Image of City Women in 20th Century Chinese Literature

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Twentieth Century's Chinese Women in Literature
Twentieth Century in China has great literary importance because of the Fourth May Cultural Movement, which influenced the social and cultural life of Chinese people in real as well as in literature through dramatically activist character representations. Particularly, the famous writers of that era, like Lu Xun, set features, thoughts, and actions for their female protagonists, which make them different from their past representations of traditional Chinese women. They portrayed 'new woman' who was not ready to accept her stereotypical role as a loving mother, loyal wife, or submissive daughter, but a socially and politically conscious being, demanding equal civil rights. in twentieth century's Chinese literature, contemporary writers like Lu Xun and many others created urban female characters with improved social awareness, rejecting the patriarchal division of their rights and moving ahead to conform to their individuality as 'new woman.'
The portrayal of the urban woman in Lu Xun's writing is dismal with a tragic spectrum. Lu Xun is a great Chinese author of the 20th century who handled gender problems in society with complex ideas. Although he was a strong activist regarding women's rights, he did not make his heroines stand to affirm the issues of social injustice. Zhu invites the reader to Lu Xun's essay "On Photography and the Like," which is a social commentary on women's role with liberal ideas by the author. Following his ideas in this piece of literature, it is visible that Xun is against the division of social roles and Western ideals because these social codes can give a halt to conventional Chinese culture with a belief in masculine epitome (Zhu 45). His views seem to conform to the Chinese ideals of social images. Zhu also talks about 'the western gaze,' which kept the Xun influenced to motivate him to pronounce his national culture and remove the idea of 'weak feminity' through his writings. Zhu refers to Xun's three stories, "New Year's Sacrifice," "Regrets for the Past," and "Tomorrow" to highlight the author's female portrayal, which is bleak and works as a conductor from the tradition to the present in need of modernity (Zhu 74). The three heroines by the author in these three stories, Xianglin's spouse, Zijun, and Shansi's wife, represent the twentieth-century urban woman in China by one of the most influential writers of the era. All of them appear to be struggling to break the social constraints for freedom and individual rights, but none of them grants the twentieth-century Chinese girls with an ideal revolutionary pride in actions and self-designed fate. For example, Zijun is an urban woman with good education and a cultured lifestyle. She attempts to reverse the fixed social course of life for women in China, giving preference to individualism, but she is gloomy at the end, considering her life not worth living without love (Fu). Lu Xun appears violent while condemning social injustice and suffering of women in patriarchal Chinese social settings in his essays and social debates. However, when he develops a female character in stories like Zijun, he positions her with strong warnings on the other side of the border of t...