Severely Limited Roles of Women in the Stories

The stage of the woman's marriage-by-force is also verit qualified as something women were expected to endure (Lau 22). Finally, she is rejected by the community, humiliated, laugh atd, and dies a beggar.

The womanish protagonist in "The Merchant's Wife," by Hsu Ti-Shan, is just as abused as the woman in the first bosh, still the merchant's wife rationalizes her abuse at the hands of a union which devalues women: "If I recall [the traumatic events of life] them myself---the long separation, being sold, my escape, etc.---none of these events be without happiness. So you gather upn't feel sorry for me. You must be able to take things easy" (Lau 50). Her attitude would please Confucius, who wants people to use up life as it is without causing social turmoil. Women who might admit in any meaningful way would not be acting according to Confucian moral examples. The merchant's wife is not only a break one's back to society, accepting whatever abuse it heaps upon her and rationalizing it as the source of happiness, yet she is a slave to the internal master who tells her that she has no right or need to protest her abuse.

The story "Rice" by Yeh Shao-chun has nothing to do with women so it is difficult to discuss its depiction of women's roles, except heretofore as the absence of any meaningful mention of women in a village's crisis indicates once again their peripheral social nature. The teacher is a man and the superintendent is a man. Both atomic number 18 positions of some power, although cl

The title of the story "A Slave-Mother," by Jou Shih, tells us everything we need to know to the highest degree women in this tale. The female protagonist is "pawned" by her husband in hard economic times. She is used as a test-tube for the dressing of another man's child, and after having been essentially leased for three old age is sent back to her husband. It is difficult to read much(prenominal) a story and not feel rage at such a system which not only treats women as things but also does so with such civility, according to Confucian rules of behavior. The Confucian "gentlemanliness" adds a patina of civility to the cruelty and abuse which makes it even more enraging and horrifying.

The despair of the slave-mother is obvious in the final words of the story: "The long night, silent and cold as death, seemed to drag on endlessly" (Lau 219).

Lau, Joseph S.M., C.T. Hsia, and Leo Ou-Fan Lee (eds.). Modern Chinese Stories and Novellas, 1919-1949. young York: Columbia University Press, 1981.

Pa Chin's story "Nanny Yang" tells the tale of a woman who has some power---but only over the children in her care. for certain she is a beloved person in the household, but she is a victim as are all the major female characters in these stories. She falls ill, suffers greatly, and dies finally. The children see her as a tremendous person, which she was, but they knew little of her life full of suffering because she was seen as an appendage to her husband, who died and left her helpless and destitute.

In Lu Hsun's "In the Wine Shop," Ah despise is shown as a typically ideal female---waiting on men and living to serve them well: "I hadn't the heart to put down the chopsticks. I saw in her face both hope and fear---fear, no doubt, that she had prepared [the angelical buckwheat gruel]badly, and hope that we would find it to our liking" (Lau 30). Once again, the catastrophe of a woman's miserable life is overshadowed by the effects on and responses of surrounding men. In fact, it can even be argued that Ah Shun
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