already in the lightest of summer clothing. Her vital young body was sheathed in close-fitting light-blue chiffon, her full, firm breasts jutting out prominently, her snowy forearms bared. Old Mr. Wu felt his heart constricting with disgust and quickly averted his eyes, which, however, fell straight away upon a half-naked young woman sitting up in a rickshaw, fashionably dressed in a transparent, sleeveless violet blouse, displaying her bare legs and thighs. The old man thought for one horrible moment that she had nothing else on. The text "Of all the vices, sexual indulgence is the cardinal" drummed on his mind, and he shuddered. But the worst was yet to come, for he quickly withdrew his gaze, only to find his youngest son Ah-hsuan gaping with avid admiration at the same half-naked [End Page 96] young woman. The old man felt his heart pounding wildly as if it would burst, and his throat burning as if choked with chilies.
(17)
Bare arms, bare legs, breasts that invite baring—such a barrage of urban sexuality is too much for Old Mr. Wu. At the same time, such fashionable visions appeal to his son, who has absorbed a new code of body culture.
Old Mr. Wu's senses are further and finally assaulted when he enters the house. Already struggling to understand the modern technology around him, Wu feels attacked by the Modern Girl and her sexuality. As the younger people dance, Old Mr. Wu's vision is filled with countless breasts that he imagines are assaulting him. Under their attack, he collapses and dies later that night. To his bewildered eyes,
All the red and green lights, all the geometrical shapes of the furniture and all the men and women were dancing and spinning together, bathed in the golden light. Mrs. Wu Sun-fu in pink, a girl in apple-green, and another in light yellow were frantically leaping and whirling around him. Their light silk dresses barely concealed their curves, their full, pink-tipped breasts and the shadow under their arms. The room was filled with countless swelling breasts, breasts that bobbed and quivered and danced around him. Wu Sun-fu's pimply face grinned and Ah-hsuan's lustful eyes shone among the dancing breasts. Suddenly, all these quivering, dancing breasts swept at Old Mr. Wu like a hail of arrows, piling up on his chest and smothering him, piling up on the Book of Rewards and Punishments on his lap.
(21; translation slightly altered)
This passage almost speaks for itself, with its repeated emphasis on breasts, breasts, and more breasts and its presentation of the women, the lustful men, and the breasts as interchangeable elements in some frenzied dance. The room is a microcosm of Shanghai, containing LIGHT, HEAT, POWER, and SEX. The lights—reminiscent of the neon in Mao Dun's opening passage—are joined with elements of technology, visible in "all the geometrical shapes" of the furniture and the room's clock. However, it is Shanghai's SEX, in the form of attacking breasts, which is responsible for Old Mr. Wu's collapse and death.
This image of female sexuality is problematic and functions on several levels. On one level, these depictions of women are pleasurable, displaying knowledge of urban body culture and fashion. The images of the Modern Girl conjured by Mao Dun's words do not greatly differ from the visions in film of the 1920s and 1930s, or in pictorial magazines. On another level, in these passages, unrestrained female sexuality is a dangerous force, capable of breaking social boundaries and even leading to death. Modern female sexuality destroys the order and control of traditional beliefs, represented by the figure of Old Mr. Wu and by his beloved classical tome, The Book of Rewards and Punishments. Such representations of dangerous female sexuality echo the advice from socially conservative discourses, such as materials dealing with fetal hygiene, which advised that unnatural sexual [End Page 97] activity was dangerous to the woman, to her future children, and therefore to the nation. Here, unrestrained female sexuality is depicted as a danger to society at large.
