20世纪二三十年代知识界对贞操的现代诠释

The Modern Interpretations of“Chastity”by Intellectuals in the 1920s and 1930s

贞操问题自五四以来成为热议话题,新文化人在批判传统贞操观的同时又为其赋予新的内涵。绝大多数新文化人在认同男女共守贞操的基础上,提倡夫妇互守贞操;继而又有人将贞操从婚姻领域扩展到恋爱领域,将爱情作为衡量贞操的唯一标准,强调贞操的“灵肉一致”和“灵先于肉”。这些观念成为知识界的“一般思想”。在这一诠释过程中,人们使用了多种现代知识和现代话语,反映出此时中国知识结构及其话语体系从传统向现代的转型。

Chastity had become a hot topic since the May Fourth Movement.Those who advocated the new culture criticized the traditional virtue of chastity and redefined it.Most of those who advocated the new culture agreed that both men and women should be faithful to their spouses.Later,some intellectuals applied chastity to love relationship in addition to marriage.They regarded love as the only criterion to judge chastity and defined chastity as“the unification of body and soul”and“soul before body”.These ideas became the“common knowledge”among intellectuals then.In this process of reinterpretation,many kinds of modern knowledge and discourses were used,and this process demonstrated the Chinese knowledge structure and discourse system were transformed from the traditional to the modern ones.