We have begun to separate gender from literature and define the concept of "female literature", and we have begun to see the influence of literary gender differences on literature and life. The concept of "difference" comes from the contrast between the recognized object and memory, which is actually a reflection on the old literary common sense. It can be said that the modernization of China's contemporary literature, in a sense, is constantly moving forward in the promotion and cognition of this difference.
In China's century-old literature, the emergence of a large number of female writers and a large number of women's issues have attracted unprecedented literary attention. A large number of multiple narratives and multiple descriptions of rural urbanization and desire of gender relations, women's original desires from physical philosophy to soul flogging, from "copying red" to "judging men" and even Ah Q and Wu Ma all show the poetic expression of literature in this difference, showing the deep differences in the literary relationship between the two sexes.
However, from the root of women's words, the definition of women's literature is actually very problematic. It seems that literature concerning women's gender is particularly distinguished from men from creation and practice, seeking differences and balancing to show fairness. Seeing that difference is a kind of progress, while difference itself is a kind of discrimination. Therefore, the definition of female literature is full of problems-this is a long-standing mistake in academic circles-referring to the author's gender, not the rest? Refers to the literary theme, female consciousness? Or both? This phenomenon is not uncommon in the history of literature: first, the female images written by female writers and male writers are the same; second, male writers can still write works with feminine meaning or feminism, such as Yu Dafu and Ye Lingfeng; There are also many female writers who write masculine and rough works without female consciousness, such as revolutionary writers such as Cao Ming and Serina Liu.
(Therefore, the more accurate definition of "women's literature" should be "women's writing", which is a literary respect given to women by social opening and literary progress, and also a rational supplement for modern social civilization to peep at gender differences through literary expression to move towards harmony. However, it is probably not the will of feminism to confine women's issues to the gender vision of female writers. )
The question is not who will write. In the patriarchal era, women's writing is regarded as proof of resisting male chauvinism, but in the feminist era? The author's gender has no special significance. In modern society, which advocates equality between men and women and gender civilization is still on the rise and fall, female writing shows its unique significance. In other words, women's writing itself has surpassed itself and become a banner, a banner for independence and equality, and a cultural symbol that shows the degree of social gender civilization.
The feminist movement promoted the development of women's literature
The French Revolution awakened women's consciousness and raised the issue of women's status in society. At the end of 19th century, there was a movement for women's participation in politics in the United States and Britain. The first goal was to fight for the right to vote, and then to fight for equality in education, culture and work. By the 196s, the feminist movement had been developing vigorously.
On December 3, 1987, the Spanish "Ultimate Daily" published the article "The World Feminist Movement": "Education is no longer the sphere of men's influence, and the proportion of male and female students entering universities tends to be balanced gradually. Women have realized that education is the only way to seek a career. Women who advocated sexual liberation 2 years ago now find themselves as tools for men to satisfy their desires. Therefore, they even organized to oppose the beauty pageant, considering it an insult to women. On a series of issues, we need to make clear judgments. Women all over the world know that they still have a long way to go, but the goal will not change, and that is equality between men and women. "
The basic trajectory of this description at least shows the following tendency. After years of setbacks and repetitions, the feminist movement turned from focusing on the conditions outside itself to women themselves, including the experience of social life and family roles, to the needs of inner life. This turn inspires us to review and clean up the history of the feminist movement in the past. In fact, the feminist movement is to strive for a balanced and equal right with men in social life and psychological needs. To a great extent, this struggle is a query and resistance to men being regarded as "the model of species". Men are regarded as normative in all myths, while women are the variation and deviation of this norm. Men are the main body and women are the other body. All the actions of men towards women are motivated by "taking back", while all the passivity of women as ribs lies in "returning". This is the oldest footnote of patriarchal theory and the philosophical explanation of the relationship between men and women. According to this cognition, if women are compared to left-handed, they live in a world created for right-handed, in which men represent norms. The psychological effect of this concept can be found in many cultural behaviors of human society.