In Mu Shiying's short story "Craven 'A,'" the direct link between female sexuality and the city is again made through the detailed descriptions of a Modern Girl. Published in 1933 in Shanghai, Mu Shiying's story is an example of New Perceptionism, in contrast to Mao Dun's canonical realist writing. Both stories share the same descriptions of women and dangerous sexuality, set within an urban environment and functioning as warnings of the perils of modernity. Mu Shiying's story takes its name from the brand of cigarettes smoked by an intriguing Modern Girl who is the object of male protagonist Yuan Yecun's obsession. The woman's name is Yu Huixian, but Yuan calls her Craven "A," conflating her identity with the Westernized, commercial product she consumes. Craven "A" is introduced in an archetypal urban situation—drinking, dancing, and smoking at a Shanghai dance hall. As the protagonist gazes at her, he equates her body to a map: "People's faces are maps. After researching the map's topography and mountain ranges, the rivers, climate, and rainfall, you can immediately understand that place's customs, habits, thoughts, and characteristics" (536). Yuan thus believes that gazing at the exterior appearance of Craven "A" leads to understanding her inner nature (removing the possibility of female subjectivity in the process). He analyzes her appearance at great length, using geographical and industrialized terminology. Her hair (the "northern border") is a region of dark forest, bound with a white silk scarf, like a cloud in a smoke-filled sky. This dark forest of hair is the site of "fragrance manufacturing." The description continues, linking her body to highly sexualized landscape elements. Her mouth is a volcano, with sultry puffs of smoke and milky-white teeth. This sexualized volcano imagery is elaborated at length, as Yuan Yecun imagines a yearly offering of sacrificial male victims to her dangerous, volcanic mouth. The objectified woman's entire body is described, with Yuan discussing plateaus, rises, temperature, and rainfall in a highly suggestive manner. Between her "embarkments" (legs), Yuan pictures a three-cornered plateau (pubic mound) with an important "port" (vagina)—a "big commercial port"—"otherwise, why would two such exquisite embarkments be built?" (537-8). This long descriptive passage creates a fragmented and fetishized view of the Modern Girl's body. Through a type of twisted Petrarchan blazon, the female body is broken down and its elements are conquered by the male viewer. She is nature to be appeased, nature to be exploited, and a modern industrial landscape ripe for commercial venture.
After Yuan Yecun discovers the name of this mysterious woman, he suddenly recalls hearing many scandalous stories about her. His new musings about Craven "A" deal directly with her sexuality and are couched in metaphors of use, possession, and colonization: [End Page 98]
I know many stories about her. Almost all my friends have already visited that country, because the traffic is so convenient that you can see nearly the whole country in a day or two. They have all already inscribed poems on the rocks at the peak of those twin sister-hills. Whether old-handers or first-timers, they immediately scale the banks to the port and then go upstream towards the north. Some stay two days, some stay a week. After returning, they boast of the beauty of the country's scenery. Everyone treats this place like a fine landscape for short vacations.
(539)
This passage is overtly misogynistic and pornographic, clearly equating the woman to an exploited colony. Most importantly, the most sexualized part of her body—her vagina—is described as a port and a site of invasion. In describing Craven "A," Yuan Yecun might well be describing the arrival of Westerners to China. If we extrapolate this identification of the woman's body to China, we discover that the "big commercial port" is Shanghai. The port of Shanghai is thus identified with the vagina-as-port, reifying the undeniable link between SEX and the City.
In this short story, the figure of the Modern Girl also represents the vision of a certain, narrow type of sexuality. Craven "A" is a physically attractive woman who attracts Yuan Yecun's attention from across the room. She is ultimately cosmopolitan, smoking foreign cigarettes and enjoying the trendy atmosphere of the dance hall. The Modern Girl archetype is thus identified as the object of both desire and loathing. She is desirable on the exterior, yet is also represented as being both immoral and dangerous. Both the Modern Girl's mouth and vagina function as highly sexualized orifices. Echoing male fears of the vagina dentata, her mouth is a volcano surrounded by teeth, feeding on sacrificial male victims. Her vagina is a busy port, open to all visitors, whether "old-handers or first-timers." Because of the close associations between the city of Shanghai and prostitution, the not-so-veiled implications of immoral sexuality are tainted even further by contemporary discussions of the prostitute as a dangerous figure (Hershatter 1997).
Both Mao Dun's text and Mu Shiying's vivid depiction of Craven "A" work to dehumanize the body of the Modern Girl by focusing on specific body parts. Such tactics necessarily serve to dehumanize female sexuality and break women into component fetishized fragments. Likewise, the protagonist in Shi Zhecun's "At the Paris Theater" ([1931] 1933) fixates on, of all things, a snotty handkerchief used by the object of his desire, who is an elusive Modern Girl qua femme fatale. This close focus on dismembered female bodies (and bodily effluvia) presents women as objects to be divided and devoured, not owners of an independent female sexuality. This breakdown of the female body may be one technique through which the male author assuages his anxiety over modernity, symbolized in the figure of the Modern Girl. Both dangerous and seductive, the Modern Girl—like the city, like modernity itself—must be conquered by anxious male characters. [End Page 99]
Language Acts, Body Acts
In all major revolutions a certain reciprocity will obtain between violent actions choreographed within master narratives and master narratives realized in the form of essential texts. . . . Body acts become anchored in language acts.
