"Teahouse", "Midnight" (I'm so anxious!!! High reward!!!)

Earn some points and help your classmates.

Our Chinese students read a lot of literature. However, I think Lao She's "Teahouse" is very special. Readers can use "Teahouse" as historical material to gain a deeper understanding of the problems in people's lives from the Qing Dynasty to the Kuomintang era. Although this period is not long, it is only a person's lifetime. China has gone through a lot of changes during this period. At this time, China was in serious disaster.

From "Teahouse", readers not only understand the politics of that time, but also see the way people live. Mr. Lao She's play includes a variety of Chinese people, from the powerful eunuch Pang to the most pitiful Kang Liu. I think every reader will find a character you can sympathize with.

Because I took a Chinese history class in college, I found "Teahouse" particularly interesting. We college students have read many books by politicians, but we rarely have the opportunity to learn Chinese history, especially from the perspective of ordinary people. In order to thoroughly understand Chinese history, we should study literary works. Although I have read many history books, none of them left such a deep impression on me as "Teahouse". I have read some stories about corruption in the Chinese government before. But when I saw Shopkeeper Wang being oppressed, I realized how corrupt the government was.

It is not easy for Americans to admit the benefits of communism. Modern China is incomparable with China in the old era. In Mr. Lao She’s "Pictures of the Old Era", starving people are very common. ; There are many people selling their daughters. Although I have not seen very rich modern Chinese, I have not seen very poor Chinese either. I think China now deserves praise.

In addition to studying Chinese literature, I also enjoyed studying Lao She’s literary works. His writing is so good and has an authentic Beijing flavor. I really envy his writing skills and talents. He can include so many characters in a short play. Each person's character is clearly distinguished, and the words they speak clearly indicate his social status.

Because I am a woman, I am particularly interested in female characters. My favorite character is Kang Soon-ja, so I was happy to play that role. From the character of Kang Shunzi, readers can see the capabilities of Chinese women. He has suffered a lifetime, but his spirit is still strong and he finally found his own happiness. Women in the old days had no status in society, but the story of "Tea House" also implies that this situation will slowly improve. The little flower represents the next generation; although she is a girl, her father, grandfather, and Grandma Kang all encourage her to study hard. After seeing the situation of these women, I am grateful for my good luck. Once, a man asked me, "If you could meet anyone, who would you choose?" I replied, "My great-grandmother." Because I wanted to know the history of my family, I didn't know the story in "Teahouse." Which female figure resembles my great-grandmother.

There is some language in "Tea House" that I particularly like. Dasha Yang's words are a very clever opening method. I have never heard of Shulaibao. (I also think Mu Kun acted very well!) The audience immediately knew the situation of the people at that time when they saw Dasha Yang. In the first act, he spoke very lively, but in the third act, his look was "Half dead and half alive". I found that the way Chinese people speak is very different from that of Americans. The difference is huge! Chinese people are relatively reserved; they often use polite words and tactful words. This is the most difficult part of learning Chinese! In "Teahouse" we learned the authentic Chinese sayings. The funniest thing is in the second act. Two slutty brothers want to marry a wife, but they are too embarrassed to tell Liu Mazi their strange request. Of course they don't say it directly. , instead they said, "The friendship between these two people wearing a pair of pants... No one laughs at our friendship." Liu Mazi agreed, "No one laughs at it." They added, "Then you said that the friendship between these three people is not the same. People are laughing at it, right?" I also like Liu Mazi's reaction.

"We usually talk about young couples, young couples, but who has ever heard of young couples?" There is such a subtle meaning in Chinese!

I learned some polite words from Shopkeeper Wang’s lines. He specializes in saying polite words; he himself said: "I... have been an obedient citizen all my life. I bow, say hello, and bow to everyone I see." ,” So, I now know some words; like “There is light on my face” or “There are words”, I heard Singaporeans use these two sentences, so what I learned is really useful!

The dialogue written by Mr. Lao She also includes words that discredit and discredit him. For example, Mr. Qin and Eunuch Pang seemed to praise each other, but as soon as Mr. Qin left, Eunuch Pang immediately said bad things about him. , showing that he looks down on Mr. Qin. There are also some sayings that I have never heard before. For example, everyone often calls "so-and-so's mother". Of course, this also reflects everyone's view of women: the most important task of a Chinese woman is to give birth to children! I think if someone calls my mother "He Huo Wang Li's mother" she will be angry. We modern Chinese women insist that we have our own names!

