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Female Characters In Lu Xun's Literature

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Lu Xun’s literature was more of a medium for promoting social change rather than serving as a political vehicle or an aesthetic game. In addition to that, in his short stories, female characters play a very significant part. Women make up the second largest group of characters that can be seen in Lu Xun 's short stories and suggests that Lu Xun had a fondness for the underdogs like the poor and oppressed, the elderly and most especially women (Lyell). He embodies them with traits that his rich, powerful or male characters often lack, with kindness and humanity. Even though women are portrayed in a variety of roles in his Selected Stories, a common thread with them is their lower class status, the submissive voice that they play, the restriction …show more content…

“The True Story of Ah Q” is the last of Lu Xun 's stories that deal with social realities. The most comical of Lu Xun’s madmen is depicted in this story. The subject (Ah Q) is stripped of subjectivity to the extent that he the vices of every Chinese, which include egomania, self-deluding optimism, and a tendency to bully the weak and cower before the strong (Anderson). Although most of Lu Xun’s protagonists represent individual types or even national types, they are extremely vivid and concrete. Ah Q is an example. The author’s impressionistic eye captures, in blurred but emotionally accurate detail, a protean everyman in China at the beginning of the twentieth century (Fairbank & Twitchett). The character’s composite nature is manifested by the narrator’s inability to trace a family name for Ah Q. Ah Q’s spirit and psychology, however, not his appearance or rootlessness, make him a national type. Ah Q embodies the Chinese slave mentality. This diseased mentality produces a typically Chinese black humor that can turn any defeat into a self-deceiving, spiritually consoling, victory. This humor resorts to escapism for survival (Anderson). Lu Xun showed great sympathy for Ah Q 's unfortunate experiences, but expressed anger at his being so easily discouraged. Lu Xun hoped to awaken Chinese peasants ' awareness and desire for revolution through criticizing Ah Q 's

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