Why I became a feminist
✪ Dai Jinhua | Department of Chinese, Peking University
This article is the author's 2015 lecture at the Yufeng Bookstore Parkson Museum, talking with Sun Bai
"The Woman Who Dared to Hold a Pen— The Crazy Woman in the Attic" and Sexual Consciousness
Transferred from the "Translation Teaching and Research" public account
Every time someone asks me why I became a feminist, I answer very simply because I'm too tall. It's really a no-brainer, as if I've had this gender consciousness for a long time. I told everyone that when I was thirteen years old, I was already as tall as I am now (standing up), and I had to listen to adults whispering behind my back every day, "How to marry.". I was a person with "original sin", there was no gay culture at that time, boys and boys, girls and girls were all hooked up, and at that time homosexuality was like "hooligan" and "crazy" was a very ugly and dirty word. Because I grew too tall, girls sometimes had to rely on me like the strength of boys, so that I had to face this.
So I was very miserable and confused when I was very young, and I always said to myself in my heart that I was a woman, that I was a good woman, and that I had nothing different. My dreams are like all girls, my weaknesses are like all girls, I want to be praised and cared for like all girls, but I can't get them, these should be a simple satisfaction. The first time I read The Mystery of Gender, when I read The Second Sex, I was suddenly enlightened, I saw other people express my experience, so it was really not me who had a problem.
For example, I read a book, there is a chapter called "Height and Rights", male and female pairing must be male tall and female short, this is natural, this is logical, so what do I do? I never danced ballroom dancing because no one invited me, and it was entirely my personal life experience that followed me from a very young age because I was kicked out and became a concern for others. By the time I was thirty years old, people began to say that tall is beautiful and thin is beautiful. I was also very thin, but the bad thing was that by the time I didn't have to face these problems, they had become advantages, but at that time, my height seemed to have really become a physical defect.
It took two full centuries, from the first feminist novel to the first monograph on feminist fiction.
Yesterday, when I was reading the book again for this lecture (The Mad Woman in the Attic), I began to realize a problem. The question is that, in fact, this book is the foundation of feminist literary theory, the first tome in the history of feminist literature in the 19th century. If you think about it, 35 years is very far away, and every 30 years human society will add a new generation, so the current works are purely written by the previous generation. 35 years ago it was a long way to think about it, but if you think about it from another angle, there was a discussion about women's literature 35 years ago, and there was a systematic theoretical work on feminism 35 years ago.
Two interesting aspects have emerged for me, one is the radical, subversive, very young (literal english translation called "fresh phD student") 35 years ago, and two very unqualified female teachers who wrote such works in the English department, which today have become classics, which in itself have become a trace of history. But if you look at it from another angle, in fact, all the female poets and writers in this work are originally classic writers in the history of British literature. They have only made a completely different interpretation of the classic writers in the history of English literature, and through their interpretation, the female identity of these women writers has become prominent, and their research method is not to say that these writers are women, so they write women's literature. Rather, they find in the works of female writers a different narrative feature, some emotional characteristics, which are different from those of male writers and shared by female writers, and in their analysis, they find something oppressive and rebellious in historical society.
Gilbert (left), author of "The Mad Woman in the Attic," and Guba in 1980
I think this is very interesting, and today this book has finally come to the world of Chinese. But this book did not come late, because we never had the opportunity to read them through this original book, through their theoretical texts, to read their words, to read their expressions, to read the history and society behind their words and their expressions. Then, let's feel what we've been through in the last 35 years. For women, is history in a linear process of progress? Is it far more advanced today than it was then?
We can all realize that writing is not just writing, that the pen in the writer's hand is not a symbol of the so-called male genitalia, or that writing is a process of conception and childbirth, a woman's right, because women have a womb. These statements today have no irritation at all, but have become rhetoric in the general sense. But when this rhetoric has been formed, what is our real condition of existence? What is the cultural status of gender? How do we understand women's writing today, I think this book will open up a gender thinking, including how we can more consciously stand in the position of Chinese subject and dialogue with the West. Today we understand that not only can we learn, we can also create.