"Teahouse" has another meaning to me. I found that Chinese people admire "foreigners", which I find baffling. Why do Chinese people imagine foreigners? Why do Chinese people think foreigners are better than them? In the first scene of "Tea House", we can see that the status of foreigners is getting higher and higher. In the first act, Ma Wuye "eats foreign food, believes in foreign religions, and speaks foreign languages." The tea guests also said that Liu Mazi's foreign clothes and foreign stuff are very clever. In the second and third acts, the foreigners' The habit slowly became the habit of the Chinese people. Even their currency was called "Xian Da Yang". People listened to music with a foreign flavor and no longer wanted to listen to traditional storytelling. Xiao Liu Mazi was most influenced by foreigners. He is very popular when he talks about foreigners. Even words with a foreign flavor are more powerful than ordinary words. Xiao Liu Mazi said, "You see, if people don't say 'hao', they say 'hao hao'". Even shopkeeper Wang can speak "Alright!" in foreign languages! Chinese people are increasingly breaking away from the Chinese habit of being reserved. Xiao Dingbao simply said that Xiao Liu Mazi's plan would be best to use a "bad company". I think it is wrong to love foreign things too much. I feel uncomfortable when I see this attitude. Maybe I am particularly sensitive because I have some Chinese-American friends who have this attitude.

I agree most with Mr. Qin. I believe his heart is good and his aspirations are good. No matter how proud he is, I also want to do social service work. After listening to Mr. Qin's last few words, I asked myself, "Will I regret it like him?" Should we young people listen to his advice to "eat, drink, whoring, and gamble"? My parents often told me that my ideals were impossible to achieve. Is Mr. Qin telling the truth? I don't believe it! "Teahouse" is not only a good literary textbook, "Teahouse" also helped me understand the history of China, the history of my family and my own ideals. Moreover, "Tea House" gave us the opportunity to use our acting talents. I have been taking Chinese classes for three years, but I have never seen students take so much interest in the teaching materials. My only regret is that other students did not fully understand our performance. "Teahouse" really left a deep impression on me

After reading "Midnight"

Mao Dun's female image has evolved from " The "Eclipse" trilogy began, and major changes took place in "Midnight". The former is based on the background of a changing era, and describes the ups and downs and struggles of several female characters. They are connected with the entire nation and the era, and participate in completing the masculine mainstream narrative; the later "Midnight" shows It focuses on women in the modern environment of urban China. These female images are not the center of gravity of the narrative of the writer and his works, and have little penetration of the writer’s subjective factors. They serve as foils in the grand narrative of national discourse. They are non-mainstream and non-subjective with real women. status is more appropriate. The Wu Mansion, the environment in which the women in "Midnight" live, is similar to the Grand View Garden in "A Dream of Red Mansions". It is a paradise on earth in troubled times, and a paradise for a group of marginalized characters who are outside the trend of the times. The bourgeois young men and women in "Midnight" are all based on the author's own life experience. The author inadvertently beautifies some women, as if the goddesses from Nordic mythology have descended into the modern Wu Mansion. The female workers in the silk factory are cheap laborers struggling in hell, without any tenderness and beauty of women. This comparison may show that sisters Lin Peiyao, Zhang Susu and others condense the writer's life experience and aesthetic feelings, and are more in line with the ideal female model in the writer's mind.

This article attempts to conduct a personal reinterpretation of this type of female image.

1. Lin Peiyao and her utopian "love"

The most plump and tragic female image in "Midnight" is Lin Peiyao. This gentle and graceful young lady exudes fairy spirit, but behind the noisy crowd, she has picked up the pain of separation between soul and body. The "true taste of reality" of being a young lady Wu is so bitter, which makes her miss it even more. The time when I was a young girl. Lin Peiyao longed for the romance of the classical aristocracy, passively accepted the modern capitalist civilization, but silently resisted in her heart. What she yearns for is "great" love, and she places her heart on the utopian love fantasy, and does not care about stocks, public bonds, factories, township enterprises and the like. As a wife, Lin Peiyao seems destined to suffer a split personality. Her poetic love and romantic imagination are outside her husband and family. Wu Sunfu was completely unaware of this. In his world of experience, there had never been a similar split in consciousness. Compared with Wu Sunfu's characteristics as a utilitarian capitalist, her character seems more charming. The American philosopher Marcuse pointed out in "One-Dimensional Man" that the advanced capitalist industrial society has created a high degree of material wealth for people, and it has also made the dehumanized living conditions become increasingly serious, and people have been Control of industrial production and consumption becomes "one-dimensional man." Therefore, he advocates that art can break with daily habits, bring new sensibility, and create a new dimension of existence to resist human alienation. In this sense, as a woman, Lin Peiyao's mental pain not only reflects the huge differences in love and marriage experiences between men and women, but also has a universality of human nature. The tragedy of Mrs. Lin seems to be a tragedy that is not a tragedy, a sadder tragedy under the surface of a superior life. The French feminist Beauvoir quoted Byron in "The Second Sex": "Man's love is part of a man's life and a woman's entire existence." [1] (P431) Love, in Lin Peiyao, has been

