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Wanton Women in Late-Imperial Chinese Literature: Models, Genres, Subversions and Traditions
 9004340629,  9789004340626

Table of contents :
Part 1 Wanton Women in History and Fiction..............27
Part 2 Wanton Women in Drama..............79
Part 3 Womens Songs and Ballads..............127

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Copyright 2017. Brill. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law.

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Wanton Women in Late-Imperial Chinese Literature

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Women and Gender in China Studies Edited by Grace S. Fong (McGill University) Editorial Board Louise Edwards (University of New South Wales) Robin D. S. Yates (McGill University) Harriet T. Zurndorfer (Leiden University)

VOLUME 8

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/wgcs

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Wanton Women in Late-Imperial Chinese Literature Models, Genres, Subversions and Traditions Edited by

Mark Stevenson and Wu Cuncun

LEIDEN | BOSTON

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Cover Image: Illustration from An Unofficial Account of Yang Taizhen (Yang Taizhen waizhuan 楊太眞外傳), an erotic novella retelling the life of Imperial Consort Yang (楊貴妃, 719–756), included in the early Qing dynasty adult magazine Springtime Inspirations from the Bedchamber as Transmitted Secretly by the Capital Publisher (Jingyuan michuan dongfang chunyi ce 京院秘傳洞房春意冊, circa 1640–1655). Image copyright, Muban Educational Trust. Reproduced courtesy of Christer von der Burg. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Stevenson, Mark J. (Mark Jeffrey), editor. | Wu, Cuncun, editor. Title: Wanton women in late-imperial Chinese literature : models, genres, subversions and traditions / edited by Mark Stevenson and Wu Cuncun. Description: Leiden ; Boston : Brill, [2017] | Series: Women and gender in China studies ; volume 8 | Includes bibliographical references. Identifiers: LCCN 2016053995 (print) | LCCN 2016055196 (ebook) | ISBN 9789004339156 (hardback : acid-free paper) | ISBN 9789004340626 (E-book) Subjects: LCSH: Chinese fiction—Ming dynasty, 1368–1644—History and criticism. | Chinese fiction—Qing dynasty, 1644–1912—History and criticism. | Women in literature. | Sex (Psychology) in literature. | Women—China—History. | Sex role—China—History. Classification: LCC PL2296 .W368 2017 (ebook) | LCC PL2296 (print) | DDC 895.109/0046—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016055196

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 1877-5772 isbn 978-90-04-33915-6 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-34062-6 (e-book) Copyright 2017 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi and Hotei Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

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Contents Editors’ Preface and Acknowledgements VII List of Contributors xi

Introduction 1 Wanton Women in Late-Imperial Chinese Literature: Models, Genres, Subversions and Traditions 3 Mark Stevenson

Part 1 Wanton Women in History and Fiction 2 The Polyandrous Empress: Imperial Women and their Male Favorites 29 Keith McMahon 3 The Male Homoerotic Wanton Woman in Late Ming Fiction 54 Mark Stevenson

Part 2 Wanton Women in Drama 4 Musical Seductresses, Chauvinistic Men, and Their Erotic Kunqu Discourse 81 Joseph Lam 5 Late Ming Urban Life and Wanton Women in Huang Fangyin’s Short Plays 105 Wu Cuncun

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vi

CONTENTS

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Part 3 Women’s Songs and Ballads 6 Wanton, but not Bad: Women in Feng Menglong’s Mountain Songs 129 Yasushi Ôki 7 Turning the Authorial Table: Women Writing Wanton Women, Shame, and Jealousy in Two Qing Tanci 157 Maram Epstein 8 Gossip, Scandal, and the Wanton Woman in Chinese Song-cycles 184 Anne McLaren Index 209

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Editors’ Preface and Acknowledgements The English phrase ‘wanton woman,’ like its Chinese counterparts, immediately strikes the modern reader as symptomatic of a double standard. Double standards should hold something of a natural attraction for cultural historians, for around about them are configured the many kinds of stated and unstated assumptions that make up social ideology, whether they concern gender, class or race. This special position of double-standards—which speak of hypocrisy but mean far more in addition—gives the terminology and other discourses associated with them immense power. Gender double standards both represent and enact social-sexual power, and so, while being important for understanding social and cultural processes in history, they are also troubling to speak of and write about. Since our first collaboration on a translation from Chinese, which happened to be the then little known late Ming novella Chipozi zhuan (癡婆子傳 A tale of an infatuated woman), we had wondered about the challenges of putting together a book on ‘wanton women’ as a literary motif in late imperial China, convinced that much could be learned by that way of gender ideology in the period. As is the case with many research project ideas, the way it eventually “got moving” was through sending out a call-forpapers and getting a panel together (“New Perspectives on Wanton Women in Late Imperial Chinese Literature,” 2013 Association for Asian Studies Annual Conference, San Diego).1 Following the panel we agreed that the question was important and wide ranging enough to bring in additional contributors and assemble a book focused on the wanton woman motif. For the AAS panel we took “wanton woman/women” as an English stand-in for yinfu 淫婦 (or its formal equivalent, dangfu 蕩婦). While there are bound to be misalignments between the terms, it was felt a close English equivalent would also be preferable for the book’s title, being more readily recognisable than if using pinyin romanization. The English adjective ‘wanton’ originally described someone who was resistant to discipline, taking on additional connotations of lasciviousness in the fourteenth century. Thus an idea of wilfulness or disobedience later attracts a reading and use that is almost exclusively related to sexual “unruliness,” particularly in regard to women. The history of ‘Jezebel,’ originally the name of a princess in the Old Testament, follows a similar pattern, shifting in application 1  The original panel consisted of Maram Epstein, Keith McMahon, Mark Stevenson and Wu Cuncun, with Paola Zamperini presiding as discussant. Professors Lam, McLaren and Ôki very kindly agreed to join us for this book.

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viii

Editors ’ Preface and Acknowledgements

from shameless women to ‘loose’ young women only in the nineteenth century. Wilful or unrestrained women become associated with sexual excess or transgression, an expression of cultural contempt for women who step beyond roles which are subservient to men. ‘Jezebel’ also exemplifies the stories that get told about women rulers, a kind of narrative found in both Chinese and Western literature. Wanton women in English literature appear to be more often portrayed as coming from the lower strata of urban society and stepping outside their station, a social subtext that is very important in Jin Ping Mei but not prevalent in most other works from China. Etymologically the English term wanton conveys a spirited or headstrong resistance to control. The Chinese term yin (淫) has a very long history, over which time it has attracted a host of connotations. Its earliest sense appears to have described the movement of excess water after soaking rain, and by extension mud and filth. The image is of plenty gone to excess, of overflow, of something that seems to run all over the place with nothing to stop or hold it. Rather than resistance to control, of will against will, it conjures up spatial disorder, inundation (not forgetting the prevalence of water references in Chinese terms for governance). Beyond alerting us to some background assumptions, however, etymology does not take us very far. Nor does the term yinfu itself tell us very much without a detailed history of its use; as a literary motif there seems to have been no limit to men’s inventiveness in mobilizing the accusation against women. Indeed, it can be shown that one of the pleasures men found in the literary conjuring up of wanton women in the late imperial period was an appreciation of their ability to enjoy something of the idea of yinfu without fear of taint themselves, for by then sexual adventurism fitted entirely within the expected performance of elite masculinity—water off a duck’s back. Redressing the relative invisibility of women in Chinese history has been an ongoing task for a growing number of scholars since the emergence of a broader movement of feminist historians in the 1970s. This has never been a straightforward project, given that the overall bias of the written record leans overwhelmingly to writings by men concerned largely with the affairs of men. Methodologically, sources which on the surface may be inferior when set against the usual standards of history potentially reveal valuable historical perspectives on the same sensibilities that produced and demarcated standards of evidence in the first place. Because of the patriarchal bias in the archive overall, strategies for achieving such a reading ‘against the grain’ are immensely important. And so, while there can be a felt need to honour and ground women’s history in ‘serious’ sources, ‘unorthodox’ genres such as f­iction, pornography,

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Editors ’ Preface and Acknowledgements

ix

plays, and popular songs often provide counter-historical materials and perspectives. In late-imperial Chinese fiction the hypersexualized ‘wanton woman’ was for the most part portrayed as the obverse of the idealized chaste woman who epitomized prescribed female behaviour, and the motif was invoked as part of the mobilization of stock character types as well as in conscious literary experiment with pre-existing modes of gendering order and disorder. From the late-Ming onwards wanton women can also be understood as a function of men and women’s heightened interest in tensions experienced between ideal and lived worlds. While continuing to engage with fiction to varying degrees, we are pleased to see that the papers in this volume broaden analysis beyond the usual xiaoshuo locus to explore the theme’s wider transgeneric, cultural and historical significance, perspectives that explore redeemable and unredeemable aspects of transgressive sexuality for diverse audiences. It is also rewarding to note in the roughly chronological arrangement of the chapters an observable increase in the volume of late imperial Chinese women’s voices, a feature of the book that was unplanned and for which we have to thank the pioneering perspectives of our contributors. We have been lucky in that all of the contributors invited to join us on this project have been responsible for gender relations in late-imperial Chinese literature being one of the most exciting fields in cultural history today. In personal terms it has been a wonderful experience to work with a team of scholars who have long been our guides in showing us how to do the history of gender in China, and we want to thank them all for showing us once again, this time ‘up close.’ Ever astute and generous, Paola Zamperini (Northwestern University) circulated extensive discussant notes to the original conference panel members. From the outset, the enthusiasm of Katherine Carlitz (University of Pittsburgh) for our project has remained inspiring, as too has that of Martin Huang (University of California, Irvine) and Ellen Widmer (Wellesley College). Our respective institutions have also been generous with study leave and travel support during the realisation of this project. Louise Edwards (University of New South Wales) presciently encouraged us to send our proposal to the Women and Gender in Chinese Studies editorial team at Brill, while also lending our proposal invaluable support. Our warmest thanks must go to series editor at Brill, Grace Fong, for guiding the formation of the book, and also to acquisitions editor, Qin Higley, for all the care and patience she showed along the way. Victoria Menson, assistant editor, was also amazingly patient in ensuring production of the book we always had in mind. In Melbourne, Marc Askew’s friendly hospitality on several occasions during Mark’s move to Hong Kong was indispensable to the work of

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x

Editors ’ Preface and Acknowledgements

completing the manuscript. Finally, we must extend sincere appreciation to our two anonymous reviewers, whose generous engagement with the manuscript has undoubtedly contributed enormously to any redeeming qualities this ‘wanton’ book might claim. Mark Stevenson

Victoria University

Wu Cuncun

University of Hong Kong

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List of Contributors Maram Epstein is Associate Professor of Chinese Literature in the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures, University of Oregon. She is the author of Competing Discourses: Orthodoxy, Authenticity, and Engendered Meanings in Late Imperial Chinese Fiction. Her current projects concern ritual, expression of emotions, the body, and representation of self, and include a new book on interpretations of filial piety in eighteenth century China. Joseph S.C. Lam is Professor of Musicology in the School of Music, Theatre and Dance and Director of the Confucius Institute at the University of Michigan. He is the author of State Sacrifices and Music in Ming China: Orthodoxy, Creativity, and Expressiveness and Songdai yinyueshi lunwenji: lilun yu miaoshu/宋代音樂史 論文集: 理論與描述 (Historical Studies on Song Dynasty Music: Theories and Narratives). A specialist in theories of music historiography, he is currently working on a monograph entitled “Kunqu, the Classical Opera of Globalized China.” Anne E. McLaren is Professor of Chinese Studies at The Asia Institute, The University of Melbourne. Her books include The Chinese Femme Fatale: Stories from the Ming Period, Chinese Popular Culture and Ming Chantefables, and Performing Grief: Bridal Laments in Rural China. Her current work is concerned with the ethnoecology of the lower Yangzi delta and how folk performance reflects human responses to the transformation of the local environment. Keith McMahon is Professor of Chinese Language and Literature in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, University of Kansas. His books include Polygamy and Sublime Passion: Sexuality in China on the Verge of Modernity, Women Shall Not Rule: Imperial Wives and Concubines in China from Han to Liao, and most recently, Celestial Women: Imperial Wives and Concubines from Song to Qing (2016). Ôki Yasushi is Professor of East Asian Literature in the Institute for Advanced Studies of Asia at the University of Tokyo. His recent books in Japanese include Fū Bōryū

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xii

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

“Sanka” no kenkyū: Chūgoku Mindai no tsūzoku kayō (馮夢龍「山歌」の硏究: 中国明代の通俗歌謠 A Study of Feng Meng-long’s Shange), Min-matsu Kōnan no shuppan bunka (明末江南の出版文化 A Study of the Publishing Culture

in late Ming Jiangnan, recently translated into Chinese), and Bō Jō to “Eibaian okugo” no kenkyū (冒襄と「影梅庵憶語」の研究 A study of Mao Xiang and his Reminiscences of the Convent of Shadowy Plum-blossoms). He is also the author (with Paolo Santangelo) of Shan’ge, the ‘Mountain Songs’: Love Songs in Ming China, a philological translation of Feng Menglong’s collection. Mark Stevenson is adjunct assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, as well as honorary fellow in the College of Arts at Victoria University, Melbourne. He is the author of Many Paths: Searching for Old Tibet in New China and editor and translator (with Wu Cuncun) of Homoeroticism in Imperial China: A Sourcebook. His current research is on theatregoing in nineteenth century Beijing and the development of epitheatrical approaches to theatre history. Wu Cuncun is associate professor in Chinese literature in the School of Chinese, The University of Hong Kong. She is the author of Ming-Qing shehui xing’ai fengqi (明清社會性愛風氣 Sex and sensibility in Ming and Qing society), Homoeroticism in Late Imperial China, and editor and translator (with Mark Stevenson) of Homoeroticism in Imperial China: A Sourcebook. Her forthcoming book is Xiwai zhi xi: Qing zhongwanqi Jingcheng de xiyuan wenhua yu liyuan siyuzhi (戲外之戲:清中晚期京城的戲園文化與梨園私寓制 Drama beyond the drama: the private apartment system and Beijing theatre culture, 1790–1911).

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Introduction



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Chapter 1

Wanton Women in Late-Imperial Chinese Literature: Models, Genres, Subversions and Traditions Mark Stevenson There both were and were not yinfu (wanton women, 淫婦; formal equivalent dangfu 蕩婦) in Chinese history. In addition to the questionableness of the label and the instability surrounding the term’s connotations, few records exist of individual women being categorised or identified as wanton women while they lived.1 Despite use in fictional writing which suggests that it was a common day-to-day term of abuse (and occasionally a perverse kind of endearment), the term invoked a category, and was therefore lived more in the imagination than in the flesh. Nevertheless, I think we can say that as the subjects in the papers in this volume bring us closer to the present, their sources take us closer to ‘real’ wanton women as opposed to the mythical or literary models that dominate earlier representations.2 While this historical tendency may be a function of the narrowing of temporal distance from the present 1  In legal case records, moral tracts, and guides to family life, the behaviour of individual men and women could be described as being yin, but this is not the same as invoking a category. The legal category that would usually apply to women was jianfu (姦婦), or “wife who committed illicit sex,” where illicit connoted a transgression against propriety and its ritual frameworks (zhengdao 正道, or simply dao 道, “the [proper] way”), in other words, against the husband, the patrilineage, and imperial authority. See Matthew Sommer, Sex, Law and Society in Late Imperial China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), as well as the following note. 2  This is particularly clear in the case of the pages of newspaper and pictorial presses after the 1870s, which soon collided with public education for girls and an increased public presence of women, producing a busy and sensational interest in their purported corrupt and unbecoming behaviour (and particularly in cases of murder committed by women party to adultery); see Paul Bailey, “ ‘ Women Behaving Badly’: Crime, Transgressive Behaviour and Gender in Early Twentieth Century China,” Nan Nü: Men, Women and Gender in China 8.1 (2006): 156–197. In relation to earlier periods, Ding Naifei identifies a similar trend when comparing the evolution of the yinfu trope between Shuihuzhuan and Jin Ping Mei (a question I visit later in this introduction), in Obscene Things: Sexual Politics in Jin Ping Mei (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 145. On the jealous “virago,” Yenna Wu also writes of “an increasing interest in depicting the virago less as an allegorical figure than as a lifelike character”

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4

Stevenson

(particularly important in relation to performance genres), it is equally possible that it represents cultural shifts reflected in a greater prominence of folk sources in literature, the closer involvement of women themselves in processes of textual production, as well as the widening social reach of chastity cults. Considering the above, it should be clear that models, genres, subversions and traditions contribute to the discursive construction of the category ‘wanton woman’ in an entirely interrelated way, entailing all at once moral values, literary forms, cultural positions and social forces. The first of the models is of course not the category of yinfu that is the focus of this volume, but instead that standard against which it is a transgression, the modelled bounds of wifely behaviour and duty that propped up patriline and patriarchy. Closing the circle, throughout Chinese history sexual morality referred back to a naturalised model and theory of order outlined in a key set of foundational texts, some of which, primarily the Doctrine of the Mean (Zhongyong 中庸), took the family as their guiding (or governing) metaphor.3 As Ames and Hall point out in Focusing the Familiar, in contrast to ancient Greece, Chinese political and ethical thought saw (and still does see4) the private and public spheres as intrinsically connected: “In general there are nine guidelines in administering the empire, the state, and the family, yet the way of implementing them is one and the same.”5

Discursive Touchstones

Moral guidelines, their ritual embodiment, and the integrated vision of the social field were pursued continuously and consistently, yet the way their integration was managed and the way the appearance of integration was maintained and represented certainly changed, and it is that change that continues b­eginning from the late sixteenth century, in The Chinese Virago: A Literary Theme (Cambridge, MA: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1995), 8. 3  Roger T. Ames and David L. Hall, Focusing the Familiar: A Translation and Philosophical Interpretation of the Zhongyong (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2001). 4  As J.K. Fairbank observed, “Since patterns of the past cannot be entirely expunged they remain curiously intertwined with new motifs. . . . Even today, Mao Tse-tung’s successors must still rely less on laws and procedures than on moral exhortation and personal example”; Fairbank, The United States and China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 465, 474. 5  Zhongyong 20; translation from Ames and Hall, Focusing, 103.

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Wanton Women In Late-imperial Chinese Literature

5

to occupy much of the work in the field of Chinese history today.6 While historians tend to avoid the word ‘evolution’, and while there are real concerns among historians and social scientists alike over the teleological adoption of ‘modernity’ into the history of China, late-imperial China—here taken as the last two dynasties (Ming 明 1368–1644, Qing 清 1644–1911)—was a period of considerable cultural and social transformation, with urbanisation and commerce appearing to interrupt the ordered integration of life and Heavenly principle (tianli 天理) to an extent never seen before. This change is seen most dramatically perhaps in the eruption of the golden age of xiaoshuo fiction (小説) from the late sixteenth to the late eighteenth century, a literary form where, as Maram Epstein has put it, “orthodox rhetoric is frequently suggested through isolated tropes that invoke the moral logic of Neo-Confucianism but are overshadowed by more colourful and transgressive aspects of fiction.”7 In her study of the construction of gender in late-Ming and Qing vernacular fiction, Competing Discourses, Epstein identified two central components driving orthodox Confucian discourse: hierarchically differentiated gender roles (yin and yang structuring “correspondences that informed natural, social and metaphysical epistemologies”) and formalism (regular literary patterns and structures associating “a text’s formal aesthetics . . . with the author’s ethical vision”).8 The rejection or disruption of either of the two ordering principles was transgressive, but gave shape to an alternative discourse of “authenticity” which enabled passion to be identified with self-realisation. In the resulting play between the “competing discourses,” gender hierarchy remained and was possibly even strengthened as the gendering of desire played out and intensified in literary and personal experiments. While women and sexuality did not enter or transform orthodox discourse in any lastingly affirmative way, they did nonetheless become busy topics of men’s writing. As Anne McLaren observed in The Chinese Femme Fatale, during the very same period that late-Ming men were composing books on moral education 6  “Conversations about sex are always part of a larger current of conversations and arguments. Desire’s objects, expressions, control, suppression, transgression, relative importance, and the venues in which all of these are expressed, are not ‘natural’ occurrences, but social ones. Like everything else of interest to the historian, they change over time,” Gail Hershatter, “Sexing Modern China,” in Remapping China: Fissures in Historical Terrain, ed. Gail Hershatter et al. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 78. 7  Maram Epstein, Competing Discourses: Orthodoxy, Authenticity, and Engendered Meanings in Late Imperial Chinese Fiction (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 14, my emphasis. 8  Ibid., 6, 7.

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specifically designed for consumption by educated women in elite households, they were also adapting tales of “wicked women” as well as “virtuous heroines” for their own consumption and amusement. Why they would want to circulate tales of virtuous heroines (i.e. chaste widow suicides) may be explained by their support for the chastity cult as well as the sympathy they felt the stories had with “their own plight under a despotic reign,” but, even considering the terrible fate usually administered to wicked women in didactic fiction,9 it is less obvious why there should have been such an interest in circulating images of women’s transgressions against family and state ideology. One explanation may be a mounting anxiety over women’s desires and agency in an age when leading literati thinkers were taking an interest in the creative potential and philosophical significance of passion (qing 情) and desire (yu 欲). Vernacular tales such as the Sanyan examples translated and analysed in The Chinese Femme Fatale were not pornographic, but were “moral tales of the dangers attendant on the improper management of women and their sexual desires.”10 McLaren’s study draws attention to the complex and many faceted relationships existing between literature, gender and the ideological control of desire in Chinese history, as have a series of studies before and since. Keith McMahon’s Causality and Containment in Seventeenth-century Chinese Fiction has from the time of its publication become an essential reference point in our understanding of the play of containment and abandon in late-Ming cultural production,11 just as his Misers, Shrews and Polygamists: Sexuality and Male-Female Relations in Eighteenth-Century Chinese Fiction identified how the “openness” of vernacular fiction he had previously identified led eventually to an embattled consensus which placed “men and women in mutually alien positions from which

9  Anne E. McLaren, trans., The Chinese Femme Fatale: Stories from the Ming Period (Sydney: University of Sydney East Asian Series 8, Wild Peony Press, 1994), 1. See also Wu Cuncun and Mark Stevenson, “Karmic Retribution and Moral Didacticism in Erotic Fiction from the Late Ming and Early Qing,” Ming Qing Studies n.v. (2011): 467–486. 10  McLaren, Femme Fatale, 5. At around the same time Dorothy Ko formed a similar view: “To men who found the transience of economic fortunes as anxiety provoking as that of sensual pleasures, stories of women’s steadfastness were doubly satisfying,” in Teachers of the Inner Chambers: Women and Culture in Seventeenth-Century China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 56; similarly, Yenna Wu, “The clash between the social restrictions on women and their desires (and ability) to break free may have contributed to the increase in the literary depiction of female jealousy and dominance,” Chinese Virago, 48. 11  Keith McMahon, Causality and Containment in Seventeenth-century Chinese Fiction (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1988).

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each can theoretically take vital essence from or lose it to the other.”12 As the title of his latter book suggests, the pitted battle enabled inventive writers to position a diverse range of “types” along a continuous scale of confrontation. Central to the inner workings of the contradiction was the privileged position of men in relation to polygamy in a theoretically (as opposed to physically or financially) unlimited realm of desire. Shrewishness signalled the limitation of male sexual privilege, wantonness was its usurpation, and both were popularly portrayed as being imagined by men in order to deflect their own failings. In relation to the shrew (pofu 潑婦), McMahon concluded “in one sense the woman becomes shrewish because she is forced into more constrained [or contained!] positions than the man; in another sense she is shrewish by virtue of the man’s alienation from her, which is manifested in his ineptness and fear of her. In either case, he ‘produces’ the shrew, even if he thinks she appears on her own through no fault of his.”13

Brief Anatomy of a Term

While terms referring to specific ranges of behaviour such as dufu (妒婦, jealous wife) circulated as early as the Han dynasty (206 bce–220 ce),14 more overarching, categorical expressions for women exhibiting traits resistant to patriarchy did not gain wide currency until the appearance and growth of vernacular writing. While care naturally needs to be taken in regard to the relative invisibility of vernacular forms of expression until the late imperial period, the eventual popularity of the terms dufu, pofu and hanfu (悍婦, fierce wife) may be an indication of how the changing role of women in city life intensified 12  Keith McMahon, Misers, Shrews and Polygamists: Sexuality and Male-Female Relations in Eighteenth-Century Chinese Fiction (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), 2. McMahon is alluding to late transformations of an ancient belief that sexual activity, and particularly climax, depleted a person’s original store of life-force, a fear that was creatively manipulated in fiction to epitomise other (what would be described today as ‘psychosocial’) ways in which men and women were believed to be at loggerheads. 13  McMahon, Misers, 56. 14  Jealous women, their ambitions, and the resulting disruption and tragedy, are of course all symptoms of the contradictions inevitably faced in polygamous households, presenting much the same pattern for imperial court and gentry household alike. See Wu, Chinese Virago, 6–7, where this theme is described as being popular in literature from the Han dynasty through to the Tang and Song, when it was commonly used as an analogy for opportunistic officials (59–60). The same set of contradictions is at the heart of what Anne Kinney describes as “dynastics,” see my discussion below.

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discourse surrounding womanly influence upon men. The term yinfu had an early appearance (but even then, as we shall see, there are some surprises). The idea itself, that ‘woman’ is the source of disorder, goes back to the very beginning of Chinese canon formation and the Book of Odes (Shijing 詩經), where in at least one song, “Looking Up to Great Heaven (Zhanyang 瞻卬),” wise women are considered and then dismissed in favour of the judgement that “Disorder does not come down from heaven; It is produced by the woman” (亂匪降自天, 生自婦人。).15 This casual nugget of shared advice remained prominent in men’s minds down through the centuries, a handy diagnosis for the ills of the moment. It also travelled, appearing, for example, in the jottings of an anonymous samurai in late-Edo Japan in need of an aetiological principle that could explain the social decay witnessed in his time.16 In a more ironic vein, the same idea resurfaces in a comment penned by the preeminent modern writer Lu Xun in the fourth chapter of The True Story of Ah-Q (“The Tragedies of Love”): “From this we can see that woman is a menace to mankind. The majority of Chinese men could become saints and sages, were it not for the unfortunate fact that they are ruined by women.”17 The same idea was also transmitted through a tradition of moral invocations guiding elite women derived from the Lienü zhuan (列女傳, Categorized Biographies of Women), a collection of historical narratives describing the behaviour of court women compiled by the Han courtier and bibliographer Liu Xiang (劉向 79–8 bce). Liu presented the anthology to Emperor Cheng (成帝 r. 33–7 bce) in 17 bce, in all likelihood responding to the vicious influence of the beautiful Zhao Feiyan (趙飛燕) and her equally dangerous sister (see McMahon, this volume). Intended to alert the emperor to the danger women posed within the machinations of court life, particularly when not closely governed in accord with the ancient rites, several of Lienü zhuan’s prefaces address female readers and could possibly be the first Chinese texts to do so, a feature that may either reflect a level of literacy among court women at 15  “Zhanyang 瞻卬,” Mao no. 264, translation from James Legge, The Chinese Classics: With a Translation, Critical and Exegetical Notes, Prolegomena, and Copious Indexes, vol. 4, She-King (Hong Kong: Lane, Crawford and Co., 1871), 561 (original bracket punctuation removed). Photographically reproduced at Internet Archive (https://archive.org/details/ chineseclassics05legggoog). 16  Mark Teeuwen and Kate Wildman Nakai, ed. Lust, Commerce and Corruption: An Account of What I have Seen and Heard, by an Edo Samurai (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 88. 17  Yang Hsien-yi and Gladys Yang trans. Selected Stories of Lu Hsun (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1972).

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the time or at least an expectation that the emperor share his reading of the anthology with the women closely associated with him.18 After six chapters treating categories of women deserving honour and emulation, Liu Xiang’s Categorized Biographies of Women reserves its seventh and final section (discounting the supplementary biographies) for “The Depraved and Favoured” (niebi 孽嬖), fifteen examples of women who brought disaster, death and disorder to their men and their states, consequences in some cases continuing for generations as a result of acting outside customary limits. Three of the women are described as being debauched and insubordinate (yinluan 淫亂), and others are described as deluded and lustful (huoyin 惑淫), haughty and lustful (aoyin 驕淫), or licentious and dissolute (yinyi 淫泆/淫佚). While the most serious crime committed by women selected for inclusion in this section is interference in succession, such seditious and murderous opportunities (and nature) are very closely aligned with adultery, or even with what was simply assumed to be the dissolute influence of beauty.19 At the same time, yin (淫)—as dissolution, debauchery and wantonness—is readily acknowledged throughout all the chapters of the Lienü zhuan as a failing common to both men and women participating in court life, hence requiring rulers and their consorts to be vigilant in serving as an example to each other, their inferiors, and offspring. Introducing her translation of the anthology, Anne Kinney points out: the Lienü zhuan is not arguing for an inflexible separation of the sexes or for rigid adherence to various oppositions between men and women, such as inner versus outer, superior versus inferior, but suggests the ways women can mediate or temporarily transcend those distinctions. It acknowledges that power predicated on a strict system of division can easily break down and that women’s contributions are key to dynastic health and survival.20 Kinney therefore comes to the conclusion that “[t]he unifying theme of the collection as a whole can thus be best understood with reference to ‘dynastics,’ ” by 18  Anne Behnke Kinney, trans. ed., Exemplary Women of Early China: The Lienü zhuan of Liu Xiang (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), xxxvii. 19  Similar warnings could include good-looking men as well, as seen in the “Martial Reputation” section of the Remainder of Zhou Documents (Yi Zhou shu 逸周書), see Mark Stevenson and Wu Cuncun, ed. trans., Homoeroticism in Imperial China: A Sourcebook (London: Routledge, 2013), 9. 20  Kinney, Exemplary, xxx.

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which she means “an ideology for reinforcing habits of deference to a familybased hierarchy for the sake of its ongoing continuity and prestige.”21 It is clear that yinfu and yin are during this early period understood in these same terms, as damaging to family and court. For the same reason the dissoluteness of men is also regularly circumscribed, again with copious references to the lessons contained in the Odes. Kinney continues, “We therefore see in the narratives of the Lienü zhuan and elsewhere in early Chinese literature not just women subordinating themselves to men but also husbands, sons, and brothers who are directed to defer to women as a means to sustain dynastic power or family prestige.” This spirit perhaps reflects Liu Xiang’s approach and enterprise as a whole, and is evident in the “Correct Remonstrance” (zhengjian 正諫) section of the Shuoyuan (說苑 Garden of stories) anthology in which Confucius is cited as advising how, in the same way as bitter medicines improve ailments, loyal words, hard on the ears, improve behaviour. “In such a way,” Liu Xiang continues, with inferiors taking responsibility for correcting those above them “there are no fallen states or ruined homes, no obstinate fathers or rebellious sons, no irresponsible elder brothers or neglectful younger ones, no wild husbands or wanton wives (kuangfu yinfu 狂夫淫婦), no severed associations or withered friendships.” This is perhaps the earliest extant instance of the term “wanton woman,” and it is worth noting that, as was often the case also in the Lienü zhuan, the wayward woman is here identified alongside the wayward man. In the Lienü zhuan it is also clear that praiseworthy conduct is constantly measured against blameworthy conduct, and one of the most commonly identified forms of blameworthy conduct is yin (wantonness or debauchery), the category of conduct that appears to be of most concern at court whether it be committed by women or men (not forgetting that it is an anthology that focuses on women’s role at court). From these early references there appears a story to be told of how yin (wantonness) was closely associated with men, became historically associated with women, and coalesced into a readily identifiable constellation of characteristics defining an evolving type of woman, or rather, an evolving type of discourse on women’s sexuality. Before moving on to examine how the papers in this volume contribute to the late imperial part of that picture, it is worth stopping to reflect on the formulation kuangfu yinfu 狂夫淫婦 as invoked by Liu Xiang, given the way it mentions men and women together, so as to draw attention to the vagaries of terminology and translation. Appearing as it does at the end of a list of paired roles and the blameworthy qualities associated with them, the phrase “wild husbands and wanton 21  Kinney, Exemplary, xxvii.

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wives” is, along with the other pairs, a good candidate for a particular kind of construction known as “mutually implied phrase” (互文 huwen), a rhetorical technique commonly employed in early Chinese writing and argument. In such a construction both topics share what is said about them, in this case meaning that both men and women can be wild or wanton. Such a reading would suggest that we are not to make too much of the differential alignment of men with wildness and women with wantonness. Nevertheless, the difference is not entirely unimportant, for while a huwen phrase implies the sharing of two qualities across a pair, a choice is always made as to which quality is syntactically matched with which topic, even if the two qualities are reasonably contiguous (in this case sharing an undisciplined core).22 What can it mean that a husband’s promiscuity is named wild and a wife’s is named wanton other than the one is lusty and the other wicked? As it says in the Odes, “When a gentleman indulges in such pleasure, Something may still be said for him; When a lady does so, Nothing can be said for her” (士之耽兮,猶可說也,女之耽兮,不可說也。).23 Wild speaks of the daring and rash; wanton speaks of the insubordinate and sinful. The differences bequeath quite different histories. When “wild man/husband” is used in the context of Lienü zhuan it takes the form of a woman’s self-deprecating (and affectionate) term for her husband when speaking with others.24 There does not appear to be any such affectionate use of “wanton woman/wife,” at least not until the pornographic Jin Ping Mei (金瓶梅) in the sixteenth century—where the adjective “affectionate” needs to be applied with caution. In Jin Ping Mei the word yinfu appears 382 times, occurring in such abundance in part due to Ximen Qing’s use of it in his (sometime) term of (sadistic) affection for his fifth and fated concubine Pan Jinlian (潘金蓮, i.e. 怪小淫婦兒 guai xiaoyinfur, “funny little strumpet”25), and in part due to his blind pursuit of lascivious adventure, or again in part due to its use as a catch-all term of abuse for women.26 22  This can be also be concluded from the fact that “wild wives” and “wanton husbands” never enter the terminology, at least not until modern times when “wild wife” enters newspaper headlines as “madwoman.” 23  “Mang 氓,” Mao no. 58, Legge, She-King, p. 99. 24  Kinney, Exemplary, 6.6 (“humble husband”), 6.7 (“my betrothed”). 25  “You crazy little whore” in David Roy’s translation. David Tod Roy trans., The Plum in the Golden Vase, or Chin P’ing Mei, Vols. 1–5 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993–2013). The phrase does not appear in Vol. 5. 26  Lanling xiaoxiaosheng 蘭陵笑笑生, Xinke xiuxiang piping Jin Ping Mei, 2 Vols. 新刻繡 像批評金瓶梅 [Plum in the golden vase, newly printed and richly illustrated with commentary], ed. Qi Yan 齊煙 and Wang Rumei 王汝梅 (Hong Kong: Sanlian shudian, 1990).

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Stevenson

Yin Genealogies

As Ding Naifei has demonstrated in her study Obscene Things: Sexual Politics in Jin Ping Mei, the late-sixteenth century work is heavily marked by its fascination with yinfu, a fascination which is integral on several levels to its relationship to the earlier Shuihu zhuan (The Water Margin 水滸傳). As is well-known, one of the remarkable features of Shuihu zhuan is its celebration of warrior homosociality,27 a situation it constructs in the geographical and moral isolation of the 108 outlaws (綠林好漢 lülin haohan, rebel heroes) in their stronghold on Mount Liang, a locality symbolic of their ability to maintain the heroic purity required to issue the justice a corrupt Song government is unable to deliver. Shuihu zhuan, through a complex textual evolution, became the first major venture in vernacular writing, at the same time giving central place to what might be described as highly plebeian (and marginal) lives.28 Because the band lives by and for its solidarity, women, with a few ‘neutralised’ exceptions, are seen on the whole as a danger to both their fellowship and their righteousness (yi 義). That danger, however, does not mean that women are banished from the novel entirely—as Ding explains, a liberal sprinkling of yinfu seductresses provides opportunity for haohan to test and prove their resolve, and one of these tests is of course Pan Jinlian whom Wu Song first manages to resist and later decapitates when avenging her murder of his older brother Wu Dalang.29 If women and yinfu are held in a marginal position in Shuihu zhuan, Jin Ping Mei tells a different but complementary story which still manages to be extremely misogynistic. This is best represented by Pan Jinlian’s elevation from being a bit-player or walk-on part in the earlier work to centre stage in the later. The thread (and threat) passing between Shuihu zhuan and Jin Ping Mei is therefore not simply the borrowing of a plot segment involving Pan Jinlian, Ximen Qing, Wu Song and Dame Wang, and must be understood to also include the borrowing and recasting of the yinfu theme. Read in the other direction, it can also be interpreted as a passing on of a theme that has its own Term search conducted on the Chinese Text Project site (http://ctext.org/jinpingmei), August 2015. 27  Kam Louie, “Sexuality, Masculinity and Politics in Chinese Culture: The Case of the ‘Sanguo’ Hero Guan Yu,” Modern Asian Studies 33.4 (1999): 835–859. 28  Martin Huang, Negotiating Masculinities in Late Imperial China (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2006), 104. 29  There are four adulterous wives/concubines: Yan Poxi (閻婆惜), Pan Jinlian (潘金蓮), Pan Qiaoyun (潘巧雲), and Lady Jia (賈氏), all of whom are killed by their husbands except for Pan Jinlian, who is killed by her husband’s younger brother. On later dramatic development of the Yan Poxi character, see Joseph Lam’s chapter in the current volume.

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momentum, a theme which requires rereading and “re-accentuation” with each generation.30 At the very least this alternative perspective is instructive in terms of how Shuihu zhuan was read and what was taken from readings of it in the sixteenth century, yet it also raises questions as to when and how certain themes and their (re-)writings and (re-)readings become literary possibilities in Chinese history. Looked at this way the two novels can be read as a single work that is working out the problem of where and how yinfu might be allowed a fuller public reading.31 Remarkably, although perhaps not all that surprising, around the same time that Jin Ping Mei was being put together the yinfu theme was being taken up for detailed treatment in another pair of novels (more properly novellas at just over 10,000 characters). One, Chipozi zhuan (癡婆子傳, Tale of an infatuated woman), was probably written at the same time that Jin Ping Mei was taking shape (c. 1590); the other, Ruyijun zhuan (如意君傳, The lord of perfect satisfaction), appeared earlier in the sixteenth century and served as a source of erotic language and intertextual quotation for the other two. Ruyijun zhuan recounts with fabulous exaggeration Empress Wu Zetian’s (625–705) quest to satisfy her imperial sexual appetite, delivered in the novella by the arrival of the over-sized Xue Aocao who is made Lord of Perfect Satisfaction. Chipozi zhuan, which cites verbatim an episode from Ruyijun zhuan, is a seventy yearold woman’s account of her lascivious childhood stirrings and scandalous married life, “having no regard for proximity or distance [in kin relations], seniority or youth, high or low, clerical or lay, and a mind completely fixed on sensual excitement,” a history that results in her expulsion from her husband’s house at the story’s conclusion just before she is forty. There are a number of overlapping details in Chipozi zhuan that suggest the author wanted the reader to draw comparisons with Ruyijun zhuan,32 but the most obvious sign that this 30  “Every age re-accentuates in its own way the works of its most immediate past. The historical life of classic works is in fact the uninterrupted process of their social and ideological re-accentuation,” Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 421. 31  “Public reading” here does not assume a public sphere, merely reading within a public discourse provided in part by the circulation of texts (publically or privately). A Foucaultian history of sexuality in China, should one be desired, would in all likelihood take the form of a genealogy of public patriarchy: locating transformations, repetitions, and exceptions in patriarchy’s acceptability. 32  Those details include: a “re-enactment” of a splashing incident from the earlier novella; A’na’s family name, which is shared with one of Wu Zetian’s apparently lascivious palace maids, Shangguan Wan’er; the echo of her own name A’na with Wan’er; her age when she tells her story, which is the age Wu Zetian has reached at the end of Ruyijun zhuan.

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was deliberate (or driven by powerful socio-cultural imperatives) are the circumstances of the two women, which are in some instances matched by being diametrically different. For the differences to be meaningful, however, a number of similarities need to be considered in order to form a basis for comparison. Most fundamentally, both novellas are dominated by a central woman who is so central as to actively decentre each and every man in the narrative (something that can’t be said of Pan Jinlian).33 In Chipozi zhuan the narrative is constructed as A’na’s narrative, and while certainly written by a male literatus, its framing as a herstory from beginning to end is quite unique. Ruyijun zhuan, even while bearing the title of the empress’ favourite lover,34 and even while framed as unofficial imperial history, is equally centred on Wu Zetian throughout (with the brief exception of a momentary shift to follow the arrival of Xue Aocao). Finally, and not unrelated to the women’s licentiousness, both stories are characterised by absent husbands, in the one case by the death of Emperor Gaozong, in the other by A’na’s husband being away on business and possibly preoccupied with homoerotic attractions. This is also where the important contrasts begin, for A’na’s flirtations go on predominately under her father’s and then her father-in-law’s roof. Wu Zetian, on the other hand, usurps authority after Emperor Gaozong’s death and it is under her own absolute sovereignty that her assignations with male favourites are from then on conducted (earlier, as an imperial consort, she cuckolded Emperor Taizong with his own son). Wu Zetian is, once sovereign, entitled to all the male palace concubines (or some equivalent) she desires, yet, in an unthinkable position, her monstrosity leaves her in a virtual state of monogamy with Aocao, the only man large enough to fulfil her (and too big to copulate with anyone else). Monogamy, strangely enough (particularly in terms of the broader history of pornographic fiction in seventeenth century China), is also a significant subtext in Chipozi zhuan where there is no mention of concubines, thus leaving all the married men in the household monogamous.35 As it turns out, A’na’s father-in-law treats his son’s wives as However, in terms of what the story is (or stories are) about, these signs are not as significant as the contrasts, which I believe are just as deliberate. 33  More fundamental still, in another sense, is their both being composed in classical Chinese. For a detailed analysis of these two works see Mark Stevenson, “Sound, Space and Moral Soundscapes in Ruyijun zhuan and Chipozi zhuan,” Nan Nü 12.2 (2010): 255–310. 34  “Favourite lover” is a close translation for ruyijun. The novella’s secondary title is Kun yu qing zhuan 閫娛情傳 (A tale of pleasure and love from the boudoir). 35  Which is to say they fail to succeed at one half of what Keith McMahon describes as the “polygamist-philanderer” ideal. While McMahon estimates that never more than 10 percent of the male population could afford to have concubines, polygamy was “neverthe-

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concubines, and A’na ends up being debauched (yin 淫, here employed as a verb) by every man in the house, including servants and a visiting actor. In Ruyijun zhuan and Chipozi zhuan it is not only the behaviour of the transgressive women that is not what it should be. Despite a good deal of licentiousness, the imperial household with Wu Zetian at its head is in its fashion monogamous, and the Luan household (欒, pun on 亂, “chaotic”) likewise fails to be polygamous (or more correctly, polygynous). The natural reading of these unlikely scenarios would be to argue that the kind of dysfunctionality they portray, relative to the expectations of the time, is merely indicative of how wrong things can get if women are allowed to step out of place. When yinfu Wu Zetian ascends the throne the cosmic order is turned on its head; when A’na marries she enters a luan household and the rest of her story is a fine lesson in the consequences of a household’s failure to manage luan-ness (or yin-ness). While it makes a good deal of cultural and historical sense on one level, such a reading cannot be shown to require (and therefore fails to explain) the underlying monogamous pattern that structures these two ‘wanton woman stories,’ and instead we must turn to consider how a discourse on wanton women might sometimes be bound up with a re-evaluation of polygyny and male privilege.

Desperately Seeking Subversion

Keith McMahon’s recent book on the cultural fate of polygamy in response to China’s confrontation with modernity in the nineteenth century could be incautiously misread as suggesting that cultural critique of polygamy had to wait until China’s confrontation with the West.36 As his earlier studies as well as many of the other analyses cited above attest, the critique of the place of desire, and in particular female desire, has a much longer history than such a reading acknowledges. One way of reading the essays in our collection, then, less the superior goal toward which the successful man tended, while monogamy was for the rest—except the large numbers of poor men whose prospect was no marriage at all.” Among influential merchants and literati, “which vernacular fiction portrays prolifically,” polygyny was not strictly linked to the requirement to bear sons, but instead had to do with “a man exercising privilege and prestige and, if possible, enjoying the sexual pleasures of having many women”: Keith McMahon, Polygamy and Sublime Passion: Sexuality in China on the Verge of Modernity (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2010), 1, 2 (for percentage), 6. 36  See previous note. He has since completed a further study related to women and polygyny focusing on historical imperial households, Celestial Women: Imperial Wives and Concubines in China from Song to Qing (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2016).

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is to view them as taking up a set of related texts which, while turning to very different representations of yinfu, are all concerned with the proper cultural and social placement of female desire.37 Being about this, however, means the essays and the texts they examine will also end up being about many other things as well. Sixteenth and seventeenth century China, as has so often been observed, was a period of deep cultural questioning under the accumulated effects of several centuries of urbanisation and an attendant expansion of commerce.38 Those changes placed enormous pressure on such fundamental cultural arrangements as personal ambition and public life, arrangements that were deeply gendered. Similarly, the publishing boom that had begun in the Wanli era (1573–1620) made the printed page available to many new classes of people, and before long the reading public “exemplified the plurality of the monetarized society of which it was part.”39 The quickened evolution of China’s imaginative life, an evolution that took in the nature of imagination itself, was opening up uncharted social territory. “Starting with the late-sixteenth century appearance of Jin Ping Mei and other erotic novels and stories,” writes Keith McMahon in Misers, Shrews and Polygamists, “the sexual affairs and daily, intimate life of the polygamous family became common subjects of Chinese vernacular fiction.”40 In contrast to earlier forms of fiction, represented by Shuihuzhuan and Sanguo yanyi 37  On the European front Lynn Hunt sees in Retif de la Bretonne’s early usage of the word pornographe “the now hidden connection between the development of the modern notion of pornography and the particular eighteenth-century worry about women’s participation in public life . . . Female eroticism was particularly disturbing because it blurred the lines between private and public; eroticism was the intrusion into the public sphere of something that was at base private”; Hunt, “Introduction: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, 1500–1800,” in The Invention of Pornography: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, 1500–1800, edited by Lynn Hunt (New York: Zone Books, 1993), 3, 5. 38  Craig Clunas’ Superfluous Things: Material Culture and Social Status in Early Modern China (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2004), originally published in 1991, was not the first book to draw attention to the link between commerce and broad cultural change in late Ming China, but was significant in being followed by a number of books responding to the issues Clunas raised, particularly those around questions of material culture, subjectivity, and early modernity. Among them were Francesca Bray’s Technology and Gender: Fabrics of Power in Late Imperial China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), Timothy Brook’s The Confusions of Pleasure: Commerce and Culture in Ming China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), and Jonathan Hay’s Shitao: Painting and Modernity in Early Qing China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 39  Ko, Teachers, 35. 40  McMahon, Misers, 28.

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(三國演義, Romance of the Three Kingdoms), where narrative action was played out on the hyper-masculine stage of dynastic history, late-sixteenth century pornography took fiction into the domestic space of the family and household, where readers’ interest presumably lay. The city itself, in the form of domestic urban life, had become the focus of a new imaginative world, but what is more significant for our purposes here was the concomitant challenge facing literati men to include women in their narratives, bringing them to life instead of simply dispatching them to the margins, or worse! Jin Ping Mei embodies this transition on several levels, containing elements of the old form, such as the beheading of yinfu, just as it pries open the door to revel in domestic detail.41 While it is no doubt true, as Joanna Handlin and others have noted, that widespread female literacy in the sixteenth century “provoked men for the first time to perceive not the equality of women but their comparability, and to ask just how, given their obvious talents, they differed from men,”42 it must have been equally unsettling for those turning their brushes to the new literature of the city to find themselves representing, in lifelike detail, women who were similar to the women they themselves knew, and, moreover, who had relationships with men just like themselves.43 One remarkable realisation that appears to have occurred to men as a result of the sixteenth-century literary transformation of their perspectives on women was that the yinfu was a female version of a polygamist-philanderer, or, in other words, a replica of themselves (a suggestion the female tanci authors in Epstein’s essay would no doubt welcome). This same insight—and the historical situation that informs it—is very important for reading and exploring the several versions of the yinfu motif described in the essays that follow. In particular, it is worth keeping in mind the possibility that a significant subtext in literary yinfu narratives (including drama) was a complex and ambiguous critique of polygamy, at least in relation to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.44 It was not necessarily an effective or always sincere critique, but 41  Indeed, Wu Song wanders into the narrative as a kind of knight-errant out of place, just so that he can come back and exact revenge on his brother’s murderers—in as bloody a manner as readers will want and expect. 42  Joanna Handlin, “Lu Kun’s New Audience: The Influence of Women’s Literacy on Sixteenth-Century Thought,” in Women in Chinese Society, ed. Margery Wolf and Roxane Witke (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975), 17. 43  While men had long practiced occasional adoption of a female persona in writing, this shift was of a different order entirely. 44  “Jin Ping Mei alone could serve as a textbook about what can go wrong with polygamy. Other late Ming works contain actual statements about why polygamy is wrong and cannot work”; McMahon, Misers, 51.

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it continued its subversive work for at least a century and possibly beyond. In pornography the yinfu motif could include tales of empresses who inverted the cult of widow chastity and the ideology of polygamous male rulership (McMahon, this volume), as well as surprises like the homoerotic monogamous male ‘wanton woman’ (Stevenson). Beyond pornography it could include the plebeian late-Ming shange folksongs where women delight in and flaunt their wantonness (Ôki), late-Qing women’s song cycles which disturb local cosmic balance by retelling neighbourhood tales of illicit passion (McLaren), Qing tanci ballads which turn the tables on polygamous-philanderer relatives (Epstein), and the realisation of flirtatious and passionate women in drama and on stage (Wu, Lam). There both were and weren’t yinfu in Chinese history. Our essays also make it very clear there was no archetypal yinfu, despite later impressions to the contrary.

Wanton Women and Historical Questioning

In Chinese speaking regions of Asia today, and indeed through the twentieth century, Pan Jinlian has been the dominant image of ‘the wanton woman’ or yinfu: so much so that this fictional woman out of the pages of Shuihu zhuan and Jin Ping Mei has become identified with the term itself.45 In contemporary popular culture, as represented by magazines, newspapers, cinema, and television, it is not uncommon to read or hear a woman being taunted or insulted 45  As is clear in Anne McLaren’s contribution to the present volume, the coded evocation of Pan Jinlian was a readily understood reference within oral traditions, including those transmitted by women. From more recent times, in Clara Law’s feature film The Reincarnation of Golden Lotus (Pan Jinlian zhi qianshi jinsheng 潘金蓮之前世今生, 1989) Pan Jinlian is described as “the number one slut [sic] in ancient Chinese history” (tianxia di yi yinfu 天下第一淫婦) by fashion photographer-playboy Simon (Ximen 西門), unaware he is addressing her twentieth-century incarnation; see Steve Fore, “Tales of Recombinant Femininity: The Reincarnation of Golden Lotus, the Chin P’ing Mei, and the Politics of Melodrama in Hong Kong,” Journal of Film and Video 45.4 (1993): 57–70, 66. As Fore notes, the reincarnation theme in the film effectively treats Pan Jinlian as if she was an “actual historical figure” (p. 69, n. 6), a sure sign we are dealing with popular culture. The “number one” phrase used in the film is in all likelihood ultimately derived from Fairy Disenchantment’s evaluation of Baoyu, hero of Dream of the Red Chamber, as “the alltime most lustful person in the world” (tianxia gujin di yi yinren 天下古今第一淫人); Cao Xueqin 曹雪芹 and Gao E 高鶚, Hongloumeng, 3 Vols. 紅樓夢 [Dream of the Red Chamber] (Beijing: Renmin wenxue, 1982), 1.90. Feng Xiaogang’s I Am Not Madame Bovary (2016), Chinese title Wo bu shi Pan Jinlian (我不是潘金蓮, I am not Pan Jinlian), continues the same popular evocation of an historical “Pan Jinlian.” EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 11/4/2019 7:50 PM via TOWSON UNIVERSITY AN: 1507598 ; Stevenson, Mark J., Wu, Cuncun.; Wanton Women in Late-imperial Chinese Literature : Models, Genres, Subversions and Traditions Account: towson.main.eds

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as ‘a’, ‘that,’ or ‘this Pan Jinlian’ when her sexuality/agency is inconvenient or evokes fear. In the twenty-first century this use of ‘Pan Jinlian’ seems to be on the decline, principally because the image and its sources have become outdated—something an older generation read and said. Pan Jinlian is quickly becoming a casualty of cross generational change in China, where those who are growing-up in the twenty-first century will not be nearly as conscious of her role in Chinese cultural history (or as interested) as those who grew up in the twentieth (when she probably entered general public discourse for the first time).46 In Competing Discourses Maram Epstein remarks that “unconventional depictions of women had lost their counterhegemonic edge by the late Qing”; confrontation with ‘modern’ twentieth century attitudes brought about a temporary reversal.47 If the posture of condemning women’s sexual agency that it represents also makes the Pan Jinlian slur look dated, there remains nevertheless, at least in the blogosphere, a level of interest in exchanging views on portrayals of Pan Jinlian in film and video, as well as on women deemed to be ‘Pan Jinlians’. In this new context, attempts by twentieth-century dramatists to produce sympathetic portrayals which re-evaluate Pan Jinlian’s character and the context of her seduction of Ximen Qing would appear long forgotten.48 Similarly, academic and semi-academic attempts to re-evaluate Wu Zetian’s place in history are unlikely to shift continuing popular recourse to a stock image attuned to the imagined dangers (and supposed oddness) of a powerful woman, even if improvements in the image of less-favoured historical emperors tends to attract ready sympathy (unlike Pan Jinlian, no one is ever abused in Wu Zetian’s name). Writing in 2014, Kay Schaeffer and Xianlin Song calculated that “in the past two decades alone more than 20 books on Wu Zetian’s life, 46  Confirming this diminishment of Pan Jinlian’s contemporary relevance, Susan Mann’s Gender and Sexuality in Modern Chinese History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011) and the Routledge Handbook of Sexuality Studies in East Asia, edited by Mark McClelland and Vera Mackie (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014), contain no references at all to Pan Jinlian, Ximen Qing, or Jin Ping Mei. 47  Epstein, Competing Discourses, 285. 48  Such revaluations could be along May Fourth lines of free love, or along lines of class identity, emphasising her origins as a serving girl suffering sexual abuse. A good example of the first is Ouyang Yuqian’s 歐陽予倩 play Pan Jinlian (1926), which was one of many attempts to create a Chinese answer to Henrik Ibsen’s Nora (A Doll’s House, 1879). Ouyang, one of the founders of spoken drama in China, played the title role himself (he had ­experience acting young female roles in Peking opera plays). See Yomi Braester, “Rewriting Tradition, Misreading History: Twentieth Century Subversions of Pan Jinlian’s Story,” in Witness Against History: Literature, Film, and Public Discourse in Twentieth Century China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 56–80. EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 11/4/2019 7:50 PM via TOWSON UNIVERSITY AN: 1507598 ; Stevenson, Mark J., Wu, Cuncun.; Wanton Women in Late-imperial Chinese Literature : Models, Genres, Subversions and Traditions Account: towson.main.eds

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including one by a female Japanese writer, have been published in mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan and Singapore. Several films and television shows have also been produced.”49 In the early 1990s it was widely reported that the internationally acclaimed director Zhang Yimou 張藝謀 had hired five leading historical-fiction writers to pen biographies of Wu Zetian as material for an epic blockbuster, but two decades later the project is yet to go ahead (among the rumours it was reported that the film was to be a vehicle for Zhang reuniting with his earlier collaborator, Gong Li 鞏俐, a development facilitated through yet other productions soon afterward).50 Even if they are not directly identified with Wu Zetian or Pan Jinlian, it does not follow that images of wanton women have not played a significant role in the historical blockbuster aesthetic that has extended Zhang’s influence to popular audiences around the world—and consequently attached wanton women to the process of ‘picturing Chineseness.’51 Bringing together the research contained in this volume and what it says on a theme in gender history, the aim has not been to produce a more consolidated view of what we already know or suspect about wanton women in Chinese literature. Nor is the intention to provide a definitive set of statements on what the image of the wanton woman meant at different moments or for 49  Kay Schaeffer and Xianlin Song, “Reconstructing the Past: Zhao Mei’s Biography of the Tang Dynasty Empress Wu Zetian,” in Women Writers in Post-Socialist China (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014), 120. The chapter is an abridgment and update of Song’s journal article “Re-gendering Chinese History: Zhao Mei’s Emperor Wu Zetian,” East Asia 27.4 (2010): 361–379. 50  Howard Y.F. Choy, “Conclusion: Back(ward) to the Future: Toward a Retro Fiction,” in Remapping the Past: Fictions of History in Deng’s China, 1979–1997 (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 229–236, 236. Su Tong’s 蘇童 novel was published in Hong Kong in 1994, Zhao Mei’s 趙玫 in 1998. Some read allusions to Wu Zetian in the powerful and ruthless women in Feng Xiaogang’s 馮小剛 The Banquet (Ye Yan 夜宴, 2006) and Zhang’s Curse of the Golden Flower (Man cheng jin dai huangjin jia 滿城盡帶黃金甲, 2006); Ya-Chen Chen, Women in Chinese Martial Arts Films of the New Millennium: Narrative Analyses and Gender Politics (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2012), 4. See also Tin-kei Wong’s thesis “On Fidelity and Historicity: A Reconsideration of the Representation of Wu Zetian in Chinese Historical Fiction” (MA diss., University of Hong Kong, 2013). 51  This phrase is adapted from the title of Darrell W. Davis’s book, Picturing Japaneseness: Monumental Style, National Identity, Japanese Film (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996). Davis was concerned with a “monumental style” in period films that “promoted an apotheosis of Japanese national identity” (p. 45), whereas the current spate of historical or period ‘blockbusters’ are aimed at international box-office takings, disappointing those who prefer achievements more along monumental than “consumerist” lines (e.g. Choy, Remapping, 235–6).

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different genres (it is becoming increasingly evident that there was considerable variation on these points within popular genres, as well as a diversity of audiences). Rather, the contributors attempt to draw attention to the diverse ways in which the interrelationship between image and genre has played out, offering new perspectives on the wanton woman theme and encouraging new ways of questioning gender in Chinese literature and history—and in particular giving more space to understanding what today might be called ‘the flipside’ to images and models of women’s virtue (and, as we discover, the ways Chinese women could be positioned either to challenge or champion the double standard). While reading different genres is one way of gaining access to multiple perspectives on gender and gender prescriptions, temporal perspectives are no doubt equally important. In this respect the focus on “late imperial Chinese literature” signalled in the title of this book is not meant to imply that an overarching consistency runs through gender relations and representations in the 650 year period from the founding of the Ming up to 1911. Indeed, the current focus on late imperial China is exciting precisely because it enables us to puzzle at how a series of broad cultural and political shifts impacted on the portrayal of gender relations in imaginative literature, engendering images and practices that continue to resonate in the behaviour and attitudes of our own time. In addition to the expanding urbanisation and commercialisation already noted above (and already important trends in the Song dynasty 宋 960–1279), in a recent survey Harriet Zurndorfer has identified several key elements shaping the performance of gender in the Ming dynasty (the broad thrust of which was inevitably driven by patriarchal interest). In short they include cultural recuperation after the fall of the “barbarian” Mongol Yuan dynasty (元 1260–1368), including a new focus for men on the importance of the examination system, a heightened focus on family ritual and cohesiveness (including patriarchal authority and female fidelity), and sharper differentiation of the male (outer) and female (inner) domains (including elite men’s mastery of multiple partners inside and outside the strictly delineated boundary of the household).52 The rising influence of eunuch factions in the capital as well as an explosion in the number of successful examination candidates frustrated by dwindling career prospects also left their mark on the cultural climate and literary production—disaffected, highly-educated men were increasingly willing to turn their talents to less prestigious but highly marketable portraits of city life, in 52  Harriet Zurndorfer, “Polygamy and Masculinity in China: Past and Present,” in Changing Chinese Masculinities: From Imperial Pillars of State to Global Real Man, ed. Kam Louie (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2016), 13–33.

