In the preface to Les Misérables, there is a passage that says: Poverty humbles men, degenerates women, and obscures children. Poverty will not only lose the dignity of human beings, but also cause all evils in the world.
In Lao She's rare book "Crescent Moon", which describes women, it profoundly describes the tragic fate of a pair of low-level mothers and daughters who inevitably go to the bottomless abyss of depravity. The mother and daughter who have fallen into the dust abandon their dignity and give up their yearning and desire for life. Just for money to survive into the "beast" of the walking dead.
When the good qualities of hard work, hard work, simplicity, and self-sufficiency are swallowed up by life, and the shallow crescent moon is also obscured by dark clouds, what remains is only forever plunged into the darkness from which there is no escape. So is poverty the one behind all this misfortune?
Lao She
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="4" > social reality under the tragedy of Crescent Moon</h1>
"Crescent Moon" tells the story of a mother and daughter in the 1930s, who want to survive but eventually bow to reality and become a prostitute. This also represents the tragic situation of women in the old society at the bottom in the dark social reality of the time.
When the heroine was 7 years old, her father was seriously ill, and although she went to the pawnshop as a young child to change all the valuable things to change her father's medicine, she still failed to keep his father's life.
The death of his father undoubtedly does not mean that the burden of life is all on this thin and poor mother. Looking at her father's grave, her mother's crying did not worry about the future of their mother and daughter.
"Crescent Moon"
Such a storyline was not unique to the society at that time, and the warlord forces in old China were in chaos and frequent wars. Imperialism, feudalism and bureaucratic feudalism were three mountains that could not be moved at that time, and the whole society suffered from them. The chaotic and dark social reality weighs on every working person.
Women at the bottom live unimaginable lives. At that time, the control under the patriarchal society made these illiterate and powerless women desperate, so that they only relied on men for survival, they were just men's vassals, materialized commodities.
The heroine and mother in "Crescent Moon" are the epitome of countless miserable low-level people and low-level women at that time, and their desolation is like a crescent moon immersed in darkness, and a little hope and beauty will eventually be covered by darkness. Overwhelmed by the dark social reality.
Warlord melee
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="11" > backward cultural education in the context of "Crescent Moon"</h1>
At the beginning, the mother of the novel can be said to be a condensation of the image of the vast number of working women in China, who are hard-working and hard-working, and bear no grudges. In order to let her daughter study, she went to wash the workers' hard and cowhide-like stinky socks, but the money was not enough to feed the two women, so she chose to remarry.
Under the care of the new father, the mother and daughter have hope and motivation. The heroine can even go to school at this time, but unfortunately fate never talks about humanity, and sometimes even cruelly seems to be joking with you.
The new husband's resignation undoubtedly knocked the mother and daughter into a deeper and darker dungeon, and the mother seemed to recognize her fate at this time, no longer choosing to do hard work, but directly becoming a prostitute. A hard-working and beautiful working woman finally conceded defeat under the constant whipping of life.
The mother came to the wrong conclusion under the blow of fate, and crudely and directly came to the wrong life experience. If you want to live, you can only rely on men, and once you can't rely on men, you can only sell your body and lay down your dignity to fill your stomach.
Mother figure
Money is the only real thing, and the only thing that can be grasped. "Money is stronger than man, and if man is a beast, money is the guts of a beast." The mother became more and more numb and indifferent.
Because the daughter had received a certain culture, she naturally did not accept her mother at first, so she chose to leave her mother without hesitation. Decided to prove to his mother that he was right. But life still taught her a lesson, and she finally embarked on the same path as her mother. The cold crescent moon was still obscured by dark clouds.
If combined with the contemporary background of the times, it is not difficult to find that it has a lot to do with the backwardness of education and culture, although the mother and daughter duo had new ideas at the beginning and were influenced by new moral concepts, when they conflicted with the experience of survival, they denied the new ideas they received and tacitly acquiesced to the numb experience, which indirectly led to the tragic fate of the mother and daughter duo.
Banknotes from the Republic of China period
A solid educational culture can strengthen people's sense of personality, and the degeneration of mother and daughter and their pushing on poverty is rough. What really leads to depravity is the loss of personality consciousness, and thoughts and behaviors are tilted in a negative direction or even collapsed. Among them, the role of educational culture in shaping our personality consciousness cannot be ignored.
At that time, the social background, in order to let people receive a good education in the cultivation role is a fantasy. What's more, the feudal atmosphere at that time made a large stone in the educational road ahead that could not be moved.
Three principles and five constants, three from four virtues. Feudal culture was even more deeply persecuted for women, making them have no way to survive except to sell their bodies. The heroine, who has received a little education, repeatedly struggles and suffers from it, and even ends up completely sinking and falling.
Republic of China period
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="22" > the imbalance of economic and social development hidden by Crescent Moon</h1>
In "Crescent Moon", the mother and daughter eventually became secret prostitutes in the end in order to be able to eat and eat, in order to be able to survive. Underneath the tragic and miserable fate is an extremely contradictory and pathological imbalance of economic development. The economy was deformed, and the people could not eat or even starved to death.
At that time, there were descriptions of the students' living conditions, which was in stark contrast to the mother and daughter. This also happens to be a satire on the imbalance in economic and social development at that time. Forcing good prostitution has become a common deformity under such a deformed economic development, and the mother and daughter have become victims of this unbalanced economic development.
Poverty is not the direct original sin that causes a person to fall, but poverty haunts them like a devil clutching his hands, making them gradually numb, indifferent, and lose the ability to respect themselves and love themselves.
For money, the mother in the book can calmly accept watching her own daughter suffer from strangers, and even negotiate a price with that person afterwards. When reunited with her daughter, whom she had not seen for a long time, the first thing she asked was how much money her daughter had. The love of the past has been bitten by the poor worm, just a numb corpse still alive.
The crescent moon in the play
"Crescent Moon" is a rare depiction of women by Lao She, or such a tragic female figure. From this, we can see that the society at that time was already dark to an unimaginable extent.
We may not be able to imagine a difficult life, but if it is obviously unreasonable to simply and rudely equate poverty and depravity directly, we must still have firm faith and confidence in life and the future.
The brilliance of human nature lies in the fact that in the face of great pain and despair, it still maintains the light of the heart. After recognizing the truth of life, I still love life. "Crescent Moon" gives us compassion and at the same time brings us deeper thinking.