Mulan's Legend and Legacy in China and the United States

2. Heroic Lineage: Military Women and Lady Knights-Errant in Premodern China

2 / Heroic Lineage: Military Women and Lady Knights-Errant in Premodern China The footbound Chinese woman who dominates the Western historical imagination is a product of creative mistaking that has no place in the family album or storehouse of China’s own cultural childhood. —susan mann, “presidential address” In the historical Western imagination patriarchy and patrilineal male kinship rigidly structure traditional Chinese society to the degree that women are deprived of fundamental rights and are inferior to men without exception. One missionary has commented that “[t]he condition of the Chinese woman is most pitiable. . . . Suffering, privation, contempt, all kinds of misery and degradation, seize on her in the cradle and accompany her pitilessly to the tomb” (Huc 1: 248). Abundant examples of female chastity, footbinding, the indentured servant-wife, and the cult of widow fidelity have been published in observations of Westerners. Patricia Ebrey has summarized: Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century observers described in detail the plight of girls who might be killed at birth by parents who did not need another daughter, who could be sold at five or six as indentured servants, whose feet were bound so small that they could hardly walk, who when a little older had to marry whomever their fathers ordered them to marry, who had to submit to frequently tyrannical mothers-in-law after marriage, who might not be allowed to remarry after their husbands’ deaths, who had few legal rights to property, and who could be divorced easily and denied custody of their children. (197) Before the 1960s a number of scholars in Chinese studies had underdeveloped or misrepresented the role of women in their accounts of Chinese institutions (Wolf and Witke 1). By the 1970s the body of literature 10 / heroic lineage on Chinese women had been growing, including “both the explicitly political and supposedly neutral varieties of feminist-inspired scholarship” (Stacey 485). Such intellectual interest has continued to propser during the past few decades and increasingly fosters people’s awareness that “[a]lthough women have been marginalized in Western accounts of Chinese history, China’s documentary record on gender relations is rich” (Mann and Cheng, Introduction, 1). The topic of literary women in imperial China, for example, has enjoyed repeated scholarly attention.1 Within the field of women in traditional China, courageous heroines, including Mulan as a cultural phenomenon, occur so frequently in premodern Chinese society that a thorough understanding of female stereotypes , literary representations, and social perceptions of such figures warrants a careful examination. Citing Mulan as one of the two most prominent female mythic figures in Chinese culture, Susan Mann’s presidential address at the Annual Meeting of the Association for Asian Studies in 2000 delineates “myths of Asian womanhood” with a particular focus on Chinese tradition (835–62).2 Expanding the term “myth” to include “mythified” histories and legends as well as historically and culturally overwritten myths, Mann contends: Chinese poets, painters, sculptors, librettists, essayists, commentators , philosophers, storytellers, puppeteers, illustrators, and historians made a veritable industry of myths of womanhood—an industry that . . . far outstrips any of its counterparts elsewhere in Asia. . . . Embedded as they are in historical and cultural context, though, Chinese myths of womanhood yield unexpected insights into historical consciousness about women, and among women, in Chinese history. (“Presidential Address” 835) Sharing Mann’s insight into the significance of deciphering Chinese women and uncovering the “historical consciousness” through myths, this chapter maps the cultural landscape of heroic women in premodern China through analyzing the stories of female combatants found in historical chronicles and literary texts. An overview of valiant heroines as well as their positions in premodern Chinese society would suggest that even though heroic womanhood remains an underdeveloped field in scholarly studies until recently, their stories have enjoyed enduring interest in historical archives and literary texts and prospered in oral genres such as storytelling and theatre performances in China. Instead of being miserable victims or unusual radicals heroic lineage / 11 these heroic women are agents “who embraced certain aspects of official norms while resisting others” (Ko, Haboush, and Piggott, Introduction, 1). Their existence and popularity challenge any one-dimensional view of Chinese women and any monolithic understanding of premodern Chinese society. Because the “old stereotype construes Asian women as victims of traditional or Confucian patriarchy,” a careful study of the interplay between Chinese womanhood and heroic tradition would be helpful to restore “both female subjectivity and historical complexity” (Ko, Haboush, and...