Women Playing Men: Yue Opera and Social Change in Twentieth-Century Shanghai

Conclusion

251 Conclusion For at least five hundred years, from the mid-Ming to the last decades of the twentieth century, local operas represented a prominent part of popular culture and an important aspect of Chinese life, and their transformations were integral to epochal social and political upheavals. In the twentieth century, the massive entrance of Chinese women into the public realm and their active participation in popular culture resulted in a profound transition of opera culture, from the realm of men to an artistic and social world in which actresses and female spectators figured prominently. The feminization of the operatic body gave rise to a distinct feminine opera culture of the twentieth century. While the transition was a general process, it was manifested most intensely in the phenomenon of women’s Yue opera in Shanghai. The early development of Yue opera comprised two major transformations —from rural to urban and from all male to all female—which occurred in the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries. The increased prominence of Yue opera, and of minor operas in general, may be seen as an expression of many modern processes, such as the deterioration of the rural economy, the rise of treaty-port cities as industrial and commercial centers, and mass urban migration. Major political and ideological revolutions of the period also facilitated the transformation of Yue opera and of minor operas more generally. The 1911 Republican Revolution lifted the ban against women in the entertainment market that had been imposed by Qing law and custom; the subsequent May Fourth New Culture Movement promoted ideas of women’s liberation and free love and marriage as opposed to arranged marriage and hence sanctioned love themes that were central to minor operas. The emergence of Yue opera as a female opera, then, should be viewed not as a special case in cultural development that ran contrary to the trends of the time but as a phenomenon that most intensely expressed the gendered nature of these historical processes. The success of women’s Yue opera in Shanghai was a ramification of the city’s social formation, characterized by key factors of gender, class, and native-place ties, and revealed the city’s basic cultural characteristics— bourgeois, colonial (domestically as well as internationally), and feminine. Yue opera’s constituency came mainly from three powerful new groups in Republican Shanghai that helped define the city’s social landscape: an urban middle class; Zhejiang, more specifically Ningbo-Shaoxing, immigrants ; and women. First, as the largest industrial city and the most important commercial and financial center, Shanghai was home to a great number of capitalists, modern businessmen, and white-collar professionals as well as apprentices at printing houses, shop hands in modern stores, and industrial workers. The concentration of these new groups in Shanghai nurtured China’s first generation of the urban middle- and lower-middle class. These wage earners or wives of wage earners made up the majority of Yue opera’s audience. Second, Shanghai was a city built by settlers.1 Divisions among various immigrant groups from different native places, though not necessarily always so clear-cut, were a basic factor in the city’s social life and political economy. If most Subei natives and many Shanghai natives composed the lower layers of society, members of the new bourgeoisie were mostly natives from the more economically developed Jiangnan region. More specifically, the powerful Ningbo-Shaoxing business group and intellectuals strongly backed Yue opera, and the opera’s success in turn symbolized the rising power of this native-place group in the city. Third, Shanghai had a high, perhaps the highest, concentration of new types of women, which included factory workers, shop assistants, domestic helpers, middle-class housewives, students, office workers, and professionals such as accountants, teachers, nurses, doctors, and actresses. Mostly young immigrants in a young metropolis marked by a semicolonial cosmopolitanism, these women found unprecedented, though still quite limited, freedom in pursuing their personal interests, among which was the choice to patronize public entertainment. During this important period of transition in gender norms, women’s Yue opera provided opportunities for various women to expand their lives beyond their social stations. When historical conditions were right, the actions of young actresses made it all happen. When a group of girls from the poor countryside of 252 Conclusion Shengxian joined the first all-girls opera school in 1923, when female Shengxian opera troupes frequented Shanghai in the mid-1930s, and...