The Mother and Narrative Politics in Modern China (review)

Almost a decade has passed since Rey Chow's first polemic against Asian studies in her Woman and Chinese Modernity (1991). For Chow at that time, the "tendency to disparage the relevance of psychoanalysis is disturbing" because the existing scholarship, premised as it were on a dichotomy between the "realpolitical" non-West and the "imaginative" West, had produced "a non-West that is deprived of fantasy, desires, and contradictory emotions." In reaction to this general lack of interest in psychoanalysis, Chow proposed to read modern Chinese literature "perversely" as a means of challenging "the entrenched ways of interpretation" imposed by the specialist methodologies in sinology and China studies, which, according to her, tend to read Chinese stories "naturalistically."¹

Chow's call for action has been answered mainly by her own subsequent works,² but a book-length psychoanalytic study conceived with a vision similar to hers did not appear until the work of Lieberman's under review here. Published as a volume in the series "Feminist Issues: Practice, Politics, Theory" from the University Press of Virginia, Lieberman's book recognizes Rey Chow's influence in the Acknowledgments (p. ix) and in references throughout the book. However, as far as this reviewer can see, Lieberman differs from Chow in at least one crucial point: while the latter prioritizes Western theory over Chinese texts (a strategy indicated in the order of "West and East" in her book's subtitle), the former's work is fundamentally anchored in Chinese literature even when she engages Western theory.

To make this point clearer, let us begin with Lieberman's book itself. In the Introduction, Lieberman narrates her discovery in dissertation research of a contradictory attitude toward the mother figure in modern Chinese writers: "Had the idealization of the mother figured in important ways in the modernization of China's literary culture, only to become a source of embarrassment as the New Literature 'came of age'? Had the subsequent repudiation of the mother… contributed to the New Literature's self-definition by flaunting its advocates' maturity, detachment, and seriousness of purpose?" (p. 2). With these questions in mind, Lieberman proceeds to investigate a number of typical mother images and their significance in modern Chinese fiction: the idealized mother as an important modernist icon for the bourgeois individual (chapter 1); the father's woman and her place in the oedipal conflict between the modern son and the traditional father (chapter 2); the domineering mother as articulation of political powerlessness and national humiliation (chapter 3); the absent mother and the precarious place for the "new woman" in Chinese modernism (chapter 4); the revolutionary mother and the marginalization of actual productive labor (chapter 5); the menial mother in autobiographical writings and her triple function (chapter 6); and, finally, the bereaved mother and a pathology of madness in realist fiction (chapter 7).

In chapter 1, "The Idealized Mother and the Politics of Personhood," Lieberman contextualizes the "woman question" in Chinese cultural history and surveys the May Fourth discussion of personhood, womanhood, and motherhood. What she finds noteworthy is that "male intellectuals seemed at times more interested in discovering and cultivating their own maternal natures than in constructing masculine identities in opposition to the mother" (p. 33). Reading Ye Shengtao through Julia Kristeva and Melanie Klein, Lieberman discovers that "the mother's idealization was accomplished via the neutralization of maternal power" (p. 41). Furthermore, an examination of the reception of Bing Xin points to a trajectory of criticism whereby "emotional engagement with an idealized maternal figure is rejected and a masculine model of independence and detachment is (re) asserted" (p. 50).

In chapter 2, "The Father's Woman and the Rebel Son," Lieberman focuses on stories that deliberately flout the incest taboos in their oedipal plots. She claims that Mao Dun's treatment of Sun Wuyang in "Vacillation" (1928) "is perhaps the most important instance of vacillation in the text—between the...