Reading Lu Xun Through Carl Jung By Carolyn Brown

he is still a key figure with whom one must wrestle, whether by way of denial or affirmation.

Brief Summary: Historical and Biographical Context

Lu Xun is the pen name of Zhou Shuren 周树人, who was born in Shaoxing, a small town in Zhejiang Province, into an educated gentry family in decline. His grandfather had attained the highest degree in the imperial examinations, at that time the conventional path to wealth and power, but had fallen into political disgrace. The bribes required to spare his life figured significantly in the family’s economic difficulties. Lu Xun’s father, also a scholar, had neither the capacity nor the opportunity to regenerate the family’s fortunes. The oldest son of the next generation, Lu Xun was educated to continue the family’s scholarly tradition. In an unusual departure from custom for such a family, he was also permitted to read myths and folklore, an interest in premodern popular literature that would influence his later scholarly research. He successfully passed the first level of the imperial exams, demonstrating his command of the formal written tradition, but by then he had already decided that his future lay elsewhere. He moved to Nanjing to attend schools that taught Western technical subjects and in his spare time immersed himself in translations of Western works of thought before setting off four years later for further study in Japan.

In the mid-nineteenth century, Japan had been on a technological par with China. With the initiation of the Meiji Restoration in 1868, however, Japan had single-mindedly set out to incorporate Western knowledge such that by the beginning of the twentieth century it had become the first Asian state to modernize and had even become something of a power in its own right. Japan had centralized power in the emperor’s name; written a constitution and created an elected parliament; initiated industrialization; introduced modern transportation and communication systems, including railroads, telegraph, and telephone; formally eliminated feudal class distinctions; initiated education of its entire population; and created a