'Farewell My Concubine: Self-Identification in Context\r'

'Directed by subgenus Chen Kaige, a highly acclaimed fifth-generation Chinese fool a focusing director, F arewell My doxy has received many international film awards and nominations; among them are the Best Foreign Film and the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 1993. In the film, Cheng Dieyi, a Peking opera house house actor undertakeacting the leading egg-producing(prenominal) characters, becomes obsessed with his role as the fancy man of the King of Chu and haze overs his coiffure role with the really life he leads. The circumstances in which peerless grows up in are critical factors in shaping his or her sense of self-identity.This paper attempts to research the gender identity troubles that Cheng Dieyi has underg peerless in his self-identification and sexuality in the context of the environment of his lift. The story begins when Cheng’s begin takes her boy to ascertain Guan and begs him to take Dieyi (whose nick get word was Douzi at the met re) into his opera fellowship. In order to be a performer in the Peking opera, one moldinessiness not lose any features that are abnormal or that may frighten the audience. Unfortunately, Douzi fails this test because he was born with a sixth riff on one of his hands.His mother was desperate to sell him sour and thus cuts finish off her son’s fingers breadth with a cleaver. At this point, Master Guan agrees to accept Douzi as a disciple in his opera troupe. Master Guan notices that Douzi’s â€Å"features were surpri blabberly delicate; he was nearly pretty” , which are perfect for playing womanish roles. Thus, Douzi is chosen as a dan , or the fe young-begetting(prenominal) lead of the opera troupe. He will play the female person roles alongside his best friend, Xiaolou who was chosen to be his sheng, or male lead. St prowessistic creationing from even the early scenes of the film, Dieyi’s self-identity has been slowly ripped away from him.D ieyi’s garbled passing from living in a bordello as a prostitute’s son to becoming a well-disciplined opera singer in the troupe is marked by his mother’s brutal amputation of his sixth finger. This symbolic castration implies that one must abandon his inherited past in order to seek a new well-disposed identity. â€Å"The root of biological determinism has been severed and the subject freed to postdate a place in a symbolic world of gender fluidity” Dieyi’s finger is not the further thing that has been emasculated, fitting his self-identity has been emasculate as well. The film hints at this in the germ by including the character of Master Ni, a unuch who was physically castrated, losing his male reproductive organs. While Master Ni was physically castrated of his male reproductive organs, Dieyi becomes mentally and emotionally castrated finished his harsh upbringing in the opera troupe. Whereas the symbolic castration signifies the ad venture of Dieyi’s transition from a biological male to a stereotypical female, the harsh bodily penalisation he receives during his training in the opera troupe enforces that transition. Corporal punishment is often used in schools to reinforce the relation between master and student.It instills in students a sense of the power of the social pecking order and their place within it. Dieyi’s designated â€Å"place” on that hierarchy, sadly, requires that he learns to abandon his male identity. While corporal punishment remakes Dieyi mentally, costume and make up remakes Dieyi physically. As he performs in the long dresses and fancy headdresses, he sees himself capable of reflecting signs of beauty and femininity. He is forced to sing â€Å"I am by nature a girl, not a boy” , and his full transition to femininity went into full motion the moment he mastered this line and accepted it as the truth, that he is by nature a girl, not a boy.Like roughly of th e male dans in the Peking Opera theatre, Cheng Dieyi must be able to create the prank of a real female that appeals to the male audience, but Cheng’s femininity is apparent not only on stage, but off stage as well. Clearly, Cheng has fully adapted his female roles into his life off stage. He speaks in a low loony voice, his movements are graceful, maintains the delicate hand pose of the local area network huazhi (the artificial feminine hand pose of the male dan), and wears a seductive look that would often be considered a feminine gaze.Most male dans merely attend these feminine acts on stage, but Cheng Dieyi gradually transforms these â€Å"acts” into an unconscious mind habit of his. â€Å"The repetition of the stylized female acts embed in female impersonation and the rigid and fierce regulation of these acts eventually bring ab break through Cheng Dieyi’s unconscious identification with Yuji, concubine of the Chu King, constructing in him a feminine s exuality and identity. ” Opera performers at the time were expected to play their stage roles for ife. Dieyi’s most notable performance is an epic opera named word of farewell My Concubine; it tells the story of the King of Chu (Xiang Yu) and his faithful concubine Yuji. Xiang Yu knows that he has lost to his enemy and drinks with Yuji on the refinement night. Yuji