Shen Congwen's Fetishism: Corporeality of the City and the Rural Homeland in Representations of Women's Hair

Shen Congwen's fictional images of women are often reduced to a naïve dualism, which consists of good-natured country women and corrupted city women. This tendency is supported by the sexualized and fetishized quality of Shen's writings regarding west Hunan (Xiangxi 湘西), his homeland, to which he was strongly attached. Shen often used images of ideal country girls as the embodiment of his nativism, although he hardly depicted the inner sentiments of his country women. His descriptions of women almost always stayed superficial; in other words, they are highly fetishized. As a result of these two qualities, studies on Shen's view of women are often conflicting: Is Shen a feminist writer with a profound concern for women in lower classes, such as country prostitutes? Or, is Shen a sexist male writer who can barely describe independent female characters with their own inner worlds? How can Shen's intensely fetishized female characters be reassessed from a 21st-century perspective? This study approaches the relationship between Shen's images of women and his concepts of "city–homeland" from the viewpoint of fetishistic discourse. Shen's fetishistic view of women is seen in the detailed descriptions of female body's parts, such as the eyes, neck, bosom, legs, and feet. This work especially focuses on representations of women's hair. When Shen began writing on the modern city by describing "modern girls" in Beijing in 1925, he used two types of hairstyles as a representative of modernity: tangled loose hair and short hair. Initially, modern girls with loose or short hair in his novel were mere objects of the narrator's libidinal gaze, but through descriptions of individual gazes from female students who look straight back at the narrator, loose or short hair gradually began to imply women's awakening of sexuality. Meanwhile, when he began writing on west Hunan, one of the most important qualities of country women was that they were members of ethnic minorities (Miao); therefore, there were no specific hairstyles. These women wrapped their head with scarves, which clearly indicated their ethnic identities. Later, Shen began to bring in three types of new hairstyles into his description of country girls: thick plaits that call to mind the serpent mentioned in the Bible; tangled loose hair that implied a young lady's sexual awakening; and long and black tresses that resembled a spider's web, which can catch and hold her lover's neck in a magical manner. These hairstyles were separately brought in from a libidinal discourse on the modern urban life and an obsession with women's hair, which was common among Victorian painters. As Shen Congwen continues to be overestimated as a noble feminist who admired women, his specific tendency for machismo merits critical review from the perspective of feminism. In analyzing Shen's representations of women's hair, this work claims three new points of importance for Shen's fetishistic narrative. First, Shen's narrative of the modern city shows how young intellectuals in 20th-century China longed for love, strongly influenced by the discourse on love and sex that was novel at the time. Second, Shen created idealized country women through a rhetoric that was originally used to represent the city's modernity. Third, Shen's fetishistic narrative paradoxically opened new possibilities for depicting the inner sentiments of the "silent" subaltern.