Imagining Jiang Qing: The Biographer's Truth in Anchee Min's Becoming Madame Mao

Autor(en)

Silvia Salino

Abstrakt

This chapter examines the re-construction of the figure of Jiang Qing in the biofiction Becoming Madame Mao (2000) by Chinese American writer Anchee Min. Jiang Qing was the fourth wife of Mao Zedong and the top leader of the Chinese Communist Party starting from the late 1960s. In official historiography, she has served the function of archetypal villain and scapegoat for the Cultural Revolution, and her image is associated with that of the White-Boned Demon, a (gendered) destructive monster. Min’s novel represents the life of Jiang Qing, imagining the subject speaking as she approaches death. Drawing upon the concepts of historiographic metafiction and metabiography, the analysis focuses on the construction of female subjectivity as an unstable identity. Min’s novel not only counters the structure of patriarchal history by presenting the life of the female protagonist as a juxtaposition of multiple stories, but also unsettles the tenets of biography, as it encourages to see the biographical heroine as inseparable from subjective representations.

Organisation(en)

Institut für Ostasienwissenschaften

Seiten

109-132

Publikationsdatum

2022

Peer-reviewed

Ja

ÖFOS 2012

605004 Kulturwissenschaft

Link zum Portal

https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/de/publications/8a24bfb6-1a96-4536-a1f3-f9a794dbdb46