CONCLUSIONS
What difference does it make that the alternative vision of modernity and modern subjectivity espoused by the redemptive societies flowered under a Japanese rule that conducted brutal military experiments and engaged in horrifying violence in its occupation of China? While we ourselves may not be particularly sympathetic to their redemptive vision, to tar these people with the brush of collaborationism is to slip into an easy nationalist moralism that was immoral to them. The goal of these societies was to attain a level of moral and spiritual commitment that would enable the individual to transcend the walls of nationality and ethnicity. The Manzhouguo government constructed a space for them—for the first time—in which to operate and flourish, and they responded, I believe, with considerable enthusiasm.
Similarly undeniable is the reality of women's subjugation within the Morality Society. I have cited the constraints on the women toward the end of my essay in order to remind myself of the limits of interpretation, to acknowledge the extent to which the pedagogy did shape the women's subjectivity. Yet just as I believe that an abstract master narrative of the nation cannot deliver the full or final judgment on a person's sense of value, I am impressed by the extent to which the enunciating woman was able to carve out an autonomy within the modern patriarchy.
To be sure, there were divisions of opinion among the men of the Morality Society itself that gifted women were able to exploit. But I would like to propose that discourses and representations that structure the reality of the individual are unable to prevent the irruption of elements from alternative or ambient discourses into their language, in this case the irruption of elements from the discourse of the modern woman and, even more, from the discourse of the ideal of universal public service and economic independence. This transformation is often disguised metaleptically—by the continued usage of an older language that has come to signify a different, newer meaning—as with the transformation of lishen and liye, which accompanied the emergence of the social realm. Discursive irruption into the interior space of authenticity from alternative discourses did not occur only among conservative or traditionalizing societies. While the May Fourth view of the nation had little place for the tropes of the past, there was a discursive split in its imagery of woman. In the wartime writings and propaganda of many May Fourth activists, the nation was depicted in the historical figure of a chaste woman raped by an aggressor—an irruption of both past and contemporary, conservative representations of woman and nation into the May Fourth Movement's vision of modernity.[76]
At the same time, the women's enunciation of the rhetoric of the Morality Society should not be mistaken as purely instrumental manipulation. These women were not one-dimensional rational actors who manipulated language to maximize their utility. Some critiques of the idea of hegemony come dangerously close to such a position. James Scott's interesting work on subaltern groups who pay lip service to or use the "hegemonic" ideology to pursue practices from a hidden transcript suggests a flexible view of ideology that is welcome, but its instrumentality is overdrawn.[77] The women lecturers of the Morality Society were people who maneuvered the language in the same moment in which they were constituted by it. The moral and spiritual goals that pervaded the space of authenticity enabled a defiance of pedagogy even while they limited the behavior and identities of these