"A few days here, and you won't want to leave."
Foucault's Panopticon in Zhang Yimou's Raise the Red
Lantern, and Nawal El Saadawi's Woman at Point
Zero.
Plot
Zhang Yimou's Raise the Red Lantern, set in
turn-of-the-century China before the Cultural Revolution, is about a 19
year-old village woman named Songlian whose father has just died. To
support her stepmother's livelihood, she agrees to be sold to a rich man
named Chen as his Fourth
Wife. For generations, the Chen family has consisted of one man surrounded
by wives, servants,
and children, all living together in a vast estate, with separate houses
for the wives that are not much
more than glorified bedchambers. Every evening Chen and his wives take
supper together in the
family dining house. After dinner there is a ceremony in which all the
wives stand waiting outside
their respective houses. When Chen decides which one he will spend the
night with, the butler calls
in a loud voice, "Raise the lantern over the (4th House, 2nd House, etc)!"
and servant men light the
house whose occupant is to be honored by her husband's private company.
Chen is approaching the age of sixty, and has long tired of his First
Wife, who is almost as old as
he is. When Songlian joins the family, she becomes embroiled in a vicious
rivalry among herself,
Second Wife (Zhanyun), and Third Wife (Meishan). She learns to compete
with them for Chen's
favor, a competition that involves subterfuge, alliances, secrets,
performance, and manipulation.
She learns that her most important duty is to give Chen a son. She learns
that Zhanyun, behind a
sweet demeanor, harbors a malicious jealousy of the other wives because
she is growing old, and
has not borne a son. She learns that Meishan, a former opera singer and
the next youngest besides
Songlian herself, is having an affair with the family doctor, Dr. Gao. She
learns of the existence of
a death house in the compound, where wives of past generations were hanged
for adultery. When
she asks Chen about it he ridicules her and changes the subject. And she
learns that the maid who
has been assigned to her, Yan'er, is filled with spiteful envy because she
herself had harbored hopes
of becoming the Master's Fourth Wife.
Yan'er's dream of being promoted to the station of a Wife is so obsessive
that she has stolen some of
the family's Red Lanterns and keeps them lit in her quarters. Songlian
learns this secret, but,
understanding their common fate as women, spares Yan'er the humiliation of
exposure. Songlian
temporarily gains the Master's top favor by pretending she is pregnant,
but Yan'er finds menstrual
blood in her pants and tells Zhanyun. Zhanyun advises Chen to have Dr. Gao
examine Songlian.
When her secret is thus revealed, she is beaten and her lanterns are
covered with cloth sleeves. She
retaliates by exposing Yan'er and her stolen lanterns.
The lanterns are burned, and Yan'er commits suicide. Depressed by her loss
of status, and by guilt
over Yan'er, Songlian gets herself drunk on her 20th birthday. In a
drunken stupor she unwittingly
tells Zhanyun about Meishan's affair with Dr. Gao. Zhanyun tells the
Master and Meishan is ejected
from the household.
The next day Songlian hears sounds of a struggle, and goes to investigate.
Watching covertly, she
sees a group of servant men take Meishan into the death house, emerging a
little while later without
her. When she goes to the house and sees for herself that Meishan has been
hanged, she screams
and is apprehended by Chen and his servant men. Chen tells her she is
crazy. Eventually she does
go mad, wandering the grounds senseless. Chen takes a Fifth Wife and the
movie ends with
Songlian pacing back and forth through her chamber, as if she can't find a
way out.
Soul Sisters
Some reviews of Raise the Red Lantern have characterized
the film as a treatise on sexism in
China before the Cultural Revolution, in much the same way Woman
At Point Zero has been
reduced to a treatise on sexism in contemporary Egypt. Although I wish to
show that both texts
have much in common as powerful indictments of patriarchy in these two
societies, references to
Foucault will suggest that they also contain broader themes of class
struggle, and the modes of
discipline that are used to organize any hierarchical society.
