Six women writers in contemporary China : a comparative study of three generations, 1978-1989

Abstract

This thesis examines the writings of six mainland Chinese women writers - Ru Zhijuan, Shen Rong, Zhang Jie, Zhang Kangkang, Zhang Xinxin and Wang Anyi - belonging to three different generations as a reflection of the changing attitudes of Chinese urban intellectual women to literature and society in the period 1978-1989. Underlying the various generational differences that emerge from a thematic analysis of their writing are two related trends: a trend away from collective orientation in the older writers' works towards literature centred on the individual and the self in the younger writers' works; and that of the younger writers away from the Chinese socialist and Confucian traditions that guided socialist literature in mainland China prior to 1978. The trend away from socialist literary traditions is most palpable in the writers' treatment of history and contemporary society. Whereas veteran writer Ru Zhijuan's presentation of pre-1949 history perpetuated state myths of the Party's glorious past, the younger writers challenged both the model of the heroic communist soldier and the use of class stereotypes to depict wider society that had been established in earlier Chinese socialist literature. Whereas social and political issues were central to the older writers' fiction about the period from 1949, the younger women's writing tended to focus on characters and their psychological development. The writers' treatment of love, sex and marriage showed a strong trend away from Confucian moral values in the younger writers' fiction that intensified over the 1978-1989 period. Although all the writers presented a pessimistic view of actual marriages, and promoted marriage based on love as the ideal, the younger writers showed a much greater acceptance of blameless divorce and pre- and extra-marital sexual relationships than their older counterparts.