On Women's Day, Teacher Xu Zidong talked to everyone about the breakthrough significance of Ding Ling's "Diary of Ms. Sha fei", why it is still highly respected by feminist critics, and recommended a feminist book to everyone.
Xu Zidong on Feminist Literature (10:05)
Ding Ling's "Diary of Ms. Sha Fei" is still highly respected by feminist critic Dai Jinhua and others, what reasons do you think there are?
To understand the significance of "The Diary of Lady Shafi" in the literary history of 1928, we must review a little bit of what the situation of love literature in the May Fourth New Literature before this was. Take Lu Xun's only romance novel, "Wounded Death", as an example.
It ("Wounded Death") is that the male and female protagonists fall in love, the woman comes to the man's study, the man tells her about Shelley, Byron, Whitman or Ibsen, and the woman does not speak, has been listening. Half a year later, the woman replied that I was my own and that no one had interfered with my rights. It is estimated that when talking about European literature, this man "fooled" her to leave the family, to love freely, and so on. This story had a deep impact on us when we were young, so that when we were young, when we were in love, we had to talk about Hemingway and Picasso first, and I was embarrassed to talk about houses, cars and the like, which was very vulgar. But looking closely at Lu Xun's novel, there is a very funny phenomenon, that is, when a woman is equivalent to giving him a promise and an answer, Juan Sheng said: It can be seen that Chinese women are not completely hopeless, and I see the dawn of the new century. This is a bit funny, in reality, for example, a foreigner comes to Shanghai, he and the Shanghainese drag, will he say that there is still hope for Shanghai women? Wouldn't that be right. It can be seen that Lu Xun's novel is not simply a love novel. Represented by "Wounded Death", there are other things like Yu Dafu's "Spring Breeze Drunken Night", Mao Dun's "Creation", etc., and even including "Border City", "Home", Cao Yu's "Sunrise", this series of works they all have a common model: men fall in love with a woman, this is the first layer; the second layer, men can teach women some things, that is, men are culturally higher than women, so he can tell her some truths, point out to her various possibilities of life; third, in a symbolic sense, The man seems to be the intellectual who awakens the masses, while the woman is like the masses asleep in the dark house, waiting to be awakened. The third meaning is the basic theme of May Fourth literature: the theme of enlightenment. Therefore, before Ding Ling, love literature was usually a three-tier structure: love literature, educational literature, and enlightenment literature. There is nothing wrong with this, at the time, it had its limitations, but it also had its significance.
Stills from the movie "Wounded Death"
The problem is that after we did a statistic, we found that the male protagonist of this type of novel has several basic conditions. In fact, the Qinglou novels of the late Qing Dynasty already had conditions, and Wang Dewei concluded that men want three things: talent, affection, and sorrow, to have talent, to be able to move feelings, to be worried, that is, to be melancholy and profound. So when it comes to May Fourth, there is talent, but also a political correctness, to pursue progress, so why "Small Reunion" challenges big, everyone is very incomprehensible Zhang Ailing like such a person, most of the works at that time did not have this situation; there is also a factor is the economy, there is money, but there is money may not be able to solve the problem, no money must not be able to solve the problem, so no money such as Xiangzi is very miserable, but money is sometimes a diaphragm, you see "Border City" money is not necessarily good, Juehui had money and couldn't save Mingfeng and so on. One of the characteristics is that these men, when he likes a woman, he must not be careful, no novel in the man is a scumbag, the problem of scumbags is written by female writers later.
There is another problem, all these male protagonists have no appearance, and now everyone says that there are many scholars climbing on every word of Lu Xun, and I would like to ask scholars to tell me what kind of growth trickles are. Similarly, Yu Dafu's novel is also (so), Mao Dun's novel is also (so), we know that Cuicui is very beautiful, there are descriptions of appearance, what the second elder looks like, what the eldest elder looks like, I don't know. So, here comes a very serious, feminist study of the subject: Why does a male writer — a man who is very narcissistic — write a novel that does not describe the appearance of the hero, does not write about his figure? The first reason is that these novels are written from the perspective of a man, so he only writes about what women look like; second, he assumes that men can fall in love, and women will fall in love with me, not because I look good, but because I am talented, rich, loyal, I progress, enough. To describe love from a male perspective is actually a masculine point of view, do not look at how many women he writes, writes a lot of women, not necessarily that he respects women.
The Diary of Ms. Shafi, People's Literature Publishing House, 1987
Now we can discuss why "The Diary of Lady Shafi" has a breakthrough significance. Its first breakthrough significance is to first subvert the basic male-female relationship model of male and female looking up, that is, one of Shafi's suitors, called Reed Brother. Reed brother likes her very much, but when she sees her, she cries, the woman does not like him, but she does not reject him, just put it on the side, the Hong Kong saying is called "collecting soldiers", and the current saying is called "spare tire". The man was obviously older than her, and maybe taller than her, but she was completely mentally superior to this man. The second meaning is more important, I met an overseas Chinese student who came back from Nanyang, a beautiful man, as soon as she saw it, she looked at his lips, she said like an apple, wanted to bite his lips, and then wrote in the diary: Dreaming of kissing his whole body, all places... Today, netizens' Weibo and WeChat do not necessarily dare to write like this. This is at least the first time in modern Chinese fiction that there has been an erotic observation of men, a female erotic perspective. Ding Ling later paid a huge price, saying that she played with men because of this.
Aside from this book, if you were asked to recommend feminist books worth reading, which ones would you recommend? Why?
I recommend Tie Ning's "The Great Bath girl".
《Great Bathing Woman》
"The Great Bath Girl" it is also a painting of French Impressionism, a novel in which the heroine dissects her mother's unrequited love, and then dissects herself several difficult choices in the relationship between men and women, including a good friend of hers, constantly using eroticism as a tool to open her life path. The novel is set in the 1970s and 1980s, writing about the boldness of women's lust, not under Ding Ling. I'll just give you one small detail, and I think it's very interesting. Around the beginning of the 1970s, the heroine's parents lived separately between male cadres and female cadres in a may-seventh cadre school, but they could meet on a Sunday. Where will we meet? There was a hut on the hill in this place, and on Sundays, these men and women would go to that hut to party. To get close to that hut, there are more people, so you have to queue, but if a pair of people are queuing there, there is a bad mood, everyone is not embarrassed, what to do? There will be a scene where men and women are in the mountains, in the obstacles of the road and the woods, as if they are there to look at the scenery, but they all understand who is in front and who is in the back. Then, the people who go in, knowing that there are so many people waiting outside, will say less nonsense, and do whatever they want when they go in--this is not what I said, this is the description in the novel. But tie ning is pure in the end, she wrote that these characters quickly finished their work and left the hut on the mountain, she did not describe these people in fact, can not do too fast, time can not be too short. Why? Think for yourself.