1. Bai, Juyi. “The Song of Everlasting Sorrow (Chang hen ge).” Repository of Chinese Literature. 2003 Feb. 7.
Poet Bai Juyi retells the fall of the Tang Dynasty from its glory and the quintessential femme fatale figure of traditional China—Imperial Consort Yang Gui Fei. Historically, after Yang’s entrance into the palace, the Emperor focused his time and attention solely on her, neglecting national affairs of all kind. In popular culture and belief, Consort Yang is blamed as the evil seductress responsible for the fall of the nation. Devoted to the nation and the people, the troops demanded the death of Consort Yang before they would continue to march on to safety. Most unwillingly, the Emperor was finally left with no other choice. He gave the command for one of the soldiers to strangle her to death. Through this poem, Bai casts an entirely different light upon her altogether. She is no longer a temptress, but rather a victim. The poem romanticizes and idealizes both her and her relationship with the emperor. It is told through the perspective of the emperor and his longing for her after her death. The title of this poem, which Wang Anyi borrows for her novel serves as a subtext for the work. The influence of the poem is even more explicit at times, as in direct usage of certain lines as the heading of sections of the novel. The portrait that Bai paints of Consort Yang is significant for the implications of Wang Anyi’s intent in viewing her protagonist. His redefinition of Consort Yang as a victim calls the reader to redefine the term of femme fatale itself. By the same extension, Wang Anyi implicitly signals for the reader to view the protagonist through an alternative perspective.
2. Chang, Eileen. “Writings of One’s Own.” Written on Water. Trans. Andrew F. Jones. Weatherhead Books on Asia Ser. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. 15-22.
Zhang Ailing’s essay responds to the Chinese scholar Fu Lei’s criticism that her serialized novella Chained Links, following the acclaimed “A Love that Topples a City” and “The Golden Cangue,” is too trivial in its concentration on the domestic, neglecting nationalistic values. Within this essay, Zhang not only discusses her own writings, but also contemplates the relationship on literary theory and the work, arguing her purpose of producing literature, namely, she prefers to portray desolation over tragedy, for only the former can provide a sense of “equivocal contrast.” Thus, its impact is much more profound and its effect more realistic. She states that her main intent is to strive for a greater degree of realism within her works. Hence, in engaging in equivocal contrast, she chooses not to use themes of extremes such as good and evil, unlike her classicist predecessors, pointing to what I argue is a form of antiheroic writing.
3. Cheng, Stephen. “Themes and Techniques in Eileen Chang’s Stories.” Tankang Review. 8.2 (1977), 169-200. Rpt. In Short Story Criticism. Ed. Anna J. Sheets. Vol. 28 Detroit: Gale Research, 1998. Literature Resource Center. Gale. CUNY Libraries. 13 Sept. 2008 .
Cheng argues that Zhang Ailing is innovative in that she understood that evil cannot be solved by a perfect social system, for it arises from desire. Therefore, her stories explore the heart in search for truth and illuminate a sense of inherent sadness. Her stories are not panoramic. Here, Cheng analyzes Zhang’s points of view on heroism and desolation in her “Writings of One’s Own.” Cheng claims that within her stories, like her characters, love is also incomplete and imperfect, a combination of jealousy, hurts, joys, and delights. Regarding “A Love that Topples a City,” Cheng offers a couple of unique insights. He argues that by bringing Liusu to Hong Kong, Liuyuan essentially attempts to ruin her reputation in order for her to surrender to him. What ensues is their game of cat and mouse. Their apparent stalemate leads the two to briefly separate. Yet, this returns Liusu into the bondage of her family and she realizes that she must surrender. It is then with the Japanese attacks on the Hong Kong Harbor that leads them to see each other as being indispensable. Commenting on the “opulence and range of [Zhang’s] imagery,” Cheng sees the condition of Liusu and Liuyuan—“stranded in a fallen house in a fallen city, isolated, with almost no contact with the civilized world”—as being “the quintessence of human condition, desolation.” In that sense, I find that this story can be seen as representative of Zhang’s goals of realism within her works.
