Description
The legend of Huā Mùlán, the maiden who joined the army to save her aging father, has been passed around since at least the 4th or 5th century. From her beginnings as the heroine of a simple Xianbei folk ballad, Mùlán has made her way into a household name throughout China – and, thanks to the grinding gears of the Disney marketing machine taking a hold of it in the late 1990’s, throughout the world. Mùlán’s explosion of fame after Disney’s treatment of her story lead to other new adaptations and re-imaginings of the Mùlán legend in the United States, all of which are more or less indebted to work Disney did in domesticating and familiarizing the traditional Chinese hero within the American cultural sphere. In my examination of Mùlán’s cross-cultural existence in the United States, I focus on three works: Mulan, the quintessential Disney movie that brought the story to a new generation in 1998; Wild Orchid, a more literary take that is nevertheless heavily indebted to the Disney movie, published in 2009; and the 2013 graphic novel Mulan: Revelations, a more adult-oriented reimagining of the possibilities of the Mùlán legend. Though the plots of the stories are superficially similar to the “Ballad” that began Mùlán’s legend, very little remains of the cultural context of the story or the character. The Chineseness of Mùlán/Mulan in these adaptations remains almost purely a matter of aesthetics – an East Asian girl superimposed onto a fundamentally American narrative – leaving no room for depictions of ethnic difference or any kind of diversity. Ultimately, I also argue that while many mainstream books and movies claim to include diverse characters, their characters hew too closely to American cultural standards to depict any real difference or diversity. Instead of providing representations of Asian characters, these American versions of Mùlán are fraught with Orientalist tropes and motives and end up perpetrating stereotypes rather than dismantling them.
