Zhang Li, a professor at Beijing Normal University, specializes in the history of modern and contemporary Chinese literature, contemporary literary criticism, and women's literature and culture. (Southern Weekly data map)
Regarding the relationship between literature and the night, this is a topic that we have to talk about, and I think of Shanruzod in "One Thousand and One Nights", a woman who survived the long night by telling stories and got rid of bad luck, and I think she is a woman with literary charm. Of course, I also think about my childhood experience, when I was about five or six years old, living in the country with my grandmother. I vaguely remember an aunt who used to come to talk to my grandmother at night for fear of waking me, and they would always whisper for fear of waking me. To this day, I can still remember the conversation between the two women on a cold winter night in the north. I don't know what they said, but anyway, in my memory, they were female storytellers in another sense.
In this world, there are many storytellers, some like to tell their own stories, and some like to tell other people's stories. Those female storytellers, who give the night another enchanting color.
The female perspective is to make us "see again"
The title of my talk today is "Why the Emphasis on the Women's Perspective". I bring this topic because last year I heard two male friends talk about the pressure they have been feeling lately. A friend who is a screenwriter said that he wrote a movie, and after its release, the audience criticized it for the male gaze, and many viewers left him messages suggesting that he learn how to tell stories from a female perspective, and he was very aggrieved and told me "I have always supported equality between men and women, you know". Another writer friend, who was going to publish a novel recently, revised some of the details, why did he change the details? Because his editor-in-charge, the female editors, collectively thought that his details were too macho, and he finally listened to the editors. Then he told me that they had a point. So those two things make me think that our audience, our readers, including our literary editors, there is a female force that is rising in them, and in a way they are really driving the generation of the female perspective of the creators.
In my graduate classes at Beijing Normal University, I myself became aware of the rise of young female readers. Once we read Lu Xun's "Sadness and Death" together, the novel is about a pair of young men and women who live together after falling in love, and the male protagonist begins to realize that daily life is very difficult, and realizes that poverty hurts love, so he especially wants to break up with the heroine. There is a sentence in the novel where he says, "I'm tired of eating in a constant stream." We had a writer's class, we had a graduate student majoring in creative arts, and an older graduate student was particularly excited to stand up, and as a boy he especially identified with the hero's situation, and he said, "You know, it's really tiresome to eat in a constant stream." As he spoke excitedly, as a teacher, I noticed that the atmosphere in the class began to become very tense, and several girls had a bit of intense facial reactions. He had just sat down when a girl stood up, and she said that when she read that she was tired of eating, she seemed to see the heroine cooking in a steady stream. She felt suffocated for the silent stream of heroines who cooked endlessly. When this post-00s girl finished speaking her opinion, our entire classroom of more than 40 people suddenly fell silent, and I think everyone was touched by this girl's sight.
So, if you default to a male perspective, then the novels you see are usually textbook understandings, and the male protagonist is tired of ordinary life, but if you substitute a little bit of a female perspective, you will see another kind of pain beneath the surface of this novel, which is a perspective that we rarely have in the past when reading literature. What is a female perspective? So in my opinion, the female perspective is to make us "see anew", to see again what we didn't notice before, to discover what we didn't see before, to hear again what we didn't hear before.
So, the next question is, is there a common female perspective as long as we are women? The other question is, what kind of female perspective should we have today? For example, when I was a child, I really liked to read Jane Eyre, and this novel was a love story for me, "Do you think that because I am poor, lowly, not beautiful, and short, I have no soul and no heart? You are wrong!" This is a very stirring line in "Jane Eyre", which I remember very clearly when I was a child. From Jane Eyre's standpoint, we will see the beauty of Jane Eyre and Rochester's love. Later, when I grew up, I read a lot of books, especially the book "The Mad Woman in the Attic", and if you put yourself in Rochester's shoes, you would think that the Mad Woman in the attic, Rochester's ex-wife was a madman. If you put yourself in Jane Eyre's shoes, you will feel that it is this woman who is holding her back from her happiness. But what if you put yourself in the shoes of this crazy woman? She's a voiceless woman who has been oppressed by society, and if she could speak, then Rochester might well be a cold, ruthless, disgusting man. In the past, we were used to standing in the perspective of Jane Eyre, and the madwoman and she were both women, but their positions and their perspectives were different, so before this interpretation appeared, our understanding of "Jane Eyre" was so single. And this critical method is a feminist critical method, which allows us to see the broader world that should not be ignored in the first place, and also to better understand the work. So, the madwoman in the attic will make us think again about what is a real female perspective, not only from the perspective of Jane Eyre, but also from the perspective of a crazy woman, and when we stand from the perspective of a crazy woman, we will find that "Jane Eyre" is another story, another story under the story.