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some cases the more dysfunctional the more satisfying (and risking high political stakes). Before the Ming dynasty the exploration of female sexual agency in imaginative literature was usually carried out, when explored at all, through imagery of (imperial) courtesans as well as ghosts, goddesses, spirits and immortals—effectively relocating consideration of a sensitive and even taboo subject to a realm apart.53 Through the Ming, in line with literary trends in general, women begin to appear in the more mundane guise of city and town dwellers (wives, concubines, bond servants, virginal maidens, entertainercourtesans, nuns and prostitutes) where they were made part of a broad interest in delineating the public pattern of urban domesticity. Heterodox literary and cultural experiment in the late Ming was a symptom of deeper social changes that also led to localism and a decline in commitment to the capital in the political sphere, ultimately leading to the Ming court’s failure to repel the Manchu founders of the next dynasty, the Qing (1644–1911)—‘barbarian’ as the Yuan, and China’s last dynastic rulers. Several patterns from the Ming continued in this final period of dynastic China, which included the sequestering of women, the prestige of polygamous households, and a commercialised (somewhat déclassée, but nevertheless legendary) courtesan culture, features of the social landscape still prominent enough at the turn of the twentieth century to cause distaste among modern reformer intellectuals. Yet, even as the links between female fidelity and family standing were increasingly ritualised, many young women were enthusiastic consumers and sometime producers of literature celebrating qing, a topic that had 53  A large percentage of the stories included in Hong Mai’s (1123–1202) vast compilation of supernatural anecdotes, Record of the Listener (Yijian zhi 夷堅志), are stories which feature women from a diversity of mostly non-elite backgrounds, often caste as avengers. These tales were an important source for Beverly Bossler’s study of female martyrdom and wifely fidelity in Courtesans, Concubines, and the Cult of Female Fidelity: Gender and Social Change in China, 1000–1400 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Centre, 2013). The Yang Guifei and Zhao Feiyan stories (see McMahon in this volume), as well as Zhang Zu’s (張鷟, c. 651–721) Youxianku (Sojourn in a Fairy Grotto 游仙窟), are additional examples of the translocation of sexual agency. As Bossler notes, during Yuan times tales commemorating fidelity in courtesans and wives circulated widely and to some extent contributed to the development of later imaginative representations of women in general, but the Yuan stories, while ostensibly portraying women, had more to do with representing male sexual agency than female. Nor did the ghostly displacement of feminine agency disappear with the arrival of new forms of imaginative writing, as Judith Zeitlin demonstrates in The Phantom Heroine (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2007)—although female “phantoms” in the Qing just as often evoke agency in highlighting its absence.

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received constant devotion, as we have seen, from at least the closing decades of the sixteenth century. Qing could at various times connote feeling, passion, love, sensitivity, purity, or genuineness, and was, in the late-imperial period, feminine.54 It was also implicitly subjective, which in Confucian China meant it was heterodox. In the literature of the late-imperial period all of the elements touched upon in this paragraph strained and pulled against each other, always in different measure, often in quiet sophistication, sometimes through noisy buffoonery. One of the more noticeable characteristics of this period appears to have been a gradual resignation that social standards and models were no longer to be found through looking back to the distant past,55 and the role of imaginative literature therefore becomes, fitfully, a process of looking to what is found in contemporary landscapes for signs of a new order and new possibilities of self-presentation.56 While the twentieth century picture of many pre-modern Chinese traditions was flattened and compressed by modern distortion of cultural memory, in looking back the essays in this volume challenge us with a picture of ‘wanton women’ that is much broader and heterogeneous than popular memory of Pan Jinlian would suggest. Most important among the many insights to be found is that despite gender performance in Chinese history being overwhelmingly guided by the needs of patriarchal authority, men and women in the late imperial period discovered diverse ways in which to reflect on how men were constantly seeking their own bearings in reference to women.

54  Or rather, as Epstein observes, “a literati appropriation of the feminine and the female subject position,” Competing Discourses, 119. 55  Those who were alarmed by the trend certainly did look backward, but that was the scholastic-literary (i.e. philological) response more than the imaginative-literary one, and what we today refer to as ‘(imaginative) literature’ was in general becoming increasingly separate from orthodox Confucian morality. That the two were part of a broad cultural contest can be seen by their impact even on approaches to scholastic prose; see Theodore Huters’ discussion in “From Writing to Literature: The Development of Late Qing Theories of Prose,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 47.1 (1987): 51–96, 53. See also Huters’ note regarding the care needed with the English terms ‘literature’ and ‘literary’ when treating pre-twentieth century Chinese history (57 n. 9). 56  The poet and literary critic Yuan Mei (1716–1797) can be seen as representative of this trend, not least in his encouragement of women’s poetry. See J.D. (Jerry) Schmidt, Harmony Garden: The Life, Literary Criticism, and Poetry of Yuan Mei (1716–1798) (Abingdon: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003), 68–70.

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References Ames, Roger T., and David L. Hall. Focusing the Familiar: A Translation and Philosophical Interpretation of the Zhongyong. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2001. Bailey, Paul. “ ‘Women Behaving Badly’: Crime, Transgressive Behaviour and Gender in Early Twentieth Century China.” Nan Nü: Men, Women and Gender in China 8.1 (2006): 156–197. Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination, edited by Michael Holquist, translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981. Bossler, Beverly. Courtesans, Concubines, and the Cult of Female Fidelity: Gender and Social Change in China, 1000–1400. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Centre, 2013. Braester, Yomi. Witness Against History: Literature, Film, and Public Discourse in Twentieth Century China. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003. Bray, Francesca. Technology and Gender: Fabrics of Power in Late Imperial China. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. Brook, Timothy. The Confusions of Pleasure: Commerce and Culture in Ming China. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Cao Xueqin 曹雪芹 and Gao E 高鶚. Hongloumeng, 3 Vols. 紅樓夢 [Dream of the Red Chamber]. Beijing: Renmin wenxue, 1982. Chen, Ya-Chen. Women in Chinese Martial Arts Films of the New Millennium: Narrative Analyses and Gender Politics. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2012. Choy, Howard Y.F. Remapping the Past: Fictions of History in Deng’s China, 1979–1997. Leiden: Brill, 2008. Clunas, Craig. Superfluous Things: Material Culture and Social Status in Early Modern China. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2004. Davis, Darrell W. Picturing Japaneseness: Monumental Style, National Identity, Japanese Film. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. Ding Naifei. Obscene Things: Sexual Politics in Jin Ping Mei. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002. Epstein, Maram. Competing Discourses: Orthodoxy, Authenticity, and Engendered Meanings in Late Imperial Chinese Fiction. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001. Fairbank, John K. The United States and China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983. Fore, Steve. “Tales of Recombinant Femininity: The Reincarnation of Golden Lotus, the Chin P’ing Mei, and the Politics of Melodrama in Hong Kong.” Journal of Film and Video 45.4 (1993): 57–70. Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality: An Introduction. Translated by Robert Hurley. London: Penguin.

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Handlin, Joanna. “Lu Kun’s New Audience: The Influence of Women’s Literacy on Sixteenth-Century Thought.” In Women in Chinese Society, edited by Margery Wolf and Roxane Witke, 13–38. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975. Hartman, Mary S., and Lois Banner, eds. Clio’s Consciousness Raised: New Perspectives on the History of Women. New York: Harper and Row, 1974. Hay, Jonathan. Shitao: Painting and Modernity in Early Qing China. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Hershatter, Gail. “Sexing Modern China.” In Remapping China: Fissures in Historical Terrain, edited by Gail Hershatter, Emily Honig, Jonathan N. Lipman, and Randall Stross, 77–93. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996. Huang, Martin. Negotiating Masculinities in Late Imperial China. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2006. Hunt, Lynn. “Introduction: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, 1500–1800.” In The Invention of Pornography: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, 1500–1800, edited by Lynn Hunt, 9–45. New York: Zone Books, 1993. Huters, Theodore. “From Writing to Literature: The Development of Late Qing Theories of Prose.” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 47.1 (1987): 51–96. Kinney, Anne Behnke, trans. ed. Exemplary Women of Early China: The Lienü zhuan of Liu Xiang. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014. Ko, Dorothy. Teachers of the Inner Chambers: Women and Culture in SeventeenthCentury China. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994. Lanling xiaoxiaosheng 蘭陵笑笑生. Xinke xiuxiang piping Jin Ping Mei, 2 Vols. 新刻繡 像批評金瓶梅 [Plum in the golden vase, newly printed and richly illustrated with commentary], edited by Qi Yan 齊煙 and Wang Rumei 王汝梅. Hong Kong: Sanlian shudian, 1990. Legge, James, trans. The Chinese Classics: With a Translation, Critical and Exegetical Notes, Prolegomena, and Copious Indexes, vol. 4, She-King. Hong Kong: Lane, Crawford and Co., 1871. Louie, Kam. “Sexuality, Masculinity and Politics in Chinese Culture: The Case of the ‘Sanguo’ Hero Guan Yu.” Modern Asian Studies 33.4 (1999): 835–859. Mann, Susan. Gender and Sexuality in Modern Chinese History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. McClelland, Mark, and Vera Mackie, eds. Routledge Handbook of Sexuality Studies in East Asia. Abingdon: Routledge, 2014. McLaren, Anne E., trans. The Chinese Femme Fatale: Stories from the Ming Period. Sydney: University of Sydney East Asian Series 8, Wild Peony Press, 1994. McMahon, Keith. Causality and Containment in Seventeenth-century Chinese Fiction. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1988. McMahon, Keith. Misers, Shrews and Polygamists: Sexuality and Male-Female Relations in Eighteenth-Century Chinese Fiction. Durham: Duke University Press, 1995.

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McMahon, Keith. Polygamy and Sublime Passion: Sexuality in China on the Verge of Modernity. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2010. McMahon, Keith. Celestial Women: Imperial Wives and Concubines in China from Song to Qing. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2016. Roy, David Tod, trans. The Plum in the Golden Vase, or Chin P’ing Mei, Vols. 1–5.Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993–2013. Schaeffer, Kay and Xianlin Song. Women Writers in Post-Socialist China. Abingdon: Routledge, 2014. Schmidt, J.D. (Jerry). Harmony Garden: The Life, Literary Criticism, and Poetry of Yuan Mei (1716–1798). Abingdon: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003. Sommer, Matthew. Sex, Law and Society in Late Imperial China. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000. Song, Xianlin. “Re-gendering Chinese History: Zhao Mei’s Emperor Wu Zetian.” East Asia 27.4 (2010): 361–379. Stevenson, Mark. “Sound, Space and Moral Soundscapes in Ruyijun zhuan and Chipozi zhuan.” Nan Nü: Men, Women and Gender in China 12.2 (2010): 255–310. Stevenson, Mark and Wu Cuncun, ed. trans. Homoeroticism in Imperial China: A Sourcebook. London: Routledge, 2013. Teeuwen, Mark and Kate Wildman Nakai, eds. Lust, Commerce and Corruption: An Account of What I Have Seen and Heard, by an Edo Samurai. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014. Wong, Tin-Kei. “On Fidelity and Historicity: A Reconsideration of the Representation of Wu Zetian in Chinese Historical Fiction.” MA diss., University of Hong Kong, 2013. Wu Cuncun and Mark Stevenson. “Karmic Retribution and Moral Didacticism in Erotic Fiction from the Late Ming and Early Qing.” Ming Qing Studies n.v. (2011): 467–486. Wu, Yenna. The Chinese Virago: A Literary Theme. Cambridge, MA: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1995. Yang Hsien-yi and Gladys Yang, trans. Selected Stories of Lu Hsun. Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1972. Zeitlin, Judith. The Phantom Heroine: Ghosts and Gender in Seventeenth-century Chinese Literature. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2007. Zurndorfer, Harriet. “Polygamy and Masculinity in China: Past and Present.” In Changing Chinese Masculinities: From Imperial Pillars of State to Global Real Man, edited by Kam Louie, 13–33. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2016.

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Part 1 Wanton Women in History and Fiction



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CHAPTER 2

The Polyandrous Empress: Imperial Women and their Male Favorites Keith McMahon After the death of her husband, Emperor Gaozong 高宗, the seventh-century Wu Zetian 武則天 called herself emperor, created her own dynasty, and, if the sources can be believed, had a series of at least four male favorites. After the death of her husband, Emperor Jingzong 景宗, the tenth-century Liao Empress Chengtian 承天 ruled as regent in place of her son and, again if the sources can be believed, took a male favorite and had a child by him. She appears to be the only empress in Chinese history to do such a thing. Wu Zetian, Chengtian, and others I will cite are examples of the ‘polyandrous empress,’ an imaginary category that I will define shortly but that for now simply means imperial women who had sexual relations with more than one man. It is an imaginary category because it does not exist except as a hypothetical counterpoint to the polygynous emperor, who was standard throughout history. But there were at least eleven empresses and one princess between the third and tenth centuries who fit this category; two were said to have had male concubines. All appear in what are conventionally read as historical sources, though that does not mean the reports are necessarily acceptable as fact. One can add cases such as Han Empress Zhao Feiyan 趙飛燕 and Wu Zetian in Ming pornography and the Queen Mother of the West (Xiwangmu 西王母) in early myth and other texts, all of whom were portrayed as taking multiple lovers. The world of rumor and slander plays a further role, including accounts from the end of dynastic history when Qing Dowager Cixi 慈禧 was said to have taken fake eunuchs as lovers and to have smuggled young men into the palace for sex, then murdered them. From the above cases, the suggestion is that something like the polyandrous empress existed in China until around the time of Wu Zetian and Empress Chengtian. To be able to say this necessitates examining the notion of the polyandrous empress in terms of what polyandry actually meant in historical reality and in terms of the shadowy existence of polyandry as an imaginary phenomenon. The relation between the historical accounts and fictional treatments, including rumor and slander, is key in examining the formation of a repertoire of themes and images defining the political status of imperial women. © koninklijke leiden,(EBSCOhost) ���7 | doi- ��.��63/9789004340626_003 EBSCO Publishing :brill eBook nv, Collection printed on 11/4/2019 7:50 PM via TOWSON UNIVERSITY AN: 1507598 ; Stevenson, Mark J., Wu, Cuncun.; Wanton Women in Late-imperial Chinese Literature : Models, Genres, Subversions and Traditions Account: towson.main.eds

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The repertoire was something to which people could turn to warn about and prevent crisis, especially when the situation arose in which ruling men were weak or unavailable and the empress was the person with the highest royal authority. Fictional treatments magnified the logic that informed the historical accounts by exaggerating the image of the wanton, polyandrous woman. That logic said that the authority, will, and pleasure that were the privilege of monarchy culminated in the sexual prerogatives that would also be assumed by the polyandrous empress. The woman in power was inevitably the sexually voracious woman. A further theme of this logic was the equation between the polyandrous empress and the impotence of men, which in historical reality most often took place when women regents appeared, that is, empresses who ruled when emperors died and heirs apparent were too young. The woman regent took command when men were weak and she threatened to keep men weak as long as she ruled—hence the need to eliminate and prevent her at all costs.1 Such considerations take me to the margin between historical fact and fictional imagination and consider the boundary between the two as both porous but also meaningful in terms of what both share as representations of the fantasy of the polyandrous empress, which is a significant sub-category for what this volume otherwise identifies as the wanton woman. While trying when possible to distinguish between historical fact and fiction, my goal is to examine their common assumptions and expectations about who this woman is, and even about what we do not know about the woman and what people fantasize about her. Unfortunately, there is no consistent easy-to-use term for what I am talking about: ‘imperial women who had sexual affairs with men other than their husbands’ is too wordy. Other ways of referring to them include women who had male favorites, which does not apply to every case I will cite; extra-marital affair is possible, but sounds anachronistic and does not apply in all cases; illicit affair likewise fails to apply in all cases, but I will use both terms along with male favorite, which mirrors its common counterpart, the female favorite of the male emperor. The polyandrous empress is in part a term of convenience, although the etymological roots of the word, ‘poly-’ for 1  Thanks to two anonymous readers and to Mark Stevenson and Wu Cuncun for ideas in this paragraph (especially “magnified the logic” and “sexual prerogatives”) and for constructive comments throughout. In the treatment of Zhao Feiyan to Wu Zetian, I borrow material and sometimes wording from my previously published Women Shall Not Rule: Imperial Wives and Concubines in China from Han to Liao (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield, 2013) and forthcoming Celestial Woman: Imperial Wives and Concubines in China from Song to Qing (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield, 2016).

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The Polyandrous Empress

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multiple, and ‘-androus’ for men, happen to suit my purpose well if we avoid too narrow an interpretation limited to multiple husbands. Finally, I will also use the term ‘women rulers’ to refer to imperial women, whether they exerted power as a regent or simply a person with royal privilege. In other words, the word ruler comprises the person who exerts power—or threatens to do so— even if not head of state.2 What the accounts of the figures listed above—at least eleven empresses and one princess between the third and tenth centuries—can tell us about real historical women is always tenuous because of the unreliability of sources. Women rulers around the world were commonly rumored to have illicit or secret lovers. The phenomenon is so widespread that one can hardly read any report without caution; some historians would dismiss nearly every instance I cite below. Nevertheless, dynastic histories and other sources record these cases, while few do from the tenth to the nineteenth centuries, although rumors still spread. We lack the conditions to verify our sources to the same extent that we have with women elsewhere, such as Elizabeth I of England or Catherine the Great of Russia. Reliable records tell us that the former had suitors, liked having them, and even openly kissed one on the mouth, but was probably a virgin all her life; the latter had a series of lovers, both before and after her husband died, and had children by more than one of them. In Byzantium, widowed empresses could remarry, sometimes raising their new husbands to be co-rulers, sometimes taking a secondary role, and sometimes bearing children. Queen Tamar in twelfth century Georgia, who inherited the throne from her father, divorced her first husband, married a second, had children, and maintained the dominant role with both.3 In China, remarriage for an empress was out of the question, even before the elevation of the value of widow chastity beginning in the Song (960–1278) and Yuan (1271–1368) dynasties. As sketchy as it may be, the evidence suggests that pre-Song women were powerful enough that they were able to get away with their sexual liberties and that opposition to such relationships was not as strong as it was later. The decrease in cases of imperial women taking male favorites paralleled the development of a stricter code of widow chastity, which, as scholars have recently shown, developed as a result of the combination of both Han and Mongol values.4 In addition, imperial women after 2  See Keith McMahon, Women Shall Not Rule, 132–34 and 273–74. 3  On Elizabeth, see Carole Levin, “The Heart and Stomach of a King”: Elizabeth I and the Politics of Sex and Power (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994); and for Tamar, Donald Rayfield, Edge of Empires: A History of Georgia (London: Reaktion Books, 2012). 4  For the scholarship, see note 40 below.

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Wu Zetian had Wu’s terrible image to contend with. Having male favorites in the alleged manner of Wu Zetian was a worse transgression than it had been before. Finally, the Ming (1368–1644) and Qing (1644–1911) stand out for their starkly lower number of female regents compared to earlier dynasties, which, as I discuss elsewhere, coincided with the neutralization of the position of empress that occurred in those times.5 The power of the empress or queen is a key factor in considering the possibility of her being polyandrous. The weight of judging the reliability of evidence lies mainly on the quality of the individual sources and on their social and temporal context. I want to say that particular empresses had particular lovers, and that the recurrence of reports in a particular span of time suggests a pattern. But it is possible that the particularity of detail was a ruse by the historians and that other historians followed suit. The best that can be done is trace how historians and others created an image, how the image was extended, and how it can be examined and questioned based on cross-referencing between sources, including non-Chinese sources. The polyandrous empress was more likely to have existed before the Song than after. That is something solid that can be said. What follows is in part the history of an image, in part the history of actual change over time, in spite of the difficulty of verifying sources.

From Queen Xuan to Wu Zetian

A detailed account of imperial women and their alleged extra-marital affairs would take too much time and space, but a broad-brush group portrait is valuable, in particular because I do not think anyone has yet put such a group together to see what kind of picture emerges. To the imperial women between the third and tenth centuries can be added three earlier examples who contributed strongly to the image of the ‘polyandrous queen.’ The eleven empresses plus one princess were Empress Jia Nanfeng 賈南風 of the Jin, Empresses Feng 馮, Feng Run 馮潤, and Ling 靈 of the Northern Wei, Princess Shanyin 山陰 (Liu Chuyu 劉楚玉) of the Liu Song, Empress Dowager Wang Baoming 王寶明 and Empress He Jingying 何婧英 of the Southern Qi, Empress Hu 胡 (wife of Gao Zhan 高湛) of the Northern Qi, Empresses Wu Zetian and Wei 韋 of the Tang, Empress Chen Jinfeng 陳金鳳 of the Min, and Liao Empress Chengtian. All appear in dynastic histories. The three earlier ones are Queen Xuan 宣 of the Warring States period, the first recorded female regent in Chinese history; the queen-mother of the First Emperor of the Qin, former concubine of 5  McMahon, Celestial Women, Chapter 6.

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Lü Buwei 呂不韋; and Empress Zhao Feiyan 趙飛燕 of the Han, the last of whom along with Wu Zetian constitute the core prototypes of the Chinese wanton woman. Queen Dowager Xuan (died 265 BC) ruled the kingdom of Qin 秦 after the deaths of both her husband and his successor, who was a son by another of his wives. With the help of her younger brother, Queen Xuan had her own son take the throne and ruled in his place for forty-one years until her death. During that time she reportedly had two lovers, the second of whom, King Yiqu 義渠, gave her two sons. Their affair lasted thirty years before she trapped and killed the king and their two sons in order to occupy his territory. When near death, she requested that another lover, Wei Choufu 魏丑夫 (whose name means ‘ugly man’) be sacrificed and buried with her, but others persuaded her to abandon her wish. She once had a ribald conversation with a foreign envoy in which she stated that she used to object if her husband, the now deceased king, put his leg across her body. It was too heavy. But she was pleased if he lay on top of her with his whole body. The passage appears in the late-Zhou text Strategies of the Warring States (Zhanguoce 戰國策), her point being to distinguish between actions that were beneficial and ones that were not. The envoy sought her help in his battle against another kingdom and she wished to be convinced that helping him would benefit her kingdom, hence her use of the example of her and her husband.6 Regardless of the degree of truth in the reports about Queen Xuan, which we may never be able to determine, let us read her affair with King Yiqu as evidence of a practical effort to gain political alliance. She saw no reason to remain a widow. The combination of intimacy and political alliance will be seen in future cases. A second example is the reputed relationship between the concubine of the Qin statesman Lü Buwei 呂不韋 (died 235 BC) and the king of Qin. As Sima Qian 司馬遷 (died 86 BCE) wrote, but many think unreliably, the king coveted the concubine; Lü gave her to him, knowing that she was already pregnant; and she gave birth to a son who eventually succeeded the king and became First Emperor of China, Qin Shi Huang 秦始皇. She continued her 6  Her husband was King Hui 惠, who died in 311 and whose consort she was. His son and first successor, born of another mother, was King Wu 武, who left no son. See Sima Qian 司馬遷, Shiji 史記 [Records of the Historian] (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1989), 72.2323, 110.2885 (death of King Yiqu); He Jianzhang 何建章, Zhanguoce zhushi 戰國策注釋 [Strategies of the Warring States with Annotations] (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1996), 148 (her death , Qince 2.16 秦策), 1009 (dialogue with the envoy and reference to leg , Hance 韓策 2.1); and James Crump, trans., Chan-kuo Ts’e (Ann Arbor: Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan, 1996), 129 (death), 448–49 (leg).

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relationship with Lü Buwei, who, fearing the consequences, found a replacement for himself, a man named Lao Ai 嫪毐, who had an unusually large penis. The concubine, now queen, had the man’s facial hair plucked to make him look like a eunuch, but not undergo the operation, and thereby enabled him to move about freely in the palace so that they could continue their secret relationship.7 The stories of both Queen Xuan and Lü Buwei’s concubine involved situations of political strategy and intrigue. In Queen Xuan’s case, the Strategies of the Warring States has her speaking outlandish words as a part of a clever strategy—or was it putting those words into the mouth of a woman who was thought to have grabbed power and held on to it too long? In the other case, it is possible that Sima Qian inserted the story to assert that the hated First Emperor was a bastard. What is clear is that the image of the wanton queen was already forming by these times, though the venom and vilification of later stories was not yet as strong. The image still needed more proof, so to speak, and lacked enough examples, whether real or fictional. The third example provides a more essentialized version of the wanton woman. An early source says that Han Empress Zhao Feiyan 趙飛燕 (32 BC– 1 BC) tried to get pregnant by having orgies with men whom she smuggled into the palace. The source is a semi-fictional chronicle, Miscellaneous Records from the Western Capital (Xijing zaji 西京雜記), from perhaps 500 AD. The official dynastic history, the History of the Former Han (Hanshu 漢書), mentions nothing about the affairs, but refers to Zhao Feiyan’s jealousy and plotting against other consorts, especially pregnant ones.8 Miscellaneous Records from the Western Capital portrays Zhao Feiyan in a way that became a permanent part of her legend for centuries to come. A fifteen-year-old boy named Qing Anshi 慶安世 was a court gentleman for Emperor Cheng 成 and a favorite of Zhao Feiyan. As Miscellaneous Records recounts, “He slept with the empress, who wanted to have children but never could.” She used to invite young men dressed in women’s clothing to her quarters and have sex with them, one after the other. “When one got tired, she’d replace him with the next. Still, she died childless.”9 The episode later became part of Song and Ming tales, including The Sensational History of Flying Swallow (Zhaoyang qushi 昭陽趣史), a short pornographic novel possibly written around 1621. In this version, when the 7  Sima Qian, Shiji, 85.2505–14. . 8  Ban Gu 班固, Hanshu 漢書 [History of the Former Han] (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1962), 97b.3974 and 3993–94. 9  Cheng Lin 成林 and Cheng Zhangshan 程章燦 ed. and trans., Xijing zaji quanyi 西京雜記 全譯 [Complete Translation of the Miscellaneous Records of the Western Capital] (Guiyang: Guizhou renmin chubanshe, 1993), 60–61.

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emperor began to prefer Feiyan’s sister, Feiyan had a male palace slave named Yan Chifeng 燕赤鳳 smuggle another man she once knew into her quarters. Then follows the episode lifted from Miscellaneous Records about Qing Anshi and the young men disguised as women. In a climactic episode that first appeared in a Song dynasty version of the story, The Unofficial Biography of Flying Swallow (Feiyan waizhuan 飛燕外傳), the emperor dies because Feiyan’s voracious sister gives him an overdose of aphrodisiac. The main difference between the Ming novel and all previous versions is the extent of detail in the descriptions of the woman’s sexual strength. Few men can meet her needs, and certainly not the emperor, who can only look on as she takes one man after another. Although history and fiction agree about Zhao Feiyan’s rise from government slave to imperial favorite, the History of the Former Han never mentions the sexual affairs or anyone resembling Yan Chifeng or Qing Anshi, but instead emphasizes the Zhao sisters’ jealousy and conniving.10 What a story like Zhao Feiyan’s verifies is the motif of the woman ruler who is also a wanton woman. The woman ruler, in other words, must necessarily be wanton and promiscuous. The eleven cases that come from the dynastic histories begin with Jia Nanfeng 賈南風 (257–300), wife and empress of Emperor Hui 惠 (reigned 290–306) of the Jin 晉. A key feature of her account as composed in the Jin History (Jinshu 晉書) is that the emperor was mentally unfit, so much so that his father, Emperor Wu 武, once sent one of his own concubines to initiate his son in sex. As for Jia Nanfeng, she was said to have smuggled men into the palace to have sex, after which she had them murdered. After a coup in 291, she and her family took control of the government, but she was deposed and forced to commit suicide in 300. In a continuation of the theme of Emperor Hui’s lack of virility, the history reports that when his second empress became consort to another emperor, she claimed to have discovered what a real man was like.11 Next are two women from the Northern Wei (Bei Wei 北魏), first Empress Dowager Feng (442–490), who served as regent twice. In contrast to Jia Nanfeng, but recalling Queen Xuan, Empress Feng’s favorites were both lovers and advisors.12 The other case was Empress Dowager Ling 靈, surnamed Hu 胡 10  Ban Gu, Hanshu, 97b.3995. 11  Fang Xuanling 房玄齡, Jinshu 晉書 [Jin History] (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1974), 31.963– 965 (Jia Nanfeng); 31.968 (initiation of son); and 31.967 (real man, 始知天下有丈夫耳). 12  Li Yanshou 李延壽, Beishi 北史 [History of the Northern Dynasties] (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1974), 13.495–97. The first lover, referred to as her “secret” or “inner favorite” (neichong 內寵), a standard term for imperial favorites, usually female, was Li Yi 李奕, whom the empress’s son, Emperor Xianwen (獻文, 454–476), executed when he

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(died 528), who likewise served as regent twice and who allegedly had affairs with four men, one of whom was a prince she supposedly forced herself upon and two of whom rose to high rank and, as the dynastic history reports, “were openly licentious at court” (xuan yin yu chao 宣淫於朝), where xuan yin 宣淫, to spread licentiousness openly, was a standard expression in the moralizer’s vocabulary and a sign of outrage at the dowager’s alleged immorality.13 One of the most famous stories of wanton imperial women tells of the sister of the Liu Song 劉宋 dynasty Emperor Liu Ziye 劉子業 (449–466), who ruled for two years, was murdered, and posthumously deposed. His sister, the Princess of Shanyin 山陰 (Liu Chuyu 劉楚玉, died 465), once lamented that it was unfair that men could have multiple spouses, but not women. The emperor responded by giving her thirty male concubines (mianshou zuoyou sanshi ren 面首左右三十人).14 In what seems like a continuation of granting women male concubines, a Southern Qi 齊 emperor gave his mother, Dowager Wang Baoming 王寶明 (455–512), “thirty male attendants, something that no other dynasty had ever done” (nan zuoyou sanshi ren, qiandai suo meiyou ye 男左右三十人,前代所沒有也). There are no details about what either woman did with their concubines; and their cases produced no tradition of the normalization of the practice. The stories were told as jokes and were seen as signs of the immoral times in which they lived.15 The accounts from the Period of Disunity suggest a level of permissiveness for women that was unimaginable in later times. The following four cases fall discovered the affair. The other two favorites, whom she had after killing the emperor and becoming regent again, were Wang Rui 王叡, a non-Han man who, it was said, “had free access to her bedroom” (churu wonei 出入臥內) and was a specialist in astronomy and divination, and Lin Chong 林沖, who likewise “received favor within the curtained chambers” ( jian chong weiwu 見寵幃幄) and was an astute advisor, even to Xianwen’s successor after the dowager died. 13  Li Yanshou, Beishi, 13.503–505 (the prince, “spreading licentiousness”); Wei Shou 魏收, Weishu 魏書 [History of the Wei] (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1974), 13.337–340; Sima Guang 司馬光, Zizhi tongjian 資治通鑑 [Comprehensive Mirror for Aid in Government] (Taibei: Shijie shuju, 1974), 149.4656 (forcing prince to “favor” her), and 150.4698 (reference to two others); and Jennifer Holmgren, “Empress Dowager Ling of the Northern Wei and the T’o-pa Sinicization Question,” in Papers on Far Eastern History 18 (1978): 123–70. 14  Shen Yue 沈約, Songshu 宋書 [History of the Song] (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1974), 7.147–48. She was also said to have tried to seduce a young official, but he refused and she finally released him. 15  Li Yanshou 李延壽, Nanshi 南史 [History of the Southern Dynasties] (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1975), 11.331. Liang 梁 dynasty Xu Zhaopei 徐昭佩 (ca. 500–549), first wife of the third ruler, Emperor Yuan 元 (508–555), died before he became emperor, but was said to have had affairs with handsome young men. See Li Yanshou, Nanshi, 12.340–42.

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into the category of illicit affairs, none of which appear to involve political alliance. Empress Feng Run 馮潤 (died 499) of the Northern Wei lived between Empresses Feng and Ling and was notorious for her affair with the eunuch Gao Pusa 高菩薩. It is not known whether he was a true eunuch or a monk disguised as one. When the emperor found out, he severed relations with her.16 Two more cases are of concubines, both belonging to the first great leader of the Northern Qi (Bei Qi 北齊), Gao Huan 高歡 (496–547), and both of whom had affairs with members of his family. The first had an affair with Gao’s brother, whom Gao killed; she was sent away and later re-married. His lenient treatment probably had to do with the fact that Gao wanted to maintain good relations with the powerful clan to which she belonged. The other consort, Zheng Dache 鄭大車, was Han and had been previously married to one of Gao Huan’s Tabgatch puppet rulers. While Gao was away from court, his oldest son “committed incest with her.” Another source reports that Consort Zheng slept with her own son, Gao Huan’s fourteenth. Was this a case of a woman involved in two cases of incest, one with the son of another wife and one with her own son? Or have the historians confused one case with another?17 A final case before arriving at Wu Zetian is Empress Hu 胡 of the Northern Qi, mother of Gao Wei 高緯 (557–577), the last Northern Qi emperor. She was said to have had an affair with a Central Asian merchant, indecent relations with eunuchs, and an affair with a Buddhist monk, whom she invited into the palace where “she lived with him day and night.” When Last Ruler Gao discovered the last affair, he had the monk executed and his mother temporarily imprisoned. She allegedly continued her wanton behavior after the fall of the dynasty, dying sometime at the end of the sixth century.18 The above examples, spanning approximately two-hundred years beginning with Jia Nanfeng, suggest that imperial women in this period enjoyed unusual freedoms, though they were subject to criticism and punishment. Wu Zetian 武則天 (625–705) of the Tang represents the culmination of the story of the polyandrous woman. After her husband died and she became de facto ruler, she is said to have begun an affair in 685 with a man named Feng Xiaobao 馮小寶 (died 694), who made his living selling women’s cosmetics. The empress renamed him Xue Huaiyi 薛懷義 and had him shave his head and be ordained 16  Li Yanshou, Beishi, 13.498–502. 17  Li Yanshou, Beishi, 14.519; Li Baiyao 李百藥, Beiqi shu 北齊書 [History of the Northern Qi] (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1972), 10.139 (Zheng and son); and Jennifer Holmgren, “Family, Marriage and Political Power in Sixth Century China: A Study of the Kao Family of Northern Ch’i, c. 520–550,” Journal of Asian History 16.1 (1982): 1–50 (Gao’s marriages). 18  Li Yanshou, Beishi, 14.522–23 (merchant, He Shikai 和士開, and monk, Tan Xian 曇獻).

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as a Buddhist monk in order to have easy access to the palace. The affair lasted ten years until she tired of his excesses, especially his setting fire to a part of the palace in resentment at her taking a new lover, an imperial physician named Shen Nanqiu 沈南璆. In 695 she had Xue murdered.19 The historians were reserved in reference to her affairs, none of which were with politically talented men like Empress Feng’s. The Old Tang History, which is more sympathetic to Wu than the New Tang History or the Comprehensive Mirror for Aid in Government, does not explicitly refer to the affair with Xue, but for her second affair states that the imperial physician “gained her favor” (de xing 得幸). These words typically refer to a consort who gains favor and sexual access with the emperor and, although in some contexts the words do not necessarily mean that there were sexual relations, the writers probably meant to insinuate that there were. The Comprehensive Mirror for Aid in Government reports that Xue “gained the favor” of the empress, while the New Tang History says that she “was intimate with him” (yu si 與私), which unmistakably assert a sexual affair. Writers in later centuries, especially the Ming and Qing, liked to picture women over sixty who were still lusty and driven to have affairs with younger men. The only sensation the Song historians add to their reports is that “even though the empress was elderly, she was skillful with her make-up, and even those close to her were unaware of how much she had aged.”20 Another notable point about the empress and Xue Huaiyi is the fact that the Old Tang History places his biography in the chapter on “In-law Relations,” which dynastic histories usually reserve for an emperor’s wives and concubines. The imperial physician also appears here. Although one cannot assign too much importance to this categorization, it nevertheless hints at the resemblance the historians saw between Xue Huaiyi and female consorts married into the imperial family. By not placing them in the chapter on imperial in-laws, on the other hand, the New Tang History denies them the slightest hint of normalization.21 Wu Zetian’s next male favorites were two half-brothers in their twenties, Zhang Yizhi 張易之 and Zhang Changzong 張昌宗, who were known for their delicate beauty. Skilled in music and song, they “wore powder on their faces 19  Liu Xu 劉昫, et al., Jiu Tangshu 舊唐書 [Old Tang History] (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1975), 183.4741, 4743; Ouyang Xiu 歐陽修 and Song Qi 宋祁, Xin Tangshu 新唐書 [New Tang History] (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1975), 76.3483; and Sima Guang, Zizhi tongjian, 205.6499. On Wu Zetian, see McMahon, Women Shall Not Rule, 187–202. 20  Liu Xu, Jiu Tangshu, 183.4743; Sima Guang, Zizhi tongjian, 203.6436; Ouyang Xiu, Xin Tangshu, 76.3480 and 3482 (make-up); and Sima Guang, Zizhi tongjian, 205.6487 (make-up). 21  Liu Xu, Jiu Tangshu, 183.4741–43 (Xue Huaiyi).

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and rouge on their lips” (fu fen shi zhu 傅粉施朱), a common practice for men in the Period of Disunity and the Tang, and dressed in extravagant clothing. Their time with the empress began in the late 690s when the empress was seventy-two and lasted until she was eighty. The Old Tang History never suggests that the relationship was sexual; the New Tang History says that they “gained her favor.” At first they mainly entertained her, but eventually became involved in politics and were audaciously corrupt. Although officials complained that the brothers were guilty of lewd and shameless behavior and encouraged decadence at court (referring to the young men as ‘inner favorites,’ neichong 內寵), the empress dealt with serious internal and external matters as before. The Zhang’s involvement in the issue of imperial succession finally tipped the scale, at which point conspirators dethroned the empress and had the Zhang brothers decapitated.22 Shortly after Wu Zetian, Emperor Zhongzong’s 中宗 Empress Wei 韋 (died 710), the ninth of eleven cases, allegedly had an affair with Wu Zetian’s nephew, Wu Sansi 武三思.23

The Period after Wu Zetian

Some say that the bias against Wu Zetian was so strong that the evidence about her sexual intimacies is unreliable. Nevertheless, she was a key turning point in that later women had a much greater example to avoid than they previously had in Empress Lü of the Han. Imperial women began consciously avoiding resemblance to Wu; and officials and other critics cited her when warning about Wu Zetian-like behavior in the palace.24 The remaining two of the eleven cases I have identified as historically significant are from the tenth century, Empress Chen Jinfeng 陳金鳳 of the Min 閩 dynasty and Empress Chengtian 承天 of the Liao. Chen Jinfeng (died 935) was a favorite of the first emperor of the Min (909– 945), one of the Ten Kingdoms. When the emperor became ill, she began an illicit relationship with one of his confidants, through whom she had an affair with an official who as a youth had been intimate with the confidant. 22  Liu Xu, Jiu Tangshu, 78.2706 (powder and rouge); Ouyang Xiu, Xin Tangshu, 76.3484 (gaining favor), 104.4014 (lewdness); and Sima Guang, Zizhi tongjian, 206.6538, 6546–47. 23  Liu Xu, Jiu Tangshu, 51.2172. 24  McMahon, Women Shall Not Rule, 227, 233, 244. On the rejection of negative evidence about Wu, see Mark Edward Lewis, China’s Cosmopolitan Empire: the Tang Dynasty (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), 36; See also Dora Shu-fang Dien, Empress Wu Zetian in Fiction and in History: Female Defiance in Confucian China (New York: Nova Science Publishers, Inc., 2004), 27–57.

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She was killed during a coup along with the emperor and her two lovers. She became the subject of a late Ming story containing features common to pornographic tales of the time, including a husband’s homoerotic affair leading to intimacy between his lover and the husband’s wife or concubine, a man and multiple wives in bed while others watch, and the motif of one dissolute act linking to another until all involved meet a dire end. In Chen Jinfeng’s story, fact and fiction are difficult to distinguish, though all sources refer to her affairs with the two men.25 The Liao Empress Chengtian 承天 (954–1009) was famous for having led an army to victory over the armies of the second Song emperor. Her affair appears to have been openly accepted. After her husband died and she became regent, she began a relationship with the Chinese official Han Derang 韓德讓 (941– 1011), whose father and grandfather had served the Liao since the founding of the dynasty and who had been awarded the founder’s surname. Although the affair does not appear in the History of the Liao, it can be found in the writings of two Song dynasty visitors to the Liao court and in the thirteenth-century chronicle known as the History of the Qidan Kingdom (Qidan guozhi 契丹國志). It was said that the empress and Han were betrothed when young, but that the imperial clan requested her for themselves and forced her to break off the engagement. While serving as regent for her son, however, she asked Han to resume their relationship, after which he had “free entry to her curtained chambers.” Two other remarkable facts were that they had a son, although the History of the Liao likewise fails to refer to him, and that they poisoned Han’s wife. Han was twelve years older than she and was one of her main advisors, becoming commander-in-chief of the Northern Chancellery, a position normally reserved for Liao nobles. He was later appointed grand counselor. The fact that one of the Song visitors wrote as an official ambassador lends weight to his account, which was not written in a vilifying or sensational way. If the

25  McMahon, Woman Shall Not Rule, 251–55; Sima Guang, Zizhi tongjian, 279.9128, 9132–34 (which says she was “vulgar and lascivious”); Ouyang Xiu, Xin Wudai shi 新五代史 [New History of the Five Dynasties] (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1974), 68.849–50; Wu Renchen 吳任臣, Shiguo chunqiu 十國春秋 [Spring and Autumn of the Ten Kingdoms] (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1983), 94.1360–62; and for the fictional source used by the author of Shiguo chunqiu, see Xu Tong 徐熥 (1561–99),  Jinfeng waizhuan 金鳳外傳 [The Unofficial Biography of Chen Jinfeng], Xuelin manlu 學林漫錄 [Casual Notes from the Forest of Learning], 15 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2000): 231–40 (thanks to Liu Yongqiang 劉勇強 of Beijing University for this source).

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relationship was real and openly acknowledged, it would be the last of its kind in Chinese dynastic history.26 The remaining cases that I have found, of which there are seven, though there are undoubtedly more, are either clearly false or minor in comparison with the previous ones. As recorded in the dynastic history, the Liao dynasty Empress Xuanyi 宣懿 (late eleventh century) was falsely accused of adultery as part of a plot to depose her; she committed suicide.27 Also reported in the dynastic history, after the Jin 金 dynasty Emperor Hailing 海陵 (1122–1161) spurned one of his wives, she allegedly had an affair with one of her female servants (thus, strictly speaking, not an example of a ‘polyandrous’ woman); another of Hailing’s consorts allegedly smuggled a lover into her chambers in a clothing trunk and disguised him by dressing him as a woman.28 For many centuries, people wrongly believed that the younger sister of Empress Yang 楊 (1162–1232) of Song 宋 Emperor Ningzong 寧宗 had an affair with a court painter. A late Ming story told of Empress Yang having an affair with the innercourt advisor, Shi Miyuan 史彌遠.29 The rumor of an unofficial chronicle 26  See McMahon, Women Shall Not Rule, 260–62; Chen Shu 陳述 ed., Quan Liao wen 全遼文 [Complete Liao Writings] (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1982), 360–361 (report by Liu Bin 劉斌 about son and murder); Ye Longli 葉隆禮, Qidan guozhi 契丹國志 [History of the Qidan Kingdom] (Taibei: Guangwen shuju, 1968), 13.132 (affair with Han); and Lu Zhen 路振, Chengyao lu 乘軺錄, in Songchao shishi leiyuan 宋朝事實類苑 [Collected Song Dynasty Documentation Arranged Categorically], ed. Jiang Shaoyu 江少虞 (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1981), 1010–16, especially 1011 and 1013–14 (ambassador’s report). For a translation of Chengyao lu, see David Curtis Wright, The Ambassadors Records: Eleventh-century Reports on Sung Embassies to the Liao, Papers on Inner Asia no. 29 (Bloomington: Research Institute for Inner Asian Studies, 1998), 30 (free entry and exit, wife killed, birth of son) and 38 (seeing son, description of empress; using Wright’s translation with minor modification). On Han Derang in Liaoshi, see Tuotuo 脫脫, et al. Liaoshi 遼史 [History of the Liao] (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1974) 82.1289–91 (sonless). Also see Linda Cooke Johnson, Women of the Conquest Dynasties: Gender and Identity in Liao and Jin China (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2011), 154–62 (including reference to recent archaeological discovery that Han was buried in tomb next to hers; I have not been able to relocate this online source). 27  Tuotuo, Liaoshi, 23.277–78 and 71.1205–06. 28  Tuotuo, Jinshi 金史 [History of the Jin] (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1975), 63.1509–10. In addition, the son of a high minister was reported to have had an affair with a Jin imperial concubine; see Johnson, Women of the Conquest Dynasties, citing Franke, which I have been unable to further trace. 29  Hui-shu Lee, Empresses, Art, and Agency in Song Dynasty China (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2010), 19–20, 187, 192–205. For the late Ming story, see the seventh story of Xihu erji 西湖二集.

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reported that a Yuan 元 dynasty minister visited Empress Dowager Budashiri 卜答失里 (13th century) secretly at night.30 The History of the Ming reports that Consort Zheng 鄭 of Ming Emperor Shenzong 神宗 (1563–1620) had an affair with a co-conspirator in a plot to seize power.31 Rumors have long told of the promiscuity of Qing Empress Dowager Xiaozhuang 孝莊 (Bumbutai, 1613– 1688), mother of the Shunzhi 順治 emperor and grandmother of the Kangxi 康熙 emperor. She was said to have had an affair with or married Dorgon, one of the early Qing leaders, and in another case to have made advances to a Qing official.32 A final case is that of Dowager Cixi, about whom both Chinese and foreign writers fabricated reports of her affairs with eunuchs and men smuggled into the palace, which I will discuss shortly. Budashiri, Consort Zheng, and Bumbutai are the only ones who resemble the earlier type of ruling woman who was involved with a political ally. From the sources that we have, it appears that after Wu Zetian and for about the next twelve-hundred years imperial women changed their behavior. Some might say the northern conquest dynasties, from the Northern Wei to the Liao, Jin, and Yuan, should be considered separately since their gender customs differed from the Han-ruled dynasties. Turco-Mongolian regimes of Central Asia granted elite women the right to openly participate in political and military decision-making. When those regimes ruled China with Chinese-style administrations, they retained some of their heritage, which may help explain the reigns of the Northern Wei Empresses Feng and Ling and Liao Empress Chengtian—though it happens that Feng’s mother was Han (we do not know about her father) and that Ling was Han by both parents. On the other hand, 30  Quan Heng 權衡, Gengshen waishi 庚申外史, cited in John Dardess, Conquerors and Confucians: Aspects of Political Change in Late Yuan China (New York: Columbia University Press, 1973), 68. The minister was Baiyan 伯顏. 31  Zhang Tingyu 張廷玉 (1672–1755), Mingshi 明史 [History of the Ming] (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1974), 114.3539. 32  M. Jean Gates and Fang Chaoying, in Arthur Hummel, ed., Eminent Chinese of the Ch’ing Period (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1943–44), 300–301; Tie Yuqin 鐵玉欽, Shenyang gugong yiwen 瀋陽故宮逸聞 [Shenyang Imperial Palace Anecdotes] (Shenyang: Chunfeng wenyi chubanshe, 1984), 123–29 (Bumbutai meeting a Ming general); Lü Simian 呂思勉, Shixue sizhong 史學四種 [Four Historiographical Monographs] (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 1980), 61 (Lü’s ancestor; thanks to Meng Fanzhi 孟繁之 of Beijing University for this source); and Zhao Erxun 趙爾巽, Qingshi gao 清史稿 [Draft History of the Qing] (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1976), 238.9496–97 (biography of Lü’s ancestor, Lü Gong 呂宮, who in order to resign from office claimed “complete impotence” 人道俱絕, which made Lü Simian speculate that he claimed this in order to fend off the empress).

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was Wu Zetian the way she was because the Tang, although ruled by Han, was originally a northern regime influenced by Central Asian values?33 It is possible, but I think it more useful to examine the records of these women rulers as part of an ongoing full-length drama about women and politics in Chinese dynastic history. The non-Han regimes are an inherent part of the history and would have been widely known about, even if they were thought to contain examples of what women should not do. As for the Qing, the final conquest dynasty, with the exception of Dowager Cixi, the Manchus had no women regents like the ones in earlier conquest dynasties; and as for Cixi, she led no armies and had no male favorites. From early on, Manchu imperial women adhered to Han values of widow chastity and, like Han imperial women from the Song on, avoided Wu Zetian-like appearances or any comparison with her.

Polyandry vs Polygyny

Having considered themes emerging from the stories in historical sources, I am now able to address the notion of the polyandrous empress in terms of the word polyandry in its normal sense. Doing this will clarify polyandry’s significance in the history of Chinese imperial marriage and female rulership, as well as its significance in contrast to polygyny, which was the standard type of marriage of Chinese emperors and other elite men. Then I will broaden into zones of male fantasy and anxiety about the multi-partnering and sometimes sexually voracious woman in the forms of the mythical Queen Mother of the West, the wanton woman in Ming and Qing fiction, and the character type known as the ‘famous courtesan’ (mingji 名妓). In its customary sense, polyandry refers to a woman who has more than one husband at the same time. In contrast with polygyny, polyandry commonly occurred in situations of poverty and scarcity of women, while polygyny typically occurred among men of wealth and high status.34 Polyandry and polygyny were symmetrically uneven in the sense that

33  The historian Chen Yinke 陳寅恪 (1890–1969) asserted that the Tang was heavily influenced by the northern dynasties; see Chen, Sui Tang zhidu yuanyuan luelun gao 隋唐制度淵源略論稿 [Preliminary Study of the Origins of Sui and Tang Institutions] (Beijing: Sanlian chubanshe, 2001), 3. On the power and privilege of women in TurcoMongolian regimes, see the Prologue and Chapter 9 of McMahon, Celestial Women. 34  This was the case in China and Islamic regions, for example, in which women live in one household. In some societies, for example, sub-Saharan Africa, women live separately and each contributes to the income of the polygamous family.

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a woman of high standing usually did not command the privilege of having more than one spouse, while the man of high standing did. Actually occurring polyandry mainly took two forms, fraternal and nonfraternal, neither being a practice found among royalty. In fraternal polyandry, brothers shared both a wife and the common property inherited from their parents, which they did not divide up as they would if each brother had his own wife. Sharing a wife allowed the brothers to keep the family property whole and thereby pool resources for livelihood; if divided among brothers, property would become too sparse to survive on. Fraternal polyandry occurred in regions where it was crucial to keep property intact, especially areas of poor agriculture or under circumstances in which men were away for long periods, whether as laborers or mercenary soldiers, for example. In non-fraternal polyandry, men shared a wife because of poverty and scarcity of labor, land, and women. Non-fraternal polyandry was the main type occurring in China, where, as Matthew Sommer has shown, it was called ‘getting a husband to support a husband’ (zhao fu yang fu 找夫養夫). People drew up verbal or written contracts specifying the conditions under which a husband and wife might, for example, allow an outside man to join the family, contribute labor and earnings, and stay with them either for a certain period or until death. Polyandry occurred throughout the Old and New Worlds, including Europe, pre-Islamic Arabia and Iran, Tibet and other Himalayan regions, and India. In some cases it was temporary, lasting until one of the husbands could finally afford his own wife. A man who already had children might lend his wife to another man to beget offspring, after which the woman would return to her original husband; or an infertile man might lend his wife to another man to beget offspring and then take her and the offspring back. The term can also refer to a husband and wife agreeing to hire her out to other men for money and sex, thus constituting a form of prostitution. Some engaged in polyandry without a sense of stigma, especially in parts of Tibet where wealthy families also practiced it. But in Persia and China it was typically something that non-practitioners condemned and that those who practiced it kept to themselves. To begin with, polyandrists commonly lived in remote or distressed areas, where they suffered less interference from authorities that viewed the practice as an evil custom, again as was the case in both Persia and China.35

35  See Matthew H. Sommer, “Making Sex Work: Polyandry as a Survival Strategy in Qing Dynasty China,” in Gender in Motion: Divisions of Labor and Cultural Change in Late Imperial and Modern China, ed. Bryna Goodman and Wendy Larson (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2005), 29–54; and Patricia Crone, The Nativist Prophets of Early

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Such in brief was polyandry in historical reality. To discuss it in terms of queens and empresses is to treat it as an imaginary construct, though a few women in world history appear to have asserted their power and privilege by taking multiple partners, for the most part serially and rarely at the same time, and by divorcing and remarrying as they saw fit. In only two hazily known cases did imperial Chinese women have what were clearly called male concubines, the Princess of Shanyin and Empress Dowager Wang Baoming. Zhao Feiyan of the Han allegedly had lovers smuggled into the palace, but the report about her affairs is unreliable as history. Of the cases I have examined, some of the male favorites were solely sexual companions, while others were political advisors as well. Of the eleven cases between the third and tenth centuries, only three are clearly known to have died natural deaths, Empress Feng of the Northern Wei, Wang Baoming of the Southern Qi, and Wu Zetian. Nothing is known about the death of He Jingying. Six met violent ends or were ordered to commit suicide: Jia Nanfeng, Feng Run, Empress Ling, the Princess of Shanyin, Empress Wei, and Empress Chen. Except for Wang Baoming, all were in some way punished.36 In contrast to polyandry in historical reality, the form it takes in fictional texts, especially in Ming and Qing pornography, yields sexually voracious women such as Zhao Feiyan and Wu Zetian. Although they can only be negatively portrayed, they enjoy sex to an ultimate degree, at their extremes turning into sexual machines that cannot stop. In the case of a character like Pan Jinlian 潘金蓮 in Jin Ping Mei 金瓶梅, if her husband ignores her, she turns to other men. The sexual passions of the women in the eighteenth-century novel Guwangyan 姑妄言 are so huge that they mate with any male they can find, including beggars, dogs, donkeys, and monkeys. Promiscuous imperial women may almost disappear in historical sources after Wu Zetian and Chen Jinfeng, but fictional narrative replaces them with wanton women of both high and low status. Another polyandrous queen existing from long back appeared in a more tolerable light, though she was not a historical person. She was the Queen Mother of the West (Xiwangmu 西王母), an ancient goddess of immortality who ruled a realm of her own far to the west of China, where she received visits from distant kings and emperors. Men felt privileged to meet her, returning to China with gifts of wisdom and drugs of immortality. She makes an ominous Islamic Iran: Rural Revolt and Local Zoroastrianism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 391–438 (Persia and elsewhere). 36  For other references to royal women from non-Chinese realms who took non-marital lovers, see McMahon, Celestial Women, Chapter 9.

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appearance in a Tang source about the art of sex, which reports that she had no husband and used to enhance her vitality by having sex with young men who afterwards suffered depletion and illness. This side of her tradition may have been less widely known than others, but it reflected a fundamental belief in Chinese sexual lore about the mighty sexual powers of women which allowed them to draw vital energy from men, who if they did not master the art of sex would suffer illness and death. But the Queen Mother of the West was not necessarily an object of condemnation. Her mythical status set her apart. She was a woman who ruled her own realm with no need of a husband; men were blessed to receive gifts from her. She was the most important Daoist goddess in the Tang dynasty, during which time she represented a role and a position that appealed to women who did not fit the normative roles of mother, wife, and daughter, in particular, nuns, prostitutes, and artists.37 An historical figure sharing a number of features with the mythical Queen Mother is the ‘famous courtesan’ (mingji), who, though far from being an empress, likewise contributes to the image of the polyandrous woman. Skilled as an artist, writer, and musician, she is exalted by men who value her all the more because other like-minded men vie with one another to become one of her patrons. They hardly care that she slept with other men. She is sometimes an object of pity, thrown into the world of sex work involuntarily and hoping to be rescued by an understanding man, but instead mistreated and unrecognized for her true worth. For men who do recognize her, however, being with her is like entering a heavenly zone in which two people meet in deep monogamous love. They are temporarily and sublimely cushioned from the outside world, which in stories like the nineteenth-century novel, Traces of the Flowery Moon (Huayue hen 花月痕), finally crashes in when the man runs out of money to support her and the woman’s owners demand her back. In other instances, the famous courtesan is a heartless manipulator, whose only goal is to fleece the man until she uses him up, then transfers to another. Only the master of the brothel, like the one in the late Qing novel Nine-times Cuckold (Jiuwei gui 九尾龜), can tame her by turning her into a concubine instead of a prostitute, thus paralleling the return to order of the empress, like Wu Zetian, who finally yields the throne to the proper male ruler.

37  See Yufang mijue 玉房秘訣 [Secret Formulas of the Jade Chamber], in Tamba Yasuyori 丹波康賴, Ishimpō 醫心方 [The Essence of Medical Prescriptions] (Tokyo: Edo bungakusen, 1976), volume 6, 75–76 (men suffering harm); and Suzanne Cahill, Transcendence and Divine Passion: The Queen Mother of the West in Medieval China (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1993), 3, 33, 38, 45–56, 58, 213, and 215.

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Conclusion It is safe to say that by the Ming and Qing, the promiscuous woman ruler touched particularly strong chords of excitation. From the sources that we have, it appears that after Wu Zetian and for about the next twelve-hundred years imperial women changed their behavior. Even if such a conclusion lacks a statistically large enough sample, there was a repertoire of images and motifs of the wanton, polyandrous woman, from which people as late as the time of Dowager Cixi still drew to create rumors about her sexual affairs in order to malign her. After the failure of the 1898 reform movement, opponents of the dowager began to slander her, Kang Youwei 康有為 (1858–1927) and Liang Qichao 梁啟超 (1873–1929) among them. Others helped, including the Singaporean Lim Boon-keng (1869–1957), who called for an end to her regency in order that the Guangxu 光緒 (1871–1908) emperor gain sole power. Echoing claims made by Kang Youwei, Lim wrote that, when she was the Xianfeng 咸豐 (1831–1861) emperor’s young consort, Cixi already “exhibited her charms to a mighty concourse of eunuchs!” Rumors spread about two of her favorite eunuchs, first An Dehai 安德海 (1844–1869), and second Li Lianying 李蓮英 (1848–1911), who, it was said, had not been castrated. Lim claimed that Cixi recruited handsome young men whom she disguised as eunuchs, had sex with, and then murdered.38 We may surmise that Kang Youwei, Lim Boon-keng, and others drew inspiration from stories long since told about Empresses Zhao Feiyan and Jia Nanfeng, who likewise allegedly had men secretly brought to them for sex and in the latter’s case had them killed. The reputed affairs between the mother of Qin Shihuang and eunuch Lao Ai, the Northern Wei Empress Feng Run and eunuch Gao, and Northern Qi Empress Hu and her eunuchs added to the mix. In Cixi’s case, foreign writers also participated, including Englishman Edmund Backhouse, and the Frenchmen Georges Soulié, Victor Segalen, and Charles Pettit. Backhouse wrote of his secret affair with Cixi, Soulié and Pettit of the dowager’s affairs with men smuggled into the palace, and Segalen of a young Belgian who had an affair with Empress Dowager Longyu 隆裕 (1868–1913). Traditionally it was the lucky concubine who won the emperor’s 38  See Lim Boon-keng 林文慶 (1869–1957), under the pseudonym Wen Ching 文慶, The Chinese Crisis from Within (London: Grant Richards, 1901), 75–76, 88–89; Sterling Seagrave, Dragon Lady: The Life and Legend of the Last Empress of China (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992), 101, 267–71; and Li Yuhang and Harriet Zurndorfer, “Rethinking Empress Dowager Cixi through the Production of Art,” Nannü: Men, Women and Gender in Early and Imperial China 14 (2012): 1–20, especially 5, 8–9.

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favor. Now Backhouse felt honored to accept the dowager’s summons, though he feared he might not live up to her sexual demands. It was likewise with Segalen’s Belgian, who was as if the last man on earth to enjoy such a rare pleasure, given that the Qing was soon to end. Following Lim Boon-keng’s lead, Soulié wrote of men who were smuggled into the palace and then murdered by the dowager’s chief eunuch. At first the dowager had the eunuch plunge the knife into the victims in the midst of their sexual ecstasy. Later she handled the knife herself: “The blood spurted into her face and made her swoon in a shrill and voluptuous agony.”39 However foreign their fantasies were to the Chinese tradition, they were similar in staging the reversal of order that the polyandrous empress’s regime signified. Unusual possibilities opened up; strange situations suddenly emerged—hence Princess Shanyin and her male concubines, as if she could be a polygamist like the emperor; the Northern Wei Empresses Feng and Ling and their male intimates and advisors; Wu Zetian and her favorites, whom she entertained with impunity; and Liao Empress Chengtian and her apparent husband and advisor Han Derang. When a woman ruled, it was an abnormal, temporary, and experimental interval. It was an in-between phase, or could only be understood as such. The pornographic imagination reduced the image of the woman ruler to its base sexual logic, the bedrock of proof justifying the rule against female dominance, by demonstrating that the politically ambitious woman was sexually voracious at her core. In the meantime, expectations about widow chastity and female sacrifice had grown firmer and more explicit in the Song and Yuan dynasties.40 A turning point occurred in the Ming, when the founder Zhu Yuanzhang 朱元璋 prohibited the position of female

39  See Georges Soulié de Morant (who added de Morant to his name later), T’seu Hsi: Impératrice des Boxers (Paris: Éditions You-feng, 1997, reprint of 1911), 157–60, 198; Victor Segalen’s novel, René Leys (1922); Charles Pettit, who wrote in 1928, cited in Li and Zurndorfer, “Rethinking Empress Dowager Cixi,” 8–9; Hugh Trevor-Roper, A Hidden Life: The Enigma of Sir Edmund Backhouse (London: Macmillan, 1976), 34, 249–56 (Backhouse); and Sterling Seagrave, Dragon Lady, 14–15. 40  See Jennifer Holmgren, “Observations on Marriage and Inheritance Practices in Early Mongol and Yuan Society, with Particular Reference to the Levirate,” Journal of Asian History 20.2 (1986): 127–92; Bettine Birge, “Levirate Marriage and the Revival of Widow Chastity in Yuan China,” Asia Major, 3rd series, 8.2 (1995): 107–46; and Beverly Bossler, “Gender and Empire: A View from Yuan China,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 34.1 (2004): 197–223, and Courtesans, Concubines, and the Cult of Female Fidelity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2013).

