"Red Rose" In Anti-japanese Campaign

Chen Quan (1903– 1969) was a major figure in the"Warring States Movement"of Chinese literature during the 1930's and 40's. An academic with solid groundings in the Chinese, American, German, and other cultures, he viewed China's societal and political landscape from a purely literary perspective. From the time he entered Qinghua University, Chen's writings displayed a focus on social politics and worries about national destinies. His works elucidate the social responsibility and historical mandate felt by the Chinese: as Qing Dynasty scholar Gu Yanwu's adage says:"The Nation's prosperity or demise is a responsibility all men bear."Chen mostly wrote fiction, though he also authored poems, essays, scholarly dissertations, and made several translations. Chen began to focus on writing plays during the second Sino-Japanese War, a time when China's army was constantly retreating before the Japanese and citizen's morale ebbed. While his country edged dangerously close to a painful demise, Chen and a group of free thinkers took the phrase"the Nation above all, the Chinese above all"as a rallying cry for their literary movement, hoping that the promulgation and understanding of national literature would break off the shackles of conservative and constrained traditions. He ardently wished for the spirit and ideas of his German peers to achieve widespread acceptance in China, and for them to reform the character of the Chinese people, awakening them to a sense of national consciousness as part of a great restoration of the Chinese people.Chen studied in Germany, and was personally greatly impressed by the robustness and vigor of the German people. He become a fervent admirer of German culture and thinking, which became his model for what he dreamed China might become. Chen read German literature voraciously and identified three German characteristics he believed critical: national consciousness, genius saying, and hero worship. These three formed the basis for Chen's approach toward national literature and appear prominently in his plays.Love, war, and virtue served as the three main themes of Chen's plays, which aimed to evoke both national feeling and individual emotion within them. This not only gave Chen's plays their clear feeling of Zeitgeist, but filled them to the brim with Romantic images and motifs. His characters embodied his aesthetic views on beauty and strength, frequently by creating resolute female patriots possessing intense feelings of national identity and patriotic fervor. These heroines all possess a romantically tragic nature, as if they are female Fausts: they endlessly strive for an idealized goal, ready and willing to sacrifice themselves for their ideals. They possess in equal measures both traditional and modern feminine virtues of gracefulness and intellectual strength.Though Chen desired his idealized female characters to inspire the Chinese into action and re-invigoration, the extremely conservative views of his contemporary establishment caused his writings to be labeled"literature traitorous to China"and"foreign spy literature", along with other damning criticisms. His heroines Xia Yanhua, Fan Xiuyun, and the others were thus seen as undermining Chinese culture, as"poisonous flowers"that encouraged decadent emotion.Misunderstandings of Chen Quan's life and works continued well into the 1980's. However, as scholarship of World War II-era Chinese literature has grown, the study of Chen's works has also grown, though it is still fairly one-sided. This thesis analyzes the characteristics of the female characters and heroines in Chen's plays, as well as the Zeitgeist his works captured, reevaluating his aesthetic values in a historical context. It concludes that although Chen's works contain some of the flippant attitudes of his era and some weakened aesthetics, they are full and creative, with richly developed three-dimensional characters that excel beyond those of his contemporaries.Chen's plays are important parts of Chinese wartime literature. His unique female characters are vivid and colorful representations of the aesthetics of the era, and have great historical value for studying that era. At the same time, Chen's plays achieved great success, and were a significant contribution to wartime propaganda and the promotion of socialism. Because of this, Chen's works ought to be examined on a broader scale and from a more objective viewpoint, returning him to his rightful place in the history of Chinese literature.