In English, the word "man" can be used as a general term for human beings, while in Japanese, the meaning of "man" is "master". There was no word "she" in ancient Chinese, and women were replaced by men in the world-wide language field. This language phenomenon particularly profoundly proved that men's culture invaded human culture in an all-round way, and women accepted this aggression and infiltration with a collective unconsciousness. This deep consciousness is also in a conscious super-stable state in men. History has arranged men's advantages in all aspects. However, anyone with a little knowledge of ancient history and culture knows that the so-called male model is actually the crystallization of a long patriarchal society and has no sufficient biological basis. The myth of male model is also in a state of change in different cultural periods.
this historical change shows its fascinating situation and flavor in literature with a parabolic trajectory.
human beings originated in the abdominal cavity of women, and the sacred worship of women by the early Archaean people weaved the long years of motherhood. Shan Hai Jing, the earliest myth in China, recorded the majesty of the first goddess in China, the Queen Mother of the West, which was a great image of the first gods in the world view of the early people. In primitive times, the Queen Mother of the West was the goddess of the matriarchal society. She went from being a half-man, half-beast in primitive mythology to being the head of the immortals in Wei and Jin Dynasties, and then she completed the final evolution, and never developed again. This can at least show that the distant memory of motherhood has infiltrated the long historical era. After being replaced by patriarchy, literature still remembers it vividly, but in the face of the increasingly powerful patriarchy, it has gradually become dim and infiltrated the thoughts of contemporary people.
The social, historical, political and economic changes have completely erased people's last memory of the years of motherhood, and the decline of women's political and economic status has been completely manifested in the evolution of myths. The long years of motherhood disappeared in the prehistoric chaos, and since the history of civilization, the superiority of male power has been controlling the development of history. As the opposite of this development, women have been rewritten in myth and reversed in reality. In Greek mythology, "Pandora's Box", Eve became the source of all evil. These myths or doctrines, which are based on the patriarchal center, are nothing more than emphasizing the male order in reality. The male-centered myth has disappeared in modern civilized society, but as an unconscious ideology, it dominates the psychology and behavior of men and even women all the time and becomes an invisible criterion of knowing and doing. To what extent do women realize the danger of this unconscious thought in daily life and spiritual field? To what extent is its subtle state of life and formal representation deeply criticized by reason?
Women's self-awakening and self-imagination are publicized in literature
Women's self-awakening is publicized in literature first. The oppression of women is first of all the oppression of human nature, that is, the oppression of sex and lust. The May 4th New Literature has created a context of personality liberation, especially the famous and fruitful writers who are called "Creation Society". Taking the relationship between men and women as the incision, they pay attention to the human nature revolution of expressing people's lust and nature, releasing the ID and liberating emotions and passions, which is a hot topic of the Creation Society. According to the Introduction written by Mao Dun in 1935 for "China New Literature Series, Novel Collection", during the three months from May to July in 1921, there were 115 new novels published in various magazines, including 7 love novels, only 8 in rural life, 3 in urban life, 9 in family life, 5 in school life, 2 in social life and family life. Therefore, "it can be said that novels describing the love between men and women account for 98% of the total." This tendency is repeated in the novel creation in the new period, and this time the performance turned out to be yin flourishes while yang declines.
Women's writing gained momentum in the 198s, and it was in full swing in the 199s, but it became rampant in the 21st century. It is the female writers, not the male writers, who are the most prominent and farthest in the literary description of gender issues. Teasing has become the means and purpose of so-called literature. These things that are out of place and far away from literature are ignored, but they continue the literary tradition of personality liberation and self-promotion in the May 4th New Literature, and they are revolutionary and subversive, which is completed by women's writing.
In contemporary literature, Zhang Jie's Love Can't Be Forgotten first touched the tragedy that women love but can't love, but they can't forget what they love, questioned the rationality of non-love factors in gender relations, and explored the current practice of interpreting Engels' The Origin of Family, Private Ownership and Country in a literary way. In 1979, just after the Cultural Revolution, it was undoubtedly a rock-breaking event, and it was also the lifeblood of Chinese marriage. Zhong Yu, the heroine, can't realize what she loves in reality, so she can only bet her love on his gift, Chekhov's selected novels, and put loved one in the heaven and the afterlife. Zhang Jie skillfully expressed China women's long-buried desire for life, and put this desire under the escape of freedom. Responsibility, morality, restraint and other human virtues seem to instantly turn into a huge wall from the ancient wasteland, lying between two souls who are attracted very hard and separated very tired, and alienated into a kind of sublimity in disguise. She turned the anxiety of women's life into a kind of loftiness, and she rebelled against her personal desire and obeyed some morality. Zhang Jie put the hero's tragedy into a cruel dialogue system to interpret, and separated himself. Zhang Jie weaves this story flatly, soberly and rationally, and narrates it in the first person, which makes the characters obsessed with it and unable to extricate themselves, but still looking forward to hopelessness. The detached state of the works makes the complex situation of women's psychological self-control and argument objective, and completes the reflection of a universal truth. Therefore, Zhang Jie realized not only standing in a narrow female position, but looking down on all kinds of heckling in the oriental cultural atmosphere in the relationship between men and women from the commanding heights of people.