Has become the whole of life. She gave the chastity of love to her lover Lei Ming, and the chastity of body to her husband Wu Sunfu. She cherished both love and sexual morality. Unfortunately, these are not things that men value. Wu Sunfu devoted all his attention to the "great" cause and did not give his wife the necessary care. The lonely Lin Peiyao and her first lover Lei Ming rekindled their old relationship, and the love that had been suppressed for many years rekindled sparks. However, love is by no means everything in Lei Ming's life. This romantic spiritual love is not equal between two people. When he appeared in the novel, he was mixed up with Xu Manli, and his behavior after confessing his love to Lin Peiyao was even more puzzling. Poor Lin Peiyao's passionate kiss with Lei Ming made her feel guilty about her husband. When Wu Sunfu was in an extremely bad mood, he could vent his feelings to maids and courtesans, and his extramarital sex was exposed. Take it for granted and be immune to criticism. Lin Peiyao, however, automatically and consciously regarded her alienation from her husband and family as betrayal and immorality.

2. The Fourth Miss Huifang who is suffering from mental persecution

The female image in "Midnight" that best embodies the conflict between rural feudal civilization and urban modern civilization is the Fourth Miss Huifang . Her fierce spiritual contradiction is a manifestation of the confrontation between the collective unconsciousness of feudal society and the open modern concept. She was strictly disciplined in a family where her father ruled over everything. Feudal morals such as "all evils of sexual immorality are the first, and all kinds of good deeds and filial piety are the first", "men and women are not close to each other" and so on, are still lingering, and they control the fourth lady's thoughts and actions invisibly. She was like a piece of grass, uprooted by the roots and thrown into the materialistic and bizarre Shanghai. Her old values ??were impacted, and she was unable to squander and enjoy life like the people around her. The prominent status of the fourth daughter of the Wu family has prevented her from being harmed physically, but there is a certain gap between her and urban people. Caught between two civilizations, the fourth lady endures sorrow and loneliness. Fourth Miss Huifang's mental pain marked her as a persecutor. She was locked up in a feudal prison cell by her father, Mrs. Wu, for too long, and urban life made her uncomfortable. On the one hand, watching Lin Peishan, who is her own age, carefree in love, the girl's desire for love and sex sprouted in her heart. On the other hand, her heart was constrained by years of asceticism.

As a woman, she was passive and weak, so she did not have the courage to actively pursue love, so she followed the example of the late old man, picked up the "Tai Shang Inspiration", burned incense, chanted sutras and practiced with concentration. Huifang's "misbehavior" was because her desire for love and sex violated sexual taboos (women should not have lust and sexual desire), and it was also because she violated her father's teachings and majesty ("obeying your father at home" has always been the norm). One of the ethics that daughters should abide by is that it is a natural tradition that marriage is dominated by parents). Her being forced to commit suicide was also a conjecture, just like the madman in "Diary of a Madman" who used suspicious eyes to guess that the people around him had eaten people and were plotting to persecute him. Fourth Miss Huifang's penance ended in failure, and the writer gave her a brighter ending that did not include an ending: "Revolutionary" Zhang Susu led Huifang to escape from the Wu Mansion, which was declining and falling apart, to find a new one. free.

