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Article
Cultural “Authenticity” as a Conflict-Ridden
Hypotext: Mulan(1998),Mulan Joins the Army(1939),
and a Millennium-Long Intertextual Metamorphosis
Zhuoyi Wang Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures, Hamilton College, Clinton, NY 13323, USA; zwang@hamilton
Received: 6 June 2020; Accepted: 7 July 2020; Published: 10 July 2020
Abstract: Disney’sMulan(1998) has generated much scholarly interest in comparing the film with its hypotext: the Chinese legend of Mulan. While this comparison has produced meaningful criticism of the Orientalism inherent in Disney’s cultural appropriation, it often ironically perpetuates the Orientalist paradigm by reducing the legend into a unified, static entity of the “authentic” Chinese “original”. This paper argues that the Chinese hypotext is an accumulation of dramatically conflicting representations of Mulan with no clear point of origin. It analyzes the Republican-era film adaptation Mulan Joins the Army(1939) as a cultural palimpsest revealing attributes associated with different stages of the legendary figure’s millennium-long intertextual metamorphosis, including a possibly nomadic woman warrior outside China proper, a Confucian role model of loyalty and filial piety, a Sinitic deity in the Sino-Barbarian dichotomy, a focus of male sexual fantasy, a Neo-Confucian exemplar of chastity, and modern models for women established for antagonistic political agendas. Similar to the previous layers of adaptation constituting the hypotext, Disney’sMulanis simply another hypertext continuing Mulan’s metamorphosis, and it by no means contains the most dramatic intertextual change. Productive criticism of Orientalist cultural appropriations, therefore, should move beyond the dichotomy of the static East versus the change-making West, taking full account of the immense hybridity and fluidity pulsing beneath the fallacy of a monolithic cultural “authenticity”.
Keywords: Mulan; adaptation; Disney; Orientalism; cultural authenticity; cultural palimpsest; Chinese cinema
1. Introduction In 1993, Disney animators encountered an impasse while working on a short feature called China Doll, a cliché-ridden story about a miserable Chinese girl rescued by a British Prince Charming. They turned to the Chinese legend of Mulan for inspiration (Whipp 1998). The earliest written record of the household legend is the anonymousBallad of Mulan(Mulan ciorMulan shi, henceforthBallad), which scholars generally agree began circulating during the Northern Wei Dynasty (386–534 CE) (e.,Hu 1928;Yu 1953;Lu and Feng 1956;You 1991;Liu 1997). Balladcharacterizes Mulan as a courageous daughter. When her father is drafted into the military, she enlists in his stead, and takes to the battlefield in a uniform which conceals her gender. After a valiant ten-year tour of duty, the emperor attempts to recognize her achievement by appointing her to a high official position. However, Mulan decides to reassume the role of an ordinary woman upon returning home. Her fellow soldiers are startled when she presents herself as a female, a departure from her previous mode of dress, hairstyle, and makeup (Anonymous 1979). The legend inspired the creation of a new model for a Disney heroine in the filmMulan(dirs. Tony Bancroft and Barry Cook, 1998). Mulanmarked a departure from the standard model of a
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Disney heroine who passively awaits a prince’s deliverance. In the film, Mulan is an independent and resourceful warrior who uses her intellect to surpass her male allies and overcome her male adversaries. Thanks to this change, the film successfully cashed in on the turn to “girl power” in the Western-dominated pop culture of the 1990s, and was internationally acclaimed for breaking the stereotypical female mold in mass media (e.,Labi 1998;Chan 2002;Nguyen 2008). As critics have pointed out, however,Mulan’s progressiveness is seriously hampered by its reassertion of Western supremacy. Throughout the film, Mulan acts as a surrogate for commonly perceived Western values, such as individualism and independence, fighting to find her “true self” against restrictions imposed by a centuries-old “Chinese” patriarchy. Ironically, her apparently feminist struggle fits well into the cultural-imperialist agenda of “saving brown women from brown men” (Spivak 1993). While not incarnated inMulanas an actual British Prince Charming, the commonly perceived Western values play the role of a savior whisking away this imagined ancient Chinese girl from her own repressive culture. Such feminism (or pseudo-feminism, as some critics call it) is particularly non-threatening to white male audiences, as it projects contemporary Western mainstream values as timeless and righteous, reducing gender oppression to the exclusive problem of