Woman Rules Within: Domestic Space and Genre in Qing Vernacular Literature 2020028826, 9789004437463, 9789004437920

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgements
Figures
Introduction
1 The Vernacular Mode
2 Domestic Space
3 Affection and Ritual Propriety
4 Genre
5 Chapter Outlines
Chapter 1 Rewriting the Collected Biographies of Women
1 Fidelity and Critique in Late Ming Editions
1.1 Natal and Marital Family Loyalty
1.2 Ji, Wife of Duke Mu of Qin
1.3 The Righteous Aunt of Lu
1.4 The Loving Younger Sister of Heyang
2 Expansion and Emotional Development in the Expanded Biographies
2.1 The Righteous Aunt of Lu
2.2 The Loving Younger Sister of Heyang
2.3 The Principled Woman of the Capital
3 The Yanyi Genre and the Rise of Qing
Chapter 2 The Marvelous in the Everyday: Domestic Space and Colloquial Fiction
1 From Chuanqi to Huaben
1.1 “Gengniang” and “The Reluctant Bigamist”
1.2 “Danan” and “The Virtuous Concubine”
1.3 “Shanhu” and “The Harsh Mother-in-Law”
2 Literary and Thematic Critique in Parallel Words
3 Vernacular Ethics
Chapter 3 Savvy Women and the Inner–Outer Divide
1 Biographies: Classical Paradigms and Qing Negotiations
1.1 Space and Gender in Early and Late Imperial China
1.2 Expanding the Biographies
2 Expediency and Ethics in Qing Fiction
2.1 Verbal Dominance and Clan Governance
2.2 A Filial Daughter and Female Inheritance
2.3 The Ethics of Sex and Property
3 Genre and the Discourse on Female Talent
Chapter 4 Reframing Household and Text in Later Dream of the Red Chamber
1 The Jias, Their Jia, and the Virtue of Containment
2 The Boundaries of Marriage: Qing and Li in Co-wife Marriage
3 Commentary, Metafiction, and the Borders of the Book
Chapter 5 The Ethos of Expansion in Dreaming Again of the Red Chamber
1 Rewriting Emotion and Ritual
1.1 Qing and Sworn Kinship
1.2 Marrying and Giving in Marriage
2 The Architecture of Plot and Feeling
2.1 Spatializing Ritual and Emotion
2.2 Building Plot and Agency
3 Tragedy and the Caizi Jiaren Genre
3.1 Baochai as a Tragic Figure
3.2 Baochai’s Laughter
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Woman Rules Within

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

VOLUME 11

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

Woman Rules Within Domestic Space and Genre in Qing Vernacular Literature

By

Jessica Dvorak Moyer

LEIDEN | BOSTON

Cover illustration: Workshop of Ding Liangxian 丁亮先, The Last Three Months of the Year, print, ca. 1600–1800, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Rogers Fund, 1923. http://www.metmuseum.org/ (accessed March 20, 2020). The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available online at http://catalog.loc.gov LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2020028826

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. ISSN 1877-5772 ISBN 978-90-04-43746-3 (hardback) ISBN 978-90-04-43792-0 (e-book) Copyright 2020 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi, Brill Sense, Hotei Publishing, mentis Verlag, Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh and Wilhelm Fink Verlag. 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. Requests for re-use and/or translations must be addressed to Koninklijke Brill NV via brill.com or copyright.com. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

Contents Acknowledgements vii List of Figures ix Introduction 1 1 The Vernacular Mode  3 2 Domestic Space 6 3 Affection and Ritual Propriety 13 4 Genre 17 5 Chapter Outlines 22 1 Rewriting the Collected Biographies of Women 25 1 Fidelity and Critique in Late Ming Editions 26 1.1 Natal and Marital Family Loyalty  29 1.2 Ji, Wife of Duke Mu of Qin 31 1.3 The Righteous Aunt of Lu 35 1.4 The Loving Younger Sister of Heyang 39 2 Expansion and Emotional Development in the Expanded Biographies 43 2.1 The Righteous Aunt of Lu 45 2.2 The Loving Younger Sister of Heyang 46 2.3 The Principled Woman of the Capital 49 3 The Yanyi Genre and the Rise of Qing 51 2 The Marvelous in the Everyday: Domestic Space and Colloquial Fiction 56 1 From Chuanqi to Huaben 57 1.1 “Gengniang” and “The Reluctant Bigamist” 59 1.2 “Danan” and “The Virtuous Concubine” 70 1.3 “Shanhu” and “The Harsh Mother-in-Law” 75 2 Literary and Thematic Critique in Parallel Words 82 3 Vernacular Ethics 84 3 Savvy Women and the Inner–Outer Divide 92 1 Biographies: Classical Paradigms and Qing Negotiations 94 1.1 Space and Gender in Early and Late Imperial China 94 1.2 Expanding the Biographies 96

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3

Expediency and Ethics in Qing Fiction 103 2.1 Verbal Dominance and Clan Governance 106 2.2 A Filial Daughter and Female Inheritance 111 2.3 The Ethics of Sex and Property 115 Genre and the Discourse on Female Talent 119

4 Reframing Household and Text in Later Dream of the Red Chamber  128 1 The Jias, Their Jia, and the Virtue of Containment 131 2 The Boundaries of Marriage: Qing and Li in Co-wife Marriage 145 3 Commentary, Metafiction, and the Borders of the Book 150 5 The Ethos of Expansion in Dreaming Again of the Red Chamber 161 1 Rewriting Emotion and Ritual 162 1.1 Qing and Sworn Kinship 166 1.2 Marrying and Giving in Marriage 172 2 The Architecture of Plot and Feeling 177 2.1 Spatializing Ritual and Emotion 181 2.2 Building Plot and Agency 188 3 Tragedy and the Caizi Jiaren Genre 190 3.1 Baochai as a Tragic Figure 191 3.2 Baochai’s Laughter 195 Conclusion 200 Bibliography 207 Index 219

Acknowledgements I write these acknowledgements in the separation from colleagues and friends imposed by social distancing measures against the COVID-19 pandemic. That physical isolation underscores the fact that without the help of many others— some of whom I have never met face to face—this book would not exist. Tina Lu supervised the dissertation that became this book with wisdom and good humor, and her generous guidance both personal and professional has remained invaluable during the years since graduation. My deepest debt of gratitude is to her. Thanks go also to my Yale professors, especially Kang-i Sun Chang, Annping Chin and my Ph.D. qualifying committee, Paize Keulemans, Haun Saussy, and Jing Tsu, who pushed me to new levels of perceptiveness in reading and clarity in writing. At Kenyon, Jianhua Bai opened my eyes to the world of Chinese language and literature, and Robert Bennett and Carolin Hahnemann were models of teaching and scholarship. During the writing process, Grace Fong and Keith McMahon heroically read every early chapter draft, while feedback from Maram Epstein, Rivi Handler-Spitz, Robert Hegel, William Oram, Matthew Sommer, and Yuanfei Wang greatly improved key portions of the manuscript during revision. Roger Davis provided meticulous copy editing. I am especially grateful to Guojun Wang, who not only read and commented on parts of the English manuscript but also helped decipher and punctuate difficult calligraphic texts, saving me from some egregious mistranslations in the process. Thanks are due, as well, to the editors and reviewers whose critical feedback at various stages along the way made the final project far better. All remaining errors of fact and interpretation are entirely my own. At Smith, I am grateful to the entire EALL department, especially Kim Kono and Sujane Wu. Their guidance has helped me grow as a teacher and a scholar, and their collegiality has made service a pleasure. My colleagues Yalin Chen, Lu Yu, and Ling Zhao have been a joy to teach with. Jon Cartledge helped me with the illustrations, Marnie Anderson and Sabina Knight have been generous with their advice and friendship, and Michael Gorra gave invaluable guidance about writing and publishing. The help of many librarians strengthened the research presented here, especially Tang Li of the East Asia Library at Yale, Martin Heijdra of the East Asian Library at Princeton, and Sharon Domier at Smith. I am also grateful to the editors of Late Imperial China for permission to publish a revised version of “Reframing the Boundaries of Household and Text in Hou Honglou Meng,” LIC 36, no. 1 (2015), as chapter 4, and to the editors of Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews for permission to publish a revised version of “Savvy Women and Boundary Negotiations in Qing Fiction,” CLEAR

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41 (2019), as chapter 5. Finally, my thanks to the editorial board at Brill for their help throughout the publication process, especially to Patricia Radder for detailed and gracious answers to many e-mail queries. My sense of the richness inherent in everyday household life owes everything to my family: to my grandparents, Stan and Anita Dvorak and George and Martha Kelsey, for constant prayers and lives faithfully lived; to my parents, David and Lois Dvorak, for their example of dedication and humor; to my siblings, Jonathan and Elizabeth Dvorak, for showing me new ways to see the world; and to my Moyer parents- and grandparents-in-law, William and Betty and Bill and Karen, for welcoming me into their family with open arms. After all my research on natal and marital family conflict, I am grateful beyond words for my two families. My husband Jarrett has improved my arguments with his keen logic, wrangled stubborn toddlers to give me space and time for writing, and anchored me through thick and thin with patience and love—the best partner at life I can imagine. My daughter Gabrielle and my son Samuel have distracted me from research and tolerated their mother’s frequent distractions, making life messier and more joyful.

Figures 1 “Ji, Wife of Duke Mu of Qin” from the Supplemented Biographies. Zengbu quan­ xiang pinglin gujin Lienü zhuan 增補全象平林古今列女傳. Wanli (1591) Yueyu wentai edition. Public domain, courtesy of Harvard Yenching Library digital rare books collection. https://curiosity.lib.harvard.edu/chinese-rare-books/catalog/ 49-990077588800203941 (accessed March 17, 2020) 33 2 “Ji, Wife of Duke Mu of Qin” from the Illustrated Biographies. Lienü zhuan shiliu juan 列女傳十六卷. Zhibuzu zhai, 1779. Public domain, courtesy of HathiTrust. https://catalog.hathitrust.org/api/volumes/oclc/28482256.html (accessed March 17, 2020) 35 3 “The Righteous Aunt of Lu” from the Supplemented Biographies 37 4 “The Loving Younger Sister of Heyang” from the Illustrated Biographies 42 5 Relative length of episodes in “Gengniang” and “The Reluctant Bigamist” 70

Introduction Men do not speak of what is within; women do not speak of what is without. Unless in sacrificial and mourning rituals, they do not give things to each other. When they do give things to each other, the woman receives the item in a basket, or if she has no basket, the two both sit, one places it on the ground, and the other then takes it. Outer and inner do not share a well; they do not share a bathing room; their sleeping mats do not touch; they do not communicate requests. Men and women do not share the same clothing. Inner words do not go out, outer words do not go in. 男不言內，女不言外。非祭非喪，不相授器。其相授，則女受以篚，   其無篚則皆坐奠之而後取之。外內不共井，不共湢浴，不通寢席，不 通乞假，男女不通衣裳，內言不出，外言不入。  1

∵ This quotation from the “Inner Standards” (Nei ze 内則) chapter of the Classic of Rites emphasizes the fundamental distinction between male and female and the equally fundamental identification of men with the outer sphere and women with the inner. The formulations “There is distinction between man and woman” (男女有別) and “Man rules without, woman rules within” (男 主外，女主内) would govern the discourse on gender and the family for the next two millennia. Gender differences were spatially conceived, inculcated, and enacted through practices of spatial segregation. They were physically ingrained in bodily practices of gesture and clothing. They were also verbal. In this locus classicus of gender construction, even the words of men and women are supposed to have nothing in common. Two different genders meant two different ways of speaking, two different worlds of language. These differentiated discourses likewise formed the gendered subject. Decades of scholarship have studied women’s words at length, tracing the struggles and strategies of women whose voices reached beyond the inner

1  Zheng Xuan 鄭玄 and Kong Yingda 孔穎達, Li ji zhushu 禮記註疏, Siku quanshu, Wenyuange ed. (Hong Kong: Dizhi wenhua chuban youxian gongsi, 2006), 27:11.

2

Introduction

quarters.2 The fact that men’s words also reached into the women’s quarters, whether to instruct, eulogize, or voyeuristically describe, seems almost too obvious to mention. In fact, there is nothing obvious about it: The Rites makes it taboo for men’s words to enter the inner sphere of women’s lives. Yet men frequently wrote about women, not only in their roles as mothers, wives, daughters, concubines, and servants of men, but also as social beings among other women. This project examines textual depictions of women’s household relationships across multiple genres: biography, popular history, classical tales, vernacular short stories, and long vernacular fiction. One of the most obvious facts that the book must grapple with is that texts within a genre tend to say similar things about women, while reading a different kind of text reveals a different vision of female relationships. Debates about how women should relate to others often took place in the spaces and gaps between genres rather than between individual works within a genre. That genre shapes discourse is a truism so broad as to be unhelpful. In this book, I will show how authors’ choices of genre and language shaped discourse around a specific question in the Qing dynasty: how women should integrate their emotional lives with the ritual demands of the household space. Authors, editors, and readers in the first half of the Qing dynasty grappled with the late Ming legacy of the cult of qing 情, trying to revalue and re-contain qing within the household at a time when the family order was perceived as newly important to the stability of local communities and the Qing empire as a whole.3 The texts analyzed here work to balance two cultural imperatives: the demand inherited from the late Ming to acknowledge the depth of human feeling, and the newer need to correct the excesses of the cult of qing and stabilize family roles by means of ritual propriety. Their participation in distinct genres, articulated in their choices about language and setting, helps establish their ideological positions within this larger cultural landscape.