Even in the most superficial ways, Songlian and Firdaus could be
soul-sisters. They both live in a
society where women are valued only as prostitutes or wives - Firdaus says
near the end of her
account: "All women are prostitutes of one kind or another." They are both
from poor backgrounds,
one the daughter of a farmer, the other, of a tea merchant. They both lose
their biological mothers at
an early age, and their fathers afterwards. They both possess some degree
of education: one
treasuring her secondary school certificate, the other disappointed at
having had to withdraw from
the university after her first six months. They are both sold to a rich
and powerful man, one by her
aunt (her uncle is urged into agreement by her aunt) and the other by her
stepmother. They both
learn about their societies, not academically, but existentially, by
living through numerous ordeals.
Both are intelligent, and philosophically sophisticated compared to the
people around them. And for
both, this philosophical bent leads to a nihilism that forces them to
withdraw from their societies, an
act that ultimately destroys them.
Firdaus begins life in naive curiosity about her life and the world around
her. Whenever she seeks
more knowledge as a child, her way is barred and/or she is punished for it
- she is "castrated" for
asking her mother a sexual question; she is told by her uncle that El
Azhar is forbidden to women;
she enjoys reading about history in school but soon finds that all history
is filled with neverending
stories about men who abuse power to fulfill their greed. Songlian's youth
is unknown to us, but
after six months at the university she knows enough: when her stepmother
warns her that marrying
a rich man means becoming a concubine, she is able to reply, "Let me be a
concubine then. Isn't this
a womans fate?" So early in her training each woman understands
theoretically that men rule the
world. The existential training that begins once each is forced to leave
school and marry is the
beginning of a deeper quest, a quest for firsthand knowledge of how deep
this power runs, and
what is required to break free of it.
At first each woman clings to the belief that even in a patriarchal world,
her education must count
for something. Songlian snobbishly shuns playing Mah Jong, and treats her
maid with much more explicit contempt than that with which her
husband treats her. But she is haunted by constant reminders of her
education's ironic uselessness.
First Wife tells her "It's good you're educated. You'll get used to it
here." Second Wife asks her for a
haircut and when Songlian says she doesn't know how to cut hair, Zhanyun
rejoins "Of course you
can. You went to the university." When Dr. Gao compliments her on her
education, she answers "What good are books? I'm just one of the Master's
robes. He puts me on or takes me off at
will." In a bonding moment with Meishan, the Third Wife says, "You are a
scholar. I am just an
opera singer. But we share the same fate." And when Songlian exposes
Yan'er's lanterns and
demands that she be strictly punished, Meishan reminds her not to behave
with the peevishness of a
servant.
Firdaus also begins her life as an adult believing that her education
affords her an elevated
status in society. She treasures her certificate throughout most of her
life, even hanging it framed on
the wall during her self-employed years. But snobbish schoolgirls laugh
and say shes crazy when
she calls attention to her learning, and Bayoumi belittles the
certificate's relative importance in a city
filled with jobless college graduates. Her disillusionment comes when she
realizes that her formal
education has not given her the kind of empowering knowledge she needs.
Knowledge and Power
Foucault discusses how knowledge can spawn a kind of imperialistic,
conquering power:
"The great empirical knowledge that covered the things of the world and
transcribed them into the
ordering of an indefinite discourse that observes, describes, and
establishes the facts (took place) at
a time when the western world was beginning the economic and political
conquest of this same
world . . ." (Foucault, 226)
In reading connections between Enlightenment empiricist modes and the
growth of the Western
imperial powers, Woman at Point Zero becomes an ideal
text for reading together with Foucault,
because Saadawi herself is a social scientist - one who collects facts,
conducts examinations, and
classifies objects.