4. Chow, Rey. “Chapter 3: Modernity and Narration—in Feminine Detail.” Woman and Chinese Modernity: The Politics of Reading Between West and East. Theory and History of Literature Ser., Vol. 75. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1991. 84-120.
Chow examines the role of the “vanishing superfluous detail” (84) as an approach of exploring history in modern Chinese narratives. The detail serves as a point of intersection between the old and the new through which its examination may lead to a greater understanding of both. Writers, such as Zhang Ailing, who focused on social details within their works directly undermined the male literati mainstream that stressed the importance of seriousness, versus the trivial, in fiction. Chow states that in exploring issues of femininity, Zhang approaches modernity and history with sensuous details. In this sense, Chow’s argument further explains and defends the incompleteness of Zhang’s works, with which Wang Anyi disagrees. Chow argues that the study of the detail has been consistently degendered although the spaces through which the detail manifests are conventionally associated with femininity. Chow argues that narrative will always work against a subject as representing a nation, but rather detail production that works against this program. Chow goes on to discuss Zhang Ailing in relation to the detail and femininity. She explains that Zhang’s unique literary method is “the refusal to tame or suppress even the ugliest and bleakest emotions” (113), but rather to externalize them, revealing a different approach toward history and modernity. Thus, the detail is never sublimated. Zhang redefines the detail by removing it from the conventional human interest. Her usage of details is as if piling one atop of another. One detail is only seen as being an addition to another. By juxtaposing seemingly irrelevant details, any “human ‘virtue’ ” (114) is eliminated. Details are not just of the body. Details become a form of destruction, which expresses itself through “figures of ruin and desolation,” destroying “the centrality of humanity that the rhetoric of Chinese modernity often naively adopts as an ideal and a moral principle” (114). It is through these figures of destruction that Zhang presents the world, as details apart from the ‘whole.’ Her wholeness is one that encompasses incompleteness and desolation, rather than the “idealist notions like ‘Man,’ ‘Self,’ or ‘China’ ” (114). This is what distinguishes Zhang in her approach to modernity, which manifests itself through her portrayal of characters. Unlike other writers of her time and after her, Zhang was interested in portraying the limits of humanity rather than lofty ideals. These limits are illustrated as cruelty within her narratives. Both suffer the same treatment from society of extremes. Unwilling and unaware of how to handle these factors, society chooses either to dismiss a problem as being negligible or over-generalize it as being an universal human condition. Thus, these issues of women cause the details of society to always be incomplete for women do not have the power to gain agency and these unsolved issues continue to shatter the societal dream of a collective humanity. Zhang’s narrative stands as a polar opposite to the revolutionariness rampart in modern Chinese literature. Her women stand as a reminder of the inability to truly move forward with fetters of feudal China still present. They mock the pursuit of “ ‘inner subjectivity’ and new nation’ ” (120). Zhang’s texts create a tension with the ‘historical.’ “It forces us to rethink the assumption of modernity-as-revolution in the details of form, which are defined not as the technicalities of aesthetics but as the fragmented symptoms of historically produced but epistemologically unrecognized conflicts” (120).
5. Lu, Jie. “Chapter 3 Boredom: The Female Experience of Time.” Dismantling Time: Chinese Literature in the Age of Globalization. Materialising China: Vision and Perspective Ser. Singapore: Marshall Cavendish Academic, 2005. 83-108.