▍ From the two key years of feminism to the moment of revisiting today
We discuss feminism for two historical ages. Not only is the discussion of feminism, if we discuss any contemporary culture, society, politics, there are two historical periods that are particularly prominent, one is the 1960s, like Sun Bai just now constantly used the expression "68 generation". The French student movement in 1968 almost shook the Western world, France almost turned against the grain, and the United States fell into the only constitutional crisis in American history. The three main hotspots of this countercultural movement in Europe and the United States are young students, women and people of color, and ethnic minorities, who have set off democracy movements, women's liberation movements, and civil rights movements.
Many of the things that we take for granted today, like the way we behave, how we live, and how we think, actually came about under the great shock of the 1960s. Another period was the turn of the 1980s and 1990s. The change of this period is not only that the Cold War, which lasted for half a century, finally divided the victors and losers, but also, metaphysically, it truly changed the map of the world, and many countries disappeared after that. For example, the most optimistic Western theorists, thinkers, science fiction, and political fantasy novels did not expect that one day the Soviet Union would be gone, and there would be no Soviet Union in the world, but the Soviet Union would not be there for 30 years. This is another big parameter beyond the 35 years just mentioned.
Before the end of the Cold War, critical issues and rebellious issues originally focused on three axes, namely class, gender, and race. But after the end of the Cold War, both the critical issues of class and race have been illegalized to some extent, especially class issues, and we will no longer discuss class issues. Only gender issues, feminist issues, have always been legitimately pioneering and critical. I feel that wenjing published this book today ("Crazy Woman in the Attic"), and we have the opportunity to buy this book today, not only to learn the literature and works of women writers in the 19th century through this book, but more importantly, to return to this historical moment in order to re-experience and re-examine the historical state and cultural state in which we are today. When we look back at this moment today, we will probably find that the Cold War is over, the class proposition is no longer discussed, the racial proposition begins to become ambiguous, and only the gender proposition becomes more and more avant-garde and avant-garde.
About a year ago, I saw an interesting post on the Internet, which probably means that the Internet is taboo, and you must not do anything online. The first sentence is called "cats and dogs are masters", the second sentence is called "comrades can not be black", and the third sentence is called "straight male cancer to die". Two of those sentences are gender issues, and so open, so pioneering, so right. The United States coined the word "political correctness," so politically correct. But we also have to wonder, are these expressions a true, accurate picture of our reality today? Are the "straight male cancers" in reality today ashamed of themselves? Are comrades occupying the center of the stage today?
In our mass culture, at the same time as "comrades can't be black", there is a role that must be black is "leftover women". What is left of the "leftover woman"? Relative to patriarchy, heterosexual and marital institutions. In my day, when I decided I was going to get married, I seemed to have a little responsibility to explain to my friends what was the basis for me entering the marriage system. Of course, one thing that is naturally legal is that I fell in love with someone who loved me. The famous line in "Jane Eyre": Loving others and being loved is a nameless blessing. I'm going to tell you that I really love him, he really loves me, so we decided to go into the marriage hall. In fact, marriage is more important today as a form of property, but in my time there was no meaning of property. On the one hand, in the legal sense of absolute marital property joint ownership, on the other hand, we basically have no private property, in today's parlance we call "those who have no permanent property have no perseverance". But I think I'm probably a more persistent generation than most people.
We return to that historical node today in order to regain our perception of that period of history. 35 years ago, no one had discussed whether Jane Eyre was a feminist work. 35 years ago, everyone thought that "Jane Eyre" was a Gothic Romance, which was a kind of evaluation. Today there is a more snarky comment, saying that it is not the founding work of the Mary Sue? Some people say that it is not "the domineering president fell in love with me"! Seriously: "Jane Eyre" is the first modernist novel in the history of European literature and the foundation of Western modernist literature. Despite such a high evaluation or such a low evaluation, it has not been interpreted at all in terms of women, women's lives, women's life experiences, the ways in which women may be expressed in a particular historical structure.