The same snobbery Songlian feels for Yan'er, and that Firdaus feels for
the office women who don't
know enough to prostitute themselves for a high price, Saadawi feels for
the people working in the
prison - "She was no more than a woman cleaning the prison floor. She
could not read or write and
knew nothing about psychology, so how was it that I had so easily believed
her feelings could be
true?"(Saadawi, 4-5) When Firdaus rejects her, she feels as if she has
been insulted by a servant, and tries to
console herself accordingly - "Whatever the circumstances, a doctor was
surely to be preferred to a
woman condemned to death for murder."(5) But when Firdaus later agrees to
see her, she feels a
perverse scientific pleasure, an almost erotic impulse to know, to examine
- and I call it perverse
because it is as if she has forgotten that Firdaus is still condemned to
die -
"My breathing in turn quickened, as though by infection, or to be
more precise, I felt out of breath,
for my heart was beating more strongly than it had ever done before. I do
not know how I climbed
out of the car, nor how I followed so closely behind the warder that I
sometimes overtook her, or
moved ahead. I walked with a rapid, effortless pace, as though my legs
were no longer carrying a
body. I was full of a wonderful feeling, proud, elated, happy. The sky was
blue with a blueness I
could capture in my eyes. I held the whole world in my hands; it was
mine."(Saadawi, 5-6, emphasis added)
Thus Saadawi herself is implicated along with Songlian and Firdaus in her
quest for the truth. She
is a minor character because she learns the truth academically, as we do,
rather than existentially, as
the two players do, but she still tells us that years after her interview
with Firdaus, she was to end
up at the very same prison for adventures of her own.
Firdaus's quest for the truth is more actively existential than
Songlian's, in that she acts on every bit
of knowledge she gains. But she still has as much of the perverse
scientist about her as does
Saadawi. When she pieces together the money-power puzzle she feels "the
elation of a child that has
just pulled a toy to pieces and discovered the secret of how it
works."(Saadawi, 68) Then she discovers the
fear of men for their slaves: "I realized that I had been afraid, and that
the fear had been within me all
the time, until the fleeing moment when I read fear in his eyes."
(Saadawi, 95-96) She acts on this knowledge
by killing Marzouk. The man, of course, is the symbolic source of money,
and later she shows her
thorough understanding of the implications of this act by ripping up three
thousand pounds in cash.
Once she has burned her bridges in this way, her greatest quest lies ahead
of her, the solution of the
ultimate mystery - "Tomorrow morning I shall no longer be here. Nor will I
be in any place known
to man. This journey to a place unknown to everybody on this earth fills
me with pride."(Saadawi, 11)
Songlian is somewhere between Saadawi and Firdaus - not quite as
scientific as one, but not as
active as the other. She is a philosopher, thinking abstractly, and
tending to apply metaphors to
people. As mentioned above, she calls herself one of the Master's robes
and in a contemplative
moment with Meishan, she says "People have no meaning here. They are like
dogs, or rats." The
philosophic nihilism that replaces her book learning also supplants the
class snobbery and
narrow-mindedness that first arose from that learning. When she calls for
Yan'ers punishment she
says "Wives are wives, and maids are maids." But later on, when her
depression turns to despair, she
says, "People are ghosts. Ghosts are people."
The film explicitly notes the connection between schooling, metaphorical
thinking, and power in a scene in
which Chen's youngest son is shown reciting his lessons. The child-scholar
stumbles through a
poem he has memorized, himself probably unaware of its significance to the
women of the
household - "Locked in a golden cage, I pine away. / Set me free." It's a
poignant moment, but we
notice that the poem is pointedly not subversive - the beauty of the bird
is seen as enhanced by its
sadness. It is not a poem about how beautiful a bird is in flight. Thus it
is shown that men's
education reinforces the ideal of captured beauty. Similarly, during
Songlian's first night in the
compound, she says that she doesn't like to eat meat. So Chen orders young
bean sprouts from the
kitchen. It's a cruel joke, but unmistakeable - bean sprouts are unearthed
and cooked just as the plant
has begun to break free of its seed. Hence they are killed at a young age
- fixed in immaturity
forever, or at least until they are devoured.
