Image of City Women in 20th Century Chinese Literature

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Twentieth Century's Chinese Women in Literature
Twentieth Century in China has great literary importance because of the Fourth May Cultural Movement, which influenced the social and cultural life of Chinese people in real as well as in literature through dramatically activist character representations. Particularly, the famous writers of that era, like Lu Xun, set features, thoughts, and actions for their female protagonists, which make them different from their past representations of traditional Chinese women. They portrayed 'new woman' who was not ready to accept her stereotypical role as a loving mother, loyal wife, or submissive daughter, but a socially and politically conscious being, demanding equal civil rights. in twentieth century's Chinese literature, contemporary writers like Lu Xun and many others created urban female characters with improved social awareness, rejecting the patriarchal division of their rights and moving ahead to conform to their individuality as 'new woman.'
The portrayal of the urban woman in Lu Xun's writing is dismal with a tragic spectrum. Lu Xun is a great Chinese author of the 20th century who handled gender problems in society with complex ideas. Although he was a strong activist regarding women's rights, he did not make his heroines stand to affirm the issues of social injustice. Zhu invites the reader to Lu Xun's essay "On Photography and the Like," which is a social commentary on women's role with liberal ideas by the author. Following his ideas in this piece of literature, it is visible that Xun is against the division of social roles and Western ideals because these social codes can give a halt to conventional Chinese culture with a belief in masculine epitome (Zhu 45). His views seem to conform to the Chinese ideals of social images. Zhu also talks about 'the western gaze,' which kept the Xun influenced to motivate him to pronounce his national culture and remove the idea of 'weak feminity' through his writings. Zhu refers to Xun's three stories, "New Year's Sacrifice," "Regrets for the Past," and "Tomorrow" to highlight the author's female portrayal, which is bleak and works as a conductor from the tradition to the present in need of modernity (Zhu 74). The three heroines by the author in these three stories, Xianglin's spouse, Zijun, and Shansi's wife, represent the twentieth-century urban woman in China by one of the most influential writers of the era. All of them appear to be struggling to break the social constraints for freedom and individual rights, but none of them grants the twentieth-century Chinese girls with an ideal revolutionary pride in actions and self-designed fate. For example, Zijun is an urban woman with good education and a cultured lifestyle. She attempts to reverse the fixed social course of life for women in China, giving preference to individualism, but she is gloomy at the end, considering her life not worth living without love (Fu). Lu Xun appears violent while condemning social injustice and suffering of women in patriarchal Chinese social settings in his essays and social debates. However, when he develops a female character in stories like Zijun, he positions her with strong warnings on the other side of the border of the gender-based social restrictions. Although he communicates the message of the importance of female education by making his heroin smarter, more qualified, and cultured than traditional Chinese women of the era, he removes the necessity to flee from the oppression in the hope of betterment.
Lu Xun's "Regret for the Past" is a crucial social critique in response to establishing the dignity of his national cultural women identity in response to western modernity ideals with women activists. Brown takes the reader to compare the feminist works by American writer Ibsen and Lu Xun, who participated in the already hot debate around Ibsen's Nora, who left the door slamming behind her at the end of the story, signifying her rejection of traditional American social ideals, and gender-based injustice. The protagonist Nora raised a wide variety of gender issues for worldwide discussions. Xun joined the debate and came up with his warning notes for 'China'swould-be-Noras'; he opened two vistas for the Chinese protagonist coming out of her house after positioning her in Ibsen's story "A Doll's House." One of them was prostitution, and the second possible option was a painful desire to reverse the decision, described by the author in his essay "What Happens After Nora Leaves Home" (Brown 55). Although Xun is a strong supporter of individual and women's rights and uses his pen to show disgust against gender-based oppression and anti-freedom laws, he does not portray Ibsen's Nora in his stories, but a protagonist who ends agonizingly, remembering her past (Brown 56). All in all, Lu Xun is a twentieth Chinese writer with a modern approach to women rights as exposed by his essay writing and social debating, while the picture of heroin in his stories is rather dreary, favoring spiritual independence but lamenting the past she enjoyed under social constraints before her rebellion like Zijun.
Twentieth-century Chinese culture, as represented by the female protagonists in Chinese literature, depicts a shift of women's role from domestic to professional. Many scholarly works show the progress of 'new woman' in that era in the urbanized part of the country. These women broke their stereotypical domestic shells to enter modernity through education, affiliation, and career orientation. They were to make a livelihood for their families, develop professional abilities, and begin protests demanding social justice through rallies and public demonstrations (Feng 3). Feng mentions many writers of the era with their creations showing 'new women' like Lu Xun, Yu Dafu, Mao Dun, and Ding Ling. Describing their works, he shows that the Chinese "popular" fiction of the era revealed a 'new woman' switching her roles from ideal housewife or peasant to a self-reflective and qualified, individual urban part of society with improved sociopolitical rights (Feng 3). The criti...