Disclaimer: This post was originally written in Chinese and translated into English by GPT-5.2.
Miss Sophie’s Diary is Ding Ling’s work that brought her fame. This short story, once published, “was like dropping a bomb on this deathly silent literary world,” and “shocked a whole generation of the literary and art circles.” More than that, even up to the present, when I come across such a delicate yet bold stream-of-consciousness, diary-form novel, I still can’t help but feel pleasantly surprised, and a sudden interest in studying women arises. If human nature is truly like canine nature, then Sophie—this young woman whom people of her time regarded as a Modern Girl—still carries considerable significance today, at the very least representing the characteristics of women of a certain era, a certain class, or a certain physiological stage.
We often say that a work is the author’s child, but we never investigate the author’s metaphorical gender. Strictly speaking, this saying should be changed to “the author is the mother of the work” to be fully true, because, just as the joke ridicules, only the mother can guarantee the child is her own; for a father to “treat the child as his own” with perfect accuracy, he probably still has to do a paternity test. But with the progress of the times, now even the one who carries the baby has no way to guarantee the child is her own! If, before studying Miss Sophie, we turn our gaze to Ding Ling, we can’t help but wonder: is Ding Ling really Sophie’s biological mom, or a surrogate mother? This doubt is well-grounded. Ding Ling said of herself: “I’m not as sentimental as Miss Sophie… what I wrote is not myself.” Yet her later essay Not a Love Letter clearly reveals “the same sentimentality as Sophie,” and furthermore, the recipient of that love letter, the author’s “devarish” (Russian for comrade) Feng Xuefeng, said that she “very much sympathized with Sophie and very strongly cast her own shadow into it.” Another example: Ding Ling asserted that “Sophie doesn’t have any sexual demands,” that she was simply, as Mao Dun said, “a young woman burdened in spirit with the painful and stifling wounds of the times, crying out in anguish.” But right after saying this, Mao Dun immediately concluded: “Miss Sophie is the representative of the contradictory psychology in matters of love and sex among the emancipated young women after the May Fourth Movement!” If we know a bit of the historical facts, we will understand that such depictions of sexual psychology were a vogue in fiction at the time. The author’s repeated denials seem to be imitating the ancient maxim “the more you try to cover it up, the more it shows,” and such contradictory denial is, fundamentally, breathing through the same nostrils as Miss Sophie—of course, it can also be said to be women’s common nature. In the author’s writing, Sophie’s final decision to go south returns to her earlier psychological state of wanting to move house, only “recounting without creating,” and before long it is then fundamentally denied again. This gives me enough courage to straightforwardly treat Miss Sophie’s Diary as the personal diary of a lady who truly existed, named Sophie, regardless of whether her prose is good or bad, her artistry high or low—still less needing to discern right or wrong in the author’s statements, or the gestures and movements of her life—and to focus only on what kind of woman this lady really is. As for the author’s statements, or those of other commentators, in this paper they are, at most, auxiliary evidence for verification, eyewitness testimony; attaching and attaching, in the end it is still I, the chief judge, who will strike the gavel and deliver the one-man verdict. This, too, can be said not to violate our country’s basic principle in dealing with foreign culture: “taking ourselves as the main thing and using it for our own purposes.”