And Chen does treat Songlian as a child - when she catches him fondling
Yan'er she is furious, and
to placate her he says paternally, "Come on, don't be childish. Tomorrow
I'll take you to the market to
eat dumplings. You like those, dont you?" (The equivalent in Saadawi would
be found in the
diplomat who insults Firdaus's intelligence: ". . . he explained to me
that
refusing a Head of State
could be looked upon as an insult to a great man and lead to strained
relations between the two
countries." [Saadawi, 90]) Throughout the film Chen treats her with this
same patronizing condescension.
When he sees her for the first time, he tells her to lift a red lantern to
illuminate her face, and says,
"You educated girls don't look the same." Its a callous belittlement of
her education (which probably
exceeds his own) but it's also a stinging insult in that it reverses the
subject-object relationship - he is
studying the student.
Phallic Eye
The problem of male objectification of women is, of course, an age-old
one, and Songlian and
Firdaus come to learn about it firsthand in ways that are strikingly
similar. During Songlian's first
night, Meishan, jealous over having been bumped down from first place,
complains that she is sick
and demands that Chen come to her chamber. After he leaves, Songlian looks
in the mirror, raises a
lamp to illuminate her face, stares at herself, and cries. Likewise
Firdaus finds the light and the
mirror when she first moves in with her uncle:
"When I entered my uncle's dwelling, I put my hand on a switch and light
flooded the room. I shut
my eyes against the glare and screamed. When I opened my lids again I had
the feeling of looking
out through them for the first time . . . I glimpsed myself in the mirror.
This also had never
happened to me before. . . . A sinking feeling went through my body. . . .
I was filled with a deep
hatred for the mirror." (Saadawi, 20)
The light, whether the bright white light of Point Zero, or the glowing
red light of Red Lantern,
represents for the two women the phallic eye, and with the help of a
mirror, each can see herself the
way men see her, whether as a prisoner, slave, commodity or territory
waiting to be conquered. For
Firdaus, seeing herself the way men see her temporarily reinforces her
self-regard as a prostitute,
under Sharifa's tutelage:
"She probed with a searching light revealing obscure areas of myself,
unseen features of my face and
body, making me aware of them, understand them, see them for the first
time. I discovered I had
black eyes, with a sparkle that attracted other eyes like a magnet, and
that my nose was neither big,
nor rounded, but full and smooth with the fullness of strong passion that
would turn to lust."(Saadawi, 54)
But for Chen's wives, that look is never empowering, because they are not
self-employed: Chen is
both their pimp and their only client.
A friend of mine (1) pointed out that, although there
are constant tight
shots
of women's faces in Raise
the Red Lantern (indeed the film begins with a close-up of
Songlian's face, and near the ending
comes a corresponding close-up of the newly purchased Fifth Wife), at no
point does the viewer
ever get a good look at Chen's face. There is never a tight shot of him,
which emphasizes the
insolence of a woman looking her husband in the face. What the film does
filmically, Saadawi's
book does bookishly - Firdaus shows us that women are like characters
waiting to be read in the
description of her uncles reading lessons: "Alif has got nothing on her,
Bas got one dot underneath,
Gim's got a dot in the middle, Dal has nothing at all."(Saadawi, 15)
Gag Rule
As Foucault says of the object in a hierarchical power relationship - "He
is seen, but he does not see;
he is the object of information, never a subject in
communication."(Foucault, 200) It is in a sense
true that Firdaus and Songlian do not really see - Songlian only sees how
little freedom she has at
the end when she witnesses the execution of Meishan, and even that
witnessing must be done
covertly. Firdaus's quest for the truth requires that she step back
further and further from society,
gradually gaining perspective on its power connections - in the end she
has rejected society
completely and is in a sense free, seeing through the lies (although for
her all there is to see once
she has escaped civilization is the mystery of death).
