Fragmented sisterhood in the Nanking Massacre: The Flowers of War

ABSTRACT

Women experience abuse both physically and psychologically in a war, and, marginalized women’s voices are rarely heard. Yan Geling’s The Flowers of War 金 陵十三 钗 [Jinling shisan chai] is based on a true story of vulnerable parochial schoolgirls whose lives intersect in a Catholic cathedral with the lives of a local cadre of prostitutes. The two groups became trapped in the cathedral during the sudden and brutal occupation during the 1938 Nanking Massacre. This paper analyses the fate of two disparate women’s groups by showing how cultural, religious, and social chastity norms were used as a weapon of abuse and oppression by the chaste group against the prostitutes. This oppression in turn caused the fragmentation of the female identity of both groups of isolated women and led to tragic results. Using the fragmentation theory as a framework, this paper investigates how oppressive tactics caused women who otherwise should have been mutually supportive in their common need for survival, to oppose and oppress each other, fragmenting individually and as a group.

KEYWORDS:

• Fragmentation
• sisterhood
• chastity
• the Nanking Massacre
• oppression

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Kohut, H. (1977). The restoration of the self; Scott, S. (1999). Fragmented selves in late modernity: making sociological sense of multiple personalities. The Sociological Review, 47(3), 432–460; Tissier-Desbordes, E., & Visconti, L. M. (2019). Gender after gender: fragmentation, intersectionality, and stereotyping.

2. Comfort women慰安妇, are the civilian women who were forced to provide sexual services to the Japanese army during the Pacific War in World War II. Yoshimi, Y. (2000). Comfort women: Sexual slavery in the Japanese military during World War II. Columbia University Press.

3. Wilhelmina “Minnie” Vautrin, (1886–1941), was born in Secor, Illinois, USA, a missionary of the American Church of Christ in China, and a witness to the Nanking Massacre. When the Japanese army captured Nanjing in 1937, Minnie Vautrin served as the acting president of the Jinling College, and she protected tens of thousands of Chinese women and children in Jinling Collge. Vautrin was widely praised by the Chinese people for protecting the Chinese people during the Nanking Massacre, and she was awarded the Medal of Jade Picking by the National Government in 1938.

4. Ban Zhao 班昭 (49–120), is a writer and historian of the Eastern Han Dynasty. She is the daughter of Historian Ban Biao and the sister of Ban Gu and Ban Chao. She is the first female historian in China.