Embodying “Pure Love”: Tactility and Female Subjectivity in Republican Literature

In an era of intense explorations of questions of “modern love,” New Culture intellectuals and writers grappled with the dynamics of the soul and the body. While many writers foregrounded the modern body, sexual desire, and embodied experience as hallmarks of literary modernity, others extended the spiritual dimension of love into something akin to a profound religious experience. After briefly exploring frequently underappreciated ideas of “pure love” or “spiritual love” and their circulation in print media, this paper focuses on contemporaneous discussions surrounding selected short stories and love letters composed primarily by “boudoir writers” in the 1920s. The critical questions that will be examined include: what role did tactility and the sensations play in bridging the relationship between the carnal and the spiritual in these narratives; in an age of radical reconfigurations of female sexuality, how did female writers (who received a gentry-class upbringing and modern schooling) understand “pure love” as a significant means of negotiating with Confucian morality, autonomy, and the construction of their self-subjectivity; and how are gendered voices and intimacy articulated and shaped within modern genres (short stories, love letters, and philosophical texts).