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regent, as he commanded in his Ancestral Injunctions.41 Other dynasties had expressed similar sentiments, but the Ming put them into effect. After Empress Zhang 張 (died 1442), who ruled as unofficial regent for her grandson, Emperor Yingzong 英宗, the two most powerful women in the Ming were nursemaids, not empresses, thus representing even more accidental and abnormal situations.42 In the Qing, male rulers remained strong for almost the entire dynasty until the classical condition for a female ruler again emerged, the youth and poor quality of the male successor, the Tongzhi 同治 emperor (1856–1875), at which point China’s final empress regent took power, Empress Dowager Cixi. What does this history of the polyandrous empress tell us? It is clear that female regents needed advice and companionship and that men from their natal families, government officials, and eunuchs were the most convenient for those purposes. In the Qing, natal family members were replaced by male relatives of the emperor.43 Eunuchs like An Dehai and Li Lianying still played prominent, though not paramount, roles. In whatever period, intimate, sexual companionship was risky, both for the woman and the man she favored, but, I believe, was more feasible up to around the time of Wu Zetian and Empress Wei. Liao Empress Chengtian was exceptional and was the last of her kind in Chinese history. The imaginary polyandrous woman, however, had an enormously real effect. Suppressing her in reality created a large space for her in the imaginary, which became a weapon against the slightest appearance of her in reality. In such an imaginary, the woman ruler was in danger of becoming a wanton woman; both were meddlers in the realm ruled by men. To ensure the wanton woman’s non-existence, even the slightest hint of wantonness was all that was needed to suppress and remove her. Ming and Qing pornography took the image of the promiscuous woman to its raw sexual core, as novels such as Guwangyan describe. The fictional treatments magnified the logic of the 41  Ming Taizu 明太祖, Huangming zuxun 皇明祖訓 [Ancestral Injunctions], vol. 264 of Siku quanshu cunmu congshu, shibu 四庫全書存目叢書•史部 [Collectanea of Works Cited in the Cunmu Catalogue of the Complete Library in Four Sections, History Section] (Tainan: Zhuangyan wenhua shiye youxian gongsi, 1996), 29b. 42  Dowager Li 李 (1546–1614), who served as strict guardian of her son, the Wanli 萬曆 emperor, was another case, but did not rule in as major a capacity as Dowager Zhang. The two nursemaids were Emperor Xianzong’s 憲宗 Honored Consort Wan 萬 (fifteenth century) and the Tianqi 天啟 emperor’s Mme Ke 客 (1620s). On changes in the Song and Yuan, see McMahon, Celestial Women, Chapters 1 and 2, on Ming Taizu, Chapter 3, and on Dowager Li and others, Chapter 5. 43  See Evelyn Rawski, The Last Emperors: A Social History of Qing Imperial Institutions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 128, 133 (allying with husband’s brothers).

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historical accounts, following the workings of that logic to their extreme. The ostensible theme was the link between the sexually unbridled woman and social instability, while within that raw core there was found to reign a level of ecstasy and pleasure that writers portrayed as awesome and magnificent. Such an awesome and tantalizing level of enjoyment ultimately had to be suppressed in favor of an ideological edifice defining the rule of society by men. Rulership was inherent to masculinity; the loss of that role turned gender roles upside-down, as the reigns of Wu Zetian-like women supposedly illustrated. Who in sum was the wanton, polyandrous empress? First, she was an imaginary construct, and, second, a woman who seems to have appeared in history up to around Wu Zetian. As an imaginary being with real effects, she appeared and prevailed when and because men were weak. She was the sign of male deficiency, an equation that inevitably translated into one between male impotence and female strength, lavishly described and challenged in Ming and Qing pornography. The cult of widow chastity strengthened itself during the Song and Yuan dynasties, after which it became a permanent part of the culture of gender and after which the number of female regents and other powerful imperial women significantly decreased. The cult of widow chastity had as its obverse the cult of the wanton woman. One, the cult of widow chastity, was conservative and served men by controlling women. The other, the cult of the wanton woman, was subversive and haunted the male imagination.44 Together, the figures of chaste widow and wanton woman performed as corollaries of the rule against women rulers, which reached ultimate strength during the Ming and Qing. Excluding women rulers, in turn, was a way of defining social harmony as something based on the necessity of male rulership. The ideology of male rulership maintained that as long as men ruled and as long as they were polygamists, social harmony would prevail. When women ruled, they were the sign of a fundamental threat to harmony and they were meddlers and they were wanton. References Ban Gu 班固. Hanshu 漢書 [History of the Former Han]. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1962. Birge, Bettine. “Levirate Marriage and the Revival of Widow Chastity in Yuan China.” Asia Major, 3rd series, 8.2 (1995): 107–46.

44  The wording in the last two sentences was in part suggested by Mark Stevenson and Wu Cuncun.

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Bossler, Beverly. “Gender and Empire: A View from Yuan China.” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 34.1 (2004): 197–223. Bossler, Beverly. Courtesans, Concubines, and the Cult of Female Fidelity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013. Cahill, Suzanne. Transcendence and Divine Passion: The Queen Mother of the West in Medieval China. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1993. Chen Shu 陳述, ed. Quan Liao wen 全遼文 [Complete Literature of the Liao]. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1982. Chen Yinke 陳寅恪. Sui Tang zhidu yuanyuan luelun gao 隋唐制度淵源略論稿 [Preliminary Study of the Origins of Sui and Tang Institutions]. Beijing: Sanlian chubanshe, 2001. Cheng Lin 成林 and Cheng Zhangshan 程章燦, ed. and trans. Xijing zaji quanyi 西京雜記全譯 [Complete Translation of the Miscellaneous Records of the Western Capital]. Guiyang: Guizhou renmin chubanshe, 1993. Crone, Patricia. The Nativist Prophets of Early Islamic Iran: Rural Revolt and Local Zoroastrianism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Crump, James, trans. Chan-kuo Ts’e. Ann Arbor: Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan, 1996. Dardess, John. Conquerors and Confucians: Aspects of Political Change in Late Yuan China. New York: Columbia University Press, 1973. Dien, Dora Shu-fang. Empress Wu Zetian in Fiction and History: Female Defiance in Confucian China. New York: Nova Science Publishers, Inc., 2004. Fang Xuanling 房玄齡, Jinshu 晉書 [History of the Jin]. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1974. He Jianzhang 何建章. Zhanguoce zhushi 戰國策注釋 [Strategies of the Warring States with Annotations]. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1996. Holmgren, Jennifer. “Family, Marriage and Political Power in Sixth Century China: A Study of the Kao Family of Northern Ch’i, c. 520–550.” Journal of Asian History 16.1 (1982): 1–50. Holmgren, Jennifer. “Observations on Marriage and Inheritance Practices in Early Mongol and Yuan Society, with Particular Reference to the Levirate.” Journal of Asian History 20.2 (1986): 127–92. Hummel, Arthur, ed. Eminent Chinese of the Ch’ing Period. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1943–44. Johnson, Linda Cooke. Women of the Conquest Dynasties: Gender and Identity in Liao and Jin China. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2011. Lee, Hui-shu. Empresses, Art, and Agency in Song Dynasty China. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2010. Levin, Carole. “The Heart and Stomach of a King”: Elizabeth I and the Politics of Sex and Power. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994.

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Lewis, Mark Edward. China’s Cosmopolitan Empire: the Tang Dynasty. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009. Li Baiyao 李百藥. Beiqi shu 北齊書 [History of the Northern Qi]. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1972. Li Yanshou 李延壽. Beishi 北史 [History of the Northern Dynasties]. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1974. Li Yanshou 李延壽. Nanshi 南史 [History of the Southern Dynasties]. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1975. Li Yuhang and Harriet Zurndorfer. “Rethinking Empress Dowager Cixi through the Production of Art.” Nannü: Men, Women and Gender in Early and Imperial China 14 (2012): 1–20. Liu Xu 劉昫, et al. Jiu Tangshu 舊唐書 [Old Tang History]. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1975. Lü Simian 呂思勉. Shixue sizhong 史學四種 [Four Historiographical Monographs]. Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 1980. Lu Zhen 路振. Chengyao lu 乘軺錄. In Songchao shishi leiyuan 宋朝事實類苑 [Collected Song Dynasty Documentation Arranged Categorically], edited by Jiang Shaoyu 江少 虞, 1010–16. Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1981. McMahon, Keith. Women Shall Not Rule: Imperial Wives and Concubines in China from Han to Liao. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield, 2013. Ming Taizu 明太祖. Huangming zuxun 皇明祖訓 [Ancestral Injunctions], vol. 264 of Siku quanshu cunmu congshu, shibu 四庫全書存目叢書•史部 [Collectanea of Works Cited in the Cunmu Catalogue of the Complete Library in Four Sections, History Section]. Tainan: Zhuangyan wenhua shiye youxian gongsi, 1996. Ouyang Xiu 歐陽修 and Song Qi 宋祁. Xin Tangshu 新唐書 [New Tang History]. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1975. Ouyang Xiu, Xin Wudai shi 新五代史 [New History of the Five Dynasties]. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1974. Rawski, Evelyn. The Last Emperors: A Social History of Qing Imperial Institutions. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Rayfield, Donald. Edge of Empires: A History of Georgia. London: Reaktion Books, 2012. Seagrave, Sterling. Dragon Lady: The Life and Legend of the Last Empress of China. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992. Shen Yue 沈約. Songshu 宋書 [History of the Song]. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1974. Sima Guang 司馬光. Zizhi tongjian 資治通鑑 [Comprehensive Mirror for Aid in Government]. Taibei: Shijie shuju, 1974. Sima Qian 司馬遷. Shiji 史記 [Records of the Historian]. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1989. Sommer, Matthew H. “Making Sex Work: Polyandry as a Survival Strategy in Qing Dynasty China.” In Gender in Motion: Divisions of Labor and Cultural Change in Late

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Imperial and Modern China, edited by Bryna Goodman and Wendy Larson, 29–54. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2005. Soulié de Morant, Georges. T’seu Hsi: Impératrice des Boxers. Paris: Éditions You-feng, 1997. Tamba Yasuyori 丹波康賴. Ishimpō 醫心方 [The Essence of Medical Prescriptions]. Tokyo: Edo bungakusen, 1976. Tie Yuqin 鐵玉欽. Shenyang gugong yiwen 瀋陽故宮逸聞 [Anecdotes from the Shenyang Imperial Palace]. Shenyang: Chunfeng wenyi chubanshe, 1984. Trevor-Roper, Hugh. A Hidden Life: The Enigma of Sir Edmund Backhouse. London: Macmillan, 1976. Tuotuo 脫脫, et al. Jinshi 金史 [History of the Jin]. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1975. Tuotuo 脫脫, et al. Liaoshi 遼史 [History of the Liao]. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1974. Wei Shou 魏收. Weishu 魏書 [History of the Wei]. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1974. Wen Ching 文慶 (Lim Boon-keng 林文慶). The Chinese Crisis from Within. London: Grant Richards, 1901. Wright, David Curtis. The Ambassadors Records: Eleventh-century Reports on Sung Embassies to the Liao, Papers on Inner Asia no. 29. Bloomington: Research Institute for Inner Asian Studies, 1998. Wu Renchen 吳任臣, Shiguo chunqiu 十國春秋 [Spring and Autumn of the Ten Kingdoms]. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1983. Xu Tong 徐熥. Jinfeng waizhuan 金鳳外傳 [The Unofficial Biography of Chen Jinfeng]. Xuelin manlu 學林漫錄 [Casual Notes from the Forest of Learning], 15: 231–40 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2000). Ye Longli 葉隆禮, Qidan guozhi 契丹國志 [History of the Qidan Kingdom]. Taibei: Guangwen shuju, 1968. Zhang Tingyu 張廷玉. Mingshi 明史 [History of the Ming]. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1974. Zhao Erxun 趙爾巽. Qingshi gao 清史稿 [Draft History of the Qing]. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1976.

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CHAPTER 3

The Male Homoerotic Wanton Woman in Late Ming Fiction Mark Stevenson In a recent paper examining representations of female same-sex desire in Ming and Qing literature, Laura Wu argued that unlike the literature of male same-sex desire, which has recourse to its own grammar of conventional allusions as well as those of heteroerotic romance, female same-sex desire has “no medium but the images, metaphors and allusions favoured by conventional heteroerotic romance,” the bond between husband and wife being “the only analogy available to them to describe their relation.”1 This perceptive observation raises some equally interesting questions regarding the wider translation of gendered signs across “boundaries” of gender and sexuality in homoerotic fiction, and in this essay I examine an example of translating or borrowing of gendered images in the other direction, where the patriarchal discourse of heteroerotic sexuality is imported into male same-sex narratives. In raising these questions my aim is to expand on Wu’s observation, a comment on the narrow range of figures available for the portrayal of female same-sex desire, by acknowledging cultural restrictions on the figures available for the construction of male same-sex scenarios, in this case a scenario where there would appear to have been no choice other than to turn to a heterosexual analogy as “the only analogy available to them.” It is also important to acknowledge that the literary comparison of men against standards for women and feminine example was not unknown in China, most famously in relation to the feminised position of men in political service in relation to the ruler. Such examples are often employed to draw attention to both the fluidity of gender categories in pre-modern China and their politicisation. As Wu’s analysis of representations of female same-sex desire tells us, both fluidity and prescription applied in different ways for men and women and how they were imagined and constructed. At the same time, the question of when in a narrative, in a poem, or in history such borrowings or inversions occur has only recently become a topic of scholarly discussion, 1  Laura H. Wu, “Through the Prism of Male Writing: Representation of Lesbian Love in MingQing Literature,” Nan Nü 4.1 (2002): 1–34, 22–3.

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and it is a question that must continue to be addressed if we want to clarify the role of gender ideology in Chinese literature.2 Do gender borrowings and interchangeability3 in literature erode, refashion, or consolidate configurations of gender and power? As will become clear, the borrowing I will be examining is a negative comparison, a translation not from ‘heteroerotic romance’ so much as from ‘heteroerotic debauchery’ (keeping in mind that in debauchery, someone is ‘debauched’ by someone else) that is carried over into the realm of male homoerotic excess: hence the invention in fiction of the “male homoerotic wanton woman,” the portrayal of men in homoerotic scenarios whose rapturous response to penetration leads to their being metaphorically associated not simply with women, but with wanton women. In proceeding with a reading of literary borrowing in late Ming homoerotic texts I have been made aware that there are in fact very few literary readings of the genre. Giovanni Vitiello, Sophie Volpp, and Wu Cuncun have all engaged in close readings of homoerotic texts, but the dominant tendency is to read texts, if not as the theory of the practice, at least as indices of sexual ideology and same-sex desire in late imperial Chinese cultural history.4 In other words, 2  A number of significant works touching on the question appeared with the new millennium: see Zhou Zuyan, Androgyny in Late Ming and Early Qing Literature (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2003); Song Geng, The Fragile Scholar: Power and Masculinity in Chinese Culture (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2004); and Martin Huang, Negotiating Masculinity in Late Imperial China (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2006). Focusing on representations of male same-sex desire, Giovanni Vitiello’s The Libertine’s Friend: Homosexuality and Masculinity in Late Imperial China, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011) can now also be added to the list. Each of these monographs acknowledges the pioneering (and ongoing) work of Kam Louie on masculinity in Chinese culture, Theorising Chinese Masculinity: Society and Gender in China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Literature provided similar possibilities in other cultural contexts, and gender crossings played an important role in the development of the English and European novel, see Heike Bauer, “Sexuality in Enlightenment Popular Culture,” in A Cultural History of Sexuality in the Enlightenment, ed. Julie Peakman (London: Berg, 2011), 159–183. 3  In his introduction to Negotiating Masculinities in Late Imperial China, Martin Huang introduces the theme of ‘interchangeability’ around which his book is to some extent organised, and the question of “why, in trying to come to terms with their own gender identities, many late imperial Chinese literati wrote so much about the feminine, sometimes even appealing to the interchangeability between the masculine and the feminine, while never doubting the naturalness of gender inequality,” 9. On the new prominence of the feminine, see my reference to Keith McMahon’s work below. 4  Giovanni Vitiello, whose project has seen the most sustained interest in literary analysis, describes his book as concerned with “ideologies of masculinity and romantic love as they are represented in fictional works spanning roughly three hundred years,” The Libertine’s Friend,

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homoerotic writing has been primarily read as historical evidence (which is a different kettle of fish to reading literature in the light of historical context). Such a focus is not unexpected given that recent scholarly interest in samesex desire in Chinese history has been dominated by questions that speak in the main to continuing contemporary (Euro-American?) concerns around the social significance of same-sex desire, yet there is a need for more literary focused analyses of individual works, or of figures or tropes used across works from homoerotic writing. Literary critical readings should then contribute to better cultural historical placement of the same texts and their themes; interrogating how the texts work as literature will in turn provide new perspectives and evidence for establishing how they are to be placed or interpreted as social and cultural history. After all, the texts were read as literary works— dependent on literary devices—before they became twenty and twenty-first century historical evidence. Why should ‘womanly’ wantonness be represented repeatedly in examples of late Ming homoerotic fiction describing sex between men?5 In outline it is clear that, as is the case in English, “wantonness” is not usually exhibited by men, and that within taxonomies of gender and sexuality wantonness is a quality constructed as inherently aligned with women.6 We no longer and 1. For a close reading of the The Moon Part novella from Yichun xiangzhi that I also address below, see Vitiello, “The Fantastic Journey of an Ugly Boy: Homosexuality and Salvation in Late Ming Pornography,” positions 4.2 (1996): 291–320. In “The Literary Circulation of Actors in Seventeenth-Century China,” Sophie Volpp is concerned with “the social significance of the circulation of actors among literati” in its social and literary forms: Journal of Asian Studies 61.3 (2002): 949–84. On the other hand, her chapter on “Illusion and Allusion in Nan wanghou” in The Worldly Stage: Theatricality in Seventeenth-Century China is probably the most extended literary treatment of a single “homoerotic work” to date (in this case a play) (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2011). While it includes an enormous wealth of literary references, in Homoerotic Sensibilities in Late Imperial China Wu Cuncun sought to establish that “as part of sexual culture in imperial China, male homoerotic sensibilities are a product of social forces and sexual beliefs that were central to the culture of this period,” and to demonstrate “a number of ‘shifts’ in homoerotic sensibilities between the end of the Ming and the end of the Qing” (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004) 5, 160. 5  Lest it be thought these literary gender crossings turned only in one direction, the case of a “female homoerotic wanton man” will be considered in my conclusion. 6  I mention English only because that is where the problem of linguistic incommensurability will present a problem in this paper. Comparisons of wantonness and gender involving other traditions, such as classical Indian literature, would also be instructive. The Indian case has stock heroines “lacking in self-control” (adhīra) or “dissolute” (pramadā), the latter term understood to also apply to women as such, as well as to the beauty and bounty of the Earth, cosmic being-becoming (bhāva, life) being understood as frolicsome.

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perhaps never did speak of “wanton men” in English; historically wanton men were simply “unruly,” while “wanton” marked and judged a dissolute woman. Turning to China, while terms such as langdangzi 浪蕩子 and dangzi 蕩子 (rake, wastrel) existed in Ming usage (the first story in Yichun xiangzhi speaks of dangqing nianshao 蕩情年少, “young men of unrestrained passions”), their history of use gave them connotations that took them some distance from meaning anything like a male equivalent of a wanton woman; the unrestrained rake or playboy is blamed more for his wastefulness and deceit than for his licentiousness, which instead verged on the side of celebrity. There were in Ming times numerous references in fiction to yinseng 淫僧, or licentious monks, but for the moment the monks may also be put aside as a special case.7 The question at the centre of this paper is therefore, If, according to the prevalent ideology, wanton men are celebrated philanderers and wanton women are perverse, what are male (homoerotic) wanton women? And if literary characters and types are essentially to be read as questions addressed to readers, what kinds of questions is the male wanton woman of the late-Ming raising?8 While in the 1980s it may have brought a certain amount of honour in some circles of men-who-have-sex-with-men (MSM) to be counted among Beijing’s sida yinfu (“the four top ‘wanton women’ of Beijing” 四大淫婦),9 the comparison of men with yinfu in late Ming literature tended only to be contemptuous or at best ambivalent. Furthermore, whether we are speaking of the late twentieth century or the early seventeenth, it seems clear that 7  Further discussion on how wantonness was applied to different types of men and women can be found in this book’s introduction. 8  “Character is the name we give to that form of the author-hero interrelationship which actualises the task of producing the whole of the hero as a determinate personality . . .  [e]verything is perceived here as a constituent in the characterization of the hero, i.e., fulfills a characterological function; everything reduces to and serves the answer to the question: who is he?,” Mikhail Bakhtin, “Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity,” Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays by M.M. Bakhtin, edited by Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990), 174. Echoing Bakhtin, although apparently unaware of his views on the matter, in Ariadne’s Thread Hillis Miller writes “[T]he novel as the perpetual tying and untying of the knot of selfhood for the purpose, in the psychic economy of the individual and of the community, of affirming the fiction of character by putting it fictionally into question and so short-circuiting a doubt which, left free to act in the real social world, might destroy both self and community,” Ariandne’s Thread: Story Lines (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 98. 9  See Li Yinhe (李銀河) and Wang Xiaobo (王小波), “China’s Male Homosexual Communities, Part 2 (Zhongguo nantongxinglian qunluo (xia) 中國男同性戀群落 (下)),” at Huaxia wenku 華夏文庫, http://archives.cnd.org/HXWK/column/Society/cm9308d-4.gb.html. Originally published in Shuzhai, 1993.1《書摘》93年第一期). (

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constructions of male wanton women are unflattering of women whether or not they are unflattering of men. It should also be remarked at the outset that there are, in late-Ming and in other periods, features of sexual arousal that are assumed to be shared by both men and women. Surveying “the most commonly described involuntary somatic expressions of emotion . . . namely blushing, tears and instantaneous sexual arousal” across a sample of plays, long-fiction and short-fiction collections from the beginning to the end of the Ming, Katherine Carlitz has addressed this area. In her 2006 essay “Weeping, Blushing, and Giving Way to Desire in Ming Dynasty Fiction and Drama,” she demonstrates how emotional responses in both men and women relate to schematic characterisations of a “cosmically connected body.”10 Examining sexual arousal in the form of what might be called ‘lust at first sight,’ Carlitz establishes that in the works she surveyed “[w]omen as well as men are instantly aroused.”11 This allows her also to conclude that the regularity of this motif in literature is primarily conservative and reflects ancient stipulations on the separation of the sexes, thereby sharing “a general understanding of sexual desire as simmering within each individual, ready to be released at a moment’s notice.”12 In her analysis the entry of sudden sexual attraction into a narrative tests individual men and women who may either choose to maintain equilibrium (and the separation of the sexes) through impassivity, or choose to threaten social (and cosmic) chaos through acting on the violence of their desire. In 1988, examining the related area of adultery in late-Ming short stories, Keith McMahon noted two trends: “a developing awareness of the feminine, and the sharpening of focus on [. . .] detail.”13 In terms very much pertinent to the following discussion of the male wanton woman, he goes on to say: The feminizing trend is interesting because the relationship of women to men in the major sixteenth century novels is peripheral or largely antagonistic. When antagonistic, the relationship takes the form of a sexual 10  Katherine Carlitz, “Weeping, Blushing, and Giving Way to Desire in Ming Dynasty Fiction and Drama,” in From Skin to Heart: Perceptions of Emotions and Bodily Sensations in Traditional Chinese Culture, ed. Paolo Santangelo and Ulrike Middendorf (Weisbaden: Harrossowitz Verlag, 2006), 229–248, 236. 11  Carlitz, “Weeping,” 237. 12  Carlitz, “Weeping,” 237. 13  Keith McMahon, Causality and Containment in Seventeenth-Century Chinese Fiction, (Leiden: Brill, 1988), 34. On the same page he also notes that the two trends are closely interrelated.

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battle in which women are presented as essentially demonic. Neither sexual battles nor demonic or peripheral women disappear in the late Ming novels or those that come after, but in many cases the male viewpoint, although overwhelmingly central as usual, implies a more generous attitude to women than before. Male characters are shown as more sexually and sentimentally open to women, and, at times, they assume feminine appearances.14 This observation suggests that the kinds of cosmological connection involving the body referred to in Carlitz’s work were by late Ming times undergoing considerable change and challenge, at least in terms of literary representation. Needless to say, the examples considered in this paper are likewise understood to be imaginary representations, the question not being what kind of underlying reality they portray, but why reality (or fantasy) is portrayed in the way it is? This question poses difficulties for any attempt to separate the realm of literature from social forces and gender ideology, more so for a literature intent on mobilising homoerotic scenes and histories as a means for casting doubt across the entire socio-cultural spectrum. In Desire and Fictional Narrative in Late Imperial China, Martin Huang notes that “A lover who assumes the passive role in a homosexual relationship and tries to repay his lover’s favour by insisting on becoming an exemplary woman or concubine is a common theme in homoerotic stories of the period.”15 Intense qing (情 passion, love), in this argument, tends to render gender distinctions irrelevant, just as it overcomes much else; but it can do so only up to a point, for as Huang adds further into his discussion, “[a] passive partner is able to demonstrate his devotion or qing to his lover by giving up his rights as a man and becoming a woman, a sacrifice unavailable to a ‘real’ woman in a heterosexual relationship since she is already in the inferior position. She cannot claim that she has made a sacrifice by lowering herself further since as a ‘real’ woman she is already in the cellar of the gender hierarchy.”16 As it turns out, the homoerotic male wanton woman is almost always chaste (in a fashion), yet, as will be demonstrated below, this is often only achieved after an intimate display of total abandon. As McMahon says of the author of the late-Ming collection of homoerotic novellas, Bian er 14  McMahon, Containment, 34. 15  Martin Huang, Desire and Fictional Narrative in Late Imperial China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 181.n5. How penetration is rewritten as a “lover’s favour” is already half the question, this step alone already having already instituted a feminization of the penetrated. 16  Huang, Desire, 183.

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chai (弁而釵 Caps with Hairpins), “Another facet of his theme is to show that emotional fulfillment in qing is not complete without its sensual component.”17

The Passages and the Formula

The problems I have been outlining prohibit a straightforward definition of wantonness or the male wanton woman. However, in line with arguments I have made elsewhere in relation to sound and the literary depiction of transgressive or wanton women in Ming fiction, and particularly in pornography,18 I will again assume for our Ming sources that wantonness is constructed as an inner condition which must be revealed before it can be represented.19 If wantonness is an inner condition, it is, among other things, the function of plot in pornographic fiction to reveal it, and it is not pornographic fiction unless wantonness is exposed. And, just so, when we turn to pornographic modes of representation in homoerotic fiction we find that it habitually includes passages which serve to achieve just that revelation of inner wantonness, and, furthermore, it is in those passages that the wanton woman is habitually imported into the scene of homoerotic passion, translated or transmuted into the male wanton woman—perhaps, but let’s see, a wanton woman in male guise.20 At moments of revelation and exposure the wanton woman will be demonstrated 17  McMahon, Containment, 75. 18  Mark Stevenson, “Sound, Space and Moral Soundscapes in Ruyijun zhuan and Chipozi zhuan,” Nan Nü 12 (2010): 255–310, 281, 290–292. 19  This is closely bound up with devices such as interstices (pp. 19–21), walls of self-containment (pp. 25–28), and public exposure (pp. 98–103) identified by McMahon, as well as the fact that “Late Ming fiction displays an increased focus on subtleties, undersurfaces, and the ‘behind-the-scenes,’ ” Containment, 2. Not all late-Ming literary portrayals of male same-sex desire or sexual relations between men are pornographic, but many are. While there is a marked tendency in the field of Chinese history to avoid the term ‘pornographic’ in favour of ‘erotic,’ I will follow Giovanni Vitiello’s lead in identifying the sources drawn upon for this paper as pornographic, and also acknowledge with him that the products of pornographic modes of expression provide some of the most useful information on “the gender and sexuality ideologies circulating during that period,” see Vitiello, Friend, 9. His subtle and wide ranging study of male homoeroticism in late-imperial Chinese fiction demonstrates just how central as well as convoluted a theme it was in Chinese cultural politics and imagination. 20  From the perspective of literary analysis it is the image of the wanton woman that is imported into the male homoerotic scene; from within the diegetic perspective of the narrative it is the passive male who inhabits a feminized position.

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in the following analysis to emerge as a semi-spectral presence in late-Ming male homoerotic narrative. The last seven decades of the Ming dynasty (from the reign of the Wanli emperor, 1573–1620, to the dynasty’s collapse) was an immensely important period in the development of Chinese fiction, and erotic fiction in particular.21 The libertinism that made room for this literature was not so much a cause of Ming decline as a symptom of change in Chinese society under the dual disruption of urbanisation and commercialisation, change that also fed an increase in individualism and challenges to the cultural leadership of the scholar-official or literatus. It is in this relation that McMahon has described the xiaoshuo (小説 fictional narrative, novel) as a “voice of exposure in a badly functioning system” and a source of “counter-ideology.”22 Not unlike the case of the libertine literature that accompanied the cultural upheaval of the European Enlightenment, a large number of examples of pornographic fiction, individual novels as well as collections of novellas and short stories, have survived into the twentieth century—and those that have survived may only be a small proportion of the actual literary output, as many late Ming works were lost during prohibitions and burnings of ‘licentious lyrics and fiction’ enforced under the Qing. Not a small proportion of that corpus, delighting in the ridicule of any and every social type, specialised in male homoerotic desire and its potential for satirical reflection. Shaped by traditions of storytelling, the development of narrative fiction in the Ming dynasty tended initially to be historical and ‘outdoor,’ taking in large tracts of country and action. A focus on values such as justice, loyalty and courage reflected the tendency, also present in folk literature, to enlarge sharp conflicts and moral contrasts. The same process also reflected popular understanding of orthodox morality, supposed to be embodied in the imperial capital and transmitted down on through the empire. From the late Ming onwards there is by contrast an increasing interest in individuals’ experience of city and family life, what might be called ‘indoor’ fiction, or the fiction of ‘manners’—and in between flourished a compromise that could be described as ‘urban life.’ These later trends produced some of the wildest imaginary socialexperiments in the history of world literature, and in that vein two of the most 21  As Tina Lu has noted, “Year for year, commercial publishing was on average six times more active in the Wanli period than in the fifty years preceding it”; Tina Lu, “The Literary Culture of the Late Ming, 1573–1644,” in The Cambridge History of Chinese Literature, Vol. II, From 1375, ed. Kang-I Sun Chang and Stephen Owen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 63–4. 22  McMahon, Containment, ix, 67.

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popular targets of inventive parody in homoerotic fiction are imperial officialdom and married life; the subject of catamites and their lovers was thus put to parodic effect while also being the target of more direct jibes itself. One of the earliest homoerotic tales comparing penetrated men not just with women,23 but with wanton women, comes from the pen of Naturally Foolish Old Man (Tianran Chisou 天然癡叟), who interestingly enough was also known as ‘Langxian’ (Dissolute Immortal 浪仙). The story, “Pan Wenzi seals his union in a lovers’ tomb” (Pan Wenzi qihe yuanyangzhong 潘文子契 合鴛鴦塚) is from Langxian’s early seventeenth century collection of fourteen vernacular short stories, The Stones Nodded Assent (Shidiantou 石點頭).24 After an introduction recounting two tales of male love from ancient times, we meet our eponymous hero Pan Wenzi, who manages to delay an arranged marriage and travel to a private academy attached to a monastery in Hangzhou, where he intends to pursue an education in the classics. “Nine parts the image of his mother and one part his father,” he attracts a good deal of unwanted attention, “men of letters being a lecherous lot.” When the slightly older student Wang Zhongxian—after at least half a year of ‘relationship cultivation’—finally succeeds in breaking down his roommate’s resistance, we read: [Pan] Wenzi kept up the pretence of modesty. While half repelling him and half welcoming him, he found himself firmly in Zhongxian’s arms as their flesh became intertwined and his final defences were penetrated. Wenzi had not experienced anything like it before and he squinted in agony as he endured the excruciating assault. In the craze of excitement Zhongxian pumped with abandon, surely it was: Adopting a scholar’s amorous aperture, To fulfil King Xiang’s erotic desire. 23  Vitiello, Friend, 35. 24  Tianran Chisou 天然癡叟, Shidiantou 石點頭等三種 [The Stones Nodded Assent and Two Other Works] (Nanjing: Jiangsu guji chubanshe, 1994), 304–323 for the Pan Wenzi story (hereafter “Pan Wenzi”). Little is known about the collection’s recorded author, although the fact that he is referred to in Feng Menglong’s preface as Langxian has led to his possible identification as Xi Langxian 席浪仙, whom Patrick Hanan has established was associated with Feng’s publishing ventures between 1627 and 1630; Patrick Hanan, The Chinese Vernacular Story (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), 121. Further discussion of authorship, dating and style can be found in Wang Lei 王磊, “Shidiantou kao lun 石點頭考論 [An Analysis of The Stones Nodded Assent],” Qiusuo 求索 [The Seeker], 2004.9 (2004), 208–9; he concludes that “Shidiantou was probably written during the late Wanli [1573–1620] and early Chongzhen years [1627–1644], but the date of its printing should fall after the tenth year of the Chongzhen reign [1637]” (p. 208).

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In the course of their lewd pleasure (yinle 淫樂) not only did Wang Zhongxian feel completely fulfilled (tongchang 通暢), even Pan Wenzi was transported with ecstasy (shendong hunxiao 神動魂銷). Surprised, he thought to himself, “I really had no idea it could feel so marvellous (bu dao you ci miaojing 不道有此妙境), now I know why women are so fond of lewd pleasures (nüren dou hao yinle 女人都好淫樂).”25 We then read that “after that night both of them abandoned their study and ambitions.” When eventually expelled by the headmaster, “Wang Zhongxian was not too troubled by it all. Pan Wenzi, on the other hand, felt as if he had completely lost face and had nowhere to hide.”26 They leave the school to set up house together in the isolation of a mountain in south-eastern Zhejiang, from where they methodically divest themselves of all social ties: “They lived without any servants, preparing the fire and cooking the food themselves. Enjoying the fresh air and the moonlight they often composed poems to express their blissful love.” Two months later their behaviour becomes increasingly odd and they soon die together in a manner that suggests the attainment of immortality, bringing them public veneration. Two large trees grow from their graves, bending toward each other, branches entwining. This first example, as well as possibly being the earliest, is also one of the milder versions of scenarios that rewrite young scholars as wanton women. It is the only “sex scene” contained in “Pan Wenzi”, and like the other scenes to be analysed, it marks a turning point in the young men’s relationship of the kind noted by McMahon in relation to pornographic works in general, “For the late Ming, it is perhaps the case that once the story has been told—or once the worst has been said, the worst consisting of the obscenity and the portrayal of abandon—there is no turning back except by a return to continence.”27 Being relatively uncomplicated, sparse in outline, as well as self-contained, this first passage is useful in identifying a number of elements that recur in similar passages from the period. Features or phases that stand out include: Phase 1) that wantonness is preceded by coyness, Phase 2a), that under the assault of a penis the coyness of the penetrated party inevitably gives way to pleasure and excitement (miaojing 妙境), and Phase 2b) there is some surprise about this, Phase 3) that an inner (truer or inherent) predilection to licentiousness is thereby revealed (behind a front of coyness), and Phase 4) that a predilection 25   Mark Stevenson and Wu Cuncun, Homoeroticism in Imperial China: A Sourcebook (London, Routledge, 2013), 148; “Pan Wenzi,” 315–6. 26  Stevenson and Wu, Homoeroticism, 148–9; “Pan Wenzi,” 316. 27  McMahon, Containment, 61.

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to licentiousness is essentially aligned with women (as opposed to simply being the penetrated party, but not immaterial in the alignment of position with role). For want of a better term, let this pattern or formula be called “four phases of wantonness revealed,” while noting that the formula for female wanton women in pornographic fiction may not need the fourth phase. It should also be noted at this stage that the manifestation or revelation of wantonness (Phase 3) is not in itself an isolated moment of feminisation, which is already indicated by Pan’s “natural” appearance from birth and, more proximately, his coyness as their love making begins. This same context of feminisation applies in all the examples examined below. Paradoxically, I will be arguing that Phase 4, despite it explicitly associating wantonness with women, is a reassertion of each hero’s male identity (something a male wanton woman must preserve), and a chivalric identity at that. Our second example is from “Marvellous Love” (“Qing qi” 情奇), the fourth in a set of four novellas, Caps with Hairpins (Bian er chai 弁而釵).28 Caps with Hairpins, like its companion volume Fragrant Beauty Inspiring Ardour (Yichun xiangzhi 宜春香質), is a product of the author West Lake Besotted Moon Heart Master (Chongzhen reign period, 1628–1644).29 Both collections elaborate fancifully on the late Ming absorption with male prostitution and homoerotic desire. At the same time the collections explore themes that are more generally related to the ambitions and anxieties of their readers, fellow literati men. One of the most pressing anxieties is travel and the risk of things going badly, of being stranded without means of support (liuluo 流落), which appears to have been a favoured narrative frame in West Lake Besotted Moon Heart Master’s fiction (and evident also in the story to be discussed from Fragrant Beauty Inspiring Ardour). Another anxiety or central theme concerns the genuineness of love, whence the titles of the four stories of Caps with Hairpins: Chaste Love, Gallant Love, Virtuous Love and Marvelous Love. As we pick up the story in “Marvelous Love,” Li Zhaifan (李摘凡 a.k.a. Li Youxian 李又仙) has sold himself into prostitution in order to obtain the cash he needs to recover his father from prison. All alone in the capital he is at the mercy of Turtle Yan 燕龜, owner of a male brothel called South Court. Having refused to sleep with his first customer, Zhaifan is taken to Turtle Yan’s room where he is given a whipping and strapped to a bench to be “broken in”: 28  Zuixihu Xinyue Zhuren 醉西湖心月主人, Bian er chai 弁而釵 [Caps with Hairpins], Vol. 6 of Siwuxie huibao 思無邪匯寶 [No Heterodox Thoughts Compendium], ed. Chen Qinghao 陳慶浩 and Wang Qiugui 王秋桂 (Taibei: Taiwan daying baike, 1995), 271–344 for the novella “Marvellous Love.” 29  See Chen and Wang’s introduction to Zuixihu Xinyue Zhuren, Bian er chai, 18.

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“Oouuch!” cried Zhaifan as it went in fully halfway along its length. With just one more shove it slid in right to the root. Without the least thought of the young man’s social status he thrust like a wild animal. Zhaifan was in immense pain, unable to move, nor could he manage to call out. . . . After being fucked a thousand more thrusts the pain gradually began to ease. Likewise, a sound began to emanate from his arsehole and it slid very comfortably. Zhaifan sighed: “I never thought I had such a sinful streak (bu yi wo you ci niezhai 不意我有些孽債),” he thought to himself, “It must be due to sins committed in a previous life.” And with these thoughts in mind he began to accept the thrusting. Then Turtle Yan ejaculated.30 In this slightly more torrid passage there is the same pattern of resistance, accommodation and pleasure, and the uncovering of a licentious or sinful tendency. Occurring in a scene of violent rape, the signalling of a shift from pain to pleasure is not pronounced, but things do end up going more smoothly and (to his, and supposedly to the reader’s surprise, i.e. bu yi 不意) Zhaifan accepts or resigns himself (自解自歎, zijiezitan) to the thrusting. Strictly speaking niezhai (孽債, here translated as “sinful streak”) refers to a debt from karmic sins, and that suggest a reading that describes the rape (and “reduction” to a feminine role) as karmic punishment. That could be all there is to the reading here, except for the fact that thoughts of niezhai occur to Zhaifan not during the painful phase of the assault, but at the moment of relief from pain and the beginning of pleasure. In that context the idea is more one of a liability, tendency, or even an imprint of sin, and again Zhaifan (together with the reader) gains insight into an inner aspect of his character of which he had not previously been aware. For the Phase 4, aligning a licentious response to penetration with womanly wantonness, the reader must read along a few pages to the following chapter where Zhaifan first sleeps with Mr Kuang, his knight in shining armour. After the scene just recounted Zhaifan is returned to the waiting customer and so pleases him that he stays at the bordello for a whole month. Zhaifan’s subsequent renown only makes his life a further misery, and he turns to poetry, and it is poetry that in the second chapter brings him to the attention of Mr Kuang. Toward the end of his first visit to South Court and a long conversation with Zhaifan, the gallant Mr Kuang agrees to find a way to release Zhaifan from prostitution. This soon brings things to a head:

30   Bian er chai, 283.

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His skin was as smooth as lard, and feeling his buttocks there was a tight little hole. This was an auspicious alignment of the stars. Applying a little spit it pried open easily. Kuang thrust his club, Li met his blow. Crazy, wild, wholehearted and gentle, it was more wonderful than with women ( jiao furen er geng mei 較婦人而更美). Waggling, working, arching and wiggling, he bested even prostitutes (sui changji er bu ru 雖娼妓而不如). Kuang was adept at prolonged battle, Li was a specialist in holding the fort. One would attack, the other defend, and so each enjoyed his own pleasure. “Flapping the winnowing basket the chaff is blown forward,” said Zhaifan. “Fossicking on the river shore the sand is pushed back,” answered Renyou.31 Amused, they both laughed, and then it was finished.32 Zhaifan is compared not just with (implicitly lewd) women, he excels even prostitutes.33 He is at this stage a male prostitute, but to see him as such and to accept the comparison at that level at that point in Chinese history would be to overlook his impeccable social origins, something neither Mr Kuang nor the reader is expected to do. He is a young scholar of good family, and there may in the end be even more to him still. Nevertheless, this is the only detailed description of sexual pleasure in the narrative. Mr Kuang will buy him out and eventually have him brought into his household as a concubine. Ill-fortune besets the Kuang household and Zhaifan is forced to become surrogate mother to Mr Kuang’s son, raising him to become a “principal graduate” while teaching as a nun in a Buddhist convent. By story’s end it is revealed that all along he was Jade Flower Immortal: “Having once travelled to Penglai Island I succumbed

31  This exchange between the two men comprises quotations alluding to a story from Shishuo xinyu (A New Account of Tales of the World, fifth century) where an older official of junior rank and a younger official of senior rank manage to defer to each other despite the incongruity of their positions. 32  Stevenson and Wu, Homoeroticism, 182, with modification; Bian er chai, 298. 33  The text could be read ambiguously at this point, there being no explicit indication of who is being described in the passage “Crazy, wild, wholehearted and gentle, it was more wonderful than with women. Waggling, working, arching and wiggling, he bested even prostitutes” (癲狂溫柔,較婦人而更美;扭聳拽搖,雖娼妓而不如。 ). I am assuming from the antithetical structure evident through the entire scene that the first sentence describes Mr Kuang’s actions and his perception of his experience with Zhaifan, and that the second describes Zhaifan’s actions and the nature of that behaviour.

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to the fantasy of experiencing feminine embodiment and descended into the common world.” We will come back to Zhaifan and his position later. It is time now to turn to possibly one of the most bizarre and certainly scatological representations of the male wanton woman in Chinese fiction, Niu Jun from The Moon Part (Yueji 月集) novella in the seventeenth century collection Fragrant Beauty Inspiring Ardour (Yichun xiangzhi 宜春香質, also known as Fragrant Essences of Spring).34 In the midst of a dream-journey an ugly young student, Niu Jun, makes his way to the City of Wonderful Fulfilment in the Kingdom of As You Wish, where he is flayed and given a new skin. He is then sent to the allmale Welcoming Males Kingdom where his good looks attract the attention of the emperor. After a hasty palace examination he emerges as primus, and the events that follow destine him to be promoted to imperial consort: “Don’t be frightened sweetheart,” said the Emperor, “Accepting the Emperor’s favour today you will rise to be an imperial consort tomorrow.” “I’m not a woman,” said Young Niu, “I don’t think I should really expect any favours from you.” “In our Welcoming Males Kingdom every-body is the same,” replied the Emperor, “Even the Empress was originally a primus, just like you. Elevation to Empress, it’s the opportunity of a lifetime,” and he as he spoke he reached around to feel Young Niu’s arse, while the other arm curled around his neck. His legs wrapped around Young Niu’s legs. With a little bit of spit it went in just like fitting reins. Young Niu dared emit neither word nor whimper, remaining silent he allowed the Emperor to do whatever he wished. The Emperor handled him as if he was a fragile jade or delicate flower, gentle and responsive. . . . [Their lovemaking builds incrementally] . . . Young Niu swooned from the pain of such a deep attack. The Emperor was a raging fire, pumping deep and fast, and Young Niu, just managing to suppress the urge to scream, let out only a series of grunts as the jabbing continued. After a time he wasn’t sure if the inside of his backside was stinging or not stinging, it itched and tingled both, and by now it wasn’t as painful as it had been. After some further time he began unconsciously to roll back and forward with the attack, and the Emperor knew this was a sign he had begun to enjoy it. He had him turn 34  Zuixihu Xinyue Zhuren 醉西湖心月主人, Yichun xiangzhi 宜春香質 [Fragrant Beauty Inspiring Ardour], Vol. 7 of Siwuxie huibao 思無邪匯寶 [No Heterodox Thoughts Compendium], ed. Chen Qinghao 陳慶浩 and Wang Qiugui 王秋桂 (Taibei: Taiwan daying baike, 1994), 291–353 for the novella “The Moon Part.”

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over and began to thrust wildly in and out until Young Niu’s rear was dripping wet and emitting appalling noises. . . . . As the battle dragged out he felt a rising itch in his buttocks, a mounting ecstasy. Just then he thought that if he became an imperial consort he would serve the emperor like this every night, which would be wonderful. The only problem was the Emperor could have a change of heart the next day, and so he thought he had better display all his charm so as to win his heart. “My darling husband Emperor,” he crooned, “how you make my insides itch and crave.”35 The effect on the emperor and the consequences for Niu Jun were predictable: . . . . There was nothing to do but to hold on for dear life. He had never felt such complete satisfaction, it was as if he was melting from inside and his body was filled with delicious pleasure from the tips of his hairs to the heart of his bones. His heart trembled with a mixture of anticipation and release. There are no words to describe what was so deeply enjoyed. . . . The Emperor was transported as his passions reached their climax, and he discharged like an ocean. Young Niu’s libidinous effluvia followed the Emperor’s piece and spilled over the bedding, soaking through the mat three futons deep.36 Much of the erotic vocabulary toward the end of this scene is recognisably lifted from the notorious sixteenth century novel Ruyijun zhuan (The Tale of Lord As-You-Wish 如意君傳),37 albeit with a vernacular inflection: pleasure that cannot be described, appalling noises, prodigious discharges, and copious emissions of libidinous effluvia, and even the affectionate calls between the lovers mirror those exchanged between Xue Aocao and Empress Wu. The connection with Empress Wu is not inconsequential. First up, however, we can note that at least the first three of the four phases of “wantonness revealed” are found in Niu Jun’s introduction to the pleasures of penetration: Niu Jun is at first disconcerted by the prospect of receiving the emperor’s favour (Phase 1), pleasure replaces anxiety (it is not clear he is surprised by this, but it is a new sensation) (Phase 2), and an inner predilection to licentiousness is made both visible and audible through the responses of his body (Phase 3). 35  Stevenson and Wu, Homoeroticism, 189–90; Yichun xiangzhi, 310–12. 36  Stevenson and Wu, Homoeroticism, 190; Yichun xiangzhi, 312. 37  Translated in Charles Stone, The Fountainhead of Chinese Erotica: The Lord of Perfect Satisfaction (Ruyijun zhuan) (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2003). See also Stevenson, “Sound.” EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 11/4/2019 7:50 PM via TOWSON UNIVERSITY AN: 1507598 ; Stevenson, Mark J., Wu, Cuncun.; Wanton Women in Late-imperial Chinese Literature : Models, Genres, Subversions and Traditions Account: towson.main.eds

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Is his licentiousness aligned with womanliness, the fourth phase? Given that his meeting with the emperor of this all-male (or all-male-body) kingdom is part of his grooming to become imperial consort, I think we can confirm that it is at least on the way. But on a less complicated level there is also the question here, and also in the preceding two examples, of the manner in which the boy experiences pleasure. Citing both Caps with Hairpins and Fragrant Beauty Inspiring Ardour, Vitiello has pointed out that “some works of homoerotic pornography . . . do conceive of anal pleasure. In turn, its representation reveals the hybrid nature of a boy’s gender status. For example, rarely is ejaculation made to convey the culmination of a boy’s pleasure, which is rather configured as an implosion, signified externally by the production of waves of anal fluids. In this sense, a boy’s sexuality is assimilated to that of a woman.”38 If this wasn’t enough, through a series of nods to Ruyijun zhuan the author also equates Niu Jun with the most extreme model of libidinousness under heaven, Empress Wu, attaching to him the same signs of depravity.39 Moreover, in the case of the Moon Part novella, we need only turn back to its opening passages to read the author’s auto-commentary on his novel’s opening lyric. The lyric provides an introduction to the theme of the novella overall, and that is: to simply point out that a man’s being born fine-featured may turn out to be the cause of his lowering himself. . . . All the way down to our present age the situation has worsened beyond words. Not even twelve or thirteen, and without anyone showing the least interest in them, if they have a hint of good looks they oil their hair, dress up brightly, talk coyly, display their allure, flirt with their eyes, all in order to keep their ‘old friends’ coming. Some will even waggle their asses begging to be pounded, thereby showing no shame in doing what the loosest of women (淫婦) or the lowest whores never stoop to do.40 If the “loosest of women or the lowest whores” were not thought to “stoop to do it,” then the comparison would not be made, and the comparison’s rhetorical gambit will not be lost in a text that repeatedly invokes classes of women held in contempt. Late imperial Chinese fiction is never so one-dimensional 38  Vitiello, Friend, 35. 39  Fittingly, Niu Jun’s first depraved implosion—he is ‘refitted’ several times during his dream, only to be debauched by male and female alike—also takes place following his beautiful transformation in the Kingdom of As You Wish (Ruyiguo 如意國), another echoing of Ruyijun zhuan. 40   Yichun xiangzhi, 294. EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 11/4/2019 7:50 PM via TOWSON UNIVERSITY AN: 1507598 ; Stevenson, Mark J., Wu, Cuncun.; Wanton Women in Late-imperial Chinese Literature : Models, Genres, Subversions and Traditions Account: towson.main.eds

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in the structuring of its arguments, however. Once his exposure to depravity is considered to have reached a sufficient level, the Buddha Tathagata catches up with him only to announce “Niu Jun! Know that you are the Knight of Beautiful Countenance serving Buddhism. In being too serene your mind turned to activity, taking advantage of your beauty to flirt with the Goddess of Enchantment your descent into ugliness was punishment.” Undertaking a thorough surgical cleansing of his organs his divine surgeon, Heavenly King Purifying Hearts, identifies “a black, sticky length of gut about five inches long,” the “the root of sin at the bottom of your mischief,” which he slices up and tosses into the river. It is a length of gut that is associated more closely with the “excesses” of men than women,41 and in Niu Jun’s case it has experienced half a dozen transformations while undergoing considerable duress.42

Some Preliminary Conclusions

As a first and preliminary conclusion, the examples considered above demonstrate that the “four phases of wantonness revealed” are repeated through Ming homoerotic narratives, each text exploring new means to achieve and interpret that revelation. It remains to consider in what ways this is significant and whether or not each of the narratives is employing the trope for similar or for diverse ends. To begin answering these questions it is important to point out that, in the main, the ‘four phases of wantonness revealed’ are invoked where the young man being introduced to the pleasure of penetration is a literatus. Pan Wenzi and Niu Jun start off as young students, and Zhaifan is a “very honest and upstanding” student before his father runs into trouble. They are not without doubts or flaws, yet each is a studious and earnest young man, and so the revelation of their wanton potential, while narrated as a general human propensity to be aroused sensually ‘like a wanton woman,’ will strike the reader as being in marked contrast with their ostensible social status. Catamites in homoerotic fiction, by comparison, can tend to be far more pragmatic or perfunctory. In the first story of The Forgotten Tales of Longyang, to cite one example, when after many weeks Han Tao finally gets Little Girl Pei into bed—a situation not 41  See Vitiello, “Fantastic Journey,” 318 n. 35. 42  While it would take us too far away from our main line of argument, it should at least be noted that each of the anatomical transformations is aligned with social analogues that Niu Jun enters within each dream sequence.

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unlike Wang Zhongxian’s seduction of Pan Wenzi—the catamite, sandwiched in between Han Tao and a courtesan, is “so concentrated on the pleasure in front of him” that he doesn’t notice that “behind things had come to a stop for some time.” On the other hand, “a weight of colossal longing had so swiftly been lifted from [Han Tao’s] chest.”43 At first glance this observation would appear to suggest that Ming homoerotic fiction viewed young scholars on the whole as being more dissolute and more abject than young men who sell themselves on the market. While it would not have been the first time in Chinese history that “men of letters” were accused of being “a lecherous lot” (那些讀書人,都是老渴子, as the “Pan Wenzi” story puts it), we should ask if there was more to it than simply an ironic jab at the literati from within the literati, and if we have not rushed to misjudge their passion. The stories may have more to them that simply being a Chinese version of Menippean satire, although satire they no doubt are. Another reading of these scenes, which in essence are constructing a realignment of literati identity with libidinal discovery, or even libidinal excess, is that literati men are not so much lecherous as they are men of qing, of passion, sentiment and ‘heart’. Each of the young scholars, unlike fickle catamites, immediately devotes himself to the man who revealed his wanton potential, and wantonness is sublimated in the form of love. It is useful at this point to recall observations Vitiello made a decade and a half ago in regard to “sodomites” and chivalry, and to “the fictional synthesis of chivalry (xia 俠) and love (qing).”44 Extending his argument, in all of the passages considered above what the reader is called to witness is a scene of sacrifice, a scene of sacrifice that is at one at the same time self-sacrifice (the boy becomes a willing/wanton victim) and victim-sacrifice (officiated as an initiation by an elder man), out of which a new being, a new hero, emerges.45 The scene of the “four phases of wantonness revealed” increasingly looks like a rite-of-passage in which the phases allow and enact a transmutation that could not otherwise take shape or

43  Stevenson and Wu, Homoeroticism, 169. 44  Giovanni Vitiello, “Exemplary Sodomites: Chivalry and Love in Late Ming Culture,” Nan Nü 2.2 (2000): 207–58, 213. 45  “Sacrifice is a religious act which, through the consecration of a victim, modifies the condition of the moral person who accomplishes it or that of certain objects with which he is concerned,” Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss, Sacrifice: Its Nature and Function, trans. W.D. Halls (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), 13. Self-sacrifice is often aligned with divinity when the self is offered to the self.

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be imagined. In the process “a man’s love for a man is presented as the fullest expression of both chivalric solidarity and romantic subtlety.”46 This reading is borne out also in some of the different ways each story is constructed. In the passage from Caps with Hairpins that describes Zhaifan being broken-in as a catamite, for example, the fourth phase is delayed, and it is not until he has been united with his destined male lover that his “sinful streak” is identified as a vehicle for womanly wantonness, and it is portrayed as a gift offered in confirmation of his devotion. Not irrelevant to the same line of argument, in The Moon Part novella from Fragrant Beauty Inspiring Ardour discussed above, the female King of the Kingdom of Holy Yin is able to implant a “shoot” in the rectum of the cross-gendered Niu Jun (at this stage a male Empress) that enables them to penetrate each other. As Vitiello has noted, “The key sexual persona in the Kingdom of Holy-Yin is, not by chance, the King: the lesbian par excellence is the woman who desires like a man and like him penetrates.”47 This in fact creates a “female homoerotic wanton man” who is quite analogous to the “male homoerotic wanton woman,” except that at Phase 4 the crossing is not made, and the King speaks from a penetrated position, “If I had not met Your Highness [Niu Jun] I would never have known so much pleasure could be given below the belt around a woman’s skirt.” The announcement is quite telling, and it converges with Martin Huang’s observations about the sacrifice offered by the passive partner in homoerotic fiction already noted in the introduction to this paper. While the ‘King’ is announcing exactly the same kind of discovery experienced by the male homoerotic wanton woman, the author is unable to extend the mirroring in the expected direction and identify the wantonness discovered within the female homoerotic wanton King as male wantonness.48 Nor is the male-positioned woman, the woman as King, able to offer her wantonness as a gift of sacrifice, which continues to be provided by Niu Jun, now, thanks to implantation of the miraculous shoot, in the double guise of penetrator and penetrated (and soon to experience apotheosis). In line with Huang’s observation cited earlier (“[a] passive partner is able to demonstrate his devotion or qing to his lover by giving up his rights as a man and becoming a woman, a sacrifice unavailable to a ‘real’ woman in a heterosexual relationship since she is already in the inferior position”) the woman cast in the role of a man has nothing to offer at this point

46  Vitiello, “Exemplary Sodomites,” 237. 47  Vitiello, “Fantastic Journey,” 311. 48  And perhaps, given her position as King, pleasure has not so much been discovered as ‘enhanced.’

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in a double crossed-dressed ‘heterosexual’ relationship and ‘his’ ability to enact chivalrous self-sacrifice is thereby limited. The answer to the questions asked by this paper—What are late-Ming homoerotic male wanton women, and what are they doing in late-Ming fiction?— would appear to be “a literatus on the way to becoming a chivalric knight.” Undergoing what should by rights be the most abject treatment (a fact the sources themselves emphasise), each of the central protagonists emerges from the flames reborn and ready to live a remarkably selfless life. In this they may be understood to resemble an inversion of the many debauchers who achieve apotheosis at the close of numerous works of heterosexual fiction.49 ‘Victims’ debauched at the commencement of homoerotic tales are awakened to their own passionate nature/resources and go on to become exemplary men of love. Read this way, the narratives look less and less like a simple satirisation of the literati class. It should be added that none of the glory that accrues to male wanton women in seventeenth century homoerotic fiction has any ameliorative impact on the debased image of the ‘original’ wanton women, illustrating why it is inadvisable to allocate a single definition to ‘wantonness.’ While wantonness in the selected narratives is not allowed to reify or represent a direct or indexical reading, the redeployment of gendered literary or cultural figures (or qualities) across a gender divide would appear to be a form of discourse that acts out a series of unexplored possibilities or restatements. Approaching the example of wantonness schematically, extending (or moving) wantonness (coded feminine) from the female sphere to the male at once restates feminine wantonness while accentuating the absence of a code of wantonness on the male side. At the same time, this figural play raises a possibility or spectre of a male coded wantonness, bringing the line dividing gendered allocations of good and bad desire into question. While it is wantonness that is thus “translated,” it is not clear that other terms within the scheme remain stable. “All margins are dangerous,” Mary Douglas alerts us in Purity and Danger, “If they are pulled this way or that the shape of fundamental experience is altered. Any structure of ideas is vulnerable at its margins.”50 All of the male homoerotic wanton women in our examples venture far from home and thereby experience to varying degrees the drama of liuluo, being abandoned or stranded without support: Pan Wenzi heads to a monastery school with ambitions of scholarship, Li Zhaifan is left alone in the capital after ensuring 49  Wu Cuncun and Mark Stevenson, ‘Karmic Retribution and Moral Didacticism in Erotic Fiction from the Late Ming and Early Qing’ Ming Qing Studies 2011: 467–486. 50  Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge, 2003 [1966]), 122.

