From 'girl student' to 'woman revolutionary': The representation of the deracinated woman in Chinese fiction of the May Fourth era.

摘要

This dissertation explores the relationships between fictional narration and self-signification, gender and writing, and literary and national modernization in Chinese fiction of the May Fourth era (c. 1920--1930). It examines the representation of the "deracinated woman," i.e., a figure outside stereotypical domestic roles that was deployed by would-be modern Chinese intellectuals both to promote Chinese women's emancipation and to create a sense of self-identity.; Previous scholarship on May Fourth fiction has occasionally probed the thematic implications of women characters in specific works but has not engaged in systematic study of the deracinated woman as a figure. This dissertation contextualizes the form of narration in the representation of the figure. It situates the narratological permutations of the period---such as the unprecedented centrality of first-person narration in the early 1920s, and the later shift to less subjective modes and to the privileging of more radical women---within the rise of the discourse of individualism and Chinese intellectuals' turn towards Marxist ideology. Furthermore, by investigating the complex interaction between male intellectuals' literary criticism and female authors' fiction writing, it scrutinizes issues of gender negotiations in the May Fourth project of women's liberation.; Through examining representative works by May Fourth writers both male (Lu Xun, Yu Dafu, Ba Jin, and Mao Dun), and female (Ding Ling), this dissertation concludes that the fictional representation of the deracinated woman reveals complex ideological and gender negotiations. The male authors under study all resorted to "othering" the Other in their fiction. They accentuated either the alienness of the figure to the male protagonist or its amenability to particular ideologies, in order both to facilitate male subject formation in the text and to establish the authors' extra-textual "modern" status. Ding Ling, by contrast, appropriated the male "othering" of women so as to negotiate independent self-identities both for herself and for her characters. Finally, it will be shown that, the "othering" of the Other in the representation of deracinated women in May Fourth fiction signifies the dynamic relationships both of modern intellectuals to their cultural past, and of women writers to literary traditions established by men.