Literature "crazy" Women: The Evolution Of 20th-century Chinese Women Writing

In the cultural evolution of the 20th century, women gradually awaken in the encounter with modernity. The influence of modernity on femininity is a process during which feminists switch from irrationality to rationality in seeking their individualism. Modernity, given its essence of pursuing freedom and its belief in rationality and development, offers an exterior motivation for feminine sense of equality and freedom, and coincides with the interior demands brewing in their hearts. It is just under the precept of modernity that the destination of women meets their significant changes, and begins their substantial awakening to the self-consciousness of femininity as a whole in modern era.With the foot holding of equality and emancipation, feminist liberation in the 20th century brings with itself the great significance of breaking away from their traditionally stipulated role. With female rebels in literature ranging from the fleeing "Nalas" during the May-Forth movement, to the "Iron Ladies" and "Strong-willed women", until the collection of many "Crazy women" at the end of the 20th century, feminist writers have exhausted their imagination to furnish their female protagonists with an opportunity of rebellion and freedom in the most realistic sense. However, the prospect and tendency of the femininity as a group are always beyond their grasp, and the ideal always runs counter to the reality. In a long century's theoretical preaching and brave practice, the physicality and spirituality of the female including feminist writing all have acquired the maximum space of freedom. Nevertheless, the things that are wedded with freedom are nothing else than unidentified worry and nihilism.Modernity for women is no doubt a sort of double-edged sword. It prompts female awakening to their self-consciousness and boiling libido, and twists this overwhelming power with the certain extreme emotion inside them, finally leads to female loss of self-control and the outbreak of their language hysteria. Thus they become all the more readily the victims of modern commercial society, which is forever patriarchic.This paper embraces Marxism as its guiding line, trying to make reasonable use of feminist criticism, psychoanalysis, deconstruction, neo-historicism and post-modernism, attempts to discuss about the evolution of female images in the 20th century China on the basis of modernity. Its practical significance is, starting from the changing female images and in the fields of sociology, body rhetoric, feminism, social gender studies and feminist literature, it intends to explore into the vicissitudes of 20the century Chinese women, female spiritual lives, the development of female self-consciousness, and the freedom and limitation of female emancipation.