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Women's Literature: Writing from a Female Perspective
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SAILING ONTO THE WORLD STAGE：THEMES IN TAIWAN LITERATURE
Women's Literature: Writing from a Female Perspective
⧉ Female writer Lin Wen-yueh
（Kept in National Museum of Taiwan Literature）
In the 1950s, although anti-communist literature and homesick "nostalgia literature" dominated Taiwan's literary scene, female writers began writing about the plight of a woman in society, based on their own experiences.
Influenced by the wave of feminism in the 1980s, female writers started focusing on the conflicts and predicaments that the women of Taiwan encounter in marriage, family, and the workplace. Through the action of writing, female authors aimed to exercise critical thinking and engage in public discourse. Li Ang's The Butcher's Wife pushed Taiwanese society to pay more attention to women's issues. In 1993, women's organizations called for more serious scrutiny regarding domestic violence, raising significant public awareness.
It was rather difficult for Lin Shi to dodge Chen Jiang-shui. Lin Shi refused to moan like before, prompting Chen Jian-shui to sink in his fanatic and turbulent anger. Chen Jian-shui beat her, choked her, and squeezed her, prolonging the time he spent inside her. Lin Shi grit her teeth and endured it. She could only let out her breath through the gaps between her teeth. The wheezing sounds were like little animals breathing heavily before dying.
——Li Ang: "The Butcher's Wife" The Butcher's Wife (1983)
Struggling to survive her husband's physical violence and verbal insults, Lin Shi is tortured past her physical and mental threshold, and ultimately kills her husband with her own hands.
The liberalization of politics and subsequent shifts in national identity led to a surge of "family memoir writing" among female writers. Using the female perspective, female writers deconstruct and reconstruct the family and national concepts, breaking free from the patriarchal frameworks of male discourse.
Perhaps, one needs to reach a dead end, past a point of no return, and go a little further, to finally discover what they truly want. Otherwise, they'd just stay trapped in the same predicament, unable to advance or retreat. (...) Maybe one day, I'll take what I've written, string together the fragments of anecdotes about the Shunzhi Emperor traveling outside his palace, and put it all into a book. I'll dedicate the book to you, my husband, my runaway husband.
——Ping Lu: East & Beyond (2011)
The protagonist, Min-Hui, travels to Beijing in search of her missing husband. The story weaves together her husband's letters with the historical novel that Min-Hui writes, intertwining them into a depiction of the emotional struggles between the sexes, as well as their complicated relationship with Taiwan's history.
⧉ Taiwanese Female Writers-Kaori Lai
（Painting by Yi Fong Chen）
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