non-Western cultures (Maio 1998;Ma 2003;Limbach 2013;Yin 2014). Resisting this racial and cultural hegemony, scholars have turned to the Chinese legend of Mulan in an attempt to demarginalize oppressed narratives, memories, and imaginations. Many scholars have insightfully revealed how Disney’s adaptation interpolated its stereotypical imaginings of Chinese culture into the Mulan story in order to inject it into a Western frame (Mo and Shen 2000;Djao 2002; Sun 2003;Wang and Yeh 2005;Peng 2005;Yin 2014). Such efforts at demarginalization, however, are usually flawed, owing to the general underestimation of the complexity of the transformation that the legend of Mulan has long undergone. Oversimplified and de-contextualized versions of the legend, as a result, have often been used to represent the “authentic” Chinese culture that needs to be restored after Disney’s disruption. For example:
[Disney’sMulan] trivializes a people’s cultural heritage by forcing the elements of the story into a Hollywood formula. In the process, the plot of the folklore, cherished by the Chinese for over a thousand years, was distorted through embellishment and omission. [...] In the traditional story Hua Mulan joined the army in place of her father out of filial piety. She knew that it was out of question for her old and infirm father to be mobilized although he had served in the army with distinction. [...] In the folklore, Hua Mulan was instructed in the martial arts and military stratagems by her father [...]. (Djao 2002) 1 Such criticism ironically privileges Disney, as well as the Western culture where the media conglomerate emerges, as the sole transformer of a Chinese “traditional story” that was supposedly free from modification for over a thousand years. Already present in this brief synopsis, however, are several later Chinese interpolations into the storyline ofBallad. The depiction of Mulan’s father as “old and infirm” did not exist untilSong of Mulan(Mulan ge, henceforthSong), which was written by a Tang Dynasty (618–907 CE) poet Wei Yuanfu (?–771 CE) hundreds of years afterBallad(Wei 1979). Mulan did not have a family name until the Yuan Dynasty (1271–1368 CE), and no one claimed Hua as her family name until Xu Wei (1521–1593 CE), a Ming Dynasty (1368–1644 CE) intellectual who wrote the play Female Mulan Joins the Army in Place of Her Father(henceforthFemale Mulan). The father’s education of Mulan was also a later embellishment that first appeared in the play. Moreover, as this article will further discuss, evenBalladcannot be considered a single “original”. It is rather a product of hundreds of years of transmission, adaptations, and translations of an oral folklore that probably did not even originate in the Chinese language. Consequently, it is far more mixed than just a text of “Chinese” or Confucian moral lessons. By overlooking such complexity, critics of the Orientalist paradigm risk
1 I have omitted Djao’s descriptions of Disney’sMulanin comparison to the folklore.
The beginning of the 1939 film, however, presents a Mulan hunting in the openness of the outer space and reluctant to fulfill the “fundamental” womanly duty. By doing so, it epitomizes late Qing and Republican intellectuals’ efforts to rewrite her legend and advocate women’s new position in family and society. Predominantly male, many of these intellectuals saw women who adhered to traditional values and practices as a source of weakness for the nation. They argued that these women, crippled with bound feet and confined in the domestic sphere, were physically and intellectually unable to nurture and educate their children to be future citizens of a civilized China. They therefore urged a reconstruction of Chinese women along Western guidelines. Exemplary biographies of strong, ambitious, and patriotic women served as the main way to codify new female norms (Judge 2007). Mulan was a prominent figure among them. The first modern version of her legend, written by an enlightenment intellectual Liu Yazi (under the pseudonym of Yalu, which refers to the “Asian Rousseau”), appeared as early as 1904 (Yalu 1904). Interest in adaptation of the legend continued to grow during the Republican era. A Beijing opera rendition of Mulan’s story, with modern concerns added by the famous artist Mei Lanfang, appeared in 1912. Before the 1939 film, Mulan’s story had been adapted into two other films:Hua Mulan Joins the Army(Hua Mulan congjun, dir. Li Pingqian, 1927) andMulan Joins the Army(Mulan congjun, dir. Hou Yao, 1928). These are just a few examples of Mulan’s frequent appearances across a full spectrum of media at the time, including literature (biography, poetry, fiction, essay, speech, and scholarly research), theater, music, painting, and cinema (e.,Anonymous 1907;Zuo 1935;Yi 1940;Ouyang 1982;Ma 1949;Xu 1945;Yutian 1945;Zhao 1945; Zhu 1948) (Figure 1 ).
