Tötösy de Zepetnek, Steven.

"Towards a Theoretical Framework for Analyses of Body Images of Women in Literature"

Abstract: In his presentation "Towards a Theoretical Framework for Analyses of Body Images of Women in Literature" Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek discusses a number of seminal texts which provide a theoretical framework for the study and analyses of body image(s) of women in literature. For example, Paul Schilder defined body image as "the picture of our own body which we form in our mind, that is to say, the way in which the body appears to ourselves." Image(s) indicate(s) that we are not dealing with a mere sensation or imagination: there are mental pictures and representations involved, but it is not mere representation. Sarah Grogan defined body image as "a person's perceptions, thoughts, and feelings about his or her body. This definition can be taken to include psychological concepts such as perception and attitudes toward the body, as well as experiences of embodiment. The concept of body image is used in several disciplines, including neuroscience, psychology, medicine, psychiatry, psychoanalysis, philosophy, cultural studies, feminist studies and the media also often use the term and concept. Definitions of body image extends to the conscious and unconscious, the external and internal, reality and fantasy, as well as cultural and social forces and factors which affect body image such as gender, social media, ethnicity, social class, etc. Perspectives of "body image(s)" include "beauty," "ugliness," relationships between men and women, age and ageing of women, the image of the body and eroticism of women, etc.

Keywords: Body Images; Women’s Literature; Literary and Culture Theory

The concept of “Revolution plus Love” (geming jia lianai) emerged in the late 1920s as a literary response to political upheaval, intertwining political commitment with personal desire. This formula became a site where power, gender, politics, and literature intersected, offering a feminist lens on modern Chinese revolutionary literature.

With the rise of feminist theory, scholars have scrutinized the gendered dimensions of China’s revolutionary history, exposing discursive fissures in the nation/state myth. David Der-wei Wang and Jianmei Liu employed the “Revolution plus Love” formula as a case study to examine the gender and literary politics of modern China.Through the metaphor of syphilis, they highlighted the disparities between leftist male writers and their female contemporaries.

Against the backdrop of wars, women are often incorporated into the discourse of nation, ethnicity, and revolution, becoming symbols and representations within revolutionary narratives. Their bodies often serve as both weapons and instruments of revolution. This paper compares four literary texts set in similar historical contexts—Bai Wei’s A Bomb and an Expeditionary Bird (Zhadan yu feiniao), Jiang Guangci’s The Moon Forces Its Way through the Clouds (Chongchu yunwei de yueliang), Ding Ling’s When I Was in Xia Village (Wo zai xiacun de shihou), and Eileen Chang’s Lust, Caution (Se, jie). By analyzing these works, this study explores how different writers reconfigure the RPL formula, revealing the multifaceted interplay of revolution, love, and the female body while examining female identity construction in wartime.

This study highlights the divergent rhetorical strategies of male and female writers. Male narratives tended to reduce the female body to an expendable instrument for national or revolutionary agendas, whereas female writers foregrounded suffering, desire, and resistance. By employing mimicry, parody, and displacement, female writers critiqued the patriarchal foundations of revolutionary discourse and tried to reclaim the female body as a site of both political and personal agency.

Ultimately, this study examines how reconfigurations of the RPL formula challenge traditional male narratives. By employing rhetorical strategies centered on the body and desire, modern female writers deconstructed and redefined chastity within a patriarchal framework, creating new spaces for female subjectivity and expression.

This paper explores the construction of female identity through the fetishism of the head and the theme of death in two late 19th-century plays, Hedda Gabler by Henrik Ibsen and Salomé by Oscar Wilde. By comparing the two works, the paper examines how the female protagonists engage in extreme behaviors related to their bodies in an attempt to assert meaning, subjectivity, and self-affirmation. In Salomé, the protagonist's obsession with Jokanaan's severed head and her desire to kiss this object of death demonstrate her fixation on mortality. In Hedda Gabler, Hedda's targeting of the heads of her former lover and current rival with a gun and flame symbolizes her struggle for control and self-destruction. These women construct their identities through actions closely tied to Memento Mori—the reminder of death—demonstrating an extreme aesthetic of self-destruction as a means of confirming their existence. In this way, death ceases to be merely an end; it becomes a symbol of existence and meaning. The intersection of head fetishism and the death motif reflects the complex emotional landscape of the fin-de-siècle, revealing how women, situated between the constraints of traditional and modern worlds, resist or respond to external pressures through self-destructive acts.