—Apter and Saich (1994, ix)
During the interwar period, the two archetypes of the New Woman and the Modern Girl demonstrate conflicting emotions associated with ideas of modernity, progress, urbanization, and "new" China. The New Woman is used to exhort China to follow the path of modernity to a bright and strong future. The Modern Girl expresses the anxieties of authors, readers, and society at large as to what that future will look like. How can subjectivity—whether male or female—be constructed in a new and alienating environment? Both of these images exist in contrast to socially conservative ideals of the good wife, wise mother, and the eugenically flawless woman. I would like to conclude by speculating on the following two questions. First, how do these discursive constructions of women during the interwar period relate to images of women in post-1949 China? How did these constructions affect real women in the 1920s and 1930s? In other words, how did real women embody the tensions between contending notions of modernity?
Republican literary images of women have many textual descendents. The revolutionary New Woman, who finds fulfillment in her duty to the nation, has obvious daughters in the works created after Mao Zedong's 1943 "Talks at Yan'an" (McDougall 1980). Model works of the 1950s and 1960s provide some of the most obvious examples of the dedicated revolutionary heroine who sacrifices herself for the greater national good. Such works continue to downplay the significance of gender, to posit a progressive and linear notion of the modern project, and to call for the creation of a strong nation. As for the Modern Girl, glimpses of her re-emerge in post-Mao fiction created after 1978. She appears in the writings of women who once again claim a female voice and female subjectivity. As a femme fatale, she also appears in the writings of male authors who re-write masculinity by, in part, creating misogynistic images of the dangerous female Other.
What about the relationship between cultural images of women and real women during the interwar period? As so elegantly stated in the above quotation by David Apter and Tony Saich, "body acts" and "language acts" are often inseparable. What were some of the real body acts that were linked to the discursive creation of the New Woman and the Modern Girl? To what extent did real women embody conflicting ideals of modernity? At the heart of this discourse study is the belief that cultural
[End Page 100]
displays do both reflect and create reality. Real women were exposed to competing messages about female sexuality, female subjectivity, women's role in the national project, and women's place in the modern, urban setting. Individual women received different messages from many sources and had some ability to choose among many options, from embodying traditional values as mothers of citizens, to becoming leftist revolutionaries, to rejecting politics in favor of urban pleasures and new consumerism. Further study of these choices and the women who made them will help to determine how ideas about modernity were written onto women's bodies and how real women dealt with this discursive merging.
Sarah E. Stevens is Acting Director of International Programs at Southern Oregon University, where she also teaches in Women's Studies and sociology. Her research interests focus on issues of women, gender, and sexuality in twentieth-century China. Current projects include an examination of the changing body culture in Republican China. Send correspondence to International Programs, Southern Oregon University, 1250 Siskiyou Blvd., Ashland, OR 97520; stevenss@sou.edu.
Endnotes
1. In the early twentieth century, the term jianquan was intrinsically related to the eugenic mission of strengthening the Chinese race and appeared frequently in texts on hygiene and education. The term could also be translated as "perfect" or something much less politically charged, like "robust," "sound," or "in good health." I have chosen to use "flawless" in order to highlight the eugenic use of the term. For more on the effects of eugenics on views of female sexuality, see Stevens 2001, 28-33 and 105-46. For a non-gendered study of Chinese eugenics and medical science, see Dikötter 1995.
2. This shift from a reliance on gender roles to biology resonates with changes in the history of sexuality in the West. During the Victorian era, Western ideology shifted from an emphasis on role to an emphasis on sexual identity, as images of the True Man and the True Woman (emphasizing gender roles) gave way to ideas of heterosexuality and homosexuality (emphasizing biological models of sexuality as identity). For a good discussion of this shift, see Katz 1990.
3. Such signifiers reinforce the importance of body culture in Republican China. Norma Diamond's interviews with female leaders during this time period reveal that hundreds of women were killed after 1927 for having short hair or other physical indications of being "radical women" (1975, 6-8). These characteristics also played a crucial role in the construction of the modan garu in Japan (Sato 1993, 364-6; Silverberg 1991, 242-8). [End Page 101]
4. The female protagonist in Chen Ying's "Woman" ([1929] 1998) is another example of the Sophia-type of Modern Girl. This story details a woman's decision to have an abortion. The character is clearly caught between her desire to be an independent, modern woman and her fears that becoming a mother will lock her into traditional expectations for women. In many ways, the protagonist is a New Woman, but in the depictions of her obsessive thoughts, uncertainty, and painful decision making, she is clearly revealed as a Modern Girl who illustrates the pains of modernity. Interestingly, this story is narrated by the woman's husband, a man who is quite confused about how to be supportive; he is utterly unable to comprehend his wife's thought patterns. Presented as a sympathetic character, however, he does not fall into the trap of viewing the inscrutable Modern Girl as a "praying mantis."
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