Raped Female Body

In this"age of peace"in China, national war seems far away from us and"women liberation"as part of"socialist revolution"was considered to be achieved through political social movements already, is it still necessary to explore the relationship between women and nation?I analyze three important modern Chinese novels, which all were written during the war against Japanese invasion (1931-1945), by three Chinese writers, Xiao Hong, Xiao Jun and Ding Ling, respectively. These three novels all wrote about a raped woman. Here, the"raped female body"as an important site for contestatory meanings is a critical key image with rich and complex content. Taking this image as a point of departure, this thesis analyzes Jin Zhi (means Golden Bough, the heroine in The Field of Life and Dead by Xiao Hong), Li Qisao (The Seventh Aunt of Li, in Village in August by Xiao Jun) and Zhenzhen (the heroine in When I was in Xia Village by Ding Ling) to concretely reveal the entangled relationship between women and nation, and to explore these three writers'standpoints and opinions when the nation was at stake.Since 1980s when feminist critics appeared in China, Xiao Hong and Ding Ling's works have been regarded as two peaks in modern Chinese female (feminist) literature while the works of Xiao Jun were seen as the"masculine-nationalism"canons that were the target of and were blasted by the feminism critics. But my point of view is that the multiple and complex relationship of women, nation, female body, national subject and so on is profoundly presented in these three novels. From these novels, we can see that woman is not simply a conspirator or a victim of nationalism discourse, male writers'works can not be regarded as nationalism discourse simply, and female writers can participate in the construction of nationalism discourse through female narrative. In the war narrative of male and female writers, the problem of gender, nation and class were tangled together. The past explanations to these novels tried to integrate them into the nationalism discourse while the feminism tried to make use of them to criticize nationalism discourse.It is of great importance to discuss the problem about women and nation in the ebb and flow of globalization and nationalism during the present time. As a conclusion of this thesis, I concisely discuss the practically referential significance of the problem of how women coexist with nation.