I often meet young feminists who haven't read the original book, but tell me: "The Mad Woman in the Attic" says that in jane ey, Bertha and Jane Eyre are sisters, and Bertha should walk out of Thornfield Manor hand in hand with Jane Eyre, leaving Rochester forever. I don't disagree with this view, it's not a problem as a choice, it looks tall and beautiful, as if the two of them are also quite compatible. However, this is not the narrative of Mad Woman in the Attic, nor is it the imagination that Charlotte Brontë, the author of Jane Eyre, as the daughter of a poor priest, might have had in that ill-clothed wasteland of Devonshire. Each of us is a child of history, each of us is a prisoner of reality, and each of us cannot have endless freedom to fly.
The value of this book lies in the fact that it goes from the daughter of a poor priest more than a hundred years ago in the 19th century to never getting real love in her life, and finally she married her sister's fiancé, and then died in childbirth, a very short life, very poor, very miserable. She wrote such a book, no doubt a woman's dream, a woman's daydream, but in this dream she conveyed a completely different pursuit, rebellion, extremely bold offense and dream, for at least in the eyes of the two authors of our book. So in this story, Jane Eyre is not only a ghost of the mad woman in the attic (Bertha), she and Rochester are mirror images of each other.
It's not "the domineering president falls in love with me", but a story of equal love, a woman who breaks through the challenge, fights uncompromisingly with her own wisdom and talent, and wins the respect of a man who is much higher in class than she is, and the man is forced to treat her as an equal person. And in this mutual equality, together they convey to us a spirit of fighting of 19th-century British capitalism and its bourgeoisie. They are spiritual brothers and sisters, they are spiritual commonalities. But they are also a man and a woman under a 19th-century Victorian structure of extreme sexism, and they are a master-servant pair.
In such a process, how could a rebellious, independent, intelligent woman of that era express her anger, her despair, her madness? In the story she becomes another character, the mad woman in the attic. We are grasping the author's subconscious in a structural sense today, which is not the psychoanalytic subconscious. This subconscious is the subconscious of history, the subconscious of culture. These two authors grasped this point in a very exquisite literary analysis, with very good literary training, literary accomplishment, and artistic recognition. Not to take for granted that Bertha is the ghost of Jane Love, but from the analysis of Bertha's appearance and her and Jane Love's echoes of each other in an almost hopeless, unrequited emotion.
Don't forget, Jane Eyre is the embodiment of a woman in the pioneering spirit of the British Empire that has colonized the world
If we go up to the theoretical level, it will feel very interesting. This work is a critical, radical, avant-garde, foundational work, but in the past 30 years this work has been criticized by many women, by feminists. I'm sure there are many men who disagree with it, but in these 30 years they can't keep their mouths shut, they can't denigrate it from an ugly old patriarchal chauvinist standpoint. Instead, it is the more radical women who criticize it. If we refer to that critique, it is easier to see a historical process, for example, in this story, Charlotte Rembrandt does not say that Jane Eyre and Bertha walk out hand in hand, but that they are a ghost relationship, a woman's heart, reflecting the duality of women's hearts under the deep oppression of male power, her taming and her rebellion, her reason and her madness, her pilgrimage and destruction.
This story unquestionably re-expresses man and woman with the help of the dualism of Western theory of difference, but in this work it is expressed as "you men" and "we women", which is a gesture of resistance. Because when men say "we", we don't know if it includes women, but when women say "we", it definitely includes men, and of course includes the identification with men. So at that moment, "you men, we women" was already a huge rebellion. There has been too much discussion about the expression "we", I will not introduce them all here, just to give an example, Spivak proposed that here is not such a simple "you" and "we", but another level of "you" and "we": who are you? Subjects of the British Empire; who are we? Bertha, a half-race from the West Indies colony.
Note that racial issues are already involved. I was really happy when I read About Spivak because the book suddenly thickened because I read about another dimension of Charlotte Brontë. I read Jane Eyre when I was very young, and frankly, when I was younger, it was a Mary Sue dream for me. When I was younger, I used to say that I wanted a house with a bay window, that house didn't matter, and the most important thing was that bay window where I could sit and read novels. At that time, there were men who said with kindness or malice that you didn't want the bay window, but Rochester in that house.
