Front. Lit. Stud. China 2014, 8(1): 78−100 DOI 10.3868/s010-003-014-0005-0 FORUM Kun Qian Gendering National Imagination: Heroines and the Return of the Foundational Family in Shanghai during the War of Resistance to Japan Abstract During the War of Resistance to Japan (1937–45), the cultural scene in Japanese-occupied Shanghai took on a “feminine” quality, as female leads dominated stage performance and film screens. This essay seeks to engage this gendered phenomenon through examples of Ouyang Yuqian’s wartime play Peach Blossom Fan (Taohua shan) and the film Mulan Joins the Army (Mulan congjun). Borrowing affect theory in conjunction with the gendered perception of modernity, the author argues that these representations of female characters, on the one hand, highlight the subjective projection of male intellectuals motivated by intense feelings of shame and anger, which constitutes a feminized national imagination encountering the colonial Other. On the other hand, such representations continue the May Fourth project of enlightening and liberating woman from the conventional family while reintroducing the concept of the nation in the family setting and proposing the foundational family as the basic unit of the new nation. Keywords family total war, masculinity, femininity, shame and anger, foundational Introduction During the War of Resistance to Japan (1937–45), many films, operas, and stage plays, especially those with historical themes, featured female leads in the Japanese-occupied “orphan island” Shanghai.1 Women warriors such as Hong 1 Edward Gunn, Unwelcome Muse: Chinese Literature in Shanghai and Peking, 1937–1945, 149. Kun Qian ( ) Department of East Asian Languages & Literatures, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA 15260, USA E-mail: qiankun@pitt.edu Gendering National Imagination 79 Xuanjiao, Liang Hongyu, and Hua Mulan were prominent in cultural production, and renowned historical beauties such as Diao Chan and Li Xiangjun foiled the incompetence of male characters in troubled historical times. This phenomenon, in a “total war” situation nationally and a local context of foreign occupation, deserves further investigation. It prompts one to ask: In a war that demanded public morale, why were female characters chosen to embody such virtues as righteousness, patriotism, and fighting spirit? What motivated writers to create strong women instead of men? And how can this gendered representation shed light on the formation of colonial subjectivity and the imagination of the nation? This essay attempts to address the aforementioned questions. Taking affect theory as a point of departure, the first section lays out the different gendered strategies for boosting morale in the hinterland and Shanghai. In contrast to the “masculine” portrayal of war heroes in the interior, the “feminine” quality in the cultural production of Shanghai seems to continue and even highlight the “effeminate” aspect of Chinese culture, as painfully observed by Chinese intellectuals in the earlier periods to account for the weakness and backwardness of Chinese society encountering the colonial Other. I suggest that the war conditions exacerbated the lingering feelings of male inadequacy that stimulated intellectuals to create female characters to express their profound shame and anger. Just as in the May Fourth period, when rebellious historical beauties were chosen to push for the enlightenment movement,2 historical heroines were once again brought to center stage to carry on the mission of saving the nation. The following sections then focus on Ouyang Yuqian’s wartime play Peach Blossom Fan (Taohua shan) and the film Mulan Joins the Army (Mulan congjun) to discuss how archetypal heroines were incorporated in the narrative of national salvation. I argue that Xiangjun and Mulan’s stories not only shed light on the male intellectuals’ emotive structure during the wartime, but also prefigure the subordination and reincorporation of the foundational family in the building of the nation in later literary and cultural practices. Gendered Strategies of Boosting Morale in a Situation of “Total War” In a recent article on affect theory, Ben Anderson delineated the relationship 2 For example, in the 1920s, Guo Moruo wrote three historical plays, which constituted the collection Three Rebellious Women. He used the images of Wang Zhaojun, Zhuo Wenjun, and Nie Ying to participate in the discussion of women’s emancipation and enlightenment. Ouyang Yuqian also wrote a play Pan Jinlian to comment on women’s fate in a suppressing patriarchal society. 80 Kun Qian between morale and power in the situation of “total war.”3 Although illusive and excessive in nature, Anderson observed, morale emerged as an object for specific techniques of power as part of changing relations between the state and the population. In the United States during WWII, for example, various forms of power apparatus, such as radio, were employed to mobilize the affective bodies of the population to create a collectivity facing the “total war” condition. Yet, there is a paradox here as to how to arouse morale. On the one hand, morale is conditioned by the present—the hardship and suffering in the war situation that could both motivate and destroy the spirit of the population; on the other hand, however, it must be organized around a “faith in the future.” Thus, how to effectively combine the narratives of the present and the future becomes the object of state propaganda practice. 4 In general, Anderson maintained, mobilizing morale promises to synchronize two narratives: “a ‘providential’ apparatus defined by relations of prediction, relief and repair and a ‘catastrophic’ apparatus defined by relations of destruction, damage, and loss.”5 This “morale-as-political-excess” model is based on the affect theory that bodies are prone to be both affective and affected. The impersonal intensities existing between bodies can create a contagious atmosphere that transmits feelings and emotions. We can recall the experience of watching a football game at a stadium: The audience’s shouting, cursing, tramping, and applauding certainly influence each other’s physical and emotional response to the game. As Anna Gibbs describes it, “Bodies can catch feelings as easily as catch fire: Affect leaps from one body to another, evoking tenderness, inciting shame, igniting rage, exciting fear—in short, communicable affect can inflame nerves and muscles in a conflagration of every conceivable passion.”6 Insofar as morale is communicable, the practice of targeting morale must be built upon the shared structure of feeling in an “imagined community.” Therefore, the different modes of practice in boosting morale in a “total war” condition can shed some light on the emotive structure of the national imagination. By any measure, the War of Resistance to Japan amounted to a “total war” situation in China, and morale was certainly an object for the state and cultural elites to mobilize. However, the state and the independent intellectuals seemed to have employed different strategies to boost the morale of the population. Whereas the state pretty much