The representation of women in Lu Xun’s “Soap” and Ding Ling’s “Miss Sophia’s diary”

Abstract

This thesis examines the spatial dimensions of female subjectivity in twentieth-century Chinese literature, focusing on Soap by Lu Xun and Miss Sophia’s Diary by Ding Ling. Emerging during the transformative period of the May Fourth Movement, both texts grapple with modernity, individualism, and the shifting roles of women within a rapidly changing social landscape. While the May Fourth era is often viewed through the lens of national reform and political awakening, this study attends instead to the nuanced ways in which physical and psychological spaces are constructed and contested in fiction, particularly as they pertain to gender and autonomy. Ding Ling’s Miss Sophia’s Diary offers a rare, introspective portrayal of a young woman negotiating illness, desire, and alienation from within the confines of a rented Beijing apartment. In contrast, Lu Xun’s Soap renders domestic space as a site of performance and agency, especially in relation to class and feminine respectability. Though markedly different in voice and form, both narratives reveal how spatial settings, like the rooms and the house, function not merely as backdrops, but as active participants in the emotional and ideological experiences of their female characters. Through a comparative lens grounded in spatial theory, particularly the work of Henri Lefebvre and feminist scholars such as Virginia Woolf, this dissertation argues that space in these works is gendered, politicised, and deeply entangled with the self. The female body, constrained yet expressive, navigates these spaces in ways that illuminate the broader struggles of modern identity, nationhood, and literary form. In contributing to the growing field of feminist literary studies in modern Chinese literature, this thesis seeks to shed light on the often-overlooked domestic and psychological landscapes within which female subjectivity takes shape, landscapes that are fraught with contradiction, vulnerability, and power