Forging marriage

Abstract

Figure 1 Comrade Ma Xiwu Mediates a Lawsuit by GU Yuan This paper discusses what role literary and artistic works played in constructing the Mao‐era marriage discourse. Through analyzing a matrimonial dispute case, ‘Ma Xiwu’s way of judging’, and the woodcut print of ‘Comrade Ma Xiwu Mediates a Lawsuit,’ I explore the complex relations between state power and the ‘masses’, and between traditional customs and modern laws. When ‘Liu Qiao’er Brings a Lawsuit’, ‘Liu Qiao’s Reunion’ and ‘Liu Qiao’er’ had been produced on the basis of the matrimonial dispute mediated by Ma Xiwu, this legal event was transformed into a series of dramatic and artistic works with a central structural change: the landlord and the labor hero were set as opposite poles in marital politics, and women had to pick one out of the two contrastive candidates. With this binary structure dramatized by literary and artistic works, marriage was integrated into the discursive order of class struggles, and thus became a significant vehicle through which state ideology penetrated into personal life. In this process, art, marriage, state power, mass media, folk customs and laws were closely interwoven and interacting with each other. In the end, their combined forces changed people’s life and views.