GWENDOLYN LIMBACH
Disney’s Mulan, released in 1998, is one in a sequence of animated feature films from the company that proffer outspoken, seemingly rebellious, female characters: Disney’s New Woman. In Mulan, as in the Chinese folktale of Hua Mulan1 upon which it is based, the young heroine impersonates a man to join the army in her ailing father’s stead. Though adapted from this well-established legend, the Disney version retains certain “distinctive Chinese cultural traits and historical facts to construct a ‘Chinese’ flavour” while organizing the film around an Americanized cultural pathos.2 Whereas in the poem Mulan cross-dresses with the aid and approbation of her parents, in the film Mulan runs away from home, breaking away from her family to find her identity. Thus in this translation, Disney not only puts an American teen spin on the story of Mulan but also reorganizes it around the typical Western fairy-tale ideals, ones which privilege masculinity over femininity.
Indicative of the film’s motif of crossing boundaries, Mulan begins with the Huns crossing the Great Wall into China. In response, the emperor issues a conscription notice and drafts one man from every family into the imperial army. Believing that her father will be killed if he fights, Mulan steals his armor and sword, running away to join the army to save him. At first glance, the story of a daughter becoming a warrior “woman” to defend family and country seems to espouse a progressive, feminist message to its viewers. However, Mulan’s transgression supports patriarchal3 power structures rather than disputes established gender roles. Cross-dressing challenges commonly held notions of binarism, questioning gender categories and what exactly is “female” and “male,” whether these are considered essential and biological or cultural and constructed. Transvestism poses the question, if one relies on sartorial artifacts to designate gender (girls wear pink, boys wear blue), how does one “read” gender when those designations are changed? While it appears that the film celebrates its protagonist as a liminal character and sets up gender as culturally fabricated, these constructions are in fact based on essentialist notions of biological sex. Rather than blurring the boundaries between genders, Disney’s Mulan continually differentiates men and women through “axiomatic” concepts of what is female and what is male.
The film illustrates continual boundary-crossings: The Huns invade China, Mulan crosses genders, and Li Shang’s troops cross from novices in training camp to heroes on the battle field.4 Yet only those crossings that reaffirm the established masculine order are allowed to remain; whereas the victorious soldiers maintain their lauded position, the Huns are defeated, and Mulan becomes an obedient daughter and future bride. Although narratives of cross-dressing often subvert the predominant social discourse surrounding gender, Disney’s Mulan contains the disruption that arises when a woman becomes a man to reinforce the gender binary and deny any agency that occurs when these boundaries are crossed.
Two of the ostensible themes of the film are established through the first song, “Honor to Us All”: in particular, that honor is the most precious commodity an individual can provide the community; and that fulfilling societal imperatives, fitting in to one’s (gender) role, is difficult but necessary for survival. In order to gain the former one must succeed in the latter. As Mulan prepares to meet the matchmaker, who holds the girls’ place in society in the balance, she copies notes onto her arm as if about to take a test she’s ill-equipped to pass. The necessities for impressing the matchmaker do not reside within Mulan but must be placed on her as visible indicators: “quiet, demure, graceful, polite, delicate, refined, poised, punctual.”5 These characteristics are not innate and do not come from within Mulan; rather, they are to be learned and reiterated, to be placed on the body, just as the make-up and fancy dress, in order to designate her as female.
Both visually and lyrically the scene demonstrates that Mulan (and, by extension, all other girls), must submit to a feminizing process. Mulan, before the intervention of society’s restrictive gender requirements, is not made of the right materials to be formed into a proper woman, which in this context is equivalent to a proper bride. She is substandard in the eyes of the women who mark—and make—girls who bring honor to their families. Nevertheless, because every girl must become a bride (read: truly female), Mulan undergoes the transformative process through which she will be created. As her mother and grandmother take Mulan from shop to shop, we learn exactly what is required to be a girl and thus bring “honor to us all.” Each proprietor of femininity lists the extensive qualities that make a bride, and each lesson for becoming female is both oral and visual: Mulan is told what she must be and then made into that model. Rather than adhering to the demands of her family role, Mulan continually resists her transformation. She is pushed and pulled by hairdressers and costumers, always looking pained and uncomfortable in her own body. Every characteristic, even a tiny waist, is fabricated rather than natural, and none are essentially linked to the biological “fact” of Mulan’s sex. Like the make-up painted on her face, the above qualities are culturally constructed markers of femininity that one assumes as a rite of passage into womanhood.
