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Title |
Gendered Modernity: Female Characterization in the Works of Xu Kunquan and Wu Mansha |
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Author |
Lin, Pei-Yin |
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Assistant Professor, School of Chinese, University of Hong Kong |
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Abstract |
Research on Taiwanese literature under Japanese rule has been fruitful over the past few years. Scholars have adopted multiple approaches, and paid substantial attention to popular narratives. Existing scholarship examines Taiwan’s Chinese-language popular novels of the 1930s from various angles, including topographic imagination, market awareness, female’s voice, and genre studies. Overall scholars agree that those works exhibit efforts to enlighten the people and concern for women’s roles, and regard such features positively. However, the authors’ gendered visions of modernity and the hyperbolic rhetoric prevalent in their writing warrant further scrutiny. This article will discuss the female characters in Xu Kunquan’s Loveable Rivals (Ke’ai de chouren), and New Mencius’ Mother (Xin mengmu), and Wu Mansha’s Chives Flowers (Jiucai hua) and Peach Blossom River (Taohua jiang). It will examine the characterization of females in those texts, and both authors’ common melodramatic narrative mode. It will argue that the two novelists’ views of modernity are gendered. In other words, the two male writers express their ambivalence toward modernity through highlighting the stark contrast between virtuous women and morally degraded women in their works. By offering a female-centric reading, this essay will point out those texts’ patriarchal moral standards and the imbalanced structure in which moral discourses appear more dominant than sensual/erotic narratives discount their possible implications of enlightening the people and concerns for women. Yet paradoxically, Xu’s and Wu’s quasi-conservative attitudes toward modernity may as well be considered modern in an alternative way. The tension between the moralistic narratives – revealed through criticizing the “decadent” urban life, and promoting conditional free love – and (female-focused) sensual/erotic depictions in fact not only enhance those works’ stylistic charms but also endow the seemingly “anti-modern” instruction-centric rhetoric in those novels with a “modern” twist which reflects how authors like Xu and Wu have negotiated with and responded to Taiwan’s social change at that time. |
