Woman, War, Domesticity: Shanghai Literature and Popular Culture of the 1940s (review)

Nicole Huang's Woman, War, Domesticity examines women's writing and editorial practices in occupied Shanghai, revealing how the everyday rhythm of urban life, discussions of female sexuality and gender, and sentimental tales of the "boudoir" dominated home journals, the modern essay, autobiographical fiction, and the "domestic" novel. It then raises the important if difficult-to-answer question of how to explain the focus on everyday life and the domestic arena in women's writing in occupied Shanghai in the 1940s. How can we connect the predominance of concerns with the quotidian to the broader context of war? Huang answers this question by arguing that the publishing world's cultural concern with the quotidian served as a site for women writers, including Eileen Chang and Su Qing, among others, to comment on, explore, and even protest the experience of war and occupation, thus creating a space for themselves as key cultural and intellectual figures.

This book has several strengths. To start, Huang rightly rejects the facile categories of collaboration and resistance as frames of analysis for a study of wartime culture. In her introduction, she points out how the label of collaborationist writer, often applied to these women after the war with tragic consequences, has only served to obscure the history of how they negotiated the politically complicated terrain of occupied Shanghai in order to survive. She proposes instead to use the trope of Scarlett O'Hara of Gone with the Wind, the prototypical woman who survives myriad challenges in a war-torn era and whose movie image was, in the early 1940s, being adapted to film, books, and theater in urban China to describe these writers. Early 1940s Shanghai was a city where the Japanese exerted tremendous control over the publishing world in their efforts to promote the ideology of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. Yet, despite such inhospitable conditions, these Chinese women found ways to be active cultural producers. By working within the system, they were able to win a strong readership and secure a cultural space from which to write on topics that not only did not conform to occupation ideology but also had politically subversive implications. In Huang's words, the writings and editorial practices undertaken by these women constituted a "symbolic gesture of cultural protest" (p. 26).

Not merely a conventional literary history that focuses on highbrow literature, this study takes seriously popular journals and the more middlebrow culture of the era. Chapters 2 and 3, in particular, shed light on the parameters of print activity in occupied Shanghai and document how wartime urban culture was increasingly a platform for a new generation of public female intellectuals. They provide a full picture of how Shanghai women writers, editors, and painters were important cultural players during the war era and demonstrate how these women pursued relatively autonomous literary and aesthetic agendas in a difficult time of occupation. Eileen Chang, Su Qing, and the other women writers published prolifically in popular magazines. Some even co-edited journals sponsored by Japanese cultural agents. Yet, by writing about issues of domesticity and urban daily life, they were often able to avoid the occupation agenda. The very nature of China's popular culture, moreover, made this type of "autonomous" cultural production possible. The less weighty nature of the popular journal, its fragmented layout style, and the breezy tone many adopted meant that censors paid less attention to these sorts of magazines. Huang also points to artful ways in which female cultural producers expressed "subversion" in these journals. For example, in a discussion of magazine covers, Huang shows how even as Pan-Asian images that conformed to the Co-Prosperity ideology dominated, the visual focus of magazines on neoclassical images (from fine brushwork to the portrayal of graceful aristocratic women in domestic settings) served to convey a distinctive sense of "Chineseness" (p. 89).

The book is not without its...