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Title |
Women’s Boathouse and Men’s Oxcart－An Analysis of messages and discourse of “pawning wives to brothels” in Shen Cong-Wen’s “Husband” and Lyu He-Ruo’s “Oxcart” |
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Author |
Chen, Wei-Lin |
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Associate Professor, Department of Chinese Literature, National Hsinchu University of Education |
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Abstract |
Shen Cong-Wen’s “Husband” was written in 1930 and Lyu He-Ruo’s “Oxcart” was written in 1935. Despite the fact that these two well-known works containing their respective metaphors were respectively written in China and Taiwan, they both address the authors’ concerns about ‘pawning wives to brothels’, which reveal social contexts of rural China and agricultural Taiwan, and create a meaningful inter-textual conversation. Rather than writing from “concerns about women” or investigating patriarchal ideology in these writings, this paper emphasizes on the plots of “pawning wives to brothels” where “boathouse” and “oxcart” seem to reflect certain types of social ideology and social symbolic orders. The boathouse and the oxcart are not merely methods of transport or practical agricultural tools; they obviously take leading roles in the discourse of the fictions, and elaborate on messages of “women’s boathouse” and “men’s oxcart”. Therefore, the fictions are a part of a broader reproduction system: “women’s boathouse” reconstructs space of local and gender and “men’s oxcart” symbolizes history and class. |
