Chapter 84 Section 2 The space of women's self-world: "Women's Poems"

Zhai Yongming completed her first large group of poems[2] in 1984, and the 20 lyric poems included shocked the literary world with their unique and weird language style and shocking female stance.This is a relatively early and mature feminist literary work in the history of contemporary Chinese literature. The ideology of its female position is more clearly expressed in the preface "Consciousness of the Night" written by Zhai Yongming for the series of poems: "As a Half of human beings, women face a completely different world from birth, and her first glimpse of this world must bring her own emotions and intuition... Does she try her best to project her life to create a night? And in the crisis Transforming the world into one giant soul? In fact, every woman faces her own abyss of selfish pains and experiences that are constantly disappearing and acknowledging... This is the first night, which rises to lead us into a new , a world that only belongs to women with a special layout and perspective. This is not a process of salvation, but a process of enlightenment.” [3] The entire group of poems has a grand vision that covers all women’s living experience, with a large number of dense lyric and The description seems to want to exhaust all the emotions, situations, consciousness and narration of women; but more importantly, what is written in the poem is completely from the poet's personal perspective. What Zhai Yongming reveals is A hidden space that is different from the norm, that is, the individual female self-world.This is what the name "Dark Night" refers to.Almost without exception, all 20 poems in the series have images of night, such as: "I created the night to save mankind from disaster"; such as "Monologue": "Longing for a winter, a huge night"; for example: "I want to tell you that no one is going to stop the night / The darkness has entered this edge"; For example: "Your eyes have become a trap, full of night"; For example, "The End": "A little consonance makes me focus on the direction of the night ", and one of the inscriptions of the frontispiece is the two lines of Jeffers's poem: "Vital/There must be a night in us". They are all in a situation of being suppressed and covered, so their self is as dark as the night.

Obviously, the consciousness of "creating a dark night" means the discovery and establishment of the female self-world in Zhai Yongming's poems.However, due to the tense and antagonistic relationship between the sexes, there is bound to be great antagonism and deep pain in the process of creation.The expression of imagery in the poem is reflected in the lyricist placing the masculine world on the opposite side of the female self-existence, and the relationship between the two is recognized as the contrast between hurting and being hurt, violating and being violated, possessing and failing.A poem like "Monologue" is written about the complex and unequal emotional relationship between women and men: "With my heart as the boundary, I want to hold your hand / But my gesture in front of you is a fiasco"; or the situation described in "July": "You are the shadow that invades my habitat / You silence me with the only human means". As a necessity of fate, it is precisely because women's self-assertion cannot be realized in the male world that they consciously turn to marginalized existence, that is, women retreat to a world that is alienated and opposed to men with no other choice. In the private space of living and discourse, or "retreat into the dream of the night to weave one's inner life" [4]. It is worth noting that, in "Women "Group of Poems" is basically a kind of ecstasy and irrational way.The lyricist in the poem confesses in the first person. She describes herself in "Monologue": "I, a fantasy, full of the charm of the abyss". The dark night is the root of this fantasy and the charm of the abyss. The unique experience and consciousness of women are isolated from the eternal imagery of disaster and disaster. The various characteristics contained by the night are all symbolized in the poem as women's self-features, which is repeatedly emphasized. Rational tendencies.On the one hand, this reveals the great confusion that women encounter in the process of self-recognition, but more importantly, it points to an extremely personalized aesthetic space.The spiritual experience described in the group of poems is often expressed as conjecture, nightmare, tension, madness, dizziness and convulsions, etc., so as to constitute the distinctive self-image of the lyricist. A woman who is addicted to the free fantasy of the world, she rejects and discards the so-called "normal" concept and emotion from her most unique living experience, and thus achieves the self-sufficiency like a creator above everything else. The realm of poetic expression.Although this night-crazed style of discourse is fundamentally generated in opposition to the male world (since the male world is considered to mean normal and rational in the usual sense, it even represents the existing civilization form of the entire human world , then women’s self-assertion has to give up these, retreating to abnormal and irrational expressions in pain), but it still has great creative significance, that is, ecstatic discourse can not only fully dismantle The control of the central discourse of ideology, such as the sun and day in the poem as a symbol of the male world, and such as "the sun, I doubt" ("Conjecture") and "Daughters with weak appearance/When the day comes, you turn around and go away." Poems such as "Go" () clearly indicate the meaning direction of the center of resolution, and because of the poet's unrestrained passionate narration, it completely restores the female self-world at the level of individual experience, which means that the dark night For women, a self-created spiritual dwelling that contains infinitely rich meanings is generated from the covered metaphor.

In addition, to a large extent, "creating a dark night" in "Women's Poems" also means a state of female self-restraint.Take, for example, the feeling expressed in this poem: "Afraid and fascinated, and the room is turning black / The day, once a part of me, is now taken away / Orange red gazes at me from above / It is watching the world's most Horror content"; and the question in "Vision": "Where do I appear? As the sun goes down/beats the darkness, I am still the center of pain". In fact, the depth and excellence of the Doubt and scrutiny mean that the poet not only chooses personalized self-confirmation, but at the same time frankly reveals the contradictions of women themselves and the self-masochistic tendency living in the hidden world.Women create the night, but they still cannot eliminate anxiety. This anxiety comes from the most internalized individual experience. Even if they give up all the support and trust in the external world, the night of women will still become a huge dilemma. In the situation of facing oneself directly, what is unavoidable at this time is precisely the bondage from the self itself.

Inspired by the American confessional poetess Sylvia.Influenced by Plath, Zhai Yongming adopted a monologue expression in the group of poems, and her tone showed a depth and force rarely seen in Chinese female poetry before; and she also deliberately sought innovation in terms of wording, sentence formation and rhetorical methods , although it sometimes seems a bit obscure and rigid, it has formed a very expressive personal style.Zhai Yongming has made her unique contributions in the history of Chinese new poetry. She not only opened up a new dimension of female poetry, but also reached a peak in poetic art. The monologue expression used later became the main feature of women's poetry creation.