The pathological body: Science, race, and literary realism in China, 1770--1930

In literary realism of the May Fourth era, the body that writers often described was one that was flawed at the outset—a symbolic body, scrutinized under a diagnostic gaze, and always already sick. This thesis links Western scientific and medical ideologies from the late eighteenth through late nineteenth centuries with the emergence of literary realism in China in the early twentieth century. Using primary research on images of illness and the Chinese body drawn from historical, visual, and literary sources, it argues that the association of Chinese racial identity with a kind of essential pathology in modern Chinese literary representations of the self (for example in the portrayal of China as the “Sick Man of Asia”) derives at least in part from understandings of the body and of pathology rooted in nineteenth-century scientific and medical ideologies and their circulation as part of medical-colonial enterprises following the Opium wars. The first chapter examines how ideas associating Chinese identity with sickness emerged in the modern era, focusing on the spread of the eighteenth-century idea that China was the “Cradle of Smallpox.” It suggests that circulations of this type were embedded in mutual misunderstanding and political exigency, as well as historical convergence in the Marxian sense. The second chapter moves to the mid-nineteenth century, analyzing how representations of illness and Chinese identity could also be circulated opportunistically by missionaries like Peter Parker; this is intended as an example of the collaboration of visual culture with missionary ideology, a bridge between the persuasiveness of text (Parker's journals) and the power of image (Lam Qua's paintings). The third and fourth chapters address the figurative corporeal “canvas” upon which this diseased Chinese identity was then sketched out, arguing that certain ideas about representing the “real,” or what the eyes could see, were first introduced piggyback on Western style ideas about anatomy in the late nineteenth century, and that these ideas anticipated both structurally and conceptually certain debates about literary realism in China and its effectiveness for describing “Chinese” reality in the early twentieth century. In this way the thesis suggests a theory of realism in May Fourth literature that accounts for the evolution of ideas about the body as well as of the form itself.