Memory and woman in modern Chinese literature: Shen Congwen, Zhang Ailing, and Wang Anyi

Although any drastic social changes may impose enormous pressure on the society's coming to terms with tradition and history, in China they created particularly intense crises during the twentieth century as the country underwent the traumatizing experience of "modernization." One of my purposes is to locate a place in modern Chinese literature where memory provides a significant venue for individuals to grapple with the anxiety and stresses that arise from the crisis of modernity, in particular, its disruption of the coherence of time and subjectivity. Here Shen Congwen's lyricism, Zhang Ailing's aesthetic modernism and Wang Anyi's utopian idealism offer three distinctive monads through which I explore the complex issue of the relationship between memory and modernity. Another goal of mine is to delineate the economics of desire involved in the narrative reconstruction of the past. For I detect a gendering move in the writers' invocation of memory. In all three writers' works, "the past" is often embodied and allegorized by "the feminine" in association with categories such as body, unconsciousness, nature, and domesticity. Recollecting the past is therefore often intermeshed with the recovery of the repressed "femininity" in its fused sexual, political, and socio-historical meanings. I recognize that while such summoning of the feminine to articulate historical vision helps to reclaim an utopian dimension of the feminine, whether it would constitute subversiveness or not has to be examined in specific contexts. What makes the connection between memory and woman interesting finally is the fact that the three writers' ambiguous positions on tradition and history are often interwoven with their ambiguity towards women and femininity.