How Biomedicine Shapes Women's Views of Health in a Chinese Novel - Essay Example

Literature Review: Prior to the early 1980’s, Gold-dust Dynasty was barely studied in Mainland China. Zhang Youluan and Fan Boqun were among the first to evaluate Zhang Henshui as a master of old style fiction and Gold-dust Dynasty as one of his most organized works. In 1995, Yang Yi assessed Gold-dust Dynasty from three perspectives. Firstly, from a historical perspective, as Zhang Henshui’s works inherited the late Qing tradition of fiction writing. Secondly, from a literary perspective, as Zhang Henshui’s works explored the possibilities of Chinese fiction without much influence from Western fiction. Thirdly, from an anthropological perspective, as Zhang Henshui’s works demonstrated the folklores, customs, and sentiments of a variety of social groups and individuals in the early Republican China. This thesis will study Gold-dust Dynasty from the anthropological perspective, with particular emphasis on the medical anthropological perspective. As there is a scarcity of previous studies of Gold-dust Dynasty, the review will consist of previous works on related topics and briefly introduce the methodology of critical medical anthropology. A Feminist Approach: In her Tales of Translation, Hu Ying examines the “new woman” in the early Republican China as counterparts of traditional talented women and modern Western women. According to Hu, the “new woman” is special in the 1920’s and 1930’s because of two factors. These factors are that unlike traditional talent women usually born in the privileged or literate-gentry families, the “new woman” could come from any class, and unlike modern Western women, whose image was imagined or idealized in the late Qing and early Republican Chinese novels, the Chinese “new woman” could be seen in Peking in the 1920’s and 1930’s. In Gold-dusty Dynasty, new women also embodied these features. They came from any social backgrounds and could be any one living in any alley of the old Peking. “New woman” is a loaded term; it suggests an antithesis to the traditional woman and, with its Western roots, raises the question of whether the “new woman” refers to Western women. Although Gold-dust Dynasty is set in the beginning of early Republican China, the story remains almost silent about the New Culture Movement (1917-1923). Throughout the novel, no character embraces the New Cultural idea that the “new woman” should be a follower of Western women and/or the opposite polar of the traditional women. In Gold-dust Dynasty, the “new woman” was not an exact replica of the Western model. The key feature of a “new woman,” as seen in most of the female characters, is self-determination. Self-determination in women is a significant facet of feminism. Feminism is both an intellectual commitment and a political movement that seeks justice for women and the end of sexism in all forms (Jacqui & Albrecht, 1998). It is a social theory and a political movement at the same time, which is primarily informed and motivated by the experiences of women. It generally provides a critique of social relations, as feminists are in disagreement about what sexism consists of and what exactly ought to be done about it; they disagree about what it means to be a woman or a man and what social and political implications gender has or should have (Crush, 1995). Nonetheless, motivated by the quest for social justice, feminist inquiry provides a wide range of perspectives on social, cultural and political phenomena. Important topics for feminist theory and politics include: the body, class and work, disability, the family, globalization, human rights, popular culture, race and racism, reproduction, science, the self, sex work and sexuality. Issues on women’s rights have always existed ever since the early ages in Chinese literature, but the formal movement for women’s self-determination really evolved in the last decade of the 19th century China, marked by the Natural Feet movement from the 1880s to 1920s. Women’s self-determination was also one of the most common topics among commercial writers. Rey Chow believed that women’s self-determination in the early Republican commercial fiction unsettled the oppositional structures of Chinese/foreign and tradition/modern (Chow, 1981). The hierarchal barriers that significantly defined women’s fates in the pre-industrial literature were increasingly downgraded by the emphasis on women’s own pursuits for their independences. A Bio-Cultural Approach: Sickness and health played crucial roles in the works of the May Fourth intellectuals, such as Lu Xun (1881-1936), who believed in Hegel’s social Darwinism. They tended to ascribe the “sick national characteristics” (bujianquan de minzuxing 不健全的民族性) of early modern China to the underdevelopment of Chinese economy and ethos in comparisons with Western countries. Darwin’s view of evolution was understood as a developing process of adaptation. A similar view is adopted in Gold-dust Dynasty. The novel equated biomedical adaptation to bio-cultural adaptation. Biomedicine is the modern Western mode of medicine, based on the understanding of the body’s biological processes. Biomedical adaptation seeks to find organic causal factors of the symptoms. Bio-cultural approaches to health extend the causal frameworks to social and cultural dynamics; bio-cultural adaptation analyzes the environment of sickness from biotic, abiotic, social, and cultural dynamics (Willey, 221). Since the bio-cultural paradigm is used as such in Gold-dust Dynasty, women’s health and sickness are defined in a bio-cultural perspective; a woman’s health is considered as a reflection of her ability to adapt to the modern environment by behavioural means; a women’s sickness, correspondingly, is thought to be a failure to adapt to the modern environment. The modern environment drives new women to keep healthy in order to work productively, either at home or at the work place. They are collectively healthier than traditional talented women in Dream of the Red Chamber, because they are forced into healthy life styles and tough minds. For example, when Leng Qingqiu is sick during postpartum, she is warned by other female family members that the quality of her milk will be less nutritious than a professional wet nurse. Her failure to remain healthy is seen as a failure of being a responsible woman, who is supposed to breast-feed her child with her own highly qualified milk. From a bio-cultural perspective, health is the essential measure of adaptation and evolution. Modern Chinese women, the mothers of the modern Chinese population, needed to devote more attention to their health for two reasons. Their health was crucial to the adaptation and evolution of the species in the transition from an agricultural society to an industrial society, and women’s health was crucial to their own adaptation and evolution in the specific environments they lived in. In Gold-dust Dynasty, women are encouraged to maintain healthy for both their families and themselves, and their thoughts and behaviours are divided to healthy and unhealthy, hygienic and unhygienic, prescribed and proscribed, and approved and disapproved, based on the measure of their health. Read More