Opening Miss Sophie’s diary, the first thing we see is a young intellectual woman convalescing. She is bored, anxious, sensitive, has a strong sense of self, and an extremely strong personality. She cannot endure “a person sitting blankly, waiting for time to pass,” detests the doctor’s instructions, yet has no choice but to be “shut in the room” on windy days (Beijing winters are precisely windy), repeatedly warming milk she may or may not feel like drinking (because it’s too boring, “so last week I didn’t play with it for a full seven days”), mechanically reading newspapers that are or aren’t new, venting dissatisfaction at the hotel environment again and again, and at night thinking about “some strange things” or erotic matters, simply because “I want to make myself happy.” But this in turn makes her “always unable to fall asleep until two or three in the morning, and before dawn I wake up again,” falling into the vicious cycle mudpit of “I’m annoyed to death.” Miss Sophie does not have the calm composure of “finding leisure in illness and not minding it at all,” nor does she have peace of mind, that one and only prescription. For someone with a strong sense of self and an extremely strong personality like her, this bout of illness instead further intensified her boredom, anxiety, and sensitivity—and these three traits run throughout her entire diary. If she herself were not so bored, anxious, sensitive, so strongly self-conscious, and so extremely strong in personality, it can be said that her later being trapped by love and her contradictory sexual psychology could not have happened; even if it did, it could not have escalated step by step to the point of irreconcilability. Emotional collapse is like a dam break: disaster often arises from tiny fissures measured in millimeters that are not easy to notice; as for the fissures themselves, without the premise of foresighted repair and mending, their gaping will only increase and never abruptly disappear.
Miss Sophie also has the lively, high-spirited air unique to women—or in modern terms, tsundere; or in her own words, “reckless,” “willful,” “self-respect and pride.” This, of course, is inseparable from her family background and educational level, after all, young intellectual women like her were not many at the time, not to mention that her personality was so strong and she possessed the temperament of a Modern Girl or the later “new woman.” This high-spirited lady says of herself: “I understand myself; I’m nothing but a thoroughly feminine woman.” Of her friends she says: “I don’t want people to understand me, to see through me too easily.” Of other women she says she is unlike them, “so fragile they can’t bear a single tear.” Nor is she “dull and silly,” “a girl just out of the countryside.” Of the loyal “Wei-di,” who loves her and is not younger than she, she says: “But has he ever caught hold of me? Of course, I cannot bear any responsibility; a woman ought to be like this.” “For this honest man, I feel an impotent apology, and I’ve suffered enough.” And from the beginning and throughout she is infatuated with the “tall man,” Ling Jishi, for no reason other than that he has “a noble model,” “bearing,” “a noble handsome form,” and all the beautiful things bestowed by God. Even when she later rejects him, her reason is only: “How could I, for these unconscious temptations (note by the author: ‘the psychology of a woman completely crazed about a man’s appearance!’), fall for a full-blooded Nanyang man!” “Of course I won’t love him; this not loving is easy to explain: within his bearing there hides what an abjectly ugly soul!” In the end she pushes him away from her, and all she thinks is: “I’ve won! I’ve won!”
After all, Miss Sophie has been educated; she knows that “a woman being so reckless won’t have a good result,” that it will “send herself to an even worse place”; she also knows herself to be “checked by another kind of self-respectful feeling,” unwilling to let others “damage my self-respect,” and at the slightest sign, from time to time “rouse up my self-respect!” Zhang Tianyi believes Miss Sophie is thoroughly “self-serving egoism,” and he says:
Miss Sophie probably pays too much attention to herself and loves to display herself too much, so only when she writes about herself, and when she writes about her reactions to the things around her, does she write authentically, vividly, and with decent technique… Apart from Miss Sophie herself, all other characters are written vaguely, and the writing technique suddenly disappears. It is as if these people exist in the world only for Sophie, and have no existence of their own—poor Ling Jishi cannot escape this fate either.
If we strip away unnecessary moral judgment from these words, they basically hold up. Of course, Miss Sophie’s writing method may to some extent be influenced by the diary genre. But “words are the voice of the heart.” When we read Miss Sophie’s diary, although it is hard to say we can see clearly the truth or falsity, beauty or ugliness of the diary’s characters’ natures in the real world, the diary’s author cannot escape the reader’s discerning eye. Therefore, surveying Miss Sophie’s diary as a whole, and integrating the various factors above, we also have Confucius’s sigh: “Look at what he relies on, observe the path he takes, examine what he rests in—how can a person be hidden? How can a person be hidden?” and determine that our conclusion is sound.
