The Motives of Mulan and Her Creators

    In the original ballad, Mulan’s story was meant to be one reflecting filial piety. Loyalty to family and self-sacrifice for the sake of communal good are very important ideals in Confucian societies like the one in which Mulan would been written (Langfitt, 1999). It is only when Mulan was brought to America that she became an icon for gender equality, beginning with Kingston’s novel The Woman Warrior. Kingston’s rendition popularized Mulan as a symbol for defying the patriarchal views which Kingston felt dictated much of her life growing up as a Chinese-American. When this idea became associated with Mulan’s character, the following renditions of her story followed suit in using her as a symbol of female empowerment. While this message may be appreciated in today’s society, it is certainly not the very Eastern belief upon which Mulan’s story was first founded. Much, if not all, of the feminism surrounding Mulan’s story in each of the American re-tellings has been born completely by Western authors with little bases in the original Chinese morality behind the tale (Zhao, EVERYTHING CULTURALLY RIGHT AND WRONG WITH MULAN 1998 [Video], 2020).



    Not only is the idea of women’s empowerment relatively foreign to Mulan’s story, but the self-empowerment that comes through each American version also separates her from her Chinese counterpart. While these may be worthwhile values, they are certainly not very traditionally Chinese ones, and they certainly do not come from the Chinese versions of Mulan (Langfitt, 1999). This caused some disconnection between the Mulan whom Americans idolize and the Mulan whom Chinese people idolize, and understandably so. Disney’s and even Kingston’s Mulan fight for Western values which are at times almost contradictory to the values which make her a hero in Chinese folklore (Haynes, 2020).



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