Pay as before
Before puberty
Dostoevsky has a novel called "The Absurd Man's Dream", about a man who does not care about everything, and decides to leave this indifferent world on a dark night. Just as he was trying to kill himself on the street, an eight-year-old girl drenched in wet and wearing a pair of torn leather shoes tugged at his sleeve and begged him to save her mother, who was dying of illness.
Such a small thing changed his choice, and he decided to reject the temptation of the ideal country to which life ultimately belonged, and to stay in this world full of suffering:
"For the sake of love, I am willing to endure suffering. I hope, I long, with tears, kiss only the earth I left; I do not want, nor will I, come back from the dead on another earth. ”
The girl inadvertently conquered a person who saw through the red dust with the innocence of the weakest strength. She saved his life by being locked in suffering; to him, she was an angel.
Girls before puberty, mostly carry this super-gender angelic characteristic. Aside from innocence, sensitivity, and delicacy, they are not much different from boys. Andersen's six-year-old and three-month-old match-selling little girl, Chekhov's apprentice in the shoe store, the nine-year-old Wanka who wrote letters to his grandfather to beg to come home, and the orphan Sanmao, who began to wander at the age of seven or eight, David Copperfield, who was begging for a living on the streets of London before he was ten years old, and so on, in the common suffering, the common desire for love and warmth, and the infinite yearning for the future, there is no fundamental difference brought about by gender issues.
In literary works, girls in this age group mostly appear in fairy tales: Alice in Wonderland at the age of seven, Snow White, whose beauty surpassed that of the queen at the age of seven, Snow White, who brought disaster to herself, and so on, their beautiful innocence is not because of gender but because of age, and although the beauty of Heaven has begun to be threatened by the dangers of the world, there are no more complex problems in their growth adventures. Simplicity is a common feature of them at this stage and the literary works that describe them. People can't help but hope that all the stories in the world can stay in the fairy tale where good will triumph and evil will be punished. The dangers of Wonderland, the jealousy of the queen, and the ferocity of the great bad wolf all seem more understandable, predictable, and preventable than the barbaric forces that penetrate the bottom line of humanity.
Little girls become girls, and the watershed should be puberty. With the changes in the body, the girl's more dazzling beauty is awakened, more distinct gender characteristics are activated, or rebellious or docile personalities begin to form, especially, complex and subtle female psychological characteristics begin to strengthen. During this transitional phase, many girls benefit from a book called Little Women.
In the context of the American Civil War, the March family, who lived in the new area of New England, had a miserable life. Dad was on the front line, and Mrs. March was working around to take care of her four daughters. They are anxious to get out of poverty, but they do not twist their minds because their mothers are positive and optimistic. When more about women continues to focus on the original family, the Classic work of the American writer Alcott can provide positive inspiration.
The four daughters in the book are all teenagers, and their self-esteem and self-improvement have taken on a distinct gender color. One of the most endearing, slightly pungent Joe proudly declared: "Women are ambitious, talented and beautiful." I hate people saying that love is enough for them. ”
Deeply influenced by this book, the "Neapolitan Quadrilogy" has been widely influenced around the world in recent years.
("My Genius Girlfriend", "The Story of a New Name", "Gone, Left", "Missing Child"), and "The Life of An Adult Lie") also upholds such a hot girl position. Italian writer Elena Ferrante accurately captures the creativity and destructive power contained in the full vitality of the youth at the bottom, in order to help girls find a way forward through the thorns of life and the fog of physiology that are full of misguided paths.
Before the bitterness of love and marriage appeared, the pain of life had already laid a universal background for girls' growth. And when puberty comes, the growing pains become more and more, the topic of women will become more complicated, and the related literary writing will become more mottled and magnificent.
Adolescent girls
In the history of ancient and modern Chinese and foreign literature, there are a vast number of works writing about adolescence. Like a rose growing on the field, or like a nightingale that constantly cries, the fragrance of this most beautiful stage of life is always the most moving. The beautiful body, the exuberance of not knowing the taste of sorrow, the hope of the sun at eight or nine o'clock, the opening of the love sinus, the hot acacia, and the righteousness of "I am my own, no one can interfere", always can make people rise up as sweet as honey, and the pleasure of letting the horse gallop by it. Splurge, whether it is time or emotion, whether it is good feelings or love, is what adolescence should be.
The seventeen-year-old youth in Sagan's "Hello, Sorrow", rebellious and evil, full of destructive desire for self and all that is established; the fifteen-and-a-half-year-old white girl in Duras's "Lover", the indulgence of men from Fushun in China on the hot and noisy Mekong River, the rebellion against her mother and her brother; the sensitive thinking and playfulness of Lin Daiyu, who died at the age of sixteen in "Dream of the Red Chamber", and the deep affection and helplessness of the spring burial flowers; the enchantment and helplessness of Werther in "The Troubles of Young Werther", Even the 19-year-old Lu Di who committed suicide to show his affection... Girls with strong youth, what do you bring to the world!
