Studies Of Chadan In Zaju In Yuan Dynasty

Chadan mainly acts as a female role that is vicious, perverse, lascivious and amusing in a drama. It is a minor role in zaju' of Yuan Dynasty, but it plays an important part in regulating the stage's atmosphere, setting off main roles, intensifying a drama's conflict, and maintaining and promoting its plot etc. The appearance of chadan is related with the continuity of cultural tradition and the peculiarity of the times. It is the result of an elaborate division of plentiful roles, with a variety of philistine lives as its social root. In the stage, chadan is mostly crafty, fierce, tough, shrewish and jocular; by showing off herself, exposing her own ugliness, and depreciating herself, it exposes the nature of ugliness and further the details of lives, and thus makes the audience obtain aesthetic pleasure in their mocking and ridiculous laughter. This kind of comic style, as the most important comic aesthetic features of chadan, contains deep tragic aesthetic implication and profound moral and cultural connotation, embodies distinct ethnic features, and causes an artistic effect with gravity and humor interacting each other. It is clear that the artistic conception of chadan expresses the dilemma and psychological weakness of the Yuan Dynasty's literati in the tough time, with the cultural tradition of the dramatists' masculine centralism and measure of value as its inside information. There are a lot of similarities between the women image of chadan in zaju of Yuan Dynasty and the women image in the Yuan Dynasty and Ming Dynasty's novels such as Outlaws of the Marsh, Three Kingdoms and The Journey to the West. Meanwhile, the narrative attitudein these novels is consistent with the artistic conception of chadan in zaju of Yuan Dynasty. This reflects that the right concept of the writer's masculine centralism is the nature of Chinese ancient dramas' concept about women and the nature of its ideology.