The Anti-Heroine in Zhang Ailing’s “A Love that Topples a City”
& Wang Anyi’s The Song of Everlasting Sorrow

Spanning nearly half a century in their respective emergence onto the literary scene of China, prominent Chinese women writers Zhang Ailing and Wang Anyi directly pushed the boundaries of literature, engaging in a discourse on gender, sexuality, and modernity within their text.  Such engagement is most evident in the canonical works of the novella “A Love that Topples a City” (1944), the most renowned of Zhang’s Hong Kong stories, and Wang’s The Song of Everlasting Sorrow (1995), recipient of the Mao Dun Prize—China’s highest literary award.  In this thesis, I will show how the main female protagonists, apolitical and driven by motives of self-interest, are anti-heroines who nonetheless exert profound political influences.

I intend to explore the writing styles of both texts as being itself a form of antiheroic writing, against the conventional literary epic form dominant within the period of their writing. I will draw upon Rey Chow’s theory of the feminine detail and Jie Lu’s theory of gossip to show how the texts’ focus on the everyday, the banal, feminine spaces, and interiority as support for my claim of an antiheroic writing.  This will be further argued through drawing evidence that the protagonists’ actions are motivated by self-interest and not by intents of nation-building. Unlike the traditional hero, Liusu and Wang Qiyao become admired not for their actual qualities, but for their existence of an idealized abstract, as a form of Oriental past.  They are romanticized as embodiments of the bygone Shanghai.

In order to demonstrate how the protagonists are antiheroines, I will discuss the role of antiheroines as defined by other critics.  Beckson argues that “the anti-hero[ine] finds commitment to ideals difficult or impossible because of his sense of helplessness in a world over which [s]he has no control.”    In “A Love that Topples a City,” Bai Liusu is a divorcee trapped within her own household, enduring the harsh antagonism of multiple members of the extended family.  Discontent with her helpless position, her attraction to playboy Fan Liuyuan, who recently returned from London, is the physical form of her individualistic desire to escape her boredom—to divorce her family.  Her apoliticalness is observed by her response to the societal disruption caused by the Japanese invasion of Hong Kong as a pure means of obtaining Liuyuan and escaping from her family altogether.  Conversely, this revolutionary atmosphere that is essentially beneficial for Liusu has the opposite effect for Wang Qiyao of The Song of Everlasting Sorrow.  Wang Qiyao is a figure unwilling to adapt to the modernizing ideals and norms set into motion by the Communist takeover.  This unwillingness is not caused by political ideology, but by the individualistic desire to escape boredom, desperately clinging onto the customs of a past.  She becomes a portrait of “Old Shanghai,” remaining static, ahistorical and apolitical as the architectural, cultural, and social landscape of Shanghai constantly transform and evolve around her.

Notwithstanding the apolitical motives of the anti-heroines, they exert influences within a political and social context.  This claims attempts to respond to traditional connotations of antiheroines as being failures and therefore unable to leave a certain impact or relate significantly with the greater world.  At the conclusion of “A Love that Topples a City,” Liusu’s impact is generalized to the collective actions of others just like her that disrupts social norms to the point that an entire city collapses.  Meanwhile, Wang Qiyao is presented as a distinct individual within society, a microcosm that is indicative of the macrocosm that is a transforming society. Wang Anyi calls attention to the fact that there are many other Shanghainese girls just like Wang Qiyao.  The ordinariness of both characters is yet another quality aligning them as anti-heroines.

Aside from analyzing the primary texts of both novels in English as well as the original Chinese, I will also be drawing upon a number of secondary texts, including peer-reviewed journal articles, literary criticism books, essays by both authors, and one New York Times Sunday Book Review on Anyi’s novel by Francine Prose.  I also intend on gathering articles written in Chinese.  In examining what factors allow both protagonists to constitute an anti-heroine, a key aim of my research is to focus on the relationship of women within a modernizing, revolutionary society and the implications on women identity and gender politics.