Foucault's analysis is also interesing in that as "objects" they are
limited in their ability to
communicate. Songlian is forbidden to talk about the death house, and when
she finds out the truth,
and tries to communicate it, she can only whisper under her breath,
"Murderers . . murderers." Chen,
of course, censors this communication by labeling her "mad", which in
effect makes her mad,
because if he won't listen to her, then she is only talking to herself.
Likewise when Firdaus finally
learns enough truth to be able to speak with authority about her society,
she is also censored; the
police at first pretend not to hear, and then they accuse her of being a
mad criminal:
"'To be a criminal one must be a man.'
'Now look here, what is this that you are saying?'
'I am saying
that you are criminals, all of you: the fathers, the uncles, the husbands,
the pimps, the lawyers, the
doctors, the journalists, and all men of all professions.'
They said, 'You are a savage and dangerous
woman.'
'I am speaking the truth. And truth is savage and dangerous.'"(Saadawi,
100)
In each case the woman sees the truth and calls men criminal, and to
suppress this truth men refuse
to allow her to communicate, and try to wrest back control by calling her
a criminal (Songlian is
only called a madwoman, but we don't need Foucault to explain the
similarities between prisons and
insane asylums).
Jail Sells
We are fortunate enough in English to be able to reverse the letters of
the word LAW and come up
with WAL(L). Criminals and mad people are both dangerous in that they
break laws, (criminal laws
or psychological laws) and the resulting rupture in the architectural
integrity of the society
necessitates that they be caught and enclosed inside stronger walls. But
for years before Firdaus is
placed within the walls of the prison, or before the pitiful Songlian
becomes mad and is trapped
within the walls of her mind, they were both already living inside walls
that were just as powerful.
Foucault describes the two kinds of trap in this way:
"At one extreme, the discipline-blockade, the enclosed institution,
established on the edges of
society, turned inwards towards negative functions: arresting evil,
breaking communications,
suspending time. At the other extreme, with panopticism, is the
discipline-mechanism: a functional
mechanism that must improve the exercise of power by making it lighter,
more rapid, more
effective, a design of subtle coercion for a society to come."(Foucault,
209)
The more primitive kinds of enclosure are like drawing and quartering in
that they are designed to
exert total control over the body, thereby either controlling the mind or
rendering that mind useless,
as Foucault illustrates in his first chapter. This kind of total control
is usually manifested in an
old-fashioned jail or in execution, but under Sharifa's wing Firdaus
experiences a more surreal
version of it: "I never used to leave the house. In fact, I never even
left the bedroom. Day and night I
lay on the bed, crucified, and every hour a man would come in. There were
so many of them. I did
not understand where they could possibly have come from."(Saadawi, 57)
This is a striking example of the total control men have over Firdaus's
body in her profession. There
is no need for a jail when she doesn't even leave the bedroom. Likewise
there is no need to draw and
quarter her (or even crucify her) when she can be dismembered in time -
split up into a hundred
pieces by a hundred different men over the course of a hundred hours. The
effect of reading this
account is like watching a trail of identical images streak past under a
strobe light, and the need for
her dismemberment in this way comes from the ravenous, neverending demand
of the men, which
far exceeds the supply. That the male demand is greater than the female
supply is shown in Chen's
need for four wives - and his taking of four wives is also like
dismembering the feminine object, in
that he divides "her" to conquer "her" will.
But total control is neither efficient, nor desirable in an enclosed
institution which claims to be a
family. Chen won't have very docile wives if he uses iron-handed
techniques to subdue them, and
so he must find a kinder, gentler way:
"If the economic take-off of the West began with the techniques that made
possible the accumulation
of capital, it might perhaps be said that the methods for administering
the accumulation of men made
possible a political take-off in relation to the traditional, ritual,
costly, violent forms of power,
which soon fell into disuse and were superseded by a subtle, calculated
technology of
subjection."(Foucault, 220-221)
It is this second kind of control - what Foucault calls the discipline-
mechanism - that Chen is
exploiting when he splits the potentially dangerous wife into four pieces.