But one cannot pass through this rite without finally meeting the local matchmaker and earning her approval. She will determine a girl’s future position in relation to society, and the girls recognize the consequences when they equate her with an undertaker. The power this woman yields, more frightening than death itself, emphasizes the necessity of heterosexual approbation in order to secure a place in society. Mulan stumbles through the marketplace, trying to catch up and—literally and figuratively—fall in line with the other potential brides. While they smile and repeat the hope of bringing honor, each girl looking nearly identical, Mulan stares ahead in disbelief that she must be like them in appearance and action. Their transformation culminates through finding husbands and integrating them fully into the heterosexual matrix by which they will be recognized as women. Thus a woman is delineated by her appearance only in that it leads to heterosexuality. The song and scenes make clear that a daughter can only bring honor to herself and her family by becoming a bride. Without fulfilling her assigned gender role through marriage she and her family merit no honor, nor can she honor the Emperor by bearing sons. In this world Mulan has no other options than wife and mother, they “are presented as the ultimate goal” for all girls, “suggesting that there are no ‘female’ alternatives in relationships.”6
After the matchmaker declares, “You may look like a bride, but you will never bring your family honor!” Mulan returns home, and, upon seeing her father’s hopeful face, turns away to reflect (literally) on her position.7 In Mulan’s mind (and within society), the terms “bride” and “daughter” are conflated, and following the matchmaker’s chastisement, Mulan questions exactly what part she is meant to play. The film takes the notion of the perfomativity of gender a step further and creates a literal metaphor for Mulan’s identity questions in the form of theatrical roles. As Judith Butler indicates, “Performativity is thus not a singular ‘act,’ for it is always a reiteration of a norm or set of norms, and to the extent that it acquires an act-like status in the present, it conceals or dissimulates the conventions of which it is a repetition ... its apparent theatricality is produced to the extent that its historicity remains dissimulated.”8 The preparations for meeting the matchmaker reduce the perfomativity—the repetition and citation of gender norms—to a set of acts that one exhibits in the moment, as if that perfomativity were a conscious choice; thus the dressing and making-up process conceals the historical actuality of required and unconscious reiterations of gender norms.
Indeed, to the extent that one declares “It’s a girl!” at birth, the naming of the girl “initiates the process by which a certain ‘girling’ is compelled, the term ... governs the formation of a corporeally enacted femininity that never fully approximates the norm.... Femininity is thus not the product of a choice, but the forcible citation of a norm.”9 Once Mulan realizes that she cannot approximate or properly cite the feminine norm, she questions only herself and her “performance” rather than the norm itself. Yet, as Garber notes, “Gender roles and categories are most vulnerable to critique when they are most valorized, when their rules, codes, and expectations are most ardently coveted and admired.”10 Though Disney impugns the extravagant means through which a girl conforms to gender expectations, it never challenges the expectation itself. Rather than critiquing the institution that requires a proper wife to be only silent and beautiful, the film instead focuses on the crisis an individual experiences when she does not meet the requirement. The paternal edict “I know my place, it is time you learned yours”11 commands Mulan to assimilate a preconceived gender role rather than rebel and form a new one.
Asking who she sees in her reflection underscores the importance of the physical manifestations of one’s gender role in Mulan’s world. When she looks at herself Mulan shows only sadness at what appears before her. The reflection of what should be the perfect bride and daughter does not touch the reality of what is underneath the female facade. Both of Mulan’s reflections—the painted and unpainted faces—are conveyed on the temple stones of her family shrine. Placed there to honor the Fa family ancestors, the stones represent both the duty Mulan owes her father and her inability to fulfill that duty in her current form. She realizes that “only by changing her outer appearance can [she] reflect her inner identity.”12 That Mulan does not recognize the girl in her reflection, that she reflects her inner identity via cross-dressing, raises the question of whom (and what gender) Mulan wishes to enact. Although “[t]hematically this song functions as a monologue through which the heroine expresses her longing for an accredited individuality,” that accredited individuality is inextricable from a condoned gender role.13 Disney reinforces the cultural constraint that one’s identity is dependent on the successful realization of one’s gender imperatives through Mulan’s personal crisis after she fails to earn the matchmaker’s approbation.