did what Anderson has described to construct a homogeneous national collectivity in the hinterland, the intellectuals in Japanese-occupied Shanghai differentiated the populace into the courageous and 3 4 5 6 Ben Anderson, “Modulating the Excess of Affect: Morale in a State of ‘Total War,’” 161–85. Ibid., 173. Ibid., 164. Anna Gibbs, “Contagious Feelings: Pauline Hanson and the Epidemiology of Affect,” 1. Gendering National Imagination 81 submissive categories, calling for public action by criticizing the betrayal and cowardice of the weaker group. These two strategies, interestingly enough, appear to be gendered: Masculine and feminine, respectively. During the wartime, the Chinese power structure appeared divided. In the interior where the Chinese army was still engaged in the battlefield, the Nationalist Party “controlled” public propaganda, while the “progressive” intellectuals associated with the Communist Party, shielded by the United Front, infiltrated cultural production and sometimes criticized the Nationalists’ non-combative policy. However, in terms of mobilizing public morale, their practices manifest the same characteristic: They converged at creating male heroes. For example, from 1938 to 1940, Nationalist Party-sponsored film studios—China Film Studio (Zhongguo dianying zhipian chang—Zhong Zhi), Central Film Studio (Zhongyang dianying sheying chang—Zhong Dian) and Northwest Film Studio (Xibei yingye gongsi)—producing eighteen feature films and many other documentary films.7 While the documentary films were direct reflections of the war, the feature films aimed at exposing the brutal crime the Japanese waged to stimulate the fury of Chinese people, advocating the heroic spirit to fight against the enemy. Without examining the content of these films, one can get a glance at the central theme from their titles: Defend Our Land (Baowei women de tudi), Warm Blood and Faithful Souls (Rexue zhonghun), Eight hundred heroic soldiers (Babai zhuangshi), Defend Our Homeland (Bao jiaxiang), Victory March (Shengli jinxing qu), Baptism of Fire (Huo de xili), Young China (Qingnian Zhongguo), and Wind and Snow in the Taihang Mountains (Fengxue Taihang shan), etc. These films, in contrast to the melodramatic aesthetic tradition of early Chinese films that still dominated the screen in the contemporary Shanghai cinema, were committed to the spirit of social realism. On the one hand, from the perspective of film content, they were almost always based on real incidents that happened in the recent past. For example, Eight Hundred Heroic Soldiers (Babai zhuangshi) portrays the battle to defend Shanghai in 1937. Young China (Qingnian Zhongguo) screens the real activities of patriotic propaganda in Wuhan led by the Third Office of the Political Department (Zhengzhi bu di san ting). Similarly, Victory March (Shengli jinxing qu) recounts a great victory in North Hunan province. Other films portraying rural life are also based on real stories.8 These films, as Anderson suggested, worked on public morale by simultaneously emphasizing the hardship and sacrifice during the war and promising a triumphant future secured by such heroic national spirit. Fighting spirit is almost always embodied in male heroes who display strength, courage and correct 7 8 Li Daoxin, Zhongguo dianying shi, 1937–1945. Ibid. 82 Kun Qian judgment, whereas female characters are either the unconditional supporters of the male-centered revolutionary discourse, or the naive women in need of enlightenment. Once they are “awakened” or “enlightened” by nationalist discourse, they are willing to actively participate in the war of national salvation. As a result, women are usually “masculinized” in that their difference from men is veiled or erased. Critics have argued that within the communist discourse, women’s liberation was always tied with the liberation of the nation, so that the former was a means to the ends of the latter. This legacy of linking women’s liberation to the needs of the nation and state was to continue and expand in the Maoist era, so that the latter came to submerge the needs of women, and women’s concerns were endlessly deferred in favor of projects of nation building.9 During the Maoist era, gender difference was further erased to the extent that the female body was masculinized, hidden under the baggy army pants or working uniform.10 To trace back the origin of this legacy, the wartime films in the unoccupied interior display the beginning of woman’s masculinization on the screen. Accordingly, these films could be defined as “masculine” in the sense that characters who are ideologically correct, heroic, courageous, and male dominate the screen. However, this portrayal of masculinity differs from the celebration of able-bodied masculine strength; rather, it is more associated with what Christine DiStefano defined as “masculinity as a form of ideology,” 11 and “male-asnorm.”12 By contrast, in the “orphan island” Shanghai where the Chinese government had lost control and the cultural productions were subject to Japanese censorship, female leads became the prominent figures on stage or screen. On the surface, this could be seen as a continuation of earlier cultural practice, especially in film production, that constructs history and nationhood through a gendered discourse. As Sheldon Lu observed, in the progressive, left-wing film tradition before 1949, many films were produced to represent the plight of Chinese women. In fact, the theme of “modern women” in cinema has been tied to a series of weighty questions such as modernity, the spiritual health of the nation, and anti9 Lydia Liu, “Invention and Intervention: The Making of a Female Tradition in Modern Chinese Literature”; and “The Female Body and Nationalist Discourse: Manchuria in Xiao Hong’s Field of Life and Death.” 10 Mayfair Mei-hui Yang, “From gender Erasure to Gender Difference: State Feminism, Consumer Sexuality, and Women’s Public Sphere in China,” 40. 11 Christine DiStefano, Configuration of Masculinity: A Feminist Perspective on Modern Political Theory, 56–57. She argues that modern political theories (eg., Marxist theory) have masculine cognitive orientation, which either ignores women, belabors their differences from men so as to justify differential treatment, or attempts to turn them into little men. This cognitive orientation results in “masculinity as ideology” and “male-as-norm.” 12 Sheldon Hsiao-peng Lu, Transnational Chinese Cinemas: Identity, Nationhood, Gender, 31. Gendering National Imagination 83 imperialism. Thus, womanhood is often a trope for the nation, a national allegory.13 Or, one may argue that it is again the portrayal of resistance with women as a symbol of the repressed. The objectification and commercialization of the female body continue contributing to the decadent urban culture as in the early 1930s.14 However, the wartime representations differ from the earlier ones in at least two accounts. First, although films and plays before the War were also dominated by female leads, they were not comparable to wartime films in quantity.15 Second, the message conveyed from the female leads is different. While the