Figure 1. A painting entitled “Mulan Joins the Army (Mulan congjun)”, published as an illustration for the biography of Mulan written by Liu Yazi. (Women’s World, no. 3, 1904).
It was not a coincidence that the ancient Mulan was chosen to be such a major modern model for Chinese women. On the one hand, she had been a mainstream female exemplar in Chinese culture for over a thousand years. Indigenous and familiar, she could make the Western-originated gender norms seem less foreign and help stimulate national pride. On the other hand, she was also different from many other “lifeless” traditional female paragons in the eyes of Liu Yazi and other enlightenment
intellectuals (Yalu 1904, p. 26). The difference derived from a narrative fissure of her legend sinceBallad. Appearing as a typical domestic woman weaver at the beginning, Mulan somehow easily transgresses the gender boundary and demonstrates a completely different set of skills as a cross-dressed warrior fighting in the outside world not attach any moral worth to Mulan’s decision to join the army. It simply jumps from the challenge faced by Mulan’s family (“The list of summoned men comes in twelve copies:/Every copy lists my father’s name!/My father has no grown-up son/And I, Mulan, I have no adult brother”) to her immediate decision to leave the domestic space for military action (“I want to buy a saddle and a horse/To take my father’s place and join the army”). 2 The reasons for her ability and willingness to do so and her family’s rationale for allowing her to do so are completely unexplained and open to many possible readings. As the narrative fissure shows,Balladis not a typical Confucian text as is often assumed, but ambivalent toward Confucian gender roles. The Northern Wei Dynasty, in whichBallademerged, was not a Confucian state of the native population of China proper, or the so-called Han-Chinese, but ruled by the Xianbei, a nomadic people who conquered Northern China. It is highly possible that Balladderived from a nomadic people’s oral folklore in their language (Lan 2003;Dong 2011). If this is the case, then Mulan is probably a transliteration of a non-Chinese name (Chen 1999). The earliest existing Chinese book that includesBalladdates to the 11th and the 12th century, which is hundreds of years after the fall of the Northern Wei Dynasty. The narrative fissure, therefore, may well be a result of Han-Chinese intellectuals’ efforts to domesticate the woman warrior according to the Confucian orthodoxy through translation, adaptation, and revision during that long period of time. Whereas we can only speculate as to what happened to Mulan’s legend before it entered the existing written record, textual development sinceBalladprovides a clearer picture of how the legend was adapted into increasingly Confucian texts. As the earliest existing adaptation ofBallad,Song depicts Mulan’s father as old and infirm from the daughter’s perspective: “My father is listed in the draft’s register/But his strength and energy daily wane/[...]/My father has grown old, and worn by age;/How can he survive service?” By vividly foregrounding Mulan’s care for her father, which is not mentioned inBallad, the internal monologue connects Mulan’s decision to join the army to a key Confucian virtue: filial piety. SinceSong, filial piety became an explicit focus of Mulan’s story along with a much-strengthened father–daughter connection. InFemale Mulanand many later texts, Mulan’s father is her educator in both literature and martial skills. Detailed descriptions of how the father teaches the daughter and/or how the daughter takes bedside care of her sick father appear inExtraordinary Girl,Unusual History, and many other works. Mulan’s travel to the male domain, therefore, was deprived of its subversive potential against the Confucian gendered order. It was turned into an extension of her filial duties in the domestic space. The 1939 film retained the strengthened father–daughter connection, yet also disrupted the traditional familial relationship. In the film, the father continues to be an educator of Mulan by teaching her martial skills, but he forbids her to use them and forces her to weave instead. Mulan continues to take care of her father when he is sick. Instead of staying at the bedside, however, she hunts so as to provide her father with game meats. The film establishes the daughter as a challenger of Confucian gender roles and the father as a defender of them, and therefore adds a tension that never existed before to their relationship. Part of Mulan’s intention to join the army is therefore to break the domestic restrictions and to go outside to where she truly belongs. As a result, the film significantly blurs the Confucian focus of filial piety with a modern, Republican woman’s wish of self-fulfillment. However, ifMulan Joins the Armywere driven only by a simple dichotomy of modern freedom versus traditional restrictions, Mulan would escape from the family in secret—as she does in Disney’s Mulan. Instead, Mulan successfully convinces her parents and, in fact, her father first, that she should
2 Translations ofBallad,Song,Female Mulan, and lines in the 1939 film are all quoted fromKwa and Idema( 2010 ), occasionally with slight revisions.