Mulan sees her identity as wrapped up in the artifice of sartorial markers so that, when she does not receive the designation of woman in her female clothes and make-up, she begins to doubt what kind of identity she is to have/perform. She seems unaware of the implications of this mode of gender construction, yet when Mulan passes as male by employing the right clothes, she demonstrates that both her feminine clothes and her armor are costumes that do not actually correspond to the gender of the person whom they cover. Thus, as Garber notes, “Transvestism, deployed strategically as disguise, uncovers as it covers, reveals the masquerade that is already in place.”14 Mulan may be biologically identified as female, but, as the matchmaker scene and the ensuing song “Reflection” attest, she does not fulfill the gender roles required of her. Trying to be the “perfect” bride or the “perfect” daughter is a masquerade already in place and literalized via the white face paint she wears at the bride selection. When she decides to run away, trying to “learn her place” as her father admonished, Mulan trades one mask for another, and the success she experiences with the male disguise only emphasizes her previous failure with the female one.
If “Honor to Us All” functions as an account of the constructedness of female gender, then its counterpart “I’ll Make a Man Out of You,” which plays over the montage of the soldier’s training, both juxtaposes and makes explicit the contention that gender is a cultural product. Mulan’s transformative toilette is a “subconscious recognition that ‘woman’ in patriarchal society is conceived of as an artifact—and that the logical next step is the recognition that ‘man’ is likewise not fact but artifact, himself constructed.”15 The film exploits this recognition in both senses via the subsequent scenes at the training camp. Rather than copying crib notes onto her arm to pass as a proper daughter and bride, Mulan—now dressed in male clothing and named Ping—carries Mushu, a small dragon guardian, through the camp, listening to his whispered guidance on how to “act like a man.” Thus the Wu Shu camp functions on two levels: training new recruits to be soldiers as well as training Mulan to be a man. If “wife” is the cultural artifact of woman in the film, then “soldier” is the cultural artifact of man. It is much more common to speak of “making a man” out of some (male) candidate; some martial or sexual exercise will “’make a man’ of the hapless boy.... To ‘make’ a man is to test him.”16 Becoming a man is an active process, requiring some physical or sexual prowess on the part of the subject. Becoming a woman, in contrast, is a passive process, to be enacted upon a silent object. Though Shang takes the rhetorically active place within the song (he is the one “making” a man of others), Ping and the other soldiers equally participate in the process of their making; they learn hand-to-hand combat, archery, rocket launching, and a plethora of physical activities to become their own agents of achieving manhood.
However, qualifiers of manhood are not as distinct as those for womanhood. Whereas the women in town tell Mulan exactly how she must look to be female, descriptions of being a man are cloaked in simile. The comparisons to elements of nature attempt to frame manliness as part of the natural world and thus not constructed by conventional society. The use of similes also functions to obscure the delineation of exactly what does make a “man”; perhaps what lies behind this lyrical vagueness is, according to Garber, a “sneaking feeling that it should not be so easy to ‘construct’ a ‘man.’”17 For in these lines there are no step-by-step directions for the process of becoming, only the repeated, baritone-voices of the chorus commanding each soldier to “Be a man.” The montage sequencing of these scenes provides only evidence of the change the soldier make into men, not how such a change came about—what the characters did to become men. In “Honor to Us All,” Mulan receives instructions accompanied by their actions: the woman painting Mulan’s face sings about being pale at the same moment she applies the white paint. In contrast to Captain Li’s dictates to be a man, the process of becoming a woman is given as an instruction manual and made accessible to any who wishes to learn and mimic it.
