China and the West

Lu, Xun. Nuola zou hou zen yang ? = Lu, Xun. After Nora walks out, what then ? : a talk given at the Peking Womens Normal College = Beijing shi fan da xue on December 26, 1923. [ID D26227].
What I would like to talk about today is this : After Nora walks out, what then ? Ibsen is a Norwegian literary figure who lived in the second half of the nineteenth century. His works, with the exception of a dozen or so poems, are all plays. There was a period when most of his plays dealt with social issues – these are known to the world as "realistic problem plays". Nora is one of these "problem plays". Nora is also known as Ein Puppenheim, the Chinese translation for which is Family of puppets. But the term "puppe" refers not only to puppets on strings – it also covers dolls that children play with ; by way of metaphorical extension, the term also includes people who do whatever other people tell them to do. In the beginning, Nora was living contentedly in a so-called "happy family"; but she was eventually to wake up to the fact that she was a mere puppet manipulated by her husband, and her children were puppets manipulated by her. And so she walked out. We hear the slam of the door, and then the curtain falls. But I'm sure you're already familiar with all of this, so I won't go into the details.
What would it take for Nora not to leave ? We might say that Ibsen himself has already provided us with an answer, which is the play The Lady from the Sea (Die Frau vom Meer), also translated as Sea Madame in China. This is about a woman who was already married, but had a lover before the marriage who lived across the sea. One day, the lover appeared out of nowhere and came looking for her, asking her to go away with him. She went and told her husband that she wanted to meet with this outsider. Towards the end of the play, the husband says to her : now you're totally free. You're free to choose [whether or not to leave], but you'll have to bear the consequences yourself. And that changed everything. She decided not to leave. Had Nora been given the same kind of freedom, then perhaps she would have chosen to stay put. But Nora did leave after all. What next ? Ibsen does not provide us with an answer – what's more, he's dead. But even if he weren't dead, he wouldn't have been responsible for giving us an answer anyway. This is because Ibsen is a writer of poetry – he is not the kind of person who identifies social problems and figures out solutions on our behalf. He is like an oriole : the oriole sings because it wants to sing ; it is not singing because it wants to amuse people, or because it wants people to benefit from it in some way or other. Ibsen is a man not very attuned to the ways of the world. It is said that, once, at a banquet in which some women got together to show their appreciation for his writing of A Doll's House, which gave people new insights into issues such as female self-consciousness and the emancipation of women, Ibsen announced, to everybody's surprise : "That isn't what I meant when I was writing the piece – I was simply composing poetry".
So what happens after Nora leaves ? Others have expressed their views. An Englishman once wrote a play about a 'modern' woman who walked out on her family, but then had nowhere to go and ended up a degenerate in a brothel. And there was a Chinese chap – what shall I call him ? – let's say, a writer from Shanghai – he said he had seen a version of Nora that was different from the present translationiv : Nora comes back in the end. It's a shame no one else has ever seen this version – unless Ibsen himself sent the manuscript to him. But if we were to work at it with some common sense, then Nora, really, is left with only two ways out : either go home, or go to the dogs. Because - imagine if it were a little bird. While it's true that there's no freedom in a cage, once the bird leaves the cage, there are cats and hawks and other such [predators] outside. And, if it were a bird that's been caged for so long that its wings have become paralyzed – it no longer remembers how to fly – then, really, there's no way out for this bird. Well, there is another way out, which is to starve to death. But if it starves to death, then it would no longer be living, which would mean that it would no longer have any problems to deal with – so that's hardly a valid way out.
