The Pastoral Alienation: A Comparative Study of Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Bi Feiyu’s Yumi

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

¹ See, for example, Oakes, Timothy S., “Shen Congwen’s Literary Regionalism and the Gendered Landscape of Chinese Modernity.” Geografiska Annaler. Series B, Human Geography, vol. 77, no. 2, 1995, pp. 93–107; Yi, Jijuan [易季鹃], “Distant and Sad Pastoral – Comparison of Shen Congwen’s Xiangxi Novels and Hardy’s Wessex Novels” [“清远、哀婉的田园牧歌——沈从文湘西小说与哈代威塞克斯小说比较”], Wai Guo Wen Xue Yan Jiu (Wuhan Shi, China), no. 4, 1996, pp. 85–9;Wang, Ling [王琳], “Shen Congwen and Thomas Hardy” [“沈从文与托马斯·哈代”], Qiu Suo (Hunan Sheng She Hui Ke Xue Yuan), no. 12, 2004, pp. 208–9; and Wei, Qingqi, and Tinging Teng [韦清琦 and 滕婷婷], “Praising Nature and Women: A Comparative Study of the Ecocriticisms of Hardy and Shen Congwen” [“踏歌自然,咏叹女性 ——哈代与沈从文的生态批评比较研究”], Journal of Nanjing University of Science and Technology (Social Science Edition), vol. 34, no. 3, 2021, pp. 51–63.

² See Gu, Ming Dong, editor, Routledge Handbook of Modern Chinese Literature, 1^st ed., Routledge, 2018.

³ The Three Sisters series is set in China during the 1970s and 1980s and focuses on the lives of three sisters from a small village. The novella Yumi (2001) was published in 2001 and translated in 2010. It won the Chinese Novel Association Prize and the Third Lu Xun Literature Prize in 2002, People’s Literature Prize in 2007 and the Fourth Man Asian Literary Prize in 2011. See Gu, Ming Dong, Routledge Handbook of Modern Chinese Literature.

⁴ In her book, Jaeggi defines alienation as a type of deficient relation between oneself and the world. She terms alienation as “a relation of relationlessness.” The opposite of alienation is “a relation of appropriation.” To appropriate, briefly speaking, is to make oneself and the world at one’s own command. “The concept of appropriation refers to a way of establishing relations to oneself and to the world, a way of dealing with oneself and the world and of having oneself and the world at one’s command. Alienation, as a disturbance in this relation, concerns the way these acts of relating to self and world are carried out, that is, whether processes of appropriation fail or are impeded” (Jaeggi 36). This article sees the two heroines as losing command over themselves as they are subject to “alien” powers represented by males.

⁵ Meadowsong refers to Arnold Kettle and Irving Howe as two of the earliest critics holding such a view. See Meadowsong, 231–32.

⁶ This detail is revealed in Part Two of the Three Sisters series, Yuxiu, whose title character is one of the main victims of the villagers’ abuse.

⁷ More information about this can be seen in Part Two, Yuxiu.

Additional information

Funding

NTU Research Scholarship (Reg. No. 200604393R).