The Foreword and the Fates

In 1929, when the stories were collected in one volume, given the title The Wild Roses, and published in Shanghai, Mao Tun wrote a five-part foreword to explain the general outlook and purpose of the collection. To understand the five stories as a unit, we need to be aware that he selected them from a much larger body of fiction written at about the same period. Thus The Wild Roses is a deliberate and purposeful selection, with each of its parts playing a definite role, and the foreword is a stage-by-stage guide to an informed reading of the stories.

Mao Tun had developed his schematic overview while writing some of the later stories. His long years of struggle with the tormenting problem of the self vis-á-vis the revolutionary future had finally yielded a perspective on the revolutionary movement in China across historical and mythological time, and on his own position within it. To discuss these stories from the perspective of the foreword is not to dismiss all other interpretations. A different ordering of the issues is very possible, and readers are also free to relate the stories to ideas and concerns other than those the author raises. They would then mean very different things. But the purpose here is to begin with Mao Tun’s own view of these works, to see how his thought processes, influenced by his intense emotional and psychological struggle over the impasse of 1927–28, led him on many seemingly divergent but sometimes converging paths to a reasoned hope for the future.

The astute critic Ch’ien Hsing-ts’un noted that the “characters in The Wild Roses are all suffering torture in their emotional and psychological prisons,”¹³ and he took these characters to be metaphors for the decadence of the revolutionary movement. Combining this perception with an awareness of Mao Tun’s psychological/political realism presents problems that scarcely exist in “Autumn in Kuling” and the Eclipse trilogy. There the historical references are recognizable, while the stories in The Wild Roses are less historically definite. Written at a time of revolution, when revolutionary tactics were still a burning issue, the stories were doubtless relevant to what had happened and was still happening in China. Connections between historical events and the episodes and characterizations in the stories must be subtly made, however, because of the psychological distancing that is part of their fictional technique. “Suicide,” for example, could well be a fictional expression of Mao Tun’s personal disapproval of the futility and suicidal bent of the military adventurism that began in late 1927, with the Canton Commune as its prime example, became rampant in 1928, and was identified with the putschist “Li-Li-san Line” that continued into 1930. But direct historical parallels are hard to demonstrate in any of the Wild Roses stories, because they are concerned not so much with the “objective representation” of reality as with the exploration of the subjective “form of consciousness” which shaped that reality. Mao Tun himself said in the foreword:

Although Ch’ien, for polemical purposes, chose to concentrate on the political implications of Miss Huan’s suicide, as if the story’s main purpose were the portrayal of “decadence,” it behooves later readers to follow Mao Tun’s intent, implied in his foreword, to try to see the psychological permutations of his protagonists in terms of their moral significance.

The foreword, about 2,000 words, comprises five sections. Section 1 argues that catastrophe in life need not be final. Section 2 criticizes the kind of unrealistic, utopian optimism that disregards the practical problem of precisely how to advance into the desired future and interprets all that has happened as the result of “historical inevitability,” thereby denying the creative role that people play in shaping history. Sections 3 and 4 deal with specific aspects of the personalities of the characters in the stories and what they represent in terms of the metaphor of thorns and wild roses in section 5. In a sense, these character traits are also Mao Tun’s oblique answers to the central question of what one should or could do after the catastrophes of 1927-28. Section 5, which is very brief, describes the selection of the stories as the author’s contribution to weaving a crown of wild roses for the revolution, his task being to identify, locate, and pull out the thorns.

The chronology of the stories and the foreword covers more than a year’s time. The stories continue, as Mao Tun later pointed out, the same subject matter of revolution and the same technique of mixing allegory with realism that he used in Eclipse. But they are different in their conceptual objectivity and narrative distance, they have gone beyond Eclipse in treatment of the subject matter and in outlook. Mao Tun is no longer seeking to dramatize historical cause and effect and to define responsibility. The drama of the 1925-27 revolution is over. He is now trying to find bases for collective action in the immediate future. He is beginning to look for answers to the question of fate and revolutionary commitment in a new context.

Each of the stories focuses on a brief period of time in which the personal fate of the protagonist is decided. These stories were not written in tranquility; their narrative modes vary from tragic to comic, but the basic tone is disquietude and anguish. Mao Tun’s final vision of man in a time of revolution, as presented in the foreword, lends deeper meaning to the stories. He did not construct the scheme because, as a creative writer and as an individual, he wished to look at man in history that way. His vision has richer implications. For one thing, history is not a series of events following blindly and automatically the dictates of uncoordinated psychological forces. The richness and diversity of human experience in a fierce revolutionary struggle may appear colorful to a spectator. But Mao Tun was more than a spectator. He was a committed revolutionary; his own fate was closely tied to the outcome of the mortal combat then raging. He therefore had to be concerned with the goals of the battle; he had to measure the distance in particularized historical time—the present—and the ultimate collective goals in infinite mythological time—the future. Time and fate are intimately related in any mythical contemplation of human destiny. Hence in the first section of the foreword Mao Tun proposed time and fate as the unifying abstract themes of the story:

