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2. Midlife Crisis and Misogynist Rhetoric: Male Intellectuals’ Divorce Narratives
- University of Washington Press
- Chapter
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52 c h a p t e r t wo Midlife Crisis and Misogynist Rhetoric Male Intellectuals’ Divorce Narratives Wu Ruozeng’s novel Divorce (Liyi; 1986) and Su Tong’s novella “A Divorce Handbook” (Lihun zhinan; 1991) concern the midlife crises of urban-based male intellectuals. Urban modernity and historic progress do not solve their personal problems. Rather, new life circumstances under changing social conditions arouse new desires as well as new anxieties for these middle-aged intellectuals who seek to overcome their midlife crises through divorce. Midlife, loosely defined as a transitional period between early adulthood and old age (thirty-five to sixty-five), is closely associated with anxiety over a decreasing libido and an increasing awareness of aging and death. In 1965, Elliott Jacques coined the term “midlife crisis,” meaning “a period of crisis that is triggered by the realization of [one’s] own mortality and a change in time frame from ‘time since birth’ to ‘time left to live’.”1 Not simply a hormone-determined and age-specific psychological phase, the midlife anxiety depicted in the two divorce narratives is rooted as much in a breakdown of old meanings, values, and social order in post-revolutionary China as in personal awareness of “time left to live.” Images of jaded middle-aged men and women populate post-Mao Chinese literature, replacing the heroic figures of revolutionary youth that dominate May Fourth and Maoist literature. The most wellknown character of this type is Lu Wenting in Chen Rong’s influential story “At Middle Age” (Rendao zhongnian; 1980). Lu, the middle -aged female protagonist, is crushed by mounting stress. She is a remarkable ophthalmologist and strives, not as successfully, to carry Midlife Crisis and Misogynist Rhetoric 53 out the role of “good wife and wise mother” (xianqi liangmu) at the same time. However, Lu’s double burden was not read as a gender issue so much as a post–Cultural Revolution social problem of the “intellectuals’ burden.”2 Similarly, the midlife crises of the male intellectuals in Wu’s and Su’s works go beyond age- and gender-specific personal issues and are represented as widespread social disorientation caused by a paradigmatic shift in post-revolutionary Chinese society and ruptures of its old emotional and ethical ties. Wu Ruozeng’s novel Divorce was first published in the prominent literary journal October (Shiyue) in 1986. It appeared in book form in 1987 and was reprinted several times due to its sweeping popularity. Its Chinese title, Liyi, literally means “to part and separate.” Liyi is a legal term used in the classical Chinese of the Ming and Qing dynasties to refer to the act of a husband divorcing his wife.3 Wu chose the term liyi for the title of his novel instead of lihun, the official legal term for divorce in contemporary China, because the former connotes a general sense of alienation, which resonates with the heated intellectual debate about alienation (yihua) in the 1980s. This debate was initiated by Wang Ruoshui’s influential article “About the Concept of ‘Alienation’” (Guanyu “yihua” de gainian). Drawing on early Marxism , Wang criticizes “the lack of concern for ‘human nature’ in Mao’s doctrine,” which results in estrangement “between the ruling ideology and the people who had been taught to believe it.”4 Taking their cue from Wang’s article, 1980s Chinese intellectuals attacked the dehumanizing nature of the Maoist regime that often manifested itself as the alienation and disruption of family relationships . Guo Xiaodong, a literary critic, argues that members of the younger generation growing up during the Cultural Revolution “bade farewell to the loving atmosphere of the traditional Chinese family and were catapulted into an environment in which expressing one’s love was a crime.” Then he labels this “homeless” generation as a bestial group who “were nursed with wolf’s milk and schooled in the philosophy of class struggle.”5 Similarly, Liu Binyan, an overseas Chinese political dissident, states: “Of all the destruction, it is the damage to the people’s spiritual world, what is called ‘internal injury,’ that is the most difficult to repair.” As a result, Liu concludes, the word “love” disappeared from Chinese literature. The antidote to such an internal injury is to renovate Chinese literature with the idea of individualism and humanism, which constitutes the core of the subject of literary modernity.6 Commenting on dominant literary trends in [3.238.142.134] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 18:20 GMT) Midlife Crisis and Misogynist Rhetoric 54...