Also juxtaposed to the feminine transformation, the male experience is one of physicality and awareness of the body. Mulan is taught that the female body is not for her own use, that its value is only measurable by its attractiveness to future husbands. Her male façade Ping, on the other hand, is shown that the masculine body is essential to male self-definition, that it must be fully integrated with the psyche to establish gender. Recall that Mushu’s first lesson to Mulan in passing is imitating a “man walk” into the training camp. Mushu can tell her what to do to walk like a man, but without knowledge of her capabilities Mulan cannot pass in the eyes of other men. Her near failure to become a man results from her body’s inability to attain physical goals despite her emotional and intellectual desire to do so.
Though the film attempts to place male and female genders on opposing sides of an intractable boundary, by relying on a binary structure to support its definition of these genders it in fact exposes a contradiction. As Eve Sedgwick observes in her analysis of binaries, valorized terms are nonetheless dependent upon subordinate terms for meaning.18 The film emphasizes that women are not considered equal to men—indeed, even after Mulan defeats Shan-Yu, the emperor’s counselor refutes the claim that “she’s a hero” with the rejoinder “she’s a woman.”19 Furthermore, as Shang and the other soldiers reveal, manhood is not only an active process of making a man but also defined in opposition to woman/girlhood (“Be a man.... Don’t be such a girl”). Thus manhood is not an entity unto itself, separate from womanhood; rather, it depends on the latter for its constitution.
As in the confrontation with the matchmaker, Mulan nearly fails to become a fully realized participant in the heterosexual matrix. Neither man nor woman, she would be unmarked, non-existent within her community and within discourse. Shang tells Ping to go home asking, disbelieving that he can make a man out of the novice. Mulan disobeys the command and works on her own to prove her manhood. She must scale the high wooden pole, phallic in its near impossibility of being conquered, with weights that represent strength and discipline to retrieve an arrow at the top. Though Ping has gone through military training and followed Shang’s orders, helped (and more often hindered) by Mushu, she has not attempted anything alone. Now, with her family’s honor and her own existence being threatened, Mulan must rely only on herself to become a man. She must transition from passive object upon which gender is written and become the subject-agent that claims a gender and a role in the community. Thus in answer to Shang’s question of how he could make a man out of Ping, Mulan demonstrates that he cannot; as the cross-dressed figure it is up to Mulan to make herself a man, to move from passive object to active subject. The most important step here is the claiming of her bodily power and integrating physical and mental strength to “make it” to the top, to “make herself a man.” Because she is able to scale the pole when the other men cannot, it appears that her “power inheres in her blurred gender, in the fact of her crossing-dressing, and not—despite the stereotypical romantic ending—in either of her gendered identities.”20
For one positioned as a woman warrior, Mulan spends relatively little time cross-dressed in her military garb, let along actually fighting. In the Chinese poem, Mulan spends 12 years in the army and fights hundreds of battles before she returns home,21 yet Disney’s version reduces her time cross-dressing (and thus between genders) into a span of a few weeks. In both narratives we are not meant to pay an inordinate amount of attention to her male facade; Disney especially desires “to appropriate the cross-dresser ‘as’ one of the two sexes ... to look away from the transvestite as transvestite, not to see cross-dressing except as male or female manqué, whether motivated by social, cultural, or aesthetic designs.”22 Though Garber calls this tendency an “underestimation of the object,” it would be more apropos in the case of Disney to name it a proper estimation of the object’s—transvestism’s—power. On the one hand, adapting the story of a cross-dressing girl “seems to desire women’s liberation by showcasing a Chinese female warrior to accentuate the image of strong women: girls can be soldiers.”23 On the other, focusing and celebrating too much the cross-dressed figure might resemble too closely supporting an outright challenge to dominant gender norms. As Sam Abel notes, Disney “cannot critique traditional gender roles because [it] buy[s] into them.”24 Instead, the film normalizes the story of the transvestite through a progress narrative: Mulan always has a reason to explain (or explain away) her transvestism, whether to keep her father from being killed or “to prove [she] could do things right. So when [she] looked in the mirror [she’d] see someone worthwhile.”25 There must be a reason so that “any discomfort felt by ... the audience ... is smoothed over and narrativized by a story that recuperates social and sexual norms, not only reinstating the binary (male/female) but also retaining, and encoding, a progress narrative: s/he did this in order to (a) get a job, (b) find a place in a man’s world, and (c) realize or fulfill some deep but acceptable need in terms of personal destiny.”26 Hence Mulan does not cross-dress in order to usurp cultural power denied her because she is female, nor does she cross-dress for personal or sexual fulfillment. Rather, her transgression is reinscribed as, at first, filial piety and later as journey to realize her place in society.
