Baiwei is the first woman playwright who was engaged in writing a play in contemporary chinese dramatical history. She wrote twelve plays for ten years starting from 1926 and the most famous work is Out of the Ghost tower. This play which is based on her own tragic life describes women who unite in struggling for chinese traditional paternal authority and depicts the sorrow of chinese women in old era. she with a strong sense of feminism hopes women can find a solution to women’s liberation for themselves through the play.
It was from a sense of responsibility for the society that made Baiwie write ?Out of the Ghost tower?. She started creating literature to speak for people who were oppressed, disclose the oppressor’s crime and attack those who have power with the help of literature. Thus this purpose of creation is well expressed in ?Out of the Ghost tower?.
The main plot of ?Out of the Ghost tower? is incest in complex family relationship and class strife outside the family. The center figure of a conflict is Hu-rongsheng, who is like a ghost in a family similar to a ghost tower. All conflicts in the play are related to him. She criticizes a male-dominated social system in chinese old era through the conflicts and emphasizes female independence and human dignity.
Cultural historical value in ?Out of the Ghost tower? is that a sense of feminism is clearly reflected in it. There were plays before by male writers which emphasized female independence but expectably they couldn’t be free from a male-dominated viewpoint and restriction of feudal culture. However Baiwei showed a woman-centered advanced view clearly out of this kind tendency. She as the left wing writer once plainly demonstrated a political character. In other words she delivered the needs of the times reflecting revolution and militancy in her works.
?Leiyu? by Caoyu is a script which was written 6 years after ?Out of the Ghost tower?.
With regard to the plot of the play, development of the story, complex blood relationship between characters and the cast, they are similar even if it is a coincidence. Some are convinced that the successor referred to the original work but they can’t find out any evidence so they just assume that.
Anyway ?Out of the Ghost tower? by Baiwei is meaningful in the way that it contained a tragic life of women in the old china and a slogan demanded by the politics of the times and played a role as a voice of the age well in the manner of autobiographical writing.