The famous cross-dressing heroine Mulan is a symbol of filial piety, a role model of female heroism in Chinese culture. However, most people do not know the story as well as they think they do. Besides the ballad of Mulan, there are at least four versions of the Mulan story. My discussion will be a comparison of various versions of the Mulan story and an investigation of the development of the Mulan story. Through the study of the zaju drama Ci Mulan tifu congjun (A Female Mulan Replaces Her Father and Goes to War) by Xu Wei(1521-1593), I question the commonly-held idea that Ming zaju were not written with an eye to performance. I argue that Xu Wei created scenes that were very entertaining for Ming audiences. This zaju play was not only widely read and may have been staged by household troupes for male audiences in the Ming literati world, but may also have appealed to common people. Though the story of Mulan was familiar to every household, authors in the Qing dynasty continued to add new twists to this old story and create more complex and intriguing images of Mulan. In the novels Sui Tang yanyi (Romance of the Sui and the Tang) and Mulan qinüzhuan (Biography of Extraordinary Mulan), Mulan commits suicide either to avoid unwanted marriage or display her loyalty to the ruler. The novel Beiwei qishi guixiao liezhuan (An Amazing Tale of a Filial Woman in the Beiwei Period Who Has Been Through Extraordinary Ordeals) challenges the audience by an explicit depiction of Mulan having sex with her husband. I examine the significance of the authors in the Qing dynasty depicting Mulan as a chaste or a licentious warrior. I argue that Mulan could be a symbol of filiality, chastity, loyalty and sexuality, or even a symbol of a mixture of all above. Her complex image may fulfill male authors' fantasies of a woman who has it all.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:PITT/oai:PITTETD:etd-06102008-143837 |
| Date | 26 September 2008 |
| Creators | Sun, Xiaosu |
| Contributors | Xinmin Liu, Evelyn S. Rawski, Katherine Carlitz |
| Publisher | University of Pittsburgh |
| Source Sets | University of Pittsburgh |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.library.pitt.edu/ETD/available/etd-06102008-143837/ |
| Rights | unrestricted, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached hereto a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to University of Pittsburgh or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report. |
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