Aside from the total
control of old jails and executions, the imprisoning power of society's
institutions and disciplines are
just as powerful, and more efficient because they require less brute force
to sustain them.
Strategies for Successful Management
To
Foucault, the crowning achievement of this science of slavery is the
Panopticon, the ideal
disciplinary building wherein prisoners, students, lunatics, employees, or
anyone else in need of
surveillance are surveyed from behind the tinted windows of an observation
tower in the center of
the building.
"Hence the major effect of the Panopticon: to induce in the inmate a state
of conscious and permanent
visiblity that assures the automatic functioning of power. . . . power
should be visible and
unverifiable. Visible: the inmate will constantly have before his eyes the
tall outline of the central
tower from which he is spied upon. Unverifiable: the inmate must never
know whether he is being
looked at at any one moment; but he must be sure that he may always be
so."(Foucault, 201)
For Firdaus, this Panopticon is the city of Cairo itself, living, panting,
always ready to snatch up a
desirable woman wandering its streets alone, even to the extent that the
police are always waiting to
blackmail any lone woman for prostitution by demanding free sex. But to
Songlian, the Panopticon
is Chen's estate. Red lanterns cast their phallic, observational glow
everywhere, and servant men are
always appearing out of nowhere, emerging from total invisibility to
either facillitate daily rituals or
drag Meishan off to the death house. But this doesn't even begin to touch
upon the brilliance of
Chen's plan.
Foucault tells us that the ideal disciplinary environment is an
arrangement whose internal
mechanisms produce the relation in which individuals are caught up ". . .
. Any individual, taken
almost at random, can operate the machine: in the absence of the director,
his family, his friends,
his visitors, even his servants."(Foucault, 202, emphasis
added) Herein lies the true power, and the super-efficiency,
of Chen's way of ruling. By dividing the family among four sites of
secondary power, each living in
her own private space, Chen encourages a healthy competition that ensures
the maximum benefit for
himself, and the maximum control over his wives.(2)
Without his having to
lift a finger, he keeps their
power in check by having them monitor each other, each hoping her rival
will break a rule so that
she herself can move up into that rival's place.
Yan'er's theft of the lanterns and Meishan's adultery are each found out
and to an extent corrected
before Chen even arrives home that evening, through the competitive zeal
of Songlian, and
Zhanyun. And the servants are ideal tools of this mechanism because they
are constantly underfoot,
often invisible, don't communicate with the wives due to the wives' own
snobbery, and have carte
blanche to invade the most private spaces of each wife's
existence simply as a matter of routine.
When Songlian fakes her pregnancy, she hides her white pants stained with
menstrual blood. Yan'er
doesn't suspect her lie any more than Chen does; she is just walking
along, innocently spitting into
Songlian's laundry, when she finds the stained pants by accident. Alone,
she might not have the
courage to act on this discovery, because Songlian knows about her stolen
lanterns. But Zhanyun,
who has learned to exploit the servants' covert power, learns of the pants
from her and tells Chen to
call Dr. Gao, on the pretense that she is worried about Songlian's health.
Zhanyun is the most learned player of this game - she needs to be,
because, not having given birth
to a son, she has the least power of all the four wives. Meishan says of
Zhanyun, "I'm no match for
her, I know. She has the face of a Buddha and the heart of a scorpion." It
is through this
performative skill that Sharifa is likewise able to exploit the system of
free market competition: "My
skin is soft, but my heart is cruel, and my bite deadly."(Saadawi, 54)
But the encouragement of a certain degree of malice is not the only way to
maintain the household.
