This essay stages a dialogue between Lu Xun and Eileen Chang on the figure of Nora,a global icon of the burgeoning New Woman from Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House.Although often thought of as belonging to diametrically opposing camps—Lu Xun political and Chang apolitical,Lu Xun a sharp critic of women's oppression and Chang a self-conscious performer of femininity in writing style and personal styling—I argue that their concerns converge more often than one would expect,in their trench-ant social critique as well as in the ways their celebrated realism unfolds into allegories of modern Chi-nese history.At the same time,the points of their divergence also provide us a window onto the gendered positioning of each writer and their different responses to the formation of modern subjectivity.On wheth-er Nora should leave and where she is going,the different answers given by Lu Xun and Eileen Chang il-luminate the conditions,limitations and pitfalls of this gendered subject,whose ambulatory-ness serves as a foundational metaphor of her modernity and self-determination.
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