Love with Chinese Characteristics: Mother Love and the Sublime

Discussions of the concept of love in Republican China have privileged romantic love and regarded the sentimental depictions of mothers by women authors as a conservative and outmoded legacy of the Confucian past. Scholarship has overlooked the discursive split between the material and spiritual formations of love throughout the modern period. Whereas Republican texts invariably depict the liberatory potential of romantic love collapsing under the weight of material forces, mother love is deployed as a spiritually pure affective force powerful enough to awaken China’s alienated youth and cathect them to the communitarian ideal of the nation. This article analyzes the trope of mother love, meaning both the child’s love for a mother and the mother’s love for her children, in fictional texts by Bing Xin and Su Xuelin to push beyond psychological readings of individual daughter-mother bonds. Both women rejected romantic love as offering liberation to women and instead promoted mother love as a philosophy that could save China. Even as mother love took on unique meanings for May Fourth women writers, male writers also embraced it as having a sublime and progressive affective power.