The New Woman: Image, Subject, and Dissent in 1930s Shanghai Film Culture

The New Woman: Image, Subject, and Dissent in 1930s Shanghai Film Culture by Kristine Harris When the silent film The New Woman opened in Shanghai on the lunar new year festival of 1935, one newspaper reviewer applauded "the number of films with 'the woman's question' as their subject over the past few years,"and declared that "in a time when the women's movement is being noticed once again, it's inevitable that this kind of film will go on to influence many aspects of the women's movement to come."! This passage suggests just one way in which The New Woman was a striking convergence point for the cinematic, journalistic, and social construction of gendered subjectivity in 1930s Shanghai. Newspaper articles and studio publicity drew attention to the subject of the film, by depicting it as a portrayal of the eponymous "New Woman": In the past several thousand years, women have been shackled to non-personhood; in the past hundred years, they have gradually climbed out from the abyss of suffering, but because old ways and economics are still so influential, the proper path is still not open to women. The New Woman is aimed at precisely this state of affairs-a call to arms for humanity and society. It offers a model for the spirit of new women, while disputing the· seemingly (but hardly) new action of suicide. The many classic types of women all become targets of description in this film, which fosters a new type of woman. Having seen The New Woman you will feel that the "Old" Woman is pathetic and pitiable. The effect of this film is like suddenly being offered a glass of brandy after a lifetime of drinking plain water-it will stun and provoke even the most complacent person; it is encouraging and inspiring. 2 The film's title also attracted audiences for the same reason. One viewer in a province as distant as Guizhou recounted his movie date with a young woman from work this way: Ithink that Ican easily guess the reason she wanted to see this movie. Naturally, she wanted to understand what the "New Woman," as presented by the movie company from the big city, was all about. 3 Certainly the film accommodated such curiosity by profiling the life and death of Wei Ming-a schoolteacher who experiences the challenges and confusions facing educated, independent women in the big city, until she is ultimately implicated in a tragic suicidal confrontation with the Shanghai news media. In this sense, The New Woman resembled some of Hollywood' s "fallen woman films" of the 1920s and 1930s, or its "woman's films" of the 1940s, in "documenting a crisis in subjectivity around the figure of woman-although it is not always clear whose subjectivity is at stake."4 But in the case of The New Woman in Shanghai, the disturbing representation of Wei Ming' s suicide was accompanied by a critique of contemporary urban society that alluded to class revolution. The film provoked a debate in the Shanghai news media over the status and symbolic significance of the "New Woman," and the protagonist's "crisis in subjectivity" was profoundly magnified when the lead actress in the film, Ruan Lingyu, reacted to personal slander in the print media by committing suicide just a month after the film's premiere. The "New Woman Incident" (as it was later dubbed) was at the nexus of a controversy over the responsibility of the urban news media-as the modem creators of "public opinion" [yulun ]-towards women and society.5 Criticism on The New Woman has appeared under two rubrics. It is either cited as an example of the complications in the leftward developments of director Cai Chusheng's politics,6 or it serves as the tragic climax to hagiographies of its star, Ruan Lingyu.7 Both approaches have treated the film entirely as narrative, and have elided the complicated relationship between politics and feminism in the film. The present essay suggests that the 1935 controversy over The New Woman, and the enduring power of the "New Woman Incident," was set into motion by the film's ambiguous message about class and gender-an...