2  Notable examples include Grace S. Fong, Herself an Author: Gender, Agency, and Writing in Late Imperial China (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2008); Hu Wenkai 胡文楷 and Zhang Hongsheng 张宏生, Lidai funü zhuzuo kao 歷代婦女著作考 (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 2008); Susan Mann, The Talented Women of the Zhang Family (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); Ellen Widmer, The Beauty and the Book: Women and Fiction in Nineteenth-Century China (Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2006); and Dorothy Ko, Teachers of the Inner Chambers: Women and Culture in Seventeenth-Century China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994). 3  Matthew Sommer, Sex, Law and Society in Late Imperial China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 305–20.

Introduction

1

3

The Vernacular Mode

A central concern of this study is the relationship between the domestic space and the written idiom usually referred to in English as “vernacular” and in modern Chinese as baihua (白話). Both terms are connotatively rich. The English term “vernacular” derives from the Latin vernaculus, meaning “of or belonging to homeborn slaves,” which is in turn an accretive form of verna, -ae, “a slave born in the master’s house.” Through transference, it comes to mean “native, domestic, indigenous, common, natural.”4 This etymology highlights the linkage between that which is native and that which is ordinary and domestic, and its constellation of meanings reflects the same ideas of nativity, simplicity, and domesticity transposed into several different arenas. “Vernacular architecture” refers to buildings created using local materials without specialized knowledge, and especially to traditional house building. “Vernacular art,” as described by James Cahill, refers to paintings and other images produced for family celebrations, domestic decoration, and other everyday uses.5 Vernacular language, finally, refers to a written language closely linked to the spoken language of a given region. It is a pleasant scholarly coincidence that the English term “vernacular” encompasses so many of the central ideas of this project, from the domestic to the linguistic. Yet although Chinese descriptions of both language and household space present no such serendipitous common term, the thematic commonalities of the vernacular, the everyday, and the domestic emerge just as strongly from Qing sources. The Chinese term baihua, “plain speech,” was not used to refer to a specific linguistic register until the nineteenth century; before that, it meant something like “idle chatter.” The aesthetic of simplicity that it evokes, however, was certainly present in the writing style that scholars now term baihua. One eighteenth-century vernacular author describes his own use of language in these terms: “Each passage, each sentence never goes beyond the bounds of the common and everyday; just as, though plain cloth and beans and millet are not comparable to brocade and gauze and delicacies, yet as to guarding against cold and stopping hunger, they are things people cannot do without.” (篇篇語 語縂不越乎尋常日用之間，猶如布帛菽粟，雖非錦繡珍肴饈之可比，至若 禦寒止饑，則人之未可少也。 )6 Clearly, the “plain speech” aesthetic predated

4  D. P. Simpson, Cassell’s New Latin Dictionary (New York: Funk and Wagnall’s, 1960). 5  James Cahill, Pictures for Use and Pleasure: Vernacular Painting in High Qing China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 3–5. 6  Shi Chengjin 石成金, Chuanjia bao 傳家寶, Qianlong 4 ed. (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 2009), 1:4:6.

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Introduction

the term baihua. And though vernacular stories and novels do not always describe the home, vernacular fiction does offer one of the richest sources in traditional Chinese literature for textual renderings of household life. The vernacular, with its close resemblance to the everyday, spoken language, lends itself to depictions of the home: Everyday speech describes everyday space. But although the quotidian connotations of the terms “vernacular” and “baihua” resonate with the language of my sources, these terms can also be misleading. Both the use of “baihua” to denote a specific kind of written language, and the use of “baihua” and “vernacular” as equivalent terms, date back to the May Fourth movement’s project of nation-building through the written word. Hu Shi, Chen Duxiu, and others advocated the use of a literary idiom they christened baihua by drawing analogies with the explosion of literature written in various national vernaculars, as opposed to Latin, in the European Renaissance.7 May Fourth writers compared classical Chinese (wenyan 文言) to Latin in order to upend the traditional hierarchical conceptions of formal and colloquial written Chinese, treating the former as “dead” and the latter as “living,” and sought to make the vernacular central rather than peripheral.8 They described works from the Song, Yuan, Ming, and Qing dynasties written in an informal idiom as popular vernacular literature, and they argued that the new baihua literature of the twentieth century should draw on this linguistic and literary heritage. At the same time, they critiqued traditional vernacular as insufficiently revolutionary and its very popularity as dangerous.9 But both their praise and their criticism make the same set of connections: Classical Chinese = written = difficult = elite; Vernacular Chinese = spoken = easy = popular. These equivalences are incomplete at best. More recent scholarship has shown how complex the relationship between late imperial vernacular and classical Chinese really was. Certainly, colloquial forms of writing more closely resemble the spoken language; they are distinct in both vocabulary and grammar and more expansive in both. They have a higher frequency of binomes, sentence structures are looser, and conciseness is not, as in wenyan, an absolute stylistic necessity.10 But the vernacular was not necessarily more accessible to the less-educated, nor was wenyan the in-group language of the elite. True, it is easier to learn to read a written language that 7  Hu Shi 胡適, “Some Modest Proposals for the Reform of Literature,” in Modern Chinese Literary Thought, ed. Kirk Denton (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 137–38. 8  Hu Shi 胡適, Baihua wenxue shi 白話文學史 (Hong Kong: Yingzhong shuwu, 1959), 9. 9  Qu Qiubai 瞿秋白, “The Question of Popular Literature and Art,” in Denton, Modern Chinese Literary Thought, 418–19. 10  Patrick Hanan, The Chinese Vernacular Story (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), 14–16.

Introduction

5

resembles the language one already speaks than to learn new vocabulary and new grammar along with a writing system. But primary education in imperial China was in Classical Chinese, and both classical and vernacular texts used the same written characters. Written texts aimed at broad audiences used not pure vernacular, but either a simple classical style or a hybrid of classical and vernacular.11 Indeed, the very category of “vernacular” written language is increasingly recognized as untenable: though classical Chinese existed in stylistically pure form, texts in the vernacular almost always employed a hybrid of classical and vernacular in varying proportions.12 Furthermore, it is linguistically and historically inaccurate to posit two categories, or even a simple bidirectional continuum, of “classical” and “vernacular” into which all written language was categorized.13 Many different kinds of writing ended up in the bucket labeled “vernacular” by later scholars. Throughout this study, I will often use “vernacular” and “classical” as shorthand terms for the various colloquial and formal idioms my sources employ. I do not attempt either to redefine the term “vernacular” or to resuscitate it as a separate linguistic category. Rather, I draw out one important function of colloquial written language for which previous systems of analysis are inadequate: the fact that it often serves as the discourse of everyday domestic life. Both Chinese and European written vernaculars are often characterized as the popular, earthy, vigorous, potentially transgressive counterparts to the elite, elegant, highbrow classical languages of power.14 Like the central correlative pairings of male and female, heaven and earth, and yang and yin, high and low are both mutual and unequal. The metaphor certainly holds true for the relationship between formal and informal language. But these levels of language do not correspond to social classes. Rather, vernacular and classical idioms were associated with different fields of cultural mastery.15 Common drinking games required the winner to juxtapose an encyclopedic knowledge of classics and poetry with an equally thorough knowledge of vulgar lyrics and common sayings. The authors of literati vernacular novels were not expressing 11  Evelyn Sakakida Rawski, Education and Popular Literacy in Ch’ing China (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1979), 175–78. 12  Hanan, The Chinese Vernacular Story, 14–16. 13  Shang Wei, “Writing and Speech: Rethinking the Issue of Vernaculars in Early Modern China,” in Rethinking East Asian Languages, Vernaculars, and Literacies, 1000–1919, ed. Benjamin Elman (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 271–72. 14  Hanan, The Chinese Vernacular Story, 15–16. 15  Yuming He, Home and the World: Editing the “Glorious Ming” in Woodblock-Printed Books of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2013), 42–55.

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Introduction

solidarity with the underdog; they were expressing elite artistry in a colloquial but sophisticated medium. Thus, the common interpretive dichotomy of “high” and “low” not only reinforces the false binary between “classical” and “vernacular” but also overlooks important aspects of what the many variants of written Chinese were actually doing in relation to one another. Vernacular idioms play a central role in describing the everyday social and domestic world. Descriptions of every kind of household occur in text, from the mansions of the fantastically wealthy to modest merchant and farmer homes. The fact that these details frequently take shape in colloquial language suggests that the paired concepts of “inner” and “outer” are an important supplement to the duality of “high” and “low” in conceptualizing the role of vernacular language. The chapters that follow show that the vernacular is a privileged site of expression of spatial and even emotional interiority. These texts use colloquial language deliberately to align themselves with the domestic everyday world. Adding “inner” and “outer” as an axis of interpretation not only adds another dimension to the analysis of Qing written language, but completes the circle to the connections between language and gender that the Classic of Rites formulated so long ago. 2

Domestic Space

A traditional Chinese home was an enclosed, interior space relative to the world outside. But within, it had both feminine and masculine spaces that were often described as interior and exterior relative to each other. The women’s quarters were innermost, and adult men were supposed to be excluded from them during the day.16 This meant that living in the home was a constant process of subconsciously navigating between “inner” and “outer,” and this spatially conceived division not only framed the distinction between family and outsiders but also the gender boundary between male and female. But thinking of gender and the household in terms of inner and outer unveils a central paradox of the traditional Chinese family system. Considered spatially, women “ruled within”: they dwelt in the inner quarters, at the center of the household, and were responsible for its management. From a lineage point of view, however, women were outsiders. Their incorporation into the family structure was always partial, varying with factors such as whether they were

16  Francesca Bray, Technology and Gender: Fabrics of Power in Late Imperial China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 129–39.

Introduction

7

wives, concubines, or maids and whether they had borne children. Domestic boundaries crossed and conflicted with one another. The household, as the inner world of clan outsiders, is where any discussion of women must begin. Women’s lives were constricted and protected by the walls of the home. Yet the household as a spatial, economic, and kinship unit was also deeply fractured for the female subject, caught between her natal family and her marital family, belonging fully to neither. Late imperial sources describe family ties in terms that resemble traditional European ideas of blood and modern ones of genetics: children born of the same parents have a shared nature (tongxing 同性), which is described as shared bone and flesh (gurou 骨肉), or vital energy (qi 氣). This physical and emotional commonality was seen as the source of affection between kin.17 But women married out. Leaving their bone and flesh, they joined their husbands’ households. They spent their days with the other women of their marital families: mothers-in-law, their husbands’ brothers’ wives, and—until they married out in their turn—the young daughters of the house. Shared household space, not kinship or the personal affinity of friendship, was the defining characteristic of adult female sociability. The tension between natal and marital family loyalty in women’s lives was one facet of a broader tension between lineage and household discourse. Zu 祖, lineage, meant the vertical patriline from grandfather to father to son, extending sideways to cousins and even more distant relations of the same surname. Jia 家, which can be translated as either “family” or “home,” meant a group of people living under one roof and eating from one kitchen, functioning as an economic unit. It included parents, children living at home, their spouses and children, and servants. The household and lineage could have conflicting interests and make contradictory demands on their members. Wives carried out their ritual duties within this network of competing expectations. The household’s ritual significance stemmed from its function as the matrix of lineage reproduction and site of ancestral worship, in which a wife served as her husband’s sexual and ritual partner. Furthermore, the household was a microcosm of society, the link between the individual and the state, the basic locus of formation of the subject both individual and political. The “Great Learning” (Da xue 大學) chapter of the Rites makes it clear: “In ancient times those who desired to make clear through the whole world their brilliant virtue first governed their state. Those who desired to govern their state first ordered their household. Those who desired to order their household first cultivated their body/self.” (古之欲明明德於天下者，先治其國；欲治其國者，先齊其 17  Lü Kun 呂坤, Gui fan 閨範, Ming Wanli Lü Yingju ed. (Jinan: Jilu shushe, 1994), 4:4.

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Introduction

家；欲齊其家者，先修其身。)18 The state and household each required order-

ing or management. Each had to be held together, made up as it was of smaller units that had in their turn to be ordered, managed, and held together. And each had to be distinguished from what was beyond it through boundary creation. The fundamental dialectic between part and whole thus governed the classical discourse on space.19 The household was defined philosophically as a microcosm of the state and a macrocosm of the self, its functioning mutually resonant with, determining, and determined by bodily experience and state government. But the household was not perfectly balanced between the poles of individual and state. The house was a very small level of social organization, superseded in the kinship system by clan and lineage, and in the political system by village, county, prefecture, and so forth. “Inner” and “outer” may operate as a philosophical dialectic, but they are fundamentally uneven.20 The inner realm existed in constitutive opposition to the outer realm, but never equaled it in either physical or metaphorical scope. In the same way, earth partnered, but did not equal, heaven—and, not at all incidentally, a wife partnered, but did not equal, her husband. Women’s restriction to the household sphere banned them from government service and most other aspects of public life. In contrast, a husband’s power in ordering the household might be limited, particularly when his mother was still alive, but his role was nevertheless recognized as important. Inner and outer were central but asymmetric conceptual poles. In practices as they emerge in late imperial texts, “inner” and “outer” were nuanced. The interior of the house was unquestionably inner relative to the street and marketplace. But when adult brothers living together decided to “divide the household” ( fenjia 分家), this might mean that they continued to live in the same family compound but cooked on two different stoves.21 Certain areas of the household, even certain pieces of furniture, were “ inner” and “outer” relative to each other. The main hall was “inner” relative to the outer courtyard, as the bedrooms were relative to the main hall, and the bed itself relative to the rest of the room. Even areas that were equally accessible to a household’s women could be “inner” and “outer” to each other. For example, 18  Zheng Xuan and Kong Yingda, Li ji zhushu, 60:1. 19  Mark Edward Lewis, The Construction of Space in Early China (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006), 3–5. 20  Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon, 1969), 215. 21  Or it could have a purely economic significance. Myron L. Cohen, “House United, House Divided: Myths and Realities, Then and Now,” in House, Home, Family: Living and Being Chinese, ed. Ronald G. Knapp and Kai-Yin Lo (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2005), 244–45.