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his father’s release and return home, and Niu Jun is tumbled through bizarre kingdoms and unforgiving borderlands in a daytime nightmare. This picture of geographical vulnerability does more than open each protagonist/character up to the mercy of the author’s imagination; it invites the reader to look in upon and witness a marginal, ritual space where the hero’s body will be offered and transformed by initiation into a penetrated role. As J. Hillis Miller remarks in Ariadne’s Thread, “The word character . . . involves the presumption that external signs correspond to and reveal an otherwise hidden inner nature.”51 In the case of Niu Jun we have a protagonist whose skin is abruptly turned inside-out at several points in (what turns out to be) his quest. There is something ritualistic in the male homoerotic wanton woman and the four phases of wantonness revealed as they repeat in our examples of late Ming fiction. What brought about this repeated invocation of the male homoerotic wanton women, and what was its purpose? Having considered the figure’s relation to our original questions of gender borrowings and interchangeability, we might also look to questions of literary history and look for some literary answers. As with all literary innovations, it is likely to be a part of a manifold of other changes. As Martin Huang has pointed out in Literati and Self-Re/Presentation: Autobiographical Sensibility in the Eighteenth-Century Chinese Novel, as the novel evolved through the Ming dynasty the class that was publishing long narrative fiction, the literati, began increasingly to turn the focus of their art on themselves, and by the seventeenth century “the literati and their lives also became the main subjects of the novel.”52 While this shift was achieved with some verve, there would also appear to have been a certain amount of uncertainty about how the literati self, or stand-ins for the self, should be represented. This anxiety, as Huang makes clear, was still in place and shaping Chinese fiction in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and it ran in particular to the types of hero that could entertain, inspire or provoke. One of the most significant contributions to flow from his analysis is not the specific anxieties about manhood, adulthood, or career, which he identifies, but the way in which it demonstrates links between anxiety, writing, and literary exploration. To return to the narratives under consideration here, clearly there is a theme that is in need of resolution—the proper form and object of love/desire (qing) for the literatus—yet there remains the problem of just what kind of story, what form of representational frame will suit that very serious subject of the literati self? Considered in relation to this question, male 51  J. Hillis Miller, Ariandne’s Thread: Story Lines, 32. 52  Martin Huang, Literati and Self-Re/Presentation: Autobiographical Sensibility in the Eighteenth-Century Chinese Novel (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 21.

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homoerotic wanton women are part of a transformation of narrative as much as they are a narrative of transformation. What I want to suggest in closing is that Pan Wenzi, Zhaifan and Niu Jun are part of a larger story taking shape in late Ming fiction, and, inevitably, late Ming society. It is a story that echoes a similar literary evolution that in Europe would (much later) ultimately have much larger consequences, where, in Franco Moretti’s words, there was an “uncertain exploration of social space . . . through travel and adventure, through wandering and getting lost,” and where all this movement found within the Bildungsroman was matched by an interest in interiority.53 In seventeenth-century China, as in Europe at the same time, status society still held sway and representation and interest in public (or published) versions of interiority had not yet come to the fore.54 On top of being a rite-of-passage, the “four phases of wantonness revealed” are evidence of the gradual appearance of questions of interiority during a phase in Chinese literary history when means for representing interiority through narrative and characterisation were still in the process of being worked out (as already noted above, in Causality and Containment Keith McMahon preferred to describe this problem in terms of “undersurfaces,” continuing a cosmological rather than psychological resolution). The young men, by turns heroic and wanton, passionate and self-sacrificing, are as much literary way-finders as they are cyphers for addressing late-imperial anxieties over authenticity and role playing.55 Not only does the genre appear at this point to be uncertain still about what kind of literati hero it is in search of—but surely it has to do with an idea of love (qing)—it is equally uncertain about how the literati hero in general will take narrative shape. Consistent uncertainty about uncertainty (and love) should all the same strike us as a rather modern development. References Bakhtin, Mikhail. “Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity.” In Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays by M.M. Bakhtin, edited by Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov, 4–256. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990.

53  Franco Moretti, The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture, trans. Albert Sbragia (London: Verso, 2000), 4. 54  Printing and publishing developments are not separate from this story of literary and cultural change. 55  Huang, Literati, 44, 73.

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Bauer, Heike. “Sexuality in Enlightenment Popular Culture.” In A Cultural History of Sexuality in the Enlightenment, edited by Julie Peakman, 159–183. London: Berg, 2011. Carlitz, Katherine. “Weeping, Blushing, and Giving Way to Desire in Ming Dynasty Fiction and Drama.” In From Skin to Heart: Perceptions of Emotions and Bodily Sensations in Traditional Chinese Culture, edited by Paolo Santangelo and Ulrike Middendorf, 229–248. Weisbaden: Harrossowitz Verlag, 2006. Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge, 2003 [1966]. Hanan, Patrick. The Chinese Vernacular Story. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981. Huang, Martin. Desire and Fictional Narrative in Late Imperial China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001. Huang, Martin. Literati and Self-Re/Presentation: Autobiographical Sensibility in the Eighteenth-Century Chinese Novel. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995. Huang, Martin. Negotiating Masculinity in Late Imperial China. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2006. Hubert, Henri and Marcel Mauss. Sacrifice: Its Nature and Function, translated by W.D. Halls. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964. Li Yinhe 李銀河 and Wang Xiaobo 王小波. “Zhongguo nantongxinglian qunluo (xia) 中國男同性戀群落(下)[China’s Male Homosexual Communities, Part 2],” Huaxia wenku 華夏文庫, http://archives.cnd.org/HXWK/column/Society/cm9308d-4.gb .html. Louie, Kam. Theorising Chinese Masculinity: Society and Gender in China. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Lu, Tina. “The Literary Culture of the Late Ming, 1573–1644.” In The Cambridge History of Chinese Literature, Vol. II, From 1375, edited by Kang-I Sun Chang and Stephen Owen, 63–151. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. McMahon, Keith. Causality and Containment in Seventeenth-Century Chinese Fiction. Leiden: Brill, 1988. Miller, J. Hillis. Ariandne’s Thread: Story Lines. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992. Moretti, Franco. The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture. Translated by Albert Sbragia. London: Verso, 2000. Song Geng. The Fragile Scholar: Power and Masculinity in Chinese Culture. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2004. Stevenson, Mark and Wu Cuncun. Homoeroticism in Imperial China: A Sourcebook. London, Routledge, 2013. Stevenson, Mark. “Sound, Space and Moral Soundscapes in Ruyijun zhuan and Chipozi zhuan.” Nan Nü 12 (2010): 255–310. Stone, Charles. The Fountainhead of Chinese Erotica: The Lord of Perfect Satisfaction (Ruyijun zhuan). Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2003.

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Tianran Chisou 天然癡叟. Shidiantou 石點頭等三種 [The Stones Nodded Assent and Two Other Works]. Nanjing: Jiangsu guji chubanshe, 1994. Vitiello, Giovanni. “The Fantastic Journey of an Ugly Boy: Homosexuality and Salvation in Late Ming Pornography.” positions 4.2 (1996): 291–320. Vitiello, Giovanni. The Libertine’s Friend: Homosexuality and Masculinity in Late Imperial China. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. Volpp, Sophie. The Worldly Stage: Theatricality in Seventeenth-Century China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2011. Volpp, Sophie. “The Literary Circulation of Actors in Seventeenth-Century China.” Journal of Asian Studies 61.3 (2002): 949–84. Wang Lei 王磊. “Shidiantou kao lun 石點頭考論 [An Analysis of The Stones Nodded Assent].” Qiusuo 求索 [The Seeker], 2004.9 (2004): 208–9. Wu Cuncun. Homoerotic Sensibilities in Late Imperial China. London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004. Wu Cuncun and Mark Stevenson. “Karmic Retribution and Moral Didacticism in Erotic Fiction from the Late Ming and Early Qing.” Ming Qing Studies 2011: 467–486. Wu, Laura H. “Through the Prism of Male Writing: Representation of Lesbian Love in Ming-Qing Literature.” Nan Nü 4.1 (2002): 1–34. Zhou Zuyan. Androgyny in Late Ming and Early Qing Literature. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2003. Zuixihu Xinyue Zhuren 醉西湖心月主人. Bian er chai 弁而釵 [Caps with Hairpins]. Vol. 6 of Siwuxie huibao 思無邪匯寶 [No Heterodox Thoughts Compendium], edited by Chen Qinghao 陳慶浩 and Wang Qiugui 王秋桂. Taibei: Taiwan daying baike, 1995. Zuixihu Xinyue Zhuren 醉西湖心月主人. Yichun xiangzhi 宜春香質 [Fragrant Beauty Inspiring Ardour]. Vol. 7 of Siwuxie huibao 思無邪匯寶 [No Heterodox Thoughts Compendium], edited by Chen Qinghao 陳慶浩 and Wang Qiugui 王秋桂. Taibei: Taiwan daying baike, 1994.

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Part 2 Wanton Women in Drama



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CHAPTER 4

Musical Seductresses, Chauvinistic Men, and Their Erotic Kunqu Discourse Joseph S.C. Lam “The tunes of Zheng are wanton . . .”1 “The men of Qi made a present of singing and dancing girls. Jihuanzi accepted them, and stayed away from court for three days. Confucius departed.”2

Introduction: Being Musical and Wanton

As the Analects registers, Confucian China intertwines music 樂 (yue) and licentiousness 淫 (yin) such that each tends to inform the other, constituting a richly documented discourse on Chinese music, gender, and sex.3 Chauvinistically, the discourse projects seductresses (淫婦 yinfu), or wantons, as women who transgress social boundaries.4 Theatrically, seductresses continue to be constructed this way on the contemporary kunqu 昆曲 (kun opera) stage, dramatizing gendered discourse via both traditional and current 1  D.C. Lau, trans., Confucius: The Analects (London: Penguin, 1979), XV.11; 134. 2  D.C. Lau, trans., Confucius: The Analects (London: Penguin, 1979), XVIII.4; 149. 3  For example, music chapters in official Chinese dynastic histories such as Songshi (Song History) or Mingshi (Ming History) register many debates about court banquet music (yanyue 宴樂), its employment of female musicians, and their licentious practices. For a sample of unofficial accounts, see Zhang Juzheng 張居正, “Chongni Feiyan 寵昵飛燕 [Doting on Feiyan],” in Dijian tushuo 帝鑑圖說 [The Emperor’s Mirror, Illustrated and Discussed] (1573; Zhengzhou: Guji chubanshe, 1996), 349–352. 4  In this essay the term “seductress” and “wanton” will be heuristically and interchangeably used as the English translation of the Chinese “yinfu” (licentious woman). Both terms carry misogynistic and moral overtones, which are, however, what chauvinistic Chinese evoke in their chastising of women whom they consider licentious and dangerous. The terms’ negative signification is neither accepted nor implied beyond the discourse being analyzed here. For other definitions and discussions of dangerously promiscuous Chinese women, see individual essays in this anthology. For an overview on wanton women in Chinese cultural history and the issues they personify, see the introduction to this volume by Mark Stevenson.

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arguments,5 answering questions of who wants to musically and licentiously engage with whom, how, when, where, and why? How do music and licentiousness relate to one another? This essay presents three popular kunqu seductresses as case studies on Chinese music and its relationship to licentiousness.6 The seductresses are, respectively, Sekong 色空 from Sifan (Longing for Worldly Pleasures 思凡), Chen Miaochang 陳妙常 from Yuzanji (The Jade Hairpin 玉簪記), and Yan Poxi 閻婆惜 from Shuihuji (Song Jiang and His Outlawed Brothers 水滸記).7 All three are protagonists in Ming and Qing drama (chuanqi 傳奇), which are still popularly performed as kunqu;8 all three have survived centuries of chauvinistic attacks and/or governmental censorship.9

5  References to kunqu audience and reception in twenty-first century China are based on the author’s personal experiences and interpretation; since 2005 he has been actively engaging with kunqu as a fan and as a musicologist. 6  Chinese operas portray many other musical wantons, comprehensive discussion of them is beyond the scope of this essay. The three selected for study here are chosen in part because audio-visual recordings of their operatic performances are readily accessible on-line and can be readily studied and referred to. 7  All three plays are traditional favorites and are included in seminal collections, such as Qian Decang’s 錢德蒼 Zhuibaiqiu 綴百裘 [A Coat Sewn Together with the Best Fur] ed. Wang Xieru 汪協如 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2005). 8  For a general history of kunqu, see Hu Ji and Liu Zhizhong 胡忌、劉致中, Kunju fazhanshi 昆劇發展史 [A History of the Development of Kunqu] (Beijing: Zhongguo xiqu chubanshe, 1989). For a history of kunqu performance practices, see Lu Eting 陸萼庭, Kunju yanchu shigao 崑劇演出史稿 [Notes Toward a History of Kun Opera Performance] (Shanghai: Wenyi chubanshe, 1980.) Following UNESCO’s declaration of kunqu as a Masterpiece of Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity in 2001, the genre has been supported and regularly performed inside and outside China, a fact that the proliferation of websites and on-line documents demonstrate. 9  Ming and Qing China regularly censored licentious plays (yinxi 淫戲) as texts or theatrical performances. The three dramas/plays examined here appear in numerous registers of censored materials. For a representative list, see that by Ding Richang 丁日昌 (1868), reproduced in Wang Liqi 王利器, Yuan Ming Qing sandai jinhui xiaoshuo xiqu shiliao 元明清三代 禁毀小説戲曲史料 [Historical Sources on Censored Novels and Dramas in Yuan Ming Qing China] (Shanghai: Guji chubanshe, 1981), 142–148. See also Ding Shumei 丁淑梅, “Qiantan Ding Richang sheju jinshu jinxi” 淺談丁日昌設局禁書禁戲] [A Preliminary Study on Ding Richang’s Institutions for Censoring Licentious Books and Operatic Performances and their Catalogues] http://wenku.baidu.com/view/2b95be8d6529647d272852a0.html; accessed June 28, 2014.

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Chauvinistic Negotiations of Music and Licentiousness

As documented by the Analects and the Record of Music (Yueji 樂記),10 historical China divides its social-musical world into two antithetical but interactive halves of yayue 雅樂 and suyue 俗樂. The yayue half is essentially public, male, and homosocial; it features ritual music, qin (seven-string zither) solos and other genres that elite and powerful men canonize. Producing and consuming yayue as performers and/or audience, elite men musically project themselves as actual or aspiring gentlemen ( junzi 君子), i.e. men of cultivation who benevolently care for those under their jurisdiction. The suyue division is essentially private, heterosocial and eroticized, featuring entertainment and vernacular music that pleasure seeking men find desirable and entertaining. Moralists such as Zhang Juzheng 張居正 and Ding Richang 丁日昌 would,11 however, find suyue licentious and corruptive, warning that its dangerous sounds dissipate men’s aspirations to live as grand and upright gentlemen (dazhangfu 大丈夫). Moralists find nüyue 女樂 (woman musicians and their seductive music) most licentious and threatening of all, and thus their censoring of it is all the more tenacious and vigorous. The historical conflation of music with gender and lust in China is clearly framed in misogynist terms, while interpretation of its arguments is shaped by personal and shared experiences. Historically, musical entertainers commonly doubled as sex workers, pleasuring their clients with musical performances,12 employing stylized enunciations, gestures, dance movements, facial make-up and costumes, all framed within eroticized occasions and sites. The musical mobilization of sexuality takes place not only through structural and stylistic features such as tone and rhythm, but importantly also within performance and appreciation contexts reliant upon expressive practices and skills, not to forget individuals’ erotic lives and tastes.13 10  For a collection of representative statements on orthodox Chinese music aesthetics, see Wenhuabu wenxue yishu yanjiuyuan yinyue yanjiusuo 文化部文學藝術院音樂研究所 comp., Zhongguo gudai yuelun xuanji 中國古代樂論選集 [A Selective Anthology of Historical Chinese Writings on Music Criticism and Theory] (Beijing: Renmin yinyue chubanshe, 1983). 11  See Notes 3 and 9. 12  Wu Zhou 武舟, Zhongguo jinü wenhuashi 中國妓女文化史 [A Cultural History of Prostitutes in China] (Shanghai: Dongfang chuban zhongxin, 2006); see in particular “Lidai yueji zhidu ji qi dui jinü de jianshi” 歷代樂籍制度及其對妓女的賤視 [Historical Institutions of Public Entertainers and Contempt for Prostitutes], 117–128. 13  This characterization rests on what the author has learned about Chinese music, music culture and history. Chinese music (yue) is multi-media in the sense that the sonic

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As a multi-media activity within Chinese aesthetic and cultural discourse, musical performance vividly reveals genuine selves and intentions. The Record of Music declares that music affords an authentic and effective mode of communication between genuine human heart/minds.14 In order that they comprehensively communicate their thoughts and emotions, the classics also observe, people not only verbalize but also sing and dance. As multi-media and instantaneous communication, music directly and effectively connects people, highlighting their sexual being. Even when performers do not deliberately act out or project erotic desire, their singing, dancing, and acted movement may be read by audiences as highlighting their physical and erotic being. The performance of a female entertainer, for example, could become seductive simply by making bodily movements and gestures visible to the male gaze. If she deliberately performs gestures that are culturally and socially understood as seductive, such as a desiring gaze or swaying hips, she acts erotically. Musical performance affords erotic sites and occasions. When female musicians teasingly perform to capture the attention of desirable and influential men,15 they are aroused and respond according to the ‘script.’ When female components of tones and rhythms are hardly separable from non-sonic elements of lyrics, programmatic titles, dances, and other contextualized elements. Chinese music is discursive in the sense that it is purposefully produced and consumed by active agents “musiking” within culturally and historically specified occasions and sites. Until the twentieth century when Western music was officially and extensively imported into China music was not practiced as an autonomous, fixed, and self-defining object of tones and rhythms that can be graphically notated, faithfully preserved over time, and definitively interpreted. For a brief explanation on the author’s “musiking” hypothesis, see Joseph S.C.Lam, “Music and Masculinities in Late Ming China,” Asian Music 42.1 (2011), 112–34, see in particular 114–115 . See also his “Reading Music and Eroticism in Late Ming Texts,” Nan Nü 12.2 (2010), 215–254. 14  “Yueji 樂記,” in Qian Bocheng 錢伯城 ed. Baihua shisanjing fu yuanwen 白話十三經 附原文 [The Thirteen Classics in Contemporary Chinese, with Original Texts] (Beijing: Guoji wenhua chuban gongsi, 1996), Vol. 1, 1262–1268. This summary of orthodox Chinese music aesthetics is based on my reading of the Record of Music, the Analects, and other related documents. 15  This hypothesis on interrelationships among music, licentiousness, female performers and male audience is based on my reading of Chinese music culture and history. It has also benefited from informative and inspiring works by Wu Cuncun and other scholars, which include, for example, Jeffery Alexander, “Cultural Pragmatics: Social Performance between Ritual and Strategy,” Sociological Theory 22.4 (2004): 527–573; Jill Dolan, Presence and Desire: Essays on Gender, Sexuality, Performance (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1993), and Theatre and Sexuality (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Huang Yufu 黄育馥, Jingju, qiao he Zhongguo de xingbie guanxi (1902–1937) 京劇, 蹺和

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performers and male admirers interact, they engage with what can be interpreted as ‘love-music’ making, often leading to short or long term, public or private affairs. Should the affairs result in marriage or concubinage, a man’s protective and moralistic parents and mentors would sternly object, wanting to guard not only the man’s physical well-being but also his gentlemanly reputation and the family’s standing. It is against such a traditional aesthetics of licentious music and misogynous views of female musicians that contemporary kunqu features a number of seductresses in its extensive repertoire of erotic dramas, referencing and updating the Chinese discourse of music, gender, and sex.16 This is particularly true when contemporary performers choose to stage licentious women roles to evoke current notions of feminine charm and sexual agency. Fact or fiction, such roles reenact Chinese male desire for (and anxiety over) seductresses, seductresses whose erotic, expressive, and manipulative potential are inseparable. Kunqu seductresses project erotic desire through literary lyrics, flowing melodies, emotive rhythms, colorful costumes, facial make-up, and choreographically suggestive acting-dancing (shenduan 身段),17 all of which are aestheticized and dramatized renditions of erotic memories and practices in Chinese culture and society. Kunqu scripts allude to erotic practices of 中國的性別關係,1902–1937 [Peking Opera, Operatic Bound-Feet-Shoes and Gender Relationships in China, 1902–1937] (Beijing: Sanlian shuju, 1998); and Wang Yijia 王溢嘉, Zhongguo wenhuali de qing yu se 中國文化裏的情與色 [Love and Sex in Chinese Culture] (Beijing: Xinxing chubanshe, 2012). 16  As represented by Tang Xianzu’s globally renowned drama, Peony Pavilion (Mudanting 牡丹亭), and in particular its popular scene “Youyuan jingmeng 遊園驚夢 [Strolling in the Garden and the Interrupted Dream],” kunqu features many romantic/erotic stories and characters. This fact is also underscored by a much quoted aphorism: “nine out of ten chuanqi/kunqu dramas tell romantic stories” (shibu chuanqi jiu xiangsi 十部傳奇九 相思). For two current studies on Chinese theatre and sex, see Joshua Goldstein, “The Gendering of National Culture, or, The Only Good Woman is a Man,” in Drama Kings: Players and Publics in the Re-creation of Peking Opera 1870–1937 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 237–163; and Andrea S. Goldman, “Sex versus Violence in ‘I, Sister-in-Law’ Operas,” in Opera and the City: The Politics of Culture in Beijing, 1770–1900 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012), 175–236. 17   Shenduan is the Chinese term for what and how opera performers act and dance on stage—acting and dancing are hardly separable on the kunqu stage. To emphasize this nature of kunqu performance, shenduan will be translated as acting-dancing in this essay. I thank Mark Stevenson for reminding me that the word shenduan can also be used to denote a handsome woman’s figure or comportment, a usage I believe indexes the interpenetration of theatrical concepts and day-to-day life.

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passionate men and women in Chinese history, and kunqu acting-dancing choreographically echoes intimate gestures. For example, kunqu performers might “touch” one another with their long and flowing sleeves (shuixiu 水袖). Kunqu seductresses, however, do not portray literal gestures of passion such as kisses or embraces. Kunqu eroticism is disciplined and veiled, generating entertainment that is pleasurable-but-not-licentious (le er buyin 樂而不淫). Indeed, such a posture enabled kunqu to be performed as not only a genre of yayue, but also as an acceptable presentation of music, gender, and sex in elite homes and respectable theatres in Ming and Qing China. Recognized by UNESCO as a Masterpiece of Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity, kunqu is now being performed as a 600-year-old and classical genre of Chinese opera, one that manifests Chinese perceptions and practices of beauty, music, and love. In other words, kunqu indexes both historical and contemporary discourse on the relationship existing between music, gender, and sex in China. In order to elucidate kunqu negotiations of Chinese music’s relation to seductresses, the selected plays will be analyzed here with reference to three key questions. First, how do staged kunqu seductresses perform their feminine sexuality and transgressive intentions? Second, how do music and licentiousness define one another through the trope of the seductress? Third, what agendas, arguments, and interactions do kunqu negotiations of music and licentiousness signify?

A Novice Seductress

A representative kunqu seductress regularly performed today is the nun Sekong from Longing for Worldly Pleasures (Sifan; hereafter Longing),18 originally a scene from the chuanqi 傳奇 drama Niehaiji 孽海記 [A Sea of Troubles in the Secular World]. Traditionally performed as a zhezixi 折子戲, i.e. a short independent play derived from a lengthy drama, Longing presents Sekong as a sixteen-year-old Buddhist nun who has just discovered her own sexuality, 18  For an English introduction and translation, see A.C. Scott, “Longing for Worldly Pleasures/ Ssu Fan,” in Traditional Chinese Plays, Vol. 2 (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1969), 14–39. For a historical examination of the play, see Andrea S. Goldman, “The Nun Who Wouldn’t Be: Representations of Female Desire in Two Performance Genres of ‘Si Fan,’ ” Late Imperial China 22.1 (2001): 71–138. The version of the play consulted for this essay is Si fan, in Yu Zhenfei 俞振飛, Zhenfei qupu 振飛曲谱 [Master Yu Zhenfei’s Kunqu Score] (Shanghai: Wenyi chubanshe, 1982), 383–392.

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Figure 4.1 Shen Guofang 沈國芳 of Suzhou Kunqu Opera Theater of Jiangsu plays Sekong. Photograph taken by Peng Chunlin and provided by Shen Guofang.

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and who therefore wants to leave the nunnery for what she imagines will be conjugal happiness in the secular world. Isolated within the nunnery, she can only experience a vague yearning for male companionship; isolation prevents her from locating a suitable object for her desire and her thoughts wander in taboo and comical directions. With a performance time of about thirty minutes by a solo performer,19 Longing has Sekong sing five arias interspersed with short monologues. The first aria and monologue depict her as an involuntary and sexually frustrated nun. Appearing on stage, she laments her abbess’s ruthless cutting of her long dark hair (a symbol of her sexuality), her tedious round of burning incense and cleaning, and her lonely and sorrowful nights in bed. The second aria begins by repeating her laments, but proceeds to tell how she accidentally catches sight of a young monk, becomes smitten with the lad, and wants to marry him even if she has to pay the price of going to hell and suffering all kinds of torture there. The third aria reports how her parents are devoted sutra-chanting Buddhist followers, and why they have sent her to live in a nunnery—born a sickly child, they believe Sekong can only survive through merit accumulated serving in a religious community. The aria ends with her complaining about sutra chanting as boring and meaningless. To relieve her boredom she goes to the hall of arhats where she sings her fourth aria, telling how the physical masculinity exhibited by the row of icons gives the impression they are infatuated with her beauty. Declaring the admonitions of religious life empty words, she asks why she cannot put on beautiful clothes and marry a man. The last aria communicates her decision to leave the nunnery and find herself a husband in the secular world; singing a short coda, she announces her wish to have a child and enjoy motherhood. As verbally portrayed by her arias and monologues, Sekong’s licentiousness is restrained. Her first monologue, for example, (4’45”) says:20 19  Several audio-visual recordings of the play are readily accessible on-line, all of which can be identified by Googling “Si fan” 思凡. For discussion convenience, this essay will reference a performance by Liang Guyin’s 梁谷音 students and friends, entitled “Yougu qingyin Liang Guyin chuancheng zhuanchang” 幽谷清音梁谷音傳承專場 [Pure Tones from Hidden Valleys: A Gala of Kunqu Performance Artistry that Liang Guyin Has Transmitted to Her Students and Friends], uploaded by mjledme on Feb 20, 2012; accessed June 28, 2014. This audio-visual clip is chosen for its age-appropriate performers of Sekong and their onstage charm. For a representative performance by a master performer, see “Sifan: Shen Shihua 思凡:沈世華”; uploaded by Jialing Shi on October 26, 2012: http://www. youtube.com/watch?v=Nm7Lq5fi_zo; accessed on June 28, 2014. 20  All time-markings for Longing listed here refer to performance time of the gala show described in the preceding note.

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It is sad that I have my hair cut and am made a nun, and that only a religious lamp keeps me company at night. Time would easily pass and people grow old, wasting their youthful charm and days. I am Nun Zhao, and my religious name is Sekong. Since I was young, I have been living as a nun in the Heavenly Peach Nunnery. There I burn incense and chant sutras all day long. By night, I sleep with my lonely pillow; what a sad life I have.21 As communicated by her acting, chanting, dancing, and singing, however, Sekong’s staged desire is more realistic and sensual (i.e. more wanton) than what her words alone convey. Dressed in a stylized nun’s habit, waving her ritual whisk (fu 拂), she appears physically and visually charming. Singing her arias and speaking her monologues, she performs seductive acting-dancing with her eyes, lips, limbs, and torso. For example, when she confesses her sad feelings about lonely nights, she highlights her beauty by raising her hands to frame her face (5’38”). When she begins to describe her lonely nights (5’16” to 6’50”), she makes a shy gesture and then one of frustration. When she gazes at the arhats (18’50” to 22’30”), she gestures to highlight her willowy waist and seductive body. To musically project her awakened desire she sings long and extended melodies with a clear and pure voice, enunciating intimate words with eloquent precision. With a carefully choreographed combination of lyrical imagery, singing, speaking and acting-dancing, Sekong is objectified as an idealized musical/ erotic woman, one that many elite and traditional Chinese men describe in their poetic writings: a desirable woman whose music (which embodies her or seductive charm) rings out from her small, cherry-shaped mouth (yingtao xiaozui 櫻桃小嘴), producing a sonic delight like orioles’ chirping. As performed and heard, Sekong’s melodies are emotively and sonically suggestive as key words in her erotic confessions are musically highlighted; for example, when she identifies the young monk as her destined but vexing lover (yuanjia 冤家; 10’43” to 11’03”), she sings a particularly long and melismatic phrase. If Sekong personifies traditional Chinese men’s fascination for young ingénues, she also projects a ‘defanged’ musical wanton, one who is entertaining, satisfying, and desirable. She is, however, not entirely innocent. Epitomizing a sexually awakened young nun, Sekong provocatively indexes not only a historical Chinese resistance against Buddhist suppression of human desires but also

21  Yu Zhenfei, Zhenfei qupu, 384.

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their stereotyping of monks and nuns as sexually frustrated persons, a theme that also runs through our next play.22

An Elite and Smart Seductress

Compared to Sekong, eighteen year-old Chen Miaochang in The Jade Hairpin (Yuzanji 玉簪記), a Ming chuanqi drama, makes an elite and savvy seductress. Penned by Gao Lian 高濂 (1573–1620), The Jade Hairpin tells of the romance between Miaochang and Pan Bizheng, an involuntary nun and a young scholar, neither of which knows of their parentally pre-arranged betrothal.23 As dramatized, Bizheng, scion of an elite family, fails in a capital examination and then takes refuge in a nunnery that his aunt presides over (too ashamed to return home empty handed). There he meets Miaochang, the daughter of an elite family from which she has been separated by war and therefore left a refugee. To survive she has no choice but to become a nun. The two young adults meet in the nunnery by chance, promptly fall for each other, and end up breaking religious and social taboos as they physically consummate their love. When their illicit affair is exposed Bizheng’s aunt forces him to immediately depart for the capital to take the examinations again. Miaochang pursues him to have him confirm his love and fidelity, then stays behind and waits for his return. From the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries on,24 performances of The Jade Hairpin story have focused on scenes that develop the romance between Miaochang and Bizheng. Among these, “Qintiao 琴挑 [Zither Seduction]” is a favorite and is noted for its portrait of Miaochang as a smart and successful seductress.25 As a play that takes about thirty minutes 22  For a revealing discussion by Liang Guyin, a master kunqu performer and an authority on Longing, see her “Niehaiji-Sifan 孽海記思凡 [A Sea of Troubles in the Secular World],” in Kunqu baizhong dashi shuoxi 昆曲百種,大師說戲 [One Hundred Kunqu Masterpieces: Grand Masters’ Explanations], Vol. 1 (Changsha: Yuelu shushe, 2014), 26–39. 23  Gao Lian 高濂, Yuzanji 玉簪記 [The Jade Hairpin], in Liushizhong qu 六十種曲 [Sixty Ming Operas] ed. Mao Jin 毛晉 (Shanghai: Guji chubanshe, 1995). 24  Since the 1980s, when Shanghai Kunqu Troupe produced an abridged version of The Jade Hairpin, the play has been regularly staged by various troupes and performers. Since then, The Jade Hairpin has been popularly performed—as a dramatic negotiation of love, eroticism, religious ideals, and morality in traditional and contemporary Chinese society. Miaochang has become one of the most staged and well-known Chinese seductresses inside and outside China. 25  For a current and representative script of the drama; see Bai Xianyong 白先勇 ed., Yunxin shuixin Yuzanji 雲心水心玉簪記 [Hearts of Clouds and Water: The Jade Hairpin] (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 2011), 54–116. EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 11/4/2019 7:50 PM via TOWSON UNIVERSITY AN: 1507598 ; Stevenson, Mark J., Wu, Cuncun.; Wanton Women in Late-imperial Chinese Literature : Models, Genres, Subversions and Traditions Account: towson.main.eds

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Figure 4.2 Shi Jiehua 史潔華 of New York Kunqu Society plays Chen Miaochang. Photograph taken and provided by Joseph Lam.

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of performance time, “Zither Seduction” presents three sets of arias and short monologues and/or dialogues, dramatizing the erotic encounter between Miaochang and Bizheng. The first set of four variation arias tells how the young couple independently visit the nunnery garden on a moonlit night, melancholy and wondering if their feelings of love are reciprocated. The second set of two short classical zither songs register the couple’s guarded flirtation with one another: he declares that he has no wife, and she coyly retorts that his marital status is none of her business. The third set of four variation arias dramatizes a musical battle of the sexes. Miaochang tells Bizheng that as a nun she is not interested in men, prompting him to indecently ask how she spends lonely nights in her cold bed. Her womanly virtue affronted, Miaochang retaliates by simulating offense, forcing Bizheng to apologize and leave the garden. As soon as he leaves, Miaochang sings her confession of love: she finds him handsome and desirable. Her wanton thoughts are overheard by Bizheng, who has not actually left the garden but hides in a dark corner a few steps away. Emboldened by what he has heard, he announces his presence again, and makes up with her. Then she departs, leaving him to sing out his male question: why does she invite and resist his advances? As scripted, Miaochang’s arias in “Zither Seduction” literally declare that she is not interested in men. For example, in her qin song she compares herself to the moon goddess: “The mist is thin and light; the laurel flowers are fragrant. Lamenting the long and lonesome evening, I embrace the jade rabbit [i.e. the moon] to warm myself.”26 As acted, danced, sung, and chanted in the scene, however, and in much the same way as Sekong, Miaochang is not so disinterested as the word on the page might convey. In fact she makes a beautiful, flirtatious, musical, savvy, and whimsical woman, one who knows how to safely and effectively win her man. She plays music to announce her feminine (i.e. culturally gendered) loneliness and her yearning for Bizheng.27 Suggestively, she plays “Xiaoxiang shuiyun” 瀟湘水雲 [Clouds and Mist over Rivers Xiao and Xiang], a qin 琴 (seven string zither) composition with a title that alludes to a romantic affair between a human king and a river goddess. Throughout the play, she sings melodious and flowing arias, creating sound waves that reveal her rapidly transforming feelings. For example, her entrance aria (5’03” to 8’15”)

26  Bai Xianyong, Yunxin, 60. The Chinese lyrics read: 煙淡淡兮輕雲,香靄靄兮桂蔭。 嘆長宵兮孤冷,抱玉兔兮自溫. 27  Zither seductions frequently appear in Chinese drama and fiction, traditional and modern, such as the Qinxinji 琴心記 [Romance of Sima Xiangru and Zhuo Wenjun] and Xixiangji 西廂記 [Romance of the West Chamber]. EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 11/4/2019 7:50 PM via TOWSON UNIVERSITY AN: 1507598 ; Stevenson, Mark J., Wu, Cuncun.; Wanton Women in Late-imperial Chinese Literature : Models, Genres, Subversions and Traditions Account: towson.main.eds

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features numerous melismatic turns, creating musical and temporal space for her to melodically and physically express her desires and hesitations.28 As the couple’s encounter develops, Miaochang also invites Bizheng to play the zither so that she can find out what he harbors in his heart. When he plays and sings a classical song about a pheasant flying in solitude, she immediately understands his performance as a musical tease. Rather than accepting his overture, she deliberately tells him how she is completely committed to a nun’s life—exercising reverse psychology to hold Bizheng away at a safe distance but sustain his interest. She also feigns offence at Bizheng’s flirtatious words and behavior, forcing him to immediately apologize and leave the garden. Seeing him gone, and thinking she is alone, she confesses the yearning he arouses in her. Except for this confession, Miaochang does not say anything explicitly erotic in “Zither Seduction.” What exposes her sexuality, if not licentiousness, is her uttering of the semantically ambiguous and linguistically emphatic cui (啐) in coordination with dramatically coordinated and suggestive acting-dancing. Semantically a xuzi 虛字 (‘empty word,’ or vocable) signifying a woman forcefully emitting a warning or reprimand, cui is theatrically uttered as an erotic signifier in “Zither Seduction.”29 In the play, Miaochang utters the word twice, making her desire for Bizheng more explicit with each ejaculation. She utters the first cui at a highly dramatic moment (29’20” to 29’35”) when Bizheng has just apologized for his improper words, and is getting ready to leave the garden. Trying to make him feel better and revealing a little of her love for him—just to stop him from giving up totally—she seductively tells him to walk carefully in the dark of the garden. Taking her words as a lover’s hint that not all has been lost, he flirtatiously asks for a lamp, and extends his hands to her. She turns her body away from him, uttering an eroticized cui to rebuke him. Miaochang utters the second cui after Bizheng has announced his presence and having eavesdropped on her confession of love. Showing mixed feelings of surprise and joy at his presence, she utters a single-word question (ha 哈/ 28  The audio-visual recording consulted here is “Kunqu Yuzanji Yue Meiti Zhang Jingxian” 昆曲玉簪記岳美緹張靜嫻 [Jade Hairpin, a Kunqu Opera Performed by Yue Meiti and Zhang Jingxian]; http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=%E7%8E%89%E7% B0%AA%E8%AE%B0, uploaded by vickylovekdw on Jan 30, 2012; accessed on June 28, 2014. Time markings cited here refer to performance time in this recording. Other recordings available online can be accessed by Googling “Yuzanji” or Jade Hairpin. 29  For a master performer’s interpretation of the expression, see Yu Zhenfei, “ ‘Qintiao’ cong ‘ya’ dao ‘cui’ 琴挑從呀到啐 [From ‘Ya’ to ‘Cui’ in ‘Zither Seduction’],” in Yu Zhenfei yishu lunji 俞振飛藝術論集 [An Anthology of Writings on Yu Zhenfei’s Performance Artistry] ed. Wang Jiaxi 王家熙 and Xu Yin 許寅 (Shanghai: Wenyi chubanshe, 1985), 112–117; see in particular, 117. EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 11/4/2019 7:50 PM via TOWSON UNIVERSITY AN: 1507598 ; Stevenson, Mark J., Wu, Cuncun.; Wanton Women in Late-imperial Chinese Literature : Models, Genres, Subversions and Traditions Account: towson.main.eds

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Figure 4.3 Xue Dongyin 徐棟寅 and Xu Chao 徐超 of Suzhou Kunqu Opera Theater of Jiangsu play Yan Poxi and Zhang Sanlang. Photograph taken and provided by Joseph Lam.

what?) and he responds with a playful confirmation (ha/yes). She concludes their erotic and playful conversation with a long and suggestive cui (34’30” to 34’45”), and then moves off with her qin. With little ambiguity, her eroticized cui tells him she is in love with him, but is shy and is playing hard to get. This cui seduction is socially authentic and theatrically intelligible—as a matter of fact, whenever it is dramatically performed, it wins audience applause and smiles. A multi-media performance, its eroticism totally depends on how it is sonically and kinetically located at a particular time and site. Every nuance in the intonation, rhythm, length, and timbre of cui utterances counts—and that is why audiences find some performers’ cui seduction much more erotically entertaining and revealing than others.

Yan Poxi: A Ghostly Wanton

Not all kunqu seductresses charm like Miaochang does. One controversial example is that of the Yan Poxi character in “Huozhuo 活捉 [Taken Alive]”. Originally a minor character in the classical novel Shuihuzhuan 水滸傳 [All Men Are Brothers], Yan becomes a full blown femme fatale in Xu Zichang’s 許自昌 (1578–1623) Shuihu ji 水滸記 [Song Jiang and His Outlawed EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 11/4/2019 7:50 PM via TOWSON UNIVERSITY AN: 1507598 ; Stevenson, Mark J., Wu, Cuncun.; Wanton Women in Late-imperial Chinese Literature : Models, Genres, Subversions and Traditions Account: towson.main.eds

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Brothers];30 as such, she popularly appears in kunqu and other Chinese performing arts. As staged, Yan is a beautiful and young entertainer who marries Song Jiang to secure a comfortable and stable life for herself and her mother. Song is a dark, short, martial, unrefined, but economically self-sufficient man; he has no sense of his wife’s expectations. Soon after their marriage, Yan finds him unsatisfactory and starts to look for love elsewhere. Zhang Wenyuan—a subordinate of Song’s and a handsome and sweet-talking lothario—accidentally encounters Yan and boldly makes advances toward her to which she wantonly responds. Conducting an illicit affair with Zhang, Yan searches for a way of ending her marriage to Song without losing the comfort he provides. One day she finds the key to her escape, a secret letter from an outlawed brother of Song’s, a document that would put him in serious trouble with the authorities. Using the letter to blackmail him, she wants a prompt divorce, and demands a substantive pay settlement. He agrees but begs to have more time to raise the funds. She refuses and they argue. In the heat of their squabble Song kills her. Dead, Yan becomes a ghost, and returns to the human world to take Zhang back with her to hell to continue their affair. Among different renditions of “Taken Alive,” the version that Liang Guyin and Liu Yilong reconstructed in 1985 and regularly performed until 2008 has been favorably received and critically praised as a model realization; it will be analyzed here.31 As originally scripted,32 “Taken Alive” includes nine arias 30  Xu Zichang, Shuihuji in Liushizhongqu. 31  For a representative audio-visual recording of the play, see “Kunqu Opera: Shuihuji, Huozhou; Liang Guyin Liu Yilong” 昆曲水滸記活捉梁谷音劉異龍 [Song Jiang and His Outlawed Brothers: A Kunqu Opera Performed by Liang Guyin and Liu Yilong]; http://www. youtube.com/watch?v=sqcrXxn_Zek; uploaded by vicklovekdw on May 31, 2012; accessed on June 28, 2014. Between the mid-1950s and early 1980s, socialist China suppressed “Taken Alive” as pornographic. Liang Guyin and Liu Yilong, two master kunqu performers, revived the play in 1985, and regularly performed it until 2008 when Liu retired from the stage; the play is now popularly performed by the masters’ disciples. Liang made a career of performing “bad women” (“huai nüren 壞女人”); for her autobiographical comments, see Liang Guyu, “Kunqu huadan di biaoyan yishu—yi ‘Jiaqi,’ ‘Huozhuo,’ ‘Xishu biexiong’ wei li 昆曲花旦的表演藝術--以《佳期》﹑《活捉》﹑《戲叔別兄》為例 [The Artistry of Performing Kunqu Young Female Roles: Case Studies with “Romantic Times,” “Taken Alive” and “Wu Song Meets Pan Jinlian and Bidding Farewell to His Elder Brother”],” http://www.artx.cn/artx/xiqu/193787_5.html, accessed on Jun 28, 2014; and Liang Guyin 梁谷音, Liang Guyin huazhuan: wo de kunqu shijjie 梁谷音畫傳:我的 昆曲世界 [An Illustrated Autobiography of Liang Guyin: My Kunqu World] (Shanghai: Wenyi chubanshe, 2009). 32  I have yet to locate an official and published script of the “Taken Alive” that Liang and Liu performed. As shown in the audio-recording of their performance, they sang Xu EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 11/4/2019 7:50 PM via TOWSON UNIVERSITY AN: 1507598 ; Stevenson, Mark J., Wu, Cuncun.; Wanton Women in Late-imperial Chinese Literature : Models, Genres, Subversions and Traditions Account: towson.main.eds

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connected by long spoken passages, all accompanied by extensive actingdancing. The first aria presents Yan as a ghost, lamenting her tragic death, and comparing herself to several short-lived beauties. The first dialogue is mostly performed by a sleepy Zhang responding to Yan’s knocking at the door. Realizing it is a woman at the door his interest is sparked, and he moves to welcome her in immediately. In the next moment, however, anxiety strikes and he decides to ask who she is and why she comes in the dark of night. Yan answers by erotically complaining how he has forgotten her and fails to recognize her voice. She then teases him to guess who she is, inviting him to ask a series of bawdy questions. Sung as the second aria of the play, Zhang’s lyrics ask if Yan is a licentious woman, one who would seduce scholars, summon men to her home, elope with her lover, and offer herself to men she fancies?33 Yan responds by saying no to Zhang’s characterization and by coaxing him to open the door to see who she is. He opens the door and she sneaks into his house with a ghostly gush of breeze, which he feels. Wondering if a ghost has entered his house, he reassures himself that it must be colleagues from the office pulling a prank on him, mocking his soft spot for women. Ending his monologue, he warns that people should not play scary games in the dark of night as they may end with fatalities, foreshadowing his strangulation by the end of the show. Then Zhang bumps into Yan who announces herself with the third round of oral delivery—this performance skips the third aria. He is terrified and tries to keep her away from him, holding up a chair as a shield. He tries to run and she chases after him, performing a long and entertaining sequence of acting-­ dancing in which a ghostly wanton and a cowardly lothario run circles on stage. The episode ends with the lothario attempting to reassert his masculinity. He turns to face the pursuing ghost, drops the chair in his hand to the floor, and insists he has nothing to do with her murder. She should avenge her death on Song, her husband, Zhang declares with the fourth aria of the scene. Zichang’s original lyrics, skipping the third aria. Their monologues and dialogues, however, are expanded and updated. For reference to the original lyrics and for comparison with other performances, I will describe the version of Liang and Liu as if structured by nine arias. For a representative and traditional script with full texts of aria lyrics and spoken words, see Wang Xichun 王錫純 ed., “Shuihuji 水滸記 [Song Jiang and his Outlawed Brothers],” in Eyunge qupu 遏雲閣曲譜 [Kunqu Scores from the Pavilion of Excellent Singing] (Shanghai: Zhuyitang, 1925), juan 11, 1–11. 33  For an informative discussion of the erotic allusions in the aria lyrics for “Taken Alive,” see Annoymous, “Huozhuo de diangu zhushi 活捉的典故注釋 [Annotations on Historical Allusions in “Taken Alive”],” http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_4b72bf7d0100t22p.html, uploaded on May 29, 2011; accessed on July 1, 2014.

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Yan responds with the fifth aria, telling Zhang that even as a ghost, she still yearns for him. He is not convinced and once again tries to escape, pulling his shield/chair behind him. Remembering a magic spell he has recently learned from a Daoist priest he attempts to use it to force her away, but it fails, leaving himself and Daoist spells looking ridiculous, and worse, defenseless against Yan’s ghostly wantonness. Yan attempts to allay his fear by reassuring him she has not come to take revenge, and invites him to look and see how beautiful she still is. He retorts that he only wants to see living and beautiful faces, not ghostly and ugly ones. She pleads with him to look, but he refuses. Annoyed, she lunges at him and sits on his shield/chair. He evades her and she chases after him. They finally join in an acting-dancing seduction sequence: she the seductive beauty, he her enthralled beholder. Then Zhang sings the sixth aria describing how Yan is as beautiful and sweet-voiced as ever, confessing he is once again smitten. In response to his tender words, she calls his name, and they commence an act-dance of lovemaking. Choreographically, the pas de deux features the couple gazing at each other, embracing, and erotically interacting with their long sleeves—symbolic extensions of their bodies. In the midst of these actions, Yan stretches her arms and hands towards his neck, trying to strangle him. He pushes her away, and asks for an explanation. Before she can answer, he sings the remainder of the sixth aria, telling how he remembers their passionate love-making in the past. In evoking these memories from their tryst his lyrics rehearse a series of stock imagery and flowery allusions relating to physical love.34 Finishing his aria, Zhang announces that he is thirsty and wants a cup of tea, words that prompt him to ask Yan if she still remembers how he seduced her by asking for a drink. In answer, Yan sings the seventh aria of the scene, telling him it was actually she who seduced him, and how she enjoyed their passionate love-making but paid for it with her life. Ending her confession, she tells Zhang that she wants to continue their affair in hell. Missing the full import of her murderous mission, Zhang tries to convince her of his love by singing the eighth aria of the show, telling how he cried for three full days and nights upon the news of her death. As he sings, she caresses his chest and chokes him. By the time he finishes his aria he is already dead and has become a ghostly puppet that moves according to Yan’s every manipulation. She concludes the scene singing the coda, the ninth aria which describes their love in hell. As outlined above, “Taken Alive” is a comic ghost tale that dramatizes an erotic danse macabre between a lothario and a beautiful wanton wife. As 34  See Wang Xichun, “Shuihuji,” 7.

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Zhang is transformed from a frivolous and vulgar man into a sorrowful puppet, the play parades all the wiles a fatally seductive wanton is purported to have at her disposal. Yan softly begs at Zhang’s door so that he allows her to enter his house—she feigns demureness to get what she wants. She tenderly calms him when he learns she is a ghost and becomes frightened—she knows how to soothe her man. She displays her beautiful face and acts seductively when he gazes at her—after he is forced to do so. She makes love with him as if they are dragons and phoenixes frolicking. She even kills him softly and sensually: she caresses his chest and squeezes his throat to choke his breathing. As staged in “Taken Alive,” Yan makes a menacing wanton that few audiences could forget; comic moments in the play only render the danger she poses more hurtful by creating dramatic contrasts and delays. Theatrically, what renders Yan’s wantonness simultaneously endearing and chilling is not the erotic content of the arias she sings, but the way she seductively vocalizes Zhang’s name and kinetically acts her wanton intent. The lyrics Yan sings are erotic and literary but semantically opaque, verging on unintelligibility for the average kunqu audience. Even though they were popular stories, only the most learned connoisseurs would fully understand the erotic allusions the literary text makes. By contrast, anyone paying attention to Yan’s staged voice and acting-dancing in “Taken Alive” would perceive a musical wanton who irresistibly entices Zhang with fluid tones and elastic rhythms. Yan’s musical wantonness is most dramatic and explicit with her six calls of Zhang’s name in “Taken Alive”.35 Each is an erotic event in itself, and each is performed with subtle changes in intonation, length, rise and fall of pitch, tone-color, and vocal intensity. The first (8’12” to 8’20”) is heard as Yan begs Zhang to open the door and let her walk into his life again. The second (19’55” to 20’04”) indexes a wanton frustrated by her lover’s failure to recognize her voice. The third call (21’36” to 21’44”) has a frightened Zhang calm down and listen to her words. The fourth (28’20” to 28’26”) has her steering him with affection.

35  Liang Guyin prepared and performed the calls with great virtuosity; see her explanations of the calls in her, “Woyan Jiecha Huozhuo” 我演借茶活捉 [My Performance of “Asking for Tea” and “Taken Alive”], http://www.cnki.net, uploaded by China Academic Journal Electronic Publishing House; accessed on June 28, 2014. How Liang learned and developed her performance of Yan Poxi is a question of biography and kunqu history that needs to be answered in future discussions. For a discussion on the performance tradition of ghost operas, see Yang Qiuhong 楊秋紅, Zhongguo gudai guixi yanjiu 中國古代鬼戲研究 [A Study of Ghost Dramas in Traditional China] (Beijing: Zhongguo chuanmei daxu chubanshe, 2009).

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The fifth call (38’37” to 38’44”) signals her lamenting over a murdered lover. The sixth (40’56” to 41’06”) communicates a satisfied cry of love and murder. In addition to her seductive vocalizations, Yan also performs ghostly and wanton acting-dancing. When she comes on stage, she enacts a deadly frozen and straight body, and walks with gliding steps (guibu 鬼步, ‘ghost-steps’) marked by a fast and continuous striking of drum and gong (00’ to 1’31”). When she jumps at Zhang to force him to look at her face, her action is punctuated by a single strike of a gong (26’07”). And when she and Zhang hop as ghosts (40’45” to 40’55”), each of their jumps is marked with single gong strikes. Without the support of musical sounds and acting-dancing, Yan would not be half as menacing or seductive. There is also great fluidity and multi-dimensionality in her erotic encounter with Zhang. Seven pairs of contrasting elements are at work in the negotiations “Taken Alive” stages. They are: lothario versus wanton; dominant versus dominated; natural versus supernatural; elite versus vernacular art; comedy versus tragedy; and indulgent entertainment versus exhortative warning. In addition, “Taken Alive” subjects Yan and Zhang to an equal balance of realism and mockery. Eschewing conventional, male, and chauvinistic verdicts that tend to put the blame on women, the play presents the couple as humanly authentic and transformative. She enters the stage as the weightless ghost of a murdered woman, but exits as an active dominator towing a puppet of a dead man behind her. She makes a sharp contrast to Zhang, a cowardly, vulgar and comical lothario who ends up her toy. “Taken Alive” at once confirms and mocks institutionalized gender inequalities that were fundamental in China. By presenting Zhang as a living man and Yan as a ghost, the location of the play gradually moves from the mundane world to supernatural and imaginative realms where spectral women challenge hegemonic men, reversing stereotyped gender and socio-political roles while subverting dominant power hierarchies.36 As an opera, “Taken Alive” is simultaneously elitist and vernacular, comical and tragic, entertaining and exhortative. Aria lyrics of the show are replete with erotic allusions intelligible to only educated connoisseurs. By contrast, the spoken passages, often adjusted or revised by individual performers, are as vernacular and straightforward as can be. The acting-dancing in the play is simultaneously theatrical and quotidian: while many kunqu erotic gestures and facial expressions are subject to dramaturgical exaggeration, they echo common acts of flirtation between infatuated men and women. An instructive 36  Similar principals are active in the folk material analysed by Anne McLaren in this volume.

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example is Yan’s erotic posing for Zhang to admire, the seductive intent of which is clear for an audience that is clearly being invited to notice and recognize the power of her attraction.37 Entertaining and erotic as “Taken Alive” is, it is also extremely moralistic and exhortative—and uncanny. There is no mistaking that Yan, the ghostly wanton, murders Zhang, delivering a warning that frightens men out of their wits. The underlying assumption is that the world will naturally give rise to women whose passions are a danger to men,38 and men who expose themselves to that danger are fools who deserve the unhappy fate awaiting them. This condemnation of the foolish lothario, however, hardly rebalances the misogynic ideological structure painting women as the root source of moral disruption.

Concluding Remarks: Licentious Women On and Off the Kunqu Stage

While women and love are quite common themes in kunqu performance and libretti, Yan Poxi, Sekong and Chen Miaochang are unusual in the way they allow women to explicitly give vent to their identity as desiring subjects, an identity that is at one and the same time openly represented as supressed. What the representation of women as desiring subjects was intended to convey and what eventually allowed exploration of the topic on stage are questions that are still subject to historical verification, and so our reading needs to proceed carefully. As Patricia Sieber has pointed out in her study of the development of song-drama (zaju 雜劇), overly direct reading of gender positions may mislead and “[c]ontrary to what the surface plot of a story between a scholar and a 37  Nowadays “Taken Alive” is often performed for Chinese and non-Chinese audiences inside and outside China. It is significant that the Northern Kunqu Troupe in Beijing (Beifang kunju yuan) performed the show in October 2011 in Paris in a celebration gala for the tenth anniversary of UNESCO Masterpieces of Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity. Reportedly, international dignitaries in the audience enthusiastically applauded the performance. See the report from People’s Daily which is now accessible on line: Guo Shixi 郭時隙, “Kunqu qiqi luoluo shenyi hou huali zhuanshen: wenxiange er zhi yayin” 昆曲 起起落落申遺後華麗轉身:聞弦歌而知雅音 [Kunqu Rises And Falls, and Grand Transformations after UNESCO Declaration as A Masterpiece of Oral and Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity: Understanding Refined Music after Listening to Its Singing Performance] http://guoqing.china.com.cn/2013-07/24/content_29516766_2.htm; uploaded on July 24, 2013; accessed on July 4, 2014. 38  A long held position already signalled in China’s earliest literary traditions; see Mark Stevenson’s references to the Book of Odes in his introduction to the current volume.

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gentry woman might suggest, in Yuan and Ming times, the Xixiangji resonated with elite male participation in courtesan culture.”39 Whatever the conditions may have been that enabled the explicit portrayal of men’s admiration of women on stage it was necessarily accompanied by its corollary, portrayals of women responding to such interest, a topic that appeared to have required an additional level of sensitivity. Such sensitivity is noticeable in the different modes of ambiguity at play in the portrayal of our three protagonists as well as alternations between ambiguity and explicitness. Beginning with Sekong and Chen Miaochang, there is a separation of the protagonists away from the domestic sphere of the family house and courtyard, the expected milieu for young women of good family. This suggests that removal from the domain where family played a role in supervising social orthodoxy put women, and especially young women, at risk of straying from sexual propriety; even in places where chastity was given added, personal meaning. Sekong and Miaochang are hardly wanton women at all, rather, their transgression is driven by a sexual awakening in one case and a budding infatuation in the other, neither of which should have been dangerous in itself had they been taking place in the proper place, within the protection of familial authority and control. Interestingly, the performance of Yan Poxi’s attractiveness (and licentiousness), is in large part removed from the domestic sphere to the uncanny boundary between this world and the next. One of the four famous adulterous wives from Shuihu zhuan, she is a clearer candidate for the wanton woman label, and the ambiguity of her desire is of a far more malevolent kind. What is even more interesting from the point of view of this essay is how the ambiguity of all three women as desiring subjects is dramatized and communicated to the audience. As I have shown, much work is left to nonverbal movement and extension of the body, as well as special forms of para-­ linguistic vocalization. When it comes to matters of sexuality, the manner in which lead characters communicate, approach, and address each other on stage plays a crucial role in what is communicated to the audience. In the contexts of Chinese performance, historical and contemporary, I have argued that subtly varied enunciations of interjections and names make erotic intent both 39  Patricia Sieber, Theaters of Desire: Authors, Readers, and the Reproduction of Early Chinese Song-Drama, 1300–2000 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003), 72. As Sieber notes, the homosocial role of this theme was not lost on contemporary commentators (pp. 153–4); for kunqu’s relationship to an ongoing process of late Ming literati feminisation, see Zuyan Zhou, “The Androgynous Ideal in Scholar-Beauty Romances: A Historical and Cultural View,” in Transgender China, ed. Howard Chiang (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 101–2.

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explicit (physical) and implicit (non-verbal). Such ambiguity in performance may have been necessary in part because of the domestic context of kunqu performances in the late Ming and early Qing, where there were often mixed audiences of men and women, young and old, but it is just as importantly a feature of the plays which embodies their special status in portraying women as desiring subjects, even while the extent of the ‘dread’ varies considerably. As popular figures in contemporary productions, Yan Poxi, Sekong and Chen Miaochang all provide evidence that kunqu continues to reproduce a ­centuries-old and ongoing Chinese performance discourse foregrounding music, gender and sex. Its discursive vocabulary and strategies are intelligible and relevant to audiences still familiar with traditional Chinese expressive culture and operatic traditions, and still living with many of its patriarchal assumptions. Engaging kunqu in its historical and operatic contexts, twentyfirst century Chinese audiences negotiate music and seductresses in their gendered lives and myths, past and present. Historically and today, the stage has served as a place where questions around desire could be raised through skilled use of explicit and implicit communication, producing a unique mix of humor and dread. References Alexander, Jeffery. “Cultural Pragmatics: Social Performance between Ritual and Strategy.” Sociological Theory 22.4 (2004): 527–573. Bai Xianyong 白先勇 ed. Yunxin shuixin Yuzanji 雲心水心玉簪記 [Hearts of Clouds and Water: The Jade Hairpin]. Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 2011. Ding Shumei 丁淑梅. “Qiantan Ding Richang sheju jinshu jinxi 淺談丁日昌設局禁書 禁戲 [A Preliminary Study on Ding Richang’s Institutions on Censoring Licentious Books and Operatic Performances and their Catalogues].” http://wenku.baidu.com/ view/2b95be8d6529647d272852a0.html; accessed June 28, 2014. Dolan, Jill. Presence and Desire: Essays on Gender, Sexuality, Performance. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993. Dolan, Jill. Theatre and Sexuality. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Gao Lian 高濂. Yuzanji 玉簪記 [The Jade Hairpin]. In Liushizhong qu 六十種曲 [Sixty Ming Operas], edited by Mao Jin 毛晉. Shanghai: Guji chubanshe, 1995. Goldman, Andrea S. “Sex versus Violence in ‘I, Sister -in-Law’ Operas.” In Opera and the City: The Politics of Culture in Beijing, 1770–1900, 175–236. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012. Goldman, Andrea S. “The Nun Who Wouldn’t Be: Representations of Female Desire in Two Performance Genres of ‘Si Fan.’ ” Late Imperial China 22.1 (2001): 71–138.

