Sophie, Greta, Cuiyuan, and Feminist Desire

Desire has a history and, for a literary criticism inflected by mimetic theory, novelistic prose fiction offers a privileged view of its unfolding. We study novelistic fiction, as opposed to various romance genres, to grasp that history, for what its authors have been able to see, understand, and dramatize—this is the procedural model, indeed the authority established by René Girard and that has largely governed such criticism thereafter.1 But of the three short fictions we consider here—two Chinese and one Canadian—only two are fully novelistic in character, in that they attempt to describe and diagnose—rather than merely express—emergent and changing desires. Students of Girard, of course, recognize here the distinction between the romanesque and romantique. to which one might add the understandings of genre developed by a number of other theorists.2However, we might also concede that all fictions are invariably and to some degree romantic—some desire, necessarily mediated, is always operative, in writers and readers alike, before or even as it is demystified, if indeed it is. Furthermore, a passionate fictional commitment to that which Girard boldly designated the mensonge romantique may actually reveal or clarify, at least for later readers, that which the author seeks half- or unconsciously to conceal. It is with this possibility in mind that we propose to consider our other subject fiction, “Miss Sophie's Diary” (莎菲女士的日记 sha fei nv shi de ri ji; 1927) by the pioneering Chinese woman writer Ding Ling (丁玲 ding ling).3 “Miss Sophie's Diary,” to be clear, is no simple romance; it is at least hybrid, and in its brave if perhaps only partially successful pursuit of the truth of desire, subtly revelatory. Miss Sophie ((莎菲 sha fei), chronically ill with tuberculosis and half-separated from a human world she both longs for and despises, with her aggrieved sense of superiority and desperate, shameful longing for those she passionately feels to be her inferiors, with her loquacious rationalizing and constant, perverse reversals of attitude, is a kind of Dostoyevskian “underground woman,” afflicted as well with a touch of the “nausea” later made prestigious by J.-P. Sartre.4 She is clearly a harbinger of her own culture's precipitation into the world of internally mediated, indeed, metaphysical desire, what we might also call the market world, the modernity Girard credits the great European novelists from Stendhal onward with diagnosing. This story has long been described as an unprecedented and “frank” revelation “of a Chinese woman's sexual feelings and contempt for conventional views,” expressing an “outspoken and unrelenting individualism.”5 At the same time, it has been seen as a product of the fatally compromised and ultimately unsuccessful May Fourth literary movement,6 and not necessarily representative of its author's overall fictional production. From an orthodox Girardian critical perspective, however, the crucial interpretative question might be the degree to which Ding Ling is aware of the sources of the newly enfranchised desires her heroine wrestles with, or, as we might also put it, the degree of separation between the author's understanding and that of Miss Sophie. But such a question is perhaps easily enough answered. Ding Ling clearly does not share Girard's “novelistic” perspective on the operation of desire. But from our current perspective, does her best-known work nonetheless offer, however imperfectly, certain now-recognizable insights into historical processes of desire that our other two writers more fully realize?“Miss Sophie's Diary” is famous in China for the delicacy, depth, and explicitness with which those bold and passionate sexual desires of Sophie are exposed, even as such desires are (perhaps reassuringly) defeated, or at least revealed as illusory. Clearly the story reflects a period of cultural and personal crisis. “I was extremely confused at that time,” she wrote in a later phase of self-critique. “On one hand, I was radically rebellious, believing blindly in social revolution; on the other hand, I indulged myself in a petty bourgeoisie sense, departing from revolution, so I was trapped in loneliness, struggle and misery . . . aside from fiction, I could not find a friend. So, I wrote fiction which was full of contempt for society and lonely spiritual struggle.”7 This now familiar condition has been productive in other contexts of an intensification of internal mediation, and so it is here. To feel contempt for society is to reject—claim to be unmoved by—its proffered desires, and specifically to spurn their pretensions to “external” authority and thus fall—tragically or redemptively, as one may judge—into an intensifying struggle with more proximate models. This variety of “lonely spiritual struggle,” as Miss Sophie's constant and obsessive fretting about her friends and potential lovers vividly illustrates, can only take place in an ever more crowded, indeed almost oppressively busy social field. The story's narrative is an