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177 chapter five A White Snake in Beijing: Re-creating Socialist Opera Art is the leap of soul, it leans towards idealism; while politics aims at maintaining the status quo . . . art as an indicator is more sensitive than politics, it is the vanguard of politics. Tian Han, “On Art and Its Relationship with Its Times and Politics,” 1929. In chapter 4, we examined the making of the modern, westward-looking national anthem with its assertion of the masculinist values of nation building . We turn now to the making of a seemingly inward-looking Chinese opera with a female protagonist. Uncannily, it is the similarities rather than the differences between the two that prevail. Both are avant-gardist projects with popular appeal and political significance. The making of the White Snake opera opens out from the war-conditioned national anthem to encompass the folk, the fantastic, and the operatic within the cultural embrace of the young People’s Republic of China. The reinvention of the White Snake opera in Communist Beijing demonstrates the relevance of Tian Han’s two lifelong intellectual obsessions with “creating the new woman” and “going to the people,” originating at the post–World War I moment and still asserting key influences in the post–World War II 1950s. Women’s issues, workers’ issues, nationalism, and international socialism converged , forging a sustained dialogue on these issues throughout the interwar period and well into the newly established Communist regime. Throughout Tian Han’s half century of experiments with the image of the White Snake, its transformation from a folk demon to a modernist femme fatale, then to a female warrior, and finally to a female activist propagating socialism and feminism , attested to the relevance of both the avant-garde and the popular in the cultural productions from the early years of the Republic of China to the first decade of the People’s Republic. 178 The Avant-garde and the popular in modern china The Peking Opera Baishe zhuan (White Snake) is thus a key text linking socialist feminism, the image of the female warrior, and the modern femme fatale to Chinese folk and operatic traditions. Most versions of the story recount how a white snake spirit disguised itself as a beautiful woman and went to the West Lake in Hangzhou to experience the beauty of the human world. She formed a sexual relationship with a handsome young man and experienced human love and happiness. In the meantime, her violation of the boundary between human and nonhuman attracted the attention of Fa Hai, a Buddhist monk with the power to recognize and exorcise spirits. Feng Menglong’s seventeenth-century vernacular story “Bai niangzi yongzhen Leifengta” (Lady White Forever Imprisoned under Leifeng Pagoda) was one of the most popular retellings of the tale, highlighting the “lust, caution” parable embedded in it and repudiating the lustful nature of the snake woman and her destructive power while upholding the monk Fa Hai as a defender of social norms and natural human relations.1 The legend subsequently went through a major transformation during the Qing dynasty, when a chuanqi version entitled Leifeng ta (Leifeng Pagoda) and a tanci version entitled Yiyao zhuan (Tale of a Righteous Spirit) rewrote the White Snake as an endearing character and recast Fa Hai as a destructive power separating lovers and families.2 Other versions have since incorporated both the lustful and loving natures of the White Snake, rendering her the embodiment of the exotic and the erotic in the legend’s countless renditions in no less than a dozen local dialects and operatic forms. The image of Salome as a femme fatale packaged in glamorously exotic costumes attracted the attention of the young Tian Han studying in Tokyo because of its sexually charged and subversive overtones and also because it recalled the mystical seductresses abundant in the Chinese folk, literary, and operatic traditions as fox spirits and flower fairies.3 Female sexuality and its transgressive power preoccupied Tian Han through a half-century-long love affair with the images of Salome and the White Snake. Metamorphosing from the seventeenth-century Chinese vernacular tale to the eighteenth-century Japanese rendering, Japanese modernist writer Tanizaki Jun’ichirō’s cinematic recreation in the early 1920s, Tian Han’s creative borrowing in the 1927 silent film “Lakeshore Spring Dream,” and the Peking Opera “White Snake,” the Salome figure was finally reconfigured in the image of the White Snake, a female warrior reinvented under conditions of war and national regeneration. Tian Han...

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