Making the private public: Women, marriage, motherhood, and the feminine discourse in Su Qing's fiction

As one of the prominent Shanghai-based women writers, Su Qing became famous during wartime in the occupied Shanghai. Her works mainly concern women's experience in society. The hallmark of her writings is to translate women's quotidian life, which always involves sexual relationships, marriage, and motherhood, into literature from an acute female perspective. Woman is depicted as the weak one in Su's writings; the subaltern woman's struggle for a living represents the common people floundering in the occupied metropolis. Su Qing delineated the life in the occupied area, without fanciful details or rhetorical embellishment. Some scholars think that her fiction is mediocre as art. Others regard her as a feminist writer, and her writing is essentially anti-patriarchal and anti-sexist. None of the discussions thoroughly examine all her works or fairly evaluate her achievements and failures. Su Qing's fiction strays off the spirit of the May Fourth women writers; she cynically laughs at women's follies, even her own stupidity, with a first-person narrator as a representative of the new women trapped in a traditional family. Su Qing's fiction stresses the realistic problems of women's daily lives, and magnifies the private experience of being a woman and other domestic trivial details when she deconstructs grand narratives to create her unique discursive and fluid narrative style. She provides a gallery of women's fragmentary forced roles, emphasizing social injustice and women's own follies as the cause for the failures of those new urban and new educated women. She overtly speaks out about the new women's perplexity and bewilderment between love and libido by depicting their bold desires for love and sex. Most importantly, she discloses the true face of contemporary marriage: women use their bodies in exchange for a stable life within the male-dominated society. Additionally, she anatomizes motherhood from physical and psychological aspects. Su Qing's fiction thus stretches a panorama of women's quotidian living situations in contemporary urban setting.