Rethinking the subject of the “moral disciplining” in Samuel Richardson’s Pamela; Or, Virtue Rewarded outside the traditional interpretations, this paper aims to uncover how the reversed disciplining game, which is manipulated and practiced by the male protagonist -Mr. B to the female protagonist – Pamela, the maid, is played through the strategy of “sensualizing morality”. It is right in the overwhelming narrating and presenting of Pamela and the nearly absence of expressing and commenting of Mr.B in this epistolary novel that we find a hidden leading of the morally dominated Mr.B . Beneath the text of Pamela’s disciplining of him in spiritual morality, there is a subtext of Mr.B’s disciplining of Pamela by sensualizing morality, which fabricates Pamela’s identity of being enlightened in unconscious through expanding and diversifying her “virtue” in four respects below: endowing the concept of chastity with “body” and “sensibility”; highlighting the double advantages of “sensualized morality” practically and esthetically over the religious morality; shaping the individual “enlightenment self” through secularization of Puritanical moral principles; providing multiple possibilities of constructing new form of “ virtue” with the game of sensual writing. As the result of this sensualizing disciplining, Mr.B successfully cultivates a “double life” in Pamela of “social moral identity” in sense and “private moral identity” in sensuality, which ensures the ever-lasting vitality and fascination of love and sex in their marriage. The new form of moral identity relies more on Richardson’s unique literary creativity than just the mirroring of realistic world, which distinguishes this novel by shedding a new light on the rich ambiguity and unpredictability of enlightenment discourses in the 18th century.

During the industrial age, Britain developed rapidly, and as machine production progressed, people gradually became alienated. When Lawrence wrote Lady Chatterley’s Lover, he observed the distortion of humanity caused by mechanization and technology, as well as the oppression and resistance stemming from class differences. Although the sexual encounters he depicted were explicit, they also showcased women’s control over their own bodies. In the 1980s, Hong Kong experienced a golden period of rapid economic growth and was hailed as one of the “Four Asian Tigers”. Men in Hong Kong held absolute power and status in the commodity market, while women were in an awkward position in such a social environment. Their youth, beauty, and alluring bodies became their bargaining chips. Author Yi Shu created the representative character Jiang Xibao based on this reality, showcasing the life struggles of some young and beautiful women of that time and reflecting on her thoughts. Connie is an upper-class woman seeking a lover in the works of a male author, while Xibao is a mistress chosen by the upper class in the writings of a female author. Under the dual emptiness of spirit and body, Connie engages in multiple encounters with the servant Mellors in a forest that symbolizes freedom. Throughout this process, Connie becomes increasingly dissatisfied with her husband’s control over her body, and while pursuing physical pleasure with Mellors, she gradually regains her sense of bodily autonomy and self. In Xi Bao, Jiang Xibao initially possesses control over her own body, but her desire for money leads her to exchange her body and youthful beauty for financial gain. In acquiring money, she loses her power of choice and becomes lost in herself. Both works have been adapted into films in modern times, where directors and actresses engage in the deconstruction and reconstruction of the original narratives. This paper will compare and analyze the physical descriptions of Connie and Xibao in the texts, reflecting women’s control and choices regarding their own bodies, as well as the similarities and differences in how male and female authors portray women in similar social contexts. This analysis holds significance for comparative literature and cross-cultural communication. Additionally, the paper will provide a focused interpretation of the cinematic adaptations of both works, aiming to explore the modern value of these two pieces more profoundly.

We are soaked and steeped, permeated and marinated, saturated and percolated with water. We know, need, and love water because it constitutes our very existence. Aware that we are always in danger of drying out and are thus constantly in need of moistening, we enjoy when water touches us—even as we are conscious that it can drown us. Water is an active thing with stories and histories to tell, yet it has no desire to tell them. What it offers it offers without goodness or depravity, generosity or stinginess, vision or blindness, love or hate. Indeed, our love affair with water is totally one-sided: we need it; it doesn’t need us. The touches we enjoy from it are not the touches of a lover—even as we experience these touches as intimate, sensuous, and stimulating. And the body is intimately wet; yet theorizing about the body has been sorely dry and has lacked contact with the Blue Humanities. This talk will argue that representations of corporeality hinge on socio-cultural understandings of water and our relationships with it. Expanding the Blue Humanities into theories about corporeality, my talk will focus on literary wet bodies and narratives of women's immersion (primarily in the work of Amitav Ghosh and Bong Joon-ho, with a few nods to Shakespeare) and will show how recognizing socio-political views about water determine how we see bodies.

Around the saying that “when we gather the mustard plant and earth melons, we do not reject them because of their roots” (采葑采菲，无以下体) in the song titled as “Gu Feng” from Book of Songs (Shi Jing), the traditional interpretation represented by The Spring and Autumn Annals (Zuo Zhuan) and Mao Shi annotated by Zheng Xuan in the Han Dynasty, mainly focuses on the ethical principle of “choosing good part” (取善节), which calls for men in marriage to pay more attention to female virtues, rather than the physiological aesthetics directly symbolized by the “roots” (下体). This article takes the annotations on “Cai Fei” (采菲) in Xian Qing Ou Ji (闲情偶寄) and Xiang Lian Pin Zao (香莲品藻) in the Qing Dynasty as the center, surveying in the last traditional period of Bound-foot Fetish, the “gathering earth melons” has changed from the single ethical metaphor to one popular core expression of literati, who liked to play between body obscenity and the Classical orthodoxy. In Cai Fei Lu (采菲录) by Yao Lingxi during the Republic of China era, this expression has then become the final projection of the contradiction between the “loss” of sexual desire expressed by men through nostalgic writing and the “unattainableness” of the times.