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Goldstein, Joshua. “The Gendering of National Culture, or, The Only Good Woman is a Man,” in Drama Kings: Players and Publics in the Re-creation of Peking Opera 1870–1937, 237–163. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. Guo Shixi 郭時隙. “Kunqu qiqi luoluo shenyi hou huali zhuanshen: wenxiange er zhi yayin 昆曲起起落落申遺後華麗轉身:聞弦歌而知雅音 [Kunqu Rises And Falls, and Grand Transformations after UNESCO Declaration as A Masterpiece of Oral and Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity: Understanding Refined Music after Listening to Its Singing Performance].” http://guoqing.china.com.cn/2013-07/24/ content_29516766_2.htm; uploaded July 24, 2013; accessed July 4, 2014. Hu Ji 胡忌 and Liu Zhizhong 劉致中. Kunju fazhanshi 昆劇發展史 [A History of the Development of Kunqu]. Beijing: Zhongguo xiqu chubanshe, 1989. Huang Yufu 黄育馥. Jingju, qiao he Zhongguo de xingbie guanxi (1902–1937) 京劇, 蹺和中國的性別關係, 1902–1937 [Peking Opera, Operatic Bound-Feet-Shoes and Gender Relationships in China, 1902–1937]. Beijing: Sanlian shuju, 1998. Lam, Joseph S.C. “Music and Masculinities in Late Ming China.” Asian Music 42.1 (2011): 112–134. Lam, Joseph S.C. “Reading Music and Eroticism in Late Ming Texts.” Nan Nü 12.2 (2010): 215–254. Lam, Joseph S.C. “The Presence and Absence of Female Musicians and Music in China.” In Women and Confucian Cultures in Premodern China, Korea, and Japan, edited by Dorothy Ko, JaHyun Kim Haboush and Joan R. Piggot, 97–120. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003. Lau, D.C., trans. Confucius: The Analects. London: Penguin, 1979. Lau, D.C., trans. Mencius. London: Penguin, 1970. Liang Guyin 梁谷音. Liang Guyin huazhuan: wo de kunqu shijjie 梁谷音畫傳: 我的昆曲世界 [An Illustrated Autobiography of Liang Guyin: My Kunqu World]. Shanghai: Wenyi chubanshe, 2009. Liang Guyin 梁谷音. “Niehaiji Sifan 孽海記思凡 [A Sea of Troubles in the Secular World].” In Kunqu baizhong dashi shuoxi 昆曲百種,大師說戲 [One Hundred Kunqu Masterpieces: Grand Masters’ Explanations], vol. 1, 26–39. Changsha: Yuelu shushe, 2014. Lu Eting 陸萼庭. Kunju yanchu shigao 昆劇演出史稿 [Notes Toward a History of Kun Opera Performance]. Shanghai: Wenyi chubanshe, 1980. Qian Bocheng 錢伯城, ed. Baihua shisanjing fu yuanwen 白話十三經附原文 [The Thirteen Classics in Contemporary Chinese, with Original Texts]. Beijing: Guoji wenhua chuban gongsi, 1996). Qian Decang 錢德倉. Zhuibaiqiu 綴百裘 [A Coat Sewn Together with the Best Fur], edited by Wang Xieru 汪協如. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2005. Scott, A.C. “Longing for Worldly Pleasures/ Ssu Fan.” In Traditional Chinese Plays, Vol. 2, 14–39. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969.

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Seagrave, Sterling. Dragon Lady: The Life and Legend of the Last Empress of China. New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1992. Sieber, Patricia. Theaters of Desire: Authors, Readers, and the Reproduction of Early Chinese Song-Drama, 1300–2000. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003. Wang Liqi 王利器. Yuan Ming Qing sandai jinhui xiaoshuo xiqu shiliao 元明清三代禁 毀小説戲曲史料 [Historical Sources on Censored Novels and Dramas in Yuan Ming Qing China]. Shanghai: Guji chubanshe 1981. Wang Xichun 王錫純 ed. “Shuihuji 水滸記 [Song Jiang and his Outlawed Brothers].” In Eyunge qupu 遏云閣曲譜 [Kunqu Scores from the Pavilion of Excellent Singing]. Shanghai: Zhuyitang, 1925. Wang Yijia 王溢嘉. Zhongguo wenhuali de qing yu se 中國文化裏的情與色 [Love and Sex in Chinese Culture]. Beijing: Xinxing chubanshe, 2012. Wenhuabu wenxue yishu yanjiuyuan yinyue yanjiusuo 文化部文學藝術院音樂研究所, compiler. Zhongguo gudai yuelun xuanji 中國古代樂論選集 [A Selective Anthology of Historical Chinese Writings on Music Criticism and Theory]. Beijing: Renmin yinyue chubanshe, 1983). Wu Cuncun. Homoerotic Sensibilities in Late Imperial China. London: Routledge, 2004. Wu Zhou 武舟. Zhongguo jinü wenhuashi 中國妓女文化史 [A Cultural History of Prostitutes in China]. Shanghai: Dongfang chuban zhongxin, 2006. Yang Qiuhong 楊秋紅. Zhongguo gudai guixi yanjiu 中國古代鬼戲研究 [A Study of Ghost Dramas in Traditional China]. Beijing: Zhongguo chuanmei daxu chubanshe, 2009. Yu Zhenfei 俞振飛. Zhenfei qupu 振飛曲谱 [Master Yu Zhenfei’s Kunqu Score]. Shanghai: Wenyi chubanshe, 1982. Yu Zhenfei 俞振飛. “ ‘Qintiao’ cong ‘ya’ dao ‘cui’ 琴挑從呀到啐 [From ‘Ya’ to ‘Cui’ in ‘Zither Seduction’].” In Yu Zhenfei yishu lunji 俞振飛藝術論集 [An Anthology of Writings on Yu Zhenfei’s Performance Artistry], edited by Wang Jiaxi 王家熙 and Xu Yin 許寅, 112–117. Shanghai: Wenyi chubanshe, 1985. Zhang Juzheng 張居正. “Chongni Feiyan 寵昵飛燕 [Doting on Feiyan].” In Dijian tushuo 帝鑑圖說 [The Emperor’s Mirror, Illustrated and Discussed, 1573], 349–352. Zhengzhou: Guji chubanse, 1996. Zhou, Zuyan. “The Androgynous Ideal in Scholar-Beauty Romances: A Historical and Cultural View.” In Transgender China, edited by Howard Chiang, 97–125. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.

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CHAPTER 5

Late Ming Urban Life and Wanton Women in Huang Fangyin’s Short Plays Wu Cuncun In comparison to historical settings, depictions of contemporary life were relatively under-represented within popular narrative and drama in traditional China, and this was particularly the case for drama. Perusal of the plays written in Ming and Qing periods reveals that the majority of storylines in drama were drawn from history.1 Nevertheless, the river of history does not follow a single course, and in the culturally and economically volatile late Ming challenges to conventional thought, literature and drama produced an increasing number of exceptions. Not only were cultural producers more adventurous, the prosperous, bustling urban life of the Yangtze Delta cities in the late-Ming provided writers and dramatists with ample subject matter and inspiration for literary exploration. Urban lives, particularly the lives of non-elite urban residents— their love-, marital- and sexual-lives, as well as their values and life aspirations—increasingly caught writers’ attention. Among the examples of this new literary trend, Chipozi zhuan 痴婆子傳 (A tale of an infatuated woman) can be regarded as an early representative work in narrating a series of sexual adventures of a woman from an unexceptional and relatively modest urban household.2 Unlike most previous erotic fiction, but sharing similarities with 1  Zhuang Yifu 莊一拂, Gudian xiqu cunmu huikao 古典戲曲存目匯考 [Collected notes on extant classical play titles], (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1982). For the brief appearance of “contemporary opera” reflecting political developments between 1573 and 1663, see Paize Keulemans, “Onstage Humour, Offstage Voices: The Politics of the Present in the Contemporary Opera of Li Yu,” Frontiers of History in China 9.2 (2014): 165–201. On the longstanding and pervasive historical aesthetic in Chinese drama, see Li-Ling Hsiao, The Eternal Present of the Past: Illustration, Theatre and Reading in the Wanli Period, 1573–1619 (Leiden: Brill, 2007). 2  The date of Chipozi zhuan remains undetermined, however internal evidence suggests that it belongs to the last two decades of the sixteenth century, see introduction and modern critical edition in Chen Qinghao 陳慶浩 and Wang Qiugui 王秋桂, eds., Siwuxie huibao 思無邪匯寳 [No Heterodox Thoughts Compendium], vol. 24 (Taipei: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1995), 77–149. For an introduction and English translation, see Mark Stevenson and Wu Cuncun, trans., “A Tale of an Infatuated Woman,” Renditions, 58 (2002): 47–97.

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many other works that would accumulate through the late Ming, Chipozi zhuan no longer ventured into the lives of royal consorts, concubines of wealthy families, or courtesans, but chose a very ordinary household setting. The main protagonist is the wife of a petty merchant, and the plot simply details her sexual relationships with her cousin, father- and brothers-in-law, servants, an actor, a monk, and her son’s tutor, all men from one level or another of what might be called ‘the common social strata’ (pingmin 平民, baixing 百姓). Following such early experiments in the classical idiom, and in-step with collections of vernacular fiction such as those collated (and written) by Feng Menglong (馮夢龍, 1574–1645), an identifiable vernacular genre focused on urban commoners came to prevail in late-Ming fiction. In much the same way as occurred with fiction, playwrights were also shifting their attention to contemporary concerns and set at least some of their plays in their own time, dramatizing contemporary concerns. Turning to Huang Fangyin 黃方胤 (fl. 1596), we find that the plays in his Short Plays from the Studio of Wayside Flowers 陌花軒雜劇 exemplify this trend in plainly portraying townspeople’s venal and carnal appetites,3 and in this respect the collection resembles quite closely collections of Ming short fiction, such as Sanyan 三言 (Feng Menglong’s Three Words), Erpai 二拍 (Ling Mengchu’s Two Slaps), Longyang yishi 龍陽逸史 (The forgotten tales of Longyang), and Huanxi yuanjia 歡喜冤家 (Enemies enamoured). Portraying life in the quarters of ordinary townspeople, its plots also focus on the ‘the sorry state of the world’ which it portrays as the open urban contest for meeting sexual and material desires. Investigating Huang’s repeatedly revisited motif of the ‘wanton woman’ of the city, this paper argues that questions around women and desire were part of an emerging Chinese modernity in the late Ming and goes on to consider how this emphasis impacts on the cultural and historical significance of his little studied collection. From comments made by Huang’s contemporaries it appears Short Plays from the Studio of Wayside Flowers were popular and well-known at one point in 3  Huang Fanyin, Mohuaxuan zaju 陌花軒雜劇 [Short Plays from the Studio of Wayside Flowers] (Beijing: Zhongguo shudian, 1994), 2a. Hereafter MHXZJ. The influence of farce/ skit genres such as found in Song zaju 雜劇 and Jin yuanben 院本 survived in Ming performances that linked the portrayal of common people with humour and the entertainment quarters (the yuanben, literally ‘bordello editions,’ had an obvious connection to this milieu). See Stephen H. West, “Playing with Food: Performance, Food, and the Aesthetics of Artificiality in the Sung and Yuan,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 57.1 (1997): 67, 106; see also, Stephen H. West and Wilt L. Idema, Monks, Bandits, Lovers, and Immortals: Eleven Early Chinese Plays (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2010), ix–xxvi (Introduction).

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the late Ming period. The first contemporaneous record is by Zhou Hui 周暉 in his Jinling suoshi 金陵瑣事, first published in 1610.4 Other early records are found in Kezuo zhuiyu 客座贅語, published by Gu Qiyuan 顧起元 (1565–1628) in 1617,5 as well as in Yuanshantang jupin 遠山堂劇品, by the famous Ming drama critic Qi Biaojia 祁彪佳 (1602–1645), who comments on the volume’s strengths and weaknesses.6 Despite this early reception history, the collection more or less disappears from sight through the entire Qing period, attracting no interest from either literati or popular readers, and no record exists to indicate that the plays were ever produced on stage. The two earliest extant editions of the collection are both from the Shunzhi period (1644–1661). One is a standalone volume. The other is found in Zou Shijin’s (鄒式金 fl. 1640s) Zaju xinbian (雜劇新編 A new collection of zaju plays),7 indicating that the plays in this collection were all written in the late Ming period, while not early enough to be included in Shen Tai’s Sheng Ming zaju (盛明雜劇 Zaju of the flourishing Ming, 1629).8 Given both versions share exactly the same format and content, we can assume reprinting by the publisher in response to the collection’s popularity. After the Shunzhi period, as already noted above, the collection disappears from view: no reprints are known and only very occasional mentions in bibliographies are encountered—until Zaju xinbian was reprinted by the Dongshi Songfengshi press 董氏誦芬室 in the 1930s. Short Plays from the Studio of Wayside Flowers was then reprinted again in the 1950s and 1990s in Beijing, each time in thread-bound form as part of projects preserving antique books from extinction. The modern reprinted editions were issued in very limited numbers and have received little attention from cultural or literary historians; nor has the collection been reset in any of the modern editions, and so available copies are either early Qing editions in the collections of a few Chinese libraries, or reprints of twentieth-century facsimile editions.

4  Zhou Hui 周暉, Jinling suoshi 金陵瑣事 [Nanjing Trivia] (Nanjing: Nanjing chubanshe, 2007), 83. 5  Gu Qiyuan 顧起元, Kezuo zhuiyu 客座贅語 [Visitor’s Gossip] (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1987), 257–8 (juan 8). 6  Qi Biaojia, Yushantang jupin 遠山堂劇品 [Comments on Plays from the Distant Mountain Studio], late-Ming hand-copied edition, 20b. 7  Also known as Zaju sanji (雜劇三集 A three volume collection of zaju plays) in some bibliographies of the Qing period. 8  Xia Linxi 夏林夕, “Chongyin xuyan 重印序言 [Reprint Preface],” MHXZJ, 2a.

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Huang Fangyin and his Short Plays from the Studio of Wayside Flowers

Given the relative absence of academic discussion of Huang’s Short Plays it is important that we first review the background to its production.9 As is the case for many creators of popular literature from the Ming dynasty, the details of Huang’s life and writings are rarely recorded, and even distinguishing his names remains problematic. His works, when they appear in collections and bibliographies, are variously signed as Huang Fangyin, Huang Fangru 黃方儒, Xingkuang 醒狂, Huang Sijun 黃四君, or Xingkuang Sanren 醒狂散人; it is hard to ascertain which are his formal name and courtesy name as there are various forms in different documents, and no confirmation from any contemporary texts. However, from the preface contributed to Short plays by the playwright’s friend Ma Lihua, as well from information provided in bibliographical writings such as Qi Biaojia’s Yuanshantang jupin, or Zou Shijin’s Zaju xinbian, we can be sure that Xingkuang (Awakened Madman) was the sobriquet by which he was best known. From his collection of plays and a lost collection of poetry we know that he used the studio name “Studio of Wayside Flowers” (Mohuaxuan 陌花軒). “Wayside flowers” is an image that fits the marked libertine values expressed in his plays—all characters in his plays resemble wayside flowers— common and wild.10 From his contemporaries, we also learn that Huang was from Nanjing and grew up in a literati household with libertine leanings. Both his father and four brothers were well-known poets, lyricists, or dramatist. His father Huang Jia (黃甲 fl. 1550s) passed the imperial metropolitan examination in 1551, serving in a number of official posts thereafter and rising, at his peak, to Salt Distribution Commissioner. As a famous poet of his day, Huang Jia was described by his contemporaries as a talented but arrogant and rude man. Both Gu Qiyuan 顧起元 (1565–1628) and Qian Qianyi 錢謙益 (1582–1664) admired him for 9  Yenna Wu cites Huang’s play Junei (The henpecked husband) in her early essay on the shrewish wife, “The Inversion of Marital Hierarchy: Shrewish Wives and Henpecked husbands in Seventeenth-Century Chinese Literature,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 48.2 (1988): 363–382, 373; see also her translation of a brief opening segment of the same play in The Chinese Virago: A Literary Theme (Cambridge, MA: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1995), 191–2. 10  This studio name was also recorded in a number of late-Ming and early-Qing biji or catalogues, such as the biji by Gu Qiyuan and Zhou Hui, as well as Huang Yuji 黃虞稷 (1626– 1692)’s Qianqingtang shumu 千頃堂書目 [Bibliography of Qianqing Studio, 1680], vol. 24 (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1990), 653; it is also noted by the drama critic Jiao Xun 焦循 (1763–1820) in his Jushuo 劇說 [Theatre topics, early 1800s] (Hefei: Huangshan shushe, 2008), 444. EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 11/4/2019 7:50 PM via TOWSON UNIVERSITY AN: 1507598 ; Stevenson, Mark J., Wu, Cuncun.; Wanton Women in Late-imperial Chinese Literature : Models, Genres, Subversions and Traditions Account: towson.main.eds

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achieving a unique diction and innovative approach to poetics, certainly outside the fashion of the day; however, this also attracted some criticism from Qian Qianyi as displaying excessive faith in his own achievements while ignoring developments of poetry taking place around him.11 Gu Qiyuan recalls a quite revealing anecdote: His character tends to be contrary and only two or three people were in regular contact with him in his hometown. In his autumn years he often spent time with Liao Wenguang of the Ministry of Works and they would enjoy a drink and poetry together. One day Liao offered him advice to the effect that the word ‘zhentan’12 would best be deleted from his anthology. Huang replied with a tirade of expletives and cut of all connection with him. 性好忤物,居鄉與往還者不二三人。晚與廖工部文光善,數共觴詠。 一日,廖規其集中有「陣毯」等語,宜刪,遂大詬罵,絕之。 13

These same traits were passed to his four equally famous, talented, and rebellious sons, none of which made any concerted effort to pass the imperial examinations or seek an official career. Commencing life as members of a high-ranking official’s family all his sons pursued literary or artistic interests, each authored at least one collection of poetry, and all ended their lives in miserable poverty or illness. These things we know from several mentions of the Huang family in late Ming jottings, but none of the sources provide the usual life details. It may now be impossible to finally ascertain accurate dates of birth or death or complete information on marriages, careers, or lists of writings. According to Gu Qiyuan’s Kezuo zhuiyu, Huang Fangyin was the third son of Huang Jia (although Ma Lihua, the author of the preface, refers to him as “The Fourth”, sijun 四君, see below), and was “resigned to failure,” “mocking the world and its 11  Qian Qianyi 錢謙益, Liechao shiji xiaozhuan 列朝詩集小傳 [Brief notes on poetry collections from the Ming reign periods] (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1983), 456. 12  The word is found in a description of a pre-marriage defloration rites recorded in Cambodia in the late thirteenth century by Zhou Daguan (周達觀, fl. 1297) and found in his Zhenla fengtuji (真臘風土記) [A Record of the Land and Customs of Chenla]; see Zhou Daguan, A Record of Cambodia: The Land and Its People, trans. Peter Harris (Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books, 2007). The Khmer word is possibly derived from the Sanskrit kanyādāna, “giving a girl [or virgin/daughter] in marriage,” more usually the offering of the bride to the groom by the father; Monier-Williams Sanskrit-English Dictionary © Gérard Huet 1994–2014 (http://sanskrit.inria.fr/MW/56.html). 13  Gu Qiyuan, Kezuo zhuiyu, 257. EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 11/4/2019 7:50 PM via TOWSON UNIVERSITY AN: 1507598 ; Stevenson, Mark J., Wu, Cuncun.; Wanton Women in Late-imperial Chinese Literature : Models, Genres, Subversions and Traditions Account: towson.main.eds

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ways with wry humour.” Gu also lists two anthologies: The Small Anthology from the Studio of Wayside Flowers (Mohuaxuan xiaoji 陌花軒小集) and Lyrics from the Alleyways (Quxiang ciyu 曲巷詞餘). In the early Qing, Huang Yuji’s Qianqingtang shumu listed two of Huang’s anthologies: The Small Anthology from the Studio of Wayside Flowers listed under bieji (individual anthologies), and The Small Anthology of Lyrics from the Studio of Wayside Flowers 陌花軒小詞, listed under ciqu (詞曲 lyrics and libretti), which likely includes Short Plays from the Studio of Wayside Flowers, or is even the same collection under a different title, given that no existing book with this title has been found. Huang Yuji also lists the works under two different names, and, despite the uncommon studio name, may not have noticed they were by the same author when putting his bibliography together.14 On opening Huang Fangyin’s collection of short plays, what is immediately striking is that the single preface to the book was composed by one Ma Lihua 馬麗華, courtesy name Yingying 盈盈, a courtesan from the entertainment quarters of Qinhuai, Nanjing, who identifies herself as one of the playwright’s friends. It is highly unusual, even in the libertine late Ming, that a literatus should invite a courtesan to compose a preface for his anthology. Given that Ma Lihua does not appear in any of the courtesan ranking books of the period, the invitation from Huang to contribute the preface appears to be based on friendship, rather than for the purpose of inviting attention. The preface itself is short and colloquial in tone: Awakened Madman, Huang the Fourth, is the epitome of a dashing young gentleman. In the brief time we have known each other sharing beautiful days and moonlight, raising toasts and singing requests, my songs were often accompanied by his applause. He presented me with his Short Plays from the Studio of Wayside Flowers to read, and before I had reached the end I found myself filled with admiration. So marvellously does he describe the sorry state of this world, one is left aghast! “It does not tell of anyone in particular,” he told me, but I answered, “Isn’t it more the case it tells of everyone?” It is just like him to be so thoughtful and use pseudonyms. Performed for the aristocracy they would not raise offence, sung in the common quarters they may instruct. Carefully considering the above, can anyone say these plays are merely aimed at amusing theatre audiences? Not in my opinion. Contributed by Yingying, Ma Lihua of Qinhuai15 14  Huang Yuji, Qianqingtang shumu, 653, 787. 15   M HXZJ, 1a.

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醒狂黃四君蓋翩翩佳公子也。儂竊辱一日之雅,風晨月夕,舉白命 歌,多君稱賞。因出《陌花軒雜劇》示儂,捧讀未終,令人鼓掌。 不 謂塵寰情態,被君三寸舌盡而吐矣。君曰:“匪有所指。”儂則 曰:“殆甚于十指哉。”第假而名,用存忠厚耳。奏之王公之前不  為褻,歌之閭里有所懲。然則斯刻也,詎徒廣戲場一粲已耶?儂所弗 信矣。 秦淮盈盈馬麗華志

Brief as it is, Ma’s preface is instructive. If it was indeed written by her, and there is always the possibility that paratextual contributions are composed by authors themselves, we may notice the following: 1) she is a singsong girl or courtesan, and Huang is one of her customers as well as something of a friend, 2) as well as being friends they share similar views on the society of their day, 3) the inclusion of dialect and colloquialisms (儂,詎,弗) may indicate a woman with limited education, 4) she reads Huang’s short plays as holding up a truthful mirror to the world of urban commoners at the time, and 5), that Huang was a young man at the time (i.e. under forty).

‘Wanton Women’ in Short Plays from the Studio of Wayside Flowers and Questions of Modernity

There are seven plays included in Short plays from the Studio of Wayside Flowers: Leaning in the Doorway (Yi men 倚門), Serial Monogamy (Zaijiao 再醮), The Licentious Monk (Yinseng 淫僧), Illicit Rendezvous (Touqi 偷期), Training a Prostitute (Duji 督妓), The Catamite (Luantong 孌童), and A Henpecked Husband (Junei 懼内). The titles alone are enough to make it clear that Huang designed the plays around a unifying central theme of transgression of sexual and gender norms, a theme the plays share many with late-Ming erotic fiction while never being quite as explicit. Only the first is in four acts (along the lines of ‘classic’ zaju), the remainder are all single act plays (along the lines of yuanben). In terms of artistry they can be said on the whole to have little merit; plots, arias, and dialogue are perfunctory and lack craft.16 The significance of 16  As Tian Yuan Tan explains, these short farces were typically “characterised by coarse and often bawdy humour, [and] often relied more on actors’ performances than on texts per se for their effectiveness on stage,” Songs of Contentment and Transgression: Discharged Officials and Literati Communities in Sixteenth-Century North China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2010), 212. This characterisation of yuanben was originally put forward by Wilt Idema, “Yüan-pen as a Minor Form of Dramatic Literature in

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this collection, however, is not to be found in its artistry, but rather in the representation of a socio-cultural sensibility which is evident through a number of the devices the plays employ. Most obviously, the plays shift focus decidedly away from genteel complexities of gentry living and turn to consider questions of love, marriage, prostitution and sexuality among the lower classes, particular those it deems “scoundrels” and “trollops.” Verging on class analysis, this is an additional point of difference with most fiction and drama of the time. In this respect it can be said that Huang’s artistry is directed at capturing an earthy humour that is allowed to remain in tension with and show through the moral message being conveyed. This injects the plays with an overall ironic tone. Secondly, the themes of each play in this collection never transcend sex and money, which are absolutely intertwined both in the unfolding action and in the minds of scoundrels and trollops. While norms of sex and marriage are put to the test, the search for satisfaction in that realm is forever linked to questions of liquidity. On this score the standard scorn reserved for women who pursue wealth before love is not brought down upon the protagonists of these plays—protagonists who have virtually nothing yet desire almost everything, and who believe everything has its price. This sense that life is a marketplace devoid of, or even in no need of, traditional standards or measures is found to some extent in other genres of late-Ming erotic writing or pornography, where it was also something new, prefiguring modern anxieties around urban anomie. These features will become clearer though a few examples. The terms for ‘wanton women’ in Ming texts are usually dangfu or yinfu, the former carrying connotations of being “loose”, the latter of being “predatory”, and both terms include any woman portrayed as being unable or unwilling to control her desires. In traditional poetry, fiction, prose, and drama, images of wanton women fell into three categories: 1) court beauties, such as Empress Wu Zetian and the imperial consorts Yang Guifei and Zhao Feiyan, 2) concubines in wealthy polygamous households, such as Pan Jinlian, and 3) women from the entertainment quarters, courtesans and prostitutes. While the terms dangfu and yinfu could be understood to apply to prostitutes (who were understood in the main to be in the trade as a result of moral weakness), they were rarely directed at them, and were more usually applied to adult women who pursued sexual satisfaction without regard to social or moral norms. In late-Ming literature, as has already been noted, there was a new focus on women from ordinary or even ‘middle-class’ commoners’ households, a shift the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries,” Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews 6.1/2 (1984): 53–75, 68, where he is also arguing that the formal differences between zaju and yuanben had been narrowing during the period.

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that reflects an interest in urban life as well as direct or everyday experience. Wanton women, too, begin to pop-up in the literary neighbourhood as part of a fuller social landscape—no longer distant and fabulous like Empress Wu Zetian, they are now the girl or woman down the lane. While authors continue to frame their stories within moral homilies, we find that alongside outright condemnation authors tend to be more interested in locating wanton women’s behaviour within a broader set of social negotiations. This latter trend is particularly obvious in the short tale collection Huanxi yuanjia, where stories of women (and men, we should not forget) engaging in extra-marital affairs portray sexual misbehaviour as an inevitable feature of city life. Not disappearing altogether, ideals of chastity recede into the background and are replaced by recognition of everyday practicalities. The women might be temptingly passionate, but they are equally calculating, a trait associated in these works with small-traders and the labouring classes. This downward social shift in literary representation, however, is far less generally evident when we turn to drama, where the preference for historical themes in the period remained very strong. Apart from in the minor forms already identified, zaju and yuanben, there is virtually no sign that the trend, so obvious in short fiction, had a comparable impact on plays, and Huang’s collection is therefore important for rounding out our understanding of Ming drama. The same observation may explain why there is no record of his plays ever having been performed. The setting for all the works contained in Huang’s Short Plays is the everyday world of late-Ming townsfolk. With the exception of two plays, The Catamite (which has no female roles) and A Henpecked Husband, all the chief women protagonists appearing in the remaining plays are in the wanton women mould. Three plays—Leaning in the Doorway, Serial Monogamy, and Illicit Rendezvous—contain Huang’s most concentrated treatments of the wanton woman theme. As women with uncontainable or frustrated desire, their search for pleasure leads them to look beyond their husbands, and each finds her own unique solution. Madam Chu, in Leaning in the Doorway, indulges her desires via prostitution, using her husband to rope in customers; Madame Ding, in Serial Monogamy, divorces and remarries repeatedly, and she is only eighteen and already looking for a fourth husband; and Mrs Fang, in Illicit Rendezvous, simply pursues satisfaction through adultery. Despite a certain sympathy for his subject matter, the playwright is clearly scornful of each of these ‘types’ of wanton women, as he also is of venal catamites and predatory monks (and in the case of monks, the women who succumb to them); nevertheless, instead of deploying stock moral formulae he resorts to comedy and ridicule. This differs considerably from wanton women in the earlier stories of Zhao Feiyan or Wu Zetian, where wanton women are

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evil and threatening; now simply detestable, they are a morally regrettable but expected part of life in the city, and as I have argued elsewhere in relation to folksong, this matter-of-fact treatment of sexuality fits in with other evidence we have of sexual codes among the urban crowds.17 The appearance of a similar sensibility in these plays reveals something of the influence urban social change was having on cultural values in the last decades of the sixteenth century and the first half of the seventeenth. Leaning in the Doorway tells the story of Wang En and his wife, Madam Chu, two lazy spendthrifts who are faced with starvation after selling off their last possessions. Wang suggests his pretty wife trap a wealthy man into supporting them, explaining that he is happy to pimp for her as well as wait on any guests she brings home. His wife is happy with this proposition, her only concern being that her husband may live to regret the arrangement. When they finally agree to the plan each swears a vow; the husband to “catch a generous customer,” and Madam Chu to “to give his penis hell.”18 Going ahead with the plan, Madam Chu soon brings one Bu Chengqi through their door. A long-time admirer, his setup with Madam Chu resembles one of lovers more than prostitution, and as well as satisfying Madam Chu’s lusty nature it also puts food on the table. She describes her pleasure with the arrangement in song: I am always ready to last the whole night, behind-the-curtain bliss enjoyed by candlelight. May eternal harmony spring from our carnal love, superior to the mundane love shared by husband and wife.19 終霄準備著,繡幃中燈花報,永和諧鸞也麼交。比著那糟糠情分  外好。

The convenient arrangement runs into trouble when Wu Ren and Wu Yi, two local ruffians, become jealous of Bu Chengqi’s good luck and decide to make a bid for a share of the action. Not having the kind of resources Bu has, they instead attempt to blackmail the three, but that backfires when Wang, Chu and Bu present them with a united front. The brothers then turn to the magistrate, prosecuting the trio in the name of morality, and the adulterous trio 17  Wu Cuncun, “ ‘It Was I Who Lured the Boy’: Commoner Women, Intimacy and the Sensual Body in the Song Collections of Feng Menglong (1574–1646),” Nan Nü: Men, Women and Gender in China 12.2 (2010): 311–43. 18  Literally, “work on his gristle until it snaps”; MHXZJ, 5a. 19   M HXZJ, 8a.

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are quickly punished. However, the magistrate also turns on the two brothers; issuing them with a good caning, he announces: You scoundrels! It is for each individual to sweep the snow from in front of their own gate, it’s none of your business if there is ice on a neighbour’s roof. You’d best get busy making your own living, whoever said you could take advantage of another man’s wife for free? ([Aria to the] previous tune) With no occupation you get by on extortion; Breaking into Wang’s house demanding lusty libation; You caused this uproar purely out of your own frustration; Thus you brought a fake accusation. I’m issuing a beating so you’ll never bother with ice on anyone’s roof again!20 你這光棍!各人各掃門前雪,莫管他人屋上霜。你自做你的營生,誰 教你白著手要奸人家婆子。 〔前腔〕你生涯不習逞豪強,撞入王家索 酒嘗,祗因不遂肆猖狂。訐告瞞天狀。我打你個從今後休管他人屋  上霜。

Rather than making an example of the adulterers and calling for the enforcement of moral standards, the scene in the court ends with the magistrate railing against those who would meddle in others’ privacy or, in the words of the proverb, “bother with ice on a neighbour’s roof.” While I would not say these are the thoughts of the playwright exactly, the libretto is very finely crafted at this point and it is clear he wants the audience to share in the pleasure of seeing the scoundrels taught a good lesson. As for adulterers, so long as no party is offended, what others consent to do should be left to them. If a reluctance to enter into moral judgment is expressed only indirectly in Leaning in the Doorway, Serial Monogamy boldly leaves no one in doubt. In this play Madam Ding, only eighteen year’s old, is already in search of her fourth husband after all her previous marriages have failed, and all for the same reason, because she was left unsatisfied in the bedroom. When Madame Ding makes her entrance she delivers what must have been a shockingly brazen monologue for the time: What a delight to be born a woman; with an eye for the best looking and a loathing of boors, I trade men in at a regular rate. When husband 20   M HXZJ, 3b.

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Zhang didn’t suite my taste, I left and walked through Mr Li’s gate. Now I’ve found Mr Li is quite a pain, so I’m off to visit the go-between again. [Laughs] How laughable am I, having reached eighteen and never yet married a Mr Right. Either they were not to my liking, or I just ran into some bad luck. I’ve not suffered want of food nor clothes, it’s just that our sex life has been uninspired. Of fifteen sessions through the night, seven are too quick and eight miss the mark. Giving him a shove to get him off, I’m left frustrated and biting my nails. Is it only I who is carried away by lust? The woman next door answered me thus: “I would happily starve for just a taste of bliss.”21 為人喜作婦人身,愛俏嫌村頻換郎。張郎不遂心,拋開嫁李門。李門 不遂,我又向冰人奔。〔作大笑介〕堪笑奴奴年十八,嫁夫不著把嘴 咂。不是他不中奴心,便是奴奴没緣法。不少吃來不少穿,上得床來 興不發。一宵雲雨十五遭,七剛進門八外塌。雙手推郎下得身, 急 得奴奴咬指甲。豈是色心偏我重,鄰家大娘把話答。他道寧可不吃 飯, 嘗著滋味快活殺。

The play is a comedy, and Huang is out to get as many laughs as he can, but through Madam Ding he manages at the same time to make satisfaction in the bedroom a plausible foundation for marriage. Through constructing a parody he also exposes the censure women were ordinarily expected to endure, with Madam Ding behaving and thinking independently and in many ways like a man. Through her own account given to go-between Auntie Yang, we learn that her first marriage was arranged by her parents to a fifty year old merchant, and soon ended because he was “too old to do what was needed”; she then married another merchant, and things went well until she tired of him being constantly away on business. In her third marriage her husband soon learns of her previous marriages and rejects her in favour of regular visits to the entertainment quarters. Naturally feeling slighted, Madam Ding again decides to leave her husband and seek the assistance of a go-between on her own behalf. Consulting Auntie Yang, she is very frank as to her motivations: Auntie Yang: He may despise you, but has he ever deprived you of food or clothes? Madam Ding: The food and clothes are more than sufficient. Auntie Yang: In that case, I suggest you simply let him do as he likes. 21   M HXZJ, 23a.

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Madam Ding: Auntie Yang! Being hitched to a man, isn’t it all about doing the deed? I’ve not turned into a glutton, so why all this talk about food?22 〔凈〕他既怪你,可少你穿吃麼?    〔 丑〕恁教食用豐腴。  〔 凈〕既不少 你穿吃,你隨他便了。  〔丑〕楊媽,嫁漢嫁漢,原只靠幹。誰害餓 癆,只管講飯!

This passage conveys two messages. Firstly, at a time when all women were expected to accept the dictum “faithful unto death” (congyi er zhong), Madam Ding is comically oblivious and convinced that her quest for a compatible partner in the bedroom is only natural; secondly, Madam Ding’s view that “Being hitched to a man, isn’t it all about doing the deed?” alludes to the popular saying “Being hitched to a man, provides clothes to wear and food to eat” ( jiahan jiahan, chuanyi chifan 嫁漢嫁漢,穿衣吃飯). Madam Ding’s modification of the usual formula redirects the emphasis of marriage in a scene that manages to be comical while at the same time announcing an urban woman’s new attitude to marriage. Unable to accept her modern ideas, Auntie Yang decides to trick Madam Ding by recommending the chaste widow Mrs Zheng as a good matchmaker for Ding to consult, hoping Madam Ding will receive some moral re-education from the widow. Mrs Zheng has been living alone since her husband passed away thirty years prior and her observance of widowhood has brought her much honour in the town. Her entrance monologue provides the audience or reader with her background: My husband was a student who sadly died when young. I don’t have parents-in-law, neither have I brothers-in-law. I live in this remote house, enduring a life of lonely widowhood. Whenever the weather is inclement I retire alone beneath my quilt; autumn moonlight and spring blossoms have completely passed me by. Bodily I have not yet died, yet I long to enter my husband’s grave. A good thirty years I have lived this way now! When I’ll die and go to meet my man, for now I cannot ken. How miserable my life will be ’til then!23 夫君游泮,不幸早亡。上無公姑,下鮮叔伯。煢煢一室,凉凉獨 守。 疾風暴雨,嫠擁孤衾。秋月春花,如同過客。形雖未亡,心藏夫 壙。今經三十餘年,不知何日眼光落地,得晤所天。好苦殺人也。 22   M HXZJ, 26b. 23   M HXZJ, 29b.

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Mrs Zheng’s chaste widowhood gains her respect and reputation throughout the town and she invests great pride in setting a moral example, even though the price she pays is a life of dreary isolation: “a chaste widow now for over thirty years, down the streets and lanes can there be any who do not know of it” (老身是守寡之人,經今三十餘年。一街兩巷,人誰不知?).24 This actually becomes her purpose in continuing to live, even though that purpose itself leads her to deny almost all that human life ordinarily entails. When Mrs Zheng realizes that Madam Ding has mistaken her as a matchmaker—and furthermore that she has already married three times—she is deeply affronted and becomes noticeably angry. Madam Ding’s attempt to comfort her—“Are we not both women, fragile and easily broken, why argue the point?” (奴和你總紅裙,磽磽易缺辨誰真)25—only causes Mrs Zheng deeper offence at the immodesty of her attitudes. Their meeting escalates into a battle between morality and wantonness: Mrs Zheng: You disgraceful hussy, you are putting yourself on the market! Madam Ding: You lonely old widow, you’re no more than the wife of a ghost! Mrs Zheng: All that gloss in your hair and make-up, you’re no different to a cheap harlot! Madam Ding: You’re so sallow and gaunt, you could be a skeleton escaped from the cemetery. Mrs Zheng: Inspected once by Mr Zhang, and then looked over by Mr Li, you’ve no face left to feel SHAME! Madam Ding: Never touched by the breeze, never wet by the rain, you pass the nights with no affection. Mrs Zheng: Still but a mere child you’ve been through three husbands, only a slut would be so unrepentant. Madam Ding: With hair as grey as yours you will know that old stock never sells. Mrs Zheng: Cheating men of their bride-price and taking advantage of them, no wonder the skin on your face is the same as on your cunt! Madame Ding: You are a curse on your husband! Hanger-on without an heir! What disastrous karma you must have!26 24   M HXZJ, 29 b. 25   M HXZJ, 30a. The set phrase should normally be 嶢嶢易缺 (yaoyao yi que, the unyielding are easily damaged). It is not clear if Huang intends a pun at this point or if 磽磽 (qiaoqiao, thin) stands in for 嶢嶢. 26   M HXZJ, 31b–32a.

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〔老旦〕你傷風敗俗,是一個販漢!    〔 丑〕你孤辰寡宿,是一個鬼妻!   〔老旦〕你油頭粉面,好一似瓦楞上的娼妓!    〔 丑〕你黃皮寡瘦,好 一似墳堆里的骷髏! 〔老旦〕你張來相,李來看,賣臉兒不知羞恥!   〔丑〕你風不吹,雨不灑,夜深時沒個溫存!   〔老旦〕你年少連更三 主,賤肉尚不回頭! 〔丑〕你鬢髮已經半白,老貨定難出產! 〔老旦〕   你驅拜錢,嘗飯碗,臉皮好似𣬼皮! 〔丑〕你妨老公,焦尾巴,在世真 同現世!

A shouting match such as this one between women was unheard of in Chinese drama—a dialogue that rehearses the positions of the wanton and chaste woman.27 Does the playwright intend anyone to win in this exchange between what might be thought of as the extremes of dissolution and chastity? While the insults emanating from both sides no doubt reinforce conservative patriarchal positions toward women, the intent is aimed at revealing how unnatural and inhuman the widespread chastity cult governing women’s lives at the time was. Neither party could be said to emerge with their dignity intact, the chaste widow is made to look inhuman and spectral, and her complaints are shriller and more obscene. While the shamelessness of Madam Ding’s behaviour is also uncovered, she remains human and alive, and Huang might even want his audience to consider admiring her spirit and courage. Huang’s play Illicit Rendezvous exemplifies a similar argument that may be considered sympathetic towards shameless women. Taking the stage, Mrs Fang, a woman from good family, frankly confesses her desires, affairs and motives: I am only twenty-eight and have been married to my husband for ten years. I cannot control the burning passion within, and my husband alone cannot quench it. If I work him too hard, I worry he might fall ill. Instead, I am forced to call sweet messages under the moon and stars in search of lovers’ trysts. As days and nights went by I made several acquaintances, and pass the night with them every few days, about which I’ve said enough, just a few understanding lovers who meet me in secret.28

27   But see Wilt Idema’s reference to an operatic showdown between Cui Yingying (崔鶯鶯) and Li Yaxian (李亞仙) (and their maid-servants) in the yuanben play by Li Kaixian (李開先, 1502–1568), Yuanlin wumeng (園林午夢, Noontime dream in a garden grove); Idema, “Yüan-pen as a Minor Form,” 64–5. 28   M HXZJ, 42ab.

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Wu 奴家方氏,年方二十八歲。嫁歸夫主已經十年。爭奈慾心燔熾,興趣 饒長。夫主一人,不足以當之。欲待強制,又恐成病。只得星前月 下,燕語鶯期。朝去暮來,結成相識。三五信宿者,不必言矣。所有 一二知心,時時密約。

A light-hearted comedy, Illicit Rendezvous makes no attempt to judge Mrs Fang, and indeed the play ends happily as she continues to enjoy her lovers still undiscovered by her husband. As I have noted elsewhere, a happy ending is almost unknown for wanton women in Ming writing.29 While it is something of an oddity that Huang has written a group of plays that go as far as they do in re-evaluating questions of women, sexuality and personal choice, we could also say it is not entirely unexpected, particularly within the urban milieu of late Ming Lower Yangtze cities. Very similar storylines and themes of adultery recur throughout the late Ming short story collection Enemies Enamoured, including several that decline to inflict or express harsh judgement upon the female protagonists. Enemies enamoured may even be said to go even further than Huang’s Short Plays, allowing unfaithful women—in the stories, almost always urban commoners—to avoid the demonization so common in traditional fiction; more often than not they instead appear as independent and principled heroines. Such women are made to exemplify a new or at least alternative moral standard that is made to appear pragmatic and suited to commoners’ lives, while at the same we see them being portrayed as having the courage to challenge local representatives of conservative social norms. In the narratives collected in Enemies enamoured chastity does not survive as the cornerstone of women’s morality.30 If this trend represents a nascent cultural modernity, there are signs that the lower classes were as equally responsible for the shift as the literati, who, if Huang is representative, where also being forced by city life to take into account a new view of the world. Or should we attempt to read Huang as parodying wanton women? Given that the play comes with the endorsement of a woman of that very same class (and accepting that it is not an invention), such a reading is an unlikely one. Huang’s women may be shameless, but the plays betray an unusual thoughtfulness in regard to how things look from their position within Ming 29  Wu Cuncun and Mark Stevenson, “Karmic Retribution and Moral Didacticism in Erotic Fiction from the Late Ming and Early Qing,” Ming Qing Studies n.v. (2011): 467–486. 30  Xihu yuyin zhuren 西湖漁隱主人, Huanxi yuanjia 歡喜冤家 [Enemies enamoured], in Siwuxie huibao 思無邪匯寳 [No Heterodox Thoughts Compendium], Vol 10–11, edited by Chen Qinghao 陳慶浩 and Wang Qiugui 王秋桂 (Taipei: Encyclopedia Britannica Ltd, 1994).

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society, even going so far has to have them fight back . . . and win. Huang is even able to imagine women’s solidarity gathering around this issue. In Serial Monogamy, when Madam Ding tries to persuade Mrs Zheng to abandon her moralising she says, “Hasn’t it always been we women who are fated to suffer?” (由來薄命是紅顏).31 In Illicit Rendezvous, Mrs Fang justifies her own choices with reference to double standards: What a hilarious place the world is; When nine out of ten men are rakes, A woman need just have one lover And all hold her up to mock and hiss.32 好笑人間不平事,十個男兒九放肆。若教我輩結交人,眾口嘵嘵便  譏刺。

While this kind of challenge is in part made possible by the libertine literati currents in late Ming culture, they would also appear to be a product of the new pace of life and concomitant anxieties. Life is short, and the usual duties and responsibilities, let alone the usual marital strictures, only get in the way of making the best of what you have. The pleasures of the city also appear to bring new forms of agency—at least, as I have argued elsewhere, for women outside the tightly supervised confines of gentry households.33 Huang’s women share a close kinship with the labouring women of Feng Menglong’s folksongs as well as the female protagonists in Enemy enamoured already noted. In Serial Monogamy, Madame Ding is clear eyed about her motivation for repeatedly re-marrying: Faded beauty is impossible to restore, And so life is just like a puppet show. How transient our sorrows and pleasures are; Why keep one’s bed as empty as a bier?34 紅顏難再得,如登傀儡場,悲歡一霎盡,怎守活靈床?

31   M HXZJ, 30b. 32   M HXZJ, 42a. 33  Wu, “ ‘It Was I Who Lured the Boy’ ”. 34   M HXZJ, 26a.

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A few pages later she also remarks: With all consideration, I dread my youth going to waste, And shyly I go in secret to seek a go-between’s advice.35 尋思怕誤青春,含嬌悄自覓冰人。

Young Madam Ding is making her own decisions, and she expects help from other women. The new sense of female agency she represents is as unusual for Ming writing as the apparent moral neutrality of the plays. Nevertheless, if we look further afield within late-Ming society we find a once widely popular folksong capturing a very similar attitude circulating at around the same time: After twenty there’s twenty-one, Have an affair, don’t be a fool. One day you’ll wake, your looks all gone, And no beaus running to your outstretched arms. 二十去了廿一來,不做私情也是呆。有朝一日花容褪,雙手招郎來郎 不來。36

The mood of this folksong and the words of Huang’s Short Plays are identical in terms of their rejection of the then socially pervasive and conventional expectations surrounding women’s chastity. We know too little about Huang Fangyin to know what his personal motivations were, apart from what appears to be his own refusal, like his brothers, to live life in the orthodox mould. Like other late Ming libertines and adventurers, he appears to have understood that life could hold a diversity of paths for women as well. And I think he found women who represented individual rebelliousness interesting and attractive. Whether this had anything to do with the way he lived his own relationships with women, or if it was something played out solely in his imagination—in a metaphorical realm—we may never know. 35   M HXZJ, 31a. 36  This song appears in Feng Menglong’s Jingshi tongyan 警世通言 [Comprehensive words to admonish the world] (Jinan: Qilu shushe, 1993), 351; as well as Feng Menglong, Shange 山歌 [Mountain Songs], in Feng Menglong quanji 馮夢龍全集 [The Complete Works of Feng Menglong], vol. 42, edited by Wei Tongxian (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1993), 9.

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Conclusion Reading through Huang’s Short Plays and meeting his intriguing wanton women protagonists, it is possible to notice a background they share with other late-Ming works, and in particular the short stories found in Enemies enamoured, or The forgotten tales of Longyang. That background relates to subtle but important changes taking place in private life in Chinese history, and two strands within this development had a bearing on late-Ming treatment of gender and sexuality. The first strand is the anti-establishment disposition pervading the plays, here contesting the influence of the cult of female chastity in particular. While superficially the playwright might be taken to be labelling his wanton women protagonists immoral and shameless, they are not painted with the kind of infamy used to portray ‘bad women’ in erotic fiction,37 rather, plot development and dialogue reveal a far more sympathetic account of the women and their plights. A sympathetic treatment of women’s desires was unusual, even for the late Ming, where an overall reconsideration of the place of desire in life and culture inevitably came up against the far more unsettling and, for the time, radical question of women and desire.38 For example, comparing Huang’s treatment of Madam Ding to the treatment of Pan Jinlian in Jinpingmei, both women might be portrayed as shameless, but Huang does not align this quality with the kind of cunning and malice that is conjured up in the novel, even though the two works are only separated in time by about one or two decades. Not unrelated to the first strand was a second, a rise in the expression of commoner attitudes to sexuality in public discourse, or at least in literature, and particularly within in late-Ming collections of short fiction in both classical and huaben (話本, vernacular story) form. With a growth in commerce and the expansion of private markets in the late Ming many of the rules of life, including the rhythms of town life and questions relating to the regulation of the private sphere, were being shaped anew—as were questions of what gave men and women the right to enjoy what bustling urban life offered.39 One of the 37  For a similar conclusion relating to contiguous material, see Ôki Yasushi’s contribution to the present volume. 38  Mark Stevenson, “Sound, Space and Moral Soundscapes in Ruyijun zhuan and Chipozi zhuan,” Nan Nü: Men, Women and Gender in China, 12.2 (2002): 255–310, 264. See also Martin Huang, Desire and Fictional Narrative in Late Imperial China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2001). 39  Timothy Brook, Praying for Power: Buddhism and the Formation of Gentry Society in the Late Ming China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard-Yenching Institute, 1993), 26–8.

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things Huang’s plays seem to suggest is that as social relations were re-defined, so was the place of women. As urban women commoner’s agency expanded in both family and public life the hold that chastity had on their identity appears to have begun to loosen, despite gentry society’s continued commitment to upholding Confucian ideology and the unyielding family regulations published in the same period. I am not suggesting they loosened so far as to have led to the approval of the kinds of attitudes suggested by the wanton protagonists of Huang’s plays, but that these features of the plays are symptomatic of the changing place of women as social relations changed around them. In addition I am tempted to see in these expressions signs of modernising pressure coming from “below”. But in what sense? While mainstream late-Ming writing was still very much in the hands of educated elite men, libertine currents within that same strata led adventurous literati imaginations in search of fresher inspiration, and so the experiences of the lower classes, as noted at the time, were often a source of inspiration falling outside orthodox strictures. The question is not one of urban protest or mobilisation, nor even one of an accurate reflection of urban commoner realities in literati writing, but rather space and material that offered alternatives to imagination and thought. Literati attention was thus drawn to the lives and values of urban commoners as material with which to experiment in imagining moral alternatives. Undoubtedly, Huang Fangyin was unable to write from the perspectives of common urban women themselves, and he in all likelihood shared many of the assumptions regarding woman held by his literati friends, but at the same time he does not appear to judge what he found or imagined in the lower classes as simple folly; there are too many signs of a sympathetic imagination in his writing. It is this sympathetic note that convinces me of the value of his plays and the glimpses they offer of cultural re-evaluations of the body in early modern China, as well as insights into some of the processes through which such a corporeal modernity was taking shape at the commencement of the seventeenth century. References Brook, Timothy. Praying for Power: Buddhism and the Formation of Gentry Society in the Late Ming China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard-Yenching Institute, 1993. Chen Qinghao 陳慶浩 and Wang Qiugui 王秋桂, eds. Siwuxie huibao 思無邪匯寳 [No Heterodox Thoughts Compendium]. Taipei: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1995. Feng Menglong 馮夢龍. Jingshi tongyan 警世通言 [Comprehensive Words to Admonish the World]. Jinan: Qilu shushe, 1993.

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Feng Menglong. Shange 山歌 [Mountain Songs]. In Feng Menglong quanji 馮夢龍全集 [The Complete Works of Feng Menglong], vol. 42. Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 2007. Gu Qiyuan 顧起元. Kezuo zhuiyu 客座贅語 [Visitor’s Gossip]. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1987. Hsiao, Li-Ling. The Eternal Present of the Past: Illustration, Theatre and Reading in the Wanli Period, 1573–1619. Leiden: Brill, 2007. Huang Fangyin 黃方胤. Mohuaxuan zaju 陌花軒雜劇 [Short Plays from the Studio of Wayside Flowers]. Beijing: Zhongguo shudian, 1994. (MHXZJ) Huang, Martin. Desire and Fictional Narrative in Late Imperial China, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2001. Huang Yuji 黃虞稷. Qianqingtang shumu 千頃堂書目 [Bibliography of Qianqing Studio]. Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1990. Idema, Wilt L. “Yüan-pen as a Minor Form of Dramatic Literature in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries.” Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews 6.1/2 (1984): 53–75. Jiao Xun 焦循. Jushuo 劇說 [Theatre Topics]. Hefei: Huangshan shushe, 2008. Keulemans, Paize. “Onstage Humour, Offstage Voices: The Politics of the Present in the Contemporary Opera of Li Yu.” Frontiers of History in China 9.2 (2014): 165–201. Qi Biaojia 祁彪佳. Yushantang jupin 遠山堂劇品 [Comments on Plays from the Distant Mountain Studio], late-Ming hand-copied edition. Qian Qianyi 錢謙益. Liechao shiji xiaozhuan 列朝詩集小傳 [Brief Notes on Poetry Collections from the Ming Reign Periods]. Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1983. Stevenson, Mark. “Sound, Space and Moral Soundscapes in Ruyijun zhuan and Chipozi zhuan.” Nan Nü: Men, Women and Gender in China, 12.2 (2002): 255–310. Stevenson, Mark and Wu Cuncun, trans. “A Tale of an Infatuated Woman.” Renditions, 58 (2002): 47–97. Tan, Tian Yuan. Songs of Contentment and Transgression: Discharged Officials and Literati Communities in Sixteenth-Century North China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2010. West, Stephen H. “Playing with Food: Performance, Food, and the Aesthetics of Artificiality in the Sung and Yuan.” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 57.1 (1997): 67–106. West, Stephen H. and Wilt L. Idema. Monks, Bandits, Lovers, and Immortals: Eleven Early Chinese Plays. Indianapolis: Hackett, 2010. Wu Cuncun. “ ‘It Was I Who Lured the Boy’: Commoner Women, Intimacy and the Sensual Body in the Song Collections of Feng Menglong (1574–1646).” Nan Nü: Men, Women and Gender in China 12.2 (2010): 311–343. Wu Cuncun and Mark Stevenson. “Karmic Retribution and Moral Didacticism in Erotic Fiction from the Late Ming and Early Qing.” Ming Qing Studies n.v. (2011): 467–486.

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Wu, Yenna. “The Inversion of Marital Hierarchy: Shrewish Wives and Henpecked husbands in Seventeenth-Century Chinese Literature.” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 48.2 (1988): 363–382. Wu, Yenna. The Chinese Virago: A Literary Theme, Cambridge, MA: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1995. Xia Linxi 夏林夕. “Chongyin xuyan 重印序言 [Reprint Preface].” In MHXZJ. Xihu yuyin zhuren 西湖漁隱主人. Huanxi yuanjia 歡喜冤家 [Enemies Enamoured]. In Siwuxie huibao 思無邪匯寳 [No Heterodox Thoughts Compendium], edited by Chen Qinghao 陳慶浩 and Wang Qiugui 王秋桂, Vols 10–11. Taipei: Encyclopedia Britannica Ltd, 1994. Zhou Daguan 周達觀. A Record of Cambodia: The Land and Its People (真臘風土記). Translated by Peter Harris. Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books, 2007. Zhou Hui 周暉. Jinling suoshi 金陵瑣事 [Nanjing Trivia]. Nanjing: Nanjing chubanshe, 2007. Zhuang Yifu 莊一拂. Gudian xiqu cunmu huikao 古典戲曲存目匯考 [Collected Notes on Extant Classical Play Titles]. Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1982.

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Part 3 Women’s Songs and Ballads



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CHAPTER 6

Wanton, but not Bad: Women in Feng Menglong’s Mountain Songs Yasushi Ôki Mountain Songs (Shange 山歌) is a collection of folk songs edited by Feng Menglong 馮夢龍 (1574–1646), a man of letters of Suzhou 蘇州 in the late Ming dynasty.1 The chapter titles and the number of songs in each chapter are set out in Table 6.1. As can be seen from the table, Feng’s Mountain Songs is quite a large collection, consisting of 386 songs in ten chapters. Chapters one through nine are the main body of the collection focusing on folk songs from Suzhou; chapter ten is entitled “Tongcheng popular songs” and features songs from Tongcheng in Anhui province. Feng Menglong divided the songs from Suzhou into three types according to the length of the songs: short songs, mid-length songs and long songs. After classifying the songs by their length, he classified them again by their contents: siqing 私情 (secret feeling/love), zage 雜歌 (miscellaneous songs), and yongwu 詠物 (songs on objects). As can be also seen from this table, the majority of the songs were love songs and most of them were those of ‘secret love,’ which describe illicit love affairs. The word ‘secret feeling/love’ (siqing) is one of the key words for Mountain Songs, and Feng Menglong provides us with various depictions of love in China’s seventeenth century and vivid images of ‘wanton women.’ Aside from the themes of its unique range of popular songs, Feng Menglong’s Mountain Songs is an invaluable text because the songs were written down entirely in the Suzhou dialect (Wuyu 吳語) of four hundred years ago. In the comment appended to the song “Smile”, which is the opening song of Mountain 1  For studies of Feng Menglong’s Mountain Songs, see Cornelia Töpelmann, Shan-ko von Feng Meng-lung: Eine Volksliedersammlung aus de Ming-Zeit (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1973); Ôki Yasushi 大木康, Fû Muryû Sanka no kenkyû 馮夢龍『山歌』の研究 [Studies in Feng Menglong’s Shange] (Tokyo: Keisô shobô, 2003); Ôki Yasushi, “Women in Feng Menglong’s Mountain Songs,” in Writing Women in Late Imperial China, ed. Ellen Widmer and Kang-I Sun Chang (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 131–143; Kathryn A. Lowry, The Tapestry of Popular Songs in 16th- and 17th-century China: Reading, Imitation, and Desire (Leiden: Brill, 2005); and Ôki Yasushi and Paolo Santangelo, Shan’ge, the Mountain Songs: Love Songs in Ming China (Leiden: Brill, 2011).

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Table 6.1

Ôki Number of songs in each chapter

Chapter (with title and length)

No. of Songs

Chapter One (Secret feeling/love, four lines) Chapter Two (Secret feeling/love, four lines) Chapter Three (Secret feeling/love, four lines) Chapter Four (Secret feeling/love, four lines) Chapter Five (Miscellanea, four lines) Chapter Six (Songs on objects, four lines) Chapter Seven (Secret feeling/love, various styles) Chapter Eight (Secret feeling/love, long songs) Chapter Nine (Miscellanea, long songs) Chapter Ten (Tongcheng popular songs) Total Number of Songs

68 65 36 41 37 71 22 14 8 24 386

Songs, Feng Menglong goes on to compare the singing of mountain songs in the Suzhou dialect with local children’s games. He distinguishes this from the decrees of the emperor that were written in such a way as to be universally accessible. This is a comment on the value of dialects, and may even be said to be a declaration of the author’s intention to establish a dialect literature. The language of Feng’s Mountain Songs is different from Mandarin (i.e. guan­ hua 官話, the spoken koine used for administrative purposes) in terms of its phonemes, vocabulary and grammar. A ‘native-speaker’ himself, in editing the songs Feng chose to obey the rules of the Suzhou dialect, and this is one of the main features making Mountain Songs so valuable.2 The dialect material is not merely valuable as a corpus for students of linguistics, as is indicated in Feng’s ‘sociological’ observation contrasting the “decrees of the Emperor” with “dialect.” The Mandarin language is more standard and formal than dialects; on the other hand, dialects can express the intentions and feelings of the common people more clearly than the classical Chinese (wenyan 文言, the written literary standard) or Mandarin languages, because they are closer to the daily life of those people. Dialect is a component of 2  Hu Mingyang 胡明揚, “Sanbaiwushi nianqian Suzhou yidai Wuyu yiban 三百五十年前 蘇州一帶吳語一斑 [A glimpse of Wu dialiect in the Suzhou area three hundered and fifty years ago],” Yuwen Yanjiu 2 (1981) 93–110; Shi Rujie 石汝傑, “Shange de yuyan fenxi 《山歌》的語言分析   [Analysis of the langauge of Shange],” Hokuriku daigaku kiyo 19 (1995): 201–209, etc. EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 11/4/2019 7:50 PM via TOWSON UNIVERSITY AN: 1507598 ; Stevenson, Mark J., Wu, Cuncun.; Wanton Women in Late-imperial Chinese Literature : Models, Genres, Subversions and Traditions Account: towson.main.eds

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language that grants access to a world unobservable through classical Chinese and Mandarin. Since dialect allows this closer access to emotions and feelings, Mountain Songs is an important window into the feelings and sentiments of the men and women of Feng Menglong’s time.3 Although Feng’s Mountain Songs is a collection of Suzhou folk songs, it is in fact a hybrid mix of folk songs circulating amongst the rural population, songs sung in urban areas and songs sung by courtesans, and literati imitations of these.4 Broadly speaking, the songs in chapters one through four are songs from the village or commoners in the city, the songs in chapter five are songs from the pleasure quarters, and the songs in chapter six are imitations by literati. In addition, the songs in chapters one through four include some sung by courtesans or imitations penned by literati.5 The songs in chapter six are songs on various objects. The singer chooses one object as a title, and from that theme then proceeds to construct associative erotic images of love affairs or a woman’s body which match the characteristics of the object. One of the themes of chapter six is women voicing grudges. For example, in “Pearl”: Pearl My secret female lover is like a pearl. The round pearl drop is waiting eagerly to be threaded onto a necklace. She says to him: When you are not here, I shed thousands and tens of thousands of pearl-like teardrops. Please do not despise me if I become old and yellow. (Chapter Six, No. 157) The woman depicted in this song is not bold and self-confident, but rather throws herself upon her lover and asks for mercy. In this essay I set out to explore and interpret depictions of ‘wanton’ women found in Feng’s Mountain Songs, following which I will also consider Feng’s treatment of ‘illicit love’ and ‘wanton women’ in his other works. In particular, in analysing this theme, I will endeavour to make use of the richness of content and dialect surrounding the images of the lascivious women of Jiangnan 3  Ôki Yasushi 大木康, “Zoku bungaku kara mita Chûgoku no toshi to nôson: chûô to chihô 俗文学からみた中国の都市と農村·中央と地方 [Vernacular Literature from the perspective of China’s cities and villages: central and regional],” Gendai Chûgoku 66 (1992): 20–28. 4  Ôki and Santangelo, Shan’ge, 10–20. 5  Ôki and Santangelo, Shan’ge, 24. EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 11/4/2019 7:50 PM via TOWSON UNIVERSITY AN: 1507598 ; Stevenson, Mark J., Wu, Cuncun.; Wanton Women in Late-imperial Chinese Literature : Models, Genres, Subversions and Traditions Account: towson.main.eds

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during the late Ming period. In employing the word ‘wanton’ I understand it to include two circumstances commonly touched upon in the songs, both transgressing the then standard expectations of female chastity: (1) women who make love with multiple partners, and (2) women who do not hide their sexual desire. My analysis of the depictions of wanton women in Feng Menglong’s Mountain Songs largely relies on the songs’ deployment of these two features. While I will analyse them separately, it is not unusual to notice the two being deployed together. As typical images of ‘wanton’ women are well represented in chapters one through four of the anthology, my discussion mainly concerns songs from that part of the collection.

