Analysis Of Cai Chusheng's New Woman

“Save me!” cries Wei Ming, the protagonist of Cai Chusheng’s 1935 film New Woman. She strains forward in her hospital bed, her eyes gleaming with desperation, as the toxins she ingested in a suicide attempt claim her life. “I want to live!” she exclaims. I want to live! This primal sentiment, this vital urge, serves as Wei Ming’s credo throughout New Woman. Wei Ming’s futile struggle to survive as an independent actor within her society reflects the tenuous existence of China’s “new women” in the mid-1930s. This class of educated, urbane women sought equality and autonomy within their modernizing nation, only to find that the Confucian social structure that once imprisoned them remained largely intact. Despite persistent efforts throughout

The China depicted in New Woman features a progressive veneer, replete with bustling urban centers and a glamorous elite, but a Confucian social structure underlies this cosmetic modernity. In New Woman, the most pervasive aspect of this structure is its rigid gender hierarchy. Confucianism, as a religious philosophy and cultural tradition, relies on a system of familial and communal obligations; this system mandates the subservience of the female gender, requiring women to obey, in turn, their fathers, husbands, and sons. A youthful Wei Ming’s conflict with this structure, occasioned by an illegitimate pregnancy, illustrates its tendency to objectify women and reduce them to the status of family heirlooms. Educated in a Chinese university’s “department of music,” Wei Ming possesses a keen intellect and, as New Woman illustrates at periodic intervals, a gift for teaching. But Wei Ming’s father, a man so traditional that he convenes his family atop the “sacred ground of the Wei family,” hands her a rope, instructing her to commit suicide. Endowed by his society with such great authority over his daughter, he easily objectifies Wei Ming, viewing her not as a talented, beloved heir gone astray but as spoiled goods that must be discarded. By linking this breakdown of paternal love to Confucian cultural mandates, New Woman indicts the social order that permits such

A society that compels one of its members to choose between slave-like subservience and death is eminently unjust, and Wei Ming depicts 1930s China as such a society. Chusheng depicts every injustice inflicted upon Wei Ming as either absurdly misogynistic or sexually depraved, portraying these as the logical results of a Confucian system that mandates women’s lifelong subservience to men. While New Woman suggests no solutions or specific reforms that might provide redress for this social ill, it makes one thing very clear: Women deserve the respect and autonomy accorded to their male counterparts, and a social structure that rejects this truth must not go