Introduction

9

the story “The Harsh Mother-in-Law,” discussed in chapter 2, gives this description of a young bride: “At the beginning, she just stayed in her own room, sitting at ease, and all outside matters were still under Huang shi [her motherin-law]’s management.” (先前只在自己房內清坐，外面事情，還是黃氏主 持。 )22 In the context of women’s movements, one’s own room is nei relative to the rest of the house, which is wai. The Chinese household depended on a constant process of re-creation, negotiation, and maintenance of both concrete and symbolic boundaries between “inner” and “outer” spaces. This constant re-creation of boundaries was the defining task of ritual.23 Both the Chinese self and the Chinese home maintained themselves through ordered, yet contingent, boundary creation. The boundaries of the home were especially important in defining women’s subjectivity and their status as moral and ritual beings. Yiqun Zhou’s article on the spatial bounds of female piety in late imperial China reminds us that female religiosity received praise if it conformed to either of two fundamental laws. It could follow Confucian ancestral rites, fulfilling the ritual function of a wife within the lineage system, or it could incorporate Buddhist doctrine but remain spatially located within the walls of the household.24 Thus, the ritual importance of the household in female life results both from women’s place in the lineage structure and from the spatial constraints that kept them within the house. But the household’s ritual centrality was a fact experienced by both men and women, as they repeatedly passed by the ancestral shrine in the main hall, together paid the daily ritual visits to the husband’s parents, mutually observed the ritual separation of men and women, and acted out the daily rites of greeting, entering, sitting, standing, and leaving that combined to shape the ritual subject. Ritually overdetermined as it was, the household was also a domain where emotions ran hot and affection and enmity both flourished. Late imperial authors were aware of family warmth and its attendant potential for heated division. Qing’s effects on household dynamics could potentially be either unifying or explosive, and authors exhibit a wide range of attitudes to the differing manifestations of qing. The affection between a man and his parents, or between brothers, was uniformly celebrated; the love between the same man and his wife and children became problematic when it competed with qing-inspired filial piety. A man was expected to maintain his loyalty to parents and brothers 22  Juqi zhuren 菊畦主人, Xingmeng pianyan 醒夢駢言, Qing Qianlong ed. (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1990), 7:10. 23  Angela Zito, “Silk and Skin: Significant Boundaries,” in Body, Subject, and Power in China, ed. Tani E. Barlow and Angela Zito (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 104–07. 24  Yiqun Zhou, “The Hearth and the Temple: Mapping Female Religiosity in Late Imperial China, 1550–1590,” Late Imperial China 24, no. 2 (2003): 109–11.

10

Introduction

even after marriage, resisting the temptation to prioritize his own wife and children. A late imperial woman, conversely, was admonished to transfer her loyalty to her marital family, resist the temptation to favor her own natal kin, and instead do her utmost to serve her mother-in-law and get along with her sisters-in-law. Men expected this task to be difficult. As the Ming educational reformer Lü Kun 呂坤 (1536–1618) remarked of sisters-in-law, “They are of different surnames but they inhabit the spaces between bone and flesh. They give rise to feuds and quarrels and transform unity into difference.” (異姓而處人  骨肉之間。搆釁起爭，化同為異。 )25 For Lü, not only do quarrels between wives drive brothers apart, but the wives’ lack of kinship with each other, represented by their different surnames, is the root cause of this lack of harmony. The fact that an adult woman’s day-to-day life was governed by non-kin interactions with the women of the shared marital household causes the quarrels. These negative emotions, too, fall under the umbrella of qing. What, then, was the affective dimension of the household space in Qing China? What did it feel like to come home, to be home? Any answers must remain partly speculative, yet the speculations need not be groundless. Yi-Fu Tuan suggests some cross-cultural commonalities of the domestic realm: the sense of shelter and comfort, of a place where the young or the ill are cared for, of a place where humans can let down their guard in the ultimate vulnerability of sleep, and where hunger is satisfied.26 These surely have broad validity across times and places. Francesca Bray suggests that the inner space of the women’s quarters can be seen, not merely as a place of confinement to which women were restricted, but as a place of comfort, privacy, and safety.27 In addition to warm hominess and prickly enmity, the affect of home included a sense of everyday familiarity which could shade into boredom. Li Yu 李漁 (1610–1680) is one of the most forthcoming writers on the subject of boredom at home and how to alleviate it. In his essay “On Enjoying Oneself at Home,” in Casual Reflections of Idle Feeling (Xianqing ouji 閑情偶寄), he writes that though the home ought to be the foremost place of pleasure, a desire for novelty often leads people to abandon their own parents and wives, visit courtesans, and recognize unrelated persons as adoptive parents and sworn brothers. His characteristically lighthearted advice is for the reader to take the money he would have spent on gifts for courtesans and use it to buy new clothes and adornments for his wife, since only makeup and finery distinguish the 25  Lü Kun, Gui fan, 4:3. 26   Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1977), 136–38. 27  Bray, Technology and Gender, 145–50.

Introduction

11

courtesan anyway.28 While his approach is idiosyncratic, Li Yu’s analysis of familiarity’s potential to breed both affection and contempt transcends his own historical and geographic context. The emotions that governed family relationships and the household space served to shape late imperial subjects’ experience of home and the ways they wrote about the home, and many of these emotions resonate across modern and pre-modern iterations of the home in many cultures. But the differences between particular homes could be radical. The experience of Chinese household life varied by gender, by family role (a mother-inlaw or a young bride), by region and time, and by the social position of the household and the individual within it (a wealthy matriarch, a pampered daughter, a peasant wife, a single maid who did most of the work, or a member of a flock of servants). One of the difficulties of comparing household depictions across genres is the stark differences in the visions of household space they present: specific genres tend to have specific ideological commitments and particular kinds of imagined reader, which means that descriptions of the home in a particular genre often resemble each other closely, while differing sharply from those in other genres. For example, the households in vernacular short stories (huaben 話本) tend to have a few servants and collect rent from tenant farmers, but they are small and crowded. Their members are unlikely ever to hold public office and have no money to spare on art or antiques. Longer fiction frequently revels in depictions of power and luxury, spacious halls, and labyrinthine garden paths, where solitude, though it may be interrupted at any moment by a bustling maid, is never impossible to find. In the face of these differing particulars, it is the ritual aspects of the home and its daily rhythms that provide common ground for comparison, enabling a meaningful discussion of household space in eighteenth-century China. For example, the ritual principle of gender segregation would be managed differently in different homes, but all households would attempt it in some way. One author writes: The distant separation of men and women should not stop at father-inlaw and daughter-in-law or at a man and his brother’s wife. Though the custom is to be strict about it only with father-in-law and daughter-inlaw, the other relationships are no different. With a brother’s wife, with a sister’s husband, with an aunt, with the wife of one’s wife’s brother—all these relationships cannot escape suspicion…. But it is not necessary to 28  Li Yu 李漁, Xianqing ouji 閑情偶寄 (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 2000), 346–47.

12

Introduction

remain too far apart. At three paces’ distance, to stop there and stand with one’s back turned, this is acceptable. 男女之遠別，不止翁婦嫂叔為然。世俗惟嚴於翁婦，其餘無別。甚者 叔嫂姊夫小姨妻弟之妻，皆不避嫌。…… 不必相隔太遠也。三步之外 止足背立可也。29

On this passage, the Qing statesman Chen Hongmou 陳宏謀 (1696–1771) commented approvingly: “To stop and stand with one’s back turned at a distance of several paces—even poor people and small households can avoid suspicion [this way]. How much more rich lineages? Even respected relatives sharing the same roof can maintain separation [this way]. How much more with outsiders?” (數步之外止足背立，則貧窮小戶皆可避嫌，何況富族？同室尊親，皆 能有別。何況外人？)30 Poor houses might not have the space to mark off particular rooms for men and women, but they were still urged to separate men and women in space through bodily position instead of architecture. This spatial principle of action underlay and united a wide variety of domestic spaces. Thus, the household space was fundamentally defined by the intersection of affection and ritual, two competing principles of behavior and sociability. In my texts, descriptions of walls and doors and windows and buildings are critical. These architectural features serve on the one hand to create or rupture boundaries, and on the other to separate or throw together human beings linked by emotional bonds of love and hate. They establish the identities of characters and the relationships between them, and they make the ideological underpinnings of a text concrete. My focus is on households as cultural and textual constructs, not actual historical buildings. Yet the distinction between text and reality is less stark than it may appear. For one thing, the Chinese house itself served as a didactic and textual space. The architecture of buildings as disparate as cottages, mansions, temples, and palaces was conceived of as a manifestation of wen 文, the patterning that brought meaning and order to human existence.31 And the everpresent didactic home decoration in Chinese homes both ancient and modern shows that the house itself can be seen in many ways as a text.32 This notion 29  Shi Dian 史典, “Yuanti ji 願體集,” in Chen Hongmou 陳弘謀, Wuzhong yigui 五种遺規, Sibu beiyao ed. (Shanghai: Zhonghua shuju, 1936), 11:12. 30  Chen Hongmou, Wuzhong yigui, 11:12. 31  Cary Y. Liu, “Chinese Architectural Aesthetics: Patterns of Living and Being between Past and Present,” in Knapp and Lo, House, Home, Family, 141–46. 32  Ronald G. Knapp, Chinese Houses: The Architectural Heritage of a Nation (North Clarendon: Tuttle Publishing, 2004), 80–97.

Introduction

13

of house as text works on several levels: house walls and pillars served as a canvas for carving, painting, or hanging prints and mottoes of auspicious or didactic content. At the same time, the basic architectural elements of a house could be equated to the strokes of a brush. Construction manuals warn, for example, that the outer wall of a house must not be constructed before raising the central wooden roof beam, lest kun, the character for “trouble,” be formed (口+木=困). Instead, the beam should be put up before the wall is built.33 This visual pun relies on the stroke order of Chinese characters—the fact that when writing kun one draws three sides of the wei or enclosure radical before drawing the center mu or wood element. By reversing this order during house construction, the potential resonant metonymy between the processes of writing and construction is dissolved, and “trouble” is warded off. The house itself is a sinograph that can summon its referent. Architecture, text, and the universe influence one another through mutual resonance, and through the use of the proper rituals, they can be brought under human control. The proper ordering of the house in and by means of text ensures the right functioning of society and the world. If the affinity of household and text holds true even for specific, historical buildings built according to these guides, how much more so for the houses that take shape in the pages of my sources, which do not describe real buildings but use text to create fantasies of space? 3

Affection and Ritual Propriety

The household was both a ritual and an emotional space, and the terms qing and li 禮 recur constantly in Qing descriptions of home and family life. Though not as well-studied as the tension between qing and li 理 (principle), the competition between qing and li 禮, along with attempts to balance or combine them or elucidate how they related to each other, was central to the Qing discourse on the family.34 Each term has a complicated set of meanings. Qing can be translated as passion, affection, sentiment, emotion, or (romantic) love, depending on the context. I often translate it as “affection” since my sources focus mainly on qing as it functions in the family, between parents and children and siblings as well as spouses. But qing can be negative as well as positive, since 33  Shi Chengjin, Chuanjia bao, 1:5:59. 34  This can be seen as one aspect of a broader philosophical shift away from discussions of abstract principle (li) to its concrete manifestations, one of which was ritual (li), which began in the late Ming and intensified in the Qing. Kai-wing Chow, The Rise of Confucian Ritualism in Late Imperial China: Ethics, Classics, and Lineage Discourse (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 31–48.

14

Introduction

it often indicates the emotional fuel behind all household interactions— including feelings such as jealousy or anger. In these cases “emotion” and “feeling” best apply. And several of my sources, notably the long novels of chapters 4 and 5, specifically explore the fraught relationship between the different possible meanings of qing, from transcendental romantic passion to familial affection. Maram Epstein gives a useful overview of the multivalent and changing meanings of qing as they relate to these long novels. In broad terms, qing as a pre-Han philosophical term tended to refer to specific factual phenomena or essences (in opposition to reputation or falsehood) as well as to human emotive expressions of moral essence.35 It quickly became associated with subjective desires and the yin 陰 aspect of the self. Cheng-Zhu neo-Confucianism developed in such a way as to emphasize the repression of qing and its related desires, while late Ming iconoclasts valorized qing, associated with the feminine subject position, as a site of authentic self-expression. Finally, in the Qing, vernacular fiction in particular attempted to harmonize qing (in the form of romantic passion leading to companionate marriage) with correct behavior to achieve emotionally authentic orthodoxy.36 My texts show that one important strategy in this harmonization process was precisely to reframe the nature of qing itself by emphasizing the emotions that connected extended family members. This reframing goes far beyond the well-known late imperial shift from emphasizing the scholar-courtesan romance to envisioning companionate marriage between husband and wife. Thus, the meaning of qing is not simply a matter of the translator’s discretion, but an active intervention on the part of each of my sources in the cultural debates of the early- to mid-Qing, which translation and analysis must reflect. Li is usually translated as “ritual,” though as Angela Zito points out, it is important not to think that we can simply subsume li under the Western sociological/anthropological category of “ritual” and then imagine that we have understood it.37 She offers a powerful analysis of li as a textual and behavioral discourse that subsumes both orthodoxy and orthopraxy without allowing for 35  Ling Hon Lam reflects on the inherent ambiguity produced by the word’s dual meanings and its implications for a spatial theory of emotion in The Spatiality of Emotion in Early Modern China: From Dreamscapes to Theatricality (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), 59. 36  Maram Epstein, Competing Discourses: Orthodoxy, Authenticity and Engendered Meanings in Late Imperial Chinese Fiction (Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2001), 61–92. On the cult of qing in the late Ming, see Ko, Teachers of the Inner Chambers, 68–112. 37  Angela Zito, “Ritualizing Li: Implications for Studying Power and Gender,” positions 1, no. 2 (1993): 323.