Women Who Make Love with Multiple Men

In Feng’s Mountain Songs, we meet a large number of songs depicting women who make love with multiple men. Gazing Young man, you are very bold and know no shame! Why do you gaze back at me after you have passed my gate? The ever-alert eyes of my husband are not actually blind. If you wish to see me, why don’t you come to the back gate? Comment by Feng Menglong: Ever-alert eyes can only see forward, not backwards!6 (Chapter One, No. 3) In this song the women is a housewife, but she has a young male suitor. The young man comes calling at the front gate where her husband can notice his overtures, so she warns the suitor of the husband’s surveillance and requests that he more discreetly use the back gate. This song is sung from the first person perspective of the woman and does not hide her hope to meet with her young suitor. No doubt women’s adultery was regarded a serious wrongdoing in China, but, however serious it may have been, Feng’s comment does not condemn the woman. Instead, the comment jests at the husband who fails to notice the relationship between his wife and her young boyfriend. 6  Ôki and Santangelo, Shan’ge, 71.

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In chapter four, there is a whole series of songs that clearly describe women with knowledge of numerous men, even in their titles: [Many] Also7 Everyone insults me, saying that I have slept with a thousand lovers; but if you calculate precisely, the number of lovers with whom I have slept is no more than five hundred; Look! The daughter of your easterly neighbor became a Buddha after sleeping with one thousand men; so, compared with her, I should at least become an arhat. Comment: Hail to the majestic Golden-Chain Bodhisattva!8 (Chapter Four, No. 99A) In this song, the woman protests against being labelled promiscuous, saying that the daughter of another neighbour is even more licentious. Her comparison draws on the Buddhist soteriological hierarchy, where the status of the Buddha is higher than that of an arhat, so her own wanton behaviour has not obtained the same level of her neighbour, but is still worthy of ‘merit’. It is important to note that the woman is bold enough to acknowledge her many lovers. [Two Men] Also One girl has two lovers. They are both jealous and in competition over her. She says to them: “Everyone must share the tiger’s meat after we have shot it. You had better take turns to guard the door.”9 (Chapter Four, No. 100A) 7  ‘Also’ (you 又) follows the translation convention employed in Ôki and Santangelo, Shan’ge. It may be read as ‘another on the previous theme.’ 8  The Golden-Chain Bodhisattva is a reference to the Buddhist deity Guanyin. One legend tells of how a young woman once freely slept with lustful men, leading them to enlightenment. When she died, it turned out that her bones were linked by golden chains and that she had been a manifestation of the bodhisattva all along. Ôki and Santangelo, Shan’ge, 182. 9  Ôki and Santangelo, Shan’ge, 184.

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In this song, a woman has two lovers who are jealous of each other. She advises them to help each other by watching the door so as not to be disturbed by others when they sleep with her. It is not unusual for the purported author of the song to be a woman who is far more accommodating than the men she meets: the following songs are each about a woman who has relations with brothers. Brothers I commit adultery with the younger brother, and I also commit adultery with the older brother. You two brothers must maintain the harmony between you. Although I have a rice paddy, I also want a field. I have bought china from the Official Kiln. Why shouldn’t I also have china from the Ge Kiln?10 (Chapter Four, No. 101) This girl says that she wants to continue with her relationship with the elder brother, even though she already has a relation with the younger brother. The last line uses the rhetoric of homonyms, which is often used in Mountain Songs. There are two types of Longquan celadon, Ge Kiln and Di Kiln (Ge means older brother and Di means younger brother in Chinese), and thus the alternative meaning of the last line is “why should I give up the older brother”. [Lonely] Also When the westerly autumn wind starts to blow, the young sister feels sad. It is so terrible to spend the cold nights without a lover beside me! No matter where, to the north or to the south, is there no twenty-year old willing to spend time with me? If he lent me his love for this cold winter, I would let him return immediately!11 (Chapter One, No. 8A) She has a steady lover, but he does not wish to stay with her. In her loneliness, she feels she would be happier if someone, anyone, came to sleep with her. While the new love affair remains unrealized, putting her thoughts into song is a means of moving beyond pining for her former lover.

10  Ôki and Santangelo, Shan’ge, 185. 11  Ôki and Santangelo, Shan’ge, 79.

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In Chinese society the chastity of women was considered to be a very serious matter. Families set great store by the purity of the male patrilineal line, and consequently the monogamy of the wife was paramount. If a wife had a child while engaged in a non-monogamous relationship, the relationship of the progeny to the family would be cast in doubt. Such clan considerations meant that it was strictly prohibited for women to have plural partners, and transgression would be punished with banishment, or sometimes death. Nevertheless, the women in these songs brazenly announce their promiscuous relations with multiple men, and Feng Menglong’s comments do not choose to castigate them for such behaviour (we might even say he deliberately avoids doing so). [Catching the Adulterer in the Act] Also The words of our forefathers are not worth obeying! Why is a pretty girl allowed to marry only one man? If Tang Empress Wu could change the law of the great Ming, Who in the world would dare to condemn adultery? Comment: This was written in a poem by my friend Su Zizhong. He is an honest and sincere scholar, and his thinking is so extraordinary! The mind of a man of letters can go in every direction, can it not?12 (Chapter One, No. 29E) Adultery was prohibited by law; but if Empress Wu changed the law itself, adultery would by definition no longer exist. Empress Wu usurped the throne in the Tang dynasty13 and she was famous for having many lovers after she declared herself empress. The song is intended as a joke, and Su’s suggestion to change the law makes an erudite allusion while imitating the contempt common folk could feel for moral prescriptions and official statutes that only reminded them of the distance existing between their own lives and the life prescribed by tradition.

12  Ôki and Santangelo, Shan’ge, 104. 13  See McMahon, this volume.

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Ôki

Women Who Do Not Hide Their Sexual Desire

As already noted above, many of the songs in Shange depict women happy to acknowledge their desire and even boasting of the heat of their passion, and it is this refusal to hide their sexual desire that I turn to consider in this section: The Woman in Red She naturally loves to wear red clothes. She wears a red skirt, a red jacket and a red bodice. — I am like a rounded, colourful drum beaten at the Lantern Festival. As soon as night falls, I long to be beaten two or three times.14 (Chapter Two, No. 36) Here the sounds of the drum at sunset imply the intensity of her sexual desire. In this song the first two lines give an objective view, but last two lines are sung with this woman’s first person voice, and she quite candidly reveals how much she enjoys the physicality of sex. Erotic Scenes She rubs her eyes in her room. She has found some erotic paintings by chance, and now her whole body is faint. “I will memorize all these ways of making love in my belly. Why don’t I imitate them and paint a living erotic scene with my love when he comes?” (Chapter Two, No. 46) The structure of this song is mimetic, depicting a woman who finds some erotic paintings and under their influence wants to make love with her lover just as in the painted scenes. From the fiction of the period, as well as from notation books like Shen Defu’s (1578–1642) Wanli yehuo bian (萬曆野獲編 Unofficial gleanings on the Wanli reign) we know that erotic paintings and prints flourished in the late Ming.15 This song hints at how these erotic paintings and prints spread in Jiangnan during the late Ming period. 14  Ôki and Santangelo, Shan’ge, 116. 15  Shen Defu, Wanli yehuo bian 萬曆野獲編 [Unofficial gleanings on the Wanli reign], Vol. 26, Erotic Paintings 春畫 (Taipei: Xinxing shuju, 1976), 659.

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Not all the songs portray aesthetic, ideal scenes such as found in erotic paintings: Not Good in Love She has a secret lover, but he is not good at making love. His excitement lasts only for a short time, not for long. She says to him: Hey, you are like an unstable house whose foundations are not well laid. My whole body is aroused, but itchy as if with scabies.16 (Chapter Two, No. 57) In this song, a woman complains explicitly that her lover is not proficient at making love and is unable to satisfy her. She also reveals her sexual desire and the value she places on it being satisfied. Some songs also insist on the right of young women to meet boyfriends even while they risk attracting castigation or worse from their parents. [Mother Beats Me] Also Although I was beaten and humiliated by my mother, Still, I ask my lover to visit me secretly every night. “Darling, if you and I could live a romantic story like lovers from ancient times. I would willingly be beaten to death by my mother in this room.”17 (Chapter One, No. 24B) She does not fear the risk of her parents’ killing her and dares to meet her lover despite the threat of death. The lover feeds her dream of escape from the dreariness in the confines of her room. [Secret Love] Also She combs her hair until it shines like a lacquered bowl, And in the presence of others seduces a man with her small feet. They used to say that it is men who seduce women,

16  Ôki and Santangelo, Shan’ge, 141. 17  Ôki and Santangelo, Shan’ge, 96.

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But now, in this new age, it is the women who seduce men.18 (Chapter Two, No. 39A) This song is sung in the third person voice, maybe from the perspective of the compiler Feng Menglong. The singer comments on the new phenomenon of girls seducing boys in the changing world of the late-Ming Jiangnan society. Jiangnan cities and towns flourished with economic activity, causing some literati to worry about the collapse of the conventional social order.19 However, this singer seems to enjoy the new forwardness of young women. She is So Sexy Wearing a summery blue dress over a red top, She plays, holding on to the gangplank railing, how charming she is! Her hair is wonderful, tied up around her temples. Admiring her closely, she is so sexy, like a hunk of goat fat.20 (Chapter One, No. 4) [Secret Love] Also Do not be afraid about the secret affair between us. Should we be caught in the very act of adultery, I will admit to the crime; I would rather appear in court, kneel down before the Judge and honestly say: I am entirely responsible for seducing him. Comment by Feng Menglong: Indeed she has a heroic spirit!21 (Chapter Two, No. 39B) 18  Ôki and Santangelo, Shan’ge, 121. 19  Mori Masao 森正夫, ‘Minmatsu no shakai kankei ni okeru chitsujo no hendô ni tsuite,’ 明末の社会関係における秩序の変動について [Movement in the Social Order of the late Ming Dynasty],” Nagoya daigaku Bungakubu sanjuu shûnen kinen ronshû 名古屋 大学文学部三十周年記念論集, 135–159 (Nagoya: Nagoya daigaku bungakubu, 1979); and Kishimoto Mio 岸本美緖, Minshin kôtai to Kônan shakai: 17-seiki Chûgoku no chitsujo mondai 明清交替と江南社会―17世紀中国の秩序問題 [The Ming-Qing transition and Jiangnan society: Problems of order in seventeenth-century China] (Tokyo: Tokyo Daigaku Shuppan-kai, 1999). 20  Ôki and Santangelo, Shan’ge, 72. 21  Ôki and Santangelo, Shan’ge, 122.

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Songs such as these, and there are many of them, are notable in depicting quite bold women in Jiangnan society of the late Ming period. They were full of sex appeal, so bold and brave. If lovers were discovered or apprehended by the authorities, as love affairs were strictly prohibited in the society, they would be brought before the law, but this woman happily confesses, “It is absolutely I who seduced him.” Feng Menglong remarks, “She has indeed a heroic spirit!” His comment reveals that he was more pleasantly amused than critical. As Pi-ching Hsu has pointed out in her book: Women in the Hanging Twigs and Hill Songs were more determined than men in their pursuit of love. When it comes to romance, the hero pales before the heroine, because the heroine, being confined to the domestic sphere, is not corruptible by considerations of external factors such as fame, wealth, and power. The infatuated women focused their thoughts so intensively on love that they were easily cheated by the wind and mistook the shadows of flowers and trees on a windy night to be their lovers knocking on the door (Guazhier, 1: 8a-b).22

Feng Menglong’s Motivation and the Background to his Collecting Mountain Songs

It is quite rare in the history of Chinese literature that women express their sexual desires directly or declare that they have lovers. Why does Feng Menglong not judge these bold women or their actions to be morally transgressive? While Feng Menglong is associated with many works of popular literature, of primary importance in reading of Mountain Songs is the preface penned in his own words which expounds on his beliefs about the significance of popular literature.23 At the beginning of the preface Feng Menglong addresses the history of Chinese folk songs and poems, pointing out that in the Shijing (詩經 Book of Odes) folk songs (feng 風) and elegant songs (ya 雅) were juxtaposed, but later only the elegant songs were considered important. Consequently, folk songs came to be despised, and the term “mountain song” was, in a sense, a negative appellation. In the opening passage of the preface Feng thus identifies 22  Pi-Ching Hsu, Beyond Eroticism: A Historian’s Reading of Humor in Feng Menglong’s Child’s Folly (Lanham: University Press of America, 2006), 99. 23  Ôki Yasushi, “Fû Muryû ‘Jo Sanka’ kô: Shikyô gaku to minkan kayô” 馮夢龍「叙山歌」 考―詩経学と民間歌謡 [An investigation into Feng Menglong’s ‘Shange Preface’: Shijing research and folksongs],” Tôyô Bunka, 71 (1990): 121–145.

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two ongoing cultural strands: (A) the feng-sounds of common people, such as farmers mountain songs, and (B) the ya-sounds of the Chu songs and Tang poetry composed by scholars-gentlemen (usually in poetic circles), and suggests that the favouring of the latter introduced a distortion. In Feng’s judgement the distortion had long reached a point where it required correction. While the usual literary line of thinking tells us that (B) elegant poems have precedence over (A) popular songs, Feng Menglong positions himself as a supporter of (A). The preface continues: With the world in decline there is a lot of false verse and prose, but there have never been false mountain songs. Because mountain songs do not compete with poetry, there is no falsehood. As there is no falsehood, we can preserve genuineness by collecting mountain songs. Incidentally, when we see that songs noted by ancient officials (songs from the Shijing) were like that, and that songs sung by contemporary common people are like this, mountain songs can be materials for understanding the world. If I borrow the true feelings of man and woman and can uncover the falsehood of Confucianism, the effect will be the same as that of Hanging Branches (Guazhier 掛枝兒). Thus I publish Mountain Songs after publishing Hanging Branches. This suggests that Feng’s real target is “contemporary poetry,” wherein lies his reason for editing and publishing Mountain Songs. Regarding the (A) strand as genuine (zhen 真), and the (B) strand as false (jia 假), Feng was convinced contemporary poetry, full of falsehood, had lost its power to make a profound impact on readers. By editing Mountain Songs he aimed to attack specious poetry, and return energy to the art form through the power of genuineness found in mountain songs. Since Chinese literature reflects the social differences between common people (farmers etc.) and gentlemen, it is quite natural that the focus of an attack on the literature of high society would be aimed at the gentlemen and scholars themselves, and, moreover, the Confucianism of which they made so much. The phrase “borrowing true feelings of man and woman and uncovering falsehood of Confucianism” (借男女之真情,發名教之偽藥) expresses quite a radical position, and I do not think it is going too far to suggest that the import of the preface to Mountain Songs crosses the boundary from literary criticism into social criticism, and even social activism. Considered within this context Feng’s apparent leniency toward wanton women is closely related to his theoretical view that while traditional poetry had

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lost its liveliness, popular songs maintained liveliness through their bold and unfettered expression of people’s genuine feelings. This concept did not necessarily originate with Feng; many influential scholars in the late-Ming period recorded thinking along similar lines. For example, Yuan Hongdao 袁宏道 (1568–1610) wrote in his “Xu Xiaoxiu shi” 敘小修詩 (Preface to the collection of poems of Yuan Xiaoxiu) as follows: It is the case that, for all the things in the world, where something is unique it follows that it must be indispensable; and for the indispensable, even if it is desirable to discard it, it is not possible. Where something is identical it follows that it is dispensable; and for the dispensable, even if it is desirable to preserve it, it is not possible. For this reason, I believe that the poetry of the present day cannot be preserved. If in our present day there is something which should be preserved in the future, it might be popular songs such as “Pipoyu” and “Dacaogan” which are sung by women and children on the streets. These songs ring pure because they were produced by ‘pure people’ who have no learning. These songs are neither similar to the poems of the Han and Wei dynasties nor the same as those of the High Tang. Emerging directly from the nature of people, they describe lively feelings of the people.24 Like Feng Menglong, Yuan Hongdao also evaluated popular songs positively. Of course, popular songs had been sung among the common people from time immemorial, but they previously lacked evaluation. It is important to note that in the late Ming period popular songs were so prevalent that prominent intellectuals not only praised them but took interest in them. Yuan Hongdao might have taken his cue from Li Zhi 李贄 (Li Zhuowu, 1527–1602), an influential thinker of the late Ming period, whose “Treatise on Childlike-Mind” was famous for insisting on the value of pureness or innocence. Feng Menglong himself published Guazhier 掛枝兒 as part one and Shange as part two of Tongchi 童痴 (A Child’s Folly). As Pi-ching Hsu has pointed out: He (Feng) took the forbidden love of young couples as a symbol of the individual’s courageous challenge to social decorum and Confucian patriline. The youthful lovers were passionate, redheaded, and rebellious. They could not be constrained. The folkloric and comical nature of the 24  Yuan Hongdao 袁宏道, Yuan Hongdao ji jianjiao 袁宏道集箋校 [The complete works of Yuan Hongdao, annotated and collated] (Shanghai: Shanghai Guji Chubanshe, 1981), 703.

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folk and popular songs allowed the editor to side with the unestablished and inexperienced and celebrate their ‘child’s folly.’25 There can also be no doubt that the flourishing of popular songs in the late Ming was important in informing Feng’s passion for collecting contemporary songs. New songs were produced one after another, and the songs spread far and wide. In Shen Defu’s Wanli yehuo bian we find a brief history of how the fashion for popular songs spread: The short ballads of the Yuan dynasty were popular in Yan and Zhao (today’s northern Hebei and western Shanxi). Later, they spread gradually and their popularity grew. During the Xuande, Zhengtong, Chenghua and Hongzhi eras (i.e. 1425–1505), the songs of “Suonanzhi”, “Pangzhuangtai” and “Shanpoyang” were popular across the Central Plains. Li Mengyang (李夢陽, 1472–1529)26 moved to Bianliang (Kaifeng) from Qingyang (Gansu) and heard these songs, saying that these were descended from the “Guofeng” found in The Book of Odes. He Jingming (何景明, 1483–1521) also came to Kaifeng and took much delight in them, and the songs they loved were “Ninieren”, “Xuedagua” and “Aodiji,” which we are still able to hear. Subsequently there appeared “Shuahaier”, “Zhuyunfei” and “Zuitaiping,” none of which were as popular as the former three songs. In the Jiajing era (1522–1556), “Naowujing”, “Jishengcao”, “Luojiangyuan”, “Kuhuangtian”, “Ganheye”, “Fenhonglian”, “Tongchengge” and “Yinchousi” were popular and even spread through east central China (Liang Huai) and the Lower Yangtze regions. These songs gradually became vulgar and only described lecherous matters. More recently, “Dazaogan” and “Guazhier” have been popular. The melodies of these songs are not particularly noteworthy, but the songs are sung broadly from the North to the South, by men and women, by the old and the young, regardless of social rank. Songbooks including these songs are published and influence the world. We do not know when and where these songs were produced, but it is remarkable all the same that these songs spread so broadly.27

25  Pi-Ching Hsu, Beyond Eroticism, 77. 26  Li and He Jingming (see below) were archaist poets counted among the “former and later seven masters” of the mid-Ming. 27  Shen Defu 沈德符, Wanli Yehuo Bian 萬曆野獲編, juan 25, Shidiao xiaoling 時調小令, (Taipei: Xinxing shuju, 1976), 647.

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As well as pointing out that many kinds of new songs were being produced and spreading nationwide in his own time, Shen Defu thought that songs were produced in the North and were moving South, maybe because Shen, despite being born himself in the Lower Yangtze in Jiaxing, respected the tunes which originated from the North, the Central Plains. Originally sung among the common people, popular songs gradually attracted the attention of major intellectuals and poets such as Li Mengyang and He Jingming, whom Shen records as having enjoyed them. In the same vein he observes that the songs were sung regardless of social rank. Yet we also know that popular songs were prevalent historically in the south, for there is ample evidence of this for the Lower Yangtze. Many of the songs collected in Mountain Songs were originally sung in the Jiangnan area at country festivals and while labouring. Wu songs were sung in the Six Dynasties in the Jiangnan area, including Suzhou. There are records from the Tang and Song dynasties of songs being sung at festivals in the reaches of the middle and lower Yangzi River. For example, the story of Wu Cailuan 吳彩鸞 describes an event that occurred during the Taihe 太和 era (827–835) of the Tang dynasty.28 Each year, at the time of the moon festival, song competitions were held at Youwei Temple 遊帷觀 at Zhongling 鍾陵 (Jiangxi 江西 province). On one occasion, a student named Wen Su 文肅 met Wu Cailuan, a celestial nymph, and they later married. The story tells us that at the moon festival many people held hands, stamped their feet, and sang songs together. The one who could respond most quickly in song won the competition. This festival allowed Wen Su to encounter Wu Cailuan, who also sang a love song there. Noting that all the songs included in Mountain Songs relate to love affairs, we may surmise that many were originally sung at these kinds of festivals. On carnivalesque occasions such as rural festivals women would boldly sing about love and intimate feelings in the first person, a tradition that continuously influenced the shange love-song genre. Becoming part of local memory, these songs came to be sung while performing agricultural work, another context of song innovation. However, by the time of Feng Menglong, i.e. the late Ming dynasty, the number of people who had drifted from rural areas of the lower Yangtse to the city of Suzhou had increased dramatically as Suzhou in the late Ming was one of the biggest commercial and industrial centres in China. They brought with them their rural songs and ballads, and the sounds of mountain songs could be heard in cities 28  Zhu Mu 祝穆, Yu Wu Cailuan 遇吳彩鸞, [Encountering Wu Cailuan], vol. 11 of Xinbian gujin shiwen leiju, qianji 新編古今事文類聚前集 [New classified compendium of events and writings from past and present] (Kyoto: Chubun shuppan, 1982), 138.

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in the Jiangnan area, including downtown Suzhou. Although it is not a source from Suzhou, there is a record of a large-scale mountain song competition in Shengze zhen 盛澤鎮, near Suzhou. In Shenghuzhi 盛湖志 (Gazette of Shengze zhen), published in 1716, the author noted: On the night of the fifteenth day of the seventh month [lunar calendar], several thousands of spinners gathered at the East Temple 東廟 and Shengming Bridge 盛明橋, competing with each other at singing mountain songs. Composing new songs they sang until morning.29 It is known that mountain song competitions were held during the Zhongyuan 中元 festival on the fifteenth day of the seventh month of the lunar calendar. I suppose that mountain song competitions were most likely held in Suzhou as well. As a result, although rural in origin, mountain songs now also began to express urban themes and describe urban situations. For example: The Modest Woman The famous Tiger Hill is not actually very high. The fastest boat does not need to be rowed so hard. The skilful boxer does not need to strike out. The woman who knows how to seduce a man into adultery does not need to flirt openly. (Chapter One, No. 5) This song describes the most famous sightseeing place in Suzhou, Tiger Hill 虎 丘, a scene in the city. These new songs were produced after mountain songs

were introduced to the urban environment. Another important site for music in cities was the pleasure quarter. Popular songs were spread from pleasure quarters, and many kinds of popular songs were sung. In Feng Menglong’s Guazhier and Mountain Songs we find not a few eamples with comments attached by Feng Menglong stating that he learned the song from singing girls. For example, there is a comment by Feng appended to “Farewell,” a song found in volume four of Guazhier:

29  Zhong Chenzhu et al. 仲沈洙等, Shenghuzhi 盛湖志, [Gazeteer of Shengze town] Xia juan 下卷, 1b, Fengsu 風俗.

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The last song was taught to me by Feng Xisheng (馮喜生), a famous courtesan. She was beautiful and a good joker. She was a good friend of mine. On the night preceding her marriage she invited me to call on her to say good-bye to me. At midnight when I left there, I asked her, “Do you not have anything more to tell me?” She said, “Do you still remember the ‘Dacaogan’ and mountain song lyrics? What I wish to tell you is in those songs.” Then she sang two for me. Dacaogan was another name for the Guazhier song. We see here that mountain songs were sung in pleasure quarters along with popular songs in late-Ming Suzhou. Singing girls were described in many popular songs, because the genre was often produced or sung in pleasure quarters. The singing of these songs in the entertainment quarters finally lead to the literati themselves composing popular works imitating the style of the mountain songs. In late-Ming cities such as Suzhou literati were exposed to many kinds of popular song, and they were derived from or transmitted through several different social strata. Having the opportunity to collect a diverse range of popular songs in Suzhou, Feng Menglong has preserved for us songs which reflected various different locations and contexts in his anthology such as songs sung in the villages, songs sung in the city, songs in pleasure quarters and songs imitated by literati. Such was the background to the songs of wanton women that Feng Menglong, an intellectual, collected, edited and published in his two popular song collections, Mountain Songs and Guazhier.

Wanton Women in Feng Menglong’s Other Works

Feng Menglong published numerous books and publications besides Mountain Songs and in those other works we can also find depictions of wanton women. Is his attitude towards the wanton women in those works the same with that seen in Mountain Songs? I propose exploring this question with reference to the concept of ‘secret feeling/love’. As I observed at the beginning of this paper, the subject or title of six of the ten volumes of Mountain Songs were secret love, siqing 私情. While this might reflect a widespread focus found in the genre itself, it also indicates that for Feng Menglong siqing seems to have been a very important concept.

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Smile The south-easterly wind blows across strongly And a new flower blooms among the leaves. But do not smile happily, young girl! How many secret love affairs spring from a smile!30 (Chapter One, No. 1) Here the original word for “illicit/secret love affairs” is siqing. Again: [Deception] Also I have a secret lover who comes to me through the snow. Someone may see the footprints around my house and suspect. So with three copper coins I have bought straw sandals for my lover to wear back to front. Thus, people will think that someone has left and that no one has entered.31 (Chapter One, No. 27C) A Gift I have a secret love, and nobody knows, neither man nor ghost. But my lover visited me again and gave me some face powder through the green screen window; If you hold your head up as you brush, powder will fall in your eyes. If you drop the abacus, it will smash, and the beads will scatter across the street.32 (Chapter One, No. 28) Feng Menglong notes that the pronunciation of zhu (here meaning an abacus bead) is similar to zhi (being known) in Wu dialect. Hence the meaning “the whole street finds out”. The subtext of these homonyms is that everybody in the street will know about the secret relationship. The word siqing sometimes means an illicit love affair and sometimes means the lovers themselves. Paolo Santangelo explains siqing as follows: 30  Oki Yasushi and Paolo Santangelo, Shan’ge, 65. 31  Oki Yasushi and Paolo Santangelo, Shan’ge, 99. 32  Oki Yasushi and Paolo Santangelo, Shan’ge, 100.

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Instead of considering it [siqing] as a general term for emotion, [it] can be classified as objective description (of love passion), as it expresses a description of a situation/relationship between a man and a woman.33 Despite knowing that society has prohibited these love affairs, the lovers in Mountain Songs do not allow their behaviour to be overly governed by worry over societal norms.

Siqing in Guazhier

Feng Menglong compiled a collection of popular songs titled Guazhier prior to bringing out his Mountan Songs. Guazhier were urban popular songs, whereas mountain songs originally were village songs. When Feng compiled Guazhier, he also included a section on “secret feeling/love.” For an example we may take “Flirtation” from chapter one (“Secret love”) of Guazhier: “Flirtation” Handsome sweetheart, I love your amorous charms, Moving my heart, fulfilling my wishes, That’s why I make merry with you. Who would have known that you are a cutthroat ‘bandit incarnate’? Regardless of good times or bad, No sooner do you enter the door than you hold me in your arms. If somebody happens to see us, Sweetheart, what should I do? (Feng Menglong’s Comment) This is also genuine (zhen). The two songs are not shaped by any marvellous (qi 奇) imagination. They are as natural as colloquial language; they are the patterns of nature heaven and earth. Why do we have to apply rouge to a peony? (Guazhier, 1:5a-b)34 It is significant that while it describes lovers meeting secretly, this song from Guazhier is limited to conveying the feelings of the lovers and contains almost no concrete imagery from their lives or their environment. This may be an important difference between Mountain songs and Guazhier, but, again, Feng does not assign blame to lovers engaged in illicit relationships. 33  Oki Yasushi and Paolo Santangelo, Shan’ge, 492. 34  Pi-Ching Hsu, Beyond Eroticism, 92 (translation modified).

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Feng Menglong’s Treasury of Laughs

Feng Menglong thought of Mountain Songs, Guazhier and Treasury of Laughs (Xiaofu 笑府) as a single collection under the overall title “A Child’s Folly”, and we can also see a similar viewpoint in the anthology of jokes. Chapter nine of Treasury of Laughs is all about men and women. Before marriage, a bride asked her sister-in-law, “Is it really fun?” Sister in law replied, “Not at all. But, as established by Zhou Gong, an ancient sage, men and women must do that.” After the marriage she visited her old home and when she met her sister-in-law she said, “You’re a big liar!” This joke also implies that women have sexual desire. In general, woman should be prudent, but this new bride expressed her love of making love. This gap is the reason why this story is funny, and Feng Menglong himself was amused by the woman and her story. Shrimp is said to be a food that is good for stamina. Seeing her son eating shrimps, the mother stopped him and said, “Save those for your father.” “Why?” the son asked, “Does father like them?” “Once you are married you’ll know.” A husband and wife are in bed. The husband is sexually aroused, but the wife rejects him, saying, “Early tomorrow morning you’re going to the temple to burn incense. You should straighten your mind in utmost sincerity.” After he goes to sleep she is terribly regretful. Suddenly she hears raindrops outside the window. She immediately kicks her husband, waking him up, and says, “Listen. Listen. You got lucky.”35 In these humorous anecdotes women are portrayed as expressing their sexual desires or openly acknowledging the enjoyment to be found in sex. Treasury of Laughs is a collection of jokes, so Feng again revels in the humour of their situations with no intention of castigating the lovers.

35  Pi-Ching Hsu, Beyond Eroticism, 211, translation modified.

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Wanton, but not Bad: Women in Feng Menglong’s Mountain Songs

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Feng Menglong’s Qingshi

To further gain understanding of the place of the wanton woman theme in Feng Menglong’s time we must turn to his Qingshi (The Anatomy of Love, 情 史).36 This book is composed of fourteen chapters, and chapter three includes twenty-four stories under the heading Secret Feelings. They are divided into three categories: Illicit love first followed by marriage, illicit love not leading to marriage, illicit rendezvous, and illicit relations with maids. In the story of Zhang Zhuzhu, Zhang Zhuzhu had a childhood sweetheart, Fonu, in her neighbourhood. They loved each other and even enjoyed meeting while other family members went out for a picnic. Later a rich man sought to marry her, but she refuses him and eventually marries Fonu as she had wanted all along. Feng Menglong commented: “Zhuzhu not only was brave, but also far-sighted. If she had only been interested in going to a wealthy family, what would she have come to?”37 Not all ‘illicit love’ it seems is bad. The tone of the comment is similar to that of Mountain Songs. The men and women in Mountain Songs are never identified by name, but if they had names their stories would be remembered like those in Qingshi. Qingshi can be said to be an encyclopaedia of women (as well as men), containing a great number of stories under different categories. Another section, the seventeenth chapter titled Qinghui (情穢 “scandalous passion”), contains those stories of women whom Feng Menglong regarded as wanton or bad. For example, it contains the story of Wenjiang and Aijiang of Lu, two women recorded in Zuozhuan, where the comment by Feng Menglong reads: Wenjiang killed her husband, Aijiang killed her son. These calamities all started with licentiousness (yin 淫).38 It is useful to note that in this section Feng Menglong lists women far more than men, and it is primarily about yinfu 淫婦, listing most of the ‘wanton women’ of Chinese history (although the term itself, or anything like it, is only applied to Hejian in Liu Zongyuan’s eponymous Tang dynasty story, and only appears this once in Qingshi). In Qingshi, then, we find that the tone of his comments 36  On Qingshi, see Hua-yuan Li Mowry, Ch’ing-shih and Feng Menglong, University of California, Berkeley, Ph.D. dissertation, 1976. 37  Feng Menglong, Qingshi 情史, vol. 7 of Feng Menglong quanji 馮夢龍全集 [Complete works of Feng Menglong] (Nanjing: Jiangsu guji chubanshe, 1993), 102. 38  Feng Menglong, Qingshi, 616.

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on wanton women is full of criticism, which is in marked contrast to the tone we see in Mountain Songs. The majority of the texts in Qingshi are quotations from diverse sources, so the criticism may in part derive from each entry’s original context—yet Feng’s inclusion of the original passages suggests that Feng himself agreed with the critical stance found in them.

Feng Menglong’s Sanyan (三言)

Among all the literary works by Feng Menglong it is perhaps the Sanyan collections of vernacular short stories that have received the most attention. They contain 120 short stories on a wide variety of themes. In these stories how are siqing and yinfu treated? In the story “Emperor Taizu Escorts Jingniang on a One-Thousand Li Journey” (Zhao Taizu qianli song Jingniang 趙太祖千里送京娘), the twentyfirst story in Stories to Caution the World (Jingshi tongyan 警世通言), we read: His anger subsiding, Zhao explained, “My good sister, it’s not that I’m a stubborn, inflexible man, but I offered to escort you over a thousand li out of a sense of honor. If I’d had designs on you, wouldn’t I be like the two bandits? My sincere offer of help would turn out to be a hypocritical show in the end, for which I’d be ridiculed by all worthy men.”39 In this story Song Taizu (927–976), founder of the Song dynasty (960–1279), rescues a girl in trouble. When she falls in love with him, he says, “If I behave according to siqing, I would be the same as the bandits”. In the source text the original expression for “had designs on you” is siqing, which in this context does not convey a positive meaning. The twenty-fourth story of Stories Old and New (Gujin xiaoshuo, 古今小說) similarly conveys a deeply negative reading of siqing: Han Sihou’s desires had already been stirred up [lit. “aroused siqing,” 已動私情] at the first sight of Jintan’s beauty. These words [he read from her lyric] plunged him deeper into yearning.40

39  Feng Menglong, Stories to Caution the World, trans. Shuhui Yang and Yunqin Yang (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005), 336. 40  Feng Menglong, Stories Old and New: A Ming Dynasty Collection, trans. Shuhui Yang and Yunqin Yang (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000), 446.

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Han Sihou pledged not to love another woman when his wife died, but then he became attracted to a nun he saw at a Taoist temple. Later, the ghost of his wife appears and, together with the ghost of the nun’s previous husband, she kills him. In this story as well, siqing induces anger and even revenge as if heaven itself condemned those who succumb to misfortune. While the word yinfu is not mentioned in Mountain Songs, it does appear in the Sanyan stories. For example, the sixteenth story of Stories to Awaken the World (Xingshi Hengyan 醒世恆言): Now, having groped his way to the bedside, Wuhan was on the point of taking off his clothes when he heard two people snoring. Seized with rage, he said to himself, “No wonder she ignored my coughs the last two nights and pretended to be asleep! So this whore has taken up with another man! That’s why she came up with this story about her parents bugging her and told me to stop coming. She’s obviously determined to break up with me. Why would I want such a heartless whore?”41 In the above passage yinfu (“whore” in the translation) is acutely negative and used as a term of abuse. And we can also ask why, similarly, does the word siqing also connote negative meaning in Sanyan stories? This question may in part be resolved through reference to the Sanyan prefaces. Each of the Sanyan collections has a preface, and each is instructive. For example, the preface to Stories Old and New says: For the most part, Tang writers preferred an elegant style that appealed to literary minds. Song writers used the colloquial attuned to the common ear. Now common ears outnumber literary minds in our world, and fiction draws less from the elegant than from the colloquial style. Just ask the storytellers to demonstrate in public their art of description: they will gladden you, astonish you, move you to sad tears, rouse you to song and dance; they will prompt you to draw a sword, bow in reverence, cut off a head, or donate money. The faint-hearted will be made brave, the debauched chaste, the unkind compassionate, the obtuse ashamed. One may well intone the Classic of Filial Piety (Xiaojing) and the Analects of Confucius every day, yet he will not be moved so quickly nor so profoundly as by these storytellers. Can anything less accessible achieve such effect?42 41  Feng Menglong, Stories to Awaken the World, trans. Shuhui Yang and Yunqin Yang (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2009), 335. 42  Feng Menglong, Stories Old and New, 6.

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He compares vernacular stories to The Analects and Classic of Filial Piety, classics of Confucianism, and says that story telling has greater efficacy to instruct than The Analects and Classic of Filial Piety, because vernacular language is easier to understand and moves people more immediately. The preface to Stories to Awaken the World also says: All texts other than the Six Classics and the official histories are light reading. . . .. In the same vein, Illustrious Words, Comprehensive Words, and Constant Words can very well serve as supplements to the Six Classics and the official histories.43 In Chinese literature, vernacular fiction does not receive the same high regard as poetry or prose composed in the classical style, yet Feng Menglong declares that vernacular fiction has the same effect as the Confucian classics. The preface to Stories to Caution the World says: The Six Classics, The Analects [of Confucius], and Mencius, about which commentaries abound, are, in summary, nothing but exhortations for ministers to be loyal, children to be filial, officials to be judicious, friends to be trustworthy, husbands to be honorable, wives to be chaste, scholars to be paragons of virtue, and families to do good deeds. The classics state the universal truths, and the histories serve the same purpose through narrating the events. Yet, the universal truths are explained to a world inhabited not exclusively by venerable men who diligently compare notes with each other in their moral pursuits, and the histories are narrated to a world consisting not exclusively of erudite scholars of impeccable moral behavior. And since villagers, children, ordinary women, and peddlers are easily stirred to joy or wrath by what others do rightly or wrongly, take guidance in their actions from stories about the operations of karma, and gain knowledge from hearsay and gossip, popular historical romances can well serve as supplements where the classics and the histories are found lacking.44

43  Feng Menglong, Stories to Awaken the World, 4. 44  Feng Menglong, Stories to Caution the World, 5.

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The aim of letting people read fiction is to let them be good men (and women). When Feng Menglong edited these stories, he took the position of the teacher, a position higher than the commoner. It is because of his taking a position as teacher that he judged that wanton women had to be depicted with some criticism, and this is the reason for differences in attitude toward between his commentary and editing for Mountain songs and his editing and commentary for his vernacular fiction collections. Conclusion Many wanton women appear in Feng Menglong’s Mountain Songs. Though these women are quite bold, the compiler and commentator, Feng Menglong does not criticize them. On the other hand, in some of Feng’s other works of vernacular stories, like Sanyan, where he takes a position higher than the common people, a level of criticism is detectable. There are other works that contain variability in depictions of wanton women, such as, for example, Jinpingmei 金瓶梅. In chapter forty-six of Jinpingmei, the narrator states: To resume our story, in the rear compound Ch’un-mei, Ying-ch’un, Yü-hsiao, Lan-hsiang, Hsiao-yü, and company, on observing that Yüehniang was not at home, and hearing the sound of the bronze drum and other forms of musical performance at the front gate, as well as the fact that there were to be fireworks, all got dressed up and concealed themselves behind the standing screen to see what was going on. Shu-t’ung and Hua-t’ung were also behind the standing screen, heating wine over the brazier. It so happens that Yü-hsiao and Shu-t’ung had been carrying on an affair for some time and were constantly flirting with each other. The two of them, on finding themselves together on this occasion, helped themselves to some melon seeds to crack, and in the process of doing so managed to knock over a pewter flagon of wine that was resting on the brazier. The fire in the brazier flared up conspicuously, scattering ashes all over the area, but Yü-hsiao merely continued to laugh about it. When Hsi-men Ch’ing heard this, he sent Tai-an to ask who was laughing, and why the ashes had been scattered in such a way. That day Ch’un-mei was wearing a new white satin jacket with a brocaded scarlet vest and was sitting sedately in a chair. When she saw the two of them knock over the wine, she immediately raised her voice and

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berated Yü-hsiao, saying, “What a wondrously wanton whore you are! No sooner do you catch sight of a man than you start carrying on with him in an unheard of way. It’s enough that the two of you knocked over the wine, but how can you continue to guffaw over it? What are you laughing at? You’ve not only managed to put out the fire, but covered us all with ashes to boot.”45 Where the passage reads “It so happens that Yü-hsiao and Shu-t’ung had been carrying on an affair for some time (舊有私情) and were constantly flirting with each other,” ‘carrying on an affair’ is siqing. And where the translation reads “a wondrously wanton whore” (怪浪的淫婦), ‘whore’ is again yinfu, and, even where Ximen Qing uses it as a term of endearment, it can only carry negative connotations. In comparison with other fiction, including Feng Menglong’s own stories or stories he complied, Mountain Songs stands out in tending to be tolerant of women who have affairs with more than one man or who decline to hide their own desires. As I have shown, this is a question of standpoint, and as such it can vary, even when we are considering one and the same author. Feng Menglong adopts different standpoints in relation to the material he is publishing and he has been shown to at times be more judgemental, and at other times less so. At the same time, it is revealed that words such as siqing and yinfu also vary in the meanings they convey depending on their use in context and the social strata for which they are being deployed. While there may have been wanton women in the mountain songs, we do not find the term yinfu or anything like it in Feng Menglong’s Mountain Songs, and its absence is a further sign that the collection does not judge or condemn lusty women in those terms. While in the eyes of Confucian moralists the passionate women of Mountain Songs would already have condemned themselves simply through voicing and acting upon their desires, it is not the position Feng Menglong chose to take; instead he perceived an opportunity to encourage genuineness—a greater vivacity— in life and literature. References Feng Menglong 馮夢龍. Qingshi 情史. Vol. 7 of Feng Menglong quanji 馮夢龍全集. [Complete works of Feng Menglong]. Nanjing: Jiangsu guji chubanshe, 1993. 45  David Tod Roy trans., The Plum in the Golden Vase, vol. 3, The Aphrodisiac (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 103–104.

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Feng Menglong. Stories Old and New: A Ming Dynasty Collection. Translated by Shuhui Yang and Yunqin Yang. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000. Feng Menglong. Stories to Awaken the World. Translated by Shuhui Yang and Yunqin Yang. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2009. Feng Menglong. Stories to Caution the World. Translated by Shuhui Yang and Yunqin Yang. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005. Hsu, Pi-Ching. Beyond Eroticism: A Historian’s Reading of Humor in Feng Menglong’s Child’s Folly. Lanham: University Press of America, 2006. Hu Mingyang 胡明揚. “Sanbaiwushi nianqian Suzhou yidai Wuyu yiban 三百五十年前 蘇州一帶吳語一斑 [A glimpse of Wu dialect in the Suzhou area three hundred and fifty years ago].” Yuwen Yanjiu 2 (1981): 93–110. Kishimoto Mio 岸本美緖. Minshin kôtai to Kônan shakai: 17-seiki Chûgoku no chitsujo mondai 明清交替と江南社会―17世紀中国の秩序問題 [The Ming-Qing transition and Jiangnan society: Problems of order in seventeenth-century China]. Tokyo: Tokyo Daigaku Shuppan-kai, 1999. Lowry, Kathryn A. The Tapestry of Popular Songs in 16th- and 17th-century China: Reading, Imitation, and Desire. Leiden: Brill, 2005. Mori Masao 森正夫. “Minmatsu no shakai kankei ni okeru chitsujo no hendô ni tsuite 明末の社会関係における秩序の変動について. [Movement in the Social Order of the late Ming Dynasty].” Nagoya daigaku Bungakubu sanjuu shûnen kinen ronshû 名古屋大学文学部三十周年記念論集, 135–159. Nagoya: Nagoya daigaku bungakubu, 1979. Mowry, Hua-yuan Li. Ch’ing-shih and Feng Menglong. PhD. diss., University of California, 1976. Ôki Yasushi and Paolo Santangelo. Shan’ge, the Mountain Songs: Love Songs in Ming China. Leiden: Brill, 2011. Ôki Yasushi 大木康. “Zoku bungaku kara mita Chûgoku no toshi to nôson: chûô to chihô 俗文学からみた中国の都市と農村·中央と地方 [Vernacular Literature from the perspective of China’s cities and villages: central and regional].” Gendai Chûgoku 66 (1992): 20–28. Ôki Yasushi 大木康. Fû Muryû Sanka no kenkyû 馮夢龍『山歌』の研究 [Studies in Feng Menglong’s Shange]. Tokyo: Keisô shobô, 2003. Ôki Yasushi 大木康. “Fû Muryû ‘Jo Sanka’ kô: Shikyô gaku to minkan kayô 馮夢龍 「叙山歌」考―詩経学と民間歌謡   [An investigation into Feng Menglong’s ‘Shange Preface’: Shijing research and folksongs].” Tôyô Bunka 71 (1990): 121–145. Ôki Yasushi. “Women in Feng Menglong’s Mountain Songs.” In Writing Women in Late Imperial China, edited by Ellen Widmer and Kang-I Sun Chang, 131–143. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997. Roy, David Tod, trans. The Plum in the Golden Vase, Vol. 3. The Aphrodisiac. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006.

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Shen Defu 沈德符. Wanli yehuo bian 萬曆野獲編 [Unofficial gleanings on the Wanli reign]. Taipei: Xinxing shuju, 1976. Shi Rujie 石汝傑. “Shange de yuyan fenxi 《山歌》的語言分析 [Analysis of the language of Shange].” Hokuriku daigaku kiyo 19 (1996): 201–209. Töpelmann, Cornelia. Shan-ko von Feng Meng-lung: Eine Volksliedersammlung aus de Ming-Zeit. Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1973. Yuan Hongdao 袁宏道. Yuan Hongdao ji jianjiao 袁宏道集箋校 [The complete works of Yuan Hongdao, annotated and collated]. (Shanghai: Shanghai Guji Chubanshe, 1981) Zhong Chenzhu et al. 仲沈洙等. Shenghuzhi 盛湖志 [Gazeteer of Shengze town]. 1770. Zhu Mu 祝穆. Yu Wu Cailuan 遇吳彩鸞, [Encountering Wu Cailuan]. Vol. 11 of Xinbian gujin shiwen leiju, qianji 新編古今事文類聚前集 [New classified compendium of events and writings from past and present]. Kyoto: Chubun shuppan, 1982.

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CHAPTER 7

Turning the Authorial Table: Women Writing Wanton Women, Shame, and Jealousy in Two Qing Tanci Maram Epstein The Chinese writing tradition has no image of woman more misogynistic than the figure of yinfu 淫婦. While yinfu share with their shrew sisters a fierce jealousy and ruthless will to power at any cost to others, unique to yinfu are their unbridled sexual desires.1 Although female sexuality was culturally redeemed when it was in service to reproduction, the stereotypical yinfu is barren. The interrelated shock and entertainment value of the classic yinfu within Confucian cultures is that she is the inversion of everything a respectable woman should be. Yinfu refuse to conform to women’s subordinate social position: they do not acquiesce to the “three followings,” to father, husband, and son (sancong 三從); they reject the “four virtues” (side 四德) defined as chastity, proper speech, keeping a pleasing demeanor, and engaging in appropriate labor; and, of course, they do not abide by the central tenets of the lateimperial chastity cult, that is cloistering, chastity, and sexual fidelity to one man. Because she is so public in the expression of her desires, through acts of speech, violence, and sex, the yinfu exposes that which was hidden by orthodox discourse: the emotional and physical price that women paid to maintain the unequal gender ideology that shaped the meaning of their lives. Unlike other contributors to this volume who are using the translation “wanton woman” in order to keep their focus on the sexual aspect of the yinfu, I will leave the term untranslated. This allows me to shift attention away from the yinfu’s narrow identity as primarily sexual, to a broader understanding of the figure’s more positive range of meanings. In particular, using the term yinfu allows me to keep a methodological focus on the way women authors of two Qing tanci 彈詞 exploit the symbolic potential of yin 淫 to challenge 1  Yinfu share many qualities with other shrewish women. For a broader discussion of shrews, see Keith McMahon, Misers, Shrews, and Polygamists: Sexuality and Male-Female Relations in Eighteenth-Century Chinese Fiction (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), 55–81, and Yenna Wu, The Chinese Virago: A Literary Theme (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University East Asia Center, 1995).

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the naturalized moral hierarchy of yang 陽 dominance and yin 陰 subordination. With its water radical, the root meaning of yin 淫 is “excess,” as in flooding; this meaning of water, combined with the homophonic pun on yin 陰, naturalizes the connection between yin excess/ wantonness and women. The primary focus of this essay is an exploration of how two women authors of tanci adapted the implicitly misogynistic symbolism associated with the yinfu to make use of it as a productive expression of female empowerment. Closely connected to this is an analysis of how the two texts depict the paradoxical codes of sexuality that coexisted during the Qing: the cult of chastity that stigmatized female sexuality and the cult of passions (qing 情) that romanticized sexual desire as a core component of the expression of self. Tanci may refer to a performance genre originating in Suzhou or to a novellength written form that mimics the seven-character rhymed meter and some degree of Wu dialect from the oral performance style. My interest is in literary tanci, what Siao-chen Hu and Ellen Widmer refer to as “tanci novels” (tanci xiaoshuo 彈詞小說), a genre that is distinct from the oral form in that it was meant to be read, a distinction arising out of their association with women as authors, as narrating voice, and as primary audience.2 Until recently, literary tanci received relatively little critical attention because they were viewed as outside the mainstream of traditional Chinese literary history. However, even a cursory reading reveals the close connection between literary tanci and xiaoshuo novels in terms of plot, characterization, yinyang structural patterns, tropes, and motifs. Tanci are a particularly valuable resource for women’s history in late-imperial China since they allow us to see how women turned the ‘authorial’ table, by adapting, rewriting, and manipulating topoi, motifs, and characterizations taken from the male-authored xiaoshuo tradition. Reading how these women authors translated common themes into their fiction allows modern readers to look over their shoulders to see how they viewed the gender norms of their day.3 2  Hu Siao-chen 胡曉真, Cainü cheye weimian: Jindai Zhongguo nüxing xushi wenxue de xingqi 才女徹夜未眠:近代中國女性敘事文學的興起 [Burning the Midnight Oil: The Rise of Female Narrative in Early Modern China] (Taipei: Maitian, 2003), 21; Ellen Widmer, The Beauty and the Book: Women and Fiction in Nineteenth-Century China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University East Asia Center, 2006), 14. 3  A recent dissertation by Yu Zhang analyzes how the woman author Zhou Yingfang 周穎芳 (1829–1895) expanded the novel Shuo Yue quanzhuan 說岳全傳 [The complete biography of Yue Fei, authored by Qian Cai 錢彩 (fl. 1729)] into the tanci Jingzhong zhuan 精忠傳 [The Biography of Pure Loyalty]; Yu Zhang, “The Female Rewriting of Grand History: The Tanci Fiction Jing zhong zhuan” (PhD diss., University of Oregon, 2013).

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This essay focuses on two novel-length tanci, the publication dates of which bracket the nineteenth century. Tianyuhua 天雨花 (The Heavens Rain Flowers) was published in 1804. Although its preface is dated to 1651, I have argued elsewhere that it was likely written much closer to its date of publication.4 The second tanci again suggests the unreliability of dates provided in the preface: Fengshuangfei 鳳雙飛 (A Pair of Male Phoenixes Flying Together) was printed in 1898, but the preface is dated 1899. Tianyuhua is notable for the way its main female protagonist rejects the sexual shame projected onto women through acts of rape or illicit sex, and Fengshuangfei is unusual for its inclusion of explicitly sexual content in a female-authored work. Both texts feature powerful women who resist patriarchal authority, a stock characterization of yinfu and other shrews, and both use predatory sexuality as a marker of social disorder, a common theme in xiaoshuo fiction. However, unlike male-authored scholar novels which tend to depict sexual violence as a threat that is external to the family, and frequently depict men as victims of sexual encounters, these two tanci shift the agency for sexual transgression away from women and marginal male characters, the bandits, monks, eunuchs, and political rebels who lurk on the margins of domestic life, onto the elite men who are the husbands and fathers of the central female protagonists. Examining how the character of the yinfu is written by women is especially interesting because of the range of meanings associated with the figure. In male-authored texts the hypersexualized yinfu is a staple marker of disorder. Yinfu are beautiful women gone rogue: they are ambitious for power, refuse containment yet jealously try to control their male lovers, consume rather than produce, and, of course, place no value on chastity or sexual loyalty. Among the two most recognizable and influential yinfu in late-imperial Chinese literature are Empress Wu Zetian 武則天 of Ruyijun zhuan 如意君傳 (Lord As You Like It; early sixteenth century) and Pan Jinlian 潘金蓮 of Jin Ping Mei 金瓶梅 (Plum in the Golden Vase; 1590s). Common to both characterizations is the women’s insatiable sexual appetite and destabilizing will to power that overturns the parallel hierarchical order of state (guo 國) and home (jia 家). A fully rendered sexual vampire, Wu Zetian maintains her youth and vitality at the expense of her lovers who age preternaturally with their accelerated loss of semen. Even though Ximen Qing 西門慶, the male protagonist of Jin Ping Mei, has an insatiable and abusive sexual appetite, he ends up dying a passive sexual victim of Pan Jinlian’s lust. It should be noted that oversexed yinfu are not limited to literary works that are explicitly pornographic; the young romantic 4  Maram Epstein, “Patrimonial Bonds: Daughter, Fathers, and Power in Tianyuhua,” Late Imperial China 32.2 (2011), 3–8.

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male protagonist Jia Baoyu 賈寶玉 of the sentimental masterpiece Honglou meng 紅樓夢 (Dream of the Red Chamber) becomes the victim of female lust when the yinfu cousin of his maid Qingwen 晴雯 locks him between her legs and starts to undress him.5 The concept of sexual desire/ beauty (se 色) in these male-authored texts functions as a double-edged sword. Women are both attractive and dangerous. Although sexual desire may originate with the male protagonists, it eventually takes on a life of its own, as embodied in the creation of the beautiful yinfu or fox spirit, and is turned against the male protagonists so that they are made victim rather than perpetrator of violent sexual acts. The following quatrain that appears in several late Ming texts lays out the process by which the cutting power of the phallus is projected onto the body of a beautiful woman: Only sixteen with a body as smooth as cream, Her loins a sword to slay the unwary, Though no one may see your head fall from your neck, Before you know it, the marrow of your bones is sapped.6 Politically and symbolically, the classic yinfu is a marker of resistance to the normative patriarchal order that structures proper sexual ethics. Luring men with sex, these yinfu knowingly encourage their lovers to go against the longterm interests of the patrilineal family and state.7 Literary depictions of yinfu make use of the established yinyang symbolic vocabulary to show women who refuse to abide by the fudao 婦道, the moral code for women, and threaten the stability of the natural and social orders. Associated with yinfu and other transgressive female characters are a wide range of yinyang inversions and signs of yin excess, including flooding (or other water signs); the appearance of non-humans in the guise of demons, ghosts, yakshas and fox spirits; acts of predatory sexuality perpetrated by women or marginal males such as eunuchs 5  Cao Xueqin 曹雪芹, Yu Pingbo 俞平伯, and Wang Xishi 王惜時, Honglou meng bashi hui jiaoben 紅樓夢八十回校本 [A Critical Edition of the Eighty-Chapter Text of Dream of the Red Chamber] (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1958), chapter 77, p. 880. (Because of the importance of numerology to many of my analyses, future page references will include chapter and page, be abbreviated to 77. 880.). 6  Lanling xiaoxiaosheng 蘭陵笑笑生, Quanben Jin Ping Mei cihua 全本金瓶梅詞話 [The Complete Plum in the Golden Vase, Cihua Version] (Hong Kong: Taiping 1982), 79. 10a. Translation from David Tod Roy, The Plum in the Golden Vase, Volume Four The Climax (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 79. 640. For other texts in which the quatrain appears see Idem., 847, n. 35. 7  See Keith McMahon’s essay in this volume.

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or monks; and outbreaks of rebellion at the microcosmic or macrocosmic level against patriarchs or rulers.8 I lay out these symbolic conventions as background to the discussion below of how two female authors consciously manipulate and recuperate aspects of the yinfu as positive expressions of female empowerment within traditional polygynous households. As I argue, these female authors saw in the yinfu, and her less sexual but equally controlling sister shrews, a crude model of female empowerment and a marker of resistance to the values associated with the chastity cult and women’s subordinate roles within the household. Since the major identifying quality of the stereotypical yinfu is her wantonness, some comments on the sexual culture of late-imperial China are in order. First, it was rife with contradictions. The culturally sanctioned institutions of concubinage and prostitution allowed and encouraged men to pursue multiple forms of sexual pleasure. Literary celebration of the sexual appeal of beautiful young women peaked with the late-imperial cult of passions. Connoisseurship, including the appreciation of beauty, was so central to the cult of passions, that the ability to express one’s taste became an important expression of self. One result was that the male gaze became so normative in literary language that women adopted sexualizing language when describing the charms of other women.9 Male writers fantasized about an unstigmatized female sexuality available for their consumption in both pornographic erotica and in more sentimental literary works. The late-imperial literary landscape was filled with iconic beauties available for sexual consumption, such as Du Liniang of Mudan ting 牡丹亭 (Peony Pavilion) and the many virginal ghosts and fox spirits who populate Pu Songling’s 蒲松齡 (1640–1715) Liaozhai zhiyi 聊齋志異 (Strange Tales from Liaozhai Studio). Even though Lin Daiyu and Xue Baochai are not described in explicitly sexual terms in Honglou meng, 8  For examples of how these tropes are deployed in Xingshi yinyuan zhuan 醒世姻緣傳 [Marriage Bonds to Awaken the World, late Ming, early Qing] and Yesou puyan 野叟曝言 [A Country Codger’s Words of Exposure, second half of the eighteenth century], see Maram Epstein, Competing Discourses: Orthodoxy, Authenticity, and Engendered Meanings in LateImperial Chinese Fiction (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University East Asian Series, 2001), 124– 149, 215–229. 9  Shen Yixiu (1590–1635) describes her third daughter’s beauty: “Even I find you irresistible; what will your future husband have to say?” See Dorothy Ko, Teachers of the Inner Chambers: Women and Culture in Seventeenth-Century China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 167. A female character in Fengshuangfei uses a similar expression to remark on another woman’s beauty; Cheng Huiying 程蕙英, Xinbian Fengshuangfei 新編 鳳雙飛 [A Pair of Male Phoenixes Flying Together, Newly Revised] (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1996), 30. 1389–90.

