Gendered landscape in Vietnam: women and ancient capital landscape in The Moon at the Bottom of the Well

Abstract

Landscape criticism enables multi-directional viewpoints about the space, context, and habitual environment of human beings, from which physical elements surrounding people are brought to the critical vision and attached to cultural, historical, political, religious, and social elements. This article, applying jointly landscape criticism and feminist criticism, studies the relationship between landscape and gender being presented in the movie Trăng nơi đáy giếng (The Moon at the Bottom of the Well) by director Nguyễn Vinh Sơn, adapted from the same-titled short story by writer Trần Thùy Mai. How does landscape participate to the construction and presentation of gender issues, especially of women’s fate? In other words, how do people use landscape to re-construct and maintain gender structure and order in the society? From this viewpoint, the landscape becomes a gender agent that conveys people’s notions and concepts of gender. The filmmakers also become agents who use cinematic language to re-construct landscape and present gender issues through their artistic view.