Introduction

15

a dualistic split between mind/belief and body/behavior. Catherine Bell’s approach considering “ritualization” as a process by which certain actions are made distinct from quotidian life is also extremely helpful.38 Her emphasis on distinguishing ritual actions from the everyday meshes well with Zito’s description of ritual as boundary creation in the formation of subject identity.39 The importance of the act of distinguishing is found in the first chapter of the Classic of Rites: “Now ritual is that by which one determines closeness and distance [among relatives], settles suspicions and doubts, distinguishes same and different, and clarifies right and wrong.” (夫禮者所以定親疏，決嫌疑，別同 異，明是非也。 )40 The classic goes on to add that ultimately, ritual is that by which humans distinguish themselves from beasts. The individual subjectivity, the many social roles of civilization (including family and gender roles, which are, of course, mutually constituting), and humanity itself all come into being only as they are actively distinguished and re-distinguished through ritual. Ritual in my sources reflects all of these insights, appearing both as a set of specific behaviors (bows, greetings, seating patterns) and as an underlying principle that guides behavior, emphasizing the observance of hierarchy and distinction. Finally, ritual is a way of transforming both behavior and character. As such, its relationship to emotion is complex. It can be seen as opposing, limiting, or guiding the emotions: by separating those whom unwise or immoral emotion might otherwise bring together through licentiousness or incest—young lovers, or a father-in-law and daughter-in-law—or by curbing the emotions’ natural tendency to excess, emphasizing that a young man should maintain his primary loyalty to his parents instead of falling into romantic obsession with his wife. A common saying that embodies the idea of ritual as a check on emotion was “[It] arises from the affections and comes to a stop in ritual.” (發乎 情，止乎禮。 )41 Ritual was also seen as a way to fulfill the emotions, satisfying them even as it guided them, as in Xunzi’s discussion of funeral rites as a way 38  C  atherine M. Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 88–93. 39  Zito, “Silk and Skin,” 106; Zito, “Ritualizing Li,” 321–348. On boundary creation and its ritual significance from an anthropological standpoint, see Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge, 2002), 171–72. 40  Zheng Xuan and Kong Yingda, Li ji zhushu, 1:7. 41  This saying, which was commonly applied to relationships between men and women, comes from the Great Preface to the Mao Odes, where it describes the emotional but controlled response of poets to their corrupt times. In either case, it affirms that emotion is spontaneous and natural but has an inherent tendency to excess, which must be kept within limits by ritual. See Stephen Owen, ed. Readings in Chinese Literary Thought (Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 1996), 47–48.

16

Introduction

to express deep grief.42 From a modern perspective, Kai-wing Chow suggests that ritual in the Qing—compared with text- or language-based approaches to value transmission—in fact co-opts the ritual subject’s emotions to inculcate values while downplaying the intellect.43 Qing and li, therefore, should be thought of as existing, not in a simple head-to-head dichotomy, but in several productive and simultaneous tensions. Besides offering competing logics of kinship, qing and li also form distinct anchor points in the web of Chinese genre. The emergence of the cult of qing in the late Ming dynasty has been well studied, and the clearest expressions of the cult occur in certain specific genres, namely poetry, fiction, and drama, with their prefaces and commentaries. Foundational documents of the “cult of qing” like Tang Xianzu’s preface to Peony Pavilion and Feng Menglong’s preface to Anatomy of Love do show the clear influence of philosophical essays, particularly those from the Taizhou school of Wang Yangming’s neo-Confucianism. Dorothy Ko argues nevertheless that philosophical discourse generally presents qing as an abstract concept, while it is in fiction and drama that qing found concrete expression and galvanized its readers.44 In the first half of the Qing dynasty, the cult of qing remained centered in fiction and drama. But the effort to reframe qing and reconcile it with state-sponsored, orthodox morality appeared in mainstream, non-fictional texts as well.45 Didactic texts took qing seriously even while they advocated for ritual as the ultimate guide to human relations. At the same time, fictional genres short and long depicted the messy negotiations between qing and li in great detail. They took ritual seriously even as they shaped fantasies of ritually impossible emotional fulfillment. The exact terms of the relationship between qing and li, the specific negotiations necessary to harmonize the two, and the particular ideals at stake when one was criticized or discarded in favor of the other, varied greatly. This study examines the interplay between qing and li in the textual and architectural space where it loomed largest: the household and the books that discuss it. 42  X  unzi 荀子 (Taipei: Zhonghua shuju, 1966), 13:1–16. Translated by Burton Watson in Hsün Tzu: Basic Writings (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 89–111. See also the discussions of ritual in Michael Nylan, Five “Confucian” Classics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 198–201, and Maram Epstein, “Writing Emotions: Ritual Innovation as Emotional Expression,” Nan nü 11, no. 2 (2009): 194–96. 43  Chow, The Rise of Confucian Ritualism, 13. 44  Ko, Teachers of the Inner Chambers, 72. 45  For example, the Qing statesman Chen Hongmou, in his project of moral reform as a means of strengthening the state, valorized qing as “the affective, empathetic urge which prompts moral behavior,” particularly in the family setting. William Rowe, “Women and the Family in Mid-Qing Social Thought: The Case of Chen Hongmou,” Late Imperial China 13, no. 2 (1992): 31–32.

Introduction

4

17

Genre

The chapters that follow show how vernacular texts balance affection and ritual in their renderings of women’s everyday household lives. Chapters 1 and 2 show that vernacular transformations of classical accounts transform the ideology, not merely the language, of their source tales, while chapters 4 and 5 analyze long vernacular novels as particularly rich sites of engagement with the tensions of Qing family life. But the vernacular mode is only one of the factors influencing the expressions of ideology in these texts, each of which uses the vernacular mode to very different effect. One way to make sense of the web of connections between the vernacular mode, the household setting, and the varied ideological commitments of my sources is to use genre as an analytical lens. Some decades ago, Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Karlyn Kohrs Campbell integrated literary and rhetorical theories of genre to define genres as “dynamic fusions of substantive, stylistic, and situational elements and as constellations that are strategic responses to the demands of a situation and the purposes of the rhetor.”46 The term “fusion” implies a deep relationship, not a mere assemblage of elements, even as “dynamic” acknowledges that generic characteristics can shift. Finally, this definition highlights the strategic uses of genres, which do not exist in a rarefied sphere of pure literature, but in a social world where texts are only one way humans relate to each other. It is the nature of this dynamic fusion and its strategic uses in Qing dynasty domestic vernacular literature that the following chapters explore in depth. Genre was fundamental to Chinese literary criticism both before and during the Qing dynasty. Organizing the voluminous body of textual knowledge was so important that it early gave rise to an entire branch of study, muluxue 目錄 學, or the study of cataloguing.47 While the science of bibliography and generic classification gained particular prestige in the Qing dynasty (1644–1911), coming to fruition in the sibu 四部 classification system of the massive imperial collectaneum Complete Library in Four Treasuries (Siku quanshu 四庫全書), ideas of genre were already well-developed in the Six Dynasties period. The Collections of Refined Literature (Wen xuan 文選) and the Literary Mind Carves 46  Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, “Rhetorical Hybrids: Fusions of Generic Elements,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 68, no. 2 (1982): 146. 47  For the historical development of textual organization systems, see Wan Gang 万剛, Zhongguo gudai wenxianxue 中國古代文獻學 (Beijing: Beijing daxue chubanshe, 2007). See also Nagasawa Kikuya 長澤規矩也, Zhongguo banben mulu xue shuji jieti 中國版本 目錄學書籍解題, trans. Mei Xianhua 梅憲華 and Guo Baolin 郭寳林 (Beijing: Shumu wenxian chubanshe, 1990); Wang Zhongmin 王重民, Zhongguo muluxue shi luncong 中 國目錄學史論叢 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1984).

18

Introduction

Dragons (Wenxin diaolong 文心雕龍), dating from the late fifth and early sixth century CE respectively, both rely heavily on literary classification systems. These magisterial works of criticism define genres according to formal characteristics such as line length, scale, and language register, as well as the aesthetic qualities and rhetorical purposes of particular kinds of text. In the Literary Mind Carves Dragons, Liu Xie 劉勰 (c. 465–521) describes how he set out to create a comprehensive genre system: “When I discussed verse and prose writings, I distinguished various genres. I traced their origins to demonstrate their developments, defined terms to clarify their meanings, listed exemplary pieces to illustrate my points, and discussed the general characteristics of each genre.” (若乃論文敘筆，則囿別區分，原始以表末，釋名以章義，選 文以定篇，敷理以舉統。 )48 He distinguishes the Five Classics by their literary and stylistic characteristics, then shows how each contemporary literary genre derives from one of these originating texts.49 Genre is thus a matter of lineage, and genres are like families of text. Liu Xie’s genre taxonomy both prefigures and surpasses common Western genre theories based on Wittgenstein’s notion of “family resemblances.”50 By relying not on a set of loosely-defined similarities but on a theory of common origin, it offers a causal, not merely contingent, explanation for the unpredictable yet undeniable resemblance of texts in a given genre. It naturalizes the process of literary categorization. The act of classification allowed readers not only to organize texts, but to judge them: Ideas about genre allowed critics to evaluate the success or failure of a particular work by how well it met the standards of a particular genre.51 In his description of the rhyme-prose or rhapsody ( fu 賦), for example, Liu Xie insists: “Innovative in language yet substantial in ideas, variegated in colorful descriptions yet clearly focused—these are the essentials of rhyme-prose. Those concerned only with trivialities neglect the essentials. Even if they read a thousand pieces of rhyme-prose, they could not grasp the essentials of the genre.” (文雖新而有質，色雖糅而有本，此立賦之大體也。然逐末之儔，蔑 48  Liu Xie 劉勰, Wenxin diaolong 文心雕龍, Siku quanshu, Wenyuan ge ed. (Hong Kong: Dizhi wenhua chuban youxian gongsi, 2006), 10:13; Liu Xie 劉勰, Wenxin diaolong 文心 雕龍, trans. Yang Guobin 楊國斌 (Beijing: Waiyu jiaoxue yu yanjiu chubanshe, 2003), 716–17. 49   Zong-qi Cai, “Wen and the Construction of a Critical System in Wenxin Diaolong,” Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews 22 (2000): 15. 50  For a contemporary American critique of Wittgenstein’s “family resemblances” approach that recommends acknowledging common ancestry as an important defining feature of genres, see David Fishelov, “Genre Theory and Family Resemblance—Revisited,” Poetics 20 (1991): 134–37. 51  James R. Hightower, “The Wen Hsüan and Genre Theory,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 20, no. 3/4 (1957): 512–14.

Introduction

19

棄其本，雖讀千賦，愈惑體要。)52 Knowledge of a genre’s essentials allows

one both to write and to identify good literature in that genre. Understanding the functions of genre in traditional literary theory shows why genre is both problematic and useful as an analytical framework for Qing vernacular texts. On the one hand, most of these books do not belong to the scholarly and literary genres that were clearly codified by late imperial critics. The classical tales, popular histories, and vernacular stories and novels studied here were peripheral enough to have escaped systematic categorization. But on the other hand, the authors and editors of popular texts and entertainment literature frequently use genre terms to classify and evaluate both their own and other texts. Furthermore, my sources in each genre share stylistic, ideological, and contextual characteristics with each other. These are distinct from those in other genres and profoundly impact the depiction of women and domestic space. We need to take account of these commonalities, both to understand each text’s uniqueness, and to understand how the discourse on the family unfolded in the textual sphere. Ideas about genre do not need to be systematic to be important. Guo Yingde has pointed out that in traditional Chinese genre theory, genres were invariably hybrid, and there were always several different sets of standards for generic division in play.53 The prefaces to my texts show a sophisticated hybrid generic consciousness at work when they use generic labels to categorize and promote themselves by referring to other kinds of books with which readers would have been familiar. In “The Law of Genre,” Jacques Derrida offers one way to acknowledge the problematic nature of genre categories while retaining their analytic usefulness: “Every text participates in one or several genres, there is no genreless text; there is always a genre and genres, yet such participation never amounts to belonging.”54 Derrida’s term “participation” allows us to acknowledge that even though texts do not fit neatly into categories, people habitually perceive categories in the world of text, and these perceptions shape a work’s impact on the world. Readers had a sense of what to expect from a particular genre, a “horizon of expectations.”55 And as readers themselves, authors had a sense of what they could accomplish by writing in a specific genre. Finally, in the relationship of simultaneous imitation and criticism between a source text 52  Liu Xie, Wenxin diaolong, 2:7–8; Liu and Yang, Wenxin diaolong, 98–99. 53  Guo Yingde 郭英德, Zhongguo gudai wentixue lungao 中國古代文體學論稿 (Beijing: Beijing daxue chubanshe, 2005), 2–3. 54  Jacques Derrida, “The Law of Genre,” in On Narrative, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 61. 55  Hans Robert Jauss, “Theory of Genres and Medieval Literature,” in Modern Genre Theory, ed. David Duff (Harlow: Longman, 2000), 138.