female protagonists are mostly modern women representing the victims of feudal oppression in the 1920s and early 1930s, with their bodies being portrayed as the bearers of suffering and cruelty in a dehumanizing society,16 many female characters in “orphan island” Shanghai are nevertheless historical beauties or female warriors who manifest the consciousness of loyalty to the nation whenever it is under attack. Moreover, if we compare these productions with those of the unoccupied interior, and assume that most cultural products from the patriotic writers reflected their effort to boost public morale, then the gendered representation must have to do with the particular socio-political context. Perhaps, several factors could contribute to this feminine projection. First, under the intensive political censorship and deteriorating economic situation, writers and producers were forced to hide and soften their radical attitudes toward politics and war. Thus their attempt to boost morale had to be executed in a disguised fashion. As Poshek Fu argues, the wartime intellectuals in Shanghai found themselves confronted by the dilemma of the conflicting demands of private and public morality: On the one hand, survival, concerns for one’s family and pursuit of one’s own interest; on the other, patriotic commitment and dignity. As a result, wartime Shanghai exhibited a complexity and ambiguity of moral choices that could be seen as a “gray zone” of existence, in which the ambiguous response was only natural in an extreme situation of dehumanizing terror.17 In this sense, even the most “progressive” intellectuals appeared comparatively 13 Ibid., 20. Wendy Larson, “The Self Loving the Self: Men and Connoisseurship in Modern Chinese Literature.” She argues that in male literature from the 1920s, women were involved in various ways as objects of direct appreciation, the focus of male admiration and a means of male pleasure, yet women were also secondary and subservient to men in many ways. 15 Changtai Hung in War and Popular Culture: Resistance in Modern China, 1937–1945 states that “never before had such a large number of plays about female resistance fighters appeared,” due to the close relation between theater and cinema, I assume that the film industry had the same situation. 16 Sheldon Hsiao-peng Lu, Transnational Chinese Cinemas: Identity, Nationhood, Gender, 21. 17 Poshek Fu, Passivity, Resistance and Collaboration: Intellectuals Choices in Occupied Shanghai, 1937–1945, xiii−xiv. 14 84 Kun Qian moderate and passive. For those who were formerly associated with the “left,” writing and screening became a more subtle expression of their national ideal. Female leads and historical beauties more easily avoided the censorship of the Japanese and satisfied the pleasure-seeking desire of audience. Second, it could be seen as an involuntary projection of trauma, of intense shame and anger. Although the cultural policy of the Japanese had little effect on the already intimidated filmmakers,18 Japanese pressure claimed an omnipresent existence. This danger was most clearly manifested in the terrorism that eventually threatened the very existence of those intellectuals involved in resistance. For instance, Playwright Ouyang Yuqian once received a severed finger in an envelope coercing him to collaborate with Japanese.19 This kind of corporeal threat, of course, was a power apparatus targeting affect, a counter-morale strategy the Japanese employed to induce fear and submission. However, as Sara Ahmad suggested, affects are also contingent: “to be affected by another does not mean that an affect simply passes or ‘leaps’ from one body to another. The affect becomes an object only given the contingency of how we are affected, or only as an effect of how objects are given.”20 In other words, the effect of the affect is conditioned by how we are “programmed” psychologically and emotionally in the first place. For many Chinese who had been imbued with strong sentiments of nationalism and patriotism, personal terror could only evoke shame and anger. Shame because the gesture of symbolic rape reminded one of his inability and the rape of the nation by the Japanese; anger because many male compatriots were indeed threatened and became collaborative. On a different emotive register, this intense feeling of shame and anger nonetheless turned inward the highly-charged, antagonistic, nationalistic sentiments toward the colonial Other, to dramatize the inadequacy of the Self, leading to a critical imagination of national subjectivity and identity. Indeed, if endurance, resistance, and triumph characterized the emotional tones of the war propaganda in the hinterland, shame and anger nevertheless motivated the cultural production in Shanghai. Writing and screening, as a means to express individual emotions and mobilize public morale, hence, appeared as what Deleuze called “subjective disposition,” “the force through which the images are projected as inseparably political, erotic, and artistic.”21 18 In 1937 the Japanese command summoned the managers of all film companies, distributors as well as producers, to announce that all films must be submitted to them for examination and approval, but it had little effect on the filmmakers. See Jay Leyda, Dianying: Account of Films and the Film Audience in China, 140. 19 Ouyang Jingru, Huiyi fuqin Ouyang Yuqian. 20 Sara Ahmed, “Happy Objects,” 36. 21 Gilles Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, 118. Cited in Elspeth Probyn, “Writing Shame,” 78. Gendering National Imagination 85 The subjective is not just individual or psychological, but is deeply connected to the context in which the writer lived and wrote.22 Shame and anger, as both ideas and affects, then prompted the writers to focus less on creating a collectivity than on addressing the “lack” of male ability and integrity. Female figures, as a result, took the central stage and embodied national imagination in a romantic and family setting. Paul Pickowicz once described a cinematic phenomenon in postwar Shanghai that puzzled him: Given the highly patriarchal norms of Chinese society in the mid-twentieth century, it is striking to see the extent to which cultural decency, wartime strength, and anticolonialism are gendered female in these films, all of which were written and directed by men. Similarly, it is surprising to see the extent to which cultural degeneration, weakness under wartime conditions, and the failure to resist colonialism are gendered male. … men are irresponsible and unpredictable, while women are strong and capable.23 While Pickowicz did not provide an explanation for this occurrence, it seems reasonable to assume that postwar Shanghai cinema continued the wartime practice, and two powerful emotions still motivated such gendered representation in male producers—shame and anger. Female Leads: Writing Shame and Anger There was a long established view among modern Chinese intellectuals that Chinese culture was feminine compared to Western counterparts. In fact, the stigma of being effeminate, and thus not fully “civilized,” had registered in the intellectuals’ consciousness since the late Qing period, and motivated their practice in pursuing modernity and building a modern nation. Scholars have stated that in history, women’s status has been regarded as an index of the degree of civilization. The assumption was that there was a “ladder” of social development, and women’s position served as an indicator of what rung that society occupied.24As Sanjay Seth pointed out, in the early 19th century, Scottish enlightenment thinker John Millar had already argued that “as societies progressed from ‘ignorance to knowledge, and from rude to civilized manners,’ the position of women improved accordingly, from being virtual slaves of men to 22 Elspeth Probyn, “Writing Shame,” 79. Paul Pickowicz, “Victory as Defeat: Postwar Visualization of China’s War of Resistance,” 389. 