This shift in both the film’s narrative trajectory and the playwright’s approach to gender resulted from the historical context in which the film was produced. Beginning in 1937, Shanghai was occupied by Japan except for the so-called Solitary Island (gudao), which referred to the British, American, and French concession areas that remained intact until 1941. Xinhua was the first film company to resume Chinese film production on the Solitary Island. In 1938, Zhang Shankun, founder and manager of Xinhua, made a trip to Hong Kong and visited Ouyang, who had just fled there to avoid Japanese harassment. Zhang invited Ouyang to contribute a script of historical drama because he was afraid that a contemporary subject might spell political trouble in the besieged zone. Ouyang offered to adapt Mulan’s legend and Zhang agreed. Using the ancient legend as a thinly veiled vehicle to express contemporary political concerns, Ouyang eventually decided that a happy story celebrating Mulan’s “bravery and wisdom” would work better to boost the audience’s morale against the invaders (Ouyang 1961, p. 54). For this nationalist agenda, Ouyang turned his Mulan from a victim of “feudal” oppression into a loyal officer using her “bravery and wisdom” to defend a “feudal” state, the Tang Empire, against the invading nomadic enemy. The film, therefore, continued the long Confucian appropriation of Mulan, sinceSong,as a role model for imperial loyalty, which was defined in the frame of the distinction betweenHuaandYi, or between the Sinocentric “Celestial Empire” (tianchao) and the often nomadic cultural outsiders. This was clearly not the focus of the legend at the time ofBallad, which describes the monarch’s conscription as only a trouble for Mulan and her family’s glossing over Mulan’s military service does not even bother to explain whom she fights for and whom she fights against. It only presents some vague clues that seem to suggest that Mulan might have participated in the century-long war between two nomadic peoples’ states, the Northern Wei of Xianbei and the Khaganate of Rouran (Che 2000).Songturned the possibly nomadic Mulan into a member ofHuaby having her fight the Qiang people in Khotan, where the Tang Empire fought Tibetans. At the same time, it appropriated Mulan as a surrogate of Confucian virtues set for the male “officials and sons”, turning her into an educational tool urging the men to fulfill their duties in the outer space: If in this world the hearts of officials and sons Could display the same principled virtue as Mulan’s, Their loyalty and filial piety would be unbroken; Their fame would last through the ages—how could it be destroyed? Later, the escalation of Mulan’s exemplary loyalty led to her deification, as seen in such examples as a stone inscription used in a village temple worshiping Mulan during the Yuan Dynasty. The ritual purpose of the stone inscription necessitated its author, Da Shian, to give Mulan a Han family name, Wei, which properly placed Mulan in a Han-Chinese patriarchal lineage (Huang and Li 1992, p. 18). Exactly which patriarchal lineage she should belong to, however, was not an easy issue to resolve. Accounts of Mulan’s story during the Yuan, Ming, and Qing dynasties gave her various family names, mainly including Wei, Zhu, and Hua. Yet, no matter her surname, Mulan invariably fought for the Celestial Empire and often against nomadic enemies according to these accounts. TheHua-Yi distinction became so rigid that evenUnusual History, which set Mulan’s story in the Northern Wei, categorized the Xianbei empire as part ofHua, referring to it as the “Celestial Empire”. Despite having received serious blows from Western powers, theHua-Yidistinction continued to serve as an ideological root for the emerging Chinese nationalist mentality in the modern world order. Liu Yazi, for example, hoped that a modernized China could bring about a revived Sinocentric world order. His biography of Mulan, therefore, depicts her as a warrior of the powerful Han Empire, wiping out the evil nomadic enemy. Similarly, inMulan Joins the Army, all characters on the nomadic side appear stupid, sinister, and barbarian. In the words of Mulan’s parents, these invaders are “robbers and thieves”, who attack “us” for no reason. The modern analogy could not be clearer for the Chinese audience on the Solitary Island in 1939.