The most painful thing in life is to wake up from a dream and have nowhere to go. People who dream are in bliss. So unless you can see a way out for these dreamers, it is important not to wake them up. Look at Tang dynasty poet Li He. Now isn't he a man who's spent his entire life in the dregs ? Yet on his deathbed he said to his mother : "Mamma, God built this mansion of white jade, and wants me to go and write a piece to celebrate the occasion". Now how can this be anything but a lie ? How can it be anything but a dream ? Yet here you have a young one facing an old one, one who's dying facing one who lives on ; [thanks to these lies and dreams] the dying one is able to die happily, and the living one lives on, at peace with oneself. It is at times like this that lies and dreams serve a great purpose. For this reason, I believe that if there is no way out, then what we need is a dream. But one should never, ever, dream of the future. Artsybashevv once used his novel to question those idealists who dreamt of building a golden world of opportunity, who encouraged others to suffer in the pursuit of this cause. He said : "You promise a golden world of opportunity to their sons and grandsons, but what have you left for they themselves to enjoy ?" Well, there is something for them to enjoy, and that is their hopes for the future. But this is to be enjoyed at a price. In order to have these hopes, the senses are fine tuned to be so acute as to feel one's pain and suffering in all their intensity; the spirit is summoned to witness one's rotting corpse of a body. At times like this, dreams and lies become vital. So I believe that if there is no way out, then what we need is a dream – not a dream of the future, but a dream in the present.
But since Nora has already woken up from her dream, it is difficult for her to return to that dream state, and she is left with no choice but to leave. Yet once she leaves, at times it seems that her only options are return or ruin. Otherwise, what we need to ask is this : Has she brought anything with her, other than her emancipated mind ? If all she has is a mauve woolen scarf like the kind you women in the audience are wearing now, then, be it a two-foot scarf or a three-foot scarf, however wide it is, it is totally useless. She needs to be rich – she needs to have possessions in her suitcase. To put it bluntly, she needs money. Dreams are fine ; otherwise money is essential...
In fact, these days, if somebody like Nora were to leave home, she probably wouldn't have too much trouble surviving, because this is a special person we're talking about – many people will sympathize with her and help her sustain a living. But relying on other people's sympathy for a living already implies giving up one's own freedom. Now suppose there were a hundred Noras who left home, then there would be a lot less sympathy to go around ; now suppose there were tens of thousands of Noras who left home – people would start to get annoyed. Far more reliable [than sympathy] would be to have some form of economic leverage in one's own hands.
Now if we manage to acquire economic freedom, does this mean that we are no longer puppets manipulated by others ? Puppets we still are. The only difference is that we are less at the mercy of others, and have more people under our thumbs. Because, in modern society, it's not just women who are at the mercy of men, men are at the mercy of other men, and women at the mercy of other women ; there are also men who are at the mercy of women – this isn't something that will change overnight with a few women acquiring economic privileges. But then again we can't just sit there hungrily waiting for our ideal world to drop out of the sky ; like a fish lying on a wagon trail desperate for a sprinkling of water, we need something to ease our gasping, and the quest for down-to-earth economic privileges does just that – it is something to keep us going while we ponder other alternatives. Then again, so far we've been treating Nora as an ordinary person. Suppose she was special. Suppose she was the kind of person who would be willing to stick her neck out for others – that would make it a different story altogether. We have no right to encourage or entice people to make sacrifices ; nor do we have the right to stop people from sacrificing themselves. Mind you, the world is full of people all too happy to make sacrifices, all too happy to suffer pain...
A pity it is that change does not come easily in China – this is a place where anything from moving a table to refitting a stove will almost always end in bloodshed – and the shedding of blood does not always guarantee that the table can be moved, that the stove can be refitted. It will take some hard lashing on the back with a giant whip [to bring about change] – China simply is not going to move of its own accord. I believe this lashing is going to come sooner or later (whether or not it’s a good thing is another matter), but China is definitely going to be hit hard. As for where this blow will come from, how it's going to come, I really cannot say with any certainty. And that concludes my talk.

He Chengzhou : In his lecture, Lu Xun is not so much concerned with Ibsen's Nora as with the fate of a Chinese woman who dares to leave home. It seems that he only borrows the image of Nora and develops it into a polemic about the current situation of Chinese women. The solution for a Chinese Nora, according to Lu Xun, is that she will 'either degrade herself, or come back home... another alternative is to starve to death'. For women to avoid being puppets, it is very important to have equal economic rights with men. 'First, there must be a fair sharing between men and women in the family ; secondly, women should enjoy equal rights with men in society'. But Lu Xun immediately confesses that he has no idea about how women can win these rights. All he knows is that they must fight for it, and fight hard.