Female Relationship In The May4th Enlightenment Context

The liberation of human beings was the core of the May4th Enlightenment, and under thisbackground, the liberation of women had become one of the social concerns. At the same time, anumber of awakening female writers came to the historical stage with their pens breaking uptheir former the silence, they began to write their feelings and their writings are in anunprecedented prosperous than ever. Under the guidance of rationality of enlightenment, alongwith the male writers, they consider their pens as weapons criticizing the old feudal culture andorder, and advocating some advanced thoughts, such as the freedom, democracy, equality,individuality liberation etc. What they wrote were mainly about love and marriage, all these werereference with males’ intimacy and estrangement.The enlightenment requires people to pursue independence and liberation whose basis is toknow them firstly. Women must have the profound understanding of their existence as adependent human body in the world, confirm themselves and find out their most innerpsychological experience. However, under the governess of thousands of years of patriarchydiscourse, women must construct their own status if they want to make their voices be heard,explore their own fate and not to be submerged in the mighty torrent of time. But relationshipsbetween females are the fields that males cannot consider. So the same gender perspectivewriting had become one mean which female writers used to establish their subjectivity, expresstheir living and life experience.In these works, the female is not blindly radical, this not only embodies the awakening ofpeople, and more embodies the awakening of women, as well as their recognition of her ownidentity and adjustment after awakening. At the same time, because of the sensitivity and uniquecharacter of their identities, they could make a vivid description of the female lives andemotional experiences. And they become aware of the advantages and disadvantages of theenlightenment. In a male-dominated enlightenment movement, they brought about rare doubtsand reflections. These excluded the binary opposition of men and women, directly expressedwomen’s survival situation and inner emotion, as well as the discovery and remodeling of femalegroups more directly and in detail. Meanwhile, male writers’ took the perspectives of social culture, adding the femalerelationship into political reform discourse or lager culture category; they accepted constructinga new order of modern civilization. Although the female emotional experience could not expresselaborately, it conveyed the voice of women’s liberation. The female relationship reflected notonly the individual pursuit of freedom semblance, but also a cluster of roles, as well as reflecteda kind of new interpersonal relationship, and it was the practice about building the new culturalconcept like democracy, freedom in the May4th Enlightenment, and played an important role inpromoting the progress of the society. This thesis will explain in the following parts:The first chapter mainly introduces the historical category of women’s awakening inenlightenment context. It mainly includes the origin of the awakening of female, the lonelinessand predicament on the awakening road, as well as the recognition about their identity, especiallythe re-recognition and adjustment of female’s identity under this situation.Chapter two analyzes and summarizes the relationship between intergenerational females,including the mother-daughter relationship, mother-in-law and daughter-in-law relationship,teacher-student relationship. Through the comparison of the implied components in differentgenerational relations, so we can explore new female’ self discovery, growth, and the hardshipduring their growth from a historical longitudinal perspective.The third chapter summarizes and explores the female relationships of the same time,including the sisterhood, the tritium quid relationship, and the relationship between master sandservants, and then analyzes the general view about personal experience and spiritual growth ofthe female illuminati to the whole initiation. By summing up the relationship between females,this paper attempts to explore a prospect of rich and complex view of the female awakening, andtheir unique life experience and group experience world as they entered a new era of May4thEnlightenment.