新式教育、自由恋爱与少女叙事——20世纪中国语圈文学中的少女形象

New Education,Free Love and Female Narrative:Representations of Young Women in the Literary Works of 20th Century Greater China

五四运动以降,少女们时而被鼓励成为有用之才为社会做贡献,时而被要求回归家庭做贤内助,被赋予了不同的"使命"。当她们开始上学后,"自己决定人生"的价值观逐渐内化为必须的生存方式。从男性作家对少女恋爱的他者想象、受过新式教育的女性作家对爱情经历的自我书写以及文艺政策与"自由恋爱"问题的纠缠等维度来概观20世纪文学作品,可以看出女性的"自我决定"带来了什么结果,进而了解在自由恋爱等观念影响之下少女叙事与少女形象的变迁。

After the May Fourth Movement, many bildungsromans emerged in China with a focus on depicting the maturation of Chinese youth. However, in these novels it is usually male characters who are given the role of the protagonists, who struggle with social or national situations, while female youth are sometimes encouraged to be educated and contribute to the nation and sometimes forced to go back home to take care of their families. However,this new age also gave young women decisive roles to play. It is worth taking note to of the fact that young women who had previously been regarded irrelevant to the public education in pre-modern China got were given a chance to leave their parents’ homes not because of marriage but to enter schools where they learned to appreciate the importance of deciding their path in life by themselves. This paper undertakes an overview of literary works produced from the eve of the May Fourth Movement to the Reform and Opening of the Economy. First, I examine how male authors imagined young women, who were objects of their love, desire, and consumption. Second, I revisit canonical works of intellectual females and summarize their attitude to their own experiences of love. Third, I investigate the confliction and compromise apparent between Chinese literary ideals and the actual works produced. Through this process, on one hand I try to follow the pursuit of young women leaving their parents’ homes and how male authors observed them, and on the other hand, I problematize the question of whether the he"independent decision making"of women themselves could guarantee them real freedom.