Feng Xuefeng believes Miss Sophie is a “love-supremacist,” which is somewhat reasonable; for example, Sophie’s diary contains this passage: “I always wish there were someone who could understand me clearly; if they don’t understand me, what use are those loves, those considerations to me?” But this is also extremely inaccurate, because he ignores her high-spirited and “self-serving” side. In fact, Miss Sophie only “loves those she loves”; she “only puts her mind on the men she wants to conquer” (note by the author: this is the diary’s original text), has a strong desire to possess, and is extremely picky about the one she loves—self-centered, looking down from above, fundamentally an “egoist,” as pointed out above. But this egoism has a rather feminine coloring (for example the “anxiety and sensitivity” mentioned above, and the vanity to be discussed below), and is mixed with some masculine style—love is hard to say is always exclusive, but selfishness certainly is, and the selfish manifestations of selfish people are often all cut from the same cloth. That is to say, in love, men and women may have a startling consistency.
This can be seen in her vacillating attitude toward Wei-di, who loves her, and Ling Jishi, whom she loves. She dislikes the “loyal,” “sincere” Wei-di for “not knowing how to change his way” to please her, for being “too easy to order around,” for not understanding “the techniques of love,” so she doesn’t want him, “pities him,” and thinks it only natural. After taking a fancy to Ling Jishi, in response to Wei-di’s “request,” she deceives herself into “belittling” herself as “a woman unworthy of receiving that sincere love.” Not only that, like a man she has a superior mentality or political tactic of letting “friendship” and “familial affection” dilute (of course sometimes “inlay” and “strengthen”) “love.” She says: “I wish I could kneel before him and beg him to grant me only a younger-brother’s or a friend’s love!… If Wei-di knew me, I would naturally take him as my only friend to whom I could bare my heart; I would warmly hold him and kiss him. I would wish for him the loveliest, most beautiful woman in the world…” After Miss Sophie becomes infatuated with Ling Jishi, she immediately has the idea of waiting quietly to act, “knowing the male and keeping to the female,” “doing nothing yet leaving nothing undone”: “I want to possess him; I want him unconditionally to offer up his heart, kneeling to beg me to grant him my kiss. I’m simply mad; over and over I only think about the steps of the methods I want to carry out—I’m simply mad!” When Ling Jishi goes to the hospital to see her and she sees “those nurses all envying me,” she suddenly feels “I need others to remember me; I always feel it would be good to get a bit more kindness.” Later, disappointed by Ling Jishi’s snobbish style and base soul, she hardens her heart: “But I’ve made up my mind—I’ve made up my mind to let that tall kid taste my unyieldingness, my unreasonable arrogance and mockery.” Once she hardens her heart, she immediately transfers her affection to Wei-di: “That night Wei-di went back in a huff; today he came carefully by himself to make peace. I couldn’t help laughing and felt his loveliness. If a woman can only find a loyal male companion as her lifelong haven, I think no one is more reliable than my Wei-di.” Yet a woman’s heart is like “a piece of magnetic heart” in Wen Tianxiang’s writing that “will not rest unless it points south”: it seems wavering, tilting left and turning right, but once the answer is fixed, it becomes stubborn like a “heart of iron and stone”—physics books say iron belongs to ferromagnetic metals. So before long, she again unleashes at Ling Jishi her maternal complex, her “fond of being a teacher” style, and what Schopenhauer called women’s “big child” psychology, even though by then she knew he was already married: “But has he truly ever received a woman’s love? Has he ever loved a woman? I dare say he hasn’t!” “A strange thought burned again in my mind. I decided to teach this university student a lesson. The universe is not as simple as he understands it!”