In contrast to these, Nabokov's Lolita is like a "flower of evil" that suddenly grows in a wheat field, and although the author repeatedly declares that it is his "purest novel" and shows his talent, it is undeniable that such a book stirs up the existing order and breaks through the literary bottom line of male and female writing. Of course, compared to the real events we encounter in the news that have broken through the bottom line of human morality, "Lolita" is, after all, unfolding in a language of mad imagination and seduction—it is aesthetic, unlike the locked and forced reality, mercilessly mocking all the self-righteousness that thinks that progress and civilization are already around, and ruthlessly breaking the class dream of the so-called middle-class security. Chains were chained to one person, slaps were slapped in everyone's face, and slaps were loud.
Wang Shuo, in his 2008 book Talking to Our Daughter, asserted that by 2034 Socrates "died a humiliating death of a body that casts souls for the millions of bodies behind him." Whether this assertion is wishful thinking or not may now be clear at a glance. However, Qian Zhongshu imagined a picture with his unborn talent in the intellectually intensive "Man, Beast, Ghost", a genesis under the theory of evolution and theory of heaven, which makes people even more lamented: In the rapid changes in life and civilization, the changes are too many in history, and when the prophecy is too late to say, God has been evolved. And men are only God's first attempt in loneliness and boredom, and women are God's final success. However, God was soon too busy enjoying His own success, too busy jealousy and envying the union and companionship of man and woman, and the real problem remained between man and woman.
Under the gaze of a mature man, the thirteen-year-old Lolita was precocious, with a distinct gender profile that was enough to arouse all his desires. In the seemingly sincere court confession of pedophile Humbert Humbert, he shows off his evil loyalty and infatuation. Love, attached to Lolita in such a deformed way, also made her unpredictable. Is she completely innocent? Did she seduce him? In this way, Lolita is entangled with secular ethics, with complex human vines, and throws the reader a lot of questions, about youth, about love, about seduction and attraction, about fidelity and betrayal, about the nature of gender, and these questions make readers all over the world sit still—many classics are difficult to sit still.
Shakespeare said, "Madmen, lovers, and poets are full of solid imaginations." Unfortunately, Humbert had the characteristics of all three identities at the same time. In the same genre, the book has a sinister beauty, and the poisonous cloud emitted by the unique and strange romance has never dissipated. The law is to judge Humbert, and moral ethics and religious beliefs are also to torture his conscience, although literarily we admire him. But what if Humbert did not have a mild-mannered appearance in his life, was not educated, and especially an accomplice who could be bribed with a little profit? It's a creepy question to think about. "Fang Siqi's First Love Paradise" seems to be a sad and sobering literary echo of this reality.
Khaled Husseini, the author of the super best-selling book "The Kite Chaser," has also written a novel about afghan women's stories, Brilliant Suns. In the novel, the illegitimate daughter Mariam and her mother are isolated from the mountains, and on her fifteenth birthday, she decides to go down the mountain and go to her father's mansion, where his three wives and a dozen children live. She had never been down the mountain, and she had not come into contact with any strangers except her mother, the mullah, and the father who occasionally appeared. On the way, an old man who drove a carriage let her get on the bus and gave her a piece of candy. She was not abducted and made it to her father's house – thankfully.
Of course, she has her problems. Because she went down the mountain privately and her mother was hanged from a tree, she was forced to marry a widower who was more than ten years older than her, but she did not expect to be unable to have children all the time. In the troubled land of Afghanistan, Mariam's fate began at the age of fifteen, began to pause, change tracks, and then take a sharp turn. The combined power of society, culture, patriarchy and patriarchy shaped her tragic life. The book reads:
"It was a barren land, with no hope and no sorrow; no dreams, no disillusionment. There's no future. The past there leaves only this lesson: love is a wounded mistake, and the hope of its accomplice is a fantasy that cannot be regretted. Whenever this pair of poisonous two-year-old flowers began to grow in that dry land, Mariam would uproot them. She pulled them up and buried them before she could hold them. ”
Perhaps, the hope of a woman burying is not terrible, but the fear is that countless women have to bury together.
Wife, Mother, Lover, Daughter:
The second sex that is shaped
Compared with the bright rebellion and sorrow of youth, the life of entering love and marriage instantly becomes cloudy and entangled, and the literary description of women at this stage has many problems similar to "what will happen after Nala runs away". Lu Xun envisioned the end of falling, returning or starving to death, and thus said the famous saying: "The most painful thing in life is that the dream wakes up and there is no way out." ”
However, should women refuse to awaken then? Apparently not. This awakening is sometimes like Nala, urged by the recognition of her husband's character; sometimes like Anna Karenina, awakened by the late self and late love; sometimes like Madame Bovary, determined by the innate lack of wifehood and motherhood, and forced by the damage caused by the blindness and selfishness of the day after tomorrow; sometimes awakened by the truth of Zhang Ailing's red roses and white roses, awakened by the dream of Nanke of "small reunion"; and even sometimes, it is prompted by accidental encounters and impulses to escape from existing tracks, such as "" Covered Bridge Dream" and Monroe's "Escape" and so on.