What kind of female perspective do we need today? I think it should not be one-dimensional, it should not be a female perspective under the binary opposition of men and women, first of all, we must jump out of a solidified circle consciousness, and see countless situations of her. I have a book called "I See Countless Hers", which is my attempt to read or watch movies from a female perspective. In that book, I mentioned that within the same group of women, there are actually classes, classes, and positions, and different women see the world differently. Think about it: how can Mother Jia and Grandma Liu see the same world? But in any case, when we are faced with the work, the female perspective is actually a fresh perspective to look at the work, although it is not the only one. But the female perspective brings us a way of thinking, and the female perspective is not exclusive, and it is not either/or.
"Why can't a woman have long hair?"
As early as 2018, I conducted a survey of 137 Chinese writers called the "Survey on Gender Views of Our Times", in which I asked young female writers: Do you think you have a female consciousness? Do you overcome your female consciousness in writing? The same question is also given to male writers: Do you think your writing has a male consciousness? Will you overcome your male consciousness? Guess what the answer is? My writing is masculine, I'm inherently male, how can I overcome it?", but many female writers answered, "I may have a feminine consciousness in my work, but I know it's problematic, and I'll overcome it." As an investigator, what can we find out from this answer? is that you will find that male writers are positive about their own male consciousness, but female writers have a strong sense of insecurity about their own female consciousness. Of course, this was answered five years ago, and I just did a return visit not long ago, and most of the writers' understandings are starting to change.
Also in 2018, I surveyed some of the women writers who have become famous, and they all admit very directly: I am a woman writing, or that I have benefited from my female writing, my female consciousness. For example, Teacher Tie Ning, such as Teacher Lin Bai, I remember their answer was like this, she said: "Some of my works benefit from my female consciousness and my female perspective. Here I would like to mention a writer that we all like very much, that is, the answer of Ms. Chi Zijian, she said: "Many people say that women have long hair and short knowledge, but why can't women have long hair and have long knowledge?" I was very impressed by her answer! Because I think she questioned the stereotypical impressions of women in a humorous way. So you will see that in "The Right Bank of the Erguna River", she writes about the world from the perspective of a female chief, with all the ups and downs, but also with a deep sense of power, which is different from our usual women's literature.
In the surprise TALK section of the 2023 FIRST Film Festival, I also shared an example: First of all, some female writers write works in the "Domineering President Falls in Love with Me" series, which is not a real female writing for me. Another example is the Ram case, we all know that Ram's ex-husband killed Ram, and the whole society condemns him, but I noticed that there is a person under the news who replied: "She must have done something to make her husband angry, otherwise, she would not have been killed!"
I'm sure you can understand what I mean: it's not that just because you're a woman you naturally have a female perspective, it's actually a method, it's also a value and a methodology, it's something that can be learned, and it's something that we learn as we grow. So now many of us are starting to have a female perspective, which is actually what we started to have in the process of constantly learning from the world. In fact, there are many outstanding male writers in the history of literature who also wrote works with a strong female perspective, such as "Anna Karenina" and "Madame Bovary".
So, what are the really good works of women's literature? I'll give you a few examples, like Monroe's novels, which are actually about the lives of women in the family, but in nuanced and profound, Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, which starts from the female body and childbirth, but then arrives at thinking about the human condition, and Ferrante's "Neapolitan Tetralogy", which we all love to read She writes about female friendship and sisterhood, but it is completely different from the very simple type of writing that two sisters must have a relationship with a boy, and it goes beyond the understanding of stereotyped female relationships in the ordinary sense. In my eyes, these are excellent works of women's literature, and it is different from our previous understanding of women's literature.
