The Evolution of Chinese Women: From Confucian Obligations to Modern Resistance

Abstract

In their 1979 masterpiece entitled The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar observed how the publishing world is a male-dominated sphere. The voice of female writers has often been silenced and marginalized. In the Chinese context, the potentials for women to be men's equal were oppressed by the Confucian cult of domesticity. While literature is a reflection of the oppressed experience of female writers and their sex under patriarchal domination, could literary works written by male writers display the progress of women's rights along the timeline? To understand how women's power for autonomy in the fictional world is shaped by real social settings, it is the aim of this chapter to explore the changing status of Chinese women as shown from the selected Chinese literary texts. The literary works selected for analysis were produced during the time when Confucius' teachings were threatened by other ideologies, such as the suppression of the gentry class by Mongol rulers during the Yuan Dynasty, and the import of modern ideas on women's suffrage from the West in early Republican China. Attention will be paid on how these cultural shocks obstruct Confucian ideology from shaping submissive daughters and daughters-in-law.