Concealment and Idealization: The Origin and Variation of Character Images in The Marriage of Young Blacky

Abstract

Zhao Shuli’s breakthrough work The Marriage of Young Blacky is adapted from a real rural love-murder case—the Yue Dongzhi Case. Nevertheless, the author rewrote the devastating tragedy of family ruin into a comedy ending with “lovers finally getting married”. Existing studies of this classic text mostly focus on how Zhao Shuli transformed tragedy into comedy. This article further explores what the narrative conceals and whom it beautifies behind such rewriting. By situating The Marriage of Young Blacky within its generative process from the prototype event to the literary text, and through close textual comparison and narrative analysis, this paper reveals that the happy reunion ending is not merely an artistic choice, but a deliberately oriented practice of narrative politics. The findings indicate that to achieve the ideological effect of a reunion finale, Zhao Shuli tactically legitimized the villagers, who originally functioned as onlookers and accomplices in the real case. Meanwhile, he systematically reconstructed the power relations behind character images through the comedic shaping of Second Sage, the desire narrative of Third Fairy, and the simplified depiction of village cadres’ problems. This paper argues that the rewriting of The Marriage of Young Blacky reveals a core paradox in the transition of modern Chinese literature from enlightenment to revolution: in constructing a legitimate subjective identity of “the people”, how the darkness and trauma of pre-revolutionary history are deliberately assimilated and erased. This conclusion not only offers a new interpretive perspective for re-examining Zhao Shuli’s “problem novels”, but also provides a crucial textual case for understanding the narrative grammar of revolutionary literature in the 20th century.