Zhang Li talks about "women's literature": why literature should be divided into men and women

Wen | Zhang Li

This course is about women's literature, through reading literary works, thinking about some of the problems encountered in women's lives, and analyzing them in a mirror way. You may wonder, why does literature still have to be divided between men and women? The answer to this question is actually the meaning of the course I want to talk about women's literature.

Women who have been overlooked in literary history

In the history of Chinese literature, especially in the history of ancient literature, most of the writers are men. Occasionally, I will see the figure of one or two female writers, such as Xue Tao, such as Yu Xuanji, such as Li Qingzhao. But most of the time, we don't see the collective emergence of women poets, lyricists, novelists, and dramatists, as does the history of world literature, and there were no women writers in Shakespeare's time.

Why is this so, is it because female writers write poorly? Not. The primary reason is that women's history of education is shorter than that of men. In the long history, women's right to education has been denied, and the lack of education has directly led to the lack of writing ability of most women. This is why we are easy to understand. Another reason is that our understanding of the value of women has long been confined to the family. In traditional society, women's values are reflected in the family, having children, taking care of housework, taking care of husbands, children, the elderly... This is where women's obligations and values lie. The so-called good wife and mother are also based on the praise of women's values within the family. In other words, in traditional societies, our value judgments about women are in the home, not outside the home. Women's writing is not encouraged or supported.

Modern women's literature brought about by the New Culture Movement

In ancient times, Chinese women called themselves "Yu", "slaves" and "concubines", they lived in their homes, and occasionally they would recognize words in private schools or boudoirs, but even if they wrote out, most of them circulated in letters or within the family and could not be published publicly. But more than a hundred years ago, things changed. In 1895, Chinese's first girls' school began to enroll students, and slowly, Chinese women began to have the opportunity to be educated like men, receiving primary education, secondary education, teacher education, and going to college.

From this time on, women who received modern education began to write their own stories, and at this time, unlike the self-proclaimed "Yu", "slave" and "concubine", they began to use "I". Not only that, but they began to write in the vernacular. During the New Culture Movement, in order to reflect the respect for women, Liu Bannong created a word - "she", next to the female character "she". This "she" was not available before, which is a very significant invention, which also means that the female word "she" and the male word "he" are equal. This word very intuitively indicates that "he" and "she" have the same part and have different parts.

Nala in Doll's House says, "I'm the same person as you"—she's talking about someone like her husband. The man is her reference, a standard, because she can't find another standard. Zijun in "Wounded Death" said, "I am my own, and no one has interfered with my rights" - it expresses the awakening of the individual will of women, and "I" have rights to myself. However, this voice is made by a fictional character, and Zijun is a fictional character of the writer Lu Xun. In reality, if a woman wants to make a voice in literature, she has to pick up a pen to write.

It is necessary to borrow Woolf's sentence pattern to tell the history of the occurrence of modern female writers: the birth of modern female writers is thanks to two wars, one is the war of liberating women from home to the "good wife and mother" outside the home, and the other is the "super virtuous wife and mother" movement in the May Fourth era, which put forward the goal of "being a person with dignity" for the liberation of women. If women's entry into the public domain out of the family only provides objective conditions for women's writing, then the occurrence of the May Fourth New Culture Movement has provided creators for modern women's writing—a group of women with a sense of modern subjectivity. These women are new young people who have the courage to speak with "me", the courage to express their views on society, the courage to express love, the courage to examine inwardly, the courage to challenge the tradition, and the female youth who are at the forefront of the times alongside male youth.

If modern Chinese literature is understood as "literature that uses modern literary language and literary forms to express the thoughts, feelings and psychology of modern Chinese", then this means that the history of women's literature is actually the history of the emergence of modern female authors, and the history of how female texts with a "modern spirit" are generated.

You see how similar the life trajectories of the earliest modern female writers are: fleeing their families, receiving new cultural education, freely choosing marriage, and writing freely, which is not only the life experience of Lu Yin, Feng Yuanjun, and Bai Wei, but also the life experience of Ding Ling, Xiao Hong, and others. The awakening of human consciousness and female consciousness led them to participate in the writing of modern literature, and they pioneered the tradition of modern women's writing.

Of course, in today's view, Bing Xin and Lu Yin's works written in 1919 and 1920 are not so good, their initial expression is not coherent, nor fluent, they like to write other people's stories, do not dare to write their own stories - they need time to find their own voices, need to practice continuously, if not like Lu Xun and Zhou Zuoren, then how should they write?

Until the publication of the works of Ding Ling, Xiao Hong, and Zhang Ailing, we will find that the tones and perspectives used in women's writing and men's writing are so different. They have really enriched modern Chinese expression, and their writing achievements are comparable to those of men. I mean, modern Chinese women's literature, counting from 1919, is only more than a hundred years old, because compared with the long male literary tradition, the tradition of women's literature is very short, it needs female readers, female writers to establish together, so we want to emphasize women's literature.