3. High-end prostitutes and deformed modern times

There are three young women who sell their bodies in "Midnight": the socialite Xu Manli, the widow Liu Yuying, and the young girl Feng Meiqing. They were all drowned in the mud of the city. Although there is no hardship of survival like that of workers in thatched huts, it does not represent women’s freedom, happiness and civilized modernity. Xu Manli is a typical high-end prostitute. She seeks material "happiness" by selling sexual services to bring entertainment to upper-class men. She was among many men and was used to it, and her life of making jokes seemed to be very carefree: in the big living room of Wu Mansion, she acted coquettishly and invited favors, and she had her way; there was her naked "dancing like death" in the billiard room; there was also her on the Huangpu River. A figure of wild joy? However, there is still a bit of elegance and romance in Xu Manli. During the night cruise on the Huangpu River, she went to ridiculous places and still felt a sense of humiliation in her heart. Xu Manli still has the temperament of a traditional courtesan, and she still has residual self-esteem and self-deceptive fantasies about love and sex. Liu Yuying is completely tamed by the corruption of capitalist money and male society. She calmly separates love from sex, uses her body as capital, and skillfully deals with the two tycoons Wu and Zhao, pursuing the secrets of getting rich one by one. She is a woman, and she knows that the way women make money is different from that of men; men use capital outside their bodies, while women use capital inside themselves. "This is Mao Dun's thorough analysis and accurate conclusion about her. Feng Meiqing willingly made cheap goods simply because her customer was Zhao Dacai, who was a powerful figure in the business and political circles. From the perspective of gender relations, Liu Yuying embodies women's Feng Meiqing's unscrupulous pursuit of capital itself embodies women's desire for male power and money power. From the perspective that money and power control women and dominate female desires, the interests of the capitalist system and men's rights are consistent. Characteristics such as romance, liberation, and modernity are all predicated on the incomplete development of capitalism. The abnormal development of Shanghai in the 1930s has become a conclusion in the sociological circles. It was a semi-colonial and semi-feudal city full of crises, with increasingly developed comprador capitalism and a national identity. Modernization and industrialization could only be Wu Sunfu's ambitious dream. The inherent traditions of feudal society and the mixed colonial culture of Eastern and Western society could not provide women with a space for independence. Instead, they created people like Xu Manli, Liu Yuying, and Feng Meiqing who made a living by looking at sex. They are special people. Their superficial characteristics leading the trend of the times lack the basis of real economic conditions and cultural environment, and are as impetuous and illusory as the abnormal business at that time. When Zhou Zuoren evaluated Shanghai, he once said bluntly that the tone of "Shanghai style" was. China's inherent "deterioration" is that Shanghai only has a culture of comprador hooligans and prostitutes, without any rationality and grace at all. In the eyes of people with "Shanghai style", women are just tools for entertainment 〔2〕(P90)

Although women such as Xu Manli, Liu Yuying, and Feng Meiqing have broken free from the constraints of traditional feudal women's virtues and female virtuous standards and have unprecedented sexual liberation and freedom, their "modernity" comes at the cost of selling their bodies and souls. It is contrary to women's freedom and happiness as human beings. People should have healthy spiritual pursuits in addition to material and money. While liberating human desires, women must have moral self-discipline. Only when autonomy no longer serves as a tool or commodity can a society be truly civilized. Zhang Susu and Lin Peishan, two young women who are still active inside and outside the Wu Mansion, are also deified images of tenderness, brilliance and beauty.

They spend their days leisurely and wander around carefree. The free love that has just been affirmed since the "May Fourth Movement" is no longer sacred and solemn. Zhang Susu is enthusiastic and cheerful, with quite personal thoughts. That Lin Peishan is simply a clueless doll. The images of these two women are relatively thin, so I won’t go into details. When we judge from a purely literary perspective, we have to point out a flaw. Mao Dun poured too much rationality into his creation, which shows the tradition of grand narratives in male writing and its limitations. Mao Dun's strict rational conception makes many images lack the richness of humanity, and their literary aesthetic value is greatly reduced. According to Mao Dun's original conception [3] (P481), there is also an old man in the dance hall looking for the daughter of the murdered revolutionary party, the love of female worker Zhu Guiying, and the complicated relationship between Zhao Botao, Xu Manli, and Wu Sunfu. , Zhang Susu is also a character who has a lot to write about. In the final text, Zhang Susu's love story and revolutionary story develop linearly. Why does a bourgeois lady yearn for revolution and how she pursues revolution driven by sensibility? There is a lack of necessary explanation of her social background and the psychological development process of the character. Zero, the female image is inadvertently ignored, the tragedy of ordinary people is omitted, it can be said that the daily life outside of economic struggle and the image of lower-class workers are poor foils in the grand theme. Mao Dun understood and shaped the image of urban intellectual women or bourgeois women with the prior concepts of women's liberation and gender equality. However, he did not break through the tradition of male narrative in his literary creation. He was not familiar with the countryside and the vast number of women in rural areas, did not understand the survival and psychological experience of lower-class working women, and did not fully reflect on the male narrative that has remained the same since the New Cultural Revolution. oppression and male-dominated culture. The clear creative purpose of "Midnight" determines its main content. The bourgeois women and their lives and love are not complete and full compared to the protagonists Wu Sunfu and Zhao Botao and the struggle between the two types of capital they represent. We see writers depicting women as beautiful, as if they have come from the distant heaven, with an ideal rose color. This means that although they have objective authenticity, they also have a certain degree of illusion. In the book "Closed and Open - A Theory of the Art of Mao Dun's Novels", Liu Huanlin clearly pointed out the influence of Nordic mythology embodied by the women of the era shaped by Mao Dun. Mao Dun's choice of reality and artistic transformation in "Midnight" is not the objectification of women. The image embodies his appreciation of a type of women he is familiar with, or an ideal of female beauty. We cannot demand that all writers can construct texts with women as the focus and write all the truth. Rereading "Midnight" can only make a personal reinterpretation without distorting the truth of the writer and the text.