The concept of equality is practiced in the system of literary evaluation
As I said earlier, some of our young writers are reluctant to admit that they are women, and they are worried that they will be labeled. For example, today you say to a female writer, "Your work is very well written, really good, you don't write like a woman at all!" But what if we say to a male writer, "Oh, you don't write like a man at all?" and he gets angry, and then he asks, "What do you mean?" because everybody knows it, because everybody knows that such a statement may not be a compliment. In such a context, we will understand what writing is more advanced and what is not, and this is the literary and cultural context in which our literary writers live.
For a long time, we have had a subtle perception of the judgment of good works, but this is a stereotyped cognition. Why do we form such stereotypes? It is because for thousands of years the classic works in the history of Chinese literature and even in the history of world literature have been written by male writers, and it was only a hundred years ago that Chinese female writers began to pick up the pen and write for women in the general sense. Therefore, there are not enough samples of classic women's literary works, and in the case of insufficient, such a literary or cultural context will appear. This is one of the reasons why I studied women's literature.
I hope that the standard of judging classic literature in the history of literature should not only be composed of the works of male writers, but also the works of female writers, and I hope that the concept of equality can also be practiced in the system of literary evaluation.
Of course, the situation has changed a lot, and you may notice that in the field of world literature, there are more and more women writers among the Nobel Prize winners in literature. Therefore, when I look at their works, in my evaluation, I repeatedly mention "female perspective", "female consciousness" and "female writing", which shows that the writing of these female writers is different from that of those male writers in the past, but they are also excellent and deserve awards. The award is a reaffirmation, an affirmation of a new standard for judging literature, which shows that not only grand narratives are important, but also narratives that come from the margins of women.
In the selection of the 2023 Mao Dun Literature Award, we not only saw Liu Liangcheng's "Bemba", but also Qiao Ye's "Treasure Water". "Bao Shui" writes about the great changes that have taken place in rural China, the spiritual changes that have taken place in contemporary rural women, it writes about how those women use new media to change their lives, how those rural women fight against domestic violence and sexual assault, and how they can jump out of being victims. There are so many works in the history of literature that write about rural life, but it is rare to write about the fate of rural women so widely and deeply. As a writer, when facing the tradition of Chinese vernacular writing behind her, Qiao Ye, as a writer, obviously benefited from her feminine consciousness and female perspective, and it was her concern for the fate and spiritual life of women in rural China that opened up the dimension of her writing.
Since about 2019, I have started compiling the first annual selection of Chinese women's literature in Chinese history, and every year I will select the 20 most representative excellent short stories, and 20 stories written by female writers will be recommended to everyone, and this year is the 5th year, and last month I just finished compiling the 2023 annual selection of women's literature.
Three years ago, that is, in 2021, I started to host a list called the "Good Books of Women's Literature with a Small Fire", and the reason is very simple, that is, when I saw that there were very few female writers in many lists, or when the female writers I liked could not be on the list, I suddenly thought: Why don't my sister run a list herself!, so I made a list with my graduate team, and today I just released the "Top Ten Best Books of Women's Literature in 2023" on the official account of my Women's Literature Studio , including not only original Chinese works, but also translated works, welcome everyone to pay attention. In fact, this list is a very literary list, and the members of our book review team are all my graduate students and doctoral students, most of them are young people born in the 95th and 00th generations, and we mainly recommend the works of female writers, especially focusing on the writing of the younger generation of women. The reason why I do this work is actually very simple, that is, I hope that more readers can see female writers and their creative power, and pay attention to the growth of the younger generation of female writers. At the same time, I hope to confirm the pluralism and diversity of the new evaluation criteria for contemporary literature in this way.
Returning to today's topic, we are talking about the "use of literature". I especially like an American poet named William Stafford, who has a poem about the creation of literature, and he says, "And so the world was born twice, once as we saw it, and the second time it became a legend, as it was." Because the meaning of literature lies in seeing again, in seeing it for the second time, in brushing away the stereotypes of things, and discovering the world as it is, which is brought to us by excellent literary works, and also brought to us by literature that reads and writes from a woman's perspective, which is what I understand as the "useless use" of literature.
(Speech shorthand compiled by Liu Shijun)
Zhang Li
Editor-in-charge: Li Muyan
![More tolerant, untamed: The female perspective as a reading methodology[fig]](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAP///wAAACwAAAAAAQABAAACAkQBADs=)