Woman Image And Its Cultural Re-structure In The Literature Of Late Qing China

Late Qing Dynasty (1840-1911) can be described as a "globalized age", due to the expansion of capitalism and imperialism and the global flow of knowledge and practice, China had been thrown into the world with different cultures among the frequent contact, confrontation and interaction. At this point, the State/national/ personal identity was entangled in a fundamental and embarrassed "re-structure". In the rich and varied cultural products of Late Qing China, including newspapers and periodicals, Western translations, popular literature, translated literature, etc., there is a very interesting phenomenon, that is, whether shaped as a paradox old image, or a new image of the border were not clear, woman has become a compelling object of cultural re-structure. With "cultural politics" emerging, the women image in the literature of Late Qing China was often not "female image", but a new "cultural image", which was born in the competition and negotiation between the West and local culture. The Late Qing literary image of women, mostly reflecting the male writers/intellectuals'ideal plan for women should be, but this plan was in fact about their desire for prosperity and modernization of the country, as well as their anxiety on civilization and identity crisis when faced a powerful culture of the West. These images were often detailed and re-structured by the physical, moral and cultural paths, and this re-structure absorbed kinds of the ideological and cultural resources, including the traditional Confucian culture, modern Western cultureand the salvation consciousness of nationalism.Female images in the literature of Late Qing China could be detailed and precisely re-structured through physical, ethical and cultural ways:first, their body image underwent a "de-eroticized" nationalism mobilization course, in which the bounding foot became a symbol of national shame instead of the literary aesthetic object. At the same time, being used as patriotic "flesh weapon", the female body in some author's narrative did not have the right of self-empowering. Secondly, the female's moral images swung between the different ideological resources of Chinese tradition and western, during which they experienced a complex fusion and remodeling. This phenomenon was related to Liang Qichao's discuss on "New People" in which Liang mixed the Confucian elitist's private morality tradition and the western "citizenship" to build his political utopia. However, he further emphasized the value of traditional feminine virtue at the expense of depriving the cultural authority of women. In some specific novels, women who paid tribute to the tradition but meanwhile putting on a western/modern coat obtained moral or political subject position by participation in the revolution and self-sacrifice. Third, the most profound subversion and reconstruction was put on women'cultural image. According to Liang's paper "On Women", the high cultural capital accumulated by women was completely stripped, so that they were easily delimited an object of discipline and enlightenment by the male elite. However, on the western language and modern knowledge of control, women regained their cultural authority, considering that women's cross-cultural competence was usually relevant to the possibility of China among the modern state in a direct way. The legitimate form of women's writing turned from the poem which was created by traditional talented women after their embroidering works to the translation of western books on modern knowledge. The cultural connotation of the latter had a breakthrough during the May-Fourth period, in which the emergence of women writers committed to new literary. Their turned from translation back to writing in mother tongue, by which they demonstrated their own cultural subjectivity and no longer depended on men.In this thesis, the three logical clues above mentioned were presented to four chapters. The first chapter focuses on how women emerged from the historical surface of the Late Qing China in a negative way. At this moment, "female" was not a relative sex to male, but often a decrepit, sick symbol and the metaphor of pre-modern China. "She" was the opposite of China's modernization and a stumbling block of it, so "She" must be denounced, rejected and recycled. The transformation's starting point was to deny the pre-modern women's bodies. Western gaze and the "natural feet" concept spread from west to east played a key role in this moment, while the intrinsic moral crisis and cultural crisis of the era was finally found the real reason for the decline of "foot binding". Correspondingly, the reformist woman image who unlocked the foot-binding cloth means the courage and possibilities that China's participation in the global race competition, and open space for women in new knowledge and action. The second chapter discusses the impact of elite male and female's redefinition of women moral or scholarship on the construction of female images with the context of the rise of female education in the late Qing China. By Liang Qichao, modern school education that replaced the traditional women's culture is an important prerequisite for the country achieving prosperity: to get prosperity as purport, to foster "national mother" as the goal, and to redefine women's moral as the value of core. The female abroad students as the reality product of women's education of the late Qing bore the intricate imagination of intellectuals'dream of modernization. Chapterâ…¢outlined a "Heroine" portrait pedigree of the late Qing literary by close reading a large number of texts. "The mother of the national" once called the ideal woman, which means more than racial good genes, but also some important re-interpretation on female's cultural and moral role. But with the national crisis deepening, women's gender roles were polarized into the gender-based "national mother" and the de-gendered "Heroine". Either the local image of "country woman" or Sophia and Madame Roland from the West, the literature texts about them showed a specific discrimination model that stressed body, morality and gender roles of female. There was a strong interaction between the native image and the western image that they even directly involved in each other's construction. Chapter IV analyzed a typical female image and an important complex of male elite, that is, "ideal wife". If all women images meaned that their creators were looking forward to an ideal society and a political utopia, then the associated phenomenon had been followed up by the May-Fourth literary imagination of the female students. Concluding section of the paper summed up the basic patterns of female imagination and its deeply cultural connotation in Late Qing literary, and prospected for future research.