This passage is Mao Tun’s first recorded attempt to deal with the fundamental question of the ultimate destiny of the Chinese Revolution in time—namely, whether catastrophes are to be accepted as final. His attempt was cast in the form of a contrast between two concepts of fate as reflected in Greek and Nordic myths. The Greek myth, as Mao Tun presents it, judges fate to be final and irrevocable in time.¹⁵ Man is defeated by fate, often in a setting of catastrophe, and his life is inevitably cut off by Atropos. According to the Greek view of life, man could struggle valiantly against the inexorable working of his fate. He could even achieve a degree of understanding and humility which in death would endow his prolonged suffering with dignity and ennobling humanity. This, in fact, is essentially the same concept of fate that colors the tragic life and mythical poetry of Ch’ü Yüan. However, an affirmation of the Greek philosophy of life had little relevance for a revolutionary movement in the China of 1928. Greek tragedy might honor the humanity and humanistic values of the fallen individual, but the Chinese Revolution required much more than martyrdom and dignity for its collective success. It needed life. Life had to continue; life was the moral imperative in revolution. Mao Tun could not accept the Greek concept of fate nor the notion of irretrievable time and catastrophe.

The Nordic myth, in Mao Tun’s version, conceives fate not as controlling and comprehending time, but as three particularized outlooks on time, symbolized by three sister goddesses: Urd, reminiscing, the symbol of the past; Skuld, veiled, the symbol of the future; and Verdandi, staring directly ahead, the symbol of the present.¹⁶ Mao Tun found the philosophy of life implicit in this concept of fate more congenial to the question that was foremost in his mind. For one thing, finality is not an inherent part of its scheme of time. No Atropos is there to snip the measured-out thread of life. Man’s fate is defined not by catastrophe and death, but by the outlook he adopts on his own position relative to them in time. In such a perspective, fate has no control over the course of a man’s life—nor over revolutionary development, for that matter. Having happened, historical events, even catastrophes, have no effect upon infinite time which is the context of human destiny, unless an individual should by choice adopt the outlook of Urd and make the remainder of his life a series of reminiscences. Otherwise, the present and the future remain free and open to his choice. Mao Tun at that point was just beginning to see that what had been tormenting him ever since the writing of Eclipse was not only the question of continued individual commitment to the revolutionary cause, it was also the question of commitment in a collective sense to its continuation. The latter could lie only in the sphere of life; the only way to maintain this collective commitment, in the language of the Nordic myth, was to “keep a tight hold on the ‘present.’ ”

Having thus clarified the meaning of fate for a politically committed person as an individual and in the collective context of a living revolution, and having arrived in the process at a decisive stand on the question of time and catastrophe, Mao Tun proceeded in section 2 of the foreword to address himself to the next question, that of action and the revolutionary future. If catastrophe was not be be accepted as final, and if the collective life of the revolution was to continue, then what should be done? Should one merely rely on “historical inevitability” to shape the future? Less than a year before in “From Kuling to Tokyo,” Mao Tun had bitterly attacked those who on that assumption had led the revolution into a “dead end.”¹⁷ He had berated those who blindly advocated implicit faith in a bright revolutionary future as the certain way out of defeat. And his opinion had not changed. Now as before, Mao Tun saw nothing at all inevitable about a bright future for the revolution. The human failings that had brought the revolution to catastrophic dead ends in the past could be repeated and preclude any possibility of its following a road of success. Mao Tun did not hesitate to expose once again the fallacy inherent in such blind optimism:

To reestablish a hope—not a guarantee or an assurance—for a bright revolutionary future, Mao Tun was convinced that in the present, “Truly effective work is that which will lead people to see through ugliness and evil in reality and thereby recognize the great future for mankind on their own, the faith in that future being thus engendered.”¹⁹

The life of the revolutionary movement, as Mao Tun expressed it in the fifth section of his foreword, was like the wild rose; there were thorns and there were flowers:

Starry-eyed naiveté, impractical idealism, and miscalculation of the ugliness and evil in society, which are the dramatic themes of the stories—and which have the charm of the blossoms in the wild-rose crown of revolution—were actually deadly thorns.²¹ Hence

The task Mao Tun has set for The Wild Roses, then, is the identification and pulling out of the metaphorical thorns in life. Keeping this in mind, let us examine the themes, fictional devices, and see how the foreword helps to clarify key episodes.

“Suicide”

Ostensibly, the story of Miss Huan in “Suicide” (July 8, 1928) depicts her suicidal state of mind after an interrupted love affair. Miss Huan falls in love with a handsome young revolutionary and becomes pregnant by him. When he leaves for the revolution, she feels that she cannot face the world with an illegitimate pregnancy.

The story closely tracks Miss Huan’s emotions of love and fear. Half is devoted to her experience of love in a tenderly and sometimes passionately remembered past; the other half deals with her fear of discovery in the present. The two halves, interacting, create the psychological drama in Miss Huan’s otherwise uneventful life. In that drama Miss Huan is confronted with a real problem, her pregnancy.

