| In the history of modern women’s liberation,the participation of literature has played a very important role,and the stories in the early liberated areas are no exception.In fact,the understanding and interpretation of “liberation” is not only a response to national salvation,but also a very complex connotation in the context of the mainstream history.The stories of that period,while expressing the theme of“liberation”,are also related to the understanding of many topics,such as“revolution”,“class”,“gender”,and “daily life”,“aesthetic”,“labor”,as well as“enlightenment”,“subjectivity”,“local ethics”.The early liberated area stories not only show their connotations and connections of those topics,but also narrate the special traces left by them when they intersect each other and touch on rural women,revolutionary women,intellectual women,and the remaining “individual” women at that time,as well as the complex scenery formed by their interweaving.This paper is divided into four chapters.The first chapter is about “The female‘liberation’ discourses in the early liberated area stories”.The stories in the early liberated areas combined the discourses of revolution,class and gender,which provided many new literary imaginations for women’s liberation in the history of modern literature.With the help of women’s mobilization in wartime,those stories gradually brought “revolution” into women’s daily life,taking into account the influence of class conception,folk discourse,family ethics and so on,thus realizing the combination of story text with historical context and rural reality.Although the early liberated area stories also reflected that the idea of “revolution” and “class” was not completely consistent with women’s liberation,and the gender struggle could not simply shake the huge local social structure,rural women entered the public sphere,and the rural life world also changed significantly.The second chapter,“The early liberated area stories: the transformation of women and the formation of aesthetic paradigm”.The writers in the early liberated areas found that the revolutionary ranks and their lives had a great impact on women’s aesthetic atmosphere,that is,women in the liberated areas developed from the initial diversified aesthetic tastes of various strata to a certain paradigm;interestingly,the changing process of the subjective activity of “aesthetics” has triggered a complex contradiction with the discourse of “transformation” under the constraints of the new concept of “labor” and the strict “collective” atmosphere.As a result,on the one hand,the aesthetic paradigm of “cool and heroic posture” after 1942 has been in gestation;on the other hand,although those different aesthetic tastes tend to merge with each other,the division between them still exists obviously.That makes it impossible for“transformation” to avoid some deeper contradictions in the process of individual development.The third chapter is about “The female subjectivity in the early liberated area stories”.At that time,the “liberation” narration of the stories in the liberated areas reflected the various entanglements between “revolution” and “subjectivity”.Among them,the issue of female subjectivity has become a particularly noteworthy content.Because of their natural gender perspective and problem consciousness,the intellectual women highlight the thinking of “modern” subjectivity about subtle problems and complex situations;rural women are enlightened by “revolution” and awaken the subjective consciousness of “revolution”,but their subjectivity is still limited by the etiquettes and customs of rural society,family ethics and so on;in addition,women in the revolutionary ranks were deeply affected by various conflicts in marriage and love affairs,which resulted in some internal crises in the relationship between “revolution” and emotion.All those affect the internal structure,tension,change,and even the historical fate of the topic of women’s liberation.Chapter four,“From the image of ‘new women’ to the image of ‘new people’”.The early stories in the liberated areas created some images of “new women” with distinct personality and the spirit of the May 4th Movement,which left important and diversified “personal” traces in the literary history of the liberated areas;but at the same time,in the writing of the new world and new characters in the liberated areas,some female images with the characteristics of collectivist “new people” have sprouted.And the former is often easy to arouse fierce criticism,while the latter is often more generally recognized.It can be seen that the shaping of female images in the early liberated area stories as a whole began to gradually conform to the development of the internal logic of “revolution”,and the topic of “liberation” and the related quality of “new people” had a relatively obvious writing trend.They will extend forward beyond 1942.However,it cannot be ignored that,in the process of presenting their own complex forms,those diverse female images also engraved with the particularity of local female liberation which was different from that of western modern female liberation.Through the above imagination and narration of the theme of women’s liberation in the early liberated area stories,the retrospect of the complex scenery of history and reality,as well as the understanding and analysis of the women’s liberation panorama in the liberated area stories of that period,we can find the particularity of the early liberated area stories in the whole liberated area literature and even in the follow-up collectivist literature.At the same time,through this study,we can historically prove the deep logical connection between the former and the latter periods of the liberated area literature,respond to some complex topics of women’s liberation in the liberated area literature after 1942,and examine the diversity and historical influence of the early liberated area stories that show women’s liberation,so as to make an effort to supplement the study of women’s liberation in liberated area stories. |
