10 - Poverty, Gender and Nation in Modern Vietnamese Literature during the French Colonial Period (1930s–40s)

Summary

Modern Vietnamese journalism and prose fiction owe a debt to French colonialism. The conditions and opportunities created in the early twentieth century by colonial rule allowed for the emergence of new types of literature—modern novels and short stories—which in turn posed a serious challenge to colonialism itself. This chapter will examine two prominent groups of Northern Vietnamese writers of the 1930s and 1940s, whose novels and short stories on poverty reflected Vietnamese intellectuals’ preoccupation with social and moral problems associated with colonialism and global capitalism.

The first group is the Tu luc van doan (Self-Reliance Literary group), an organization of Westernized liberal intellectuals. The second group is composed of left-leaning social realist writers. Although the fiction examined here provided contemporary readers with descriptive and seemingly apolitical portrayals of poverty, they were not simply critiques of society in general. The works of the first generation of Vietnamese modern prose writers were strong indictments against French colonialism. The treatment of female characters and use of gendered imagery made these short stories and novels expressions of anti-colonial sentiment. In these works, the symbolic feminine nation and masculine Confucian moral order were used to express the authors’ anguish over the moral degeneration of their society and the loss of their nation. By openly exhibiting scenes of absolute poverty and social deterioration after nearly half a century of colonization, these writers made a mockery of the French claim to a ‘civilizing’ mission.

Another underlying theme in this chapter is the issue of identity and representation. For the most part, the intellectuals of Northern Vietnam were men of middle to upper-middle class families, who had access to education and lived in an urbanized and Westernized environment. Many of the writers examined here lived a relatively comfortable life in comparison to the misery they described in their stories. Of interest is how these writers positioned themselves vis-à-vis the poor about whom they wrote. The Vietnamese intellectuals clearly saw themselves as beneficiaries of Western modernity in terms of scientific and technological advances as well as intellectual influences.