Lu explores the female experience of boredom in relation to history and time through the two texts of Lu Yan’s “Dreaming of Visiting My Parents’ Home” and Wang Anyi’s The Song of Everlasting Sorrow. Lu argues that unlike the female protagonists that proceeded those of these writers, who are dispossessed from history and perceive it as random and irrational, Wang Qiyao, confined within the interior, experiences time and history as banality. Lu claims that Wang is representative of the temporal experiences of women of the petty urban class at certain historical moments. Lu argues that the novel represents boredom as a temporal experience that resists “narrativity” (83). It is space that creates and forms the backdrop of the social condition of boredom, which in terms becomes a sort of foundation for the social system from which it is created. Thus, boredom itself is revealing of social and historical conditions. Lu claims that narrative is a tool of making sense of temporal experiences. By extension, the true meaning of narrative is the temporal experience of life. I see that this is similar to Chow’s claim of Zhang Ailing’s stress of details and the trivial over the epic. Lu stresses that Wang’s novel uses daily trivialities to reveal truths of the urban world specifically and life. Here is the most important point of Lu’s argument, in which she proposes that the novel’s representation is not the essay form, but rather gossip. This look specifically focuses on details of domestic interiority that consist of banal objects of everyday life. Lu argues that Wang Qiyao is an ahistorical figure, completely oblivious of, isolated from, and indifferent of the historical changes occurring all around her. I will argue that her apolitcalness is an extension of this “ahistoricity.”
6. Miller, Arthur. “Tragedy and the Common Man.” The Theater Essays of Arthur Miller. (Viking Press, 1978) pp. 3-7.
Miller argues that the literary and dramatic mode of tragedy is by no means exclusive to those of high ranks, but even more so for the modern common man. He gives three reasons for why tragedy is applicable for the common man: 1) classic works of tragedies contain universal emotional responses; 2) in discussing circumstances outside of literature, tragedy is applied to everyone; 3) the popularity of tragedies among the masses speaks to an understanding of and connection to those situations. Miller argues that tragedy is evoked when the reader observes a character, who is willing to risk her or his life in order to secure a sense of personal dignity and gain a rightful position in society. Particularly fascinating is his view of the tragic flaw, which he defines as one’s “inherent unwillingness to remain passive in the face of what [s/]he conceives to be a challenge to [her/]his dignity.” Thus, it is only those who remain passive that are considered “flawless.” A common man’s defeat is still laudable if it was the ultimate result of a struggle to challenge what has been unchallenged. In then viewing Wang Qiyao of The Song of Everlasting Sorrow, her passivity is a key quality in excluding her from the categorization of being a tragic heroine. Her life is tragic, but she is not a heroine.
7. Pearson, Carol and Pope, Katherine. “Chapter 1: The Female Hero.” The Female Hero in American and British Literature. New York: R. R. Bowker Company, 1981. 3-15.
The scholars argue that our understanding of a hero has been skewed into a narrow definition of what is basically the privileged man of the dominant racial group. This definition asks one to rethink the conventional assumptions of macho heroes of the epic literary mode. Pearson and Pope argue that female heroes often challenge social norms and in turn transform the social order. They claims that heroes who are outsiders due to their gender, race, or socioeconomic status are always revolutionary. I question their thoughts on the adverse of this statement. Does my observation of both Liusu and Wang Qiyao as not being revolutionary automatically equate them as being antiheroines? In regards to the novels of Wang Anyi and Zhang Ailing, what may seem to be breaks of the novel in essay form are more closely associated with gossip or the detail rather than polemics for the feminist cause. Pearson and Pope go on to paint an idealistic portrayal of a female hero who seems to be less inclusive than the one that she originally presents. These claims are contradictory to both Chinese protagonists of interest for neither of them seek to establish wholeness in the outward community.
8. Prose, Francine. “Miss Shanghai.” Rev. of The Song of Everlasting Sorrow, by Wang Anyi. Trans. Michael Berry and Susan Chan Egan. New York Times Sunday Book Review. 4 May 2008.
Prose is on point in arguing that the interior spaces in which Wang Qiyao creates unchanging little worlds are exactly a testament to the revolutionary atmosphere of the changing outside world. Prose points to a tension between what changes and what remains the same, either succumbing to or resisting the passage of time and social change. She also indicates that history acts more as a backdrop to the novel and that the presence of Shanghai can be distinctly felt throughout. Prose then goes on to discuss a point that Rey Chow makes about Zhang Ailing’s writing: the focus on detail, particularly through fashion. Also supporting Chow’s claim of the intimate relation between history and the personal within narrative, Prose discusses how the characters seem to retain core qualities that are completely unaffected either by history or personal experiences. While Wang Qiyao suffers the most, she also changes the least. Her essence is not revealed to us through her thoughts or feelings, but rather the “patterns that reappear throughout her life.” She never understands the emotions of others. She is late in realizing the passion she causes in men. By the time she does, they are hurt beyond repair and must leave her. She holds onto vain values of glamour in reminiscing her past.
