The Anamorphic Feminine: History, Memory, and Woman in Lu Xun’s Writings

Abstract

Lu Xun was very sensitive to the issue of gender. In his essay “On Photography and the Like” (Lun zhaoxiang zhilei), written in 1924, Lu Xun talked about female impersonation in disgust. The confusion of gender was unacceptable in the writer’s eyes, since it marked the decline of the Chinese national culture from the masculine and robust ideal following the Western model. As David Der-wei Wang puts it, Lu Xun “shares with contemporary intelligentsia a yearning for a strong, virile Chinese figure, as opposed to China’s old emaciated, feminine image” (2003, 134). In his relentless repudiation of traditional Chinese culture and Chinese National Character, Lu Xun had inadvertently positioned himself under the Western gaze, a gaze that associated China and Chineseness with a passive and weak femininity. Shu-mei Shih points out that in Lu Xun stories, “‘woman’ is represented as the receptacle of tradition in need of the male modern’s enlightenment, an allegory of old China’s (female) need for modernity and modernization (male)” (204). As Lu Xun vehemently criticized women’s oppression in traditional Chinese society with his pen, his own portrayal of the female gender was oftentimes saturated with tragic hues, creating dismal female characters such as Xianglin’s Wife in “New Year’s Sacrifice” (Zhufu, 1924), Zijun in “Regrets for the Past” (Shangshi, 1925), and Shansi’s Wife in “Tomorrow” (Mingtian, 1920).