Women and Writing in Modern China (review)

Women and Writing in Modern China inquires into the "gendered meaning of writing" (p. 2) in the first half of the twentieth century, with a brief coda exploring post-Mao women's writing. Wendy Larson argues that early twentieth-century women who wrote, and the stories that they produced, were shaped (one might say haunted) by late imperial discourses of de (virtue) and cai (literary talent). De, expressed through physical practices of bodily restraint and sacrifice, was primarily women's work. Cai, expressed through textual practice, was largely the preserve of men. These divisions were not absolute, but Larson suggests that women who wrote had to negotiate powerful incompatibilities between being a woman and writing. Furthermore, because women's virtue was so often expressed physically, the body remained a problematic category in texts created by women, and was often effaced or represented as sickly and vulnerable. "The body," writes Larson, "is antagonistic to the woman who writes" (p. 4).

Larson develops her discussion in five parts. Chapter 1 takes up the relation of women and writing to the discourse of nationalism. It draws on Benedict Anderson's description of how literature "writes the nation" by deploying fictional characters with imagined national characteristics. These are disseminated through a newly ascendant vernacular language and incorporated into a shared sense of the national subject. Larson sees both gender and the assertion of an autonomous aesthetic as essential to the construction of a modern nation-state, which she calls a "virtually compulsory" form (p. 14). Nevertheless, she suggests that these two aspects of modernity do not assume fixed meanings along a predictable trajectory. Rather, the meanings of gender and of literature develop in relation to particular local pasts. And in each local context, women writing means something different. Larson provides a useful summary of the critique that early twentieth-century Chinese reformers made of women's low status, regarding it as "symbolizing China's lack of power, authority, and prestige as a modern nation-state" (p. 26). She joins many other scholars in noting that Chinese feminism was largely inseparable from nationalism. The chapter's final section acknowledges the argument developed by Tani Barlow and others that prior to the twentieth century, gender was defined in relational terms such as daughter/parent, wife/husband, and daughter-in-law/parents-in-law. Nevertheless, Larson adds, late imperial discourses of gender also essentialized female qualities as negative, confined women to the family, and imposed a narrow positionality on women that had no equivalent for men. Chinese feminism in the early twentieth century thus entailed powerful critiques of women's position within the family and of the negative characteristics traditionally ascribed to women. This meant that women's writing, conceived as a reformist practice, emerged in a fundamentally different landscape than did writing by men, and was produced and received with different expectations.

Chapter 2 explores the configurations of woman, moral virtue, and literary text in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Seeking to dismantle the idea that women should be confined to the role of moral exemplar in the family, reformers promoted women writers as a necessary feature of modernity. Education for women was clearly a prerequisite for this project, and for building the modern nation more generally. Yet, Larson points out, there was no consensus on what girls should learn and why. Some writers (women and men alike) thought that education should prepare women to be good wives and mothers, a continuation of the practice of many elite Qing families. Well into the twentieth century, the cultivation of cai in women remained suspect. Reformers and conservatives alike experimented with various solutions to "the conceptual problems involved in combining the female gender with literary talent" (p. 58). Some installed women-as-mothers as inculcators of the nation's virtue; others refigured Chinese literature (formerly associated with cai) as the expression of an inner realm permeated with moral virtue...