A Study On The Group Images Of Women In Xu Fen’s Marriage Drama

Xu Fen is a playwright who grew up with the People’s Republic and the first female playwright in Sichuan opera history.Xu Fen is very good at writing marriage dramas,and her creations also reflect many gender issues.However,the current academic research on Xu Fen mainly focuses on artistic characteristics and social significance,but lacks a gender perspective.Xu Fen aims to explore the personality,psychological and spiritual worlds of various women’s survival styles in the marriage and love.Xu Fen showed the overall state of existence of women and expressed a profound understanding of women’s tragic fate by these types of female portraits.The female portraits in Xu Fen’s plays reflect her modern concept of gender,and they also communicate the concept of gender in traditional Chinese opera invisibly.From the perspective of ethics,according to the different attitudes of women towards feudal ethical code,the female images in Xu Fen’s plays can be divided into four types: strugglers of traditional ethics and power,bearers of traditional values,defenders of gender-level,bystander in the world of marriage and love.These types correspond to the three tragedies of women’s survival—resistance brings physical destruction,endurance leads to the loss of free spirit,and maintenance symbolizes assimilation by feudal moral concepts.No matter what kind of image is,whether it is resistance or endurance,the women in the description of Xu Fen have been able to speak and talk actively.She not only saw the initiative and progress of women’s active survival,but also saw the negativity of women’s willing to submit to male authority and reduced to male power playthings.Obviously,Xu Fen has an appreciation for the former.Therefore,Xu Fen put modern consciousness into the "virtuous women" affirmed by the playwrights in the traditional text(personal attributes emphasize self-esteem and independence,social attributes rebellious spirit,emotional attributes weaken the utilitarian nature of spouse selection,and empathy),further affirming the subjective initiative of women in controlling their destiny.On the other hand,it also affirmed the efforts of these "bad" women to seek survival,and revealed the harshness of women’s reality and the helplessness of survival.Xu Fen restores women’s living environments,psychological changes and shows her emotional attitude and value congnition to women from three aspects of gendered language of deriving from female experience,detailed descriptions of daily life recurrence of daily life,and stage vocabulary of highlighting the women’s psychology.As a female creator,Xu Fen poured her life experience and personal experience on the characters in the play,gave women a highly delicate language in the play,presented true and ordinary details of life,and digged out the universals from commonplace and subtleties.The emotions of the audience caused a high degree of resonance among the audience,especially the female audience.In addition,Xu Fen cross-borderly simulated the movie technique,and completed the long shot and close-up expression of the stage of the opera,so that the audience could focus on the heroine and feel the female emotions.The stage cue also emphasized the use of light and shadow sounds and gave them emotions,which extended the female psychological space while showing off the atmosphere,showing the sad style of Xu Fen’s plays.It is worth noting that the female portraits written by Xu Fen have contradictory temperament.On the one hand,the women in Xu Fen’s drama often die generously,giving her tragedy a noble aesthetic temperament.However,the core of the tragedy of the female characters created by Xu Fen lies in the attachment of women,loneliness and the pursuit of negative freedom.This shows the incompleteness of Xu Fen’s innovation in gender concept.On the other hand,Xu Fen reshapes traditional opera The form of female images in the world,and active participation in drama practice activities have impacted the monopoly of male power on the stage of the opera for hundreds of years.However,Xu Fen basically chooses beautiful young women to shape female images,and the beautiful factors play an important role in promoting the evolution of the plot,showing that her understanding of female beauty has certain limitations and the incompleteness of her female liberation consciousness.This contradictory temperament is the unique cultural temperament of female drama in the new period.The political lifting in the 1980 s and the impact of Western feminism gave birth to female dramatists’ attention to self in the new era,the commercial wave stimulated the birth of multiple entertainment methods,consumerism guided and strengthened the public’s narrow definition of female beauty,and the cultural psychology had not escaped men at the beginning of ideological emancipation.The barrier of hegemony as a whole reveals the characteristics of Xu Fen’s progressive and conservative intersection in the view of women in the period of social transformation.Xu Fen’s humanitarian thoughts and gender equality in marriage and love dramas have positive educational significance for the public.She also made positive contributions to the reuse of traditional opera resources and the development of female writing methods.At the same time,the contradictions of Xu Fen’s female portraits suggest that the development of opera should pay more attention to the survival dilemma and aesthetic needs of contemporary women,and assume the responsibilities and obligations of mass media culture transmission.