A Comparison Of Female Characters In The Plays Of Cao Yu And Ibsen

As the consensus of the academic, drama is a type of art, which originated from ritual. Drama has an archetypal relation with ritual, and we can see that through the meanings of Archetype. First, it's about the meaning of the arche (Greek), which stands for original or primitive; Second, it stands for type, including model, form or style. It also includes the meanings behind these two meanings, such as the influence, the displacement and the mediation. The conversion from ritual to drama is a very long and complicated progress. We can see it from three levels. These changes are also the differences between ritual and drama.There are three anthropologists, Van Gennep, Gluckman and Victor Turner, who have made outstanding contributions to ritual research. The conception of Transition Ritual, proposed by Van Gennep, has initiated the processual analysis and internal research of ritual. In Gennep's view, every Transition Ritual has three phrases, separation, liminal and reaggregation. On the base of Zulu's ritual (Killing the Old) research, Gluckman made a further interpretation of the compensatory function on gender roles. Just because these rebelled ritual, female gets the especial rights and abilities and the compensatory chances to change their status. Victor Turner, as the most influential contemporary anthropologist in ritual research, who also affected by Gennep, has made new development and innovation about ritual theory. On the one hand, he proposed the conception of Betwixt and Between. Different from Gennep's standpoints, Turner thought the three phrases-separation, liminal and reaggregation is an interrelated, bidirectional and interstructural component of Transition Ritual. On the other hand, Turner used the words Structure and Anti-structure to analyze ritual process, especially about female status in ritual and the part on the role of female status of ritual. AS Men's authorities and roles were often substituted by Women, female in the liminal phrase would have an Anti-structure function. Anti of the word Anti-structure does not have the meaning of absolute denial or antisense. Anti-structure is a positive sense word, It represents a center which has great generating abilities. Considering the relationships between drama and ritual, especially the theories of Van Gennep, Gluckman and Turner, we believe that taking the perspective of ritual to study Chinese contemporary drama would be a very valuable and feasible attempt. For that, here we choose Cao Yu and Ibsen's dramas as the representative Text, to make a comparative study of their dramas'female characters.The female characters of Cao Yu and Ibsen's plays have gone through three rituals, Sacrifice Ritual, Departure Ritual and Grown-up Ritual. Each ritual is a small Transition Ritual, and all of three rituals form a big Spiraling Transition Ritual. At the Sacrifice Ritual stage, the female characters of Cao Yu's plays were bogged down in the swamp of Deformed Love and Marriage and can't extricate themselves; the female characters of Ibsen's plays were fell victims to Men's Spiritual Power, such as ideal, faith, career and so on. At the stage of Departure Ritual, the female characters of Cao Yu's plays chose to leave. But this kind of leave was in the extremely hopeless and desperate situation. It's a passive choice. Ibsen's female characters also chose to leave, but this choice was a clear-headed, rational and free option. At the Grown-up Ritual stage, the female characters of Cao Yu's plays have successively left Father's Home and Husband's Home and finally went to society. Their Grown-up Ritual has significant feature of Adult Ceremony. But here Adult rarely point to Woman itself. On the contrary, it points to Men and even points to an empty symbol. Thus their growth process has a distinctive feature of on the Road. In Grown-up Ritual, the female characters of Ibsen's plays take coming back Husband's Home as the terminal point. Here Coming Back is not a simple circulation. It has an outstanding color of Regeneration Ceremony. This regeneration is a kind of regeneration, including free and responsibility. It's a Husband, Wife and Children trinity common regeneration.Based on above comparison, we can say that whether having the subjective initiative, whether having the free right to choose is the root cause why Cao Yu and Ibsen's plays female characters have different end of fate. The feature of the liminal phrase of ritual, Betwixt and Between, said by Victor, is also because the participants had little or no subjective initiative, which is caused by ritual's programmed, predetermined and enclosed features. The advent of drama, as an artistic creative treason, to some extent, is out of the dissatisfaction with the participants'passive role and the ritual's programmed predetermined and enclosed defects. Being archetypal relationships with ritual, except for the similarity in form and content, drama's most fundamental trait is because it made an aesthetic expression and positive manifestation of the participants'Anti-structural function of the ritual luminal phrase.