Further developing the theme of loyalty, the film reconfigured the character of Mulan’s father. Earlier texts tended to focus only on Mulan’s loyalty, often characterizing her father as unwilling to serve in the military. InFemale MulanandUnusual History, for example, the father would rather commit suicide than go to the battlefront. In the 1939 film, however, the father decides to go to the battlefront without hesitation, stating:
Our country takes care of the troops for a thousand days in exchange for calling on troops when it needs them. Now that the country is in trouble, every civilian must go to war. How could I live offthe country’s support and just stay at home? [...] Fortunately, I am not that old, and I can still exert myself on behalf of my country. It’s more glorious to die on the battleground than to die at home.
It was likely a conscious wording choice of Ouyang that the father refers to the Tang Empire as “our country” orguojia, the Chinese word used to translate the Western-originated concept of the modern nation-state, rather than the “Celestial Empire”. These lines were obviously written as a call for national service during the Sino-Japanese war (1937–1945 CE). Reinforcing this theme, Mulan speaks the same nationalist language on multiple occasions in the film, using the rhetoric that dying for the country would be as honorable for women as for men to quickly convince her father that she should go in place of him. As father and daughter, they resembled an ideal nationalist education that promised a solution to the on-going national crisis. As a sick old man and a young girl, they served a similar purpose as Mulan had done in those Confucian texts: urging all, and especially the men with more strength, power, and privilege, into action to fulfill their duties. The film adaptation turned the daughter and the father into similar mixtures of modern patriots and Confucian loyal subjects, resolved their disagreement, rendered the gendered boundaries in much less focus than the national ones, and bridged the narrative fissure of the rationale for Mulan’s military service. Ironically, in doing so, the film in fact perpetuated the logic that had led Mulan to sacrifice her life and defend a male-defined and state-sponsored moral order. Dressed as a man and acting as a moral example for men, however, did not spare Mulan from becoming an object of male sexual fantasy in the circulation of her story. The sexual fantasy intensified as she became a Neo-Confucian exemplar of chastity for women, and was further aroused when she appeared in modern media adaptations.
4. Arousing Sexual Fantasy Like all collective works,Mulan Joins the Armyreflects a compromise of different approaches in its creative team rather than any individual’s unilateral vision. Quoting the well-known playwright Xia Yan, a 1940 article criticized the director Bu Wancang for altering Ouyang’s script and “deteriorating” its quality (Anonymous 1940). In a 1961 memoir, Ouyang himself also complains that the film did not fully reflect his intentions because Bu focused more on “[commercial] gimmicks” (xuetou) and made a number of changes to the script. It is difficult to find out the exact changes because Ouyang’s original script was never released to the public. 5 However, some clues exist in the differences between the 1939 film and Ouyang’s 1942 Guilin Opera (guiju) adaptation of Mulan’s legend. Indeed, several scenes susceptible to the charge of “gimmick” only exist in the film, but not in the opera. In one such scene, Mulan and a group of fellow conscripted (male) soldiers rest in an inn on their way to the army. The men are all busy washing their feet and even giving each other foot massages. Mulan, by contrast, sits quietly and does not take off her shoes. Curious about this different fellow, three men encircle Mulan. In an exaggerated manner, they bend downto examine her feet. The farce ends with Mulan nervously hurrying to another room with the foot-washing water and closing the doors behind her.
5 A script ofMulan Joins the Armywas published just one month after the film’s release. However, according to Ouyang, that was already the altered version (Ouyang 1961, p. 55).
