A Problematic Appropriation of the Mulan Folklore Kang-Hun (Brett
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興大人文學報 第五十四期，頁 29-46 二○一五年三月 A Problematic Appropriation of the Mulan Folklore in The Woman Warrior1 Kang-hun (Brett) Chang* Abstract Raymond Williams, one of the leading Left thinkers in Great Britain during the twentieth century, once said that the question of resistance is the problem of incorporation. If we judge Maxine Hong Kingston’s feminist ideas as expressed in The Woman Warrior in light of this perspective, it is without doubt that hers amount to a resistant or oppositional stance against any gender inequality a maligned weaker sex has suffered. This resistance starts to manifest itself in “White Tigers (「白虎山學道」) ,” the first section of her so-called memoir published in 1976, when the famous Mulan Folklore was rewritten and appropriated. Fa Mulan (花木蘭), the girl who substituted for her aged father to fight bravely in the battle- field, and her tale, positively confront derogatory remarks, like “cowbirds,” “maggots in the rice,” and “slave,” which Maxine Hong Kingston heard during her childhood, as well as gender discrimination in general. Nonetheless, this appropriation of Mulan Folklore is problematic because it is also a problem of incorporation—or, in Stephen Greenblatt’s words, a typical example of “the production and containment of subversion and disorder” by hegemony. In fact, the dominant class in Chinese society had already incorporated the folklore in its politically correct language, not to mention Mulan, the 1998 animated Walt Disney film version. Perhaps the popularity of The Woman Warrior could be viewed as the triumph of a global patriarchal order when most of its readers have accepted Kingston’s controversial treatment of her heroine in “White Tigers.”; or, it is probably an example of the incorporation of feminism by mainstream commercialism. The purpose of this paper is to examine the tricky relationship between Mulan Folklore and Maxine Hong Kingston’s version about a female general in The Woman Warrior, and subsequently the complicated ties between power and literary texts. Keywords: Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior, Mulan Folklore, Raymond Williams, incorporation, the production and containment of subversion and disorder * PhD Candidate, the Department of Foreign Languages and Literature, National Cheng Kung University. (Received August 20, 2014; Accepted January 20, 2015) 1 The first draft of this paper was presented at the 35th (2011) Anniversary Conference of the International Association for Philosophy and Literature. 29 張剛琿 興大人文學報第五十四期 I. In Marxism and Literature, while discussing the complex interrelations among the dominant (or the hegemonic), the residual, and the emergent elements in culture, Raymond Williams indicates that any cultural or political hegemony, albeit “always dominant,” has never enjoyed a state of “total” or “exclusive” control (113). In reality, a “lived hegemony” has “always” been “a process,” and it actually holds sway before the presence of cultural or political “counter-hegemony” and “alternative hegemony,” before the residue of previous social and cultural elements, and before the emerging new meanings and values (Williams 112-13). That is to say, “forms of alternative or oppositional politics and culture exist as significant elements in the society” all the time while “no dominant culture” permanently “includes or exhausts all human practice, human energy, and human intention” (Williams 113, 125). Certainly a “static hegemony” could “ignore or isolate such alternatives and opposition,” yet “the decisive hegemonic function is to control or transform or even incorporate them” when they are too powerful and threatening (Williams 113). As noted by Dick Hebdige, the incorporation of punk subculture by the mainstream consumer capitalist culture best exemplifies Williams’ point about the dominant’s efforts to tame, transform, and include any intimidating, menacing counter forces.2 Neither the punk subculture, which emerged in the mid-1970s with its idiosyncratic antiauthoritarian features, nor other challenging cultural elements which arise from time to time could seem to win their battle against the dominant culture. As a matter of fact, in order to survive, “any hegemonic process” has to be “especially alert and responsive to” counter-hegemony, alternative-hegemony, the residual, and the emergent social or political forces (Williams 113). Thus, more often than not, the question of resistance is the problem of incorporation in any cultural process. Next, a residual cultural element not only has functioned as “an effective element of the present,” but is also “active in the cultural process” though it comes into existence in the 2 See Hebdige 62-72. 