ABSTRACT
Defunct Capital is a return to Chinese cultural traditions in many ways, and the centrality of a Confucian, ‘soft’ masculinity in the context of a historically ‘defunct capital’ makes it imperative for Jia Pingwa to cast women in ‘traditional’ and subordinate roles. To trace and gather traditional protocols to configure the traditional discourse of sexuality is thus an important and integral part of Jia Pingwa’s goal to represent sexual politics befitting the protagonist’s identity more as a traditional literatus. Female subjectivity in Defunct Capital has to be, regretfully, regressive and removed from the social reality as most people experience in contemporary Chinese cities. Defunct Capital is categorically not a novel of standard socialist realism but a narrative intended to recapture the status of mind of Zhuang Zhidie as a quasi-intellectual lamenting over a rapidly vanishing past. Hence, the narrative ‘needs’ to define women according to premodern criteria: such a task necessarily leads to the confinement of women to domestic circles and women’s fulfilment is therefore measured in relation to men and family only. If Defunct Capital were presented as historical fiction with a vague sense of time, such characterization would most likely be considered as historically true. Defunct Capital, however, examines, the past from the present and insists that the past is within the present: part of the narrative strategy is to reduce women’s subjectivity to their sexuality only and confine them to their traditional place: domesticity.