Mulan first advises them that no countrymen should bully fellow countrymen, especially at a time of national crisis, and then teaches them a lesson with her preternatural martial arts skills. Her morality and valor later earn her the position of field marshal, which outranks all the men in the army. This also differs from the traditional versions that rank Mulan no higher than a general, retaining at least a male field marshal as her military superior. Such a modern empowerment of Mulan, however, was also a continuation of the traditional attempt to embed Mulan’s sexual appeal in her disciplinary power. InFemale Mulan, for example, Mulan suffers pain only from loosening her bound feet, but not from binding or the magically easy re-binding. As Fred Blake points out, a woman’s bound feet were a crucial part of her body mirroring the Neo-Confucian organization of the family. Through immense pain, foot-binding effectively disciplined a young girl’s body against her primordial resistance to this organization (Blake 1994). Mulan’s body, by contrast, seems to be born with this discipline so internalized that she experiences pain in the absence of regulation, rather than in the presence of it. Correspondingly, the play turns Mulan’s military adventure into a demonstration of the extraordinary degree to which her hyper-disciplined body sticks to Neo-Confucian ideals for women, most importantly chastity. 7 The safety of Mulan’s life appears to be of no concern for either her mother or herself. The mother is only worried about whether Mulan can successfully conceal her genitalia (referred to as “you-know-what”, ornahuar) when surrounded by men, and Mulan is only proud of her success in maintaining virginity in the army as promised to her mother. In the play and many later texts, includingMulan Joins the Army, Mulan’s incredible and oftentimes preternatural power comes from a hyper-disciplined body, which makes her both the prototype of Neo-Confucian woman and an ideal object of male desire. Mulan’s homecoming in this context, therefore, is often accompanied by courtship from a male elite, ranging from a high-level official to the emperor. Likewise, inMulan Joins the Army, the essential consequence of Mulan’s lecturing and punishing those bullies is the attraction of her future husband Liu Yuandu (Mei Xi). Unlike in most traditional versions, where Mulan successfully conceals her true gender to comrades-in-arms until the end, Yuandu in the film gradually senses that Mulan is a woman. The film uses the classic Hollywood-style soft lighting to foreground Mulan’s beauty in their increasingly romantic interactions, yet keeps her in male military regalia. The interactions reach a climax when Mulan simultaneously practices her sword and initiates an antiphon with Yuandu by singing: “When can [my beloved] enter my bosom and listen to my innermost feelings?” 8 In these scenes, Mulan’s heterosexual charm is integral to and enhanced by her role as a seemingly gender-neutral hero fighting for nationalist principles. The 1939 film’s publicity campaign further projected male fantasies onto the nationalist heroine’s body. When promoting the film, the Xinhua Company released two full-page pictures of its main star Chen Yunshang right next to each other in the same issue of theXinhua Pictorial(Xinhua huabao) (Figures 2 and 3 ). The first picture is a film still, presenting a heroic Chen with a steadfast facial expression and a mighty posture in the full armor of Mulan. The second picture shows a feminine Chen smiling and posing in modern female dancing dress. Spreading apart her front opening skirt, Chen showcases her shapely legs and high heels (the modern alteration of a woman’s natural feet to enhance sexual appeal). At the top right corner of the picture, there is a small-scale sketch of her with an added cloud (Yunshang, the star’s stage name, means “cloud and [beautiful] dresses”), which depicts her as a flying fairy in a traditional Chinese painting. Mutually dependent and enhancing, the two pictures epitomize the continuity in the male construction of an ideal woman from the Neo-Confucian
7 Chastity first appeared as a theme in Mulan’s legend with the rise of Neo-Confucianism during the Song Dynasty. Liu Kezhuang (1187–1269 CE), for example, stressed that Mulan returned from the battlefront “with a [morally] clean body” (Liu 1971, p. 9). 8 The original lyrics of the song use the “moonlight” to symbolize the beloved person.
tradition into modern nationalism: she must be, at the same time, morally exemplary, transcendentally mysterious, and sexually arousing. 9
Figure 2. Film Still of Chen Yunshang as Mulan. (Xinhua Pictorial, no. 1, 1939).
Figure 3. Picture of Chen Yunshang’s dance pose. (Xinhua Pictorial, no. 1, 1939).