20

Introduction

and its rewritten version or between a novel and its sequel by another author, genre expectations set the parameters of emulation, creative adaptation, and active critique. Genre expectations were often vague, but they still provided parameters of categorization and evaluation for strategic use by authors, editors, and readers. Style is perhaps the most obvious textual element by which readers make judgments about genre. It is the element that the works studied here discuss most explicitly, and the one that I spend the most time on in my analysis. Genres tend to be written in a characteristic language register—formal, colloquial, or somewhere in between—and texts within a genre are usually of comparable length. Chapters 1 and 2 show vernacular transformations of classical texts reflecting at length on their own language, while chapters 4 and 5 analyze the way vernacular novels of different sizes describe their own length. But style is never just superficial. As these case studies will show, the stylistic features of language register and scale are inseparable from the ideological messages of a text. Specific ideological messages also characteristically find expression in particular genres. Fredric Jameson foregrounded this aspect of genre when he characterized genres as “ideologemes,” where an ideologeme is “a historically determinate conceptual or semic complex which can project itself variously in the form of a ‘value system’ or ‘philosophical concept,’ or in the form of a protonarrative, a private or collective narrative fantasy.”56 Late imperial genres were associated with specific philosophical concepts; for example, as discussed above, the cult of qing was associated most strongly with fiction and drama. This holds true at a finer level of generic distinction as well: different subgenres under the broad umbrella of “fiction and drama” offer different visions of the cult of qing. For example, chapter 2 shows that vernacular stories depicting affective relationships characteristically spend more effort negotiating ritual norms and economic constraints than their classical source tales. The domestic huaben story offers a particular kind of narrative fantasy, a detailed accounting of how passion and ritual are ultimately reconciled within a secure and prosperous household. Finally, genres have characteristic places, not only the settings they depict but the situations into which they speak. These kinds of place are connected: “The setting of a text may be read as a symbolic representation of the work the text does to find a place in which to speak and an audience on which to act.”57 56  Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), 115. 57  Anne Freadman, “Untitled: (On Genre),” Cultural Studies 2, no. 1 (1988): 84.

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In this book, the most important “place” is the household space, differentiated by the social locus of class. Different genres range from aloofness to obsession in their attitudes to the household and show different degrees of awareness of the home as a physical, metaphorical, economic, and ritual space. Among genres that do pay significant attention to domestic space, particular genres often cluster around portrayals of the domesticity proper to a certain social group, such as the merchant’s residence in many short stories, or royal courts and luxurious mansions in many long novels. There is, of course, no straightforward link between a text’s setting and its imagined or actual audience. But a text’s setting is entwined with the nature of its appeal to readers from different groups. A rendering of a household similar to a reader’s own would offer one kind of satisfaction, while details far from a reader’s experience would offer a different fantasy world. Successfully creating imagined households that appealed to audiences across classes was an important aspect of these texts’ symbolic work. Thus, the three elements of style, substance, and situation are mutually dependent. None can be understood apart from the others. Stylistically, authors’ choices about language and scale shape the messages within a text and the settings about and into which they speak. For example, vernacular writing articulates the imagined family differently than classical writing does. Its inherent tendency to expand and explain lends itself to depictions of quotidian rather than exceptional life circumstances. And books of different sizes, from the short story to the short novel to the enormous novel, not only depict the differently-sized homes of different social classes, but also show ideological commitments to different levels of boundary maintenance and expansion. This affects their self-positioning relative to their imagined audiences, as well as the nature of the domestic worlds they create. Conversely, a genre’s characteristic settings and situations influence the language and content of works in that genre: the rhetorical work of rendering a space that invites the reader to particular kinds of engagement is intimately bound up with the literary task of writing in a particular style and the ideological work of creating a particular narrative fantasy. In the works studied here, genres provide constellations of creative and interpretive resources to authors setting out to write, rewrite, and critique an earlier work, to readers seeking instruction, entertainment, or even deep identification with a text, and of course, to publishers looking for a profit. Genres, then, mediate between the social milieu and the individual text, just as the Qing dynasty family mediated between society and the individual. But genres, like households, were constantly negotiating their boundaries. One may dispute the applicability of Wittgenstein’s “family resemblances” theory and doubt the common ancestry theory of the Literary Mind Carves Dragons

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that traces contemporary genres back to founding classics. But the notion of families of texts, with all the inherent messiness it suggests, remains a useful metaphor for understanding the ways genres functioned in the Qing textual sphere, influencing how books acted on their audiences and interacted with each other by providing resources and identity. 5

Chapter Outlines

Chapters 1 and 2 both compare vernacular transformations of classical accounts to their sources, showing that the vernacular mode lends itself to particular kinds of ideological negotiations. Chapter 1 studies five editions of the first-century classic Collected Biographies of Women (Lienü zhuan 列女傳) published between 1591 and 1743. It analyzes several Ming-Qing versions of selected biographies featuring women caught between natal and marital family loyalty, biographies which force their late imperial editors to confront the changed expectations for women’s incorporation into the marital family between the first and the sixteenth centuries. Editors must choose between loyalty to their canonical source text and fidelity to contemporary moral discourse. Different editions confront this problem differently: some omit problematic biographies, others include them with extensive commentary, and one rewrites them in the vernacular “expanded history” (yanyi 演義) genre. Vernacular transformation creates the most comprehensive accommodation between the Han dynasty classic and late imperial mores. Chapter 2 reads three tales from Pu Songling’s (1640–1715) classicallanguage Liaozhai’s Records of the Strange (Liaozhai zhiyi 聊齋志異) against their vernacular story transformations in the anonymous eighteenth-century collection Parallel Words to Awaken Dreamers (Xingmeng pianyan 醒夢駢言). This comparison reveals the organic connections between the short story genre, the vernacular idiom, and the gendered domestic space. The household is centrally governed by both ritual and affective logics of behavior, and the vernacular stories pay much greater attention than the classical tales to harmonizing the tension between affection and propriety through expanded details of the household space. Chapter 3 brings the sources from the first two chapters together in order to compare the functions of the vernacular mode in different collections. It analyzes clever female characters and their expedient negotiations of the inner–outer gender divide in the Biographies, then compares them to similar characters in Qing expanded history, classical tales, and vernacular fiction. Both classical tales (chuanqi 傳奇) and vernacular stories depict savvy women

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using the same kind of spatial negotiations that the heroines of the Biographies do, but the rendering of talented women’s behavior in the yanyi transformation of the Biographies, as well as in other genres commonly featuring talented women, is much more conservative. Male-authored fiction, regardless of language, accommodates more daring re-imaginations of gender norms than other late imperial genres. The fictional imagination and the vernacular mode offer different paths for ethical reflection, which intersect in vernacular huaben collections. Chapters 4 and 5 continue to analyze the vernacular mode as a means of critical reflection on the domestic space, but they shift focus from short stories to long novels and from rewriting to sequel writing. Chapter 4 studies depictions of the household space and women’s relationships in one of the earliest sequels to Dream of the Red Chamber: A Later Dream of the Red Chamber (Hou honglou meng 後紅樓夢, 1796). This sequel reverses the parent novel’s tragedies by rebuilding the household’s boundaries, reaffirming its morals, and replenishing its coffers. The process of redefining the mansion parallels the sequel’s revision of the novel’s framework: the smaller scale of the book embodies an ideal of textual containment. As a sequel, it redefines affection or passion (qing) and re-establishes ritual order; as a creative work in its own right, it makes a clear generic statement about the length of long fiction (zhang­hui xiaoshuo 章回小説) and how it should relate to its readers. Chapter 5 analyzes a second early Dream sequel, Dreaming Again of the Red Chamber (紅樓復夢, 1799). In contrast to Later Dream, Dreaming Again affirms and emulates the parent novel’s vast size. Its hundred chapters display a huge cast of characters and multiple families and mansions. It rebalances affection and ritual by giving them new definitions within extended agnatic family and fictive kin networks. Its choice to emulate the scale of a masterwork rather than the more restricted chapter range of the scholar-beauty romance reflects both an ideology of expansion and a self-conscious separation from genre fiction. Together, these analyses highlight points of tension in the Qing discourse on the household and the characteristic pathways by which different kinds of book navigate them. In the sources studied here, both the tensions and the pathways around them emerge most clearly in the dynamic of critical response to a parent text. Both rewriting and sequel writing are forms of critique, and both rewritings and sequels use generic norms strategically to further their literary and ideological critiques, which are intimately bound up with one another. These generic norms are ill-defined for the texts I study, but then, genres in general are not amenable to being pinned down. They are categories of connaissance rather than savoir. But genre as a mediating level of analysis between text and context remains illuminating. It helps us understand how each

24

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text functioned in the late imperial literary sphere, and it clarifies the relationship of literary studies as a discipline to intellectual and cultural history. If it is true that text shapes human life and does not merely reflect it, then the ways people categorize and relate to books are integral to the ways they categorize and relate to others.

chapter 1

Rewriting the Collected Biographies of Women Liu Xiang’s 劉向 (79–8 BCE) Collected Biographies of Women (Lienü zhuan 列女傳, hereafter Biographies) was the ur-text of feminine virtue in the masculine imaginary for nearly two millennia. It was compiled in the Han dynasty to admonish the emperor Chengdi about the political importance of female virtue to the imperium,1 and it founded an ongoing tradition of biographies of women.2 Editors reprinted, supplemented, abridged, illustrated, explicated, and critiqued Liu Xiang’s anthology through the end of the imperial era. They used it to exhort women to feminine virtue, to offer socio-political commentary and moral instruction to male readers, and to debate the nature of womanhood and women’s place in society.3 This chapter examines four editions of the Biographies dating from the 1580s to the 1680s, comparing their handling of biographical subjects caught between natal and marital family loyalty. These virtuous exemplars, whose loyalty to their brothers and fathers and nephews competed with their duty to their husbands and sons, presented acute difficulties of interpretation in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Their biographies create a similar conflict of loyalties for late imperial editors, between respect for the canonical source text and fidelity to contemporary mores that called for a woman to transfer her loyalty from her natal to her marital family. Late Ming editions of the Biographies use commentary and illustration to critique or to justify their heroines’ problematic actions. These editions can be imagined along a continuum from fidelity to critique: some always praise their protagonists but omit the most troubling episodes, while others include troubling episodes but critique their heroines’ behavior freely. The early Qing Expanded Collected Biographies of Women Ancient and Modern (Gujin lienü zhuan yanyi 古今列女傳演義, hereafter Expanded Biographies) uses a different 1  Anne Behnke Kinney, Exemplary Women of Early China: The Lienü zhuan of Liu Xiang (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), xv–xxi. 2  Another tradition of female biography with different emphases is the xianyuan (worthy and talented) genre tradition. Nanxiu Qian, “Lienü Versus Xianyuan: The Two Biographical Traditions in Chinese Women’s History,” in Beyond Exemplar Tales, ed. Joan Judge and Hu Ying (Berkeley: University of California, 2011), 72–77. 3  Joan Judge and Hu Ying, “Introduction,” in Judge and Hu, Beyond Exemplar Tales, 2–4; Joanna Handlin, “Lü K’un’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), 34–36; Joan Judge, The Precious Raft of History: The Past, the West, and the Woman Question in China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), 11–20.

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strategy to engage with difficult passages. It transforms the Biographies into the vernacular yanyi genre, using rewriting and plot development along with commentary to justify its heroines’ most disturbing decisions. Through this transformation, the Expanded Biographies creates a comprehensive accommodation between the Han dynasty classic and late imperial mores. 1

Fidelity and Critique in Late Ming Editions

Transformation is the rule, not the exception, in late imperial editions of the Biographies. The earliest extant editions of Liu Xiang’s work date from the Song dynasty,4 and reprints based on Song editions remained popular in the Ming and Qing.5 These editions, like Liu Xiang’s, contain six chapters ( juan) of biographies illustrating different virtues and one illustrating vices. But Ming and Qing editors who wanted their books to sell often made changes that would set their version of the Biographies apart from the glut of other editions on the market. Most commonly, editors either abridged Liu Xiang’s anthology or supplemented it with biographies of more recent exemplars in “ancient and modern” editions.6 Since the more recent biographies tended to focus on chastity, these editions effectively downplayed the intellectual virtues to make chastity 4  The Collected Biographies dates from the first century BCE, but many of its anecdotes are drawn from the Warring States Zuo Chronicle (Zuo zhuan 左傳) and Discourses of the States (Guo yu 囯語) as well as the Han historian Sima Qian’s Record of the Grand Historian (Shi ji 史記). All extant versions are based on Song dynasty editions, which could potentially differ from the Han original. However, comparison between Song editions of the Collected Biographies and its early sources shows close correspondence, and the organizational schema of the Song editions matches the earliest descriptions we have of Liu Xiang’s work, so I will assume that these editions generally reflect the tone and argument of Liu Xiang’s original collection. On the early sources of the Lienü zhuan, see Kinney, Exemplary Women, xxxi– xxxii. An overview of the textual history of the work between the Han and Song dynasties can be found in Bret Hinsch, “The Textual History of Liu Xiang’s Lienü zhuan,” Monumenta Serica 52 (2004), 96–103, and Lisa Ann Raphals, Sharing the Light: Representations of Women and Virtue in Early China (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), 109–12. Raphals concludes that although wide variance between Song and Han editions is possible, they were probably similar in organization and point of view. 5  One example is Huang Luceng’s 黃魯曾 (1487–1561) Gu lienü zhuan qi juan xu yi juan 古列 女傳七卷續一卷, in Zheng Xiaoxia 鄭曉霞 and Lin Jiayu 林佳鬱, eds., Lienü zhuan huibian 列女傳彙編 (Beijing: Beijing tushuguan, 2007), vol. 5. 6  One abridged edition is Ren Zhaolin’s 任兆麟’s (fl. 1796) Lienü zhuan yi juan 列女傳一卷 in Zheng Xiaoxia and Lin Jiayu, Lienü zhuan huibian, vol. 4; one “ancient and modern” edition is Jie Jin’s 解縉 (1369–1415) Gujin lienü zhuan san juan 古今列女傳三卷 in Zheng Xiaoxia and Lin Jiayu, Lienü zhuan huibian, vol. 9. Another “ancient and modern” edition is Huang Shangwen’s 黃尚文 1603 Gujin guifan 古今閨範, studied in Katherine Carlitz, “The Social

