Breakthrough And Regression

From the end of the 19^th century to the beginning of the 20^th century, China experienced the transformation from tradition to modernity, and the enormous projection of this transitional stage covered ail the realms of the May Fourth period such as social economy, political systems and cultural thinking, making them take on the transitional features of the combination of the old and the new in various forms. The intelligentsia of this specific period attempted to cut off their connection with the history in extreme ways, but could not thoroughly break away from the shadow of the history, as they were living in it. For Yu Dafu, who grew up in the crack between the two heterogeneous cultures of the Chinese traditional culture and the western modern culture, the numerous pairs of contradictory poles such as new and old, China and west, tradition and modernity kept colliding and overlapping in his mind, and finally came to a tangle, leading him to return to the tradition while forcing a way out of the historical encirclement.Based on the achievements of the predecessors' research on the relationship between Yu Dafu and foreign and traditional cultures, setting him against the historical context of the collision and fusion of Chinese and western cultures, starting from such four aspects as self-image, intellectual characters, sensual concepts, and gender consciousness, which can best highlight his personality, and taking the methods of impact research, parallel research and textual analysis, the paper is intended to explore the formation and patterns of the mingling of the above four aspects, to analyse the collision and fusion of the two heterogeneous cultures of the Chinese and the western in Yu Dafu's mind, to clarify his choice and rejection of the traditional culture and the western culture, and finally to understand Chinese intelligentsia's internal confliction and severe choice during the transformation from tradition to modernity in the last century.The paper consists of four chapters.Chapter One, starting from the invention of the self-image in Yu Dafu's literary texts, tends to probe the origins of the image from Chinese and western cultures. Yu Dafu had an intense and enduring interest in depicting himself, and through adding hispersonal life to literary texts, he changed his whole life into a giant text, and finally created a self in envision. The self was an integration of the western fin-de-siecle mentality as expressed by Dowson, the character of the Russian superfluous man as depicted by Rudin and the personality of Chinese traditional celebrated scholars as shown by Huang Zhongze, among which the first formed the background color of the self, determining the choice of the second and the third as a kind of horizon of expectation while achieving the transformation to modernity through their agency.Chapter Two, setting Yu Dafu against the historical background of Chinese intellectuals' transformation from traditional scholars to modern intelligentsia, investigates the different constructing impacts of the Chinese culture and the western culture upon the change of his roles. On one hand, Yu Dafu accepted western democratic notions and enlightenment thinking, and took them as the standards to lash out at Chinese social reality and national characters, thus showing the critical consciousness of modern intelligentsia, and on the other hand, he was influenced by Confucianism and Buddhism, and practiced the two life styles that Chinese traditional intellectuals had been living for thousands of years: going into the society or living out of the society. To be more specific, Confucianism endowed him with the profound consciousness of suffering, the moral integrity of laying down one's life for a just cause, and the practical literary values, while Buddhism led him to the strong sense of nihility and the worship of nature.Chapter Three tackles Yu Dafu's sensual concepts under the influence of both the oriental culture and the western culture. By means of his literary texts, Yu Dafu took the self s sensual instinct as the object of description, acquiring theoretical resources from Freud, ethical resources form Rousseau, and textual resources from Japanese Naturalism and Shishosetsu. At the same time, traditional asceticism brought Yu Dafu a deep sense of guilt, and in order to release the internal ethical anxiety, his texts took on a strong sense of penitence both explicitly and implicitly. Yu Dafu's sense of penitence resulted from the two influences of Christian confessional consciousness and Chinese traditional introspective nous. The first influence was indirectly realized through Dostoevsky and Japanese Shishosetsu, who provided Yu Dafu with psychological patterns of achieving revival through penitence, but in practice Yu Dafu did not conform to the religious patterns of Christianity, and Chinese introspective nous led his penitence to the level ofmorality, thus obtaining the effects of self-exculpation and taking on the color of optimism.Chapter Four analyses Yu Dafu's typological envision of women and investigates his male consciousness influenced by traditional gender concepts. Besides, through parallel comparison and impact comparison with Thomas Hardy, Mao Dun and Turgenev, this chapter reveals that their division of women into two distinct types, that is, the angel-like and the enchantress-like, reflects the dialogue between men's internal instinct and morality, and their ambivalence of both longing for and resisting against modern civilization, during the transition from old times to new times. In Yu Dafu's texts, women exist as symbols of desire, and they can be roughly divided into two types: the enchantress-like and the angel-like. The former possess the temptation which men characters are unable to resist, but they surpass the role imposed on them by the society and without exception are punished by men characters and by the man writer, while the latter agree with men's expectant envision, and thus win their acceptance and admiration. Yu Dafu's contradictory attitudes of both longing for and resisting against the enchantress-like women indicate his ambivalent mentality toward western modern civilization, and his recognition of the angel-like women exemplifies his internal return to the traditional culture.Yu Dafu's psychological traits embodied in the four aspects as self-image, intellectual characters, sensual concepts and gender consciousness are fairly typical in the Chinese literary history of the 20th century. His explorations in literature and in spirit have left the followers endless literary resources and spiritual resources, and looking back on his internal ambivalence and choice in the crack between the Chinese traditional culture and the western modern culture will surely provide significant and valuable reference for us to apply in a similar historical context.