Effeminate Bodies, Individual Confusion and National Crisis: A Comparative Analysis of Robert Musil’s Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törleß and Yu Dafu’s “Boundless Night”

Robert Musil’s Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törleß (1906) and Yu Dafu’s “Boundless Night” (1922) adopt similar plots about homoeroticism between the protagonist and an effeminate teenager, but for different purposes. For Robert Musil’s protagonist, his effeminate classmate is a sexual object that he momentarily uses for his sensual urges and as a means of resolving his anxieties about his sexual fantasies, identity and the link between subjective confusion and objective environment. However, Yu Dafu’s protagonist takes both the effeminate teenager and homoeroticism more seriously and sincerely, because in his anticipation, a carefree future with the feeble teenager will alleviate the frustration induced by his ungratified emotional and erotic desires, and relieve the pain of China’s vulnerability to foreign powers at the beginning of the twentieth century.