Women's writing is a symbol of urban fashion and consumption
Here is another kind of women's writing, Ying Chuan's novel. She pursues pure love and shapes men, and this shaping is realized in the face of differences and repeated clutch. At the same time, it also represents the human achievements of the evolution of social feminism in China in the 21st century. They have gone far out of the cage of Zhang Jie's era, and have not been passively chosen, but actively and aggressively chosen, and choice is freedom.
In the novel Women's Jianghu, Yingchuan created a woman who not only knew what she loved and how to love, but also had a subjective impact. In the constant escape and return of emotion and humanity, she realized the mutual rescue between herself and the other party and laid out their differences. She wandered in the extremely free love space, but instinctively escaped the intrusion of freedom. After experiencing three different men, she finally chose Gu Jiao. She wrote the last letter to Gu Jiao, but she looked at it helplessly and eagerly. This is a pure surrender to mediocrity and a challenge and reconciliation to men. This is a retreat attack and a wise move. It is not only the ultimate realistic posture of women, but also the rational posture that life itself prepares for women.
Yingchuan is naturally not as cold as Duras, nor does she have the sad side of Zhang Jie's heartbreaking heart. She just chooses to spend and love wisely. However, her plot for love has penetrated into the ordinary life, which has an oriental modern cunning.
In this article, women in literature have multiple tastes. From the beginning of the Queen Mother of the West to the glory lamp, there is a vague figure of women from God to man, from human liberation and publicity to human spiritual freedom. It can be read that women's progress in the times is facing a more spiritual crisis at the same time. Women's writing has a different value in this crisis. Especially in the process of modern urbanization, women and their writing are a symbol of urban fashion and consumption. Urbanization is actually feminine. For example, Shenzhen is a city for women in terms of consumption, fashion and quality of life.
Women's literature, which started with the May 4th New Culture Movement, is an important and indispensable aspect of China's literature in the 2th century. She was born at the same time as the "May 4th" new literature, and experienced nearly a hundred years of historical vicissitudes, with five or six generations of female writers and rich creative achievements.
If modernity is the characteristic of new literature that is different from traditional literature, we have avoided the question of whether female literature is modern new literature for too long. Answering this question is really the starting point of Chinese women's literature research. What is the female literature that has been talking to itself since the name of female literature appeared? We must also start with defining and combing the modernity of female literature.
19th-2th century: the splendid sunrise of women's literature
Elizabeth Zhanwei pointed out in American Contemporary Literature Women's Literature: Because women's literature comes from the life experience of the erased "other half" of human beings, it is necessary to "see them clearly with a lens of different degrees". [1] That is to say, if the "degree" of this "lens" is to match the reality of female literature, it must start with the birth of female literature.
in both eastern and western languages, words such as humanbeing, human and history do not include women, who are absent in the category of people and history. The humanistic thoughts of Renaissance and Enlightenment rationality are abstract people, but if they are concrete, they only refer to men. The declaration of human rights in the French Revolution was only a declaration of male rights. Alempo de Jyugo, who discovered this, published the Declaration of Human Rights for Women and Female Citizens in 1791, two years after the French Revolution, and she was later guillotined for it. The Napoleonic Code clearly stipulates: "Minors, married women, prisoners and mental patients have no right to exercise the law." Only in the emancipation movement did American women realize that they were in the same powerless position as blacks, so they actively participated in the emancipation movement and set off the feminist movement in the 182s-4s. In 1848, they published the Declaration of Women's Independence, which was similar to the French feminist declaration. In this manifesto, they changed the word "person" to "@ ①". [2] It can be seen that women's awakening begins with the realization that the abstract concept of "person" covers up the actual inequality between humans and humans, and begins with women's pursuit and exploration of the full realization of their value as human beings. By the 196s, the second wave of American feminist movement, betty friedan, known as the mother of modern American feminist movement, described and reflected on it in detail in her Feminine Myth and the Second Stage. "Feminin"