extended sequence of anticipated visits, strained exchanges, obsessive musings about acquaintances and friends, choices of suitors, conversations and reflections on conversations. By her own telling, its protagonist occupies the center of a tight, even obsessed circle of acquaintances, friends, and supplicants—if she's lonely, it's not for lack of human company. Sophie's struggle is for identity, in short, an instance of modernity's own struggle with internally mediated desire, rendered here with the power and freshness of novelty, even revelation.The diary begins on the note of the protagonist's mixed impatience with and dependence upon the social world around her. Other human voices are “coarse” and “monotonous,” yet she is “terrifyingly lonely” (14–15) when she cannot hear them.8 She “can't find anything that isn't disgusting” but worries that “perhaps” she is “the only person affected this way” (15). But even this distinction seems unstable, and she longs for firmer ones, to “find something new to get miserable over and fed up with,” before once again collapsing into doubt: “everything new, whether good or bad, is too far away from me” (15). This might be diagnostic, but when the various other characters are introduced their overall mediocrity by comparison to her victimized sensitivity and perceptiveness bears unmistakable witness to the story's investment in her heroic difference. Wei (苇 wei), a young man who is courting her, seems weak-spirited and pathetic, plausibly disqualified by Sophie as “stupid” for the fault of making a “sincere parade of his devotion” (16)—a telling formulation. Sincerity itself is read as something “paraded,” that is, performed for the purpose of attracting admiration and desire, which of course, having been detected as such, it necessarily fails to do, either for her or for the reader. For us as well as for Sophie, this truly is an “incompetence in love” (17). She likewise rejects (as she absorbs) the care of her family, seeing in it another kind of discernably mediated devotion—poisoned by its traditional, that is to say, externally mediated origin. She wants to be treasured for her uniqueness! Even her good friends Yunlin (云霖 yun lin) and Yufang (毓芳 yu fang) are characterized as obtuse, faintly ridiculous—“some people,” Sophie archly observes, “would despise this sort of ordinariness”—as she attributes their happiness with each other to the lack of a “greater wish” (21) and later invokes their capture by a kind of mindless, feudal “asceticism” (28)—a blind refusal of the larger, more modern triumphs she believes her own uniqueness puts within reach. Her contempt extends to a set of cheerful girls she encounters in the cinema: instead of being infected by their happiness, she is “sick of all those routine dimpled smiles” (18). To Sophie's blighted eye, there can be no authenticity where there is commonality, repetition, the “routines” blindly followed by other people. They must be imitating each other! The authentic is that which imitates no one, that is self-originating, or at least apprehended as such. This is the truth of the underground man: “I am unlike everyone else, and everyone else is unlike me.”9Alternately pushed and pulled, lonely and contemptuous, Miss Sophie laments, “I really don't know how to analyze myself” (19), even as she continually does just that, again and again looking for (and finding) ways to better reframe her differences through the mediation of the people drawn into her orbit. Even so, her dedication to her own “greater as she is far from in is a to our of her which might if too and have and Her and what we might also call her human in a her us (and we may her cannot always the of desires. who at least her is a woman who a Sophie has fictional that also to the sources of desire. This of the now the Sophie to to her Sophie's (17). by her friends to her, Sophie, she to but nonetheless for its with to But Ding Ling does not the full of her protagonist's to be seen and thus her heroic to mimetic their is to have ill of her, and Sophie that as of her to routine social she even her own how she has been about the she is now to Her friends of this and she from the other to Sophie's cannot be away so and are by the in of desire. desire is only to an degree mediated, so the of Sophie in the of her social are even more to or here. The to or the by sexual desire to her of the triumphs and described by Girard, that and desire which is, from desire, the of the this is the purpose of a it read by the of such is likewise and in the of the story's to that to a and only who up are even some readers to a or This is perhaps Sophie's of her a She having her own her to care for and her and up that to The an But has of an has and Sophie attributes her own to the of this been by into that Sophie she have into her current now as a than an of her of from current desire. Sophie is a of but the of her also her other her lonely her I of I really to and the I to when I was the for her. But this too Other people understand, or To be the protagonist of from a perspective, a of