From Late Qing Dynasty To The May 4th Movement: The Modern Imagination, Construction And Narration Of Female Body

The thesis aims at both a study of the periods around the late Qing Dynasty and the May 4th Movement, which were the important stages for the growth of modern China's female body, and a review of the course during which female body was imagined and constructed in social discourse and described in literature.The formation of the Chinese modern body sense had a connection with the transformation of modern China and went along with Chinese people's imagination and construction of a modern nation-state all the time. The crisis of the nation's being destroyed in the late Qing Dynasty made Chinese sense the shame of being a Sick East Asian. They began to construct the modern bodies of the citizens in nationalism. The movements like building a powerful China, the abolishment of footbinding, etc., fell and rose, which all figured the bodies of modern people. Female body also started its imagination and construction in the process of the construction of a modern nation-state. The context of the modern female body resulted from the Reform Group's body politics in the late Qing Dynasty, which called for the abolishment of footbinding, and from the bourgeois revolutionists'desire of mobilizing the women. Then at the beginning of the 20th century female body was shaped imaginatively in the slogans like mother of citizens and female citizens. In that course female body was symbolized, nationalized and revolutionized so that its initial form was constructed. However, we realize that the main stream of the discourse in the late Qing Dynasty focused on the traditional bearing body when they recognized the value of women. They emphasized more on the role that women played in bearing new citizens. Consequently, there was still a distance from the real liberation of female body.When we came to the May 4th Age due to the powerful push of democracy and science female body was further configured through individualization, noumenalization and characterization. At the May 4th Age individualism was a new viewpoint dominating the construction of female body. During this period many women proved their independent personality by choosing to leave home, cut their hair, or marry a man on their own decision. In the public field female body was admonished and watched by modern power institutions, intelligentsia, and science discourse, in case that the female body, which has been liberated, would transgress the boundary of the time spirit. Humanism coming together with individualism put female body at its noumenal position as human being and made it realize the inherent sense of human liberation. Meanwhile, science discourse redefined female body from the aspects of reproduction and prostitutes'pleasure, which brought liberation as well as a trap of modern regulations to female body.Just as the change of the social cultural structure surely influenced the basic narrative form of literature, the imaginative and constructive process of modern female body interacted with the literary narration both in the late Qing Dynasty and in the period of the May 4th. As a result, the modern factor of body narration came into being. With the purpose of enlightening Chinese people the new novels of the late Qing Dynasty had a strong desire of being propaganda tools. Some novels about the abolishment of footbinding showed fully men's political concern over the reality. The political role of women played in the national revolution was imaginatively magnified, which resulted in two narrative patterns, beauty saving the nation and heroine in power, in political novels. What's more, in the novels in the late Qing Dynasty the"goddesses"worshiping money overthrew the traditional narration of the knightly prostitutes and rewrote the legends about the gifted scholars and beautiful ladies. However, certain ethic contradiction, which is annotated in the thesis, existed in these novels.There were a lot of body writings in the May 4th literature. As an event of literary modernization body narration made clear that the new literature broke from the traditional literature in respect of narration. The discovering of human bodies and the straightforward statement became a breakthrough of the modern writers'narration. The power of human bodies released fully in literature. Based on my research I concluded that in the May 4th novels female body took the narrative forms as follows: i. as an ethic body female body denoted a modern sense of anti-feudalism and individual liberation and presented the modern metaphors women's body could bear; ii. female body was the body of desire in the Eros narration of the male writers as an erotic sign without a particular subject. In this sense it was an object being narrated and was an object both of men's desire and their ethic imputation; iii. female body was treated as an independent and rebellious body that was narrated by the female writers appearing since the May 4th Movement and contended with the male narration of the morbid and ugly female body. The female writers'individual experience was contained in their writings, which is not discussed in this thesis; iv. female body was regarded as a revolutionary body. The upright and decadent women of the age and revolutionary hags were indulged in the revolutionary narration, which displayed the strange combination of revolution and female body. The revolutionary romance was deconstructed thoroughly by this kind of annotation and revealed its inner coat under the worn-out cotton.The study of the culture and the literature around the late Qing Dynasty and the May 4th Movement has become an explicit one at present. Chen Pingyuan, Xia Xiaohong, Wang Dewei and Yang Lianfen have published some important findings. But they paid more attention on some theoretical issues, such as the change of the narration patterns, the production of modernity, the evolution of the literary thoughts, and so on. Holding a quite different angle of view of modern female body this thesis attempts to explore the process of female body's being discovered, constructed and organized in the literature narration. Besides, it tries to reveal another side of the modernity of Chinese culture and literature: the trace and the errors deducted in the pursuit of female liberation.Under the influence of Brandes the literary history has always been regarded as a mental history. People ignored such a fact that the literary history is also a history of human bodies. In this sense the thesis provides Chinese modern literature a new viewpoint, i.e. body, which has a great significance for rewriting the literary history and re-exploring the transformation process of Chinese culture and literature.