Naming his harem a family is a shrewd way of maximizing efficiency because
members of a family
can be called upon to perform any job if the need arises. Employees in a
corporation, as Firdaus
makes clear, can not. She adamantly refuses to play the additional role of
a prostitute to her
superiors at the office, and is valued the more highly on the job because
of it. But in Chen's
compound, since you are required to call the other wives your sisters you
should be willing to
administer any service for that sister when called upon. Thus Zhanyun is
subjected to the
humiliation of giving Songlian a massage when Songlian is pregnant and
asking for it. Chen
manages this artificial harmony by telling his wives "You sisters should
get along well together."
Too much harmony, of course, can be equally dangerous, and besides the
maxim of divide and
conquer the additional rationale behind enclosing his wives in separate
houses is, as Foucault says it
should be, "to prevent debauchery and homosexuality"(Foucault, 172), in
this case lesbianism. Even the wives'
personal maids go to their own quarters at the end of the day, not so much
because lesbianism is somehow "immoral" but
more because unauthorized sexual liasons can lead to alliances, which
would upset the power structure,
and possibly change Chen's political means of control. And it is not out
of religious fear that
Firdaus's aunt beats Firdaus for sleeping in the same bed as Saadia, the
servant girl; it is out of fear
of a potential alliance between the two girls which would threaten her own
status as manager of the
household. It is also for this reason that her aunt rejects her uncle's
suggestion that Firdaus stay at
home with them - she knows enough about her husband to sense the sexual
tension that exists
between him and his niece.
This is not to say religion doesn't also play a part in social discipline
- Foucault recounts how the
ideal Panopticon would "reserve a place for the religious functions of
encouraging obedience and
work . . ."(Foucault,173) And there is a religious control at work in
Chen's house, too: by requiring that his
servants and wives kowtow to his ancestors, Chen has made himself into the
descendant of a God,
not unlike the way white Christians have done the world over.
Thus the world of Chen's estate, along with the world of Firdaus's Cairo,
are self-managing
Panopticons which regulate their own efficiency through manipulation of,
and the fostering of
competition among, their oppressed objects. In each world existential
learning is shown to be truer
than academic learning, because the university, like the workplace, exists
mainly to perpetuate the
ruler's power (just as Saadawi deludes herself into thinking "Whatever the
circumstances, a doctor
was surely to be preferred to a woman condemned to death"[Saadawi, 5] we
note that Meishan is hanged for
adultery while Dr. Gao goes free.) But true learning is only to be had at
the risk of one's sanity and
life, because the truth, we find, runs deeper into the roots of our
society than we could have ever
suspected. Firdaus finds that even as the most powerful self-employed
prostitute she is still at the
mercy of any pimp who comes along, and Songlian's educated sensibilities
are destroyed when she
learns that her husband in fact wields the power over life and death. So
for each woman,
apprehension of the truth produces a philosophic nihilism that leads to a
total withdrawal from
civilization.
This civilization - theirs and ours - is built upon and powered by Man's
demand. The demand for
power in the forms of knowledge, sex, land, and wealth, is ravenous,
insatiable, and destructive,
as Foucault reminds us that historically, the rise in demand for
scientific knowledge coincided
with the rise in imperialistic ventures. So Saadawi the social scientist
is implicated along with this
greed, and her perverse desire to examine Firdaus can only be redeemed in
the long run if her
readers use the knowledge she has obtained to bring about a true balance
of power, a true global
harmony rather than the doomed, artificial harmony which Chen tries to
force into a system
suffering from built-in oppression and inequality.
Notes.
* *
(1) John Moy.
(2) Years after writing this, I learn
that Freud
develops the allegory of the
threat to a patriarch posed by his own family in Civilization and
Its Discontents.
Sources.
El Saadawi, Nawal. Woman at Point Zero Zed Books
Ltd., 1983.
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish Vintage Books,
1979.
Raise the Red Lantern(1991) Dir. Zhang Yimou. Based on
the novel Wives and Concubines by Su Tong.
This paper was written by Sigmund
Shen, at New York
University, in the
Fall '93 term, for Prof.
Ngugi wa Thiongo's graduate seminar, "Prison
Narratives".
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