Emphasis on equality and respect for differences

If you say to a female writer, "You don't write at all like a woman," it is generally treated as a compliment, and both the praiser and the praised person acquiesce. However, few people will say to a male writer, "You don't write like a man writes at all", because everyone understands that this evaluation is not praise. This is the literary fact that we are accustomed to. This shows that our judgment of a good work actually has a potential standard, or that there has long been a subtle cognition, which is based on a standard generated by male writers.

So, in the face of those who oppose women's writing and emphasize that literature is not a man and a woman, we should actually think about whether we are ignoring those differences in order to achieve certain universal, consistent, uniform standards. Today's discussion of women, women's identity, women's literature, and women's positions is not to exclude anything, but to better understand. In the case of women's voices, women's attributes, and women's literature being ignored, paying attention to women and emphasizing women is actually a basic common sense, and we discuss women's literature in fact to find more important equality, so that women's voices, women's positions, and women's achievements in writing are known to more people.

Feminist criticism brings more perspective

When we talk about women's literature, we first talk about the works of women writers; in addition, we must also talk about women as readers, reading from a female perspective, and many times we will call criticism based on women's perspectives generally feminist criticism. In simple terms, feminist criticism is to understand problems from a female standpoint, such as "Crazy Woman in the Attic", which evaluates the work "Jane Eyre".

The story of Jane Eyre is a love story between an independent and self-reliant woman and the owner of the estate, Rochester, and because of feminist criticism, Jane Eyre's story has another way of reading.

If you were in Rochester's shoes, you would think the woman in the attic was a lunatic; if you were in Jane Eyre's point of view, you would feel that the mad woman was blocking her happiness. But what if you put yourself in the shoes of a mad woman? She was actually a voiceless woman oppressed by society, and if she could speak, rochester was likely a cruel, ruthless, repulsive man. Before this, we used to stand in the perspective of Jane Eyre, although the crazy woman and her are both women, but the position and perspective are not the same, which makes people realize that in fact, there are classes, classes and positions within the female group.

For example, in "Dream of the Red Chamber", Jia Mu's position and Liu Grandma's position are different, although they belong to the same women, but because of the difference in class, class and position, their perspective on the world is completely different. Standing in a man's point of view, and standing in a woman's point of view, standing in Jia Zheng's point of view and standing in Jia Mu's point of view, may be different; the same as women, standing in Jia Mu's point of view and standing in The perspective of Liu Grandma, the way of seeing the world is also different.

The female perspective is usually a marginal, weak, and neglected perspective, and from this perspective, you will see the richness of the world and the diversity of people. When we look at the world from the perspective of a mad woman in the attic, we see how simple our understanding of Jane Eyre is. The female critical approach will allow us to see a wider world that should not be ignored, and we can better understand the work.

Back to the original question, why should we emphasize women's literature, because in women's literature, there are generally ignored female perspectives, female feelings and female positions.

This women's literature course is not advanced, it is popularizing common sense, it emphasizes women's perspectives and women's positions. Emphasizing the female perspective is not only to emphasize the perspective in the works of female writers, but also to interpret the works of male writers from a female perspective and to know the women in the writings of male writers. Only in this way will the real world we see and the literary world we read will be more complex and diverse, rather than more single and closed. That's why we study women's literature, why we have to understand women's literature.

Reading based on women's issues and based on literature is the basic purpose of this book. The twenty-three lectures contain reflections on the current hot women's issues, such as understanding women's bodies, female beauty, money and sex in love, marriage love and parting, and the diversity of mother images... It also involves the tradition of women and the origin of women's writing, among other things. What I have tried is to interpret literary works from a female perspective and a female perspective, in order to relieve our confusion and spiritual problems today.

Overall, what the book seeks is to travel with the most ordinary literary readers to the world of literature: there are both twists and turns of dramatic conflict and soothing and fascinating emotional stories that bring us spiritual pleasure beyond ordinary life.

Okay, so let's walk into women's literature reading class.

(This article is a guide to "Mirror: Women's Literature Reading Lesson")

Mirror: Women's Literature Reading Lesson

Zhang Li

Flower City Press

Starting from the three dimensions of "self, dilemma, and relationship" that are closely related to women, this book selects more than 20 typical literary images from the works of Many famous artists such as Lu Xun, Ding Ling, Xiao Hong, Zhang Ailing, Zhang Jie, Feng Jicai, Tie Ning, Wang Anyi, Su Tong, Bi Feiyu, Chi Zijian, and Dongxi, reflecting the survival of women in today's social reality.

What does it take to truly respect women? Who defines feminine beauty? What is a woman's decency? How to understand female camaraderie and mutual jealousy? Can money really measure love? Is divorce an abandonment? Will the mother also be kidnapped by the child's expectations? ...... Using literature as a mirror, you can cross gender, connect history, explain the present, and the confusion of women today can be found in this book.