To reinforce that Mulan does not truly desire to be a man she is never shown to particularly enjoy manhood, nor does she seem to understand the cultural power she now possesses as Ping; she is made a man at training camp and subsequently her first desire is to ensure that “just because [she] look[s] like a man doesn’t mean [she has] to smell like one.”27 Being a man is depicted as a physically unappealing prospect: the men in the camp are rowdy, violent, and mean to Ping, and Mulan describes them as “disgusting.” Conversely, the soldiers treat femaleness as equally unwanted: Li Shang starts training the new recruits by shaming them, asking if they’re daughters rather than sons. Fellow soldier Yao offhandedly insults Ping, Chien-Po, and Ling by calling them girls; when Ping does not want to play-fight with Yao Ling tells her “Don’t be such a girl.”28 Clearly, being a girl is inferior, but men are gross and real girls would not want to be (like) them. For the gender binary and patriarchal power structures to remain intact gender crossing cannot be an attractive option for women, and it is implied that if not for filial piety Mulan would never cross-dress.
Whether she derives any pleasure from passing as a man, the film does not hint at (and more often denies it); Mulan’s mission is to bring honor to her family through military accomplishment, and she finds that opportunity in the aptly named Tung Shao Pass. Vastly out-numbered and under-equipped, Shang’s troops encounter the entire Hun army on the mountain pass that leads to the emperor’s palace. After an unsuccessful volley, Shang commands the soldiers to aim the last rocket at the Hun leader, Shan-Yu, and prepare to fight to the death. Thinking quickly, Mulan sheaths her sword and grabs the remaining rocket, running into the open space between the troops. By firing the rocket into a snow embankment and causing an avalanche, Mulan defeats the entire Hun army by herself in one fell swoop. To reiterate Garber: her “power inheres in her blurred gender, in the fact of her crossing-dressing”; when Mulan is at her most powerful she is between genders. That this triumph occurs on the Tung Shao Pass—the path between mountain peaks, the mountain itself as a border between two lands (rural China and Imperial City)—and that she does so by running into the No Man’s Land between the two armies further affirms the power of crossing.
After defeating the Hun army, as well as rescuing Shang from the avalanche, Mulan is lauded as “the bravest of us all” and “king of the mountain.”29 But following these pronouncements of full acceptance as a man she faints from a sword injury and is literally uncovered as female. Her greatest victory is immediately undercut by the revelation of her gender. Whereas the Mulan of the original poem unmasks herself after the war, Disney’s Mulan has no choice in the matter. In the poem, after Mulan triumphantly returns home, she chooses to dress as a woman again and reveal herself to her fellow soldiers, who accept her wartime cross-dressing without question. Her exposure in the film, however, functions as punishment for her liminal behavior, and after her “true” gender is discovered, Mulan does not try to pass again. Whereas narratives of cross-dressing are often meant to open possibilities of alternative power structures, the film denies this possibility by consistently delineating between male and female; while Mulan can pass in the eyes of her comrades (for a time), she is constantly redesignated as female to the audience. Once she recrosses the gender boundary back to femaleness there is apparently no return; she earns accolades from the emperor, returns home to her family, and gains a fiancé—now that she is a “real” woman there is no reason to cross-dress.