9 Female cross-dressing is a common theme in classical Chinese literature and opera. It is closely linked to constructions of sexual fantasy. For more discussions of this theme, see (Li 2003) and (Wing Bo Tso 2014).
incident expose the conflicts inherent in the mixed purposes, but it also shook the foundation of the Confucian and nationalist construction of Mulan’s seemingly unquestionableHua/Chinese identity.
Figure 4. Yahara Reizaburou’s review ofMulan Joins the Army, published inHuawen daban meiri(Osaka Daily in Chinese Language) vol. 2, no. 11, 1939. Following the popular way at the time, illustrations for this article combine Mulan’s “mighty posture” (“xiongzi” in Chinese, literally “male posture”) in full armor with Chen’s feminine posture in modern dress.
The Republican government intervened and soon quieted the protest. The film was re-screened in Chongqing after explanations and revisions. Xinhua, for example, claimed that the song mentioning the rising sun was a Chinese folk song that had nothing to do with Japan. “To avoid misunderstanding”, however, they also changed the lyrics to “the blue sky with a white sun” (qingtian bairi), the national emblem of the Republic (Zheng 2011). Apparently, the re-screened Mulan resumed her identity as a heroine defending China. However, this happened at the same time as the film, with unchanged lyrics, continued to be used as a demonstration of the Greater East Asian patriotic values in the Japanese occupied areas of China and later in Japan. Simultaneously serving two opposing sides, Mulan displayed her cultural and ideological ambiguity in an unprecedentedly dramatic manner. Invited by such ambiguity, constant adaptations and re-interpretations of the legend produced still many more Mulans after the Confucianized Mulan, the sexualized Mulan, the Neo-Confucianized
Mulan, the modernized Mulan, the nationalist Mulan, the traitorous Mulan, and the Greater East Asian Mulan. After the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, the Maoist mainland, the colonial Hong Kong, and the Republic of China that relocated its government to Taiwan all produced their own versions of Mulan’s legends for different ideological and commercial purposes. 11 Notably, a Republican filmJunzhong fangcao(Beautiful Heroines in the Army, dir. Xu Xinfu, 1952) inserted a Beijing opera rendition of Mulan as a long dream sequence that inspired its heroine to fight the Communists. 12 For the first time, the nomadic barbarians in Mulan’s legend stood for an enemy that was actually Chinese, ruling China proper. The film initiated countless invocations of Mulan for the Republic’s induction of women into military service defending Taiwan against the People’s Republic. Lingering traces of such invocations could even be seen after the Cold War. In a Beijing Opera about Mulan produced in Taiwan during the time of the 1995–1996 Taiwan Strait crisis, for example, a character half-jokingly comments that protecting the nation should take absolute priority when the nomadic enemy is about to “fire missiles at our doorstep” (Hua Mulan, the Guoguang Opera Troupe, 1996). Compared to these previous versions, Disney’s appropriation of Mulan is nothing special. It is merely a routine continuation of the legend’s long history of adaptation, which consistently epitomizes the complex interactions among diverse cultures and ideologies both within China and between the East and the West. A productive criticism of the Orientalism underlying Disney’sMulan, therefore, should move beyond the dichotomy of the static East versus the change-making West, or in this case between China and Disney. It should take into full account the immense hybridity and fluidity pulsing beneath the fallacy of a monolithic cultural “authenticity”.
Funding: This research received no external funding.
Acknowledgments: I would like to particularly thank Joseph R. Allen and Carolyn Fitzgerald, both of whom have done excellent research on Mulan, for discussing this research with me and sharing their insights. I appreciate the three anonymous reviewers’ very helpful comments on this paper. I am also grateful to Yomi Braester, Cooper Creagan, Alex Witonsky, and Li Yang for their helpful suggestions on the writing of the paper. Conflicts of Interest: The author declares no conflict of interest.
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11 For a discussion of some of these versions, see (Harris 2011). 12 For a synopsis of this film, which is no longer existent, see (Huang 2011, pp. 116–19).
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Arts 09 00078 v2 - Has Art stuff.
Course: Electronic Art (FINE 3530 )
University: University of Colorado Denver
