Analysis Of The New Women And The Modern Girl

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According to Stevens (2003), two female figures, namely the New Women and the Modern Girl, appeared in Republican China as the gender-specific images in the reformation of Chinese women. While the New Women represents a positive view towards modernity who is therefore the primal figure in the modern nation project, her counterpart the Modern Girl is in deep anxieties and confusions of forming a woman’s subjectivity. As the Modern Girl begins to gain an increasing importance in recent research, she becomes a revealing and insightful figure in terms of the Chinese women’s gender roles in change (Hershatter, 2007; Yen, 2005; Stevens, 2003; Shih, 2001). Stevens (2003: 83) offers a succinct depiction of her:

The Modern Girl appears as the primary voice in (female-authored) works that explore female subjectivity. In this guise, the Modern Girl expresses the struggle for women to find their voices in a new and changing world. She also appears in works by so-called decadent writers like the Xin’gunnjuepai (the School of Sensationism) who objectify the the Modern Girl as a femme …show more content…

In the reading of women’s travelogues in WET, I argue that the image of the “Modern Girl” has been presented in the women’s searching for a modern subjectivity in their travel experiences. Tangled in the subjective space in travel, much of the travelogues deal with the triviality and daily mundane in the manner of becoming a Modern Girl. Such daily details, instead of offering a grandeur picture of an enlightened China, offer a depiction of the troubled experiences of alienation, anxiety, and fears inherent to the modern expoernece of Chinese women. The two travelogues of Yang Xueqiong provide an explicating example of these modern Chinese

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