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the central feminine virtue.7 Another common change was reorganizing the biographies into new categories: by Ban Zhao’s “womanly virtue,” “womanly appearance,” “womanly words,” and “womanly work”;8 by social status, with empresses, noble ladies, and commoners listed separately;9 by clan, geography, and chronology;10 and by family role, with daughters, wives, and mothers each grouped together.11 These reorganizations altered the impact of each biography by changing the context within which each woman’s actions gained significance, shifting the focus away from the women themselves and toward their families and clans.12 Illustration was another major change that impacted readers’ experiences of the Biographies. Dramatically illustrated late Ming editions visually recalled popular fiction and drama and blurred the lines between exhortation and entertainment.13 Later, with the rise of the kaozheng 考證 text criticism movement in the eighteenth century, scholars also compiled critical editions of the Biographies.14 These editorial transformations often coexisted within a single edition; Lü Kun’s 呂坤 (1536–1618) Exemplars for the Inner Quarters (Gui fan 閨 範, 1591), for example, uses abridgment, supplementation, reorganization, and illustration. Late imperial editions of the Biographies thus reflect a variety of intellectual preoccupations as well as major developments in scholarship and book production. But, although the potential impact of each of these changes is substantial, the majority of late imperial Biographies editions do not change the content of individual biographies. Changes representing deeper editorial engagement with the source text are rarer. One such change is commentary writing. Most late imperial editions have a preface framing the work as a whole, but very few provide interpretive commentary on individual biographies. In fact, many editions even omit Liu Xiang’s commentary and verse encomia (song 頌) on each biography. Changes other than abridgement to the source text are even rarer than commentary, but when they occur, even small textual changes can represent important Uses of Female Virtue in Late Ming Editions of Lienü zhuan,” Late Imperial China 12, no. 2 (2011): 132–35. Most of the editions discussed below also include modern exemplars. 7  Raphals, Sharing the Light, 113–138. 8  One example is the late Qing Diangu lienü zhuan si juan 典故列女傳四卷, in Zheng Xiaoxia and Lin Jiayu, Lienü zhuan huibian, vol. 4. 9  Such as Jie Jin, Gujin lienü zhuan san juan. 10  Such as the Lienü zhuan shiliu juan 列女傳十六卷 (Zhibuzu zhai, 1779). 11  Lü Kun 呂坤, Gui fan 閨範, Ming Wanli Lü Yingju ed. (Jinan: Jilu shushe, 1994). 12  Raphals, Sharing the Light, 114; Carlitz, “Social Uses,” 135. 13  Carlitz, “Social Uses,” 127–31. 14   Harriet Zurndorfer, “The Lienü zhuan Tradition and Wang Zhaoyuan’s (1763–1851) Production of the Lienü zhuan buzhu (1812),” in Judge and Hu, Beyond Exemplar Tales, 61.

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ideological negotiations with the original text.15 Finally, illustrations are common, but they are usually simple. In some editions, however, the illustrations are a site of exegesis and interpretation in their own right. This chapter examines three late Ming editions of the Biographies and one from the early Qing that stand out from the crowd of other late imperial editions because they use illustration, commentary, and rewriting as interpretive strategies, wrestling explicitly with the points of tension between ancient biographies and contemporary values. First, I compare three late Ming editions of the Biographies, selected because each struggles to interpret problematic stories of heroines caught between natal and marital family duties and uses both commentary and illustration to do so. The earliest Ming edition is the Supplemented, Illustrated, and Commentated Collected Biographies of Women Ancient and Modern (Zengbu quanxiang pinglin gujin lienü zhuan 增補全象平林古今列女傳, originally printed by the Fuchun tang in 1588, reprinted by the Santai guan in 1591; hereafter Supplemented Biographies), attributed to Mao Kun 茅坤 (1512–1601).16 The Supplemented Biographies keeps Liu Xiang’s organization into six juan by virtue type. It omits some of his original biographies and adds more recent ones by fitting them into the appropriate categories.17 It reprints Liu Xiang’s commentary verbatim for his original biographies, and it adds meipi commentary in the top margin by a Peng Yang 彭烊 (dates unknown). The meipi commentary is brief, but each story is also accompanied by a lavish double-page illustration captioned with a title and rhymed couplet. These illustrations and their captions also do interpretive work. The second edition is Lü Kun’s Exemplars for the Inner Quarters (printed by She Yongning in 1591, hereafter Exemplars), which reorganizes the biographies into categories by the family role of the protagonist (mothers, wives, daughters, sisters, etc.). Lü omits some biographies and adds more recent ones, abridges many of the texts, and substitutes his own incisive commentary for Liu Xiang’s original encomia. Each story is preceded by a single-page illustration. The third late Ming edition, the Illustrated Collected Biographies of Women (Huitu lienü zhuan 繪圖列女傳, printed by the Zhencheng tang most likely 1610–20?, hereafter Illustrated Biographies) was edited by someone surnamed Wang 汪 and commemorates many virtuous 15  For example, Lü Kun alters the protagonist of one story from a concubine, qie, to a maidservant, bi, explaining that he did so because otherwise her remarriage at the end of the story would be unthinkable. Lü Kun, Gui fan, 4:98. 16  Carlitz finds the attribution to Mao Kun unlikely, based on the book’s conventionality and absence of commentary within the text. Carlitz, “Social Uses,” 137. 17  Zengbu quanxiang pinglin gujin lienü zhuan 增補全象平林古今列女傳, Wanli Yueyu wentai ed. (Taibei: Guangwen shuju, 1981).

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Wang women.18 It reorganizes the biographies of Warring States heroines by state: first the women of Wei 衛, then of Qi, then of Lu, and so on. Each biography has a double-page illustration attributed to Qiu Ying 仇英 (1494?–1552), and many are followed by Wang’s detailed commentary. 1.1 Natal and Marital Family Loyalty These lavish editions transform Liu Xiang’s Han dynasty political tract into late Ming blockbusters in several ways: they add more biographies of chaste women, they provide dramatic illustrations resembling fiction and drama, and they address an expanding audience of literate women. But this transformation of a canonical text into a contemporary cultural product meets a roadblock when late Ming editors and illustrators confront stories of women caught between loyalty to their natal and marital families. Although women were expected to show filial piety to both parents and parents-in-law in both the early and late imperial eras, the balance between natal and in-law filiality was always problematic, and the relative importance of these virtues shifted dramatically between the Han and the Ming dynasties. Historically, Chinese women were often represented as outsiders to their natal families.19 But neither were they full members of their marital families. The strength of a woman’s position in her husband’s family depended on the length of her marriage, the birth of sons, the relative social and economic status of the two families, whether the woman was a wife or concubine, and whether or not the marriage was virilocal.20 The tensions attending women’s liminal family status were already quite real for the Han and Warring States heroines of Liu Xiang’s Biographies. Heroines whose brothers kill their husbands, or whose husbands kill their brothers, routinely kill themselves. Those whose husbands were at war with their brothers and fathers took a variety of approaches, from gentle persuasion to threats of suicide, to make peace between them. Some explicitly 18  For dating information based on the illustration style, see Carlitz, “Social Uses,” 145. I have used the 1779 reprinting by Zhibuzu zhai, Lienü zhuan shiliu juan. 19  Beverly Jo Bossler, “‘A Daughter is a Daughter All Her Life’: Affinal Relations and Women’s Networks in Song and Late Imperial China,” Late Imperial China 21, no. 1 (2000): 77. 20  There was considerable flexibility in marriage patterns in some times and regions, particularly the Canton delta in the nineteenth century. However, the virilocal form of marriage, with incorporation of the bride into her husband’s lineage, remained the normative ideal governing the discourse on marriage. See Mann, Talented Women, 47, 176–89 passim; Weijing Lu, “Uxorilocal Marriage among Qing Literati,” Late Imperial China 19, no. 2 (1998): 99–103; Francesca Bray, Technology and Gender, 339; Helen Siu, “Where Were the Women? Rethinking Marriage Resistance and Regional Culture in South China,” Late Imperial China 11, no. 2 (1990): 33–37.

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prioritized their natal kin, some their husbands, while others tried to split the difference. This range of actions aligns with Han dynasty kinship discourse. In the Han, patrilineal continuity was all-important, and women owed loyalty and obedience to their husbands and fathers-in-law, but women were seen as part of their natal families throughout their lives and even after death. In fact, the strong bonds between a woman and her natal family contributed to the strength of a husband’s social network through affinal relationships.21 But between the Han and Ming dynasties, China saw the increasingly tight incorporation of a woman into her husband’s family and the corresponding distancing of a married woman from her natal family.22 Changes in marriage and inheritance laws and funeral rituals propelled this shift, which was also reflected in didactic books aimed at women. Morality books began explicitly to advise women to prioritize their husbands’ families above their own. Lü Kun comments that when women think of the parents, servants, and goods belonging to their natal families as their own while treating their husbands’ relatives as strangers, trouble arises.23 An excerpt from Chen Hongmou’s 陳宏謀 (1696–1771) eighteenth-century Sourcebook for the Education of Women ( Jiaonü yigui 教女遺規) instructs new brides in how to balance their love for their natal families with their duties to their marital families. His suggested rule of thumb is always to treat “relatives of one’s motherin-law” (gujia qinqi 姑家親戚) better than “relatives of one’s mother” (mujia qinqi 母家親戚).24 The Expanded Meaning of the “Inner Standards” (Nei ze yanyi 内則衍義, 1656), commissioned by the Shunzhi emperor for the edification of 21  Bret Hinsch, Women in Early Imperial China (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2011), 35–41. 22  Beverly Jo Bossler, Courtesans, Concubines, and the Cult of Female Fidelity: Gender and Social Change in China, 1000–1400 (Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2013), 413–16; Charlotte Furth, A Flourishing Yin: Gender in China’s Medical History, 960–1665 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 131; Lu Weijing, True to Her Word: The Faithful Maiden Cult in Late Imperial China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), 110–12. The question of how the shift to emphasizing wifely fidelity over filial piety changed readings of the Biographies is complex. Some scholars see women’s virtue and lives as being increasingly defined by household and husband in Ming and Qing editions; e.g. Sherry Mou, Gentlemen’s Prescriptions for Women’s Lives (Armonk: M. E. Sharpe, 2003), 113–50; Raphals, Sharing the Light, 254–57. But Joanna Handlin sees Lü Kun ascribing greater agency to women as moral agents than Liu Xiang originally did. Handlin, “Lü K’un’s New Audience,” 21–22. Both approaches show a tendency to identify greater feminine power with one’s own focus of study while ascribing greater social oppression of women to a different time period; together, they show that the historical changes influencing women’s lives do not form a simple trajectory of either increasing or decreasing oppression. 23  Lü Kun, Gui fan, 4:4. 24  Chen Hongmou, Wuzhong yigui, 11:15.

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his palace ladies, states, “There is no Way more important than that of filial piety, and a girl takes her husband’s family as her own. Therefore, service to father- and mother-in-law has been listed ahead of service to parents.” (道莫 先於孝，而女以夫為家。故事舅姑列事父母之前。 )25 Each of these late imperial sources acknowledges the liminal status of women and the difficulty they might experience in transitioning from daughters to daughters-in-law, but ends by insisting that women must prioritize their marital families. Therefore, Warring States and Han heroines whose extreme loyalty to their fathers and brothers put them in conflict with their husbands created a secondary conflict of interpretive loyalties for late imperial readers. Should they praise these heroines, as loyalty to a canonical source text demanded? Or should they criticize them for failing in service to the marital family, as contemporary moral discourse required? Just as the protagonists had to navigate the competing demands of loyalty to their natal and marital families, their editors had to negotiate between the Han Biographies’ praise of a woman’s continued loyalty to her natal family and the overwhelming Ming and Qing consensus on the precedence of the marital family. Out of about ten such accounts in the Biographies, I have selected several that showcase the range of editorial responses to such problematic heroines, from negotiated acceptance through lively debate to outright criticism.26 1.2 Ji, Wife of Duke Mu of Qin One biography that posed an interpretive problem to late Ming editors was that of Mu Ji, who threatened to kill both herself and her children in order to stop her husband from killing her brother. In Liu Xiang’s Biographies, Mu Ji is sister to Duke Hui of Jin and wife to Duke Mu of Qin. Relations between the two states become tense when our heroine’s brother Duke Hui fails to reciprocate either his personal obligation to her husband Duke Mu, who had helped him take the throne, or Qin’s earlier gift of grain during a famine in Jin. Mu Ji’s husband Duke Mu loses patience, attacks Jin and captures her brother Duke Hui, and threatens to kill him. When Mu Ji hears the news, she builds a funeral pyre, stands on it with her two sons and her daughter, and tells her husband: 25  Fu Yijian 傳以漸, Yuding nei ze yanyi 御定内則衍義, Siku quanshu, Wenyuange ed. (Taibei: Taiwan shangwu yinshuguan, 1977), fanli. 26  To facilitate comparison, I have focused my analysis on those biographies that are included in the greatest number of editions. Similar biographies not discussed at length here include Biographies 2.2, “Ji of Wei, Wife of Duke Huan of Qi” (Qi Huan Wei ji 齊桓衛姬); Biographies 5.3, “Huai Ying, Consort of Yu of Jin” (Jin Yu Huai Ying 晉圉懷嬴); Biographies 5.7, “Lady Zhao of Dai” (Dai Zhao furen 代趙夫人); and Biographies 5.12, “The Principled Aunt of Liang” (Liang jie guzi 梁節姑姊).

