Contemporary Women in Romantic Contexts: Time-travel Period Dramas as Didactic Cultural Productions
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- Time-travel period dramas, as defined by much of the popular discourse, refer to a kind of costume drama that entails a modern character traveling into the past and taking up a dramatic journey of both romance and personal growth. In this thesis, I study Chinese and Western time-travel period dramas from a feminist perspective. In chapter 1, I discuss the theme of escape as central to time-travel period dramas. Escape functions to criticize women’s conditions in the present and offer a way to leave behind the unsatisfying lifestyles led by the female protagonists. Escape also works as exile, at least in Palace, a compulsory means to punish and educate. This is because it also presents an opportunity for these protagonists to undergo a journey that promises the resolution of those problems with which they struggle at the beginning of the show. In chapter 1, I hope to set up the didactic nature of time-travel period dramas by virtue of its promise to present “solutions” at the end of the shows. In chapter 2, I will observe what defines feminine success in each of the shows. To do this, I will first observe the competitive female homosocial space in Palace and argue why it creates a kind of feminine success that require “beating” other women. This conclusion is drawn with comparison to the cooperative and friendly female homosocial space in Lost in Austen, where the protagonist’s path to happiness is not mutually exclusive with that of the other female characters. Ultimately, I hope to show that an important mode of feminine success in Palace has to do with the manipulation of men, whereas feminine success in Lost in Austen revolves around internal struggles of self-understanding. In chapter 3, these analyses culminate in an examination of the endings of the show, which present the dilemma of staying or leaving the ideal mate/ the past. This is where I will account for most of the tension in study “feminism” across cultures and societies by diving into a deeper exploration of different strategies of interpreting a text. With regard to the Western text, Lost in Austen, I believe that its solution to women’s problems in modern society take on a radical postfeminist message, preaching the freedom of choice without moral, social historical qualifications. In turn, I will argue that the ending of Palace presents a kind of socially subversive narrative by breaking out of the Chinese post-Revolutionary, liberation narrative and confronting the continuity of women’s oppression.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Date created | June 13, 2014 |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Chang, Shu Sarah |
|---|---|
| Degree granting institution | Stanford University, Program in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies |
| Primary advisor | Sohn, Stephen Hong |
Subjects
| Subject | Time travel |
|---|---|
| Subject | period drama |
| Subject | feminist studies |
| Subject | Chinese women |
| Subject | contemporary Chinese women's issues |
| Subject | female homosociality |
| Subject | women and television |
| Subject | Chinese television |
| Subject | female success |
| Subject | Palace |
| Subject | Lost in Austen |
| Subject | Janeites |
| Genre | Thesis |
Bibliographic information
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- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial No Derivatives 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC-ND).
Preferred citation
- Preferred Citation
Chang, Shu Sarah. (2014). Contemporary Women in Romantic Contexts:
Time-travel Period Dramas as Didactic Cultural Productions. Stanford Digital Repository. Available at: http://purl.stanford.edu/ht753kq6168
Collection
Undergraduate Theses, Program in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Stanford University.
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- Contact
- sarahshuchang@gmail.com
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