Essay Database

Zhang Yimou's Raise the Red Lantern, set in turn-of-the-century China before the Cultural Revolution, is about a 19 year-old village woman named Songlian whose father has just died. To support her stepmother's livelihood, she agrees to be sold to a rich man named Chen as his Fourth Wife. For generations, the Chen family has consisted of one man surrounded by wives, servants, and children, all living together in a vast estate, with separate houses for the …

…house, emerging a little while later without her. When she goes to the house and sees for herself that Meishan has been hanged, she screams and is apprehended by Chen and his servant men. Chen tells her she is crazy. Eventually she does go mad, wandering the grounds senseless. Chen takes a Fifth Wife and the movie ends with Songlian pacing back and forth through her chamber, as if she can't find a way out.