Instinctively she first wants to keep “the fruit of her love.” At night she dreams fondly that to bring up the child will answer the “unuttered pleading of her absent lover and of all nature,” and will offer a hope of happiness and fulfillment. But when daylight comes, the social consequences of an illegitimate pregnancy appear overwhelming. The return of her beloved is uncertain; in the meantime, society will surely ostracize her and she will be denied happiness. Miss Huan feels that she would rather die than be a social outcast. As she tries to reason through the choices available to her, a drama of psychological transmutation unfolds in her consciousness:

At the moment when Miss Huan realizes her lack of long-term courage, the issue that requires decision suddenly changes its orientation from the moral to the expedient (or in the language of the foreword, this is the pivotal moment when the thorns are distinguished from the roses). She is no longer concerned about whether or not to preserve the pregnancy, but begins to seek some expedient way to avoid the immediately feared exposure. Unfortunately, no expedient is foolproof; it also involves risk and requires a courage of its own kind. When Miss Huan sees that she is not equipped even for a marriage of convenience, she has no recourse left but suicide. In despair, she turns with intense hatred upon the ideas that originally inspired her love: “Lies, lies—liberation, freedom, light—everything is a lie! It would have been better not to have any knowledge at all . . . I shall announce to the world the crimes of those fraudulent ideas of liberation, freedom, and light. I shall announce it with my death.”²⁴ Thus Miss Huan, an “educated” woman from a gentry family chooses the traditional solution of Chinese women since time immemorial.

As she puts the noose around her neck and feels it tighten, she becomes aware of other vague notions in her fading consciousness: “There ought to be a way out; if only one would boldly follow the tide of history and march on, if one could fall into step with this rapidly changing society. . .”

But it was too late for Miss Huan. “Her bulging eyes stared out as if they still wanted to comprehend what was needed for one to keep pace with this tumultuous and changing life, what that IT was.”²⁵

C. T. Hsia held that the stories of The Wild Roses were similar in tone to Eclipse, being studies of “the vacillation and exasperation of the younger generation as it grapples with ugly reality;” Miss Huan “has to kill herself” because as “an old-fashioned girl, she has not advanced intellectually far enough to defy social ostracism.”²⁶ More recently, John Berninghausen has interpreted “Suicide” as illustrative of Mao Tun’s own “ambivalent feelings about freedom of choice in love and marriage, just as he harbored conflicting feelings about revolution.”²⁷ Both views contrast with that of Ch’ien Hsing-ts’un, who with his usual sarcasm derided Mao Tun attempting to “induce people” to reflect on the sad state of life and the revolutionary movement by creating characters like Miss Huan:

The gibes at Mao Tun’s courageous and forward-looking Verdandi are transparent. Ch’ien Hsing-ts’un also ridiculed the futility of Mao Tun’s fictional method in advancing his sociopolitical goal:

Deliberate distortion and polemical animus about revolutionary strategy aside, Ch’ien Hsing-ts’un remains the most attentive, though the most acrimonious, critic of the revolutionary content of Mao Tun’s early fiction. His remarks here bear directly on Mao Tun’s purpose as stated in the foreword: concern with the theme of time, the exposure of the surrounding darkness, and the attempt to “induce people to reflect.” There is little doubt that Ch’ien understood precisely what Mao Tun was trying to accomplish with his stories. Like his criticism of Eclipse, his disagreement now was about the representativeness of Mao Tun’s fictional characters in what Ch’ien preferred to think of as a continually heroic and successful revolution. Impatient with and contemptuous of such creative matters as the artistic distance between an author and his works, Ch’ien boldly assumed in his argument that an author’s perception of reality, his fictional representation of it, and the degree to which he relates to that reality in his own life are identical.

“Suicide,” in fact, can be interpreted on many levels. The most obvious, of course, is to consider it simply a realistic depiction of the social situation in the China of 1928. A would-be modern woman, inspired by progressive ideas of liberty, freedom, and light, acts accordingly and becomes pregnant without marrying; as a consequence, she is driven to suicide by the pressure of the society she lives in.³⁰ On this level one can readily agree with Berninghausen that her situation illustrates Mao Tun’s own ambivalent feelings about Western-style liberation for women.³¹ To take this position, however, is to accept on faith Miss Huan’s personal perception of her situation or even to equate that perception with the author’s. Miss Huan is fearful that she will be ostracized; she alternatively believes and doubts her lover; dying, she becomes vaguely conscious of a possible way out. But the story itself does not show in any tangible way that she will be ostracized; or that her aunt and cousins are capable of turning her out if they learn of her pregnancy.³² Nor does the story show, not even in terms of a fantasy or a dream, any concrete form that the “way out” for Miss Huan could have assumed in life. All these exist only in her psychological world. It is therefore clear that what leads Miss Huan to take her own life is the subjective reality of this psychological world, not any actual ostracism or betrayal of pledged love in her objective situation.

On another level, “Suicide” can also be considered allegorically, as Mao Tun emphasizes in the foreword. Love between man and woman is a convention he uses in these stories to reveal the “form of consciousness” of the class to which each of the protagonists belongs.³³ This level too is relatively easy to get at, because we can see that class background is explicitly and objectively described in the stories, although we cannot say that it plays an equally important role in all five. One can probably understand Ch’iung-hua’s tragedy in “A Woman”—the story we shall examine next—as the inevitable consequence of her failure to realize that she has lost not only her family fortune but also her class standing. In “Suicide” class standing and class consciousness are not relevant to the working of Miss Huan’s fate. We cannot say that, had Miss Huan belonged to a different class and had a different “form of consciousness,” her fate would have been different. If Mao Tun had intended to show that, he would have written a different story. In fact, he did so in part in “Creation” and “Poetry and Prose” in The Wild Roses, and more poignantly so later in his historical tales which we shall examine in the next chapter.

