초록 열기/닫기 버튼
In 1998, the Walt Disney corporation witnessed world-wide success with the animation film, Mulan. The film, Mulan, is based on the story of a mythic legendary heroine, Fa Mulan, who dates back to the third century of medieval China; and, it is an adaptation of the chapter titled, “White Tigers,” in Maxine Hong Kingston’s most significant literary work, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts (1976). Both the novel and the film create their own narrative versions of the original Chinese myth about the heroine, Fa Mulan. In this paper, I analyze Disney’s film version Mulan and question how Chinese characters and Chinese representative symbols differ from Kingston’s novel and what such changes mean in terms of identity. My analysis of the novel, The Woman Warrior, applies Judith Butler’s theory of “performativity” to the heroine who is able to “perform” roles that are not prescribed by gender or restricted by social norms. My paper will begin with an examination of current research by cultural critics such as John Storey and Edward Said. I apply Storey’s recent critical analysis of how Hollywood’s Vietnam War movies not only “change” but also “invent” new forms of social and national identities concerning Vietnam. Storey states that Hollywood’s films not only “produce” their own version of “Vietnam” but also define what “Vietnam is like” to their audiences. Storey examines how Vietnam is invented and circulated through Hollywood’s powerful film industry. This paper examines the characters and iconic symbols within the novel and film in order to define how such invented identities, which result from genre transformation, often produce, change, and misconstrue identities that serve as prevalent realities in American society.
키워드열기/닫기 버튼
Maxine Hong Kingston, Walt Disney, John Storey, Judith Butler, Mulan, The Woman Warrior
