Raise The Red Lantern Analysis

In ancient China, woman’s status was always a social issue. Woman could’t get the equal rights as man and was always restrained by unequal social norms. The film describes the life of master and his four wives. The main scenery of this film is master’s house, and in this house, four wives live with different life. The film Raise the Red Lantern talks about how women were treated unequally and how the social atmosphere influenced woman’s thoughts and behaviors. The most impressive thing in this film for me is Chinese marriage custom at that time. In ancient China, polygyny was a production of Patriarchy culture, which means a man could marry many women. From this point, we can tell how women were treated unequally at that time. In the film, the master is around 50 years old. He has already had three wives, but he still marries a young girl, Songlian, as his fourth wife who is only 19 years old. These four wives have to follow the traditional family costume, which is standing by and getting ready to serve the master all the time. It is very unequal to them, because after they marry a man, they lose …show more content…
However, if the red lantern lights down, woman’s fate is going to be dark; master no longer cares about her, and other myrmidons won’t take care her as well. This is a harsh thing for a woman whose whole life and hope is based on her husband’s family. So this kind of unequal and distorted social value of women at that time let women suffered a lot pains, but they had no power to change it; the only thing they could do is to accept and adapt it, which is just like what Songlian does in the