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nineteenth-century Shanghai courtesans took these and other names from the novel to raise their appeal to customers.10 Parallel to and intertwined with these expressions of desire for an unstigmatized female sexuality, was the cult of chastity that fueled a culture of moral shaming and regulation directed at women. Female suicide in response to sexual shame was so common that the Qing code contained statutes variously dealing with assault, flirtation, and insult.11 As the legal historian Janet Theiss has argued, women, in their case testimonies, used language that reveals the extent to which the ethic of shame was integral to their personhood.12 So central was shame to orthodox ideology during the late imperial period, that teaching non-Han peoples to “know shame” (zhichi 知耻) was essential to the Qing civilizational project.13 Even as many late-Ming and Qing fictional works show that male authors were fully aware of and often sympathetic to the ways the unequal sexual standards were unfair to women, representations of female suicide in fiction, biographies, and in chastity arches erected across the landscape, normalized the culture of violence that supported the cult of women’s sexual purity.14 The Qing code empowered clans to discipline women for sexual transgressions as a family matter. This created an environment in which women understood that the threat of expulsion or other severe punishment awaited them if they transgressed the chastity code. Families were not infrequent collaborators in women’s quests for martyrdom, providing moral and sometimes tactical support for suicide by allowing women to starve themselves, or even, as occurred in Fujian, by setting up a public platform for hanging.15 Elite men helped soften the most violent aspects of the chastity code, and perhaps even appeased feelings of survivor’s guilt, through the production of epitaphs, biographies, and shrines to female martyrs. In return for their

10  Catherine Vance Yeh, Shanghai Love: Courtesans, Intellectuals, and Entertainment Culture, 1850–1910 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006), 142–3. 11  Janet Theiss, Disgraceful Matters: The Politics of Chastity in Eighteenth-Century China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 12. 12  Ibid., 160. 13  William T. Rowe, Saving the World: Chen Hongmou and Elite Consciousness in Eighteenth— Century China (Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 424–5. 14  One of the best known fictional texts that shows sympathy for women as sexual beings is “The pearl-sewn shirt” (Jiang Xingge chonghui zhenzhushan 蔣興哥重回珍珠衫), the first story in Feng Menglong 馮夢龍, Gujin xiaoshuo 古今小說 (Stories Old and New). 15  Weijing Lu, True to her Word: The Faithful Maiden Cult in Late Imperial China (Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), 116–8.

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willingness to sacrifice themselves to uphold the ideals of chastity, women were promised eternal life through their memorialization as chaste martyrs. The late-imperial fascination with yinfu, the embodiment of female sexual agency, is a byproduct of the chastity cult. The mirror image of the chaste martyr, yinfu refuse the shame and moral culpability projected onto women. Even as fictional narratives show them to be dangerous and destabilizing to the domestic and imperial order, yinfu characters, such as Wu Zetian and Pan Jinlian, fascinate precisely because they refuse the stigma of shame. In their expressions of desire for sexual fulfillment at any cost to their partner, the classic yinfu refuse the traditional role of beautiful woman as sexual object. They represent female sexuality gone rogue. The female protagonists in both Tianyuhua and Fengshuangfei refuse the stigma of sexual shame. As a correlative value, neither text celebrates chaste martyrdom. Tianyuhua contains several shocking scenes in which fathers attempt to kill their daughters in order to excise sexual shame from the family. Despite their fathers’ explicit articulations of family honor, the daughters refuse to be shamed. More unusually, both texts project licentious and predatory forms of sexuality onto men. Rather than being the usual classes of social outsiders—that is bandits, monks, eunuchs, and unattached single men, guanggun 光棍 “bare sticks”—the sexual predators in these tanci are found at the center of the elite family.

Exposure of the Sexual Double Standard as seen from Tianyuhua

The tanci Tianyuhua 天雨花 (The Heavens Rain Flowers) was written by the otherwise unknown Tao Zhenhuai 陶貞懷 (“Chaste Yearning”). Although Tianyuhua gives priority to domestic themes, it has most commonly been read for its perspective on the Ming-Qing transition. The basic narrative follows the political and domestic struggles of the idealized male protagonist Zuo Weiming 佐維明 (“Preserving the Ming”) and his talented daughter Zuo Yizhen 佐儀貞 (“Manifesting Chastity”). Interwoven into the descriptions of the Zuo household are details of the political and military collapse of the late Ming and the establishment of the Qing dynasty. That the 30-chapter work ends with the group suicide of over five hundred family members of Zuo’s sworn brothers cemented the reputation of the tanci as a work of Ming loyalism. This political reading of the text helped support the claims, starting from the eighteenth century, that Tao Zhenhuai was likely a pseudonym chosen by a male writer. The assumption of male authorship continued into the twentieth century; for example, after taking into account its political content and

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focus on a male, rather than a female, protagonist, the great modern scholar Zheng Zhenduo (1898–1958) concluded that Tianyuhua was unlikely to have been written by a woman.16 As no historical record of Tao Zhenhuai exists, the question of authorship will remain obscure until some further evidence surfaces. However, as I have argued in detail elsewhere, the unusual treatment of the themes of marriage and family in Tianyuhua supports the claim that the author was a woman.17 Moreover, given the growing evidence of gentry women’s active engagement in historical research and evidential scholarship, it is no longer tenable to claim that the tanci must have been written by a man. The prolific Wang Duan 汪端 (1793–1839) was known to have written a lengthy work of historical fiction,18 and Wang Zhaoyuan 王照圓 (1763–1851) was celebrated during her life for her evidential research on historical topics.19 By the eighteenth century, evidential and historical research were not the only points of access to late-Ming court politics for elite guixiu 閨秀 women. Similar to Tianyuhua, the well-known drama by Li Yu 李玉 (zi: Xuanyu 玄玉, c. 1591– c. 1671), Qingzhong pu 清忠譜 (A Register of the Pure and Loyal; published during the Shunzhi reign period [1644–61]), uses the historical background of the persecution of the Donglin 東林 partisans by the notorious eunuch Wei Zhongxian 魏忠賢 (1568–1627). As I argue below, the angry exposure of a hypocritical sexual culture penalizing women for men’s sexual behavior further supports the notion that Tao Zhenhuai was a woman, or, at the very least was a man who identified very strongly with a woman’s perspective. Tianyuhua contains several shocking episodes that expose the brutality of the chastity cult and its impact on women. Here I will discuss three episodes that reveal the hypocrisy of the chastity cult, in particular, how misogyny manifests as shame through women’s sexuality. The first episode reveals how 16  See Hu Siao-chen, “The Daughter’s Vision,” 200–2, and Zheng Zhenduo 鄭振鐸, Zhongguo suwenxueshi 中國俗文學史 [A History of Chinese Vernacular Literature] (Taipei: Taiwan shangwu yinshuguan, 1978), 371–2. 17  Current research in Mainland China argues for female authorship. See, for example, Chen Hong 陳洪, “Tianyuhua xingbie yishi lunxi” 天雨花性別意識論析 [An Analysis of Gender Consciousness in The Heavens Rain Flowers], Nankai xuebao 6 (2000): 28–34. 18  For example, Wang Duan wrote the historically themed work of fiction Yuan Ming yishi 元明逸史 (Lost History of the Yuan and Ming). See Widmer, The Beauty and the Book, 122–24. 19  For a brief biography of Wang’s many achievements in evidential scholarship, see Harriet Zurndorfer, “How to Write a Woman’s Life Into and Out of History: Wang Zhaoyuan (1763– 1851) and Biographical Study in Republican China,” in Writing Lives in China, 1600–2010: Histories of the Elusive Self, ed. Marjorie Dryburgh and Sarah Dauncey (New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2013), 94–7.

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women serve as catalysts for men’s shame. The second highlights how women suffer the chastity cult’s double standards. And the third episode illustrates the ways in which shame ruptures familial bonds. In each episode, the daughter is pitted against her father. In the first example, one of Weiming’s colleagues, the official Huang Chizheng 黃持正, intends to betroth his daughter Huang Jingying 靜英 to Du Shunqing 杜順卿. Jingying was born to Chizheng’s wife; her two half-brothers are born to Chizheng’s concubine who has alienated Chizheng from his wife. Chizheng is extremely strict with Jingying, but is quite permissive with the two sons, who frequently gamble and visit prostitutes (12. 439).20 When the concubine reports that Jingying has exchanged poetry with Du Shunqing, Chizheng is enraged. He confronts Jingying, who dismisses her father’s claims of supposed impropriety. She further claims that it was her family, after all, who sent her to the Du household, and all she had done was pick up some poems. Chizheng is angered by her lack of contrition, and beats Jingying and her mother. After Zuo Weiming jokingly suggests it, Chizheng agrees that the best way to clear his family honor would be to kill Jingying. Yizhen and her younger sister Dezhen 德貞 (“Chaste Virtue”) beg their father to intervene, but Weiming upholds the right of a father to punish his daughter, especially since Jingying “is unfilial and disobeys [her father], only recognizing that she has a mother” (12. 464). The episode contains a wrenching description of Chizheng ordering his two servants to take Jingying to the river, followed by Jingying’s tearful farewell to her mother before she jumps into the water, the sensation of panic as water fills her nose and mouth, and then the sound of a boat nearby (12. 457–60). Because the narrator hides Weiming’s plan to rescue Jingying from both readers and the intradiegetic characters, the readers are caught in the horror of being passive witnesses to this act of premeditated homicide. Chizheng feels no need to keep this act of discipline secret; when Weiming asks Chizheng if he has any regrets about killing his daughter, he responds, “My unfilial daughter perpetrated this scandal (choushi 醜事); death counts as getting off easy. What is there to regret?” (13. 510). This event introduces a theme that is repeated elsewhere in Tianyuhua: the eagerness of fathers to sacrifice daughters for the sake of family honor, while holding lax sexual standards for themselves and other men. This lengthy episode ends with an event that illustrates how female sexual transgression catalyzes men’s shame. Chizheng discovers his much-favored concubine in flagrante delicto with his sons’ tutor (14. 525). Chizheng calls her a “yinfu” and threatens to behead her and her lover. When his sons beg him to 20  Tao Zhenhuai 陶貞懷, Tianyuhua 天雨花 [The Heavens Rain Flowers] (Zhengzhou: Zhongzhou guji chubanshe, 1984).

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treat their mother with mercy, Chizheng threatens to kill himself rather than live with the shame of being a cuckold (duanran bu shou wuguihao, huo zai yangjian zen zuo ren? 斷然不受烏龜號,活在陽間怎作人? 14. 527). Although Chizheng drowns her, leaving her body intact as an act of mercy for the sake of his sons, her death is not enough to expiate his shame. When local security officials come to see why he has thrown someone overboard, Chizheng tries to bribe them and the boatmen to buy their silence (14. 527–29), despite the Ming code, which upholds a man’s right to kill an adulterous wife or concubine. In the fictional world of Tianyuhua, killing a dissolute daughter definitively establishes a man’s reputation for upholding the chastity code; killing a dissolute concubine, however, cannot remove the shame of having been cuckolded by someone the man chose to bring into his family. An equally shocking second episode involves Weiming’s second daughter, Dezhen. Even though Wang Liqian 王禮乾, the son of one of his sworn brothers, is known to frequent brothels, Zuo Weiming betroths Dezhen to him, ignoring her and her mother’s protests. As Weiming’s wife comments, “Daily visits to brothels are not a decent way to live—it wastes money and harms the health; and what can be done if he contracts a venereal disease?” 日游妓院 非好事,銀錢花費損精神,再染瘡毒如何處? (18. 730). Weiming asks Liqian to come stay at the Zuo home in preparation for the uxorilocal marriage, but Liqian chafes under Weiming’s strict rules. When Dezhen’s maid, masquerading as Dezhen, arranges a tryst with Liqian, he agrees and comes up with a plan to get out of the engagement with this girl who truly has “no shame” (cinü zhen wuchi 此女真無耻, 17. 737). Liqian and the maid meet in the dark and exchange tokens. Liqian then writes an erotic poem on the wall. Liqian appears before Weiming the next morning and insists that he wants the betrothal annulled since—as evidenced by the poem—Dezhen is not worthy enough to be a wife in his family as she will “just make him a cuckold” (19. 740–1). Weiming threatens to kill Dezhen immediately unless she confesses; Yizhen intervenes and insists that in all capital cases, the accuser must be deposed before the accused is sentenced to death (19. 744). At the mock trial, Liqian accuses Dezhen of instigating the affair but Yizhen tricks him into revealing that he has no idea which of the girls standing before him is Dezhen. When Weiming discovers that Dezhen’s maid is wearing Liqian’s ring, he orders his son to oversee the servant’s immediate execution and display her decapitated head, despite the pleas of his wife and daughters for compassion (19. 754). There is no punishment for Liqian. And despite Liqian’s despicable behavior, Weiming orders Dezhen to marry and submit to him (20. 769). After the marriage, Liqian quickly tires of Dezhen, and he returns to the pleasure quarters (20. 774). When

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Dezhen chastises her husband for lying about where he goes and for wasting money, he accuses her of jealousy (20. 1776). Meanwhile, both sets of parents are eager for the marriage to work and plead with Dezhen to submit to Liqian. The many attempts to reform Liqian fail. He disregards the sexual code that he earlier claimed is so important to his own family honor. After he catches sight of Song Yuxian 宋玉仙, the beautiful daughter of an elite but poor family, Liqian works with her simple brother to buy her as concubine, even though she is betrothed as a wife to someone else. Liqian asks Dezhen for permission to bring in Yuxian as a concubine, and Dezhen agrees knowing that neither set of parents would agree to such a union. Liqian secretly brings Yuxian into the household. She refuses to submit to him, so he whips her until she is bleeding and unconscious. Dezhen’s response is both complicit and rebellious. She asks Yuxian to submit because she does not want to “harm their conjugal feelings” (shangle fuqi mianshang qing 傷了夫妻面上情 28. 1160), but then arranges for a servant to take Yuxian and her widowed mother to her father. When Weiming learns how Yuxian has been treated, he turns on Dezhen and blames her for not stopping her husband. Dezhen’s response reveals the double standard at play: Dad, your point is very strange. What does your son-in-law’s behavior have to do with me? Why are you so coldly holding me responsible? You know I am helpless, so why did you pair me with such a partner? You clearly knew that he is forceful while I am weak; why give me this lecture now? (28. 1164) Weiming arranges for Yuxian to marry her original fiancé, but metes out no punishment to Liqian. Tianyuhua reveals a fictional world in which women are punished for men’s transgressions and where men, literally, get away with murder. A third episode in Tianyuhua stands out for illustrating women as both treasured family members and as the embodiment of a shame that must be excised. Weiming’s younger brother, Zhide 致德, who has never emulated his brother’s strict household management, hears a rumor that his daughter Xiuzhen 秀貞 has had sexual relations with a maternal cousin. In reality, Hongyun 紅雲, his daughter’s maid, identical to her mistress except for six moles on her shoulder, masqueraded as her mistress. The cousin had seduced Hongyun, and when Xiuzhen learns of the affair she turns against her maid but hides the scandal from her father. Hoping to force her mistress Xiuzhen to marry the man she loves, Hongyun places one of Xiuzhen’s shoes in his room and gives him one

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of her mistress’ jade hairpins (10. 384). Zhide is taken in by Hongyun’s ruse and confronts his daughter, who protests her innocence. Zhide looked at her in rage, and overturned the chair as he stood up. In one hand he grabbed an iron rod off the wall, and in the other he grasped her hair. At that moment he had no thought for her as the daughter of his own flesh and blood. His body overflowed with the heat of rage, and wherever on her chest the rod struck, bright blood gushed forth (13. 488). Zhide then attacks his wife: You are a true slut (yinfu) to have given birth to this sluttish seed (xiao yingen, 小淫根). . . . I’ve already killed this unfilial daughter; I’ll just divorce you and send you back to your family. It has taken just one morning to bring down the pure reputation of the Zuo lineage. Enough is enough, let it end! I truly do not have any face left to continue having any self-respect. Me, such a fine exemplar of manhood, utterly ruined by a woman.” 真淫婦,親生這樣小淫根。。。我已殺了不肖女,便休你去傳家門。   左門世代多清肅,今朝因你墮家聲。罷了,罷了,真罷了!實實無顏 在做人!我一堂堂男子漢,此生斷送婦人身 (13. 489)

Zhide’s actions reveal how shame transcends the individual to include daughter, mother, and himself. The only way to expunge the shame the women have brought upon his family name is to kill his daughter and distance himself from any responsibility by placing the blame squarely on his wife. Although Zhide’s wife has many flaws as a wife and mother, wantonness is not one of them. Pointedly, Zhide does not hold his wife’s nephew responsible for this egregious transgression; his rage is focused on disciplining the women in his household. The rest of the episode contrasts the conflicting values of family honor and familial bonds. Xiuzhen’s mother sends Xiuzhen, who has by pure fate survived her beating, to her natal home to protect her from her husband’s wrath, but on the way Xiuzhen and her maid are kidnapped and sold. Unbeknownst to her family, Xiuzhen is killed and Hongyun passes herself off as her mistress and is sold to the usurper Zheng Guotai 鄭國泰 (d. 1617), who takes her as a concubine. After Zheng Guotai and his son are deposed, Hongyun, as the fake Xiuzhen, is held in prison awaiting execution. Weiming and Zhide try repeatedly to have Xiuzhen poisoned in jail, so that the scandal will not be made public. Yizhen, however, keeps insisting that her father and uncle owe an affective obligation to Xiuzhen:

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“Dad, yesterday you said that Xiuzhen having sex with [our cousin] Di Chen was nothing more than misguided youthful passion (ernü chiqing 兒女癡情), and that she did not need to die [for this.]” Master Zuo laughed and responded: “You are speaking like a girl, cherry picking my words to make your point. What I said yesterday was that if she had died at the home of the Dings [to whom she had been sold] and had not gone on to become the concubine of that traitor, then we could recognize her as a daughter of the Zuo lineage. Or, if she had not left home that day, she could have avoided being killed.” The young mistress said: “Running away from home, being sold to the Dings, being sent off to that usurper, none of this was under Xiuzhen’s control (zijia zhuyi 自家主意). If you examine the root problem, it was aunt, uncle and [the servants] Weng Hu and his wife who harmed her. Seen from this perspective, what does any of this have to do with [Xiuzhen] herself?” (19. 634) Yizhen argues for the primacy of the biological and affective family bond to Xiuzhen: “She is the flesh and blood of this lineage; if she is beaten the older generation will feel the pain on their legs.” Yizhen then reminds her uncle, “If Xiuzhen is not your daughter, than who gave birth to her? . . . Even if she is the concubine of that traitor, Uncle and Aunt still gave her her name” (19. 633 and 636). Yizhen even suggests that Zheng Guotai is only using Xiuzhen as a pawn in his battle against Weiming. Weiming and Zhide, however, are agreed that rescuing Xiuzhen is out of the question for them: “Not only would outsiders ridicule (chixiao 耻笑) us for keeping this kind of girl in our home, we will be ridiculed (chixiao) by our kinsmen when we return to our home village” (16. 638). The verb to ridicule, literally “to laugh at another’s shame,” is based on the concept of having one’s shame exposed. One of Weiming’s concluding arguments is that “[Yizhen] cares only about the affection between sisters, and cares nothing about the reputation of the family,” 只重姨妹之情,不顧家門 之醜, 16. 642). For the men in Tianyuhua, the men’s sense of family honor is more significant than the familial bonds between fathers and daughters, or husbands and wives. This episode concludes with the revelation that Xiuzhen had died a chaste martyr and that Hongyun has been impersonating her. This discovery does nothing to diminish the force of Yizhen’s logic, but in the moral system promoted by her father and uncle, a woman’s agency is irrelevant to the taint of shame that accrues to the family. As the men argue, a woman’s gendered shame is so powerful, the need to eradicate it overrides any affective connection fathers have with daughters. As shown, daughters in Tianyuhua hold high

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symbolic value as scapegoats, as that which should and must be sacrificed in order to demonstrate a man’s absolute commitment to the chastity code. In the examples presented here, the only way to eradicate the taint of shame from the family name is to kill the woman/ women who produced it. Men, no matter how perfidious their behavior, are exempt from being the objects of the violence produced by shame. Even those protagonists, such as Wang Liqian, who repeatedly and actively violate the same chastity code that they use to punish and shame women, are immune from being cast as shameful. As Tao Zhenhuai presents it in Tianyuhua, there is a profound difference between the process of gendered shaming and sexualized immorality. It is important to note how within this context Tao Zhenhuai presents an alternate vision of sexual morality in Tianyuhua. Sexual monogamy for both men and women replaces the absolute standard of cloistering and physical chastity for women. Despite his strict views on cloistering (for example, Weiming forbids the women in his family from entering the garden), Weiming demonstrates an unusual sympathy for couples who have premarital contact so long as they intend to marry. As Weiming argues with Liqian, Liqian’s attack on his fiancée is misplaced since Dezhen lost her virginity to him and not some other man (19. 740). Weiming also tricks the indignant Chizheng into agreeing to a marriage between his daughter and her original fiancé. The exchange of poetry that for Chizheng has been a matter of dire shame, for Weiming was a moment of youthful indiscretion that reveals the couple’s deep feelings for each other. Tao Zhenhuai’s creation of Yizhen, a daughter who fearlessly resists her father’s attempts to cloister and contain her, proves the falseness of the cultural logic that defines a woman’s breaches of cloistered confinement as a serious moral flaw. By rejecting the cultural focus on absolute standards for female chastity during the late-imperial period, Tao Zhenhuai deconstructs the cultural and narrative logic of the yinfu as the female embodiment of transgressive sexual energy. With the exception of Huang Chizheng’s concubine, the process of labeling women as wanton is based on false charges. However, each time a man reacts to the culture of sexual shame and decides to kill the wanton transgressor, he diverts attention from the culpability of the male actors. The ritualized ‘killing of the yinfu’ creates a mechanism that obscures male agency while cleansing the community of the pollution of shame. However, by showing how the daughters labeled as wanton are actually sympathetic victims, Tianyuhua strips away the moral logic that justifies the discourse of shame. Along with rejecting gendered shame, the author of Tianyuhua rewrites several conventional tropes associated with women’s sexuality. Late-imperial fiction typically associates gardens with the feminine; most famously, the

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gardens in Mudan ting and Honglou meng are feminized spaces that become the stage for fantasies of qing romance.21 Sexual energy in the Tianyuhua garden, however, is coded as male. When Yizhen and the other girls enter the garden, despite Weiming’s warnings that it might be haunted, they are attacked by malevolent “flower tree spirits” who appear in the form of three beautiful nineteen-year-old males, “the three masters of the garden” (13. 474). The literary convention, of course, is that flower spirits are goddesses who take the form of beautiful women. Similarly, Tao Zhenhuai rewrites the conventional characterization of fox spirits. By the late-imperial period, fox spirits were typically associated with female sexuality, frequently as sexual predators, as in Jin Ping Mei and the mid seventeenth-century Xingshi yinyuan zhuan, or more sympathetically in many of the stories in Pu Songling’s Liaozhai zhiyi.22 Early in Tianyuhua, Zuo Weiming battles with a sorcerer and kills the host body of his daughter, a ninetailed fox. The sorcerer finds another fox body for his daughter to inhabit, and although she has been using non-sexual means to pursue longevity, the girl consciously decides to seduce Weiming’s brother in order to avenge herself (6. 235). Even though Zhide almost dies, Weiming locates agency for his brother’s illness with Zhide, not the fox.23 The fox spirit reappears late in the novel in a distinctly non-sexual identity, disguised as a living Guanyin to lure all the women in the Zuo family to her temple in the hope of entrapping Weiming (27. 1127). Although the fox spirit is willing to use her sexual energy, this is neither her primary identity nor preferred mode of engagement with the human realm. Near the end of the episode, Weiming describes her in surprisingly sympathetic terms as a Daoist adept who does not desire to harm humans (27. 1126). A final trait commonly associated with the yinfu is that of sexual possessiveness. This theme is largely absent from Tianyuhua. The only female character in Tianyuhua who displays sexual possessiveness is the bandit Sai Liuxing 賽流星. In a twist on the usual jealous battle between husband and wife, when her husband proposes taking a concubine, Liuxing prevents her weak bandit king husband from bedding his beautiful female captives until she finds a man she wants to take as a lover (1. 41). Her motivations seem driven less by 21  Epstein, Competing Discourses, 96–99, and 156–158. 22  See Andrew Plaks, Four Masterworks of the Ming Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 99–101; and Epstein, Competing Discourses, 135–141. 23  “My brother is morally weak and that is how he came to be possessed by the demon; it must be a fox spirit,” 吾弟心邪不正經。所以被妖來迷惑,想來也是一狐精 (6. 237).

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jealousy than a desire for sexual parity.24 None of the central female protagonists in Tianyuhua is motivated by jealousy. Weiming’s wife tries to persuade him to accept his mother’s maid as a concubine in order to reduce the tension between son and mother; Dezhen acquiesces to her husband’s desires to take a concubine and rather than feel any jealousy, she feels only sympathy for the woman because she is being forced into a marriage she does not want. The shocking descriptions of fathers attempting to kill their daughters in order to purge the taint of sexual shame expose the cultural logic of the yinfu as women who must be punished to restore social order. The men in Tianyuhua conflate their own personal reputations with the social order and will stop at nothing to try to clear themselves of the stigma of sexual shame. These episodes force readers to question the absolute standards for female sexual purity associated with the late-imperial chastity code. Pitched battles between fathers and daughters expose the brutal ritual logic that assumes sacrificing a daughter’s life (through suicide or homicide) proves a man’s commitment to the chastity cult and is enough to wash away the pollution of sexual shame. These examples in Tianyuhua repeatedly illustrate how raising the specter of female wantonness displaces attention away from the male actors so that they are never held responsible. However, in a narrative pattern repeated in Fengshuangfei, the sexual threat to domestic stability comes not from wanton women inside the household or men at the margins of society, but from the elite male intimates at the center of the family.

Rewriting Wantonness in Fengshuangfei

The late nineteenth-century tanci Fengshuangfei 鳳雙飛 (A Pair of Male Phoenixes Flying Together; printed 1898, preface dated 1899) by the gentry woman Cheng Huiying 程惠英 goes even further than Tianyuhua in shifting depictions of wanton sexuality on to male characters. Among the many unusual narrative features of this tanci is the way it inverts the figure of the hypersexual woman. In place of the ‘city toppling beauty’ whose charms so 24  Tan Zhengbi has suggested this scene was the inspiration for a similar episode in Jinghua yuan (Flowers in the mirror), chapters 51–52. See Tan Zhengbi 譚正璧, Zhongguo nü­xing wenxue shi 中國女性文學史 [A History of Women’s Literature in China] (Tianjin: Baihua wenyi chuban she, 1984), 382; also see Ellen Widmer, “Jinghua yuan: Where the Late Late Ming Meets the Early Late Qing,” in Dynastic Crisis and Cultural Innovation: From the late Ming to the late Qing and Beyond, ed. David Der-wei Wang and Shang Wei (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2005), 284–7.

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bewitch her ruler lover that he is willing to sacrifice his kingdom to please her, Fengshuangfei features the boy Bai Ruyu 白如玉 “White as Jade,” as the sexual figure at the center of the narrative’s yinyang imbalance.25 Bai Ruyu, who has the nickname Wushuang 無雙, “the incomparable one,” is so sexually irresistible that almost all men who catch sight of him try to initiate a sexual relationship with him. Unlike the classic wanton woman, however, Ruyu is motivated neither by a desire for power nor by his own sexual desires. Ruyu is depicted sympathetically, as a victim of other’s men’s desires, who, despite being treated as a sexual object, stays pure of sexual shame and remains a loyal friend and political subject. Structurally, the 52-chapter text is divided into three equal sections. With the exception of the brief mythic prologue, the first seventeen chapters are set exclusively in the world of male homosociality: the masculine domestic spaces of study and library, the imperial court and yamen, and the battlefield. This structural arrangement is clearly intentional. Although a number of the major female protagonists are introduced in this first section of the novel, they are not developed as characters with subjectivity until Chapter 18, when the plot is suddenly focalized through the female protagonists and yin is in the ascendant while the male characters recede into the background. The conclusion of the text restores a yinyang balance at both the domestic microcosm and the political macrocosm. The first third of Fengshuangfei establishes that wanton sexual desires are a male attribute. This section establishes male sexual desires as a drive that cannot be resisted. A chain of male characters, including hitherto virtuous civil officials, generals, and the imperial crown prince himself, are unable to restrain their desire for Ruyu from the moment they lay eyes on him. Unlike many Chinese pornographic narratives that begin with forcible rape and elide it into mutually-satisfying sexual passion, Ruyu is never described as taking sexual pleasure from his many sexual encounters.26 Ruyu comes to enjoy the perks of being kept as a lover, but is not driven by sexual desire and does not exploit his position of sexual favorite to advance himself.

25  See Wenjia Liu, “The tanci Feng shuangfei: A Female Perspective on the Gender and Sexual Politics of Late-Qing China” (PhD diss., University of Oregon, 2010), and “Lover-Sister: Female Same-sex Desire and Women’s Agency in Feng shuangfei,” Intersections: Gender and Sexuality in Asia and the Pacific 35 (2014), http://intersections.anu.edu.au/issue35/liu .htm. 26  For a more detailed discussion of the lustful woman trope as translated into homoerotic narratives, see Mark Stevenson’s essay in this volume.

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Despite the many instances of sexual defilement in this first third of the tanci, there is no evocation of the discourse of shame. Throughout Fengshuangfei, Ruyu is depicted as a victim of other men’s desires; and although he sometimes resents the attention, neither Ruyu nor the men around him see his sexual status as a cause for shame. Ruyu’s sexual initiation is never treated as anything other than rape: the protagonist, Zhang Qihu 張起鵠, is both the god-son and lover of Ruyu’s mother.27 When he notices how beautiful Ruyu is, he forcibly rapes the boy and sets in motion Ruyu’s identity as sexual object. Ruyu runs away from home, but the officials to whom he turns for protection each become infatuated with him and go on to have sexual relations with him. Ruyu’s presence, through no agency of his own, destabilizes the imperial court, causes the wasting disease that threatens the life of the crown prince (7. 292–4), and brings about the fall of a garrison city in Yunnan where Ruyu has followed his lover, Zhang Jing 張精, a high civil official, into exile. When a guard catches sight of Ruyu relieving himself, he tries to kidnap him and a brawl breaks out between the Han soldiers and civil leaders, allowing the Miao soldiers who are holding the city under siege to take advantage of the commotion and storm the city walls (12. 523).28 In a clever twist on the usual characterization of the citytoppling beauty who uses sex to empower herself at the expense of the welfare of the state, Ruyu now harnesses his beauty to help the besieged Han forces by using his sex appeal to set the rebel leaders against each other. There is no distinction between modes of masculinity in terms of who pursues Ruyu as a sexual object: crude soldiers, refined aesthetes, as well as high military and civil officials all pursue him. It is significant to the depiction of male sexuality in the tanci that Zhang Jing, the high civil official who is so infatuated with Ruyu that he destroys his own career and alienates his family, is the father of Zhang Yishao 張逸少, one of the eponymous phoenixes of the title. Zhang Jing experiences a parallel loss of sexual and political honor when he is captured by a “wanton and violent” (yin xiong 淫凶) barbarian queen and becomes her lover (14. 627). Although the queen is labeled “wanton,” Cheng Huiying keeps the narrative focus on Jing’s moral collapse. His only acts of resistance are to refuse, out of vanity, to allow the queen to shave his beard to make him look younger, and to threaten suicide 27   Fengshuangfei, 5. 182 and 189. 28  Whereas scenes of male urination in fiction are usually positive, women’s urination is often destabilizing. This scene underscores how Ruyu embodies the destructive power usually associated with women. On the constructed differences of urination as a gendered trope, see Maram Epstein, “Inscribing the Essentials: Culture and the Body in MingQing Fiction,” Ming Studies 41 (1999): 6–36.

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when the queen’s maid refuses his sexual advances. Jing’s moral implosion is thoroughly exposed when his son Yishao triumphantly leads Han troops into the rebel palace and finds his father naked in the queen’s bed. However, even in this scene when the parallel sexual and political perfidy of this high official is put on display, no one invokes a discourse of shame (14. 629). Lack of sexual self-control is a weakness that afflicts all the male characters in Fengshuangfei save the other phoenix, the remarkably serious and disciplined Guo Lingyun 郭凌雲. However, no matter how public the sexual folly and political transgressions of the male characters, there is no shame. Even the feminized and sexually passive Ruyu, despite his many sexual partners and unsavory sexual encounters, is exempt from the taint of shame. Parallel to the first third of the tanci which is set in the yang male homosocial worlds of court and military encampments, the second third of Fengshuangfei is dominated by yin symbols. This section makes use of a number of classic yin semes, including female political rule, an island kingdom, a non-Han people that resist Han hegemony, and a female homoerotic relationship that excludes men. The central protagonist in this middle section of the narrative, is Zhang Feixiang 飛香, the sister of Zhang Yishao and fiancée of Guo Lingyun. Feixiang flees Beijing with her sworn sister He Danyan 何淡煙 to escape from a man who is trying to abduct her. In order to travel more easily, the two girls disguise themselves as men and eventually end up on an island off China’s southern coast, ruled by non-Han barbarians. Here, Feixiang meets Murong Zhu 慕容珠, the daughter of the bandit ruler of the island. Feixiang is smitten by the princess’s beauty and fantasizes about the lucky man who will possess her as wife (18. 822). When the king finds Feixiang, still in male dress, in the same room as his daughter, he forces the two to marry in order to avoid a scandal. In contrast to many of the male homoerotic relationships in Fengshuangfei that are clearly corporeal in nature, there are no details of a physical sexual relationship between the two women, although the text makes clear that their relationship is physically and emotionally intimate.29 On their wedding night, “they both took off their undergarments and slept peacefully side by side under a single quilt, closing the door and dismissing both maids” (18. 843). The yinyang inversions in this central section of the narrative create a utopic fictional world dominated by yin. In contrast to the political and incestuous chaos of the yang world of men, the yin island world provides a safe harbor in which the girls fall in love and enjoy the pleasures of an intimate marriage. Although Feixiang had revealed herself to be a woman on their 29  Elsewhere the tanci contains an explicit description of one man teaching another how to perform male-male sex (13. 357–8).

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wedding night, she and Murong Zhu live as husband and wife for nineteen long chapters. Feixiang is so happy in her marriage that she makes no effort to contact her family, although she is nominally being held captive on the island. Guo Lingyun, Feixiang’s fiancé and field commander of the Chinese military, sends troops in search of Feixiang. Eventually, he discovers her whereabouts and launches a naval assault on the island. After her father is killed in battle, Murong Zhu assumes political and military leadership of her island. Despite all the classic indicators of her yin otherness—she is a barbarian woman who mounts political and military opposition to Chinese hegemony—the narrative treats Zhu sympathetically, as a loving and loyal wife, and a filial daughter. It is noteworthy that even after both women are living in China and Feixiang has married Lingyun, neither woman is shamed on account of their expressions of love for each other, or for any transgression of the chastity code. In chapters 36 and 37 of Fengshuangfei, Cheng Huiying passes up another opportunity to exploit yin semes that are conventionally used to link yin 陰 with yin 淫 ‘wantonness.’ As an author, Cheng shows herself to be aware of the rich symbolic associations between 36 (6 × 6; six being the numerological equivalent of yin) and yin themes.30 Among the iconic tropes of yinyang inversion deployed in chapters 36 and 37 is a battle between two rebel armies and Chinese military forces off the southern coast of China. As established in the Yijing hexagrams, yin, the broken line, is associated with twos, while yang is associated with one. Both island kingdoms are ruled by women. Chapter 36 explicitly links the feminine and wantonness; it is set in the court of a dragon princess who took the form of a beautiful woman after her corporeal desires were aroused (dong fanxin 動凡心 36. 1698). The princess is a jiao dragon 蛟精, a type of dragon associated with flooding. Not only does flooding reference the root meaning of yin 淫, the use of the character jiao 交 as the phonetic element for this type of dragon explicitly evokes the concept of sexual congress. Multiple details of her characterization set up the expectation that the dragon princess will conform to the stereotype of a classic yinfu: she is the embodiment of a non-human spirit who has taken on a remarkably beautiful feminine form, and she is jealous, manipulative, and domineering. Her husband is the hypermasculine and oversexed General Zhang Qihu, the man who had raped Bai Ruyu while having a sexual relationship with Ruyu’s mother and then went on to have many other transgressive sexual relations. Despite his aggressive sexual energy, Qihu is transformed into a junei 懼內 henpecked husband in this section of the novel. He allows his wife to humiliate him publically after he 30  Following Jin Ping Mei, the authors of Honglou meng and Jinghua yuan exploit chapters 33–36 to develop yin themes. See Epstein, Competing Discourses, 59, 179–80, 258–60.

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brings back a Chinese captive as a concubine. Although readers might expect this dragon wife to be irrationally cruel and destructive, Cheng Huiying recuperates her as a positive character by using her to rein in Qihu’s predatory sexuality.31 When the dragon wife meets the beautiful captive and realizes that she is a virgin who would prefer death to submitting to Qihu, she becomes enraged and berates Qihu. Her attack on Qihu is notable for the way she uses yin 淫 as a transitive verb, clearly projecting the agency for wantonness onto her husband: “You defile women (yin funü 淫婦女) and pillage boys, amusing yourself with no limits while completely forgetting about home” (淫婦女,掠兒郎,快樂無 窮家盡忘, 36. 1698). Her sympathies aroused, the dragon takes the beautiful and erudite Zhen Daya 真大雅 as her own servant to protect her from her husband. Cheng Huiying translates the character of this jealous and domineering dragon character, who in male-authored xiaoshuo fiction would typically be developed as a threatening wanton woman, and turns her into a powerful ally and protector of female virtue. Chapter 37 foregrounds a second battle between the sexes that again associates wanton sexuality with men. In this chapter, Guo Lingyun, one of the two eponymous phoenixes and the only male character who seems to have full mastery over his sexual urges, designs a variant of the usual seduction plot. He sends Bai Ruyu into the court of the barbarian princess Murong Zhu in order to rescue Feixiang. Until this point in the tanci, Bai Ruyu has been infallible as a secret weapon because no man (with the exception of Lingyun) has been able to resist his charms. Feixiang’s sworn sister, Danyan, comments on the plan contemptuously: The rules of war teach, ‘If you know yourself and your enemy, then all your strategies will succeed.’ This strategy reveals that you ‘know yourself’ but do not yet know your enemy. . . . [You think] because all men love (ai 愛) [Ruyu], so should women. You little imagine that women can be good or bad. [Do you believe] that all women must be wanton and lascivious? (tanyin haose 貪淫好色; 37: 1744). The military stratagem fails dismally; Zhu and Feixiang see through it immediately, and have Ruyu beaten and sent back to the Han troops. To be explicit, Murong Zhu does not refuse Ruyu because she is not attracted to men—as 31  For a comparative treatment of yin energy embodied in reptile form, the late eighteenthcentury scholar novel Yesou puyan contains an episode featuring six python couples that emit noxious yin fumes; the pythons demand a regular tribute of men and women whom they brutalize in their sexual orgies. See Epstein, Competing Discourses, 226–27.

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Feixiang’s ‘wife’ her desires are consistently coded heterosexual and she eventually becomes Lingyun’s concubine. The point is that even though she is depicted as a woman with a full range of politically transgressive behaviors, she is not wanton. In Fengshuangfei, as in Tianyuhua, wantonness and predatory sexuality are qualities exclusively associated with men. Since jealousy is an important trait associated with the yinfu, it is instructive to look further at how Chen Huiying constructs it as a positive quality that strengthens the polygamous household. Zhang Yishao, the second “phoenix,” is depicted as a handsome romantic fengliu 風流 type; both men and women are attracted to him, and he avidly pursues romantic relationships with women, even after he is married. His wife, Mu Qionghua 沐瓊花, develops jealousy as a trait only after she marries him and as a response to his behavior. Shortly after they marry, Yishao announces that he would like to take as many concubines as Qionghua’s father, eight! Qionghua agrees, so long as Yizhao models himself after her father, by “constraining himself with ritual” (yili zizhu 以禮自主) and waiting until he has passed his thirtieth birthday to start acquiring his harem (29. 1361–2). As Wenjia Liu has argued, what is labeled in the tanci as jealousy is an effective tool that allows Qionghua to maintain order in the household in the absence of any effective mechanism for controlling her husband’s sexuality. As in Tianyuhua, the male characters are immune from shame, and, with very few exceptions, have no regard for ritual propriety. Qionghua’s jealousy protects Yishao, and thereby the entire family, from his own poor judgment.32 Significantly, Qionghua steps in and refuses to allow Yishao to take the beautiful and lively Bao Xiang’er as a concubine, despite his insistence, because Xiang’er’s uncle is a hated eunuch who is Yishao’s political enemy. Yishao’s military teacher agrees that Qionghua is exactly the kind of wife needed to keep Yishao out of trouble since he has very poor boundaries. This fellow fears neither heaven above nor earth below; he has no fear of the emperor in public, nor of his father at home. . . . Someone like this who thinks he’s invincible truly needs a strict wife to keep him in line. (29. 1361) Eventually, Yishao admits to himself that “even though his wife is jealous, she is not, after all, without reason” (31. 1452). Despite her attempts to maintain some degree of order in their conjugal household, Qionghua discovers that in addition to keeping mistresses outside their home, Yishao has slept with her maids. As she explains to the maids, her jealousy, even though it gives her a bad reputation, safeguards their interests; if they wished to have a future 32  Liu, “The tanci Feng shuangfei,” 216–220. EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 11/4/2019 7:50 PM via TOWSON UNIVERSITY AN: 1507598 ; Stevenson, Mark J., Wu, Cuncun.; Wanton Women in Late-imperial Chinese Literature : Models, Genres, Subversions and Traditions Account: towson.main.eds

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as anything but a maid, they would have needed to safeguard their chastity (51. 2412). In short, the tanci justifies Qionghua’s jealousy as a rational and productive response to a husband who suffers from poor judgment and lack of sexual self-control. Jealousy seems to be the only tool that women have in a social world that places no restraints on men’s sexuality. An even more positive view of female jealousy is voiced by Guo Lingyun after he marries the barbarian princess Murong Zhu as his concubine. Unlike Qionghua, Zhu is innately jealous and has a reputation for anger. Zhu is not jealous about having to share her husband sexually, but her pride is offended that she is marrying in at a lower rank than the other concubines, whom she considers beneath her. Lingyun, who has shown exceptional sexual control and virtue his entire life, seems to enjoy her fits of misplaced jealousy. As the narrator reflects: It’s because wife and concubines are so virtuous that the household lacks the taste of vinegar [an expression for women’s jealousy]. It’s for the best that [Zhu] adds this flavor, for it keeps the romance alive in the women’s quarters. 正因大妻小妾多賢淑,七件關門少醋香,最好有他添一味,維持風月 稱閨房 (44. 2076).

In Cheng Huiying’s view, rather than being the scourge of polygynous households, well-placed jealousy is one of the spices of life. As illustrated in Tianyuhua and Fengshuangfei, men’s pursuit of sexual pleasures weakens the family at the bodily level through the introduction of sexually transmitted diseases, economically through the misuse of economic resources, and politically through involvement in messy and dangerous political intrigues. A weak subordinate wife enables her husband to dissipate his corporeal, economic, and social capital, while a powerful wife who enjoys healthy intimate relations with her husband is necessary to the preservation of the family. Jealousy, a key character trait of wanton women, constructs boundaries around male sexuality. Women’s domestic power, rather than subvert the family, helps maintain a stable hierarchical order with clear lines of authority. Conclusion Neither Tao Zhenhuai nor Cheng Huiying demonstrates any narrative interest in the stereotypical rendering of the figure of the wanton woman. As should be clear, this is not because either author shies away from depictions of EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 11/4/2019 7:50 PM via TOWSON UNIVERSITY AN: 1507598 ; Stevenson, Mark J., Wu, Cuncun.; Wanton Women in Late-imperial Chinese Literature : Models, Genres, Subversions and Traditions Account: towson.main.eds

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transgressive sexuality. Cheng Huiying’s deployment of yinyang symbolism shows that she was fully aware of xiaoshuo aesthetics; her characterization of Zhang Qihu’s dragon wife as a woman who is domineering, jealous and sexual, yet protective of other women, strongly suggests that Cheng Huiying actively rewrote the figure of the yinfu to reposition her domineering and jealous nature as a positive counterbalance to the predatory male sexual energy of her husband. The positive depictions of powerful women who resist strict cloistering in both tanci suggest that their authors explicitly rejected the core concept behind the figure of the yinfu—the naturalization of women as the site of unbounded, predatory, and dangerous sexual energy. In both texts, wanton and predatory sexuality is explicitly and exclusively associated with men. The focus on male sexual agency as the real danger to social order distinguishes these two tanci from male-authored fiction. As discussed earlier, even though Ximen Qing in Jin Ping Mei is depicted negatively, the agency for predatory sexual behavior in the narrative is quickly shifted onto Pan Jinlian, who is associatively related to the man-killing tiger with which the Chongzhen version of the text begins.33 No matter how offensive his actions, Ximen Qing ultimately dies as just one more in a chain of victims killed by the yinfu Pan Jinlian. There is no such narrative reversal in either tanci; neither shifts the agency for predatory sexuality away from the male protagonists to a deadly yinfu. Importantly, neither female author ‘others’ sexual transgression by projecting it onto deviants, that is monstrous women or the socially marginal men, the monks, eunuchs, rebels, and bandits who typically threaten decent women’s sexual integrity from outside the family. In the two tanci discussed here, sexual transgressions are carried out by fathers, husbands, and brothers who are central members of the elite fictional households. The threat to the patriline does not come from women, but from the men who embody the patriline. Most shocking is that the fictional worlds in Tianyuhua and Fengshuangfei depict the complete absence of any ideological system regulating male sexuality. Although the idealized heroes Zuo Weiming and Guo Lingyun adhere to ritual self-cultivation in refraining from sexual conquests, for them it seems more a matter of personal choice rather than a moral value that must be transmitted to other men. There is no culture of shame that adheres to any man in these texts, no matter how egregious his sexual or political behavior, or how hypocritical his attempts to shame the women around him. Ultimately, the most compelling aspect of the yinfu, family women gone rogue, for the two women authors, is not their will to power, but their refusal 33  Naifei Ding, Obscene Things: Sexual Politics in Jin Ping Mei (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 143–152; and Plaks, The Four Masterworks, 99–101.

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to accept the culture of shame that undergirded the chastity cult. Given the degree to which the chastity cult informed education for elite women, it is striking that despite the length of both texts, neither celebrates chaste martyrdom through depictions of widows or suicides. More pointedly, the female protagonists in both texts refuse to allow themselves to be shamed. Tianyuhua exposes the violent, intertwined mechanisms of shaming and martyrdom by highlighting the overtly hypocritical attempts by fathers to kill their daughters and men to destroy their lovers. Although women’s sexual purity is salient as a marker of female virtue in both tanci, they reject an absolute adherence to cloistering and the chastity code as meaningful standards of virtue. Most powerfully, both texts reject the shame associated with being a victim of sexual aggression, a shame that drove many women to suicide, and direct their narrative focus to wanton male sexuality as a force that undermines the domestic and imperial orders. References Cao Xueqin, Yu Pingbo, and Wang Xishi 曹雪、芹俞平伯、王惜時. Honglou meng bashi hui 紅樓夢八十回校本 [A Critical Edition of the Eighty-Chapter Text of Dream of the Red Chamber]. Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1958. Chen Hong 陳洪. “Tianyuhua xingbie yishi lunxi” 天雨花性別意識論析 [An Analysis of Gender Consciousness in The Heavens Rain Flowers]. Nankai xuebao 6 (2000): 28–34. Cheng Huiying 程蕙英. Xinbian Fengshuangfei 新編 鳳雙飛 [A Pair of Male Phoenixes Flying Together, Newly Revised]. Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1996. Ding Naifei. Obscene Things: Sexual Politics in Jin Ping Mei. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002. Epstein, Maram. Competing Discourses: Orthodoxy, Authenticity, and Engendered Meanings in Late-Imperial Chinese Fiction. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University East Asian Series, 2001. Epstein, Maram. “Inscribing the Essentials: Culture and the Body in Ming-Qing Fiction.” Ming Studies 41 (1999): 6–36. Epstein, Maram. “Patrimonial Bonds: Daughter, Fathers, and Power in Tianyuhua.” Late Imperial China 32.2 (2011): 1–33. Hu Siao-chen 胡曉真. Cainü cheye weimian: Jindau Zhongguo nüxing xushi wenxue de xingqi 才女徹夜未眠:近代中國女性敘事文學的興起 [Burning the Midnight Oil: The Rise of Female Narrative in Early Modern China]. Taipei: Maitian 2003. Hu Siao-chen 胡曉真. “The Daughter’s Vision of National Crises: Tianyuhua and a Woman Writer’s Construction of the Late Ming.” In Dynastic Crisis and Cultural

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Innovation: From the Late Ming to the Late Qing and Beyond, edited by David Der-wei Wang and Shang Wei, 200–31. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2005. Ko, Dorothy. Teachers of the Inner Chambers: Women and Culture in SeventeenthCentury China. Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 1994. Lanling xiaoxiaosheng 蘭陵笑笑生. Quanben Jin Ping Mei cihua 全本金瓶梅詞話 [The Complete Plum in the Golden Vase, Cihua Version]. Hong Kong: Taiping, 1982. Liu Wenjia. “Lover-Sister: Female Same-sex Desire and Women’s Agency in Feng shuangfei.” Intersections: Gender and Sexuality in Asia and the Pacific 35 (2014). http://intersections.anu.edu.au/issue35/liu.htm. Liu Wenjia. “The tanci Feng shuangfei: A Female Perspective on the Gender and Sexual Politics of Late-Qing China.” PhD diss., University of Oregon, 2010. Lu Weijing. True to Her Word: The Faithful Maiden Cult in Late Imperial China. Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 2008. McMahon, Keith. Causality and Containment in Seventeenth-Century Chinese Fiction. Leiden: Brill, 1988. McMahon, Keith. Misers, Shrews, and Polygamists: Sexuality and Male-Female Relations in Eighteenth-Century Chinese Fiction. Durham: Duke University Press, 1995. Plaks, Andrew. Four Masterworks of the Ming Novel. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987. Rowe, William T. Saving the World: Chen Hongmou and Elite Consciousness in EighteenthCentury China. Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 2001. Roy, David Tod, trans. The Plum in the Golden Vase, Volume Four: The Climax. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011. Tan Zhengbi 譚正璧. Zhongguo nüxing wenxue shi 中國女性文學史 [A History of Women’s Literature in China]. Tianjin: Baihua wenyi chuban she, 1984. Tao Zhenhuai 陶貞懷. Tianyuhua 天雨花 [The Heavens Rain Flowers]. Zhengzhou: Zhongzhou guji chubanshe, 1984. Theiss, Janet. Disgraceful Matters: The Politics of Chastity in Eighteenth-Century China. Berkeley CA: University of California Press, 2004. Widmer, Ellen. The Beauty and the Book: Women and Fiction in Nineteenth-Century China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University East Asia Center, 2006. Widmer, Ellen. “Jinghua yuan: Where the Late Late Ming Meets the Early Late Qing.” In Dynastic Crisis and Cultural Innovation: From the Late Ming to the Late Qing and Beyond, edited by David Der-wei Wang and Shang Wei, 264–93. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2005. Wu, Yenna. The Chinese Virago: A Literary Theme. Cambridge MA: Harvard University East Asia Center, 1995. Yeh, Catherine Vance. Shanghai Love: Courtesans, Intellectuals, and Entertainment Culture, 1850–1910. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006.

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Zhang Yu. “The Female Rewriting of Grand History: The Tanci Fiction Jing zhong zhuan.” PhD diss., University of Oregon, 2013. Zheng Zhenduo 鄭振鐸. Zhongguo suwenxue shi 中國俗文學史 [A History of Chinese Vernacular Literature]. Taipei: Taiwan shangwu yinshuguan, 1978. Zurndorfer, Harriet. “How to Write a Woman’s Life Into and Out of History: Wang Zhaoyuan (1763–1851) and Biographical Study in Republican China.” In Writing Lives in China, 1600–2010: Histories of the Elusive Self, edited by Marjorie Dryburgh and Sarah Dauncey, 86–109. New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2013.

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CHAPTER 8

Gossip, Scandal, and the Wanton Woman in Chinese Song-cycles1 Anne E. McLaren “Every child grows up in everyone else’s eyes . . . This is a society without strangers, a society based totally on the familiar”. (Fei Xiaotong, Xiangtu Zhongguo 鄉土中國)2 In human kind, good fortune and bad comes from just two lips, From two pieces of skin comes happiness or disaster. (“The Story of Fifth Daughter”, song of Lake Tai) Anthropologist Fei Xiaotong (1910–2005) based his famous study of peasant life in China on the village of Kaixiangong (Open-string-bow 開弦弓), named after the stream that curves across the northern part of the village like the arc of a bow drawn tight. Kaixiangong was one of hundreds of villages where scattered hamlets perched precariously over deep fields of rice paddy along the bays and water channels of Lake Tai in the Yangzi River delta region. Fei himself had grown up in nearby Wujiang. His comment, “Every child grows up in everyone else’s eyes . . .” refers to a world where virtually no aspect of everyday life could be hidden from the eyes or ears of neighboring families. Villagers interacted on a daily basis for the purposes of dike-building, gift-giving, paying loans, or 1  This study is part of a project on the song-cycles and performance culture of the lower Yangzi delta funded by an Australian Research Council Discovery Grant, “Ethnoecology and the State in Regional China”, and also by the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation, “The Cultural Heritage of the Lower Yangzi Delta”. I would like to express my sincere appreciation to the funding bodies and also to Chen Qinjian 陳勤建, professor of Chinese Folk Art at East China Normal University and his postgraduate student, Zhang Yu (Emily) 章瑜. Professor Chen first introduced me to the long narrative songs of the delta in a trip to Wuxi in 2004 and has been a constant source of support and inspiration. Emily Zhang has organized schedules and accompanied me on two field-trips to interview singers and folklorists around the delta region in 2011 and 2014. She further assisted me with the translation and explication of the song-cycle of “Wu guniang” during her stay in Australia under a joint supervisory program in 2010. 2  Gary G. Hamilton and Wang Zheng, trans., From the Soil: The Foundations of Chinese Society. A Translation of Fei Xiaotong’s Xiangtu Zhongguo (Berkeley: University of California, 1992), 41.

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engaging in festival, recreational and ritual activities.3 Before the modern era villages were largely self-regulating, with male elders exercising authority over their families and fellow villagers.4 Boat travel was the major form of transport. Zhenze 震澤, the nearest market town to Kaixiangong, was located just four miles away, but took two and a half hours to reach by boat. However, by the 1930s, when Fei undertook his famous study of Kaixiangong, this largely autonomous village world was about to undergo major change. Zhenze was now linked by motor boat, bus and train to major urban centers such as Shanghai.5 By the mid twentieth century, the Lake Tai region was already beginning its latter day transformation from a domain of water-locked villages into the flat plains of the contemporary period, the former wetlands now largely drained and covered by towering dormitory suburbs and industrial conurbations. Delta villagers loved to sing folksongs known as shange (山歌, mountain songs).6 In moments of respite from the summer heat, while toiling in the rice paddy, or when travelling by boat along the waterways they would sing elaborate songs about rebel leaders, mythic heroes, and ill-fated lovers. The majority of Wu (吳) language song-cycles deal with tales of illicit passion (siqing 私情). The siqing song-cycles portray strong women protagonists who transgress the sexual code of the era and are undone by “tales borne on the wind”. Believed to be stories about ‘real’ people who once lived in the locality, these songs implicitly encode judgments about the virtue of the central characters. As discussed here, the narrative understandings emergent in this song-cycle reflect cosmogenic beliefs in the permeability between the actual world and the uncanny, and the propensity of human beings in the thrall of jealousy and hatred to transform into destructive demons. Similar understandings surface occasionally as imagistic rhetoric in literary works of the late imperial period, but the latter contain a much more strongly articulated plot resolution along ‘rational’ Confucian lines.

3  Hamilton and Zheng, From the Soil, 127–8. 4  Fei Xiaotong 費孝通, Peasant Life in China: A Field Study of Country Life in the Yangtze Valley ( Jiangcun jingji: Zhongguo nongmin de shenghuo), bilingual ed., English trans. Dai Kejing (Beijing: Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press, 2010), 138–142. 5  Fei, Peasant Life in China, 16. 6  I use the past tense here because shange (folk songs) were largely repressed during the socialist period (post 1949). However, I have met singers who learned to sing shange during the 1960s and continued to sing these surreptitiously during the period of the Cultural Revolution (1966–76).

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Around forty lengthy song-cycles have been identified in the contemporary era and leading examples have been transcribed, edited and published.7 These long narrative song-cycles are examples of the rich oral culture performed in the Wu language from ancient times into the contemporary era.8 In the late imperial period, the best known work of Wu performance culture was the Shange (Mountain Songs, 山歌) anthology of Feng Menglong 馮夢龍 (1574– 1646).9 In the early twentieth century, intellectuals associated with the May Fourth modernization movement visited rural areas expressly to collect folk songs, including those of the Yangzi River delta. Faced with the difficult task of recording regional languages (fangyan 方言), they adapted Chinese character script to reflect the idiom of the singers, and added glossaries to assist comprehension by a national readership.10 These important anthologies laid the foundation for the large-scale state-led project to record, transcribe and publish the oral culture of regional China that took place in the early years of the reform era (post 1978). Many volumes of folk stories, songs, legends, myths, riddles, operas, ritual texts, and so on, were produced throughout China. In this way a large number of little-known stories, and even new genres, came to the attention of folklorists, ethnographers and heritage specialists. In particular, a new expressive form from the region of Lake Tai emerged to public notice in the 1980s—long narrative song-cycles of at least 1,000 lines performed in 7  For a list of these forty song-cycles see the comprehensive study of Zheng Tuyou 鄭土有, Wuyu xushi shange ynchang chuantong yanjiu 吳語敘事山歌演唱傳統研究 [A Study of the Wu Language Narrative Folk Song Performance Tradition] (Shanghai: Cishu chubanshe, 2005), 61–84. 8  In Chinese scholarship the earliest form of Wu song is traced back to songs sung in the ancient state of Chu. The Yuefu shiji 樂府詩集 by Guo Maoqian 郭茂倩 (12th century) contains a category of Wu songs (Wu sheng 吳聲) claimed to derive from the Six Dynasties, although most are likely to be later imitations. For a study of these sources see Liu Xuqing 劉旭青, Wu Yue geyao yanjiu 吳越歌謠研究 [A Study of the Folk Songs of the Wu and Yue Regions] (Beijing: Zhongguo shehuikexue chubanshe, 2012), 12–71. 9  As Ōki Yasushi has noted, Feng’s Shange comprises a hybrid mix of folk songs circulating amongst the rural population, songs sung in urban areas, songs sung by courtesans plying their trade in the boats along Suzhou waterways, and literati imitations of these, see Ōki Yasushi and Paolo Santangelo, Shang’ge, the ‘Mountain Songs’: Love Songs in Ming China (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 10–20. I have discussed the possible relationship between some of the songs in Shange and folk songs found in the contemporary repertoire, see “Emotion and the Language of Intimacy in Ming China: the Shan’ge of Feng Menglong,” International Journal of Asian Studies 9.2 (2012): 234–5. 10  See the modern day compilation by Wang Xuhua 王煦華, ed. Gu Jiegang 顧頡剛 et al, Wu ge: Wu ge xiao shi 吳歌。吳歌小史 [Songs of the Wu Region: A Brief History of Wu Songs] (Nanjing: Jiangsu guji chubanshe, 1999).

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typical shange style. Western scholarship has been relatively slow in exploring this newly transcribed material, which promises new insights into the richness of Chinese oral traditions and their centrality in the lives of village populations in the pre-contemporary period.11 This study will focus on one song-cycle of local fame in the Lake Tai region, the tale of Fifth Daughter (Wu guniang 五姑娘), a woman believed to have lived in the late Qing period. This story relates the tale of Fifth Daughter, who pursued a love affair that led ultimately to catastrophe for both parties. The notion of the ‘wanton’ woman in this song-cycle reflects the collective sentiments of the largely illiterate singers and their rural audiences in the late imperial to the contemporary period. The first distinctive feature of this song-cycle is that the entire sung narrative is constructed as a ‘true’ story about an affair which scandalized the neighbourhood. Second, the relating of this scandalous affair is portrayed as a malignant force in its own right. As the singer comments: “In human kind, good fortune and bad comes from just two lips.” Third, we do not find the Confucian or retributive frameworks that so often feature in literary works dealing with sexual passion. In fact, the common lexicon of pejorative words used to describe women in literary fiction such as pofu (潑婦 shrew), yinfu (淫婦 lascivious woman), and so on, do not appear in the songcycle at all. Instead, the singer deploys rhetorical formulae borrowed from curses and demonology to attack the perceived villains of the tale, who turn out to be not the young lovers but Fifth Daughter’s older brother and his wife, always referred to by her kinship title of saosao. The principal conflict of this story is that between two women who could both be considered ‘wanton’ in conventional understandings. On the one hand we have Fifth Daughter, the orphaned girl who falls in love with a hired hand, and on the other hand, the saosao, her jealous and promiscuous sisterin-law, who also has designs on the good-looking young man. Scenes of lovemaking are integral to the song-cycle in its ‘fuller’ form (while often abridged or excluded in printed versions). This feature helps to account for the great popularity of the siqing type of shange amongst delta populations and the

11  For an example, see this writer’s volume Performing Grief: Bridal Laments in Rural China (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2008) which uses recently transcribed bridal laments to investigate the condition of women in the Yangzi delta in the early modern era. For a study of the shorter Wu songs by an ethnomusicologist see Antionet Schimmelpenninck, Chinese Folk Songs and Folk Singers: Shan’ge Traditions in Southern Jiangsu (Leiden: Chime Foundation, 1997).

