Enlightenment, Social Instruction, and Female Bond: Love/Marriage Narratives and Representations of Women in Wartime Taiwan’s Literature

Abstract

By the 1930s, the idea of modern love discussed in the writings of Ellen Kay and Kuriyagawa Hakuson was no longer a subject limited to the circle of Taiwanese intellectuals, but a topic publicly debated in mainstream news media of colonial Taiwan. Concurrently, questions such as freedom of love, the unity of body and soul, and what modern women entail were tackled in Taiwan’s literary works. This paper examines the varied takes on issues surrounding love/marriage and women in the works of three social groups—male Japanese-language writers of modern Taiwanese literature, male Chinese-language writers of popular literature, and female Japanese-language writers—of wartime Taiwan. It analyzes how arranged marriage functions as a critique of patriarchy in the works of first-group writers, particularly those by Lü Heruo, and how the love/marriage narrative becomes an audience-appealing tactic in the Chinese-language tabloids such as Fengyuebao (Wind and Moon Bulletin), and how its contributors reveal their ambivalence toward modern women through their moralistic and polarized representations of “good wife and wise mother” (xianqi liangmu) and “morally degraded” modern women. It also investigates how Taiwan’s female authors mediate the notion surrounding love and marriage, using Yang Qianhe’s “Season of Flowers” and Ye Tao’s “Love’s Fruit” as examples. It contends that Taiwanese male authors’ limited representations of women align often with their own ideology or the colonial needs, whereas their female counterparts consider marriage and childbearing an inevitable obstacle to their much-valued female-students bond and emerging female subjectivity.