24 Sanjay Seth, “Nationalism, Modernity, and the ‘Women Question’ in India and China,” 274. 23 86 Kun Qian being their ‘friends and companions.’” 25 In other words, the more exalted women were, the more civilized a society was. Accepting this gendered logic of civilization, non-Western countries have to various extents worked to improve women’s condition on their way toward modernity. Chinese intellectuals also took women’s status as a site of anxiety and activity in order to transform their society. However, the gendered discussion about civilization did not stop at women in the Chinese context. Still taking a male-centered point of view, intellectuals saw femininity as a less favorable trait shared by both men and women in China that signified the “backwardness” of Chinese civilization. Chinese men were not only blamed for their degradation and suppression of women, but they themselves were also seen as the victims of Confucian teachings which privileged “civil” (wen) over “martial” (wu) qualities of a man. As a result, intellectuals lamented, Chinese men lacked the masculinity required to confront Western militant modernity.26 As early as the turn of the 20th century when Liang Qichao was in exile in Japan, he witnessed a ritualistic recruitment of soldiers on the street. The Japanese people’s enthusiasm for the glory of war made him ponder the difference between the militant Japanese and the pacific Chinese. He later attributed China’s weakness to a lack of military spirit, agreeing in essence with a Japanese scholar’s view about China as an effeminate nation.27 Similarly, in the postscript of his historical plays Three Rebellious Women written in the 1920s, Guo Moruo stated that, compared with Western men, Chinese men were almost all feminine: “Our Chinese people’s subjection to suspicion, jealousy, laziness, subservience, dependence, attention to trivial matters, gossiping, lack of concern for national affairs outside of family affairs, and lack of concern for society beyond oneself, are all feminine traits. Aren’t all these feminine qualities also apparent in men? …The male-centered morality first turned women into Chimpanzees, then turned men into women. A country like ours can really be called ‘motherly’! [Backward] as such, how could we still be content with degeneration and not think of self salvation?”28 Regardless of the gender hierarchy they set up, the inferiority complex tied with gender identification reveals the feeling of “lack” in male intellectuals. Or more precisely, the discovery of a gendered quality in Chinese culture under the 25 Millar’s argument was made in 1806. Cited in Sanjay Seth, “Nationalism, Modernity, and the ‘Women Question’ in India and China,” 274. 26 Wendy Larson, “The Self Loving the Self: Men and Connoisseurship in Modern Chinese Literature,” 177. 27 Xiaobing Tang, Global Space and the Nationalist Discourse of Modernity: The Historical Thinking of Liang Qichao, 15. 28 Guo Moruo, “Xie zai San ge panni de nüxing houmian,” 137. Gendering National Imagination 87 internalized Western gaze prompted the intellectuals to take a subjective position, as cultural brokers, to dissect national flaws embodied in Chinese men and women. This gendered sensitivity, intrinsic in the emergence of Chinese nationalism, was motivated by what Jing Tsu characterized as the sense of “failure”: “The articulations of Chinese cultural and national identity relied on a self-awareness that thrived not on affirmation but on self-reproach and negativity…. The mode of failure motivates every search for that positive image of the self and the nation.”29 This mode of failure, ironically, was transformed into a productive force that mobilized the remaking of Chinese men and women. Accompanying the iconoclastic attack on the Confucian family institution, one result of the May Fourth Movement is the discovery of “women” in general, and the discovery of “rebellious women” in particular, reincorporating them into the projects of enlightenment and modern nation building. The effect, as discussed above, turned out to be the “masculinization” of women and the erasure of gender difference in later practices, especially during the war and Maoist periods. In this light, if we take the “masculine” portrayal of the war in the interior as an effective way of overcoming inferiority and boosting morale in a “total war” situation, transitioning from “self-reproach” to “affirmation” of Chinese culture; the “feminine” representation in Shanghai nevertheless continues the May Fourth tradition and exhibits intensified shame and anger, apparent in the heartfelt identification with strong female figures. Indeed, at no other time than wartime did militant masculinity become the most desirable quality, the lack of which could only exacerbate the existing shame. In “orphan island” Shanghai, the dominance of female leads was not only symptomatic of the social context that sought to abide by the “pleasure principle” and evade censorship,30 but also an affective expression of male writers’ shame and their sense of failure. Among the righteous female figures, historical beauties and women warriors were the main focus of attention. These included the famous historical beauties Xi Shi and Diao Chan, who were persuaded to offer themselves as the bait in a “beauty trap” in order to save their country, as well as Li Xiangjun and Ge Nenniang, the virtuous courtesans who refused to surrender to the foreign invaders until death, and Hua Mulan and Hong Xuanjiao, the female warriors who courageously defended their country from outside invasion. The accounts of these well-known historical women on the one hand overcame male incompetence and betrayal; on the other hand, they were reintroduced in family 29 Jing Tsu, Failure, Nationalism, and Literature: The Making of Modern Chinese Identity, 1895–1937, 226. 