Woman, Sacrifice, and the Limits of Sympathy
Haiyan Lee
Front. Lit. Stud. China ›› 2012, Vol. 6 ›› Issue (2) : 184 -197.
Woman, Sacrifice, and the Limits of Sympathy
In both Lu Xun’s “The New Year’s Sacrifice” (1924) and Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” (1948), a woman is made a sacrificial victim by her village community, one symbolically and one literally. Using the two stories as my cross-cultural examples, I ponder the connection between the failure of sympathy and patriarchal sacrificial logic, and ask what literature can do to help create the condition of possibility for moral agency.
sympathy / empathy / moral agency / literature / woman / Lu Xun / Shirley Jackson
Higher Education Press and Brill
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