Miss Sophie’s egoism, whose main form of expression is her high-spiritedness, is not only manifested in love, but reflected in many aspects—for example, her thinking contains a strong traditional moral outlook. Some scholars say Miss Sophie is a post–May Fourth new youth; compared with the May Fourth generation, she has completely freed herself from the shackles of feudal thought—this is somewhat biased. In fact, for a high-spirited egoist, as long as it helps obtain the pleasure of one’s own existence, he believes anything—this belief, of course, also has the basic root nature of “selfish genes” and “selective expression.” Miss Sophie has a strong sense of moral shame, and a sense of moral shame is one of the basic markers distinguishing the Chinese side from the Western original-sin guilt. This sense of moral shame, in the final analysis, is a leftover or inheritance of feudal thought. Miss Sophie writes in her diary: “But I don’t deceive people, nor do I deceive myself; I am pure…” which is a typical expression. All high-spirited people like to compare themselves with others, and in Miss Sophie’s self-identification, her honesty and purity are clearly extraordinary and unworldly. This also, from another angle, explains why Miss Sophie is so entangled in Ling Jishi’s “abjectly ugly soul.” Another example: Miss Sophie has a female psychology with “petty-bourgeois” tendencies. This sentence in the diary can show the big through the small: “Sometimes in a whole day’s quiet contemplation I get a bit of sorrow, but this faint desolation makes me even more reluctant to disturb the mood, as if within it I can taste a thread of sweetness.” On this point, we might as well seek “grounds” and supporting evidence from Sophie’s “quasi-” mother. Ding Ling said: “Why did I go to write fiction then? I thought it was because of loneliness… I was someone who could complain a lot then, so In the Darkness, without realizing it, also got tinged with a layer of melancholy.”
I cannot prove whether Miss Sophie’s boredom, anxiety, sensitivity, strong self-consciousness, and extremely strong personality are cause or effect with her high-spiritedness and egoism, but it is very clear that these two sides of traits are interwoven and mixed, and cannot be abruptly separated and isolated one-sidedly. It is precisely within this interweaving mixture that Miss Sophie displays tremendous contradictory thoughts and behaviors—behavior is also the embodiment of thought. The inconsistency of words and deeds is precisely the embodiment of contradictory thinking. On the one hand she can say with incomparable arrogance: “Sophie is not someone who likes to hear explanations. Fundamentally I deny that the universe needs explanation.” On the other hand she says: “Sophie lives in the world; her heart’s need for people to understand her and comprehend her is too ardent and too earnest, so she sinks for a long time in the pain of disappointed anguish.” She actually knows: “Of course, I don’t wish anyone to know the unreasonable things I secretly think, but I also feel the necessity of others understanding my feelings.” But in her subconscious she feels others cannot know her, and she cannot bring herself to lose face or lower her pride, and in the end cannot open up to others; under this contradiction between words and deeds, of course she can only have this mentality: “Who can understand me, hold me, comfort me? Therefore I can only swallow, amid laughter, the crying sound of ‘I’ve ruined myself again.’” This ailment, as she herself says, is: “But also constrained by reason—no, I have never had reason.”
We know Sophie thinks very highly of herself, believing her honesty and purity are above the common crowd, yet under her sense of superiority and sexual impulse (or the power of love) she plays some “techniques”—for example, at the beginning she “muddledly” deceives her friends with the pretext of moving house, and lies to Ling Jishi that she wants him to help her make up English, which makes her feel “as if telling lies were also (my) instinct.” Of course, the most contradictory and most lie-filled thing in Miss Sophie’s diary is her feelings and attitude toward Ling Jishi—in other words, self-deception and the contradiction of sexual psychology. Because this self-deception and contradiction are in fact the “interwoven mixture” of all Miss Sophie’s traits discussed above, carrying a summarizing significance, it is quite necessary to describe it briefly.
Miss Sophie’s vacillating attitude toward Ling Jishi has been discussed above, but there has been no detailed evidence for her specific complex psychology. The most representative example in this regard is Miss Sophie’s final diary entry. She writes in her diary:
Of course I won’t love him; this not loving is easy to explain: within his bearing there hides what an abjectly ugly soul! Yet I admire him, miss him; without him I would lose all meaning in life; and I often think, if there were such a day when my lips and his closed together, tightly, then even if my body were to collapse in this heart’s wild laughter, I would be willing. In truth, if only I could obtain a knightlike gentleness—one caress—no matter what part of my body the tip of his hand touched, and thus I would sacrifice everything, I would still be willing.
I ought to go mad, because these wondrous things in fantasy, dreamlike, in the end were all obtained by me without any difficulty. But from all this, is what I felt the happiness I had imagined would intoxicate my soul? No!
