The gendering of eroticism: Modern subject and narrative of Yu Dafu and Zhang Ailing.

摘要

This thesis aims to demonstrate the ways in which two pioneers of the new literary eroticism in China---Yu Dafu (1896-1945) and Zhang Ailing (or Eileen Chang, 1921-1996)---produced "subject" and "form." Eroticism, the consciousness of taboo and transgression, is a subversive (post)modern idea that constitutes a subject by physical desire. The modern experience as loss of tradition, thirsts for modern nation-state and individual subject, free love and sexual liberation, eroticized metropolitan and Western civilization---the politics and aesthetics of eroticism were the kernel apparatus of Chinese modernity and modern subject. Chinese modern romance is a translingual practice which interprets, appropriates, or recreates the eroticism of China and the West, the traditional and the modern. Yet the gendered translingual practice, as shown through the works of Yu and Zhang, produced heterogeneous modern subject and romance.;In the chapter 1, I compare Western "eros" and Chinese "qing." Plato's Symposium defines Eros as desire of eternal lack, as desire for the Idea of Beauty, which foregrounds the Western dualistic, teleological epistemology as well as human ontology. To the contrary, "qing" is grounded on the yin-yang cosmology and monism, and considered as one of the various phases of human nature.;The second chapter scrutinizes the ideology and narrative of modern love, "lian'ai." Together with Western enlightenment, Christianity, and romantic literature, "lian'ai." emerges as a modern code as well as a communication of affection. All the lian'ai xin nuxing (New Woman) and modernity are privileged, seductive signs, yet they have ambiguous meanings. They are also gendered terms possessing different meanings that change according to the ideological context.;The third chapter demonstrates how Yu Dafu's eroticism internalizes the loss of the Symbolic Father, state, law, or aesthetic tradition. Drawing from the modern Japanese I-novel (watakushi shosetsu) and fusing it into orthodox Confucian autobiography, Yu's feminine, melancholic male hero confesses masturbation, sexual intercourse, homosexuality, voyeurism, and masochism. In the third person fiction, the prostitute's body becomes the narrative fissure where his consciousness and desire are segmented. It also exposes how a modern man constitutes himself as a voyeuristic male subject. The first-person narrative harbors an ambition for oblivion and a new birth for the purified self, Yu's novel, through the penitential confession and the recurrent suicide of the heroes, performs a ritual of redemption and the traditional male subject's homoerotic narrative which alienates woman as the Other.;Lastly, the fifth chapter examines how Zhang's hysteric mimicry and deconstruction of traditional Scholar-Beauty romance subvert its patriarchal values and orders. Her female subject is neither a femme fatal nor an ideal autonomous new woman. She wove the sexual tension or details of amorous physical contacts in alienation and selfishness. Incest, Electra Complex, sado-masochistic love, insanity and hysteria, diseased body, and so on should be read as symptoms of the Chinese women whose lives are refracted under the modern colonial modern China. The parody of the plot and structure of traditional narrative paradoxically tethers her to the traditionalism and her novel and subject fall into anachronistic.;Overall, Yu Dafu's novel retains the premodern patriarchic aesthetics and produces an androcentric, homoerotic male subject. On the other hand, Zhang Ailing's pseudo-classical novel and subject are at once post-modern, subversive and anachronistic due to her adherence to and nostalgia for the aristocracy.;Key words (If needed): Yu Dafu, Zhang Ailing, modern China, eroticism, gender, erotic subject and narrative form, lian'ai.