一九四〇年代上海の越劇と女性パトロン

Abstract

This paper aims to empirically portray the female patrons of Yue opera 越劇 who were called guofangniang 過房娘. These women formed a mother-daughter bond with actresses and supported their stage lives. Yue opera, which gained popularity in Shanghai during the Sino-Japanese War, attracted the attention of the underground Communist party during the Chinese Civil War, and it was heavily used as a medium for mass propaganda after the establishment of the PRC. Under the influence of the CPC ideology, Chinese studies of Yue opera have criticized guofangniang as controlling actresses and hindering the modernization of the opera, and Japanese studies have followed this assessment. In recent years, Jiang Jin 姜進 has positively evaluated the role of guofangniang and pointed out its win-win relationship with actresses, but there are still issues to be resolved, such as the archival limitations of using interviews as the main primary sources. Therefore, this paper analyzes contemporaneous historical documents, mainly Yue opera xiaobao 小報, and clarifies the following points regarding the perception of guofangniang in the 1940s and the actual situation of the relationship between guofangniang and actresses (the guofang relationship). First, in the entertainment industry of modern Shanghai, there was a widespread custom of guofangniang and its male counterpart, guofangye 過房爺. Among them, Yue opera patrons were characterized by the fact that many of them were wealthy immigrants from Ningbo 寧波 and Shaoxing 紹興, and guofangniang exerted more influence than guofangye. Second, the dominating and constraining nature of the guofang relationship that the “official” narrative of Yue opera has emphasized was inextricably linked to its instability and fluidity. Actresses could take out “insurance” by having more than one guofangniang to cope with such instability. Third, leftist intellectuals had already criticized guofangniang as a constraint on actresses and an obstacle to their progress since the time of the Civil War. Although there were indirect criticisms of guofangniang even before that, they were incompatible with that made during and after the Civil War based on the ideological framework of the CPC, and they were excluded from the “official” narrative as were the positive recognition of guofangniang. Through the above discussion, this paper has unearthed contemporaneous perceptions buried in the CPC's official narrative and has presented a new aspect of Yue opera and guofangniang in 1940s Shanghai.