performs a stain dance for him and then cuts her sustain throat with his sword to express her faithfulness to him. As Dieyi continues to play the role of Yuji into this professional career, he begins to blur the life of Yuji’s character and his own.This becomes very unequivocal when Dieyi begins to show signs of affection towards his stage partner, Xiaolou, who plays the King of Chu. In multiple times throughout the movie, Dieyi can be seen looking at Xiaolou with a tender, almost romanticist gaze and is especially gentle when he helps Xiaolou defend makeup and dress in costume. His romantic feel ings for his â€Å"stage chum salmon” are translucent to the audience as he is overcome by jealousy at the news that Xiaolou was getting married to Juxian. He believes that Juxian is robbing him of what was sincerely his.As in the opera when Yu Ji and Xiang Yu swear their revere to each other, what Dieyi sees is actually he and his stage brother declaring their loyalty to one another. While Cheng Dieyi wholly embodies the female roles he impersonates, the Peking opera stage is essentially the world in which he bases his identity on. As he enters his professional career and makes a name for himself, he thinks that he will unceasingly be able to hide behind his feminine charms, and that art will always transcend any situation.For a while, he is proven right. On one occasion, he sings for a Japanese official to help Xiaolou out of jail; in another, he sings for a Chinese official to bail himself out of jail. Duan Xiaolou reminds Dieyi once more and again that life is not th e stage and he must learn to adjust to the values of the changing times. The film covers a story that spans across 50 long time of Chinese history: the rise and fall of the ultranationalistic Party, the Sino-Japanese War, the rise of the Communist Party, and the ethnical Revolution.As the nation goes through a profligate historical period, Cheng simply views it as a backdrop that would never affect his performances. He was never concerned about any of the political upheavals that occurred or the change in regimes. He matte up that as long as his art is organism appreciated, it does not matter who the political leaders are. When he was put on trial for being a traitor when the Communist Party was in power, he exclaims, â€Å"If the Japanese were still here, Peking Opera would have spread into Japan already,” with no regard to the consequences.The art of Peking opera has always been Cheng’s way of escaping public, and it is this illusion that he identifies with. Howe ver, when the Cultural Revolution started in 1966, the identity he has found for himself has been robbed from him once again. The Cultural Revolution is one that advocates extreme reality, and thus traditional art becomes a target of exploitation for distracting deal from reality. When Dieyi and Xiaolou are taken out onto the streets to be reprimanded, his anterior illusion that he and Xiaolou would never betray one another, just as Yu Ji and Xiang Yu would never do so, is shattered.Under the humiliation and physical abuse of the Red Guards, Xiaolou calls Dieyi a traitor to the Chinese and a homosexual. Cheng and Duan then plough on each other and expose criminatory details about each other’s past to the Red Guards. This political movement is in a sense, a rude awakening for Cheng. For the premier(prenominal) time, it forces him to abandon the identity that he forged for himself on the opera stage, and accept that he lives in a world where loyalty is not always indestruc tible. It is because of this alteration that causes Dieyi’s blurred lines between opera and reality to slowly reappear.These lines, however, did not have a long-lived effect. When Cheng Dieyi and Duan Xiaolou reunite on the stage many eld after the Cultural Revolution, they make their final adieu My Concubine performance. At the last scene, Dieyi, playing Yuji, takes the sword and slits his throat. Dieyi wanted so desperately to be Yuji his stainless life, and he finally fulfilled that wish, or so he thinks, by boldly committing suicide just as Yuji has done so: for his love, and in a dramatic manner, like a stage opera should be.Cheng Dieyi had grown up with violence and abuse, in a society with constant political turmoil and turbulent changes. As a boy who was already an draw in to begin with, the unsettling changes that revolved around him became too overwhelming. He had no choice but to retreat into a world that he knows best: the opera stage. though the opera stage is but a fabricated world, it is the only place in which he is always the hero(ine).Works Cited Cui, Shuqin. â€Å"Engendering Identity: Female Impersonation in leave My Concubine . From Poetic Realm to Fictional human being: Chinese Theory of Fictional Ontology (1999) leave My Concubine. Dir. Chen Kaige. 1993. DVD. Miramax Films, 1999. Goldstein, Joshua (1999). â€Å"Mei Lanfang and the Nationalization of Peking Opera, 1912â€1930” East Asian Cultures Critique 7 (2): 377â€420. He, Chengzhou. â€Å"Gaze, Performativity and Gender Trouble in Farewell My Concubine. ” Nanjing University (2004): n. pag. Web. Poquette, Ryan D. , Critical Essay on Farewell My Concubine, in Novels for Students, Gale, 2004.\r\n'