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“If the Duke of Jin is brought in this morning, then I, your servant, as well as your children, will die tonight. You, my lord, should consider this!” (晉君朝以 入，婢子夕以死。惟君其圖之。 )27 Her husband releases her brother at once. Liu Xiang’s Biographies gives the Han interpretation of her behavior: the encomium praises Mu Ji for her righteous conduct (yi 義), and Liu Xiang places her biography in the chapter entitled “The Worthy and Enlightened” (xianming 賢明). She had become “a pattern for the people” (wei min zhi ze 維民之則); she had raised her son (the next duke of Qin) to have a good relationship with his uncle, her younger brother (Wen, the next duke of Jin), and she had been willing to meet death and even sacrifice her own children to do all this. All three late Ming editions, the Supplemented Biographies, the Exemplars, and the Illustrated Biographies, show that late imperial readers found Mu Ji’s conduct difficult to swallow. She had threatened not only her own suicide but her children’s death, and therefore the security of her husband’s patriline. Late imperial commentators work hard to smooth the rough edges of this story. The Supplemented Biographies does so by appealing to fate and downplaying Mu Ji’s active choices. Peng Yang’s commentary on the critical sentences reads, “The fate determined by heaven above can move the heart of Duke Mu, and can avert the calamity of the duke of Jin.” (上天數命可動穆公之心，可免晉君 之患。 )28 Peng absolves Mu Ji of infanticidal tendencies by ignoring her agency and focusing instead on Heaven’s determination. The illustration and its captions do not include the children at all (Fig. 1). The illustration shows Mu Ji seated alone on a pile of sticks facing her husband; three courtiers look on from behind a wall. The children are also absent from the picture’s title, “She saves her younger brother, going to death” (救弟赴死), and from the captions down the sides, which read, “Wearing mourning and seated on firewood, she begs release for the captivity of the lord of Jin. At Ling Tower, she changes [her brother’s] lodging; indeed, [her husband] follows the words of his favored consort.” (衰絰履薪，求釋晉君之執。靈臺改館，果從姬寵之言。)29 Both the illustration and the caption omit the most problematic element of the story, the children. They focus instead on the three adults, emphasizing both Mu Ji’s kindness to her brother and her good relationship with her husband. The picture and captions precede the story and would have shaped the mindset that a reader brought to the text. Indeed, semi-literate readers might 27  B  iographies 2.4, Kinney, Exemplary Women, 30–31; Wang Zhaoyuan 王照圓, Lienü zhuan buzhu 列女傳補注 (Taibei: Taiwan shangwu yinshuguan, 1968), 26–27. Unless otherwise noted, I follow Anne Kinney’s translation for the original biographies; translations from Ming and Qing editions are my own. 28  Pinglin gujin lienü zhuan, 2:6–7. 29  Pinglin gujin lienü zhuan, 2:5–6.

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“Ji, Wife of Duke Mu of Qin” from the Supplemented Biographies

well have stuck to the picture and its captions and skipped the main text. Through the commentary that assigns the whole affair to fate and the illustration that erases the threat of infanticide by omitting the infants, Supplemented Biographies works to reduce a reader’s potential discomfort with Mu Ji’s disloyalty to her husband and coldblooded threats to their children. Lü Kun’s Exemplars takes a more direct approach to defending Mu Ji’s conduct. First, Lü’s commentary emphasizes the personal difficulty of her choice by explaining that she had legitimate reasons to bear a grudge against her brother. She had recommended two candidates for office in Jin whom he had executed rather than promoted. These details are not included in Liu Xiang’s biography itself. But Mu Ji’s choice to defend her brother rather than seize the opportunity for revenge shows, in Lü’s reading, “her sincerity of fraternal affection” (兄弟之情厚).30 Second, Lü emphasizes the political rather than the familial ramifications of her choice. In war between states, he explains, it is wrong to kill the opposing lord and end the state’s ancestral sacrifices. By 30  Lü Kun, Gui fan, 4:63.

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forcing her husband to spare Duke Hui’s life, Mu Ji kept him from committing this crime of statesmanship. Thus, Mu Ji’s rescue “was not for personal reasons” (不為私也).31 Although the single-page illustration accompanying the story shows Mu Ji and three small children on the pyre, Lü Kun’s commentary never mentions the threat to her husband’s sons’ lives which might have ended the ancestral sacrifices of Qin. Instead, he focuses on defending Mu Ji against the hypothetical accusation of having been motivated by personal affection, first by claiming that she felt resentment for her brother (making her exercise of affection a matter of virtue rather than instinct) and second by emphasizing her wisdom as a political advisor rather than her faults as a wife and mother. The Illustrated Biographies is another edition that uses illustration to soften the biography’s infanticidal overtones, though more subtly than the Supplemented Biographies. The picture shows Mu Ji kneeling on a bundle of firewood with her two sons, facing Duke Mu attended by his courtiers (Fig. 2). Her daughter is not pictured.32 The sons are portrayed as young men, the same size as Mu Ji and Duke Mu, though beardless. The depiction of the sons as young adults makes them look more like volunteers and less like victims, and the omission of the daughter further softens the picture’s visual impact. Wang shi’s commentary, like Lü Kun’s, focuses entirely on the politics between the two states, describing Mu Ji as “sheltering” (biyun 庇云) her brother, touching on her son’s later positive relationship with his uncle, and then stating “Ever since Mu Ji became a palace lady in Qin, Qin’s treatment of Jin—can it be called anything other than generous?” (自穆姬嬪 秦而後，秦之於晉，可不云厚矣哉?)33 Both the wider focus on state politics and the portrayal of the two sons as political actors in their own right lightens the reader’s interpretive burden. Wang does not try to justify the mother threatening her children; instead, he guides the reader to focus on the network of political loyalties within which Mu Ji’s actions are both sagacious and successful. All three late Ming editions grapple with Mu Ji’s threat to her children, and their creative exegetical maneuvers show that it was difficult for late Ming readers to see her as entirely virtuous. But all three editions do find ways to praise Mu Ji, through illustrations that omit the children or make them adults, or through commentary that downplays her family role and emphasizes fate or politics instead. Their task was relatively easy, since Mu Ji never had to carry

31  Lü Kun, Gui fan, 4:63. 32  Lienü zhuan shiliu juan, 3:36. 33  Lienü zhuan shiliu juan, 3:38.

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“Ji, Wife of Duke Mu of Qin” from the Illustrated Biographies

out her threat. As the next two biographies show, protagonists who had to act on their choices created thornier problems of interpretation. 1.3 The Righteous Aunt of Lu The righteous aunt of Lu, who abandons her own son in order to save her nephew, is a polarizing figure for late imperial editors. Some find ways to praise her, while others critique her sharply. In Liu Xiang’s biography, Qi’s armies are attacking Lu. When they reach the outskirts of the city, they see a woman fleeing, carrying one child and leading another by the hand, and give chase. As the soldiers’ pursuit draws nearer, the panicked woman drops the child in her arms, picks up the one she has been leading, and runs. The soldiers eventually capture all three and learn that the child she tried to save is her brother’s son, while the boy she left behind is her own. Asked why she acted in this way, the woman replies at length: With my own son, it is a matter of personal affection. But in the case of my elder brother’s son, it is a matter of public righteousness. Thus, if I turn my back on public righteousness and follow after personal affection, denying my brother’s son and preserving my own child, though I might be fortunate enough to escape, the ruler of Lu would not harbor me, the

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grandees would not see to my welfare, and the commoners and the capital populace would have nothing to do with me. In such a case, no matter how small I might make myself, there would be no place that would harbor me, and no matter how I might place my feet, there would be no place to tread. Although I love my child, when it comes to righteousness, what choice do I have? I can bear to abandon my child to practice righteousness, but without righteousness I can’t live in the state of Lu. 己之子，私愛也。兄之子，公義也。夫背公義而嚮私愛，亡兄子而存 妾子，幸而得幸，則魯君不吾畜，大夫不吾養，庶民國人不吾與也。    夫如是，則脅肩無所容，而累足無所履也。子雖痛乎，獨謂義何？故 忍棄子而行義，不能無義而視魯國。34

The general who hears her informs his ruler that if the righteousness of a common woman is like this, Lu cannot be conquered, and Qi’s armies withdraw. The sticking point in this biography for late imperial editors is the woman’s choice to abandon her son. The Supplemented Biographies and the Exemplars both include this biography; the former praises the righteous aunt, while the latter criticizes her. The Illustrated Biographies omits the story, but mentions the Righteous Aunt of Lu approvingly in the commentary to another biography. The Supplemented Biographies expresses both praise and sympathy for the protagonist. The captions and commentary emphasize the political sphere; as in the biography of Mu Ji, the righteous aunt’s political success helps justify her failures as a mother. The caption above the picture reads “Giving weight to righteousness and forgetting the personal,” (重義忘私) while the vertical captions on each side read “Abandoning the son and carrying the nephew, the unsettled wilderness hears the bequeathed teachings of Lu. Emphasizing righteousness and forgetting the personal, the whole state escapes the harassment of Qi’s army.” (棄兒抱姪，荒郊聞魯教之遺。重義忘私，舉國免齊師  之擾。 )35 The meipi commentary also emphasizes the righteous aunt’s worthiness in refusing to make personal love equal to public righteousness. It praises her faithfulness and righteousness, which caused the state of Lu to flourish and the armies of Qi to turn back. Again, the appeal to the political realm justifies a mother’s unsettling conduct. The aunt of Lu is a national heroine, not a maternal one. 34  B  iographies 5.6. Kinnney, Exemplary Women, 95–96; Wang Zhaoyuan, Lienü zhuan buzhu, 85–86. I have slightly altered Kinney’s translation. 35  Pinglin gujin lienü zhuan, 3:29–30. The final character 擾 is missing in the image given here, but can be seen in other editions of this work.

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“The Righteous Aunt of Lu” from the Supplemented Biographies

The details of the illustration itself also work to mitigate the reader’s discomfort (Fig. 3). Unlike the vast majority of woodblock illustrations, and unlike the rest of the illustrations in the Supplemented Biographies, the aunt in this picture has a visibly sad facial expression with dramatically slanted eyebrows. Other figures in the book have characteristically serene expressions even when leaping into burning buildings or being decapitated. The illustrator thus offers visual evidence that the woman loves her child and found the decision to sacrifice him excruciating. Furthermore, the nephew she carries while speaking to the general of Qi is an infant; he is visibly smaller than her son, who is shoulder height relative to his mother. The artist may have felt that saving a baby nephew at the expense of a preteen son made for a more palatable story than choosing between two toddlers, even though this hardly matches the narrative, which states that the woman was originally carrying the son and leading the nephew by the hand. These visual elements appeal to the reader’s sympathy as well as his or her sense of the dramatic, leading him or her to identify with the protagonist in her

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anguish. Essentially, the editor and illustrator of the Supplemented Biographies accept the Warring States story on its own terms: the protagonist is virtuous because of her selflessness and its political benefits. The only hint of concession to a late imperial reader’s difficulty is the visual suggestion that the righteous aunt did love and pity her son and that her nephew, being younger, needed her help more. Lü Kun’s trenchant commentary in the Exemplars disapproves profoundly. Lü rejects the heroine’s logic, her association of personal love with the son and public righteousness with the nephew, in favor of a lineage perspective shaped by late Ming kinship discourse. He critiques the righteous aunt for forgetting that her son is also her husband’s son, not her own possession. In choosing her nephew over her son, she is not just selflessly resisting her maternal yearnings. She is also choosing to preserve her natal family’s heir over her husband’s heir. From a lineage perspective, this is a profoundly unsettling choice. If a young bride is a destabilizing outsider to the clan, and only her loyalty to the son she bears (a member of the patriline) eventually secures her partial membership in the family, then refusing that loyalty is an act of total rebellion.36 Lü does suggest scenarios in which the righteous aunt’s choice would be appropriate: if the woman’s brother were dead but her husband were alive, in which case her husband (but not her brother) would have the hope of fathering another heir; or if her husband (but not her brother) had other sons already. Otherwise, he concludes, “Although she surpasses affection with right conduct, in the end, she is not a constant model for ten thousand generations.” (雖以義奪情，終非 萬世之常經。 )37 In Lü’s late Ming worldview, lineage reproduction is a stronger imperative for a wife than personal selflessness. Lü Kun’s disapproval of the righteous aunt is so strong that he deliberately minimizes the political ramifications of her choice in order to highlight her moral failure as a clan progenitrix. His version of the biography shortens the woman’s speech to read simply: “With my own son, it is a personal matter. With my brother’s son, it is a public matter. Although I love my child, when it comes to righteousness, what choice do I have?” (己之子，私也。兄之子，公也。子 雖痛乎，獨謂義何。 )38 He omits the political content of her speech and her references to the state of Lu. The resulting emphasis on her family role and related failures is, perhaps, consistent with the overall emphasis on family life of 36  See the discussion of the suspicion of brides and the importance of the increasing overlap between the uterine family and the household in Margery Wolf, Women and the Family in Rural Taiwan (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1972), 32–42. 37  Lü Kun, Gui fan, 4:65. 38  Lü Kun, Gui fan, 4:64.