30 Li Daoxin, Zhongguo dianying shi 1937–1945, 172. Li stated that many historical films were characterized by “progressive” critics as being “poisonous” and “mesmerizing,” only aiming to make a profit and appealing to the indecent tastes (diji quwei) of the audience. Kun Qian 88 settings, and these foundational families served as an affective site for the imagination of the nation. Li Xiangjun: Shameful Love In the late 1930s, Ouyang Yuqian wrote a Peking opera Peach Blossom Fan and a film script Mulan Joins the Army. While both stories originated from classical literature, the famous late Ming courtesan Li Xiangjun and the Northern Wei woman warrior Hua Mulan nonetheless had little in common in history. Yet in Ouyang’s scripts, both women stand up for the “nation,” in their unique ways, and the private space of the family appears to be the public space to defend the country. The author seems to suggest that, for a woman, there is nothing more shameful than falling for an undeserving man, and there is no stronger feeling of pride than fighting for your country. Peach Blossom Fan was adapted from the early Qing dramatist Kong Shangren’s opera of the same title. For the popularity of the story, the play has been adapted numerous times in multiple media—in different folk operas, stage plays, and films, centering on an (anti)romantic story of a scholar and a beauty. Ouyang Yuqian’s script was used in a Peking opera in Shanghai and a Gui opera in Guilin during the wartime, and both were banned shortly after the operas were performed. The same script later was revised into a stage play in 1946 and a film in 1963.31 Even though there are minor differences in the portrayal of the supporting character Yang Wencong in different adaptations, Ouyang’s script by and large depicts a black and white world in which a girl becomes the most righteous hero. It situates the love story of the renowned courtesan Li Xiangjun and the literati scholar Hou Chaozong in the chaotic transition of the Ming to the Qing dynasty. What could be a scholar-beauty stereotype is thereby framed in and dramatized by the fateful events wherein romantic love is tested, not only through the lover’s (unconditional) commitment to each other, but also through one’s righteousness and loyalty to the country. Consequently, it is more of a political drama than a romance saga. Hou Chaozong is an influential leader of the late Ming political association, Fu She, literally Revival Society, which is constituted by righteous literati scholars who hope to revitalize the Ming from its decline and who take the former dominant eunuch Wei Zhongxian and his followers as their enemies. During his temporary stay in Nanjing, Hou asks his artist friend Yang Wencong to introduce him to a high-class brothel well known for the celebrated courtesan 31 Ouyang Yuqian, Preface to Taohua shan (Peking Opera), 1–2. Gendering National Imagination 89 Li Xiangjun. As in other typical scholar-beauty encounters, Hou and Xiangjun fall in love at first sight. However, Hou lacks the expensive dowry to pay for Xiangjun’s precious first time to fulfill his desire. To his delight, Yang Wencong offers to take care of the dowry, which, as later revealed to both Xiangjun and Hou, comes from Ruan Dacheng, former follower of the eunuch Wei Zhongxian. Though Ruan is now an unemployed man, Hou and most reform-minded young scholars despise him. Trapped in this embarrassing web of desire and moral obligations, Hou hesitates on how to treat Ruan afterwards. It is Xiangjun who, considering herself as an intellectual companion of Hou’s, rescues Hou from his awkward situation and saves his reputation as an untainted scholar. Xiangjun resolutely returns the gift that Ruan offers and disparages Ruan’s character as a corrupt running dog, consequently planting the seed of resentment in Ruan. After the Chongzhen Emperor hangs himself in Beijing and the new emperor sets up a temporary government in Nanjing, Ruan resumes power through the new minister. He takes every opportunity to slander Hou Chaozong and his fellow Fu She friends, forcing Hou into exile. The young couple is thus separated by the unavoidable political turmoil: The vulnerable Southern Ming regime, while facing the double threat from both the subversive peasant rebellion and the Manchu army’s aggressive advance, remains corrupt and divided, foreshadowing the fall of the Ming. Against this imposing backdrop, individuals’ choices reflect in every sense both the rigidity of morality and flexibility in recognizing the practical situation for survival. In the wartime plays, writers all devoted themselves to dramatizing the rigidity and integrity of morality, or in Haiyan Lee’s terms, the “virtue of constancy,”32 in the hope that if everyone is righteous and dedicated, the historical trend would be in favor of the Chinese. Exemplary figures are used as the sites for attempts to create relationships between the individual and the public space of political action. In Peach Blossom Fan, the rigidity of morality is embodied on the girl Li Xiangjun, in contrast to the wavering male character Hou Chaozong and the double-faced flatterer Yang Wencong. After Hou leaves, Ruan Dacheng seeks to give Xiangjun away as a present to another powerful official. Determined to stay loyal to Hou, Xiangjun refuses to be transferred to someone else. At the moment when the bridal sedan chair arrives to fetch Xiangjun, she knocks her head against the wall, splashing blood on the fan Hou Chaozong has given her as a symbol of love. Xiangjun’s chastity and determination shock the second-time matchmaker Yang Wencong and move the people around her in the pleasure quarter. With a simple substitution trick, Xiangjun’s adoptive mother, the madam running the brothel, Li Zhenli, then dresses up like Xiangjun and takes the sedan 32 Haiyan Lee, Revolution of the Heart: A Genealogy of Love in China, 1900–1950, 68. 90 Kun Qian chair. Inspired by Xiangjun’s willingness to shed blood to demonstrate her loyalty, Yang Wencong paints peach blossoms on the fan based on the pattern of the bloodstain. In the end, the Qing army occupies Nanjing and Xiangjun, now sheltered in a convent, continues looking for Hou Chaozong. When this couple eventually reunites in a monastery, Xiangjun discovers that Hou has become a submissive subject of the Qing who has sought to pursue a political career through the civil service exam. Astounded by Hou’s betrayal of the Ming Empire, she refuses to follow him home. A frail girl suffering chronic illness, and now seized by overwhelming disillusionment, Xiangjun loses her will to live and collapses in Hou’s presence. It is noteworthy that in adapting the play, Ouyang Yuqian changed the ending of the story. In the original play by Kong Shangren, both Xiangjun and Hou Chaozong are saddened by the fact that the Ming Empire has fallen and their home has vanished, so they decide to give up all secular attachments. Xiangjun becomes a nun and Hou follows the monks to the mountains. Needless to say, the change of Hou’s character in Ouyang’s script mirrors the collaboration of “traitors” during the War of Resistance to Japan. Ouyang Yuqian deliberately contrasts the characters of Li Xiangjun and Hou Chaozong, of righteous, ordinary people represented by musicians and courtesans with corrupt, flattering officials and literati scholars, dramatizing the good and the evil, integrity and dishonesty, loyalty and betrayal. Ouyang Yuqian once admitted that he intended to expose and criticize those intellectuals who were of two faces and two minds, holding a never failing philosophy of life during the war period. “I specially praised the righteousness and integrity