Then there is the level of social realism and political allegory. Following his statement on class consciousness, Mao Tun says, “A just reader will probably feel that behind the depiction of love there are a number of weighty problems.”³⁴ This is a very ambiguous statement. It can mean that Mao Tun is still talking about individuals and society, saying that something is wrong not only with the individual’s perception of society but with society itself. (For example, in a more just society Miss Huan probably would not be driven to suicide.) But when it comes to the level of political allegory, to seeing the “weighty problems” not as social in nature but as references to current political events, the links between the stories and historical events in the larger world are not apparent. It would be hard to show, for example, that Miss Huan’s pregnancy is not merely the consequence of love between a man and a woman or a dramatic setting for the exposure of evil social forces and personal weakness, but instead an allegorical representation of the political union between the KMT and the CCP during the united-front period. It would be equally hard to show that Ch’iung-hua’s loss of her fortune in “A Woman” is not merely a realistic description of the loss of personal and social capital in a materialistic society, but instead an allegorical representation of the CCP’s loss of its political and military capital after the searing defeats of 1927.

It is on this level of political allegory, however, that Ch’ien Hsing-ts’un’s remarks have the most meaning. Whereas it is difficult to ascertain exactly which political situation Miss Huan’s dilemma symbolizes (the united-front policy and military adventurism come to mind because of their similar “suicidal” outcomes), it is clear that Mao Tun was not supporting or affirming the inevitability of her choice, nor depicting her as a veritable image of contemporary political reality in the way Ch’ien’s remarks imply. On the contrary, what Mao Tun has done is remind us that Miss Huan’s choice could have been avoided by showing how her subjective consciousness, influenced by her psychological fear and doubt, selects and chooses from many possible factors to make that particular form of reality inevitable. Ch’ien may be correct in saying that Miss Huan is not an authentic image of the revolutionary spirit, but there is no denying that she is a realistic product of the authentic revolutionary struggle. Ch’ien’s ridicule of Mao Tun draws a good part of its vehemence from a rather doctrinaire argument, popular among the radical left in the late 1920s, that it is impossible for the authentic revolutionary spirit to yield unrevolutionary results.

Mao Tun’s foreword leaves no doubt that his purposes in writing the stories was not limited to realistic characterization. The portrayal of Miss Huan and her fate in “Suicide” was meant to be much more than a critical denunciation of a fallen individual in the revolutionary movement. In section 3 of the “Foreword” he said:

In the collective context of a continuing revolutionary course, the question for Mao Tun was not just to recognize Miss Huan’s tragic fate and what it symbolizes for the revolutionary cause, but also to see through or past the “ugliness and evil” that influence her consciousness—the possibility of other alternatives in her objective world, so that recurrence of her mistake can be avoided, life for the revolution can continue, and “faith in the future can be thus engendered.” Spite, revenge, and denunciation of wrongs done (of which, by the way, not only Miss Huan’s dying curse but Ch’ien’s remarks are examples) are understandable reactions to critical injuries. As we shall see in the next story, they are also deadly thorns in the continuous life of the collective revolution when they become bases of action by the subjective consciousness of protagonists with little understanding of their relative position in historical time.

“A Woman”

“A Woman” is the story of a completely “politicized” life that ends in grief. Yang Ch’iung-hua is a young girl from a wealthy family who has many suitors. None, however, has been able to win her heart. In flirting with the crowd of young men around her, Ch’iung-hua has acquired consummate skill in the game of love-politics. Then one day a fire destroys her home. Ch’iung-hua’s pretty face is scarred, her father dies in the accident, her mother falls ill, and her family fortunes decline. Suitors cease to visit her. At first, Ch’iung-hua is scornful of their snub; she strives to make her presence felt in her old social circle, but her reception changes from admiration to indifference. Ch’iung-hua is hurt and she is spiteful. She plans a social comeback on her next birthday and intends it to be her revenge on society. But her plan fails; few of her acquaintances appear at the party. Ch’iung-hua is mortified by the callous indifference of her former admirers. She falls ill immediately afterward and becomes delirious with fever. During her illness she yearns for someone to love her, to comfort her and sustain her through the remainder of a joyless life. Since there is no one in sight she remembers Chang Yen-ying, a former schoolmate. Chang Yen-ying was born after his father’s death. Because of this social disability and because of his closeness to Ch’iung-hua in school, he had formerly been chased away by her other suitors.

Now Ch’iung-hua, in sickness and desolation, seizes upon Chang’s parting words—“I shall not return until I have made something of I have made something of myself”—and fantasizes that they were his pledge of love to her, that he was destined to be hers. Her obsession with Chang’s return becomes a consuming passion that further damages her health. When Ch’iung-hua is near death, she hears her mother call, “Dear Ch’iung-hua, Mr. Chang has come to see you, Mr. Chang Yen-ying.” Straining to see, she makes out a dimly visible face and recognizes her long-awaited lover. A smile appears on her lips, and she dies in her mother’s arms.

