Miss Sophia's Diary

Ding Ling’s short story, “Miss Sophia’s Diary,” published in 1927, aroused waves of controversy because of its bold depiction of a women indulging in her own world and trivial things like love affairs in her life against the backdrop of China’s domestic turbulence. However, this response paper argues that the protagonist, Sophia, represents the type of new women in the new China since May Fourth as opposed to those under the violence of traditional patriarchal society. The decadence self-contradictions, and narcissism in the diary actually evince Sophia’s subjectivity in deciding her own objects of life, death, love, and desire. One conspicuous and striking difference between the female protagonist of “Sophia” and those in works like Lu Xun’s “Blessing,” Rou Shi’s “A Slave Mother,” and Xiao Hong’s Field of Life and Death, lies in the agency mediated through the work’s style and perspective. As noted, the stories of the latter three are set in the rural China and all written in the third-person point of view with the exception of

Certainly, these female characters are not necessarily the object of the stories. On the contrary, they are oftentimes the subject. Yet it is precisely these rural women as the subject of the stories put under the violence of the traditional patriarchal society that the authors can bring out the hopelessness and helplessness of women in sharp contrast to the male-centered revolutionary China, which serves as an interesting (a)symmetry to the women in “Sophia,” written in a diary form and in which Sophia is of the petty bourgeois background in the city. The diary becomes a medium through which Sophia is able to express and explore her inner self, and in which she can be her own master. What matters here is not