White Deer Patriarchal Culture Tragedy And Roots

Chen Zhongshi’s sweeping novel White Deer Plain was one of the award winning of the Fourth Mao Dun Literature Award, which represented the highest level of Chinese novel in the1990’s and also was a notable gain of contemporary literature history. Right after its publication, a large number of interpretative and critical works burst, which started the popularity of research on White Deer Plain. All the while, Chen Zhongshi was considered as a successful writer depicting the tragedy of the nation and a master of contemporary Chinese literature as well.Mr Chen specially focused on the folk life in White Deer Plain (a village in Guan Zhong Plain, Shaanxi Province) setting in the first half of the20th century China. With the old times gone and the new era come, traditional patriarchal culture and ethics were no longer suitable for the changeable society and on the contrary, became an obstacle for the progress of the Chinese society; at the same time the newly arising civilization was not wildly accepted by the majority of people and still need the baptism of blood and iron to be rooted by them. White Deer Plain people living in these days, on the one hand, couldn’t get rid of the influence of patriarchal culture, while on the other hand, were against the shackles of the patriarchal culture. As a result, the tragedy had become an inevitable, of course. The clan system played a significant role in the tragic life of White Deer Plain people. And the clan system was a basic organizational structure of the society handed down by the Chinese nation for thousands of years, especially for the villages in Guan Zhong Plain, deeply impacted by the patriarchal culture and Confucianism. The clan system could affect everybody’s destiny and was made up of the system of the villages, patriarch and ancestral hall.In White Deer Plain, Mr. Zhu was on behalf of the philosophical level of patriarchal culture and ethics, Mr. Bai Jiaxuan showed the level of the social constraints, Mr. Lu San displayed the spontaneity of the individual level and Mr. Lu Zilin exhibited the dark sides of the traditional ethics. Their tragic ending reflected an objective fact that patriarchal culture and traditional ethics had broken away from the era. The next generation of White Deer Plain embarked on the road of resistance and betrayal of patriarchal culture one after another and was onto the tragic ending of their own without exception. Whether they were revolutionaries, converts or opportunists, their endings were all tragic at last.The writer’s attitude towards patriarchal culture was rather complex. Not only was he keen on the patriarchal culture and ethics, but he clearly realized the oppression and distortion of humanity exerted by patriarchal culture and ethics. Then, featuring the folk customs and lives in Guan Zhong Plain, the novel presented a deep cultural state of mind in this region and even for the whole Chinese nation, and tried to search for the "root" where it was.