Comparing The Goddess And The White Haired Girl

The movies White Haired Girl and The Goddess are both movies depicting a lead female character that is a victimized individual. Yet while both the Prostitute and Xier find themselves struggling to overcome adversity and have a few common themes there are some key differences between the ways in which the two women approach their problems. I will lay some of the major obstacles that each must deal with and analyze the differences the characters through their responses and show why I feel that the Prostitute is the more appealing of the two characters.

The film, The Goddess, is a story of a single mother who is a prostitute and is struggling first and foremost to raise her young son. The movie does not clearly explain the woman's circumstances or even attempt to cast her in a negative light for practicing what is generally considered to be an unsavory profession. From the selfless manor that she is portrayed, one would almost tend to think that perhaps she had been married previously and had to turn to prostitution as a means of last resort following the death of her husband. Perhaps this is not the case, maybe she had always been a prostitute, but the human face that the movie gives to a prostitute leads us to want to sympathize with her character rather than to accuse her of an unsavory profession. The Goddess is struggling to provide for herself and for the welfare of her son against a society that says that prostitution and in particular, the open face of sexuality that it represents, are wrong.

The movie, The White Haired Girl, tells the story of Xier, a peasant who is denied marriage and who's life is abruptly altered for the worst when her life is traded away by her father in order to repay debts the family owed the wealthy landowner who leased them the farmland. At Huang Shiren's manor she is forced to serve and is later taken advantage of by Huang. After managing to escape, Xier spends the next few years living in a cave,