Поетика жіночих “шрамів” у прозі Цань Сюе

Abstract

The purpose of the paper is to define the artistic features of Can Xue’s works that depict female existence as a traumatic experience. Understanding the semantic models of female existence and their artistic representation is relevant, as it enables the exploration of the writer’s unique approach to Chinese women’s discourse and helps outline the key issues characteristic of contemporary women’s literature. We identify Can Xue’s works as an example of women’s writing, the writer explores women’s place and role in contemporary society, debates the biological determination of women’s social unfulfillment, and reinterprets the traditionally negative male perception of a “woman as the Other” into an affirmative one – a search for own identity in a feminine interpretation, etc. Therefore, among the complex scientific methods and approaches applied in the study, the feminist approach and the narrative construction of trauma as one of the key aspects of trauma studies are prioritized.

Can Xue’s flash fiction is examined through the framework of artistic models of female existence as a set of various interpretations, modifications, and transformations of women’s prose themes in the author’s stylistic vision. The differentiation criteria for the typology are based on the most common aspects of female existence interpretation in humanities studies: sociological (“woman in wedlock” and “woman as a mother”), psychological (“woman as the Other”), and cultural (“woman in the world of a male artist”).

Can Xue’s perception of female experience as trauma, resulting from a collision with a world structured by patriarchal norms, is evident in her collection Scars, which carries a highly symbolic title. In her reflections on the absence of a mother as the loss of a “link” in the generational “chain”, the writer highlights women’s social alienation, employing a unique chronotype where reality and the surreal merge, while also emphasizing themes of corporeality (A Woman with Legs Like a Fishing Net (双脚像一团鱼网的女人)). The realization that her marriage is a trap deeply scars the protagonist’s psyche, as it is structured around patriarchal notions of the submissive role of a “woman who serves” (Anonymous (匿名者)). Can Xue delve into the psychology of a heroine who, in an attempt to escape the “scar” of loneliness, ultimately renounces her own identity (The Usurer (索债者)). In this psychoanalytical exploration, the concept of female submission is taken to an absurd extreme through the phantasmagorical image of a cat, a projection of the “male abuser”.

Thus, Can Xue’s dominant interpretation of female existence is that of a traumatic experience, as her protagonists struggle to establish or rediscover their identity.