The Illness Writing By The Female Writers Of May Fourth Generation

The May Fourth Movement in the early twentieth century was an event with rich connotations and constant interpretation in modern Chinese history.Together with many events such as the New Culture Movement and the political revolution,it had far-reaching influence in the fields of politics,literature,and thought.The group of female writers who have grown up after receiving the spiritual nourishment of the May Fourth New Culture,finally "surfed the surface of history" in the modern sense and picked up the Pen-once a symbol of male power-to record women.Even though the enlightenment and rationalism illuminate the early twentieth century,the writings by many female writers of May Fourth generation are often filled with dark shadows of disease,illness and pain.These seemingly "untimely" and negative illness and diseases writings reflect the marginal and weak position of women under the male discourse system.The purpose of this article is to understand women’s lives in the1920 s and 1930 s by examining the writings of illness in the works of women writers of May Fourth generation and their life experiences.Some female intellectuals tried to practice a kind of "transient" subject construction through self-writing and writing other women beyond themselves.This helps to understand the repression of the other side of Chinese modernity from the perspective of women.Chapter 1 mainly draws on the perspective of gender and popular culture,and analyzes the discourses about diseases and women’s body among the newspapers and magazines,men and women,to understand the game and interaction among discourses,and to distinguish the discourse system of the nation-state,the choice of their respective discourse strategies and the escape of women’s disease writing.Chapter 2 focuses on the relationship between the occurrence of illness and personality liberation and social liberation by female writers,and understands the context and social-cultural network in which women’s diseases occur,and how the disease discourse help female intellectuals see themselves and other women in a desperate situation.Chapter 3 focuses on the results of women’s madness and death that often occur due to diseases,to analyze how these desperate endings become an approach for women to practice fighting spirit and constructing themselves.Women’s experience of illness and pain is a representation of women’s construction of subject,which also reveals a kind of discourse anxiety and lack of discourse resources for women to express themselves at that time.Women discovered their bodies from illness and realized their existence as female-gender,but this awakening did not truly liberate them,instead it prompted them to have a deeper understanding of the darkness of reality and chose the path of spiritual and body self-exile.This feminine disease discourse is a variation of emotion and rationalism in the context of the 1920 s and 1930 s,and a symptom of the times under the discourse of enlightenment.At the same time,the disease and illness writing of female writers of May Fourth generation blurred the boundary between literary text and real-life to a certain extent.Also,there was a close mirror-image relationship between female images in literature and female writers.Female writers also construct themselves through writing and shaping those morbid images,and this process provides a certain degree of literary soothing and healing.