In 1998 Disney Films gave us an animated film about Mulan, the feminist warrior, but long before Disney there were other Mulan characters. In this slim volume Shiamin Kwa and Wilt L. Idema offer five complete versions of Mulan narratives and summaries of additional ones dating from ancient, early modern, and modern Chinese popular literature and culture.
The earliest documented Mulan plot appears in a twelfth-century anthology, Collected Works of the Music Bureau. Tentatively dated to the third century CE, the brief Poem of Mulan sketches Mulan’s equipping herself (with a horse, saddle, bridle, and whip), references her twelve-year military service, and limns her return home and re-entry into a woman’s life. Her fellow soldiers, who have accompanied her on her homeward journey and are taken aback when Mulan resumes female dress and makeup, muse on the impossibility of distinguishing male from female hares when they run together. In its empty spaces lies what the poem’s quondam audience knew and supplied from their imaginations, as they read or heard it.
The second oldest Mulan narrative, also anthologized in the Collected Works of the Music Bureau, is a song dated to the mid-eighth century during the T’ang dynasty, which, we might add, is well known for its many instances of female governance, athletic horsemanship, cultural achievements, and court culture. Attributed to Wei Yuanfu, the altogether more complex Song of Mulan inserts an authorial “I” who tells the plot as a tale of exemplary civic virtue.
A four-century hiatus followed the Collected Works of the Music Bureau. Then, in the late Ming dynasty, Xu Wei composed a two-act play, The Female Mulan Joins the Army in Place of her Father. One of a quartet of plays called Four Cries of a Gibbon, it incorporates and builds on seventeenth-century cultural sensibilities, such as the titillating unbinding and exposure of Mulan’s feet to theatergoers’ view. The plot examines Mulan’s twelve-year military service during which she chased down and subdued a fictional bandit named Leopard Skin and for which she is granted the ceremonial cap and girdle that signify her elevation to the Imperial Secretariat. During her journey home, the soldiers accompanying her remark that they have never seen “Hue Hu,” the name by which Mulan goes during her army service, “use the toilet” (xviii), one of the several improbabilities the Ming plot lays before its audience. As in the earlier poem and song, she applies make-up on her arrival home, which is here greatly elaborated when she tells her parents of her exploits and confirms she is still a “dogwood bud” (a virgin), after which she is betrothed to the boy next door, who has passed the imperial examinations with flying colors and also has a ceremonial cap and girdle. Such plays regularly integrated singing to the melodies of known songs (named in the text), and its closing song quotes the third-century Poem of Mulan, which had been preserved in the twelfth-century Collected Works of the Music Bureau. In interpreting the play, Kwa and Idema write that it “points to more profound questions about how we define ourselves in general: aren’t we all simply playing parts? If we are, how do we keep hold of our ‘true’ selves?” (xx).
During the Qing dynasty (1644-1911) Mulan literature thrived and various iterations are summarized in an appendix. New elements appeared with the passage of time, such as supernatural elements, secret combat methods to which Mulan alone was privy, the insertion of additional characters (who complicate the underlying plot), political intrigues, and alterations to the plot (on occasion, Mulan committed suicide to protect her virginity). Despite innovations like these, knowledge of the most ancient versions lived on in titles such as A Couple of Hares (xxi).
The editors pay particular attention to a Mulan play (summarized on pages 108-109 in Appendix I) that appeared toward the end of the Qing dynasty, when imperialist and predatory European merchant-colonizers assailed the empire, and in which Qing vs. outsider tension is a prominent feature. First published in 1897, its author Chen Xu continued to add scenes until 1914, during which process Mulan’s character developed and changed: “If the opening scenes reflect a traditional morality and seem to present Mulan once again as an example of filial piety and loyalty, the final scenes seem more inspired by the events of the Revolution of 1911,” the editors observe (xxiii).
In the anonymously composed opera Mu Lan Joins the Army of 1903, the heroine embodies a feminist patriot during the reign of the long-ago Emperor Wu (ca. 140-87 BCE). This Mu Lan, composed in the twentieth century, meant to shame men and to serve as a model for women, an intention shared by the remarkable contemporary woman warrior, Qiu Jin (1875-1907), who was eventually executed for fomenting rebellion against the Qing emperor. There is also the text of the ten-act Mulan Joins the Army (1939) by Ouyang Yuqian.
The plots and the elaborations of the Mulan narratives reproduced (and summarized) here demonstrate the many ways in which the Mulan figure has spoken to succeeding generations with differing heroic characteristics and in the idiom that each audience understood; they offer excellent texts for a deep background for any consideration of Mulan in contemporary culture. For scholars of European fairy tales, the narratives offer striking points of comparison with European crossdressing heroines of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries.
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[Review length: 895 words • Review posted on December 7, 2011]