| "Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies," the Chinese expression that never fails to amuse someone not acquainted with its origins, is a pejorative generic label that refers to a huge corpus of popular literature written in the first few decades of the twentieth century. In spite of its tremendous popularity, Mandarin Duck and Butterfly (hereafter abbreviated to "Butterfly") fiction has either been disparaged as unworthy of scholarly study, or, in more recent investigations, reappropriated into the homogeneity of a literary or socialist "tradition." By reviewing the problematical reception of Butterfly fiction in modern Chinese literary history, this dissertation interprets the appearance of Butterfly fiction as a feminization of the predominant Confucian culture whose power still lingered in early twentieth-century Chinese society. As examples, two outstanding Butterfly subgenres--the love story of the 1910s and the social novel of the 1920s and 1930s--are examined in close detail. In both cases, sentimental, didactic, and often conflicting narrative structures demonstrate Butterfly fiction to be a complex response to modern Chinese history rather than mere "fiction for comfort." This rereading of Butterfly fiction also provides a way of rereading "canonical" Chinese literature of the "May Fourth" period, which has been upheld as representative of the "revolutionary" modern China. In the light of the melodramatic modes of subversion we find in Butterfly fiction, the "revolutionary" narratives of major May Fourth authors are revealed to be partaking of a traditional scholastic elitism that is preoccupied with "truth," which explains recurrent intellectual dilemmas in the authors' relation to writing. The rewriting of modern Chinese literary history thus proposed is finally used to contest contemporary western theories of Postmodernism, whose reliance on the concepts of "difference" and "totality" for narrating cultural history is shown to be implicitly imperialistic despite the theories' ostensibly liberating intentions. |
