Ding Ling’s “New Faith” resembles other stories that she wrote depicting the social conditions which she was concerned about. Namely, those conditions focused on the issue of gender identity as expounded by Tani Barlow’s essay on “Mother.” “New Faith” was not Ding Ling’s first story to focus on the shift of women’s gender identity during the modern era of Chinese civil war. As Barlow points out, Manzhen in “Mother” makes the change from an individual female character to an asexual political entity when she forms a sisterhood with her friends at the normal college. (Barlow, p.15) The protagonist known only as old woman or Granny in “New Faith” also becomes a political force identified with the Communist Party that Ding Ling associates with a better future for women, but through a different experience. Nonetheless, Ding Ling’s style remains more or less consistent across such stories as these.
Both of these stories are written in …show more content…
She had a couple of different ways to do this: one way is through the example of a woman who gains a modern education in the case of “Mother” and another way is through a ravaged victim of rape and physical violence given a voice in “New Faith.” Both of these stories are literary realist in detail without elements of the supernatural, but what differs is the mode of change leading to revolution. It could be argued that this desire is mirrored by Ding Ling as she herself was fighting so to speak in a literary civil war among Chinese intellectuals with censorship divided among political lines. Therefore, there are two layers to these war stories: the unification of women against ideology and the unification of the proletariat sided with the Chinese Communist Party against the Guomindang and the
Both of these stories are written in …show more content…
She had a couple of different ways to do this: one way is through the example of a woman who gains a modern education in the case of “Mother” and another way is through a ravaged victim of rape and physical violence given a voice in “New Faith.” Both of these stories are literary realist in detail without elements of the supernatural, but what differs is the mode of change leading to revolution. It could be argued that this desire is mirrored by Ding Ling as she herself was fighting so to speak in a literary civil war among Chinese intellectuals with censorship divided among political lines. Therefore, there are two layers to these war stories: the unification of women against ideology and the unification of the proletariat sided with the Chinese Communist Party against the Guomindang and the