4. The Heroine Mulan Goes to War in Her Father’s Place
The original heroine in the Mulan legend was one of a nomadic people. As Han’s influence expanded in China, a process called “sinification”, she gradually took on more and more aspects of Han culture. In the late 16th century, Chinese playwright Xu Wei wrote a play entitled The Heroine Mulan Goes to War in her Father’s Place, which forever altered the simple story related to the ballad. The short play introduced Mulan’s surname, Hua, which was absent from the ballad. Though it referred to the war in the title, very little of the military campaigns are present in the play. It instead focused on Mulan’s life as a woman, and included the process of foot binding. Mulan is presented as the ideal of Chinese feminism and beauty, as it was contemporarily viewed.
Foot binding, to create the small feet viewed as the epitome of female beauty during the period, was not practiced among the people of the Northern Wei. Thus, Xu Wei introduced a new aspect to the Mulan legend. As an educated man he was undoubtedly aware of the fiction he created. Whether and where the play was ever performed is unknown. Hundreds of years after Xu Wei’s death, the play was rediscovered, and the changes introduced by Xu Wei became an integral part of the legend. In the first act Mulan, aware that unbinding her feet would cause them to grow larger, making her unsuitable for marriage, unbinds them anyway. Mulan thus reflected her willingness to sacrifice her own happiness for the benefit of others (her father and family), exhibiting an ideal of Chinese womanhood.
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