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Feminist Readings of Farewell My Concubine & Like Water for Chocolate

Feminist Readings of Farewell My Concubine & Like Water for Chocolate. Reconstructing identity. PostModern Attack on Metanarratives. Both films challenge dominant cultural metanarratives Farewell My Concubine: Legalism and communism (Marxism) The state is the answer

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Feminist Readings of Farewell My Concubine & Like Water for Chocolate

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  1. Feminist Readings ofFarewell My Concubine& Like Water for Chocolate

  2. Reconstructing identity PostModern Attack on Metanarratives • Both films challenge dominant cultural metanarratives • Farewell My Concubine: • Legalism and communism (Marxism) • The state is the answer • Like Water for Chocolate: • Patriarchial traditions

  3. Deconstructing icons Feminism • A challenge to patriarchial / phallocentric metanarratives • Political/social • Psychological • Mythic/literary • Based upon concept that identity is a culturally based social construction

  4. Internal Battle of the Sexes Jacques Lacan (1901-81) IMAGINARY (feminine) • Mother • Plentitude • Creative • Dreams & fantasies • Illogical • Madness • Holiness • Freedom • Rebellion • Ideal • Individual expression SYMBOLIC (masculine) • Father • Lack and desire • Restrictive authority • Ordered reality • Logic • Controlled sanity • Ritual • Repression • Social conformity • Accepted imperfection • Social conformance PSYCHOANALYTIC CRITICISM

  5. Revisionist history Farewell My Concubine • Historical Reading(Scar, Root-Seeking) • The film as revisionist history; a statement against theCommunist -Marxist metanarrative (rooted in Legalism) • Homosexuality depicted as a perversion • State suppression of individuality, creativity, traditions, mythologies • 8 Model Plays (under Mao)

  6. You are who you love Farewell My Concubine • Psychological reading • Love and and identity • The other defines us • Lack of the other frustrates our desire for fulfillment • Yin/yang (hermaphrodite) • Douxi: idealized image of Xialou • Juan: idealized image of Douxi • Frustrated, broken relationships • Pressure of state leads to betrayals • Psychological neuroses

  7. A Lacanian twist Farewell My Concubine • Psychological reading • Social construction of identity • We all have female side that is repressed by the patriarchal symbolic order (language and laws) • Plot driven by ironic twist of Lacan theory • Douxi forced to become “girl” • Douxi lives in Kristeva’s world of “poetry, holiness and madness”

  8. Freudian slip-ups Farewell My Concubine Freudian reading • All people are bisexual • Bisexuality/Oedipal complex resolved by presence of father figure (order/rules) • Douxi’s is never resolved • Master becomes his father / superego(the authoritarian gaze) • Ego is battleground between id and superego

  9. Displacing our anxieties Farewell My Concubine Freudian reading • Desires frustrated; develops neuroses and employs defense mechanisms • Depression • Repression • Paranoia • Displacement • Projection • Transfers/displaces unresolved conflicts and aggressions onto substitute object (Xialou and opera)--cathexisis

  10. Language speaks us Farewell My Concubine Lacanian reading • Douxi’s identity constructed outside himself • Language used to construct his identity • Remains in the imaginary stage • Never adjusts to the patriarchial symbolic order • Searches for the ideal (maternal state of plentitude); experiences “perennial lack” • Existential hero of the feminist order (creativity, beauty, holiness, poetry, loyal to the ideal)

  11. The yin and the yang Farewell My Concubine Metaphysical reading • Yin/yang • Incompleteness in this life • Yearn for perfection • Desire for harmony with all nature • Adoration of enlightenment (the bodhisattva) • Suffering is the result of desire • There is foulness in men and women • Karmic retribution

  12. Karma Farewell My Concubine Metaphysical reading “Calamity and misfortune cannot gain entrance of their own into a person’s life. It is the individual who calls them in.”

  13. A feminist masterpiece? Like Water for Chocolate Feminist reading • Magical realism as an expression of the feminist semiotic order • Fantasy, romanticism, nostalgia, sensuality, poetic • Total reversal of the patriarchal order • Rejection of Western icons of women

  14. A feminist masterpiece? Like Water for Chocolate Feminist reading • Identity socially constructed • Creates repressions and psychoses • Dona Elena: “control freak”(displacement) • Tita: fantasy and projection • Desire for fantasy, freedom, passion

  15. Binary oppositions Good Bad • Woman • Passion • Fantasy • Rebellion • Intuition (recipes) • Free-spiritedindividuality • Man • Reason • Reality • Order • Scientific knowledge (medicine) • Social order/family responsibility

  16. Binary oppositions Good Bad • Woman • Passion • Fantasy • Rebellion • Intuition (recipes) • Free-spiritedindividuality • Man • Reason • Reality • Order • Scientific knowledge • Social order PASSION

  17. A feminist masterpiece? Like Water for Chocolate • “A sappy melodrama.” • “A film that makes women prisoners of their own libidos and hormones.” • “Sets back feminism 100 years.” • “…all her women are sluts or adulterers, while the men are pigs and wimps.” • “Esquivel is an immature love child.”

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