Nora and Other Roamers: A Dialogue between Lu Xun (1881-1936) and Eileen Chang (1920-95)

This essay stages a dialogue between Lu Xun and Eileen Chang on the figure of Nora, a global icon of the burgeoning New Woman from Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. Although often thought of as belonging to diametrically opposing camps – Lu Xun political and Chang apolitical, Lu Xun a sharp critic of women’s oppression and Chang a self-conscious performer of femininity in writing style and personal styling – I argue that their concerns converge more often than one would expect, in their trenchant social critique as well as in the ways their celebrated realism unfolds into allegories of modern Chinese history. At the same time, the points of their divergence also provide us a window onto the gendered positioning of each writer and their different responses to the formation of modern subjectivity. On whether Nora should leave and where she is going, the different answers given by Lu Xun and Eileen Chang illuminate the conditions, limitations and pitfalls of this gendered subject, whose ambulatory-ness serves as a foundational metaphor of her modernity and self-determination.