Rationally, Miss Sophie hates Ling Jishi’s base character, but emotionally she is deeply trapped in the “kingdom of fools” (her feelings for him) and cannot extricate herself. Out of repressed sexual psychology, on the one hand she fantasizes about “ecstatic” pleasure with him who has “bearing,” while on the other hand she is always confined by strict moral accountability and a fragile love-psychology that shrinks from action; from beginning to end it is so. Then, in order to escape the immense spiritual contradiction, the final result can of course only be a “half-dead” state and leaving Beijing to go south.
However, from Sophie’s diary, the reason she struggles in her infatuation with Ling Jishi is not only Ling Jishi’s inconsistency between outside and inside; more importantly, or decisively, it is the interwoven mixture of contradictions among her own various traits. For example, before she even senses Ling Jishi’s baseness, she mocks her friends’ love:
She mocks Yufang and Yunlin’s pale and powerless love, astonished why they would not need to embrace the lover’s naked body? Why would they suppress this expression of love? Why, before the two have even slept under one quilt, would they think of those irrelevant worries? I do not believe love is so rational, so scientific!
This sentence of course differs to some extent from her emphasis on “the techniques of love”; her rational self still cannot withstand the test of emotion:
Long ago, I understood what attitude to adopt in dealing with what kind of man, yet now I’ve become stupid. When I asked whether he would come again, how could I reveal that yearning look? In front of a handsome person one should not be too honest, lest one be looked down upon… But I love him—why must I use techniques? Can’t I directly show him my love? And I feel that as long as it harms no one, then why can’t kissing someone a hundred times be permitted?… I cannot restrain the surging of my feverish feelings.
Miss Sophie’s avant-garde view of love is fine talk in the diary and false talk in reality. For example, not long after she first meets Ling Jishi, she becomes a “timid person,” full of scruples, “forcing herself to refuse temptation,” behaving “so constrained, not playfully responding,” and in the several subsequent meetings, it is all the same.
Contradictory Sophie on the one hand shows an immense craving for love, while on the other hand vacillates over love. She says she would not “for unconscious reasons” fall in love with someone, but in fact both her love and her non-love can find grounds in the “unconscious.” In the unconscious, she expresses great doubt about love, even fear (disdain is fear); but where there is repression, there is resistance—under unconscious repression, urged on by sexual psychology, she is simply like a monk or nun who is a “hungry ghost in lust,” and instead has an even more fervent or pathological demand for love. The unconscious comes from past experience, and this is also reflected in her diary:
Recently when young people are together, they always like to study this word “love.” Although sometimes I seem to understand a bit, in the end I still can’t explain it very clearly. As for some small actions between men and women, it seems I see them too clearly. Perhaps it is because I understand these small actions that I become even more confused about “love,” and have no courage to advocate love, and dare not believe I am a purely lovable little woman, and thus come to doubt the “love” so-called by the world, and the “love” I have received…
When I was just a little sensible, those who loved me already made me suffer enough, and gave many idle people opportunities to slander me and humiliate me, to the point that even my closest little companions grew distant. Later, because of love’s coercion, I became so afraid that I left my school. After that, although people say I grew day by day, I still often felt those tasteless entanglements; thus at times I not only doubted the so-called “love,” but even disdained such intimacy…….. This tasteless jealousy, this selfish possession—is this what is called love?….. It’s not that I wish others to be hypocritical or affected; I only feel that trying to move my heart by relying on such childlike behavior is all useless.
In addition, Sister Yun’s death, as a kind of psychological suggestion, further deepened her existing unconscious. About a month before Sister Yun passed away, she received her letter, in which Sister Yun wrote of her sorrow after marriage: “My life, my love, are all of no use to me…” The power of this suggestion is enormous; it made Sophie develop from a sense of love’s emptiness to a sense of life’s emptiness: “How meaningless! Better to die early and be done with it…” And Sophie’s later several thoughts like “if I were to die without a sound” and “to die quietly” are not unrelated to this. Borrowing Freud’s psychoanalysis, Sophie is deeply trapped in an irreconcilable spiritual predicament of ego, id, and superego, and the interwoven mixture of contradictions among her various traits is the root of the illness.