The theme and moral of “A Woman” emerge in bolder relief when seen alongside comparable elements in “Suicide.” Written one after the other within six weeks of Mao Tun’s arrival in Japan, both stories employ a crisis in their protagonists’ lives as the dramatic setting for the theme of fate and time. Both protagonists’ crises and responses are in a context of love. Both protagonists search the past for deliverance from their present plight. In the end, both fail, and the finality of their failure is dramatized by death. In light of these parallels, one can say with reasonable confidence that the fate of the two women conveys the similar thematic message: To rely on the past for a remedy for present trouble is not only useless but fatal.

On the other hand, there are certain differences between the two characters which address different issues and say very different things about the meaning of their similar fates. There is a fundamental difference, for example, between the “form of consciousness” behind Miss Huan’s outlook on love and that behind Yang Ch’iung-hua’s. There is also a fundamental difference between Miss Huan’s subjective perception of her world and Ch’iung-hua’s practical understanding of hers.³⁶ Mao Tun probably hoped that his readers, particularly those who were not bystanders in the revolution, would reflect and guard against such failings in themselves and in their collective struggle.

In this perspective, Miss Huan and Ch’iung-hua emerges as two very different kinds of person. Miss Huan is revealed as not a victim of society, but rather an example of a moral failure. Miss Huan does have a real alternative; she could honor her commitment to love and bear the sufferings entailed. She declines to do so on the ground that she lacks the necessary long-term courage, yet Mao Tun shows that the real reason is that she is unwilling to sacrifice her personal happiness in life. Her failing, then, is not exclusively social, it is moral as well. She consciously betrays her emotional and moral commitments to her lover and their unborn child, and then, in a panic of self-justification, the very ideals that originally inspired those commitments.

Miss Huan’s betrayal is complete. Its enormity is emphasized by the graphically gruesome details of her hanging. Mao Tun will not let his readers forget that her choice is avoidable. In reiterating in her dying consciousness the notion of following the tide of history, his condemnation peeks through the bulging eyes of Miss Huan’s macabre death mask.

Ch’iung-hua, in contrast, has never placed her faith in love or abstract ideas—not because she is incapable of love or of abstract thought, but because there is no one she can entrust such notions to.³⁷ After her suitors chase away Chang Yen-ying, she is troubled. She detests their banality, but

Her friend Miss Chang tells her that man corrupts woman, which causes Ch’iung-hua to fear that one day she too will be corrupted by a man. So when her suitors slander one another to her, she loses all her trust in men.

One after the other the young men of her world are shown as faithless characters; their main occupation, in Ch’iung-hua’s company, is mutual slander and backbiting. But unlike Miss Huan, Ch’iung-hua has no fear of such a world. She knows her game well; she understands and knows how to manipulate the forces in her social surroundings. The “form of consciousness” (the yi-shih-hsing-t’ai referred to in the foreword) behind her outlook on love and society never involves any question of commitment. Mao Tun takes great care at the outset to demonstrate Ch’iung-hua’s total grasp of social reality. In episode after episode we are shown how Ch’iung-hua, in her dealings with various friends, develops in her teens a consummate skill in the politics of love to replace what was once a naive belief in Rousseauian spontaneity. By emulating the ways of her world, she learns to be insincere in human relations and becomes a master at dissembling.

Then the fire changes everything. Ch’iung-hua, scarred and deprived of her fortune, is suddenly shown to be no better equipped than Miss Huan to cope with change and disaster. But her subsequent failure is not a moral one. Fire is impersonal and makes no commitment of any kind in the human world. Mao Tun, by a novelistic trick, has deftly transferred the immediate cause of Ch’iung-hua’s crisis from the social to the natural world, so that moral considerations no longer define the meaning of her fate. After the fire, Ch’iung-hua struggles valiantly with all her skills to maintain her social standing; but the fire has destroyed the material foundation of their effectiveness. By the time Ch’iung-hua realizes she can no longer cope, she, like Miss Huan, has retreated into the past and is vainly attempting to find succor there for the future. Mao Tun, as the contemporary critic Tsu Hsiu-hsia noted,⁴¹ was not writing a romance in “A Woman.” The final scene is not a poetic “happy ending;” it is executed with deliberate irony to expose the futility of nostalgic yearning, even when the object of yearning is a worthy life goal. Like Ch’ien Hsing-ts’un, Tsu ably captures half of the ultimate meaning of the story; his point bears cogently on the tragic fate of the protagonist as an individual in the present, but does not reach beyond to ask the question of what is to be done next.