of courtesans and musicians, exemplified by Li Xiangjun and Liu Jingting,” said Ouyang Yuqian. “For those who are duplicitous and traitorous, I attacked them ruthlessly. There were many such educated people at the time [wartime]. They wavered in their positions according to the change of situations, practicing their life philosophy of ‘offending no one.’” 33 Yang Wencong thus represented the double-faced Chinese, while Hou Chaozong mirrored the submissive collaborators during the wartime. In fact, both Yang Wencong and Hou Chaozong could be seen as representatives of what Wendy Larson called literati “connoisseurs” whom modern writers have tried to criticize and distance themselves from.34 Hou’s love for Xiangjun is no more than the superficial appreciation of her beauty as an image of delicacy, as a sexualized prize within ritualized practices of male literati convention, and as a toy or pawn “within social, psychological, or 33 Ouyang Yuqian, preface to Taohua shan, 1. Also in Ouyang Yuqian yanjiu ziliao, 133. Wendy Larson, “The Self Loving the Self: Men and Connoisseurship in Modern Chinese Literature.” 34 Gendering National Imagination 91 literary games.”35 In particular, Yang Wencong’s artistic talent turns out to be a heartless exploitation of Xiangjun’s predicament. His eroticized connoisseurship thus transforms the suffering of the weak into the aestheticized pleasure and playful display of the powerful. The combination of aesthetic connoisseurship with lack of moral integrity constitutes what Liang Qiachao and Guo Moruo despised as “effeminate men.” By contrast, a delicate, fragile beauty’s uprightness appears more powerful, highlighting men’s weakness and flaws, arousing men’s feeling of shame and anxiety. On the other hand, Xiangjun’s love to Hou exceeds the scope of an ordinary romance. It is conditioned upon the wellbeing of the country and Hou’s loyalty to the country. In both Kong Shangren’s and Ouyang’s versions, the romance is meant less to form a conjugal bond as the basis of a family, than to build a foundational unit for the empire or the nation. The relationship of the romance, the family, and the country is most vividly displayed in the peach blossom fan, the love symbol that moves the narrative forward. Throughout the play, the fan is the essential motif whose repeated appearance suggests layered significance associated with different inscriptions. The first inscription is Hou Chaozong’s poetry, an all-too-familiar instrument in the scholar-beauty stories. It signifies Hou the connoisseur’s admiration, not necessarily commitment, to Xiangjun, yet obviously received by Xiangjun as a life-long obligation that deserves to be protected with her life. The second layer of inscription is Xiangjun’s blood, which endows the fan with the most celebrated virtues of a “good” woman—chastity, loyalty, dignity, unwavering devotion, indifference to the lure of material benefit and most of all, love, virtues that are against the stereotype of a prostitute who is generally regarded as shameless public property. The third layer, the peach blossom, indicates the social recognition of Xiangjun’s virtues and her self-identification as Hou’s lawful wife, thus incorporating her into a family structure, even though she is still living in the brothel. To say it implies social recognition is because Yang Wencong is indeed touched by Xiangjun’s fierce determination and goes along with the substitution plan. Although the painting of the peach blossom exhibits the literati connoisseur’s playful display of his artistic talent, it also manifests his prediction of the future of such a conjugal bond—an ephemeral, vulnerable destiny symbolized by the peach blossom. Lastly, after all these layers of inscription, the fan “travels” from Xiangjun to Hou Chaozong, reminding him of his promises and reinforcing his desire to take Xiangjun back home. However, in the end, when the reunited Xiangjun and Hou Chaozong once again appreciate the fan and reflect on its experience, Xiangjun chooses to reject the idea of the 35 Ibid., 176. Kun Qian 92 family. Kong Shangren’s play on the whole manifests the Confucian homology between family and empire. For without a legitimate country (guo), a family would lose its legitimate foundation, thereby prompting both Xiangjun and Hou to decide to withdraw from society to denounce the Qing government. Here the play takes an anti-romantic turn, and love is not only incorporated into the conjugal relationship within the family structure, but also woven into the homology between family and empire—it is by and large sublimated as ultimate loyalty, almost emptied of attraction and desire, and the rejection of a family reunion articulates the rejection of the new political regime. In this light, Ouyang Yuqian’s opera concerns less a regime’s legitimacy than an individual’s integrity. Family is still an important avenue through which to define an individual’s identity and on which to base the nation, but the rejection of the family is first triggered by Hou’s disloyalty that submerges the concern for the legitimacy of the regime. Specifically, Xiangjun’s death on seeing Hou instead of withdrawing from society more powerfully articulates the transcendent value of morality, not only to denounce the illegitimate regime, but also to demonstrate that death is the only way to maintain her integrity to love both Hou and the country when Hou betrays that country. Loyalty to the “nation” constitutes the first-order virtue among all virtues, and death carries with it the pervasive power of morality that mobilizes the living to continue the struggle. It is crucial to note that Kong Shangren’s play was written in the early Qing when the Qing dynasty had succeeded the Ming. Therefore, for the late Ming survivors, emphasizing rigid loyalty to the corrupt and already fallen Ming regime is less meaningful than calling for disengagement from the current regime. After all, Kong’s intention was to “borrow the sentiments of separation and reunion to describe the feelings for the rise and fall of the empire.” Nevertheless, Ouyang Yuqian’s adaptation was written right after the war broke out in 1937. Obviously, different social contexts bring about different concerns for the ending of the story. The contrast between Xiangjun and Hou carries the importance of morality to a gendered extreme. If a woman would rather die than marry a submissive collaborator, the man should really be ashamed of himself. Historically, Hou Chaozong mostly led a reclusive life after he reluctantly took the civil service exam. He changed the name of his study into “zhuang hui tang” (the hall of midlife regret), and died at age 37 with shame and regret.36 Ouyang Yuqian externalized this shame through a woman’s disappointed gaze and voice, expressing profound anger toward submissive intellectuals. Regardless whether his play is faithful to history, a topic that caught critics’ attention after the play 36 Liu Zhijian, “Ye tan Hou Fangyu de ‘chujia’ wenti,” 335. Gendering National Imagination 93 was published,37 Ouyang’s play imparts an updated “poetic justice” in the war period. Hua Mulan: The Return of the