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numerous attempts to repress them on the part of the authorities.12 In the case of the story-cycle of “Wu guniang” the singer seeks to elicit our sympathy for the plight of the principal protagonists and betrays intense interest in their love-making, even though this clearly transgresses conventional codes of sexual behaviour. The singer chooses to depict the saosao as a stereotypical lascivious woman (similar to the shrew of fictional writings, although she is never termed a pofu) and deploys a highly sexualized invective to condemn her. Ultimately the singer provides no consistent judgement on the morality of sexual transgression per se, rather she draws from two types of traditions in the shange repertoire, one elaborating the delights of sexual love and the other deploying crude sexualized terms to daub the chief villain with moral turpitude. These two forms of imagistic discourse could be considered a type of entextualization, that is, the detatchable, repeatable sections of discourse that the singer can draw from as he or she sees fit.13 These two contrasting portrayals of sexual behavior, one celebratory, the other condemnatory, exist in somewhat uneasy tension in this song-cycle.14 It is thus not surprising that modern redactors of “Wu guniang” have chosen to abridge or exclude both the erotic songs and the songs about the saosao’s promiscuity in order to avoid dealing with ‘inconsistencies’ that might cloud what they see as the main message of the tale, namely the evils of ‘feudal marriage’ in the old society. In this study, however, it is precisely the fuller unabridged form with all its moral

12  I have discussed this aspect in Anne E. McLaren, “Folk Epics from the Lower Yangzi Delta Region: Oral and Written Traditions,” in The Interplay of Oral and Written Traditions in Chinese Fiction, Drama and Performance Literature, ed. Vibeke Børdahl (Copenhagen: Nordic Institute of Asiatic Studies in Asian Topics No. 46, NIAS Press, 2010), 159–160. 13  The term “entextualisation” is used in the study of oral traditions to refer to portions of discourse, often stereotypical or formulaic in nature, that can be ‘detached’ as it were and recycled elsewhere. See Michael Silberstein and Greg Urban who describe “entextualisation” as the “process of rendering a given instance of discourse as text, detachable from its local context”; Natural Histories of Discourse (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 21. 14  Narrative consistency should not be expected in oral traditions. Karin Barber notes that Westerners are accustomed to thinking “that all ‘literature’ is characterized by unity, fictivity, poetic language, or a particular quality of the imagination. But one of the aims of the anthropology of [oral] texts is to open up to view the sheer range of ways in which texts can be constituted and apprehended”; The Anthropology of Texts, Person and Publics: Oral and Written Culture in Africa and Beyond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 13 .

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complexities that is my major focus.15 I will deal with each of the above issues in turn, beginning with the catastrophic effect of gossip about private affairs.

Tales Borne on the Wind

For several decades, anthropologists, sociologists, historians and literary theorists have published studies about the social construction of gossip in human societies. In the European tradition gossip is often viewed negatively as a source of unreliable talk, lies, slander and social dissension.16 Women’s prattle is regarded as particularly dangerous.17 Alexander Cowan has argued for a more positive view of gossip as a form of communication and social bonding within so-called ‘gossip’ communities. In his study of gossip and street culture in early modern Venice, Cowan notes that “[p]ermission to exchange gossip is a sign of social inclusion within a well-defined group. It is often a means of transmitting important information through oral networks”.18 Sexual innuendo is a specific type of gossip that can lead to ruinous loss of reputation. In her study of early Christian history, Jennifer Knust points out that sexual slander need not always be taken at face value, but constitutes rather a rhetorical field used by one group to demonize another group. She argues that sexual invective was used to construct notions of the disciplined “masculinity” of Christianity as opposed to the feminized hedonism of non-Christians.19 Folklorists and anthropologists, 15  This study is based on the set of complete song transcripts of several singers printed off in mimeographed form; Zhang Fanglan 張舫瀾 and Ma Hanmin 馬漢民 ed., Changpian xushi Wuge Wu guniang ziliaoben 長篇敘事吳歌五姑娘資料本 [Wu Guniang Material: a Long Narrative Song in Wu Language] 2 vols. (Jiangsu Province Folk Literature Association, mimeographed ed. limited circulation, 1983), hereafter ‘WGZ’. I am very grateful to singer and folklorist, Zhang Fanglan of Luxu, for presenting me with a copy of this material in May 2011 and for his further assistance in arranging interviews with singers in May 2014. For a study of the textual production of printed versions and later abridgements see Anne E. McLaren and Emily Yu Zhang, “Recreating ‘Traditional’ Folk Epics in Contemporary China: The Politics of Textual Transmission”, forthcoming in Asian Ethnology, 2017. 16  See discussion in Susan Phillips, Transforming Talk: The Problem with Gossip in Late Medieval England (University Park, Pa: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 1–4. 17  See particularly Bernard Capp, who noted that women often gossiped about the frailties of other women, see Capp, When Gossips Meet: Women, Family and Neighbourhood in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 59. 18  Cowan, “Gossip and Street Culture in Early Modern Venice,” Journal of Early Modern History 12.3/4 (2008): 330. 19  Jennifer W. Knust, Abandoned to Lust: Sexual Slander and Ancient Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006).

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working from cross-cultural perspectives, have noted the variable attributes and functions of gossip in different societies and the way gossip relates to other discursive genres within a particular culture. They note that gossip can both enhance and disrupt social relations: “Gossip can serve at the same time to further partisan ends and reinforce group values”.20 Gossip is a relatively new topic in Chinese studies. Recently Jack W. Chen and David Schaberg have produced an edited collection dealing with “idle talk”, that is gossip and anecdote in Chinese literature and historiography.21 In Chinese writings, gossipy tales about individuals, although often regarded as frivolous or suspicious, became an indispensable part of elite works ranging from official histories and biographies to purely fictional writings.22 Chen and Schabert note the oral foundation for gossip, which belongs broadly to “the discursive community, rather than to the individual”.23 Fear of “people’s talk” can be found in China’s earliest song tradition.24 Gossip could even serve as the fulcrum of plot formation in works of fiction. Dore J. Levy argues that in the famed Chinese novel, The Story of the Stone [Dream of the Red Chamber], gossip “play[s] a role in the retributory patterns that underlie all human interactions in a society that gives credence to Buddhism”.25 Gossip and sexual slander also play a motivating role in the narrative framework that underpins the song-cycle of “Wu guniang”. In this tale, scandal spread by gossip begins within the family but rapidly traces a path of destruction over the neighborhood, travelling up the waterways to villages, towns and counties far across the delta. Repetition and recreation of the song-cycle itself becomes an integral part of the spreading scandal, which in the minds of local audiences transcends both space and time. The singer herself is an embodied purveyor of scandal as she relates at length not only the story of the transgressive lovers but also exposes juicy details about the villainous saosao. Gossip, in fact, is so important to this particular song-cycle that it appears as an independent and unstoppable force for evil in its own right. 20  Donald Brenneis, “Gossip,” in Folklore, Cultural Performances, and Popular Entertainments, ed. Richard Baumen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 152. 21  Jack W. Chen and David Schaberg ed., Idle Talk: Gossip and Anecdote in Traditional China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014). 22  See discussion in “Introduction,” Chen and Schaberg, Idle Talk, 1–15. 23  Chen and Schaberg, Idle Talk, 4. 24  For example, in the ancient work Shijing 詩經 [Song Classic], a woman begs her lover to keep their affair private for fear of gossip and loss of reputation; see Chen and Schaberg, Idle Talk, 3. 25  Dore J. Levy, “The Retributory Power of Gossip in The Story of the Stone,” in Idle Talk: Gossip and Anecdote in Traditional China, ed. Jack W. Chen and David Schaberg, 194–215 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), 195. EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 11/4/2019 7:51 PM via TOWSON UNIVERSITY AN: 1507598 ; Stevenson, Mark J., Wu, Cuncun.; Wanton Women in Late-imperial Chinese Literature : Models, Genres, Subversions and Traditions Account: towson.main.eds

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“Wu guniang” was one of the first of the long narrative songs to be ‘discovered’ by Chinese folklorists in the 1980s.26 The published transcript was elicited primarily from a single female singer, Lu Amei 陸阿妹 (1902–1986), in the early 1980s. The original transcript comprises around 2,900 lines, with most of the material sung by Lu Amei in stages over the course of one year.27 The songcycle was subsequently published in various ‘re-arranged’ editions.28 Fifth Daughter was believed to be the daughter of a land-owning family in the Lake Fen (分湖) region, who lived in the early to mid-nineteenth century. Orphaned at a young age, she was mistreated by her older brother and his wife. When she fell in love with a hired hand called Xu Atian 徐阿天, catastrophe ensued for the young lovers, but not before there were numerous scenes of courtship, seduction, and love-making.29 Lu Amei, the principal singer of “Wu guniang” in the contemporary period, was born in Fenyu xiang 汾玉鄉, Jiashan 嘉善, on the southern banks of Lake Fen in modern day Zhejiang province. In the early 1950s she married out of her home village into the Luxu 蘆墟 region, on the other side of Lake Fen, in Jiangsu province. In this fashion her version of the story of Wu guniang, which had passed down for generations through her paternal line in Jiashan, travelled to another part of the delta.30 As reported by folklorists in the 1980s, the locals of Lake Fen professed to believe in the historical veracity of the story. According to Lu Amei, “When I was a child I heard the story from my grandmother and I myself have seen Fifth Daughter’s combs and furniture.”31 It was claimed that Fifth Daughter grew up in Fangjiabang 方家浜 on the shores of Lake Fen in the home of Yang Jinda 楊金大, and that descendants of the Yang family had continued to carry out ancestral rites until the 1950s. The spirit tablets of deceased family members were reportedly kept in a side room of the 26  Qian Shunjuan 錢瞬娟, Jiangnan minjian xushishi ji gushi 江南民間敘事詩及故事 [Jiangnan Folk Narrative Songs and Stories] (Shanghai: Wenyi chubanshe, 1997), 14–38. 27  See WGZ. In this study I have drawn only on the songs sung by Lu Amei. A ‘rearranged’ edition is available in Jiang Bin 姜彬, Jiangnan shi da minjian xushi shi 江南十大民間敘事 詩 [Ten Long Folk Narratives from Jiangnan] (Shanghai: Wenyi chubanshe, 1989), 171–266. 28  The textual life of “Wu guniang” is complicated. For details see McLaren and Zhang, “Recreating ‘Traditional’ Folk Epics.” 29  Sexually explicit sections were edited out of published transcriptions. However, they remain in the mimeograph volumes based on the original recordings, Wu guniang ziliaoben (WGZ). All citations in this study are from the latter. 30  The role of the married-out woman is an important but often neglected aspect of story transmission in the Yangzi delta. It helps to account for the broader circulation of songcycles within the Yangzi delta as well as their variation, as the song is adapted to a new receptive context. 31  Interview with Lu Amei of 1981, WGZ, 257. EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 11/4/2019 7:51 PM via TOWSON UNIVERSITY AN: 1507598 ; Stevenson, Mark J., Wu, Cuncun.; Wanton Women in Late-imperial Chinese Literature : Models, Genres, Subversions and Traditions Account: towson.main.eds

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original residence until its demolition in 1959. Folklorists noted that some remnants of the claimed Yang family compound could still be seen in 1981, including a boat shed, an ox herder’s hut and stone benches. Similarly, the hired hand she fell in love with, Xu Atian, was believed to have come from Yao’an cun (姚 or 窯岸村), a short distance from Fangjiabang. The original Xu family residence was not demolished until the 1980s. The song-cycle of Lu Amei includes a segment about Xu Atian stealing the spirit tablets of Fifth Daughter from the Yang residence and setting them up in his own home. Descendants of the Xu family claimed that her spirit tablets were indeed set up in the Xu residence. They further stated, in line with some versions of the song-cycle, that Atian had his legs broken by the Yang family and ended his life as a beggar. According to Xu family members, the spirit tablet of Xu Atian had been venerated by the family right up to the political movements of 1959.32 “Wu guniang” thus tells the story of a scandalous love affair that took place several generations ago in the local area of the singers and audience. The tale was transmitted at first in anecdotal form by means of neighborly gossip. It was subsequently recreated in a short song based on the months of the calendar, and then finally, recreated in long elaborate song-cycles.33 Traces of this past history of repeated oral transmission can be discerned in the contemporary song-cycle, as the singer makes constant references to the dangers of gossip, scrutiny by family and neighbors, and the social consequences of scandal. Within the song-cycle rumour-mongering is referred to as xianyan xianhua (閒言閒話 idle talk), shifei (是非 stories about right and wrong), fengyan fengyu 風言風語 (tales borne on the wind), luosuo 囉嗦 (long-windedness) and so on. Lu Amei said of the siqing style of song that, “If you sing a song of secret passion then people will gossip and talk a lot” (唱仔私情山歌閒人閒話口舌多).34 The ubiquitous references to gossip and scandal propel the tale along to its disastrous conclusion. When Fifth Daughter is working in the fields she tries to attract the eye of the handsome hired hand by throwing a clod of weeds at him. Her fellow workers are immediately horrified: 32  For reports on these sites see Wang Fang 王仿 and Zheng Shuoren 鄭碩人, Minjian xushi shi de chuangzuo 民間敘事詩的創作 [The Composition of Folk Narrative Songs] (Shanghai: Wenyi chubanshe, 1993), 77–87. Wang and Zheng note competing claims for the identities of the locations of the original Yang and Xu residences. See also Qian, Jiangnan minjian, 17, and Jin Tianlin 金天, Zhongguo Jiashan tiange 中國嘉善田歌 [Folk Songs from Jiashan, China] (Harbin: Heilongjiang renmin chubanshe, 2009), 63–66. 33  Discussed in detail in McLaren and Zhang “Recreating ‘Traditional’ Folk Epics.” 34   W GZ, 257.

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When the others saw Fifth Daughter throw weeds at him, They thought that the young panier-bearer would surely want to hurl abuse at her, “He’ll curse her as a cheap young thing, He’ll say, ‘You’ve got eyes in your head but you heaved your weeds wildly this way and that till it landed on this poor chap!’ ”35 When Xu Atian comes to the Yang house, Fifth Daughter warns him: The aunts and uncles will look at you with eyes as big as bamboo baskets, You’ll be like a small bird on white waves, so hard to survive!36 Fifth Daughter brings an unusually good meal to Atian, which immediately attracts the attention of onlookers: Atian squatted on his legs on the boat, He held the bowl of food and ate, smiling happily, His chopsticks moved in and out, he was worried about nothing, But the herders and maidens on the shores started gossiping, “In his rice is a piece of red-cooked pigs trotters, it sure beats a turnip!” When Fifth Daughter heard this she tried to hide but there was nowhere to go, Sweat broke out quickly on her forehead, “Malicious people talk a lot, their slander travels fast, If my older brother gets wind of this he won’t let me send food to Atian in future and he will be left hungry, his belly sunken and shriveled”.37 Their love-making is highly dangerous, with the brother and his wife in close proximity: I tell you, Xu Atian, when your feet touch the ground, be sure to be soft and quiet, On the other side of the wall are the saosao and my brother, right next to our room!38

35   W GZ, 35. 36   W GZ, 90. 37   W GZ, 61. 38   W GZ, 98.

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The saosao (also called asao) does indeed find out: Asao hid behind the door and listened to the sounds of a love affair, She heard the sound of talking, she was on fire with anger, She took up a white copper stick, With a ‘bing bang’ she rapped on the door.39

A Tale of Two ‘Wanton’ Women

“Wu guniang”, as sung by Lu Amei, constructs a portrait of two ‘wanton women’, the central character, Fifth Daughter, and her sister-in-law (saosao or asao). Both engage in illicit affairs, however, Fifth Daughter is treated as an object of sympathy while the saosao is demonized as a lecherous shrew, whose malice and jealousy brings disaster on the family. The contrast between the two dominates the storyline of the unexpurgated version of Lu Amei’s rendition.40 The shrew or pofu is a well-known figure in fiction of the late imperial era.41 She is presented as avaricious and controlling, always keen to control the family money.42 She has a fearsome temper and is adept at manipulating her hen-pecked husband. As Keith McMahon observes, the pofu “is the caricature of the overflowing, male-enervating woman”.43 The jealous shrews of Ming and Qing fiction reflect the polygamous family arrangements of gentry families. The shrew is thus usually a principal wife who tries to stop her husband from engaging a concubine. She is often described as sexually voracious and unhappy with monogamy.44 In the story of “Wu guniang” the older brother is a land owner of modest means with one wife and no concubines. The parents are dead, leaving him with the responsibility to take care of two unmarried sisters. His new bride (the saosao) mistreats the sisters, who she regards as an economic burden. When a handsome hired hand is employed at the household, the saosao has 39   W GZ, 129. 40  In the rearranged version published in the compilation of Jiang, Jiangnan shi da minjian xushi shi, most of the material on the evil saosao has been removed. 41  See the treatment of the shrew in Keith McMahon, Misers, Shrews, and Polygamists: Sexuality and Male-Female Relations in Eighteenth-Century Fiction (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 1995), and Yenna Wu, The Chinese Virago: A Literary Theme (Cambridge: The Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1995). 42  Wu, The Chinese Virago, 25. 43  McMahon, Misers, Shrews, and Polygamists, 1. 44  McMahon, Misers, Shrews, and Polygamists, 55–59.

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designs on him. Her jealousy is sparked when he falls instead for the beautiful Fifth Daughter. When they begin an illicit relationship, the saosao seizes the opportunity to browbeat her husband into brutally punishing his own sister. The moral frameworks for sexual transgressors in Ming and Qing fiction tend to be clear. It is a violation of the code of wifely submission if the principal wife is jealous of a concubine. As Yenna Wu observes, jealousy in women was “perceived as a moral problem in political, cosmological, and religious terms”.45 The jealous woman was a cause of chaos and disorder. Feminine jealousy was conceived of as a form of negative energy or dufu qi 妒婦氣, religious tracts foresaw divine retribution, and doctors regarded jealousy as pathological in origin.46 The shrewish wives of fiction meet with punishment, either in this world or the next.47 McMahon notes that the shrew “is eventually defeated”48 but a range of tactics are required to contain her.49 In the song-cycle the singer declines to provide the kind of clear moral frameworks and definite plot resolution one finds in literary fiction. In spite of the sympathy expressed for the young lovers, illicit sex is highly problematic for all parties and no happy ending is deemed possible. The transcripts of the songs of Lu Amei hint at various possibilities for the denouement. Sometimes she sings of the execution of Xu Atian at the hands of the local magistrate and the burning by fire of the Yang family homestead. At other times she sings of Fifth Daughter’s death by hanging in the mill shed, of Atian stealing her spirit tablets from the Yang home, and his later mutilation by Yang Jinda. There appears to be no Confucian moral or explicit frameworks of retribution of the type one commonly finds in vernacular fiction.50 Below I discuss the two different discursive treatments of sexual transgression in the song-cycle, beginning with the love affair between the maiden and the hired hand. 45  Wu, The Chinese Virago, 40. 46  Wu, The Chinese Virago, 40–41. 47  Wu, The Chinese Virago, 41. 48  McMahon, Misers, Shrews, and Polygamists, 80–81. 49  He outlines three main strategies. The husband comes to accept that his shrewish wife is pre-ordained due to bad karma from a previous life; he tries to cure the shrew of jealousy with various medicines, or refuses to have relations with her, Misers, Shrews, and Polygamists, 59–60. 50  For treatment of the theme of retribution in vernacular short stories see Patrick Hanan, The Chinese Short Story: Studies in Dating, Authorship and Composition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973), Wilt Idema, Chinese Vernacular Fiction: The Formative Period (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1974), and Anne E. McLaren, The Chinese Femme Fatale: Stories from the Ming Period, (Sydney: University of Sydney East Asian Series 8, Wild Peony Press, 1994).

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In the version of Lu Amei it is clear that it is Fifth Daughter who initiates the love affair with the hired hand, Atian. The singer relates scenes of sexual titillation and love-making in scenes known as “flesh segments” (rouduan 肉段) common to siqing song-cycles of the delta region. Below are extracts from one “flesh segment”, “Fifth Daughter Taking a Bath” (焐浴湯): The sun sets on Western Mountain glowing red, Fifth Daughter takes up a bucket of water to bathe herself, “My bucket of water is warm and hot”, She placed a cover on it to await her lover. As she waited for her lover, her heart was all anxious and aflutter In her hand was a ladle, she scooped it in the hot water, She scooped up the water and placed it back in the basket, Then took it to the scented chamber and poured it into a lotus-flower basin. She waited for her lover but he did not come, Young sister Fifth Daughter made ready to loosen and take off her clothes, She took off her moon-white single layer shirt and placed it on the clothes-rack, Her fine silk shirt she removed and hung over the bed.51 The next set of stanzas begin with the line, “She waited for her lover but he did not come”. Each stanza describes how she gradually takes off more and more of her clothes. Finally she gets into the “lotus basin” and begins to wash her bosom. Just as she does this, Xu Atian makes an appearance and she invites him to bathe with her. Lu Amei sang two versions of their love-making. The segment below is the more explicit one. While the main focus is on the young lovers, the final stanza alludes to the lecherous saosao, who also has designs on the hired hand: Within the green gauze curtains, the breeze lightly stirs, Fifth Daughter and Xu Atian, both of them now coupling as one, Little sister, Fifth Daughter, her hair dangled over his shoulder like skeins of silk,

51   W GZ, 103–4.

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It was just like a pedlar of Xihengtou setting off with parcels of silk to sell.52 Within the green gauze curtains, the breeze lightly stirs, Fifth Daughter and Xu Atian, both of them now coupling as one, Little sister, Fifth Daughter, extended her three-inch tongue into the mouth of her lover, It was just like the Big Sister on Beiku who rises early to bake sweet rice cakes.53 Within the green gauze curtains, the breeze lightly stirs, Fifth Daughter and Xu Atian, both of them now coupling as one, Little sister, Fifth Daughter, stretched out her snowy snowy white arm along the shoulders of her lover, It was just like the pedlar from Zhuangliantang 莊練塘 setting out to sell lotus roots in Huzhou.54 Within the green gauze curtains, the breeze lightly stirs, Fifth Daughter and Xu Atian, both of them now coupling as one, Little sister, Fifth Daughter, placed her two boobies in her lover’s hands, It was just like the pedlar from Danyang 丹陽 selling steamed bread. Within the green gauze curtains, the breeze lightly stirs, Fifth Daughter and Xu Atian, both of them now coupling as one, Little sister, Fifth Daughter, placed her little red lotus feet on her lover’s shoulders, It was just like the triumphant archway erected when the top graduate returns home! Stanza 9 (final stanza): While Fifth Daughter was coupling with her beloved within the green gauze curtains, The saosao in her own chamber was embroidering a fragrant bag. She wanted to embroider twelve fragrant bags to give to the young hired hand as love tokens, 52  Xihengtou 西橫頭 is in Wuxing County, Zhejiang. 53  Beiku (北庫) is located on Fen Lake. 54  Lotus roots are regarded as soft and white.

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“Having it off with Atian will be much better than love on one’s wedding night!”55 The saosao is portrayed as a lascivious shrew who is jealous of the beauty of Fifth Daughter. Even before she married Yang Jinda, she had taken lovers and given birth to children.56 Known as “hot pepper”, she is described in demonic terms (“hot-pepper has the heart of a female demon” (辣椒心是個女妖精).57 Her marriage is ill-omened. When she is borne in the bridal sedan chair a storm breaks out and the waves on Lake Fen heave like mountains.58 Within three days of marriage she has already begun to berate her husband and to act like the head of the family.59 When Xu Atian comes to their household to work as a hired hand she compares her husband and Atian with contrasting figures from the famous Ming novel, Jin Ping Mei (金瓶梅 Golden Lotus). Her husband is likened to the puny Wu Dalang (武大郎) and Atian to Dalang’s younger brother, the handsome and desirable Wu Erlang (武二郎).60 This implicitly places the saosao herself in the position of Pan Jinlian (潘金蓮), the adulterous wife of Wu Dalang who poisons her husband and is ultimately killed in turn by Wu Erlang. The saosao is not only promiscuous by nature, she is also fierce-tempered and cruel. She arranges to sell Fourth Daughter as a concubine to a man in a faraway province and then stages a drowning scene to hide this from the older brother.61 It is the saosao who catches Fifth Daughter in the bedchamber with Atian. It is her exposure of the affair that brings disaster down upon the young lovers. The singer devotes numerous songs to depictions of the saosao’s jealousy and malice: From a plot of filthy sludge comes ten thousand dan of white rice, With people good and bad fortune comes from those two pieces of skin around our mouth, Heaven sent disaster which caused the ruin of Fifth Daughter, But it was all because the long tongue of the saosao struck her out of the blue like a vicious arrow.

55   W GZ, 118–119. 56   W GZ, 22. 57   W GZ, 23. 58   W GZ, 25. 59   W GZ, 26. 60   W GZ, 40. 61   W GZ, 30–31.

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The long-tongued saosao’s heart was on fire with rage, All this hatred, all this bitterness is just because the hired hand Atian would not satisfy her desire, “All I want is for him to have an affair with me, Now that the guest has become the host, I’ll chase him out the door!”62 The long-tongued saosao’s heart was on fire with rage, All this hatred, all this bitterness was just because this hired hand had slept with Fifth Daughter in such carefree delight, Her eyes dripped blood, her heart is ground to mince; day and night she thought of nothing else, She was just like the old hen who shits in a vat of fine soy sauce, the sauce is ruined and then no one can eat it!63 The singer uses demonic and animal imagery to characterize the evil nature of the saosao. She is likened to “a baleful comet” (saozhou xing 掃帚星), “a black fish demon” (heiyu jing 黑鱼精),64 “a life-destroying ghoul” (cuiming gui 催命鬼),65 and “a malevolent deity” (e shen 惡神).66 In the heavens there is a baleful comet, On the earth there is a black fish demon, Of all the black fish demons, the most evil has seven stars [marks] on its head. Of all the households at Fangjiabang, the most evil is the one with that hot-pepper minx of a woman! The hot-pepper minx is the long-tongued one in the household of Yang Jinda, She has a face like the leaf of a loquat tree, With bristles on both front and back, When her eyes roll, her heart is tougher than iron.67

62  Literally, “now that the one who lights incense has taken the place of the monk” (香火趕 出和尚), a saying referring to a guest who outstays his welcome and is chased away by the host. 63   W GZ, 157–8. 64   W GZ, 159. 65   W GZ, 171. 66   W GZ, 212. 67   W GZ, 159.

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The saozhou xing refers to the Broom Star, the traditional Chinese term for a comet, which appears to have a long sweeping ‘tail’. The Broom Star is regarded as an omen of disaster. If a woman is called a Broom Star it means that she is jinxed and will bring misfortune to everyone she has dealings with. The archetypal Broom Star Woman is Wife Ma (馬氏), the wife of Jiang Ziya 姜子牙, one of the heroes of the Ming novel, Fengshen yanyi [Investiture of the Gods]. She is married to Jiang Ziya at a time when he is poor and appears to have no future. Unable to live in poverty, she asks for a divorce. Later on, when he is appointed prime minister she is so ashamed of her earlier behavior that she hangs herself and is later awarded the title “Goddess of the Broom Star”.68 The saosao is also reminiscent of another figure in the Fengshen yanyi, the femme fatale Da Ji (妲己), who brings ruin to King Zhou of the waning Shang dynasty. Da Ji is portrayed as a “ruthless woman” (hanfu 悍婦) who is willing to order the death of a young man who has spurned her advances.69 It appears that the demonology of the song-cycle is consonant with the commonly held view that “demons arise from human beings” (yao you ren xing 妖由人興).70 Rania Huntington explains this notion as follows: “Individuals, because of their faults, allow these demons entry into their breasts, but once the demon lodges there the faults are exacerbated.”71 Female demons have exceptional sexual allure. The saosao uses her sexuality to bring about the destruction of the young lovers. In the scene below she engages in a strip-tease to persuade her weak-hearted husband to take brutal action against his younger sister: The long-tongued woman saw the man was idle and doing nothing much, She smiled and tittered at him, saying, “All day ’till night you’ve worn yourself out with work, It would be best to go to your bed made by Ningbo carpenters in six days by six, thirty-six days in all, with exquisite carvings and cunninglywrought fretwork, to revive your spirits. 68  These events are related in Chapters 15 and 99 of the Fengshen yanyi. 69  For discussion of Da Ji as archetypal shrew see Wu, The Chinese Virago, 94. 70  Rania Huntington notes that this formula is commonly used to conclude ‘stories of the strange’ in the Ming and Qing period; Alien Kind: Foxes in Late Imperial Chinese Fiction (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2003), 309. 71  Huntington, Alien Kind, 312. Huntington translates this saying as “anomalies arise from men”. She notes further that medical concepts incorporated notions of demon possession (p. 31).

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When Yang Jinda heard this he felt secretly pleased, ‘Since my wife and I bowed in the hall it is now three times three, nine years in all, All that time she’s either been pulling nasty faces at me or glaring at me with her eyes bulging. Who could have thought that today it would be like a festival day of good fortune? But now my boat is setting off with smooth seas and a fair wind! Yang Jinda laughed, his eyes beaming, as he got up, His wife helped him take his clothes off. The long magua (馬掛) scholar’s gown she hung up on a crouchingdragon golden hook, The hat with the pointed peak she placed carefully on the dressing table. Yang Jinda laughed, his eyes beaming, as he got up, His wife helped him take his clothes off. She removed his embroidered fancy patterned boots and placed them on the timber floor. His tightly fitting short shirt and trousers were left draped over the bed. Yang Jinda laughed, his eyes beaming, as he got up, His wife helped him take his clothes off. She took all his clothes off till one saw the shiny skin And something like a rubber hammer that was jumping and leaping around. The hot-pepper minx turned away and took off her clothes, She removed the golden hair clasp from her head and placed it by the pillow. She took off the green parrot jacket and her trousers with the red damask rolled-up hems, She folded up her clothes and placed them at the side of the bed. The hot-pepper minx turned away and took off her own clothes, She drew out her three-inch tightly curled up small golden lotuses [bound feet] and placed her slippers, embroidered with climbing flowers, on the floor by the bed. Her tightly fitting short shirt and trousers she draped across the bed. Her two boobies, soft like the steamed bread sold by Danyang pedlars, bobbed up and down.

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The hot-pepper minx took all her clothes off, one by one, Her face all smiles, displaying her fine tender flesh as she got into bed. Yang Jinda was just like the Xietang pedlar bearing paniers of lotus roots on his way to Suzhou town, Going off to do some business and then indulging in some play. The small ivory bed with its four corner posts was just like a [walled-in] town, On both sides of the bed the curtain hooks were golden with silver inlay. So it comes about that many sturdy men and brave heroes, Plunge down on the pillow as if into a deep blue lake.72 Yang Jinda is willing to turn a blind eye to the affair but the saosao stirs him to the point where he is prepared to have his sister killed. This climactic segment is narrated in a traditional song style based on the five watches of the night. This excerpt comes from the final stage: When the sixth stroke of the sixth watch had finished ringing out, Yang Jinda’s face was now as crimson as the statues of the ferocious guardian spirits in the Temple to the City Gods, With one blow he grabbed Fifth Daughter and held her firmly by her three feet of silken tresses, Just like a hawk in the sky swooping down on a tiny sparrow. He put this question to her, “Life or death, this choice will be up to you. If you don’t break off your affair then it’s a case of you may hide at midday, but at midnight you must meet the God of the Underworld.” Fifth Daughter was heart-broken, her tears poured down, The long-tongued saosao brought out a knife and a length of rope, Fifth Daughter saw that the poison of malice had filled entirely the heart, lungs and stomach of her brother and the saosao. She said, “My own brother, in cutting bamboo shoots you don’t remove the roots.”73 The unexpurgated original transcripts also provide a surprising plot development branching out from the story. This is the tale of a potentially triangular love affair between the hired hand, Fifth Daughter and the saosao. No hint of this is allowed to appear in published versions because it compromises the virtue

72   W GZ, 159–61. 73   W GZ, 165.

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of the Fifth Daughter and Atian. In this version, Atian goes to buy a bottle of rouge for Fifth Daughter. The latter thinks there will be problems with her own love affair unless she invites her sister-in-law to join the sexual liaison. The saosao is delighted with this idea and makes plans to deceive her husband. In the following stanzas, the saosao asks Atian which one he finds most delightful—the older or the younger: In the end the two sisters-in-law had an affair with the same lover, She asked, “Dear brother, in your heart which one do you favour? The wild flowers daubed with dew, only those fresh in bud are good to eat, But with sugar cane from Tangxi, it is the mature stalks that are sweet.” In the end the two sisters-in-law had an affair with the same lover, She asked, “Dear brother, in your heart, which one do you favour? With the red caltrop in the southern lake, only take the tender ones to eat, But when simmering ringed caltrop, it is the older ones that are fragrant.”74 Songs about one man forming a sexual liaison with two women in the same kinship system are quite common in Wu narrative songs. There is a popular song-cycle performed in many variants around the delta known as “Picking up the younger sister” (Jie Ayi 接阿姨), which highlights the theme of a man marrying one sister and then coming up with a ruse to marry the younger sister as well.75 In a fuller narrative, Lu Amei may well have further developed this branch of the story. Such divergences and contradictions are common in orallytransmitted performance art. Narrative consistency was not a requirement of delta song-cycles, which were composed extempore by mostly illiterate men and women without the mediation of written texts. These songs appear of epic length when written down but were only rarely sung in relatively complete form. A singer of siqing song-cycles would generally sing a particular part of the whole song-cycle that would attract the interest of his or her audience. The accomplished singer would master a repertoire of stereotypical segments (taoshi 套式) and adapt these as required in line with her own conception of the storyline, but this was not necessarily consistent from performance to

74   W GZ, 123–4. 75  See McLaren, “Folk Epics.”

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performance.76 This would account for what would appear to be plot inconsistencies if found in a work of written literature. Nonetheless, the notion that the young couple is being destroyed by sexual slander remains as an enduring framework from start to finish in Lu Amei’s rendition of this song-cycle. Atian makes this clear when he comes back to search for his beloved but cannot think of a way out of their predicament: Xu Atian saw his dear little sister’s face was pale and wan, “When I think of your older brother and the saosao, my hair stands up on end and my heart beats wildly, The slander of others has caused our love bond to be just like trying to plant a flower in stone, its roots won’t grow. It’s worse than the frozen surface of a lake which looks slippery and cannot be walked on.”77 The same point is made as they cast about for a place of refuge. Where can they be safe from the prying eyes of kinsfolk? They consider the remote coastal saltworks of Pudong but fear that they will suffer at the hands of the salt smugglers. They cannot go north to Suzhou because the head of the prefecture is the father of the saosao’s maternal uncle. Nor can they go west to Wuxi because Luxu people go regularly to Wuxi and will find Atian. Nor can they go to Songjiang because Fifth Daughter has a paternal cousin there. In the end they decide to go the distant island of Dongting in the middle of Lake Tai, “even a tiny sparrow could fly there and be safe”.78 Conclusion What does this story-cycle, based on a scandalous tale from generations ago, tell us about notions of the ‘wanton woman’ as conceived in the minds of the rural populations of the Yangzi delta? First of all, Fifth Daughter is not a sexual transgressor caught up in the net of Heavenly retribution, as one can find in

76  This method of composition from formulae and set pieces was called by singers “mixing mountain songs” (tiao shange 調山歌). For details see Zheng, Wuyu xushi shange, 240–275. 77   W GZ, 191. 78   W GZ, 200–202.

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works of vernacular fiction of the Ming-Qing era.79 Nor is she a prostitutecourtesan type figure who may one day be married into a polygamous relationship with a man of means, as delineated in erotic novellas written for educated men.80 In the ‘mental text’ of the singer,81 Fifth Daughter is not so much ‘wanton’ as trapped, like a bird in a cage.82 Her wish to marry her lower-class lover is stymied by the malice of the saosao and weakness of the older brother. The saosao is not so much ‘wanton’ as an evil demonic force, a baleful comet whose malignant tail brings chaos and destruction. Should one interpret these references to comets, ghouls and demons as a metaphorical invective used to define the community’s moral code? Or does the singer and her community take these apparitions literally, as cosmogenic demons threatening the order of human society?83 This remains open to speculation, but there is evidence that after her death, Fifth Daughter was believed to have turned into an aggrieved spirit who could endanger her own community. In the eyes of her neighbours, singer Lu Amei has paid a high price for her ongoing exposure in song of the life-history of Fifth Daughter. In an interview of April 1982, her neighbor, Zhou Jiama 周家馬, attributed the premature deaths of Lu Amei’s daughters to the mother’ involvement in transmitting the song-cycle of Fifth Daughter: If you sing of the scandalous events (choushi 醜事) about Fifth Daughter she will be angry. At worst she could make you sleep for over a score of days, or at best, you could be sick in your heart. Of those who listen to the story of Fifth Daughter right to the end, there’s not a single one who doesn’t get heart pain. Why is that? It’s because the force of Fifth Daughter’s grievance (yuanqi 怨氣) will blow into the hearts of those listening to mountain songs . . . Lu Amei raised seven girls, but all were

79  For one example see the story thirty-eight in the anthology, Jingshi tongyan 警世通 言, “Jiang Shuzhen wenjing yuanyanghui” 蔣淑真刎頸鴛鴦會, translated as “Lovers Murdered at a Rendezvous” in McLaren, The Chinese Femme Fatale, 37–57. 80  As discussed by Richard G. Wang, Ming Erotic Novellas: Consumption, and Religiosity in Cultural Practice (Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 2011), 149–156. 81  The “mental text” refers to the story line as it exists in the minds of individual singers, see Lauri Honko, Textualization of Oral Epics (Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 2000), 232–23. 82  “Fourth Daughter Opens the Cage and Frees the Bird,” WGZ, 197 . 83  For a discussion of this issue with regard to Taiwanese villagers see Stevan Harrell, “Modes of Belief in Chinese Folk Religion,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 16.1 (1977): 55–65. He noted a high degree of variability in the extent to which villagers believed ‘superstitions’.

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taken away by Fifth Daughter. Amei now prays to the Buddha because she fears Fifth Daughter will cause trouble.84 Generations after her death, Fifth Daughter has transmuted from a woman of flesh and blood, a woman who transgressed the sexual norms of her times and paid a heavy price, to an aggrieved ghost with the power to harm those who spread scandalous gossip far and wide. The causes of her downfall are not simply her human failings but rather the transformation of a kinswoman who was obligated to care for her into a demon in human form. Fifth Daughter is also the victim of the catastrophic effects of tales ‘borne on the wind’ by family, neighbours, and ultimately by those who related her story in song-cycles that became famous across broad swathes of the Yangzi delta. This is a notion of ‘wantonness’ that belongs more to the realm of cosmogenic evil than to the conventional Confucian frameworks deployed to contain the transgressive or shrewish woman. References Barber, Karin. The Anthropology of Texts, Person and Publics: Oral and Written Culture in Africa and Beyond. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Brenneis, Donald. “Gossip.” In Folklore, Cultural Performances, and Popular Entertainments, edited by Richard Bauman, 150–153. New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. Capp, Bernard. When Gossips Meet: Women, Family and Neighbourhood in Early Modern England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Chen, Jack W. and David Schaberg, eds. Idle Talk: Gossip and Anecdote in Traditional China. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014. Cowan, Alexander. “Gossip and Street Culture in Early Modern Venice.” Journal of Early Modern History 12.3/4 (2008): 313–333. Fei Xiaotong 費孝通. Peasant Life in China: A Field Study of Country Life in the Yangtze Valley ( Jiangcun jingji: Zhongguo nongmin de shenghuo). Bilingual edition. English translation by Dai Kejing. Beijing: Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press, 2010. Hamilton, Gary G. & Wang Zheng, trans. From the Soil: The Foundations of Chinese Society. A Translation of Fei Xiaotong’s Xiangtu Zhongguo. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.

84   W GZ, 271.

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Hanan, Patrick. The Chinese Short Story: Studies in Dating, Authorship and Composition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973. Harrell, Stevan. “Modes of Belief in Chinese Folk Religion.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 16.1 (1977): 55–65. Honko, Lauri. Textualization of Oral Epics. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2000. Huntington, Rania. Alien Kind: Foxes and Late Imperial Chinese Narrative. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2003. Idema, Wilt L. Chinese Vernacular Fiction: The Formative Period. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1974. Jiang Bin 姜彬. Jiangnan shi da minjian xushi shi 江南十大民間敘事詩 [Ten Long Folk Narratives from Jiangnan]. Shanghai: Wenyi chubanshe, 1989. Jin Tianlin 金天麟. Zhongguo Jiashan tiange 中國嘉善田歌 [Folk Songs from Jiashan, China]. Harbin: Heilongjiang renmin chubanshe, 2009. Jin Xu 金煦 ed. Zhongguo Luxu shange ji 中國蘆墟山歌集 [Compilation of Folk Songs from Luxu, China]. Shanghai: Shanghai wenyi chubanshe, 2005. Knust, Jennifer W. Abandoned to Lust: Sexual Slander and Ancient Christianity. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006. Levy, Dore J. “The Retributory Power of Gossip in The Story of the Stone.” In Idle Talk: Gossip and Anecdote in Traditional China, edited by Jack W. Chen and David Schaberg, 192–215. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014. Liu Xuqing 劉旭青. Wu Yue geyao yanjiu 吳越 歌謠研究 [A Study of the Folk Songs of the Wu and Yue Regions]. Beijing: Zhongguo shehuikexue chubanshe, 2012. McLaren, Anne E. The Chinese Femme Fatale: Stories from the Ming Period. Sydney: University of Sydney East Asian Series 8, Wild Peony Press, 1994. McLaren, Anne E. Performing Grief: Bridal Laments in Rural China. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2008. McLaren, Anne E. “Folk Epics from the Lower Yangzi Delta Region: Oral and Written Traditions.” In The Interplay of Oral and Written Traditions in Chinese Fiction, Drama and Performance Literature, edited by Vibeke Børdahl, 157–186. Copenhagen: Nordic Institute of Asiatic Studies in Asian Topics No. 46, NIAS Press, 2010. McLaren, Anne E “Emotion and the Language of Intimacy in Ming China: the Shan’ge of Feng Menglong”, International Journal of Asian Studies 9.2 (2012): 231–239. McLaren, Anne E. and Emily Yu Zhang, “Recreating ‘Traditional’ Folk Epics in Contemporary China: The Politics of Textual Transmission.” Forthcoming in Asian Ethnology, 2017. McMahon, Keith. Misers, Shrews, and Polygamists: Sexuality and Male-Female Relations in Eighteenth-Century Fiction. Durham: Duke University Press, 1995. Ōki Yasushi and Paolo Santangelo. Shan’ge, the ‘Mountain Songs’: Love Songs in Ming China. Leiden: Brill, 2011. Phillips, Susan. Transforming Talk: The Problem with Gossip in Late Medieval England. University Park Pa.: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007.

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Qian Shunjuan 錢瞬娟. Jiangnan minjian xushishi ji gushi 江南民間敘事詩及故事 [Jiangnan Folk Narrative Songs and Stories]. Shanghai: Wenyi chubanshe, 1997. Schimmelpenninck, Antionet. Chinese Folk Songs and Folk Singers: Shan’ge Traditions in Southern Jiangsu. Leiden: Chime Foundation, 1997. Silverstein, Michael and Greg Urban eds. Natural Histories of Discourse. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Wang Fang 王仿 and Zheng Shuoren 鄭碩人. Minjian xushi shi de chuangzuo 民間敘事 詩的創作 [The Composition of Folk Narrative Songs]. Shanghai: Wenyi chubanshe, 1993. Wang, Richard G. Ming Erotic Novellas: Genre, Consumption, and Religiosity in Cultural Practice. Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 2011. Wang Xuhua 王煦華. Wu ge: Wu ge xiao shi 吳歌。 吳歌小史 [Songs of the Wu Region: A Brief History of Wu Songs], edited by Gu Jiegang 顧頡剛. Nanjing: Jiangsu guji chubanshe, 1999. Wu, Yenna. The Chinese Virago: A Literary Theme. Cambridge: The Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1995. Zhang Fanglan 張舫瀾 and Ma Hanmin 馬漢民 ed. Changpian xushi Wuge Wu guniang ziliaoben 長篇敘事吳歌五姑娘資料本 [Wu Guniang Material: a Long Narrative Song in Wu Language] 2 vols.. Jiangsu Province Folk Literature Association, mimeographed edition, limited circulation, 1983. [WGZ]. Zheng Tuyou 鄭土有. Wuyu xushi shange yanchang chuantong yanjiu 吳語敘事山 歌演唱傳統研究 [A Study of the Wu Language Narrative Folk Song Performance Tradition]. Shanghai: Cishu chubanshe, 2005.

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Index acting-dancing (shenduan) 85–86, 89, 93, 96–99 adultery 3n2, 9, 41, 58, 113, 132–135, 138 Aijiang 149 An Dehai 47, 49 Backhouse, Edmund 47–48 Bian er chai, see Zuixihu Xinyue Zhuren Bildungsroman 75 Carlitz, Katherine 58–59 catamites 62, 70–72, 113 Catherine the Great (Russia) 31 chastity ix, 101, 113, 119–122, 124, 132, 135, 157, 162–163, 170, 172, 181 chastity code 162, 166, 170, 172, 176, 181 chastity cult 4, 6, 119, 123, 157–158, 161–165, 172 fidelity 21–22, 90, 157 widow chastity 6, 18, 31, 43, 48, 50, 117–119 Chen, Jack W. 190 Chen Jinfeng (empress) 39–40 Chen Miaochang (Yuzanji) 82, 90, 92–93, 100–102 Cheng Huiying 172–180 Fengshuangfei 159, 163, 172–180 Chengtian (empress) 29, 39–40, 42, 48–49 Chipozi zhuan vii, 13–15, 105–106 chuanqi 82, 86, 90 Cixi (empress dowager) 29, 42–43, 47, 49 Classic of Filial Piety 151–152 Commoners (pingmin, baixing) 106 concubines 40, 47, 59, 85, 161, 166, 194–195 Confucian 5, 23, 81, 124, 140–141, 152, 157, 185, 187, 195, 206 Confucius 10, 152 congyi er zhong (faithful unto death) 117 courtesan 22, 43, 46, 71, 110, 111, 112, 131, 145, 162, 186n9 courtesan culture 22, 101 prostitute-courtesan 205 Cowan, Alexander 189

Da Ji 200 dangfu vii, 3, 112 see also yinfu Dazaogan (or Daocaogan, name of melody)  142, 145 see also Guazhier desire 6, 16, 54, 88–89, 106, 123, 136–139, 148, 171–174 se (sexual desire/beauty) 160 yu (desire) 6 de xing (gaining ruler’s favor) 38 Donglin (faction) 164 Douglas, Mary 73 dufu 7, 195 see also jealousy, pofu Du Liniang 161 Elizabeth I (England) 31 entertainer 83–84, 95, 112 musician 46, 84–85 entextualization 188 Epstein, Maram 5, 17–19 eroticism 16n37, 94 kunqu eroticism 86 Fei Xiaotong 184 Feiyan waizhuan 35 femininity 23, 55n3, 58, 73, 92, 170, 176 Feng, Empress 35, 37, 42, 45, 47–48 Feng Menglong 106, 121, 129–154, 186 Guazhier 140–148 Gujin xiaoshuo 150–151 Jingshi tongyan 150, 152 Qingshi 148–149 Sanyan 106, 150, 151, 153 Shange 129–154, 186 Tongchi 141, 148 Xiaofu 148 Xingshi hengyan 151–152 Feng Xisheng 145 Fengshen yanyi 200 Fengshuangfei see Cheng Huiying

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210 festivals 143–4 Fonu [Qingshi] 149 four phases of wantonness revealed 63–64 fox spirit 171 fudao (moral code for women) 160 Fujian 162 Gao Lian 90 Qintiao 90, 92, 93 Yuzanji 82, 90, 93n28 Gao Pusa 37 gliding steps (guibu) 99 gossip 189–190, 192, 206 Gu Qiyuan 108–110 Kezuo zhuiyu 107, 109 guanggun (unattached single men) 163 Guanyin 171 guixiu 164 guo (state) 159 Guwangyan 45, 49 Han dynasty 7 hanfu (fierce wife) 7, 200 hanging (of women) 162 Hanshu 34–35 homoerotic fiction 54, 56, 59, 60, 62, 70–73 homoeroticism 14, 18, 40, 55 female homoeroticism 72, 175 male homoeroticism 54–75, 175 Honglou meng 160–161, 170, 190 honor, family 165, 167, 168, 169 Hsu Pi-ching 139, 141 Hu, Empress 37, 47 Hu Siao-chen 158 huaben (vernacular story) 123 Huang Fangyin 105–124 Illicit Rendezvous 113, 119–121 Leaning in the Doorway 113–114 Mohuaxuan xiaoji 110 Mohuaxuan zaju (Short Plays from the Studio of Wayside Flowers) 106–113, 122–123 Quxiang ciyu 110 Serial Monogamy 113, 115, 121 Huang Jia 108 Huang, Martin 59, 72, 74 Huang Yuji (Qianqingtang shumu) 110 Huanxi yuanjia, see Xihu yuyin zhuren Huayue hen (Traces of the Flowery Moon) 46

Index Huntington, Rania 200 huwen (mutually implied phrase) 11 jealousy 34, 157, 171–172, 178–179, 185, 194–195, 198 see also dufu Jezebel vii–viii Jia Nanfeng 35, 45, 47 jia (false) 140 jianfu (wife committing illicit sex) 3n1 jiao (dragon) 176 Jiangnan 131, 136, 138–139, 143–144 Jin Ping Mei viii, 11–13, 16–18, 45, 123, 153, 159, 171, 180, 198 Jiuwei gui 46 junei (henpecked husband) 176 karma 118, 152, 195n49 Kinney, Anne 9–10 Knust, Jennifer 189 kuangfu yinfu (wild husbands or wanton wives) 10 kunqu (kun opera) 81–102 Lake Tai 185–187 Langxian (Dissolute Immortal), see Tianran Chisou Li Lianying 47, 49 Li Yu 164 Qingzhong pu (A Register of the Pure and Loyal) 164 Liang Guyin 95 licentiousness 63–64, 68, 81–82 licentious plays (yinxi) 82n9 see also yin Lienü zhuan, see Liu Xiang Lim Boon-keng 47 Lin Daiyu (Honglou meng) 161 Ling, Empress 35, 42, 45, 48 Ling Mengchu 106 Erpai/Two Slaps 106 literacy (female) 8, 17 literati 6, 17, 55n3, 61, 64, 70–75, 110, 120–121, 124, 131, 138, 145, 186n9 Liu Wenjia 178 Liu Xiang 8–10 Lienü zhuan 8–11 Shuoyuan 10 Liu Yilong 95

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211

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Index Longyang yishi 70, 72, 106, 123 Lu Amei 191–192, 195, 203–206 luan (disorder) 15 Lü Buwei 33–34 Lunyu (Analects) 81, 83, 151–152 Lu Xun 8 The True Story of Ah-Q 8 Ma Lihua 108, 109, 110, 111 male concubine 29, 36, 45, 48 mianshou 36 masculinity viii, 50, 55n3, 88, 96, 173–174, 189 McLaren, Anne 5–6, 18 McMahon, Keith 6–7, 14n35, 15–16, 18, 58–59, 61, 63, 75, 194–195 men, marginal 159–160, 180 eunuchs 21, 29, 37, 42, 49, 159, 163, 164, 180 monks 57, 90, 113, 159, 163, 180 Miller, J. Hillis 74 Ming dynasty 21–22, 32, 35, 38, 45, 54, 57, 61, 74, 105, 120–122, 163–166 late Ming ix, 5, 22, 40, 61, 64, 73, 75, 105–107, 110–113, 120–124, 129, 132, 136–145, 162–163 Mohuaxuan zaju, see Huang Fangyin monarchy 30 monogamy 14, 15n35, 18, 46, 135, 170, 194 morality 114, 118, 120, 129, 188 Confucian moralist 154 orthodox morality 61 sexual morality 4, 170 Moretti, Franco 75 mountain songs (shange) 129, 131, 136, 139–140, 143–147, 154, 185–187 competitions 144 musiking 84n13 Naifei, Ding 12 neichong (inner favorites) 35n12, 39 New Tang History (Xin Tangshu) 38–39 Niehaiji 86 =A Sea of Troubles in the Secular World 86 niezhai (sinful streak) 65 nuns 22, 46, 66, 86, 88–93, 151 nüyue (woman musicians) 83 artist 46 singsong girl 111

Old Tang History ( Jiu Tangshu) 38–39 Ouyang Yuqian  19 Pan Jinlian (1926) 19 Pan Bizheng (Yuzan ji) 90, 92–93 Pan Jinlian ( Jin Ping Mei) 11–12, 14, 18–20, 23, 45, 112, 123, 159, 163, 180, 198 Pan Jinlian zhi qianshi jinsheng (The Reincarnation of Golden Lotus (dir. Clara Law, 1989) 18n45 Paolo Santangelo 146 patriarchy  viii, 4, 7, 13n31, 21, 23, 102, 119, 159, 160–161 patron (of courtesans) 46, 64–65, 111, 162 penetration 55, 59n15, 62–65, 68, 70, 72, 74 Pettit, Charles 47 pofu (shrewish women) 7, 157, 157n1, 159, 188, 194–195, 206 see also dufu polyandry (polyandrous empress) 29–50, 135 polyandry vs polygyny 43–46 polygamy 7, 14n35, 15, 17 polygamist 17, 48, 50 see also polygyny polygyny 15, 43 popular songs 83, 129, 140–147 see also mountain songs prohibitions on licentious literature 61 prostitution 44, 46, 64, 112, 113, 114, 161 male prostitution 64, 66 Pu Songling 161, 171 Liaozhai zhiyi 161, 171 Qi Biaojia 107–108 Yuanshantang jupin 107–108 Qian Qianyi 108–109 Qidan guozhi (History of the Qidan Kingdom) 40 qin (seven-string zither) 83, 92 Qing Anshi 34–35 Qing dynasty 32, 38, 43, 45, 49, 54, 61, 105, 107, 158, 162–163 late-Qing 18, 19 qing 6, 22–23, 59–60, 71–72, 74, 158, 171 love 59, 71, 74–75 passion 6, 59, 71, 158 Qinhuai 110

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Qintiao, see Gao Lian Queen Mother of the West 29, 45 regent (female) 30, 32, 43, 48–50 female rulership 43, 49 male rulership 18, 49–50 remarriage 31, 116, 121 righteousness (yi) 12 Ruyijun zhuan 13, 68–69, 159 sacrifice (self-) 71, 73, 75 victim-sacrifice 71 Sanguo yanyi 16, 17 scandal (choushi) 165, 190, 192, 205 Schaberg, David 190 seductresses 12, 81, 81n4, 82, 85–86, 90, 94, 102 Segalen, Victor 47–48 Sekong 82, 86–89, 92, 100–102 sexual adventurism viii sexual agency 19, 22, 85, 163, 180 sexual shame 159, 162–163, 170–173 sexual slander 189–190, 204 Shanyin, Princess of (Liu Chuyu) 32, 36, 45, 48 Shen Defu 136, 142–143 Wanli yehuo bian 136, 142 Shen Tai 107 Sheng Ming zaju 107 Shenghuzhi 144 Shidiantou, see Tianran Chisou Shijing (Book of Odes) 8, 10, 11, 139, 140, 142 Shuihu zhuan 12–13, 16, 18, 94, 101 All Men are Brothers 94 The Water Margin 12 Shuoyuan, see Liu Xiang side (four virtues) 157 Sieber, Patricia 100 Sifan 82, 86, 88 sin 65 siqing (secret love) 129, 139, 145–147, 150–151, 154, 185, 187, 192, 196, 203 Sommer, Matthew 44 Song dynasty 21, 31, 35, 38, 40, 48, 50, 143, 150–151 Soulié, Georges 48 Suzhou 129, 131, 143–145, 186

Index tanci 17, 157, 158, 159, 163–164, 172 Tang dynasty 39, 46, 143, 151 Tang Xianzu 85n16 Mudanting 85n16, 161, 170 Tao Zhenhuai 163, 164, 170, 171, 179 Tianyuhua 159, 163–172, 178–181 Theiss, Janet 162 tianli (heavenly principle) 5 Tianran Chisou (Naturally Foolish Old Man) 62 Shidiantou 62 Tiger Hill 144 Vitiello, Giovanni  55, 60n19, 69 Volpp, Sophie 55 Wang Baoming, empress dowager 36, 45 Wang Duan 164 Wang Zhaoyuan 164 Wang Zhongxian 62–63, 71 wanton vii–viii, 11, 57, 81n4, 132 see also four phases of wantonness revealed, yin wantonness 7, 9–10, 18, 56, 60, 63–65, 71, 73, 158, 161, 176, 206 wanton women wanton women (def.) vii–ix, 3–4, 55–59, 112, 157 wanton woman (history of term) 10–11, 113–114 wanton woman (role) 20, 50, 179 see also yinfu Wei Zhongxian 164 Wenjiang 149 Widmer, Ellen 158 Wo bu shi Pan Jinlian (I Am Not Madame Bovary, dir. Feng Xiaogang, 2016)  18n45 Wu Dalang 12, 198 Wu Erlang (Wu Song) 12, 198 Wu guniang (Fifth Daughter) 187–206 Wu, Laura 54 Wu (or Suzhou) dialect 129–130, 146, 158, 185–186 Wu Zetian 13–15, 19–20, 29, 32–33, 37–50, 68–69, 112–113, 135, 159, 163

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Index xiaoshuo (fiction/novel) ix, 5, 61, 158–159, 177, 180 see also homoerotic fiction Xiaozhuang, empress dowager 42 Xihu yuyin zhuren 120 Huanxi yuanjia 106, 113, 120, 121, 123 Xijing zaji 34 Ximen Qing 11, 19, 154, 159, 180 Xingshi yinyuan zhuan (Marriage Bonds to Awaken the World) 171 Xixiangji (Romance of the Western Chamber) 92n27, 101 Xiwangmu, see Queen Mother of the West Xu Zichang 94 Huozhuo 94–100 Shuihu ji 82, 94 Xuan, Queen 33–34 Xuanyi, Empress 41 xuan yin (to spread licentiousness openly) 36 Xue Aocao 13–14, 68 Xue Baochai [Honglou meng] 161 Yan Poxi 82, 94–102 Yang Guifei 22n53, 112 Yichun xiangzhi, see Zuixihu Xinyue Zhuren yin (wanton, licentious) viii, 3n1, 9–11, 81, 157–158, 160, 176 see also four phases of wantonness revealed, licentious, wanton, xuanyin, yinfu yinfu (wanton or licentious women)  vii–viii, 3, 17, 81, 112, 151, 154, 157, 159–63, 171–172, 176, 178, 180 (history of term) 8–11, 18

213 yinyang (female and male vital principles)  5, 158, 160, 173, 175, 176, 180 Yiqu, King 33 Yuan dynasty 21, 31, 48, 50, 142 Yuan Hongdao 141 yuanben (plays) 106n3, 111, 112n16, 113 yue (music) 81, 83n13 Yueji (Record of Music) 83–84 Yuzanji, see Gao Lian zage (miscellaneous songs) 129–130 zaju (drama) 106n3, 111, 112n16, 113 Zhang Yimou 20 Zhao Feiyan 8, 22n53, 29, 32, 34–35, 45, 47, 112–113 Zhaoyang Qushi (Sensational History of Flying Swallow) 34 zhen (genuineness) 64, 140, 147, 154 zhengdao (the proper way) 3n1 zhentan 109 zhezixi (play extracts) 86 Zhongyong 4 Zhou Hui ( Jinling suoshi) 107 Zou Shijin (Zaju xinbian) 107–108 Zuixihu Xinyue Zhuren 64, 64n28 Bian er chai (Caps with Hairpins) 59, 64–66, 69–70, 72–75 Yichun xiangzhi (Fragrant Beauty Inspiring Ardour) 57, 62–64, 67–75 Zuozhuan 149 Zurndorfer, Harriet 21

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Copyright 2017. Brill. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law.

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 11/4/2019 7:51 PM via TOWSON UNIVERSITY AN: 1507598 ; Stevenson, Mark J., Wu, Cuncun.; Wanton Women in Late-imperial Chinese Literature : Models, Genres, Subversions and Traditions Account: towson.main.eds

Copyright 2017. Brill. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law.

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 11/4/2019 7:51 PM via TOWSON UNIVERSITY AN: 1507598 ; Stevenson, Mark J., Wu, Cuncun.; Wanton Women in Late-imperial Chinese Literature : Models, Genres, Subversions and Traditions Account: towson.main.eds