Mao Tun admittedly was no romantic, but neither was he a cynic. In “Suicide” and “A Woman,” his critical exploration never once raises questions about the intrinsic truth and value of man’s hope for love, or the ideas of liberation, freedom, and light that are the timeless collective goals of the revolution. What Mao Tun does question is, given the reality of the two protagonists’ worlds, how can they uphold those ideals, and what failings eventually undermine the vitality of those ideals? Miss Huan supposedly believes in love, but she betrays her faith and lets fear guide her actions instead. Ch’iung-hua believes in political strategies and in herself, but she arrogantly miscalculates the damage done by changed circumstances and is so reduced, through a series of subsequent innocent misdeeds, to futile romantic yearning. By stressing at once the differences in the two women’s failings and the similarity of their ends, Mao Tun is subsuming all denunciation of guilty individuals into an effort to show how to avoid such surrenders in the future and at the same time to suggest grounds for continued hope in the future of the revolutionary cause. He is considerably less hard on the defects in Ch’iung-hua’s character. She is not saved from the practical consequences of her artful arrogance and egotistical miscalculation, but she does not die a totally graceless death. The return of Chang Yen-ying and the continual presence of her loving mother stand as proof of the author’s less severe judgment of Ch’iung-hua’s social blunder.⁴² This gesture of grace and redemption in the image of a loving mother we have already seen in the case of Miss Ching in Disillusionment, and in the following story, “Haze,” we shall find another example of it when the heroine, prompted by the memory of her mother, makes a last-minute decision to save herself.

“Haze”

“Haze” is another story about a girl driven by circumstances to drastic action; but the action this time takes a different turn. Miss Chang, a former student activist, is under pressure from her father to marry an army commander but she is in love with an old schoolmate, Ho Jo-hua. One day she discovers that Ho Jo-hua has been seeing Lan, a girl friend of hers, and that the two have grown quite close. Betrayed, angry, and frustrated, she wants revenge—like Ch’iung-hua after the fire. She is rebellious, she wants to act. Meanwhile, paternal pressure mounts. A number of possible courses of action pass through her mind:

Miss Chang begins to see that she does not have the resources to do much. There are too many problems, and she cannot decide. But gradually her thoughts drift toward her native province and her mother. She can run away to Canton. This is a new idea. “Where there is still a haven, go to it for the time being.” Canton may not be the promised land, but at least she can find temporary shelter there.

Miss Chang’s escape from her oppressive surroundings is not merely a symbolic gesture. In the overall environment of The Wild Roses, the break is dramatic as well as psychological and spiritual. It signals the arising of new forces that can transform her personality, new strength in her beliefs, and a new future for her life. After the break, she need not fear the tragic fate of a Miss Huan or a Ch’iung-hua.

Mao Tun groups Miss Chang with Miss Huan in his foreword and describes both their characters as “weak,”—the cause of their “unfortunate” fate. Of Miss Chang, he said in particular that she “wanted to transcend her environment, but her bureaucratic family background conditioned her habits. So finally she thinks, ‘Where there is still a haven, go to it for the time being.’ This is an undeniable fact.”

Mao Tun here might, “off the page,” be using her decision to go to “Canton” to disguise a deserter’s psychology. He obviously did not want the overzealous readers to take as a heroic gesture a decision that was dangerously close to what had touched off the CCP adventurism of 1927-28. He may well have feared that such incidents might recur—and this fear was strong enough to make him group Miss Chang with Miss Huan as the same character type. But readers of a later time will surely sense that the recurrence of such episodes of bloodletting as the Canton Commune is only one possibility, it is equally possible that Miss Chang, once she has cut her ties to the past, will become a free woman like Hsien-hsien or Madame Kuei in Canton. The story itself is rather less ambiguous than the author’s remarks about it. It is the only time in The Wild Roses when I see possibilities in a story that contradict, or at least intuit far beyond the author’s guideposts. Miss Chang does in fact reflect on the possibility of revenge (like Ch’iung-hua) and on the possibility of suicide (like Huan), but she acts on neither. Toward the end her thoughts are leading toward a more positive goal. And what finally triggers her decision is the thought of her mother. Since the story does not follow Miss Chang to Canton to test her revolutionary urge in a concrete situation, we can probably read Mao Tun’s remarks in the foreword as primarily a warning to those who share her dilemma that they must be careful not to entrap themselves in the tragic fate of a Miss Huan.

The story itself offers good reason for us to believe that in Canton, the cradle of revolution,⁴⁴ that Miss Chang will emerge a new woman, a woman like Hsien-hsien in “Creation” and Madame Kuei in “Poetry and Prose”—who have no dark past, who bear no wounds, who have no reverence for chastity, and who revel in the liberalizing absence of the old pieties. They are the future, and they are a challenge for men like Chün-shih in “Creation,” whose behavior lags far behind his ideas, and like Ping in “Poetry and Prose,” who stands bewildered between the seductive allures of two opposed worlds.

“Creation”

“Creation” was written in February 1928, before Mao Tun went to Japan. Chronologically it does not belong to the same period as the other four stories in the collection. Evidently Mao Tun included it to rework a strand of thought which he had earlier cherished as innocent exaltation over a bright revolutionary future, and then discarded because of what happened in Pursuit, and now, after much agony and reflection, tentatively picks up again as a fictional study of a reasoned alternative to “Suicide.” The motivations behind its writing and its inclusion in The Wild Roses are certainly different.