While Mulan earns heroic admiration as Ping when she defeats the Hun army, her “true” heroism is later enacted when she is dressed as a woman. Though she has been abandoned by the troops, indeed almost killed for high treason, when Mulan learns that a few Huns have survived the avalanche and infiltrated the Imperial City she continues in her soldier’s role, if not her soldier’s garb. After Shan-Yu and his remaining soldiers barricade themselves in the palace with the emperor, Shang, Yao, Ling, and Chien-Po attempt unsuccessfully to penetrate the palace doors with a stone statue. Using her already established strategic thinking, Mulan formulates a plan: She and the three soldiers impersonate concubines to give Shang an opportunity to rescue the emperor. Hoi F. Cheu calls this “the most unconvincing scene,” in which the cross-dressed soldiers “save China from the dishonourable terrorists with their femininity.”30 Cheu continues: “This cross-dressing scene is certainly designed to make girls feel good about being ‘women’ by evoking a sense of poetic justice after what the men have done to Mulan for her transgression.”31 It is tempting to view Mulan cross-dressing her male comrades in the same manner that she was to meet the matchmaker, but in this scene the men are not figures of power but figures of parody. The three “concubines” are revealed in harsh lighting and strike bold, masculine poses despite their clothing. Their change is a spectacle meant to elicit audience laughs rather than challenge their so-called innate maleness. Whereas Mulan must viably pass as a man to uphold family honor and not be killed for treason, the men do not attempt to truly pass as women; they remain only men in women’s clothes.32 Nor do their lives and honor depend on successfully cross-dressing; it is treated almost as a lark. With the reprise of “Make a Man Out of You” in the background, the scene renders Mulan’s previous transgression a joke rather than a powerful statement. And as Cheu’s particular word choice asserts, the cross-dressing is “poetic justice” for abandoning Mulan—the soldiers are feminized as punishment. In this moment the message is clear: femininity is ridiculous and should be mocked when men exhibit it.
Once Shang, the only one who fully retains his masculine appearance, stops Shan-Yu from striking the emperor down and the other men take the emperor to safety, the Hun leader focuses his ire on the young captain. Seeing Shang unconscious on the ground, Mulan goes to his aid as he begins to wake up. Shan-Yu attacks Shang, slapping him and grabbing him by the collar as he yells, “You took away my victory!” Before he can go further Mulan hits him with her shoe and states, “No! I did!” as she pulls her hair back to resemble her former self.33 Shan-Yu remembers her as “the soldier from the mountain,” refusing to place her in either gender and thus maintaining her liminal status even when she is sartorially female. Immediately he pursues Mulan without paying heed to her gender. Shan-Yu is the only character who does not reference Mulan’s gender in their interactions, nor is he concerned with her crossing; he does not rein in his attacks or taunt her because she is female. Rather, he treats Mulan as an equal opponent who stands in the way of his victory.34
When he corners her on the roof of the palace, Mulan’s only weapon is her fan, the oft-used symbol of femininity, against Shan-Yu’s sword, an obvious phallic reference. As his sword penetrates the fan’s paper, Mulan closes the fan and twists the sword out of Shan-Yu’s grasp, grabbing it from the air and turning the weapon upon its owner. While Mulan’s resourcefulness is vital to her victories against this enemy, the winning strategy here, in Disney’s approximation, is to rely on feminine accoutrements rather than masculine war munitions. In addition, rather than defeating Shan-Yu on her own, Mulan relies on outside help. Once she has the sword, she calls to Mushu, who fires a rocket35 at Shan-Yu that hits and propels him to the fireworks tower, which explodes and leaves no doubt of his defeat. Importantly, Mulan uses his sword against Shan-Yu by pinning him directly in the rocket’s path; however, because she finally defeats the Hun leader as a woman when she was unsuccessful as a man, and because Shan-Yu’s death is what ultimately saves China, the power of the liminal figure is diminished. It is neither Mulan-the-man who defeats the enemy nor Mulan-the-liminal: rather, it is only when Mulan employs her femininity, represented by the fan, that she succeeds—she must emerge from liminality into the fully feminine. Disney exploits the girl-power pathos of the moment at the expense of the truly powerful actions of the cross-dresser. Thus the girl who returns to her daughter/future bride role is celebrated while the ungendered, rebellious person is marginalized.
