Why Doesn't the Chinese Nora Leave Her Husband?: Women's Emancipation in Post-1949 Chinese Drama

Why Doesn't the Chinese Nora Leave Her Husband?: Women's Emancipation in Post-I949 Chinese Drama CONSTANTINE TUNG The drama of the People's Repubuc of China often differs drastically from the pre-1949 drama in its treatment of many shared social issues. One major social concern of the earlier drama, a new theatre which was born during the iconoclastic May 4th era in the second decade of this century, was women's emancipation: Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House was perhaps the most widely known foreign play in pre-1949 China. Nora,the play's heroine, was a model of women's struggle for emancipation. Hu Shi (1891-1962), a leader of China's political liberalism and an advocate of China's total Westernization, wrote an historically significant one-act play, ''The Great Event in Life" (Zhongshen dashi, 1919), noticeably influenced by A Doll's House. Although it lacks the theatrical intensity of Ibsen's play, its heroine Tian Yamei stands as the first modern Chinese dramatic heroine who defies the wishes of her parents and absconds with the man she loves. I Tian Yamei is an Ibsenite Nora. Guo Moruo (1892-1978), one of China's major playwrights, wrote two historical plays, Zhuo Wenjun and Wang Zhaojun (both 1923), whose eponymous heroines similarly make their own choices of love and marriage by challenging feudal morality, absolute patriarchy, and the Han imperial power. Guo Moruo was in fact using his plays to express his own political and personal discontent and longing, employing scenes, words, and ideas derived from Oscar Wilde's Salome and totally disregarding historical probabilities, but he created two rebellious heroines who gain their emancipation through courageous struggles in the same spirit as Nora. The success of the Communist revolution in 1949 seemed to promise sweeping reform for women's rights. In April 1950 a new Marriage Law was promulgated, which banned arranged and child marriages, conCUbinage, discrimination against illegitimacy, polygamy, and interference with the right of a widow to remarry. It also gave women equal rights with men in working, in status inside and outside the family, and in property rights and divorce, while Modern Drama, 38 (1995) 298 The Chinese Nora 299 also allowing them to retain their maiden names. Drama, which had long been a powerful tool of propaganda and education in Chinese communist revolutionary history, took an active role in promoting the Party's policy of improving women's status and rights in the new China. Given that playwrights had to carry out very quickly the task assigned to them by the Party of propagating the Marriage Law, the plays of the early 1950S on women's issues were all one-act plays. Furthermore the major target audiences were peasants and workers who were far more conservative than the urban population on matters of marriage and women's rights. One-act plays were thus considered more likely than full-length drama to entertain these audiences. Representative plays on women's emancipation from the early years of this new regime include "Zhao Xiaolan" (1950), "Between Husband and ·Wife" (Fuqizhi jian, 1952), "The Woman Representative" (FunU daibiao, 1953) and "Household Chores" (Jiawu shi, 1954).2 The eponymous heroine of "Zhao Xiaolan," like Hu Shi's heroine Tian Yamei in "The Great Event in Life," fights for her right to marry the man she loves. But the two women are born in different times. Tian Yamei, a student returned from abroad, lives at a time when Western values have only just begun to challenge China's tradition; an iconoclast, she is in the vanguard of the struggle for a woman's right to make her own choice. Zhao Xiaolan, a peasant, is much more fortunate. living at a time when her freedom of choice in marriage is already guaranteed and prot. ected by the new 1950 Marriage Law. The heroine is fully aware of this advantage: "I am living at a good time. Women have been liberated, men and women are equal, and choosing a spouse is one's own business" (6). The Marriage Law is repeatedly lauded by the heroine and her supporters to justify her resistance to her father's attempt to...