In the same vein, we look at Jane Austen, not the story of a large family marrying a daughter, not the story of a woman finding a husband for herself, almost the social and cultural history of Britain before the rise of the British Empire, but you have to have eyes, you have to read consciously. I said that in Jane Eyre, Spivak also had a point of view that when Bertha appeared as a colonial mixed-race, you suddenly discovered that the misfortune of Rochester's marriage was that he sold himself to the West Indies. The British had titles, the second generation of colonists had money, it was a deal, it was an exchange.
It is also in this sense that you will see that Rochester's shame is twofold, first of all the shame of gender, the relationship is upside down, and a man who marries blindly and dumbly sells himself. At the same time, the race is reversed, and he must lower his status to marry the unsprung defiled character. In the same way, you will find that Jane Eyre finally said, "I am a free woman, I am an independent woman", and when she faced Rochester with a truly independent posture, not only because Rochester was blind and crippled, but also because she had an inheritance, economic equality.
Woolf, 1926
We often say that Virginia Woolf is "a woman's house," but Woolf says in the same article that a necessary condition for "one's own house" is "one's own checkbook," that is, financial independence. Mr. Lu Xun said that first of all, there must be independence, "first of all, there must be economic security, love is attached to beauty", otherwise, what will Nala do after she runs away? Either fall or come back. Jane Love says I'm independent, I'm free, and can face you as a free and independent person because she has that legacy. Where did Jane Eyre's legacy come from? Her uncle. Where did her uncle earn it? West indies.
The second love story of Jane Eyre is Jane Eyre and St. John. Where is the relationship between St. John and Jane Eyre? St. John's mission to India will find that the greatness of this work has gone far beyond the level of the Mary Sue, because at the same time it consciously or unconsciously brings out a socio-cultural history, a socio-cultural history of England at that time. We'll see inside, for example, rochester, that their family owns Thornfield Manor, so how did they get to the point of betraying themselves? Because he is the second son. At that time, Britain was the eldest son inheritance system, what did the second son do when he was older? Sell yourself as a priest, join the army, or go overseas to pioneer. It's all-pervasive in Jane Austen's story. You've noticed that in Jane Austen's novels, the heroines fall in love with the eldest son, and the ugly, intervening third parties in her story are the second sons.
So I think it's very interesting that the book "Crazy Woman in the Attic" opens up an important aspect for us to look at the gender consciousness of these women writers, how their gender consciousness was revealed under the norms of the times. But the controversy that followed added to the other dimensions, that we are women, that society dictates that we become women. Simone De Beauvoir's quote sounds too old today, but it is also often forgotten: "Women are not born, women are socially constructed".
I think friends here may ask, so what is the matter that we are biologically women? I've been saying that it's only on that day that we can answer the question of how much physiology determines gender differences. What day? It is only when cultural, oppressive, and discriminatory expressions are broken that we can say to what extent we are determined by our physiology. At the same time, to what extent is our physiology group rather than individual? I often say that the gap between a woman and a woman may not be smaller than the gap between a woman and a man.
Beauvoir's words made me feel nothing short of a stone shatterer. The book applies this phrase to women's writing, to women's writing, to women's consciousness, to women's rebellion, to women's creation. Later generations added racial and class issues, and they saw that the story of Grace Poole (the maid who set fire to the manor and served Bertha in Jane Eyre) was actually a repressed story. When we return to this book and today's "Why Sheng Zhen Mo", it is very different, and one of the many factors, one of the important factors, is that in this work, Charlotte Brontë gives Jane Love a strong sense of subjectivity, and her subjective consciousness does not end up in order to gain the love of men and enter marriage as a self-satisfied ending, and this kind of thing is so exalted and progressive for feminism.
But at the same time, we must not forget that this is the embodiment of the pioneering spirit of the British Empire that was colonizing the world at that time in a woman. As a latecomer, I have always joked that foresight is only available to a few geniuses, and that hindsight can be acquired through acquired learning. We can go back and look at Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters, Emily Dickinson, and when we look at them, we actually get the mirror of history to ask ourselves, to ask where our possibilities are after so many changes today? What are the problems we are re-confronted?
