In Lu Xun’s “A Madman’s Diary”, a madman is depicted as a person with dissenting voices against the mainstream in society. He challenges the established system of feudal society and calls for change. With such a figure, the author Lu Xun also expresses his desire to challenge the old system given the oppression it imposes on the general public. Thus, the article, with an analysis of the ideas in the story “A Madman’s Diary”, is to probe how the established system of feudal society is challenged and new changes are called for in the relevant historical context.
“A Madman’s Diary” exposes the mask of benevolent morality of Confucianism and criticizes the feudal ideology which eats the people. The mad man said that ” each page are the words ‘ConfucianVirtue and Morality’…see words between the lines. The whole book was filled with the two words-’Eat people’(Lu, 224). These direct and bold remarks pointed out the lies of feudal ethical codes of the Chinese history of thousands of years and exposed the destructive and oppressive nature of the feudal ethical code.
This can be described as a great discovery and revealing of the feudal society‘s nature of eating people, which is a denunciation of feudal consciousness and a declaration of war as it reveals the feudal system’s slavery and oppression of the people, which makes the nature of it appear to be full of evil. With this, it leads to the shaping of the madman—a unique artistic image. Lu Xun sees clearly how benevolence and morality cover the “people eat people” evil, revealing that the feudal society with its dominant ideology set by the various norms corrosion people’s minds to maintain the “people eat people” situation.
And through the madman, the author Lu Xun is to express his resentment and attack on thousands of years’ feudal patriarchal system and ethical education. So the madman is actually a symbol of the image of the already awakened intellectuals, and a clear anti-feudal democracy symbolic image, showing the profoundness of its anti-feudalism.
Thus, the madman was not a real madman, but an anti-feudal fighter, who has firmly grasped the pulse of the times, and is walking at the forefront of the ideological revolution. But he is a really lonely person in the cry of the anti-feudal desire so that he was called a “madman”. It is just because his act is in violation of the feudalism idea and discipline in the eyes of the feudal rulers.
Lu Xun’s attack on the feudal ideology is not limited to the general exposition of the phenomenon of oppression, and his critical object is deeply rooted in the feudal family as the organizing form of the feudal society. The mad man suspected his brother and claimed that “The eater of human flesh is my elder brother!” (Lu，225). The struggle between a madman and the elder brother is not a conflict between a landlord and other classes, but between the representative of the feudal family and the new awakening class and a traitor of the old family. Thus, the madman is the rebel of feudal etiquette.
Therefore, this novel reveals the confrontation between the madman and his elder brother, or between the defenders of feudal doctrine and rebels opposing it. The elder brother of the madman as a representative of the family and a group of people who eat others is to rely on the family system and the power of ‘ConfucianVirtue and Morality’ to imprison
and destroy the persons being eaten. Under this system of family and etiquette, those who are eaten became domesticated slaves and take blindly thoughts who eat people like their own ideas. Through the madman‘s suffering in the family system and the feudal rule represented by the elder brother, it is to lead to sharp criticism of family virtue, revealing the hypocritical side of such ritual which oppressed the real human nature and destroyed the young people even one’s own brothers.
Confucianism has always been the mainstream ideology of the country. It gives priority to the family, parent, and descent in the feudal patriarchal society, which helps maintain the old order of thousands of years, and thus the old tradition was able to spread, forming a deep-rooted oppressive force. It is based on the family. The so-called benevolent morality is imposed on the young like the dogma, and shackles. The purpose of “A Madman’s Diary” is not to only depict the persecution experienced by the lower class people, but to attack the feudal patriarchal system and ethical code through the mouth of the hero the madman, which makes the story have great critical power.
In addition, to expose the oppression against people, there is at the same time the intention to arouse the oppressed to break the shackles and rise to fight. Since the birth of the madman, for thirty years, he has not seen the moon, and now when he met it, he was in high spirits(Lu，223). It shows that the anti-feudal fighters long stayed in the dark but gradually was awakening, and began the pursuit of the trend of the new era.
So after reading this, there are mixed feelings: sorrow for how people are poisoned by the feudal morality and feudal ethical code; happiness for finally how people were awakened in the darkness, and protest and began the pursuit of light. Lu Xun thus proposed the requirements of the liberation of human nature, focusing on the attack on the feudal ideology and emphasizing the national morbid mentality. Thus anti-feudalism focused on attacking the barbarian feudal ideology that the feudal rulers used to consolidate their rule.
It becomes an inevitable phenomenon that moves for the enlightenment of the nature of the people and becomes one part of the enlightenment movement. In the new historical conditions, Lu Xun was to transform the national character as the central content of the enlightenment, starting from the requirements of the liberation of human nature, focusing on the root of the national nature of the deep-rooted feudal traditional consciousness. Thus, Lu Xun’s “A Madman’s Diary” embodies his battle in the anti-feudal struggle, focusing on the attack of the feudal ideology, and emphasizing the enlightenment of the ideological character