Individual Autonomy and Responsibility in Late Imperial China By ...

civilizations and that these concepts express the need for more freedom and autonomy. The works presented in this study provide further evidence that the self, individual identity, and affective representations are nourished by the manifoldness of cultural backgrounds and are always subject to individual and collective transformations. It is precisely because of this complex fluidity that a draft of the whole historical development of the concept of self in Chinese society would risk excessive simplifications, such as any teleological attempt of narration of a progressive process of individualization. While analogies of some stereotypes in European history confirm that there are universals in the sphere of human affective experiences (not only for the biological constitution), different explanations, ideological justifications, and mythical references also point to the existence of considerable cultural peculiarities.

The search for self and its identity is constant in both the history of China and Europe, where ideological and religious influences have informed the varieties of individual perception and representations of the self. Various kinds of individual models and autonomous personalities have developed in Chinese history, especially in the most advanced areas, among the learned and wealthy strata. In East Asian cultures, the self is mostly presented as intrinsically social and flexible, with its moral connotations and sense of responsibility, as well as the continuous appeal to “human nature” and “dignity,” based on moral examples and the emulation of role models. As a consequence, the trajectories of identity also evolve according to the roles played by the subject within a given community, to the way one identifies with one or more groups, or to the varying determinations of gender discourses and paradigms. Changes in gender roles become all the more evident in the narratives of exemplary wives or jealous shrews, in which interpretations of masculinity and femininity are kept under constant critical scrutiny. In some cases (one may think of the character Du Liniang in the “Peony Pavilion,” or other issues related to personality changes in Zibuyu), the problem of individual identity is raised with particular reference to the patterns of continuity-discontinuity of the self in diachronic and situational