9. Wang, David Der-wei. “Shanghai xiaojie zhi si: Wang Anyi de ‘Chang hen ge’ ” (“Death of Miss Shanghai: Wang Anyi’s The Song of Everlasting Sorrow”). Chang hen ge (The Song of Everlasting Sorrow) by Wang Anyi. Taipei: Maitian, 1996. 3-10.
David Der-wei Wang accurately follows Wang Anyi’s intent in opening his discussion on protagonist Wang Qiyao as “they” rather than “she.” She is a product of her times and representative of the common girl’s dream of glamour and the escape from common daily life. Her Shanghai and the Miss Shanghai pageant both point to the trend of following the latest fashion. Of greatest value within this essay is undoubtedly the extended discussion between Wang Anyi as continuing the legacy of Zhang Ailing. He links Wang Anyi with predecessors of Chinese women writers, especially Zhang Ailing. The scandalous identity of Wang Qiyao can be viewed as a new perspective on Zhang’s character of ‘the mistress.’ David Wang then discusses Wang Anyi’s criticism towards Zhang’s works as being “incomplete” and being of “only sentimental drama, and not tragedy” (8). He defends Zhang in pointing out Wang’s misunderstanding of her work. He praises Zhang’s art of portraying the “unequivocal contrast” and her belief that life itself is a tale of sadness in which one is neither able to laugh nor to cry (8). It is exactly this sense of incompleteness that Zhang uses to counter the mainstream literary discourse of her times. David Wang mentions, however, that Wang Anyi’s criticism is not without its benefits. The third part of her novel, illustrating the unraveling of Wang Qiyao, is a response to her dissatisfaction with Zhang’s work. Zhang Ailing focuses solely on women during the time of liberation. David Wang attributes this to her departure from Shanghai in 1952. She simply could not have been able to write about the post-liberation period. In this sense, he sees Wang Anyi as a resolution to her work, completing the gap that Zhang left open in her work. As witnessed by this novel, Wang provides a form of afterword for the women of Zhang’s texts, by illustrating their life following liberation. This point is stressed in David Wang’s direct allusion to “A Love that Topples a City” and its protagonist Bai Liusu. Liusu is able to find a happy resolution amidst turmoil. However, through years of toiling, Wang Qiyao is unable to reach the same ending. David Wang argues that this stark contrast is indicative of Wang Anyi’s view of modern society and the destructive powers of humanity. At the close of his essay, Wang draw a comparison between the author and her protagonist Wang Qiyao. At the conclusion of the novel, Wang Qiyao realizes that she has seen her death in the form of a visual premonition during her visit to a film studio forty years ago—a woman being strangled on a bed under a flickering electric light. David Wang sees this epiphany as the union between sets of binary—reality and memory, and more importantly, the author and the protagonist. He calls attention to the forty years of Wang Qiyao and the forty years of age for Wang Anyi. He views the protagonist’s death as the author’s means of saying farewell to the Shanghai of her illusions and of her imagined memory. David Wang finally ends with asking whether everything is but a movie.
10. Zhang, Yingjin. “The Female Visions of the Modern City.” The City in Modern Chinese Literature & Film: Configurations of Space, Time, and Gender. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996. 233-259.
The critic indicates that Zhang Ailing sets three pairs of binary contrasts in “A Love that Topples a City”: (1) conflict between the modern and the conventional within the characters; (2) old-fashioned and modern lifestyle; and, (3) civilization—synonymous with the city—and destruction. Through these three sets, Zhang’s vision of the fallen city is that of an already decaying civilization. With Liusu as a femme fatale figure linked with destruction, Zhang Ailing envisions the city as a patriarchal order that is threatened by the object it desires: the woman.