Hsien-hsien in “Creation” is recreated by her husband Chün-shih in accordance with his ideal of modern enlightened womanhood. Chün-shih is the courtesy-name of Ssu-ma Kuang (1018-1086), the author of Tzu-chih t’ung-chien (Comprehensive Mirror for Aid in Government), a monumental history of traditional China from 403 B.C. to A.D. 959. In using the name here Mao Tun intends a symbolic association between the two men’s creative masterpieces and their political functions. In light of the long account of the fictional Chün-shih’s own intellectual and political history in the first half of “Creation,” we understand his creation—Hsien-hsien—as a symbol of the general history of modern China from the late nineteenth century to the birth of the Chinese Communist movement.⁴⁵

So Chün-shih recreates Hsien-hsien according to his ideal. But once the ideal comes to life, the Pygmalion Chün-shih has trouble dealing with its flesh-and-blood reality. The new Hsien-hsien is too sensual, too vivacious, too pleasure-seeking, too unpredictable, and too scornful of the established ways of wifely behavior. Chün-shih, in his zeal to create an ideal woman for a new historical era, had given absolutely no thought to what she might actually do once given life. He certainly did not foresee that once she took life, his Galatea would no longer be his ideal but would have an independent existence of her own, and obey only the principles behind her “creation.” Chün-shih is totally unprepared to lose his wife—and all that “wife” means in traditional terms.

The comedy ends with Chün-shih realizing that he has not only created a new woman, he has also created a gap the size of an entire historical era for himself as a man. If he is to live into that new era with Hsien-hsien, he must recreate himself as well.

“Poetry and Prose”

Madame Kuei in “Poetry and Prose” is another image of the new woman, born of the same ideas as Hsien-hsien, but further developed and more sophisticated. She is impudent, earthy, sensual to the extent of having no inhibitions. She is more experienced with men, and so is more aggressive in her challenge to their manhood. Like “Creation,” the story is told with a comic tone.

Madame Kuei seduces the young man Ping openly and fearlessly. Ping feels that her lovemaking is “unpoetic,” titillating his senses excessively and his spirit insufficiently. Nonetheless, he is irresistibly attracted to Madame Kuei; she is to him “the dance of life, the dance of the soul.”⁴⁶

Ping has another attachment, however, and mis is to his sheltered young cousin. Madame Kuei confronts him with it and he protests that he is not the only one who has changed. “But, Kuei, you have to see that you yourself have changed recently, drastically changed. You have grown too sexy, too practical, and too vulgar by the day. You have entered this ordinary, unattractive, prosaic era too quickly.”⁴⁷

Madame Kuei couldn’t care less about his criticism:

Ping tries to defend himself with more talk, but there are no more answers. True to what she says, Kuei follows her words with whirlwind action, pushing young Ping to the floor and making love to him. Ping is completely overcome. “Darkness gradually spreads to the four corners of the room. The tall looking glass stands clear and bright, mirroring Kuei’s flushed cheeks, radiant with victorious light, and also mirroring Ping, panting, slightly pale around the mouth.”⁴⁸

As Ping takes his pleasure with Madame Kuei, he cannot help feeling pangs of guilt about his cousin, who, pure and demure as the white rose she once gave him, is very dependent on him. Ping wants to go on enjoying his “dance of the soul” with Madame Kuei and at the same time keep the remembered experience of his “soul’s tremor” with his cousin. But as one might expect in such a situation, before long Ping’s failure to commit himself to either of the women loses him the company of both. His cousin goes to Peking with her father, and all he gets from Madame Kuei afterward is a sarcastic remark, “When are you going to Peking, Master Ping?” She, too, is leaving him.

The Necessary Comic Vision of a Revolutionary

Ch’ien Hsing-ts’un thought that in The Wild Roses there was a shift in the sex of the protagonists, from Miss Huan in “Suicide” and Ch’iung-hua in “A Woman” to Chün-shih in “Creation” and the young man Ping in “Poetry and Prose.”⁴⁹ Mao Tun did shift his dramatic portrayal of human failings from the female to the male characters in the stories; but the shift was not, as Ch’ien Hsien-ts’un suggests, meant to underline the universality of human failings irrespective of sex. Mao Tun made a corresponding shift in narrative mode from the tragic to the comic, and both shifts highlight a change in the subject matter as well—from man’s tragic fall out of the world of values and ideals into comic attempts to seek reintegration with it.⁵⁰ The New Woman has replaced an oppressive society as the symbol of what men are up against in their struggle for self realization and the realization of their ideals. In a deep sense, she is the alternative to Miss Huan’s and Ch’iung-hua’s choices, which in their stories is symbolized in the inverse image of the absent male lovers. Dramatically and thematically the New Woman represents the positive outlook on reality in the world of The Wild Roses. Men, with all their failings, are beginning to look away from the past and to experience, through their Skuld-like, veiled understanding of what lies ahead, a direct and yet enigmatic physical contact with seductive and emotionally frightening new modes of existence, personified by the New Woman.

Mao Tun had quite a different view of who the true protagonists are in these five stories. In the foreword he made a firm distinction between the “perceiver” and the protagonist:

The aversion to heroics which made Mao Tun say that there is no “protagonist” in Vacillation is here given a more positive orientation: an affirmation of the ordinary. According to the foreword, all the protagonists have taken their lessons in “reality” from “the school of the human condition.”⁵² With what they have absorbed into their consciousness about reality in that school, they eventually shape their own destinies. The “school” itself, as portrayed in The Wild Roses, is certainly not a supportive environment in which to learn about “reality” in safety and with pleasure. The educational methods of that school are fear (“Suicide”), impersonal natural calamity and personal callousness (“A Woman”), and paternal authority trying to enforce a loveless marriage (“Haze”). Counteracting those methods, on the other hand, are man’s timeless desire for physical love and freedom from fear (“Poetry and Prose”) and for a life that is intellectually satisfying and spiritually fulfilling (“Creation”).

