This silent film, Goddess, in terms of premise and emotional pitch reminds me of the short stories of Lu Xun as an effort to raise consciousness toward the most downtrodden and helpless in society, usually single women.
In this film, the woman works as a prostitute to support her son, a toddler at the start of the film. She takes up with a ne’er do well guy after stumbling into his apartment to evade a police officer while she is out trying to get customers. He is very taken with her and moves in with her, about which she is rather uneasy but not really given much of a choice, siphoning off her money while she supports both him and her son with her prostitution.
Her one claim to power is finding a way to hide the money from her husband or partner and using it for her son’s education. During a school talent show, after her son shines singing a song, the other women spread gossip about the fact that she is a prostitute, culminating in many letters being sent to the principal demanding the child’s expulsion. He visits her to find out the truth, and she admits it.
The principal’s argument during a school board meeting, in particular, reminded me of Lu Xun’s themes: “The result of my investigation is that the child’s mother is indeed making a living as a prostitute. However, this is a result of a broader social problem. We can’t fault her moral character, much less her child’s. In order to survive, she cannot help but struggle within the vortex of life.”
The school board doesn’t accept the principal’s argument, and since they will go forward with expelling the child, the principal resigns. The gambler husband finds the remainder of the woman’s money and gambles it away the evening after she learns her son has been expelled. In a rage, she visits him at the gambling den and draws him from the crowd. When he refuses to return her money, saying he spent it already, she breaks a bottle over his head and kills him. She is imprisoned with a twelve-year sentence. The resigned principal visits her in prison and tells her he will raise her son and see to his education, which gives her hope. She asks that her son be told his mother is dead and never learn the truth about her life and work, and the principal agrees to her wishes.
One of the Lu Xun stories I am thinking of as written on similar lines is “The New Year’s Sacrifice,” in which a woman is subjected to a forced marriage and controlling mother-in-law. Following the violent death of her son, she becomes insane, and her aunt turns her out of her home because she is perceived as unclean from being mad, after which she shortly dies. Another one is “Regret for the Past,” in which a young woman who lives unmarried with the narrator returns to her tyrannical father and shortly dies, after the unmarried relationship sours. In both cases, the larger forces at work in the women’s deaths are problematized. It is not just a matter of one cruel character or other having an unfortunate hand in someone’s fate, but the fact that cruel characters persist, and there is no way for vulnerable people to survive if they are stuck with them in one way or another. This was something I loved about Lu Xun’s work when I first read him a few years ago from this collection of online works.
Sunlight-Colored Roses 