30 《女戰士》中挪用花木蘭民間傳說的問題 past (Williams 122). Normally distancing itself from the dominant culture, a residual cultural element could pose a danger to the hegemonic if it originates from “some major area of the past,” and, as a result, it must “be incorporated if the effective dominant culture is to make sense in these areas” (Williams 123). The residual is tolerated or consented because of its “incorporated meanings and values” serving the interests of the hegemonic which, in fact, “cannot allow too much residual experience and practice outside itself” (Williams 122-23). Furthermore, Williams notices that the phenomenon of “selective tradition” in every cultural process is no more than a result of “the incorporation of the actively residual—by reinterpretation, dilution, projection, discriminating inclusion and exclusion” (123). The tradition people maintain and follow arises out of “an intentionally selective” process defined and controlled by the dominant, and, likewise, the creation, changing, development, and keeping of a literary canon, “‘the literary tradition,’” have hinged upon a similar process (Williams 115; 123). Interestingly, the Fa Mulan folklore in Chinese culture, already a text of the literary tradition, also represents an attempt by the hegemonic to reinterpret, dilute a subversive feminist story, and afterwards to appropriate it for use of helping maintaining the present order.3 If we consider the impact of selective tradition as manifested in the Mulan folk tale, Maxine Hong Kingston’s appropriation of it in The Woman Warrior will be problematic and questionable.4 II. Published in 1976, The Woman Warrior has long since been viewed as a feminist tract 3 “Fa Mulan” is also spelled as “Hua Mulan” in both Hanyu Pinyin system and Wade-Giles Romanization system. However “Fa Mook Lan” is Kingston’s rendition which clearly denotes the Cantonese sounds she heard from her mother’s chanting of the ballad. See Kingston (I Love a Broad Margin to My Life) 127, 191, 210, or 217. 4 Not every critic has been a fan of Kingston’s revised Fa Mulan. For one, Frank Chin, arguably Kingston’s biggest literary nemesis, still claimed that her Fa Mulan is “fake” or “phony” in his blog in March, 2007, as persistent as ever in his criticism of her use of myth or folklore. See Chin. Yet, here in my paper the question of historical authenticity or inaccuracy will not be the focus. For another, Shirley Chew wonders if all Kingston’s woman warrior will achieve is to “do little more than return us to the old conservative order” (139). Meanwhile, other critics, such as King-kok Cheung, Robert Lee, Sau-Ling Cynthia Wong, David Leiwei Li, and Deborah Woo, deal with Kingston’s revised Mulan respectively, albeit not the main argument, in their works. 31 張剛琿 興大人文學報第五十四期 about a writer reflecting on her formative years in an immigrant neighborhood in Stockton, California, and her experience as a Chinese-American woman in search of her own identity. Partly sick of regularly hearing the derogatory remarks like “cowbirds,” “maggots in the rice,” and “slave” sneered, and shouted at herself and her sex as well while she was growing up (Kingston 46, 43, 20), its author, Maxine Hong Kingston, has utilized writing as a means of “[bringing] forth once again the theme of the injustices women suffer as a sex and the issue of female anger” (Hunt 8). This so-called memoir, more or less, represents a vindication of both women’s right and freedom of choice in the Chinese-American families, and this well-written account about her life and her relationship with her mom and other female relatives of her family “becomes [Kingston’s] way of being a woman warrior on her own behalf and perhaps on behalf of other Chinese girls and women” (Hunt 11). Moreover, if she “identifies the function of her classical Chinese swordswoman with that of the writer,” the overlapping not only shows that “‘writing is fighting,’” but also implies that her pen, like an Excalibur or a Hrunting, will help her serve as a female spokesperson for a maligned weaker sex in the literary battle ground (Cook 55). In “White Tigers” of Kingston’s autobiography, her successful and valiant female general constitutes as much a fighter-writer as the manifestation of female potentiality. The eponymous woman warrior there is quite obviously modeled after Fa Mulan, a legendary brave girl who first pretended to be the son to replace her elderly father in the emperor’s conscription. In the story, Mulan then fought for her country, returned home awarded after serving in the army for twelve years, and eventually resumed her normal life as a woman. It has generally been agreed that this legend “originated in the [Dynasty of] Northern Wei, sometime during the fifth to the sixth centuries” AD (Lan 231). No one knows for sure the exact time of its happening, but some scholars assume that the legend could begin as early as the year “429 AD” (Lan 231). The Northern Wei (AD 386-534) is a country (dynasty) established by a tribe called Xianbei (or Hsienpei in Wade-Giles Romanization system), whose people, regardless of sex and age, were able to not only ride 32 《女戰士》中挪用花木蘭民間傳說的問題 on the horsebacks but also specialize in bows and arrows.5 Therefore, Xianbei women had always been more than just dutiful housewives or daughters at home, and because of their lifestyle, they can easily become soldiers in an emergency.