Time in the “school” is infinite, though man’s choices are not. The presence of infinite time alongside man’s outlook on fate in a particularized period of time appears in all five of the stories in The Wild Roses. Hsien-hsien, for example, representing the future-in-the present, has tears of memory behind her laughter of enlightment, and her heart can ache at the half-forgotten bygone days that Chün-shih tirelessly recalls with mixed feelings of pride, regret, shock, and discontent. And Madame Kuei, despite her nearly complete physical enthrallment of Ping in the present, cannot entirely free his consciousness from his remembered time with his girl cousin. Similarly, and in an inverse time perspective, both Miss Huan and Ch’iung-hua, victims of the past, retain a “romantic” yearning for a love that, despite its feeble dramatic presence, is the future envisioned in a long present-in-the-past.

The lessons in “reality” that each of the protagonists learns and the manner in which the lessons are learned vary. But from the reader’s point of view, no matter how we look at them—whether dramatically as true-to-life characters in the stories, or thematically and abstractly as symbols of fate and time in the context of Mao Tun’s explanation—their collective meaning is the same; that is, to continue one’s struggle in the manner of Miss Huan and Ch’iung-hua is too grim a fate to endure. Short of resignation to death or perseverance to the bitter end, one simply has to look into other domains for more promising comrades to carry on the struggle. If Hsien-hsien and Madame Kuei have never existed in history before, they must be created to combat the darkness and death that would otherwise prevail. But once they have been given life, the continuation of the battle will require a successful coordination between man’s reflective understanding of his past failings and a more imaginative understanding of the bold, spirited forms of action demanded by the new forces in history. Mao Tun believed that once the impact of new revolutionary forces was felt, it would be impossible for modern man to turn back to his wandering “on the road of the golden mean.”⁵³ Madame Kuei, having broken the fetters of traditional modes of womanly behavior, would necessarily disdain “chastity.” Madame Kuei, like Hsien-hsien, is a “resolute and persevering woman” who loves life passionately and who, “when the circumstances change, is capable of carrying on the revolution,”⁵⁴ for she has shattered the boundaries of the present.

The Wild Roses, written during a critical period in Mao Tun’s life, bears immediate witness to the thought processes that underlay Mao Tun’s reflections about the revolutionary reality of China after 1927, and to the psychological forces behind the sentiments he expressed in his lyrical prose essays of the same period. The stories are also testimony of the spiritual journey the author had to take before he was able to emerge from anguish and despair and continue on the road of “flesh-and-blood struggle” leading back home. Chronologically the five stories show alternation between dark moments of resentment and despair and moments of desperate, agonizing, yet unremitting quests for love and courage.⁵⁵ “Haze,” chronologically the last of the five, shows an exceptional mode of action that sets it apart from the other four stories. In spite of Mao Tun’s reservations about the real strength of Miss Chang’s character, her final decision to return to the early base of the revolution, captures a parallel moment in Mao Tun’s own thought and action. His lingering doubts about the “golden mean” in an age of “flesh-and-blood” révolutionary struggle were finally dispelled, and he resolved to return home.

In addition to his carefully selected Wild Roses stories, Mao Tun’s literary record of his stay in Japan includes the short stories “Color blindness,” “Muddiness,” and “The Top,” all dealing with the same subject matter, and in the same style, as the stories in The Wild Roses.⁵⁶ The personal essays written in Japan express another aspect of the author’s state of mind. It was not exactly bitterness and despondency, but rather a kind of drifting uncertainty in a sunless land, the spiritual prostration of a man who was emotionally spent. “Fog,” for instance, depicts a mood that is neither sunny nor rainy but oppressively grey, as if nature too had spent its vitality.⁵⁷ The redness of “Maple Leaves” in the mountains remains brilliant and attractive, but it stirs no emotional reaction or association of any kind. The writer is a detached spectator in a foreign land, an “outcast” from his motherland.⁵⁸ The psychology behind “Knocking” is even more ambiguous, indeterminate between fearful hope and fearful disappointment, uncertain whether to advance or retreat.⁵⁹ When we compare these brief impressions of fleeting sunless moments with Mao Tun’s earlier sketch, “The Afternoon of May Thirtieth,” or with slightly later pieces such as “Autumn in the Public Park,” “Odes to the Machine,” and “In the Public Park,”⁶⁰ we are aware of the emotional coloring that can come only from a man with a well-defined communal identity. Mao Tun’s Japan essays read like faint echoes of the distant signs and longings of a poet-intellectual’s wanderings in classical Chinese poetry—sighs and longings that will not subside until the dislocated consciousness has reached its hoped-for destination.

Mao Tun returned to Shanghai in the spring of 1930, his elegiac mood dispelled. Although physical illness and severe nervous tension continued to plague him, he set out almost immediately to write longer, stronger, less fragmentary work than the essays and short stories. He was still Mao Tun, the man and writer of contradictions, but henceforth, he would deal with them on his home ground. With the three historical tales, published in 1930, Mao Tun began a new phase of his creative career.