| Abstract | Women's Yue opera was a popular theatrical form in which all roles were played by actresses for a largely female audience. The opera first started as an all-girls' theater in the countryside of Shengxian, Zhejiang province, in the early 1920s. It became extremely popular in Shanghai in the 1930s and 1940s and then spread throughout the mainland, Hong Kong, and Taiwan in the 1950s and 1960s. In the course of a half-century, a 'traditional' art form was reshaped by 'modern' conditions to become an important part of an emerging urban mass culture. One of the most important factors in the formation of such a modern culture in Republican Shanghai was women's entrance into the cultural market. Women's entrance into the opera market, both as consumers and producers, was central to the transformation of the male-dominated opera culture of the Qing Dynasty to a female-centered one in the twentieth century. Women's opera was the single most important case of women's entrance into the urban entertainment market. Tracing the emergence and transformation of women's Yue opera in the context of revolution, war, and nation building, this dissertation examines women's views and experience in a rapidly changing semi-colonial urban society and women's roles in shaping the public culture of modern Shanghai. Chapter One describes the rise of the actress in the period's cultual conflict between a traditional popular eroticism focused on the public women's sexuality and a reformist ideology that considered the cleansing of this popular eroticism to be part of the modern nation-building task. Chapter Two examines the poetics of women's opera developed in a dynamic of social and political changes in urban Shanghai. Chapter Three studies the formation of a mass audience of popular entertainment, and the female audience and patrons of women's opera. Chapter Four investigates the relationship between women's opera actresses and the left-wing intellectuals and the transformation of the actresses into mainstream media heroines in postwar Shanghai. In the Conclusion, I return to the themes concerning the rise of the actress in a changing urban public culture to highlight the social and cultural changes in Republican Shanghai. |
