The Inner Battles Of Mulan

8 Pages 1897 Words

The Inner Battles of Mulan

The story of Mulan has been told for hundreds of years in China. Mulan’s tale has been used to motivate young girls to achieve their goals and to teach them that anything is possible. These stories show the strength within such a young person, making children to young adults believe they can be someone to look up to one day. With the help of Disney, this story has been introduced to many more people around the world and through the timelessness of animated features, will continue to for many years to come. There are several versions of Mulan’s story but the two that will be discussed are, “White Tigers” from Maxine Hong Kingston’s memoir The Woman Warrior and “The Ballad of Mulan”. These two different versions of the story strongly convey the themes of inadequacy that gender barriers create for women and how loneliness can affect someone. Kingston’s version of Mulan emphasizes these themes and are a reflection of her resentment to Chinese society which has roots in her childhood and stems from the strained relationship with her mother.
In “White Tigers”, the first sentence of the story already sets up the gender barrier. “...we learned that we failed if we grew up to be but wives and slaves” (Kingston 19). This quotation automatically sets up the women’s feelings of inadequacy from the very start and continues throughout, ending with, “I read in an anthropology book that Chinese say, ‘Girls are necessary too’; I have never heard the Chinese I know make this concession” (Kingston 52-52). “The Ballad of Mulan” really has no gender barrier in it other than Mulan pretending to be a man so her father doesn’t have to join the army. There are not any significant signs of oppression directed towards her by men even before she joined the army as there are in the story by Kingston. One author’s analysis of “The Ballad of Mulan” notes that, �...