Routledge Handbook of Modern Chinese Literature by Ming Dong Gu

Author:Ming Dong Gu
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)
Published: 2018-08-16T16:00:00+00:00

A reassessment of artistic achievement

The insane behavior of Ch’i-ch’aio has prompted some critics to compare her with the madman in Lu Xun’s “A Madman’s Diary,”20 but in my view, a more pertinent comparison should be conducted between Ch’i-ch’aio and Mrs. Morel in Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers, and between her and insane women in world literature, especially the madwoman in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. In The Madwoman in the Attic, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar present an array of monster women in English literature, who are selfish, cunning, wicked, and refuse to accept the feminine role imposed on them by the patriarchy.21 Ch’i-ch’iao has all the characteristic traits of such a monster woman. In creating such a madwoman, Chang may be said to have displayed an indigenous feminist consciousness feminist critics have discovered in English women writers’ writings.

In my opinion, the first and foremost achievement of the novella lies in the author’s vision about the existential conditions of women. In The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir posits a central thesis that a woman is not born but made: “the ‘true woman’ is an artificial product that civilization makes, as formerly eunuchs were made.”22 Through her imaginative representation, Chang arrives at a similar thesis: a neurotic woman is not born but made. Ch’i-ch’iao is not an inborn psychotic; it is through the gender politics of male power that she changes from a healthy young girl into an insane woman. Second, a conscious awareness of female authorship constitutes another admiral achievement. While the English women writers whom feminist critics have identified as having achieved a sense of true female authorship “managed the difficult task of achieving true female literary authority by simultaneously conforming to and subverting patriarchal literary standards,”23 Chang already freed herself from the anxiety caused by the male prescribed standard of authorship, which requires a dichotomous representation of women as a polarity between the angel and the monster. With an assured ease, she presents the monster woman as the heroine in her novella with male characters as her foil. In her own words, Eileen Chang once said that Ch’i-ch’iao is the only “hero” (yingxiong) in her fictional world, who possesses “the discretion and wisdom of a mad person,” resorts to most perverted means to retaliate on the society that has wounded her, and relentlessly creates havoc at her will. Ch’i-ch’iao is certainly not one of the “terrible sorceress-goddess … all of whom possess duplicitous arts that allow them both to seduce and to steal male generative energy” (34). Thirdly, feminist theorists24 firmly believe that the problematic female character in literary works with feminist consciousness, especially the madwoman, represents “the author’s double,” “an image of her own anxiety and rage.”25 And it is through the violence of the double that “the female author enacts her own raging desire to escape male houses and male texts” and “articulates for herself the costly destructiveness of anger repressed until it can no longer be contained” (85). By contrast, in self-confidently creating an insane “hero” with

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.