When Mulan meets the emperor, she is prepared to accept his seeming condemnation as he lists her recent deeds in a denouncing tone, but is surprised to, in fact, receive praise. The emperor bows to Mulan, saying, “You have saved us all,”36 and the people assembled around the palace bow as well. The emperor further commends her by making Mulan a member of his council, recognizing not simply her military prowess but her intelligent strategizing. Though a council position elevates Mulan well above other jobs available to women and effectively marks her as equal to the other men on the council, the emperor offers little change to the social position of women in general. Mulan may transcend certain gender roles, but the roles themselves remain the same. As she does in the original poem, Mulan refuses the council offer in favor of returning home to her family, thus willingly returning to previous gender roles that have not changed since she left. Instead of employment, the emperor now offers his pendant, “so your family will know what you have done for me,” and the sword of Shan-Yu, “so the world will know what you have done for China.”37 Both the imperial crest and the weapon function as indicators of Mulan’s social status, but neither marks her as a woman.38 In fact, the conferral of her enemy’s sword effectively bestows upon Mulan an officially condoned phallus, marking her instead as male.
However, rather than allowing Mulan to complete her journey with her gender left “in-between” (a woman who possesses the phallus) and thus challenging the accepted gender binary, the film negates the agency of transgression at the moment she reaches the apex of her social power. The yearning for home nullifies Mulan’s self-sufficiency and rebellion against the gender norms that home represents. Moreover, immediately upon returning to her family, Mulan relinquishes these gifts, her social and gender markers, to her father as signs that “honor the Fa family,”39 placing herself fully under the dominion of patriarchal power. Fa Zhou ignores these abdicated symbols and only then embraces Mulan as his daughter, approving her return to her familial role and “proper” gender.
As this and the previous scenes illustrate, “The good, strong woman always returns to the man’s world. When Mulan defeats the Huns her emperor recovers his power; when she returns home her father retakes the order of the house.”40 The desire for home, the forsaking of her sword to her father, and, finally, the arrival of Shang to fulfill the role of Prince Charming all function to displace any liminal agency and re-designate Mulan as fully female. Thus, the pinnacle of her development, according to Disney, is not when she holds the sword of her enemy and the Emperor bows to her, but rather when Shang comes to “stay for dinner.”41 Mulan’s story begins with transgression to enact filial piety and “concludes with her fulfillment of these values. In the final scene, Mulan represents a reconciliation of the conflicts incurred by her boundary-crossing action and a restoration of the social norms.”42 Once these norms and her gender are firmly reestablished, the film can end with the obligatory happily ever after of the Western fairy tales it imitates.
Though Sui Leung Li claims, “The woman warrior is one of the most threatening unconventional female figures to the patriarchal imagination,” in both the original legend and the Disney version Mulan’s subversive power is suppressed and she happily returns to her social and familial position, suggesting little room for cultural transformation.43 In the Chinese poem, Mulan arrives home with her comrades, still dressed as a man. When she changes into her feminine clothing and applies make-up, Mulan reveals her female gender to the soldiers, who are shocked but accept her because they fought so long together. In dialogue that is unattributed, the speaker (who most assume is Mulan) says, “The he-hare’s feet go hop and skip,/ The she-hare’s eyes are muddled and fuddled./ The two hares running side by side close to the ground,/ How can they tell if I am he or she?”44 The poem’s comic ending revels in the confusion of gender conventions at the same time it returns Mulan to her gender role within the domestic realm. Because the Disney version predicates Mulan’s development on her transgression against patriarchal norms, when she returns to her former domestic role that violation is negated. The film adaptation may halfheartedly question how gender roles are traditionally fulfilled, but it never impugns the roles themselves: Mulan may not behave like American society’s version of a bride, but that does not mean she should not fulfill the role. The path is different but the destination is the same in Disney’s world. Because Mulan is a “retelling based on the use of elements typical of a fairy tale,” the traditional narrative must find its completion through the arrival of Shang and the implied courtship and marriage that will follow.45 This ending marks her acquiescence to the social order she rebelled against by running away from home. Thus, even though the film seems to celebrate Mulan’s liminality and the agency she gains because of her boundary crossing, Disney in fact contains the truly progressive significance of her actions in order to instill its own message of traditional gender roles.