▍ It's hard for me to re-establish the narrative patterns of "you men" and "we women" now, because "we women" itself is broken
You may notice that, with the exception of Jane Eyre's dialogues, or including Jane Eyre's dialogues, I have rarely dealt with gender issues alone in recent years, or have been keen to attend conferences such as gender studies and feminist studies. I haven't written my academic papers or writings on a single topic of gender for a long time. The reason is that I have a hard time answering this question. Because of several aspects, one aspect is that I personally think I have been saying to myself lately, it is time to stand in the middle of the gender issue again, and speak or respond as a feminist. But I have repeatedly hesitated, repeatedly postponed this time, for many reasons, or because of many levels.
I'm not that enthusiastic about feminism, but gender issues are my highly intrinsic position, and a fully necessary dimension. It's impossible to say that I'm not in the gender dimension when I think about a problem, but I'm not going to talk about it alone. At the lowest level, when we get into gender issues, we don't have to discover male power again in each issue. Please remember that so far, this day is the day of male power, this land is the land of male power, and this culture is the culture of men.
Until now, of all the major languages in Europe, man was still a man, and man was human, and history was his-tory, no her-tory. This is the basic issue, this is the basic reality, and today the whole of capitalism is built with reference to the basic structure of patriarchy, and modern capitalism is the latest version and the latest form of patriarchy. So we don't have to say, "I've found male power again", we take the oppression of male power, the manifestation of male power as the premise basis for our discussion, and we start from here to find its manifestation form, its retreat, its compromise, its attack, its greater aggression. It's a level, and I'm a little tired of working with everyone to discover male power in various fields.
On a larger level, it's hard for me to re-establish the narrative pattern of "you men" and "us women" now because "we women" itself is shattered. Soon after the publication of this book, "we women" were torn apart by the gay movement, and when you say you men, we women, you feel that you are very rebellious, and at the same time assume that there are only men or women in the world, and you have not given place to the third, fourth, and fifth sexes. Today it is "comrades cannot be black", which has become the common sense of cultured people, but our educated people seem to be less and less aware of other dimensions, such as the dimension of class, the dimension of race.
The class dimension, in particular, is a problem that often arises but is overlooked. A disabled low-level migrant girl, and I as a professor at Peking University, is it important that we both share gender experiences? This is a particularly important issue. At the same time, the issue of class today is not so simple, it is under the premise of "the world processing plant" accurately proposed by Sun Bai. I don't know if you remember those very scary examples, in the late 90s, a Nike factory in Shandong, the owner of the factory is a Korean woman, she found that some workers took out the scraps of Nike shoes when they got off work, what did she do? She told the whole factory worker to kneel down and forced the caught thief to swallow the skin scrap. As a result, the newspaper published the news at that time, and the tone of public opinion it triggered was "Korean women should die" and "I have gold under the knees of Chinese national boys." And the new world turmoil and exploitation behind Nike, multinational enterprises, and national world processing plants are completely absent.
In this scene, male power becomes a force for national justice. The report emphasizes "the dignity of our men" and does not say anything about human dignity and the dignity of workers. Or another set of reports that a male graduate student who was looking for a job in Shenzhen, found a job, and was treated very inhumanely during the probationary period. Then he went to the landlady to protest, and the landlady replied that he would not do it. Then it raised a question of passing tricks with the landlady. Of course, it is more male bosses and female workers, all kinds of unspoken rules in addition to exploitation and oppression, and the social fate of women who are more and more blatantly accepted in the name of human nature. I would like to say that this state of glue, the multiplicity of forces created by this great era of globalization, intertwines the female body, the female life.
When I saw this news not long ago, I had a feeling of wanting to cry without tears that I had not had in a long time, and there was a feeling of wanting to scream, but I did not make a sound. I believe that everyone has seen that a girl who was raped resisted the rapist, causing the violent person's penis to break and bleed to death, and finally the girl was sentenced to three years for manslaughter. I think this is a problem at the level of the rule of law in the process of social progress in China. But, I want to ask her how can she not commit a crime? If she doesn't commit a mistake, an old expression will appear, all the women who have been raped are recruited by them, how can a man produce hormones on a woman who has no sexual innuendo? On one side is the cultural regression of gender issues, but this regression itself is far less frightening than the change at another level.