the to her is more and its one or another be the of the The of Wei only Sophie's sense of her own but when a more and thus more man the the This is the from Ling of and his is for a Sophie's reveal with some both the story's insights into the of desire, and their her and the of the is able to her own heroic the her from on her authentic desire. this she be to take what I . . . I to But as this might in some ways Ding Ling is enough to recognize the in what is also to be a struggle for the mimetic The protagonist to if the man to a of her and has to to his or his to her, the away from she imitates his own desire for The mediation of the friends and Wei has of the power of the of this of the and the the Sophie is to a the Yunlin with the who the so petty and what Yufang must feel when she the two the one and the short This is just what Girard in of and the that itself metaphysical Ding Ling cannot her investment in Sophie's and even her protagonist's and are to are are we in the and they of internally mediated desire is not a one, as is both and ever The of the Ding narrative and the underground Sophie to to the of her She to the Other and the in which she the her from the social world and its desires. The various and a to and a to her condition in the of a of with which modernity has only too Her is the of itself in that with its and The is her to the struggle of metaphysical desire with her both she between the and as Girard Her into its the not just of a of friends, but of the admiration of a when the Ling her Other and she to that she has a her and its are actually I in This to and it is not at Sophie who Ling of his but Ding The to to as that Chinese with a of contempt one the author revealed as and and to readers, even as Sophie her does not It for that is and of and is or in to to the same of as the Wei She is with in her at is the Even has her for making such conventional to her, even she has seen as truly she But when that was on what was I some in the of their I was looking at It was when I the of what it was that and at the same I I pushed away and no to and that his such and that was too to know what it was was again and on a of that are to be of . . . on of a are to She to for of her is made She or to over what is at is and has her But her diary also the possibility that she nonetheless of the she has Even his as a the she are being so I The Chinese here that the in question both of also of various might or might not have place in the before his But if she does the she must so in a of even and when is is for a conventional of or myself” and that she is her own might or might not to sexual but are to in the of a of on the of upon sexual Yunlin and Yufang for having it for her to be this of the of one we find of our seems to and that we as I ever myself and what I have de But either feel This again is what is telling her she feel at such a and so, in a so that it almost to she the The of the story are of her with and telling a of she feels for She to from to from to she has a to contempt for her But her in the operation has been Ding can only a fiction in which Sophie's is more her or more Sophie, in the of Chinese cultural history, Ding Ling perhaps really the the operation of desire, and Her of the Sophie new and But the narrative on what has various cultural and historical and perhaps in a of the Ling a long fictional parade of courting Her we might say, is not fully to the that Sophie. the commitment to her may itself have a and revelation of the of modern desire, that no such no such even For that sort of a more history may have to and writers who through it to of and in and de to from and of an The take place in but and a the two are both literary a and an who in a is also and from the perspective, the in those in “Miss Sophie's Diary,” are and through the protagonist's of But in both the by a in the of social and for a of modern the and Sophie, are that is, subject to desires than But there are differences in the narrative that in the sources of their Sophie was but we are to with that the human world around her cannot the two are more and by more at least by are thus to or and more to on the sources of The and a through in her fiction, with to a and man differences of perspective and not or to the by Sophie's Wei or Ling the man with protagonist is in is perhaps enough with but the that his is revealed to a his is also what the great center of a Sophie's both the are by familiar of social and the desires of their of more but their to a is of either in the world of literary or in her But their are not or the on their not as or as those made upon Sophie or her and there is a certain in the of to the of other that their desires. a the impatience of not indeed to be in of desire. are both in short, by a more romanesque an with a literary in and a on the who her up the and her The other have her and familiar are as to the of to desire for what they now of to be does note in that it was for a woman to be a than it might be for a man But as a for a new of subtly the is something than in about the