Feminism in Lu Xun’s “Regret for the Past”

Abstract

Lu Xun, one of the representatives of feminism movements in China at the first stage, clearly empathized with Chinese females’ fate and called on Chinese women to awaken their feminist consciousness, playing an important role in the development of feminism movements in China. However, women were not treated equally to men in his description. Zijun, in Lu Xun’s work Regret for the Past, is a woman dependent on male domination and lacks independent consciousness. This paper explores the progress of feminism in Lu Xun’s works and the limitations of his description of independent females based on an analysis of the text Regret for the Past. Lu Xun strongly called on women to empower themselves, free their personalities, and awaken their feminist consciousness to become independent individuals. However, the paper argues that Lu Xun’s examination of feminism also had some limitations due to its male thoughts and narrative perspective.