The Study On The Feminine Nativist Imagination Of The Modern Literature

This paper confronts the cultural fact of the absence of a “native land” in the feminineworld and interprets it from two perspectives of gender limitation and status of nativistliterature. From the cultural perspective, given their social and historical status, femalescannot get rid of their identity as “otherness” in their native place and thus are deprived of anative land in material sense; from the literary perspective, the existing concept of “nativistliterature” is mainly associated with the mainstream text and inherits male criticism andperspective, leaving females as a group absent in the native discourse and in short of aspiritual native land.In an attempt to restore the spiritual land of females, explore and trace the nativistimagination of modern feminist writers, and affirm its rightful position in literature, this paperpresents a definition of “feminine nativist imagination”: literary works that are created basedon feminine and native experience to reflect the real life in villages and towns and to show thelocal customs and practices there. It embraces both the works a native creates in a native landand the products of artistic creation made by the creative subject who feels close to a nativeland through tracing and combining his or her memory, emotion and idea. Within the nativistimaginary realm of modern females, Luo Shu is noted for her description of salt workers’lives, and her works, though rustic, always shine with the glory of humanity; although thenativist works of Ding Ling mostly appeared after the historical transition period around1949,she examined the revolutionary native land consistently with “Sophia’s eyes”, persistent inbeing herself with distinctive personality; with a strong gender criticism consciousness, XiaoHong described the sufferings women experienced in their native land most profoundly andthere is always a sorrowful and desolate beauty in her works that can penetrate the soul of anyreader. Their nativist imagination proved that although females were deprived of their “nativeland”, their imaginary world was rich and diverse.The emergence of modern Chinese intellectual women was credited to the enlightenmentand edification from the feminine liberation and sexual equality advocated during the May4thNew Culture Movement. They were no longer conventional women who were ignorantlydocile under the oppression of male supremacy. Modern intellectual women rejected fromtheir own experience the “unalterable truth” that women are inferior to men, and thusconsciously or unconsciously showed a feminist attitude in their literary creation, instilling into their feminine nativist imagination special connotation in gender aesthetics: Theyexplored feminine issues deeper than male writers and did better in addressing the root causeswhy males enjoyed higher status than females; they focused more on interpreting femalepsychology while creating female characters, aiming at identifying the tough and rebelliousspirit of rural women; the undermining of local or regional color in their works was notaccidental, but was associated with their self-development and their literary development andderived from the fact that females were deprived of a “native land”, in other words, femalesdid not have their own habitat, one that they belonged to in both physical and spiritual sense.The nativist imagination of modern females runs through their attitude toward a native land.The biggest difference between feminine nativist literature and traditional nativist literaturelies in that the former is created with a native cognition based on the survival experience offemales, one that is distinguished from male nativist literature, while gender consciousness isthe fundamental cause why female and male genres of nativist literature go in separatedirections.