The (Wo)man Emancipation in May Fourth Era

Abstract

This paper aims to disclose the point that the advocacy of woman emancipation in the May Fourth era is articulated with that of individual emancipation. I will borrow Yang’s idea of “(wo)man emancipation” to analyze Hu Shih’s The Greatest Event in Life and Lu Xun’s Mourning the Dead, to illustrate the point that the feminist narrative is omitted in the grand narrative of May Fourth Movement. Instead, it is treated as a subjected discourse in order to serve for the larger discourses of “individual versus family”, “new versus old”, and “modern versus tradition”. Even Lu Xun’s concern for the status of new women is articulated with the crisis of consciousness intellectuals suffer. It is pathetic that the real woman is silenced in the process of his-tory, the history manipulated by males, which has been the dilemma of women in man-centered literary discourse the whole time.