Birth control East and West: reading eugenics in Mo Yan’s Frog and Eudora Welty’s “Lily Daw and the Three Ladies”

Abstract

This essay undertakes a cross-cultural comparison of the eugenics movement in China and the U.S. South through a comparative reading of Mo Yan’s Frog (2009) and Eudora Welty’s “Lily Daw and the Three Ladies” (1941). By positioning each work within its own particular political and cultural milieu, it argues that both writers, while demonstrating a shared criticism of gender hierarchy and biopolitical violence, cast a similar eye on the intertwinement of modernity, science, and nationalism in the cultural practice of birth control. Set in a rural northeast town, Mo Yan’s Frog unmasks how disease and the discourse of scientism in eugenics serve China’s modernity dream and political legitimacy at a critical historical juncture. By comparison, Welty’s regional story brings to the fore gender politics in eugenics, and denounces its role in soothing exacerbating social problems attendant upon the South’s pursuit of modernity. The provocative interlocutions between Welty and Mo Yan on eugenics also open up new and fertile terrains for rethinking community and the politics of identity today.