Before women become intellectual women who want to "have their own room", they already have a role that is inherently given without education and learning- the role of biology, and this role is entangled with factors such as society, marriage system, specific historical and cultural customs, women's self-positioning, etc., and always seems to be able to repeatedly confirm the shocking declaration: "Women are not born, but acquired" ("The Second Sex"),and also seem to be able to remind again and again, ignoring women's morality, flowering, ambitious, self-destructive "The Mad Woman in the Attic" is not just a character, but more like a shadow, trailing everyone, and the docile and kind woman is no exception.
As far as Chinese literature is concerned, in the 1980s, women's writing that accompanied ideological emancipation was a hot topic in the literary world, and a group of female writers also emerged, who continued the baton of the "May Fourth" personality liberation, regarded the pioneering territory of female writers such as Zhang Ailing, Xiao Hong, Ding Ling, Bingxin, and Yang Dai as pioneers, and repeatedly polished the creative temperament precipitated in the special cultural atmosphere of revolution and enlightenment, war and isolated islands, combined with the new era and fiery reality, and formed their own creative trend. In particular, in 1995, before and after the World Conference on Women was held in China, a wave of women's literature was set off. The topics discussed in literature at that time still seem to be outdated. Later, women's stories were increasingly replaced by low-level stories, and the literary world no longer focused on women's topics. By 2020, the so-called "first year of feminism", the much-concerned "she power" topic and the "top ten women's awakening events" will be more accompanied by news, and women's topics will increasingly become purely sociological.
Nowadays, the overall situation of women has undergone earth-shaking changes, and the topic of women has focused on a more civilized and global level, however, it is those issues that are closer to women's identity politics and basic rights and interests that arouse common concern and common feelings - this is undoubtedly a women's "meta-problem" that will be discussed in any era.
The sexes have never been equally divided between the world, and they still are. Goethe said: "Eternal women, leading us to soar", still stuck in the paper utopia stage, the poet Heine called men's longing for women "eternal nostalgia", which inevitably contains elements of gender inequality; and whether it is the popularity of Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale" or the rediscovery of George Eliot's "Middlermatch", it is the enduring performance of women's topics and the continuous overlap of history and reality.
Zhang Jie, a writer who just died at the beginning of this year, is unique in the contemporary literary world. She was called "LoneLy Man" by Tie Ning, and described by Li Jingze as "a child with a chin held high to the world, roses and guns in her eyes, humble like a grain of dust ready to forget and be forgotten, destined to run and doomed to be lonely"; she was also called "fox" by comments, described as "blood as ink".
In the history of contemporary literature, she once made a primrose bird for the trend of ideological emancipation with a resounding "Love Cannot Be Forgotten", making the issue of love and marriage and morality a hot topic in the whole society; then, she used a series of works such as "Emerald" and "Ark" to deeply explore women's awakening and female independence. With "Heavy Wings" and "No Words", she became the only writer who has won the Mao Dun Literature Award twice so far; she wrote about the mother-daughter love and love and killing with "The Person Who Hurt Me the Most in the World". In the text, she is sassy, spicy, serious, blunt, stubborn, and self-sufficient; she has self-esteem, pride, self-doubt, and self-torture. In her writing, she wrote about the profound understanding of love, the endless exploration and endless harshness of the self, and the self-liberation and self-awakening of the intellectual woman full of bitter pain.
In particular, her three-volume "No Words" wrote in millions of words about Mo He, Ye Lianzi, Wu Wei, Chan Yue and Feng Dan, and the pain of four generations of women in a family that flowed with the times, politics and their respective loves. Among them, Wu Wei is also a lover, wife, mother and daughter. She devoted herself to love, bitterly hated, lived seriously, and went crazy and dead, and for this kind of human experience, she really achieved "bones can be decayed and the heart is difficult to be poor" (Su Dongpo). Women are like her, bitter and happy, lonely and shining. She is a specimen, a scale, a boundary.
Zhang Jie's generation, and the relationship with the times, with tradition, with people and self, the main theme is to fight, because of material scarcity, spiritual hunger, because the times force people, life is compelling, do not fight can not live; and today's generation, do not fight, because we use to judge the information increased, so more sober and calm, or more cynical; at the same time, the vast majority of individuals have more self-choice, self-space is broader, so the relationship between women and roles, often based on reconciliation, Moth fire fighting and jade burning do not belong to them. They have lost the sense of strength and tragedy that they have to fight the "one-man war"; they seek and give up, struggle and obey, and are therefore more content with gender-defined roles.