This level of change is due to the private ownership established by the Property Law. As a result of the de facto existence and occurrence of private property, the family began to become more of an economic unit in Marx's or Engels's discourse, a combination of property, which is one of the secrets of "leftover women must be black". Who does not enter the marriage order means that the wealth you have is not organized into the marriage. So why are "leftover women" so terrible, and "leftover men" not terrible? Because the subjects in this reorganized economic order of private ownership are already set as men.
At the same time, for example, in the legal sense, an American legal scholar talked to me in a mocking tone, China is really an authoritarian country, and China's laws are really not laws. But only China can punish rapists without discussion, she said. Today we have progressed, and on the contrary there have been such heinous results, all in accordance with the legal process, all in the name of the law, all in the name of progressive, modern, just, because a man has died. But why did he die? That's why I say that the changes in the legal system, the property system, and the socio-economic system are far more essential, more important, and greater than the cultural changes. That is why I feel I should take the floor but I have not.
I say this because I realize that some very big changes are already taking shape. I didn't speak because I didn't find a position, where I stand, except that I am a woman, a Chinese feminist, I am also a feminist in Asia, I was once a woman in the third world, and now I am a Chinese woman in the rise. All of these identities and positions, how I effectively integrate them, give me a space to speak, how can I deal with each problem in multiple aspects.
How do I deal with women's writing today, which itself has formed many layers, such as "Twilight" is female writing? For example, is Fifty Shades of Grey written by women? It is true, not only by women, but also by big mothers. They are standard American middle-class housewives, sexual fantasies in the extreme tedium of life. What is its interaction with today's culture?
When Jane Austen's new book was published, women workers would use their own week's salary to buy it, and everyone would memorize Dickinson's books, but is that a popular and mass culture of mass production today the same thing? Or, as Sun Bai just introduced, when we use microcredit to allow rural women to join the capitalist production process, when the inventor of microfinance wins the Nobel Prize in economics, two aspects come out: on the one hand, women, because of economic independence, the family position in the countryside begins to be improved. But on the other hand, their housework, their traditional roles, did not lighten at all, they became up at four thirty in the morning.
On a larger scale, this path is extremely effective in organizing the global female surplus labor force of the third world into capitalist global scale production. So how do we redefine the critical position of gender? I recently found a particularly interesting phenomenon, I met women in their 20s, close to 30s or early 30s, when they talked about this, they didn't resonate much with me, they all felt that it was good now, they felt that their lives were okay, that we were so strong, so independent, so free.
I want to congratulate you, if you still feel this way, congratulations, at least you have not encountered this change in reality. Maybe you're lucky that you don't have to experience this change in your lifetime. Perhaps the toughest women are the real first sex in a world where women are destined to be second sex. But I would like to say from another point of view, it may be the reality that it is because you are still young, you are still beautiful, your skin is still delicate, you have succeeded in entering the higher social classes and the higher social classes for various reasons, and you are in the cultural world, because most of the men in the cultural world know that exposing their patriarchal positions is uncultured.
But what I will say is that you and I are different in that in the age in which I lived, they did not feel uncultured, they openly and nakedly proclaimed patriarchy, not ashamed but proud. But from another point of view, in the era in which I lived, there was a comprehensive equality between men and women in the political, economic, and legal systems. At that time, in the sense of the Marriage Law and the Civil Law, the status of Chinese women was the top 5 in the world. Today many of our laws have been revised repeatedly, and our situation has lagged behind. This is the reality you face, the openness of culture, the vision of the world, more job options, more job opportunities, more lifestyles, but you are also facing a social structure that is reorganized with private property, capitalism, the market logic of capitalism, the class gender of capitalist globalization, the logic of race, so good luck to you! But at the same time I said, we have choices, we have space, we can participate in the creation of history, because there are already so many people in front of us.
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