“Whichever I Want”: The Relational Limits of May Fourth Individualism in Miss Sophie’s Diary and Beyond

Abstract

This article reconsiders the conventional account of Ding Ling’s transition from May Fourth individualism to revolutionary collectivism through Miss Sophie’s Diary (1928) and Water (1931), tracing a sustained inquiry into the historical conditions of agency across her changing political commitments and narrative forms. In Miss Sophie’s Diary, Sophie’s encounters with Weidi and Ling Jishi expose the sentimental obligations and bourgeois hierarchies that circumscribe romantic freedom, while her relationship with Yun reveals the prior relations of care and recognition upon which her apparent autonomy depends. The belated disclosure of the diary’s origins in Yun’s request further complicates the authority of its first-person voice, locating the conditions of self-expression within a history of intimate dependence. Water situates this problem within the agrarian organization of property and subsistence, examining how shared deprivation creates the possibility of collective resistance even as the formation of revolutionary consciousness remains incompletely represented. The movement from the retrospective discovery of individual dependence to the emergence of a collective political subject thus reveals a continuity in Ding Ling’s conception of agency, whose exercise remains conditioned by historically constituted relations and whose emancipatory possibilities depend upon their transformation.