Embodied Memories of War: A Cognitive Feminist Reading of Yan Geling’s The Flowers of War

Abstract

This paper examines Yan Geling’s The Flowers of War through a cognitive-feminist framework to explore how the Nanjing Massacre is represented as an embodied female experience, not only as a military event. The novel places trauma within an American Catholic church where schoolgirls and prostitutes seek refuge, foregrounding the female body as both target of violence and medium of resistance. The prostitutes' self-sacrifice reframes heroism through gendered vulnerability, shifting memory of war from national narrative to intimate corporeality. Drawing on cognitive narratology (Herman 2013), grounded cognition (Barsalou 2008), and reader-response theory (Iser 1978), the analysis shows how sensory details, bodily imagery, the church as anticipatory anchor, and fragmented temporality shape the representation of trauma. As a result, memory takes on vivid, affective, and visceral dimensions. By integrating trauma research that foregrounds the sensory registration of experience (van der Kolk 2014) with feminist trauma studies (Osborne-Crowley 2021; Caruth 1996), this article argues that the novel’s depiction of embodied knowledge and gendered vulnerability displaces conventional war narratives, reframing trauma as a situated, corporeal mode of agency. Ultimately, the novel’s transnational circulation enables a cross-cultural engagement with WWII, mediated through the reader’s embodied apprehension of women’s experience of violence.