A Study Of Women Images In The Biographical Literature Of Women's World In The Late Qing Dynasty

The early twentieth century of China is the era of saving the nation from subjugation and ensuring its survival.Cultural elites gave women unprecedented expectations of saving the country,and they believed that women who were physically fit and intelligent played a vital role in saving the nation from peril.They enlightened women through the establishment of women's schools,newspapers,and so on,to try to break the traditional abuses of "treatment of women as inferior to men","three obediences and four virtues," and establish new ideas,which have established new identities for Chinese women such as "mother of the nation" and "female nationals” and improved their social status.Therefore,women's newspapers have become one of the important media for enlightening women and rebuilding women's social identity.This thesis takes Women's World,founded by Ding Chuwo and others in 1904,as the research object with the magazine's biographical column setting as the center,to analyze two types of women's images in China and abroad.The first type is the image of foreign characters such as Sarus Gerz,Merrigabin,Hayley Edwards and so on who take on social roles such as revolutionaries,philanthropists,and bachelor of arts;the other type is centered on Hua Mulan,Liang Hongyu,Qin Liangyu,Hong Xian,and Nie Yinniang's deeds,to explain traditional Chinese heroines' homeland consciousness and passion.The images of western heroines and traditional Chinese heroines in the biographies serve as the carriers of modern elite intellectuals to advocate women's patriotism and construct modern nation-state's "female nationals".Meanwhile,they also set an example for the independence and liberation of Chinese women since modern society.The portrayal of these two types of images reflects the main purpose of the "female national" and "national mother" as an ideological construction advocated by thefounders,translators and authors.It strives to rejuvenate the female world with a group of women who are physically strong,mentally independent,intelligent and dedicated to the country,to make them new women who are different in spirit and action from traditional women.This kind of gender thinking promoted great changes in the political and cultural life of the society in the late Qing Dynasty,which was a subversion of the traditional intellectual females who used poems and paintings as a means of self-entertainment and stayed away from social responsibility.Chinese and foreign women's biographies occupy a large proportion and prominent position in the narrative literature of Women's World.In art,the founders and contributors upheld the tradition of Chinese biography-writing,set up monuments and wrote down biographies for outstanding women in Chinese history,showing their courage to compose female history.Out of the enlightenment responsibility,they translated a large number of foreign women's biographies,which widened the knowledge horizons for the establishment of modern women images.Of course,due to the urgency and reality of the "female national" image construction,these biographies of Chinese and foreign women do not fully follow historical facts.Not only are there misunderstandings of historical figures,but there also is the "recreation" component of the author,which truly reflect the largely-intertwined mesh of realism and fiction in modern biographical literature.Owing to the overvaluation of the potential social functions of female-character shaping,these women's figures promoted by this group of intellectual elites also need to be critically discriminated and evaluated historically.However,just as the historical achievements of Women's World cannot be ignored,the ideological achievements and academic value of Chinese and foreign female figures in their biographical literature need to be further studied and explained.