Love and/or Revolution?: Fictions of the Feminine Self in the 1930s Cultural Left

Abstract

When Bai Wei (1894–1987) and Xie Bingying (1906–2000) both published autobiographies in 1936, their literary careers appeared to have already undergone the “political” transformation that modern Chinese literary histories often characterize as the shift from romanticism to revolution. As early as the late 1920s, with the breakdown of the first national alliance between the Guomindang (KMT) and the Gongchandang (CCP), the resurgence of concern over China’s political future precipitated dramatic change in the literary practices of many progressive Chinese writers, as they turned their narrative gaze from the realm of subjective experience to the arena of social emergency. By the early 1930s, the looming threat of Japanese invasion, coupled with political persecution and the repressive cultural policies of the KMT finally galvanized disparate elements of the cultural left to join forces and form the League of Left-Wing Writers (Zuoyi zuojia lianmeng), and over the next few years the League aggressively promoted a prescriptive aesthetic that accorded primacy to class issues and the national crisis. Along with their better-known (and fellow Hunanese) colleague Ding Ling, both Bai Wei and Xie Bingying were among the small handful of women writers to win critical praise in the early 1930s for “living up” to the aesthetic challenges of the new era, having transcended the allegedly narrow personal focus that was now seen to limit other “women’s writing,” and assuming the responsibilities of the socially-engaged writer.