May the old century be mournful, and may the new era rejoice
After the overall decline of feminist writing, Wang Anyi once said in an interview: The more self-conscious female consciousness, if there is a lack of truth observation, a higher realm of rational self observation, and lack of due criticism, the more it will disappear into the error of the self. This is for the more and more voluminous feminist creative path, and in a broad sense of female consciousness, there is always a problem of the unity of knowledge and action, in other words, even if women feel their own value in this world, they also need the assistance of history, the times, education, and men's approval. Simone de Beauvoir sharply states the essence in The Second Sex:
Many of them today demand a new status; they do not want their femininity to be revealed: they want to transcend sex over their own in themselves, as all human beings do; they want to finally be given abstract rights and concrete possibilities, without which freedom is merely a deception.
Perhaps it is precisely because of the awareness of such a problem that more knowledgeable women now have less shocking vulgarity and happiness in their bones, they do not want to be extreme, they do not want to oppose, they compromise, and they are more decent. Whether this is the "degradation of the species" as Mo Yan laments I don't know, but the vigorous female consciousness and female vitality are indeed less common, and many female writing has completely merged into the torrent of low-level writing and historical writing. Even with women's topics as the mainstay, the understanding of feminism has become more moderate and introverted.
Shao Li's "Golden Branch" is one of the more eye-catching of the newly published female writings. She writes family history from the perspective of women, writes about history's manipulation of people, writes about the kidnapping and torture of women by Cultural ShenKe, and also writes about the blurred strangulation and pity between the constant blood and the cultural differences and class differences that cannot be gathered, writes about the ambition and vigorous vitality of women under the flow of class desires, and writes about reconciliation, forgiveness and compassion. The whole "Golden Branch" carries a strong Chinese family cultural temperament, new and old era, new and old concepts, new and old classes, which produces a special tension in such a short novel, a cultural tension dominated by female writers and female consciousness.
Fu Zhen's latest novel, Zebra, the author of the "Tibetan White Paper", is more special in theme, focusing on the fertility of white-collar women. Suang, who originally wanted to be Dink, accidentally became pregnant, and the embryo stopped developing, and it happened several times in a row, which aroused her instinctive "competitiveness" - planning that Dink was "not can't also, not for it", and now it has become a real "can't". After all the trade-offs, she came to Bangkok to try IVF, and thus began a strange journey in life.
In this city where the sun never shows weakness, there is a group of women who refuse to show weakness to fate; in this city where religion and secularity have no boundaries, there are countless stories of piety and blasphemy; in this city full of maternal tolerance, there are the collision and fusion of Chinese and Western cultures, and also dotted with the temptation of the affectionate prodigal son and the adventures of criminals... In this process, women need to face not their own cultural destiny, but their physical destiny - in the face of fertility problems, all modern cultures and civilizations have failed, leaving only ancient, naked instincts, so they hover on the verge of resistance and obedience, escape and submission, relying on physiological bravery and echo of love to slowly reach the essence of life. As for the mystery of the zebra, it contains religious protection, safety protection, and the ineffable meaning of language and culture itself...
Writing is the same as life, and it seems that the result of civilization that humanity can now see is the lady gentleman, that is, to gently restrain his desires, carefully keeping the years quiet on the existing track, just like Suang in Zebra. Although in reality, in fact, we are infinitely close to all this - even if we barely put on the mask of the middle class, harmlessly and happily walk with society, and walk hand in hand with the ever-changing world, it is inevitable to suddenly bump into a medieval-like corner of reality, exclaiming that there are women who are at the same time as themselves who are suffering such a fate!
Whenever we encounter this shocking and sleepless moment, we are accustomed to optimistically imagining Marx's encouragement to the proletarians: in the face of the old world, the revolutionaries must forge ahead, because the proletariat has lost only chains; and all old destruction and new creation often arise at such moments. At the same time, as a woman, I always remember that in addition to thinkers and revolutionaries, Marx was also an affectionate husband, and his marriage to Yanni was hailed as an "unparalleled union in the world". He left calmness and rationality to academic works that explored the nature of marriage, and integrated romance and tenderness into poems and letters to Yanni, and every word was full of majestic passion. In particular, the phrase "May the old century be mournful, may the new era rejoice" read as exciting as "proletarians of the world unite":
Although the pages are endless,
I can also let your name fill thousands of books,
Let your name ignite the flame of thought in it,
Let the will to fight and the fountain of cause splash together,
Let the eternal and enduring truths of real life be revealed,
Let the whole world of poetry emerge in human history,
At that time, may the old century be mournful, and may the new era rejoice.
Let the universe, billions of years forever shine.
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