Foundational Family The emotionally strong yet physically frail Xiangjun offers a counterpart to the woman warrior Hua Mulan. Western audiences are probably familiar with this legendary character from the Disney animated film version: A girl dressed up like a man joins the army to fulfill her father’s military duty. After twelve years of disguise, she has won countless battles at the border and the emperor appoints her to a high rank in the military. In the end when the emperor intends to betroth “him” with a wife, she reveals her real identity and asks to go home to take care of her aging parents. This Northern Wei tale has become the source of many cultural productions. In 1939, Ouyang Yuqian was asked to write a film script to bring Mulan’s character onto the screen. Directed by Bu Wancang, the movie Mulan congjun (Mulan joins the army) achieved unprecedented success. It created a record for screening for eighty-five days straight in Shanghai, and the leading actress Chen Yunshang became a megastar overnight because of this film (Fig. 1). Fig. 1 Mulan in Her Masculine Armor In the film, Mulan’s masculine demeanor and martial skills are sufficiently presented. Horse riding, superb archery, handsome armor, and deliberately performed male posture, all constitute the image of a heroic woman warrior. Yet on the other hand, Mulan’s feminine beauty has never been sunk in oblivion; 37 Refer to Liu Zhijian, “Ye tan Hou Fangyu de chujia wenti”; Huang Qingquan, “Cong lishi de zhenshi dao yishu de zhenshi.” Kun Qian 94 instead, it is repeatedly accentuated throughout the film. In the beginning, Mulan appears to be the girl next door who loves singing, hunting, and helping other people. She was obviously attractive, for boys in the neighborhood never give up an opportunity to flirt with her, tease her, and even bully her to get her attention. Yet it is shown that her beauty arrests them, her martial skills surpass them, and her brain outwits them. In the army, the fellow soldiers also comment on “his” fine skin. They joke about “his” delicate figure that won’t overpower burglars or ferocious animals, or “his” name “hua” (literarily, flower) really fits “his” refined looks (Fig. 2). After Mulan convincingly displays her martial superiority and indeed gives them a lesson, they whisper indecently behind her back about Mulan’s refusal to wash her feet in public. Even after Mulan has been promoted to a higher rank, they still express their jealousy with such nasty comments as, “he is so bewitching, like a woman,” or “fortunately he is a man. Otherwise, I could not resist [her charm].” Even Liu Yuandu, the seemingly righteous friend and later the subordinate officer of Mulan, cannot help but be enchanted by her beauty. At a time when, to get more information from the enemy, Mulan decides to disguise as a woman to spy on the enemy’s camp, “her” beauty immediately mesmerizes Liu Yuandu. On the way to reconnoiter, he keeps joking with her that they look like a couple. Mulan feels uneasy under his stare, so she commands him go away and reconnoiter separately. After Yuandu leaves, the camera shifts to fix a medium close-up of Mulan standing upon the broad desert watching his back, with a romantic and sentimental music playing in the background. In the exotic Turkish clothing, Mulan’s femininity is accentuated at this critical moment, since it for the first time reveals her gentleness and sentiment once hit by love. Fig. 2 Fellow Soldier Teases Mulan Undeniably, the combination of both the feminine and masculine beauty of Mulan in the film is an essential tactic to attract the audience. Like the upright Li Xiangjun, Hua Mulan’s character seems to suggest that, if a woman can be a Gendering National Imagination 95 warrior, why cannot a man? On the other hand, the accentuation of Mulan’s feminine charm appeals to voyeuristic male desire, tapping eroticism into the nationalistic discourse. As Shengqing Wu astutely asserted, the idealized and eroticized representations of legendary women embody “a certain tension or complexity between the film based on a moral and lofty subject empowered by the nationalist discourse and the market-oriented exploitation of overtly sensual themes.” 38 “The female body became the site for predominantly male-led discourses on nationalism and eroticism, in which the female embodiment of the nation bound private desire and passion with public, collective discourse.”39The masculinized woman, hence, at once continues the theme of women’s emancipation emphasized during the May Fourth Movement, and pre-figures the socialist turn of constructing a female subject subsumed by a collective national subject. At the end of the film, Mulan refuses the emperor’s promotion, asking to go back home to fulfill filial duty. Granted, she returns home and reveals her female identity. With both her parents and fellow soldiers’ blessing, she marries Liu Yuandu to give audiences a cathartic grand reunion. It is noteworthy that family and empire undergo a slight twist in the film. In the original tale, filial piety is the motivation for Mulan to join the army and go back home. In the film, however, Mulan puts loyalty to the empire ahead of her filial duty to parents. At the farewell dinner before she leaves home, Mulan expresses her gratitude and hope to the family members: She thanks father for teaching her martial arts and the idea of being a patriotic subject; she thanks mother for cultivating her to become a useful person for the empire; she thanks elder sister for taking care of their parents when she is away; and she tells little brother to study hard so that someday he will become a hero. It seems like a mobilizing meeting that stages the family as the source of Mulan’s determination and success in the battlefield. By the same token, at the end of the film, Mulan’s marriage not only indicates her return to home after fulfilling the obligation to the country, but also suggests that the entire family, now including Liu Yuandu, has become a unit ready for mobilization whenever needed. In another version of Mulan’s story by Zhou Yibai, the ending is rather different. In 1940, Zhou Yibai wrote a play titled Hua Mulan, in which the emperor discovers Mulan’s beauty after she reveals her sex, so he invites her into his harem. Mulan refuses and the emperor offers two options—harem or decapitation. At the moment when Mulan prepares to die and the ax is about to fall a messenger arrives with the report of another outbreak of fighting. A wise official suggests to 38 Shengqing Wu, “Gendering the Nation: The Proliferation of Images of Zhen Fei (1876–1900) and Sai Jinhua (1872–1936) in Late Qing and Republican China,” 29. 39 Ibid., 64. Kun Qian 96 the emperor that Mulan be commissioned to lead the army in a campaign, to which Mulan agrees, on condition that she be allowed to return home after the campaign is finished. 