her and when offers itself to to and her seems both and the with her she instead has an with a thus in his she fails to over who to be a in the between the another writer another this might have a an or But this is not and is which is more and in in is and by For this a and The of the however, are to the seeing this away from her but could to she for to We have been in the story even to her and the family, and the of the story is it be the and the who must the of this this new of desire, who not get what they who have not fully imitating the desires the story that instead this new in the of a and indeed at with her and but lack of or of is not to a and in another cultural one to feel some of the same has a of but is even more and is almost indeed This only for the her from the of her only in the or ways a kind of desire. it might be is a and work of literary more than story perhaps to not just and but a kind of is mimetic but in the of a than the reflections of a The in which the are has been from the and by the of It on its through and by a and sequence of from the each a a not one, that can is at least as the of the But in the from the and other people who are from are on their own into in a world even such or however or into a by the a to another and are here and there in the the at the is to his the of that have to from the in which they are to read and or and or . . . the one man between his this degree of this as it almost from from the but a to a who in and is “the only man who such with She the as who who her as a man a woman she her overall by than too begins to the in of an her as a from one to another and another in a long only and into not of one of his in the is the that and each desire to this to desire to put his around her, the away with “the of an understanding she is a woman has not have of But in even has power and desires with The is by her own and and in is her as and to take her as a or an she as her and their The narrative their making into a a by the into they could have been so not on their this also in an happiness an his as that she is too a person for such a that the to her in that it this one might say, all the of desire are on the and must which to is more as one might also put it, how does she She might with reveal her the its a kind of of It be a of of course, but in the of be to the of a certain kind of and an who take such a the who to her in his But the other is even more a of the their are Sophie and as This other heroine really is than the woman who such not in the this woman's superiority in her at the of desire, the of which Girard can we or she this a of of her of is at more of course, it always to . . . the but her could be as as this by . . . this man on a in the of a . . . it could be this . . . this was she was one of a that no one else was away his own an She but it a She the all over his was a good world one more good it be to to woman who has to to touch a is a to and the of have been to away her her to his of this of happiness to her touch more than her for his the that from her away on thus to the of what is what the world she has to desire in her. This too is of her to what we might now call this that to the it has to the that is really the fault of a world that her into a for so a mind made she puts in the of seeing each other a her that cannot as as it “the up and the of the the same to describe it as she at the of the The the and now to is as if it the and a woman and a man Her and they for that one but the of the and they just as has to her. But might She may all her, and her own for man who and to But she that has not the is as at some from “everything that the was was a It an this is how we may the distinction between the romantique and the in the one from and But it which has us to a even potential in such from the of if and not are merely us of the of desire. But this story does not in the the potential itself the by the of the lonely woman some but of a good have been a more in the before it she has this and another to the not when it she to the world, able to proffered in the of her her desires. This kind of this from the of the that through time, is what cannot be The are for no one, for romanesque of both we might say, is that they in ways and to and the pretensions of one of modernity's of from internal the heroic of on desires. of course, is seen in in the of and all three we have here to that of The world, the must But the from to and are those who readers to in the and of such desires in their the the and of even in such it be that such an operation can be and might as be or at least The to which the romantique can to in Miss Sophie may in her fictional a and with it, new of for But romanesque fiction us of the of such of heroic desire in their human Even an must through the of and and on all of in the operation of their own and even its the of such writers as and we might say, the truth of mimetic desire is also the truth of a human and a truth in its own in the of a or the of a as that of

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