Lu Xun's Funeral
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There are a variety of interpretations on Lu Xun’s works, among which the anti-Feudalism thoughts he expressed gained great popularity. The traditions in a Feudalist society include the foot-binding, men’s braid, and the authority of the husband, etc. Lu Xun directly rejected those traditions in his works.
For instance, he once wrote a fiction called “The Story of Hair (头发的故事)” to explain how the braid restricted the freedom of young people and further expressed his anger towards the unreasonable custom. Actually after Lu Xun arrived in Japan, he then cut his long braid and sent his photo to his family (BestChinaNews). |
Another typical feudal practice that Lu Xun strongly opposed to was nobody had the freedom to choose their spouse especially for women. “Xiang Lin’s wife (祥林嫂)" in “The New Year Sacrifice (祝福)” even did not own a name or actually nobody cared about her name. Her first marriage was arranged by her parents while after the death of her husband, she was forced to marry another man by her mother-in-law. Even though in Lun Xun’s words she was a hard-working and kind woman, a women who married twice was always judged as impure. She tried to strive for her rights several times during her lifetime, but nobody supported her. The feudal traditions drove a woman with kindness to death (Lu, Selected Stories). Lu Xun, Xu Guangping(his second wife) and Their Child
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Lu Xun's First Wife (Zhu An)
Lu Xun cruelly revealed how feudalism harmed the Chinese society through his writing in order to arouse people’s awareness of the danger of feudal practices and thus abolish them. Because Lu Xun refused to follow the old feudal custom, he insisted to choose his own happiness even after he had already married Zhu An who was picked by his mother. He married his real love named Xu Guangping who used to be a student of his. They settled together and had a child when he was almost 50 years old (Denton). |