40 Zhou’s play, in addition to dramatizing Mulan’s outstanding ability, criticizes the emperor as a corrupt, lascivious, and thus illegitimate ruler. The war is the condition for Mulan’s surviving the emperor’s clutches, and Mulan and her army are the condition for the survival of the empire. It is nothing unique in wartime historical representation for writers to alter an image of a historical personality or freely single out a time period in a hero’s life to eschew the tragic or unfavorable ending of an event. Ouyang Yuqian’s portrayal of Hou Chaozong and Zhou Yibai’s depiction of the emperor in Mulan’s story both demonstrate the ideological contingency in a discursive historical moment that obscures historical truth. In the name of “borrowing history to mirror reality,” intellectuals favored the present over the past, a literary practice that is most notably theorized by Guo Moruo who, in 1942, made an assertion of “pursuing the similarity at the expense of the facts” in historical representation.41 Thus the historical representations are nothing other than the symptomatic artifacts of the war period, through which we could view the contemporary public sphere of heterogeneous concerns. In this light, whereas Zhou challenged the legitimacy of a regime (also with shame and anger), Ouyang Yuqian emphasized the function of family and the centrality of women in a foundational family. “Foundational family” is a term coined by Doris Sommer to describe the marriage between eros and polis in the romance novels of 19th-century Latin America. Turning away from a European tradition of love triangles that typically lead to tragic endings, Sommer observed, Latin American romances usually depict unbridled passions in which the success or failure of lovers mirrors the political fortunes of the nation.42 By the same token, the union or separation between the lovers in Ouyang Yuqian’s plays also projects the ultimate blueprint of the nation, in which productive romance functions as the imaginary force that grounds the (ideal) nation. Whereas Li Xiangjun’s rejection of the family is to defy the immoral husband and the illegitimate ruler, Mulan’s marriage suggests a foundational family that produces quality subjects for the nation. In wartime Shanghai, Mulan’s grand reunion could be a mesmerizing pill to brighten the suffocating atmosphere, or to satisfy the much-needed “pleasure principle” against outside oppressive terror. Yet perhaps its success for the most part is evidence of the positive mobilizing effect, the rhetorical function of a historical tale—that if everybody, including women, 40 41 42 Edward Gunn, Unwelcome Muse, 125–26. Guo Moruo, “Lishi, shiju, xianshi,” 501. Doris Sommer, Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America. Gendering National Imagination 97 is prepared to be a warrior, people should be confident that eventually they will win the war. Indeed, in “Orphan Island” Shanghai when people faced the moral dilemma between personal survival and one’s patriotic obligation to the nation, an intact family with upbeat fighting spirit would help them cultivate confidence and patience to wait for the victory. The personal intimidation that Ouyang Yuqian received seems only to have strengthened his spirit of resistance. A woman warrior is thus employed to disguise his resistance, and once again, to shame the inaction of men. As he explained in his autobiography many years later, “I intended to write a tragedy portraying her as a woman fighting against feudalism. But in order to promote the cause of resistance and to arouse the morale of the people, I stressed instead her courage and wisdom.”43 For him, it seems that as long as the Chinese eliminated traitors from within and everybody prepared to be a warrior, they would welcome victory in the end. The audience also responded favorably to the film: “It is not escape from reality, but a new strategy of reinforcing the weapon of film,” for the historical figures are infused with “the new life associated with this great time.”44 “The new life associated with this great time,” it seems, includes the return of the foundational family in national imagination during the war period. In the May Fourth era, Ouyang Yuqian also published a historical play Pan Jinlian (Pan Ch’in-lien), portraying this archetypal adulteress and murderer as a victim of patriarchal society and her socioeconomic condition.45 The rebellious Jinlian suffers attempted rape from her master, lack of passion for her dwarf husband, blunt rejection from her beloved brother-in-law, and playful toying by her rich lover. It seems that she has every reason to avenge her unfortunate fate against feudal society, even if by self-destructive means. Like other writers at the time, Ouyang Yuqian followed the spirit of the May Fourth to depict family as an embellished cage confining women, and advocated individual freedom from the Confucian family system. However, the War of Resistance to Japan brought back the value of a unified family, and writers once again engaged themselves in the practice of reincorporating family as a productive unit into the projects of national defense and nation building. Conclusion In the “total war” situation of the War of Resistance to Japan while the survival of the “nation” was at stake, how may we understand the gendered representation 43 44 45 Ouyang Yuqian, Dianying banlu chujia ji, 36. See Cheng Jihua, Zhongguo dianying fazhan shi, 195. Ouyang Yuqian (Ou-yang Yu-Ch’ien), “Pan Chin-lien,” 52–75. Kun Qian 98 of Chinese nationhood? While both the government and patriotic cultural elites tried to boost public morale to counteract the colonial terror and threat, why did the resistance in Japanese-occupied Shanghai appear “feminine” as opposed to the “masculine” portrayal of resistance in the unoccupied hinterland? Taking affect in a “total war” situation as the point of departure, this essay argues that, whereas the Chinese state effectively targeted the morale of the public as a site of activity to construct a masculine collectivity, the cultural elites in Shanghai mostly focused on addressing shame and anger encountering the colonial Other. Ouyang Yuqian’s play and film script offered two examples to tackle the question of women, family, and nation during the wartime. Xiangjun and Mulan’s feminine image foils the incompetence and unworthiness of men, rekindling the shameful observation of earlier intellectuals that Chinese culture was effeminate in comparison with the West. Moreover, the centrality of women reincorporates love and family in the national imagination. Xiangjun’s rejection of love and family not only serves to shame the undeserving men, but also puts the nation before private romance. As Haiyan Lee pointed out, love is introduced “as equivalent with and subordinate to patriotism, that is, as supplement.46 The “supplementary” love and “subordinate” family are most vividly manifested in the film Mulan Joins the Army. As an ideal combination of femininity and masculinity, Mulan brings the foundational family back to the foreground of national defense, prefiguring the more masculinized women revolutionaries in later literature to join the collective effort of national building. References Ahmed, Sara. “Happy Objects.” In The Affect Theory Reader, edited by Melissa Greg and Gregory Seigworth. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010. 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