1. Dates back to the Northern Wei Dynasty (386–534). The original tale never professes any progressive aims in Mulan’s cross-dressing—indeed, by dressing like a boy and taking her father’s place in the army Hua Mulan’s actions are not rebellion but rather approved and supported by her father as a sign of family duty.
2. For more detailed analyses of the racial issues raised in Mulan see Jun Tang and Sheng-mei Ma. Quotation from Jun Tang, “A Cross-Cultural Perspective on Production and Reception of Disney’s Mulan Through its Chinese Subtitles,” European Journal of English Studies 12.2 (2008): 152.
3. Patriarchy, as I use it throughout the essay, refers to the social order in which fathers, and by extension all men, claim a broad and disproportionate share of power and authority. Masculinity will refer to qualities and characteristics traditionally associated with the male sex. Here masculine gender is not biologically determined whereas male sex is.
4. Notably this occurs on the Tung Shao Pass the road through the mountains that border the Imperial City
5. Mulan, directed by Tony Bancroft and Barry Cook (1998, The Disney Corporation).
6. Tanner et. al, “Images of Couples and Families in Disney Feature-Length Animated Films.” American Journal of Family Therapy 31.5 (2003): 369, 365.
7. Mulan (1998).
8. Judith Butler. Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” (New York: Routledge, 1993): 12.
9. Ibid, 232.
10. Marjorie Garber. Vested Interests: Cross-dressing and Cultural Anxiety. (New York: Routledge, 1997): 51.
11. Mulan, directed by Tony Bancroft and Barry Cook (1998).
12. Lisa Brocklebank, “Disney’s Mulan—the “True” Deconstructed Heroine?” Marvels & Tales: Journal of Fairy-Tale Studies 14. 2 (2000): 275.
13. Lan Dong, “Writing Chinese America Into Words and Images: Storytelling and Retelling of The Song of Mu Lan,” The Lion and the Unicorn 30.2 (2006).
14. Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests: 282.
15. Ibid, 249.
16. Ibid, 93.
17. Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests: 102.
18. Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet: 9–10.
19. Mulan (1998).
20. Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests: 6. Though Garber is discussing Dorothy in the 1982 film Tootsie, the description is still apt. Mulan exhibits the most agency when dressed as Ping
21. Han H. Frankel, The Flowering Plum and the Palace Lady: Interpretations of Chinese Poetry, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976): 68–72.
22. Ibid, 10.
23. Hoi F. Cheu, Cinematic Howling (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2008): 3–4.
24. Sam Abel, “The Rabbit in Drag: Camp and Gender Construction in the American Animated Cartoon” Journal of Popular Culture 29.3 (1995): 188.
25. Mulan (1998).
26. Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests: 69.
27. Mulan (1998).
28. Ibid.
29. Ibid.
30. Hoi F. Cheu, Cinematic Howling: 2–3.
31. Ibid.
32. Indeed, Yao’s beard is not covered with white make-up and clearly visible.
33. This emphasizes hair, especially within the film, as the pivotal marker of gender. Recall that before Mulan even puts on her father’s armor she first cuts off and ties back her hair. All quotations from Mulan (1998).
34. As both are Others in Chinese society, both outsiders from the social order, perhaps Shan-Yu sees Mulan as an equal in her own right.
35. This rocket is simply a large firework, whereas the rocket Mulan used on the mountain was a military weapon.
36. Mulan (1998).
37. Ibid.
38. Indeed, while observing Mulan and Fa Zhou’s reunion, Mulan’s grandmother quips “Huh. She brings home a sword. If you ask me she should’ve brought home a man!” For the women in her life, Mulan’s “masculine” accomplishments don’t mean as much as the societal demands that Mulan marry—thus truly become a woman.
39. Ibid.
40. Hoi F. Cheu, Cinematic Howling: 7.
41. Mulan (1998).
42. Lan Dong, “Writing Chinese America...” (2006).
43. Siu Leung Li, Cross-Dressing in Chinese Opera (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2007): 83.
44. Han H. Frankel, The Flowering Plum and the Palace Lady: Interpretations of Chinese Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976).
45. Jun Tang, “A Cross-Cultural Perspective on Production...”: 150.
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