Fragmented sisterhood in the Nanking Massacre: The Flowers of War

Abstract

ABSTRACT Women experience abuse both physically and psychologically in a war, and, marginalized women’s voices are rarely heard. Yan Geling’s The Flowers of War 金 陵十三 钗 [Jinling shisan chai] is based on a true story of vulnerable parochial schoolgirls whose lives intersect in a Catholic cathedral with the lives of a local cadre of prostitutes. The two groups became trapped in the cathedral during the sudden and brutal occupation during the 1938 Nanking Massacre. This paper analyses the fate of two disparate women’s groups by showing how cultural, religious, and social chastity norms were used as a weapon of abuse and oppression by the chaste group against the prostitutes. This oppression in turn caused the fragmentation of the female identity of both groups of isolated women and led to tragic results. Using the fragmentation theory as a framework, this paper investigates how oppressive tactics caused women who otherwise should have been mutually supportive in their common need for survival, to oppose and oppress each other, fragmenting individually and as a group.