Qian Qianwu believes that the “state of modern people’s hysteria (note by the author: i.e., hysterics) disease” exhibited by Sophie as a Modern Girl is the so-called “fin-de-siècle” morbidity. He believes the manifestations of this morbidity include:
First, in the body there are already characteristics different from ordinary people; the self-concept is very strong, and one is easily shaken by momentary impulses. The second characteristic is being easily moved emotionally, laughing and crying over matters completely irrelevant. The third characteristic is that, depending on the person’s surrounding conditions, one may be world-weary and pessimistic, or develop fear toward the various aspects of the universe and life, often seeming exhausted, fatigued, and bored. The fourth characteristic, (note by the author: the original text is so; same below.) activity manifests a very gloomy state. The fifth characteristic is having endless dreams, being unable to focus on one thing, lacking the mental power to judge and pursue unified thought, thus being absorbed exclusively in vague, ambiguous, disorderly, fragmentary delusions. The sixth is a tendency to doubt: harboring doubts about various problems, seeking out their basis, yet being unable to resolve them and thus becoming vexed. The last characteristic is mystical frenzy, i.e., the state of Mystical delirium.
Qian Qianwu’s article was written in August 1930, and he can be counted as someone of Sophie’s era. Although Mr. Qian’s summary of “fin-de-siècle morbidity” is not aimed only at Miss Sophie, it has considerable reference value. Judging from this paper’s discussion, his view coincides with mine in several respects. I have no intention of departing from the discourse system of this paper to compare Qian Qianwu’s view; for a reference, this is unnecessary—like a beauty contest, which does not look at anything beyond appearance. Then, the final question emerges: what kind of woman is Miss Sophie exactly? My answer is:
Miss Sophie is a modernized woman: she has modern people’s boredom and anxiety, and also a woman’s sensitivity. Miss Sophie has a strong sense of self and an extremely strong personality; her existence also carries the high-spiritedness unique to women. Her existence is for the pursuit of her own pleasure, to relieve life’s boredom and anxiety, and to display her spirit and personality. This is why she is an egoist rather than a love-supremacist. Miss Sophie pursues love, and from the standpoint of purpose, it is to make herself happy; and in order to achieve the goal of happiness, she will also do things that contradict her self-identification, such as lying and using the “techniques of love.” Psychologically, this is a manifestation of a contradictory sexual psychology arising from repression, a functioning of the unconscious. And the interwoven mixture of these traits in Miss Sophie is also the reason she produces contradictions in thought and behavior, or what can be called schizophrenia. This contradiction and splitting is like Freud’s so-called disunity of ego, id, and superego; in behavior it manifests as inconsistency between words and deeds—taking moral pride in herself yet doing immoral things; in love it manifests as contradictory sexual psychology and a confused view of love (both doubting and fearing); in spirit it manifests as hysterical symptoms, such as Miss Sophie’s repeated suicidal thoughts, and her “mad” display when she finally breaks decisively with Ling Jishi. Miss Sophie certainly has resistance—this follows from her personality and thought—but her resistance is also lonely, whether in how she conducts herself in the world or in her love life; it is all so. She has always been all alone, always only herself—because she only cares about herself; she does not believe others, or rather, she does not dare to believe others. As for whether her high-spiritedness is a bluff, whether it is some kind of appearance—she herself knows. Miss Sophie complains about herself: “I, this useless person,” and perhaps there is a deeper psychological mechanism.
Main References:
The Complete Works of Ding Ling, Volume 3, by Ding Ling, Hebei People’s Publishing House, First Edition, December 2001.
Complete Collection of Materials on the History of Chinese Literature, Modern Volume: Research Materials on Ding Ling, compiled by Yuan Liangjun, Intellectual Property Publishing House, Fifth Edition, April 2011.
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