Pursuit And Escape

Xiao Hong’s life was all about “pursuit and escape”.When it came to family,she had escaped the original feudal family for the freedom of marriage.In her later years,however,she failed to go back because of the war,a barrier that stoped her in spite of her strong desire.When it came to love,she wanted to pursue perfection but finally,she was exhausted from the struggle in different relationships and ended up alone.When it came to literature,she had suffered criticism as she endeavored to write independently even though she had deviated from the mainstream at that time.This paper studies Xiao Hong’s novel,focuses on the text itself,and finds out that Xiao Hong is a female writer with three identities: the torchbearer,returnee and wanderer.She always takes the initiative to face the difficulties in her life and constantly explores the relationship between the awakening of individual self-consciousness and the state of existence.The first chapter,Torchbearer: the writing of lower-class people.Xiao Hong,in the capacity of an enlightener,depicted the cycle of reproduction and death,the suffering of women in a patriarchal society,the class conflict and the persecution of human beings during the invasion of foreigners.She unveiled the sense of powerlessness and tragedy of the uneducated people when they were revoltied with the original vitality while at the same time,revealing the numbness of their mental state and their poor material life.From criticism to compassion,Xiao Hong’s novels show us the necessity of enlightenment by describing the pictures of lower-class people’s life.The second chapter,Returnee: national character criticism and reflection.During her wandering life,Xiao Hong spent most of her time in the hometown of others,so the thought of returning home always lingered in her mind.As a returnee,she wrote down her love and desire towards home.At the same time,inherited the sense of enlightenment,she expresses her criticism of the traditional Chinese feudal culture and national character criticism.Using the metaphor of disease to dig out the cultural mechanism behind the sufferings,Xiao Hong unveiled the traditional feudal culture’s subtle influences on the individuals and persecutionof the others.What’s more,she showed us the fact that the individuals were involved in a weird circle of “injure and rescue” when “seeing and being seen”.At the same time,Xiao Hong reflected on the enlightenment role played by intellectuals and questions the social and cultural structure of the male-centered society by writing down the escape path of Ma Bole.The third chapter,Wanderer: the exploration of individual life.Through the rewrite of Xiao Hong’s novels and the analysis of the endings,this paper combines Xiao Hong’s life experiences with her views of writing,and draws a conclusion that Xiao Hong,as a wanderer,used her own difficulties as the nutrition of her writing and expressed her positive life attitude;that is,to always faced the dilemmas of life calmly,and beated them with hope.She always adhered to her literary standpoint,focused on the fate of the nation as well as the country,concerned about the individual’s state of existence.