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The Scarecrow (children's book)

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The Scarecrow Chinese: 稻草人; pinyin: Dàocǎorén is a collection of short fairy tales for children written by Ye Shengtao.

Summary

The Scarecrow consists of 23 short fairy tales, written between 1921 and 1922.

The story "The Scarecrow" follows a living scarecrow that comes face-to-face with the challenges experienced with three women: an old woman whose chance to break free of debt is endangered by swarms of insects devouring her crops, a fisherwoman forced to abandon her ailing son because she is the family's sole breadwinner, and a woman who seeks to kill herself to avoid being sold by her abusive husband. In all cases, the scarecrow waves his fan to prevent tragedy, but is unsuccessful.

Writing

For centuries, literature has been used as an educational primer for children.

The fairy tales in The Scarecrow were written by Ye Shengtao, who had taught at an elementary school in Suzhou, Jiangsu.

Analysis

Writing in Chinese Social Sciences Today, Shang Jinlin of Peking University divides the stories in The Scarecrow into two categories: "Beautiful Fairy Tales" of idealized childhood dreams (such as "Little White Boat") and stories depicting the "Sorrow of Adults" (such as "A Happy Man" and "The Scarecrow") that criticize real-world situations.

The focus on women in "The Scarecrow" continued a trend in Ye Shengtao's earlier writing. He had written an essay, "The Question of Women's Dignity", in 1919 and challenged the oppression of peasant women. Similarly, each woman's experience in "The Scarecrow" reflected contemporary customs that were deemed detrimental to women, including the requirement for widows to pay funerary costs as well as the practice of wife selling. In a 1982 retrospective, Ye Shengtao described the scarecrow as a representation of Republican-era intellectuals "who were conscientious, alert, and sympathetic, yet could not find a way to help to change the cruel reality."

The children's literature scholar Lijun Bi of Monash University sees a parallel between "The Scarecrow" and Alexander Pushkin's The Tale of the Fisherman and the Fish (1833); where Pushkin's story sees the sea become increasingly turbulent in response to the fisherman's wishes, "The Scarecrow" depicts the night becoming darker as each new tragedy emerges. The titular scarecrow is granted particular characteristics through metaphor, being juxtaposed with humanity as not a creation of God but of peasants while also being described as more diligent than a buffalo or dog.

Reception and legacy

The Scarecrow was published by the Commercial Press in 1923. At the time of publication, the critic Zhu Ziqing praised Ye Shengtao's work for its social realism. In 1961, an English-language translation was published by the Foreign Languages Press. Lu Xun

Bi describes The Scarecrow as the first major work of children's literature in modern China. Other attempts at fairy tales followed. Ye Shengtao published another collection, The Stone Figure of an Ancient Hero, in 1931. Likewise, Zhang Tianyi published "Big Lin and Little Lin" in 1932.

References

  1. ^ Shang 2023.
  2. Bi 2013, pp. 34–35.
  3. Bi 2013, p. 33.
  4. ^ Bi 2013, p. 36.
  5. Bi 2013, pp. 36–37.
  6. ^ Bi 2013, p. 35.
  7. Ye 1961.
  8. Bi 2013, p. 32.

Works cited