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the Exemplars, which reorganizes all the biographies by family role rather than virtue type. But the contrast with Lü’s earlier defense of Mu Ji as a successful political actor is striking nevertheless. In that biography, he emphasized politics over family to praise Mu Ji; here, he emphasizes family over politics to critique the righteous aunt. Wang shi’s Illustrated Biographies does not include this biography. However, in his commentary on the biography of the “Principled Aunt of Liang” (who tries to save her brother’s son from a fire and accidentally saves her own son instead, then leaps back into the flames to make her selfless intentions clear), Wang compares the Principled Aunt of Liang unfavorably to the Righteous Aunt of Lu. The former’s death, he says, is meaningless because it serves only her own reputation, and the two protagonists are so different that they cannot even be discussed on the same day.39 The implication is that he finds the righteous aunt praiseworthy because her sacrifice does serve a greater cause, not her own reputation but the state of Lu’s, and intimidates the invading army. In other words, Wang shi accepts the political justification that Lü Kun rejects. The Supplemented Biographies, the Exemplars, and the Illustrated Bio­ graphies manipulate the balance between the inner world of kin networks and the outer world of state politics in order to justify their different evaluations of the righteous aunt’s actions. But as the next biography will show, a woman whose equal loyalty to her brother and husband had no beneficial political ramifications could end up unanimously condemned. 1.4 The Loving Younger Sister of Heyang These three editions of the Biographies all find ways to praise Mu Ji, and they take opposing positions on the Righteous Aunt of Lu. But the biography of the “Loving Younger Sister of Heyang,” who commits suicide after her husband killed her brother, meets with only criticism and silence. In Liu Xiang’s biography, Jier is a woman whose husband, Ren Yanshou, kills her brother, Jizong. When Yanshou confesses his crime to Jier, she repudiates him, saying “To kill one’s husband is not righteous, but to serve the enemy of one’s elder brother is also not righteous.” (殺夫不義，事兄之讎亦不義。) Shamed, her husband offers to give her a cart with all his household goods and let her go anywhere she wants, but she says she has nowhere to go: “Where can I go? My elder brother is dead, and his enemy has not been avenged. I share pillow and mat with you, yet you had my brother killed. I am unable to live in peace with your family. Furthermore, if I let my elder brother’s enemy go free, how can I live with Heaven above or tread the earth below?” (吾當安之？兄死而讎不報，與子 39  Lienü zhuan shiliu juan, 5:38.

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同枕席而使殺吾兄，內不能和夫家，又縱兄之讐，何面目以生而戴天履地 乎？) The couple has three children, and Jier entrusts her two younger sons to

the care of her oldest daughter and kills herself.40 Both Lü Kun’s Exemplars and Wang shi’s Illustrated Biographies critique Jier sharply. Even the Supplemented Biographies, which found ways to praise both Mu Ji and the righteous aunt, omits her story entirely. Lü Kun’s version of the biography undermines Jier’s virtue, first, by shortening her speech in the text itself. His Jier says “Where should I go? To share pillow and mat with you and serve my brother’s killer, and again to follow my brother’s enemy? What face would I have to live beneath heaven or tread on earth?” (吾當安之？與子同枕蓆而使殺吾兄，又從兄之讎，何面目戴天 立地乎？)41 In this version, Jier does not explain why she cannot return to her natal family. Lü’s commentary seizes on this omission, which he created in the first place by drastically abridging the original text, in order to criticize Jier’s thoughtlessness: At this time, suppose Jizong (the brother) had had a son: then she should have returned to her own family to help raise the orphaned son. Suppose Jizong had had no son: then she should have left Yanshou and let his lineage be cut off; either of these choices would be enough to fulfill right conduct. To go so far as to hang herself; one cannot help calling this excessive. Suppose Jizong had killed Yanshou; then what should Jier have done? I have recorded this [incident] to serve as an exhortation to those who neglect their own flesh and blood. Who says that a wife must treat her parents’ and brothers’ family as outsiders, to the point of paying no attention to their life and death? 當是時，使季宗有子耶，則歸宗而撫遺孤。季宗無子耶，則自出而絕 延壽，亦足全其義矣。遂至自經，無奈過乎。設季宗殺延壽，則季兒 又當何如？吾錄之，以爲薄於骨肉者之勸。孰謂婦人外交母兄弟家，    至生死不相関耶？42

Lü’s condescending analysis silences Jier’s own statement that she literally has nowhere to go. He omits her original explanation of why she cannot return to her natal family—her unfulfilled duty to avenge her brother’s death—and 40  B  iographies 5.14; Wang Zhaoyuan, Lienü zhuan buzhu, 96. Translation slightly altered from Kinney, Exemplary Women, 106–07. 41  Lü Kun, Gui fan, 4:65. 42  Lü Kun, Gui fan, 4:65.

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this editorial omission makes his suggestion that she return home to raise her orphaned nephew rather dubious. His assertion that Jier could take revenge by letting her husband’s lineage be cut off is also disingenuous: Jier has already borne Yanshou two sons, and even if she had not, he could simply have remarried. But despite his curmudgeonly attitude, Lü Kun does acknowledge the extent to which late Ming women could see themselves as outsiders in their natal families. He even suggests it can be carried to excess. Thus, though he is generally critical of Jier, he finds her story valuable to correct a potential excess of marital family loyalty, leading to callousness to the natal family, in late Ming women. Wang shi’s Illustrated Biographies is equally critical of Jier. First, the illustration seems designed to tug at the reader’s heartstrings (Fig. 4). Jier is surrounded by the smaller figures of her children, who are raising their hands to plead with her. The older boy is wiping his eyes. Meanwhile, the husband on the facing page is gazing at them, with his head turned over his shoulder and body facing away.43 The impression is one of desolation and tragedy. And Wang’s commentary explicitly blames Jier for the tragedy. He acknowledges that “there are some matters between a woman’s husband and brothers in which faithfulness is difficult to achieve.” (事關夫婦兄弟之間，信有難處焉者。) But, he goes on, Jier should have done her utmost to mediate the quarrel between Yanshou and Jizong; perhaps she could have prevented the violence. Even if not, Jier should have taken the cart full of goods and given it to her brother’s descendants, while she herself remained single and supported herself by spinning and weaving. As it is, Wang concludes, “Yanshou bears no reproach in the matter of [Jier’s] death. How can this be called a proper revenge for her elder brother?” (友娣死，延壽益無可顧忌者耳。何言善復兄讐？)44 Wang’s censorious tone is reminiscent of Lü Kun’s. And like Lü’s, his suggestion for Jier’s vengeance seems anemic, a mere financial penalty paid by the killer to support the descendants of his victim. One suspects that Liu Xiang’s Jier would have scorned such an anticlimactic solution. Jier’s case drew particular disapproval from late Ming editors. Both Lü Kun and Wang shi dismiss her suicide as unnecessary, valuing her obligation to her brother much more lightly than Liu Xiang did. They suggest that Jier would have served her brother’s memory better with a bit of practical help, like that cart full of loot. The Exemplars and the Illustrated Biographies do critique their heroines freely, using the benefit of hindsight to explain what the women should have done differently or to praise only part of their conduct. But even 43  L ienü zhuan shiliu juan, 5:35–36. 44  Lienü zhuan shiliu juan, 5:37.

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“The Loving Younger Sister of Heyang” from the Illustrated Biographies

the Supplemented Biographies, which praises all of its heroines, cannot find a way to praise Jier. It simply leaves this biography out. Each late Ming edition relates differently to the shared canonical source text. In terms of their attitudes toward their heroines, we can place them on a continuum from ideological fidelity to critical distance. The Supplemented Biographies always praises its heroines, even those whose behavior was problematic by contemporary standards; if it cannot say anything nice, it omits the biography and says nothing at all. The Exemplars and Illustrated Biographies, on the other hand, exercise independent editorial judgment by praising some women and critiquing others, or by singling out different aspects of a woman’s conduct for praise and blame. And between the latter two, Lü Kun’s Exemplars critiques its heroines more frequently than the Illustrated Biographies.45 Praise and critique of a canonical heroine are not the only ways that a text can exhibit editorial fidelity to or independence from a classical source. There is also a continuum between exacting textual accuracy and free transformation of the source text’s language. Each of these three editions falls between 45  This difference between the Illustrated Biographies and the Exemplars is also noted in Carlitz, “Social Uses,” 133.

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the two extremes. All omit some of Liu Xiang’s biographies and add some more recent biographies. The Supplemented Biographies makes no other changes, faithfully copying the text of each Han biography, the chapter organization, and Liu Xiang’s commentary and encomia. The Illustrated Biographies goes beyond omission and addition; it also reorganizes the biographies. Finally, the Exemplars not only rearranges the biographies but also abridges the main text of each, changing the implications of each biography significantly in the process. Lü Kun’s heroines’ truncated speeches leave room for his sharp editorial judgments. But Lü Kun only abridges Liu Xiang’s biographies and occasionally changes individual words; he does not add new material. The next section turns to an early Qing edition of the Biographies in which more profound textual changes provide more strategies for dealing with these problem biographies. 2

Expansion and Emotional Development in the Expanded Biographies

The Expanded Biographies, published between 1667 and 1681, uses dialogue expansion, plot development, and increased emotional complexity to further popularize Liu Xiang’s classic.46 The Expanded Biographies retains Liu Xiang’s six-chapter organizational scheme by virtue type. Each chapter includes both original and newer biographies, retelling each story in a simple vernacular style to create a yanyi 演義 (expanded or popularized history) version of the Biographies. Most of the resulting anecdotes are dry and perfunctory; as entertainment literature, the Expanded Biographies is disappointing. But yanyi is not synonymous with fiction, and the vernacularization of the Expanded Biographies has functions other than entertainment. In the rewritten biographies, added plot details, new internal monologues, and expanded speeches all serve to justify the characters’ actions and address difficulties of interpretation. The editor also provides a new commentary for each story, which is 46  G  ujin lienü zhuan yanyi 古今列女傳演義, Qing Guwu Sanduozhai ed. (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1990). This work is spuriously attributed to Feng Menglong (1574–1646), but it includes the story of Hai Liefu 海烈婦, which occurred in 1667. The earliest edition was printed by the Changchun ge studio, which flourished in the early Qing, and it does not alter any of the characters from the first four Qing emperors’ names. Since taboo character observance became widespread in 1681, this provides a termi­ nus ante quem. See Wen Gehong 文革紅, Qingdai qianqi tongsu xiaoshuo kanke kaolun 清代前期通俗小説刊刻考論 (Nanchang: Jiangxi renmin chubanshe, 2008), 119; Huang Zhijun 皇之雋 and Zhao Hong’en 趙弘恩, Jiangnan tongzhi 江南通志, Qing Qianlong ed. (Hong Kong: Dizhi wenhua youxian gongsi, 2006), 177:61; Chen Yuan 陳垣, Shi hui juli 史諱舉例 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2004), 135.

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consistently sympathetic to the protagonists and provides further justification for their problematic decisions. These new editorial strategies effectively mediate the stark distinctions between Han and Qing dynasty norms, much more successfully than the late Ming commentary editions studied above. This mediation is evident in the treatment of two of the same accounts in the Expanded Biographies: “The Righteous Aunt of Lu” and the “Loving Younger Sister of Heyang” (Mu Ji’s story is not included in the book). Finally, I analyze a third account of a woman juggling natal and marital family loyalty, “The Principled Woman of the Capital,” to demonstrate that this early Qing edition responded directly to Lü Kun’s commentary on the same account in the Exemplars. Unlike the Exemplars and the Illustrated Biographies, the Expanded Biographies is extremely reluctant to critique its heroines.47 And, unlike the Supplemented Biographies, it does include the most difficult texts. In order to both include and praise these heroines, it adjusts the stories in subtle ways to justify their actions. Retelling their biographies in the vernacular yanyi genre allows the editor to create a nuanced accommodation between Liu Xiang’s Han dynasty heroines and early Qing relational norms. The Expanded Biographies both translate Liu Xiang’s accounts into the vernacular and expand them with minor plot additions and considerable added dialogue. The editor uses both plot and dialogue additions to work through the interpretive difficulties inherent in the heroines’ conflicts of natal and marital family loyalty. One particularly important aspect of this expansion is the added emotional development to which both the plot and dialogue changes contribute. The plots expand upon, and the heroines’ speeches give new weight to, the emotional dimensions of their actions. At the same time, the editor’s commentary also emphasizes emotion by appealing directly to the reader’s feelings. Thus, although the Expanded Biographies remains overtly skeptical of romantic love, it still reveals the subtle influences of the cult of qing that increasingly affected mainstream discourse on the family in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Expanded Biographies places a new stress on the emotional lives of both characters and readers, with profound implications for both its depictions of the heroines and its approach to ethical judgment. This congruence with one relatively recent development, the rising value placed on 47  It does occasionally offer a critique, not of protagonists who show loyalty to their natal family but of those skilled in rhetoric, which fits the trend to downplay intellectual virtue in late imperial Biographies editions observed by Lisa Raphals in Sharing the Light. This aspect of the Expanded Biographies will be discussed in more detail in chapter 3.

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qing within family life, helps the Expanded Biographies negotiate the exegetical challenges created by another relatively recent development, the increased emphasis on marital family loyalty for women. 2.1 The Righteous Aunt of Lu Like the late Ming editors studied above, the editor of the Expanded Biographies found the righteous aunt’s decision to abandon her son to save her nephew deeply troubling. But by appealing to the reader’s emotional judgment, the Expanded Biographies ends by praising her. Recall that the Supplemented Biographies praised the aunt’s political astuteness, while in the Exemplars, Lü Kun omitted the political aspects of the woman’s speech and then criticized her for abandoning her son and heir to her husband’s patriline. The Expanded Biographies differs from both. It guides the reader through both sides of the debate before ending on a note of praise. It gives full weight to the protagonist’s political achievements: the text translates Liu Xiang’s version of the woman’s speech in full. But the Expanded Biographies is not content to make the righteous aunt a politician rather than a mother: it explicitly addresses the woman’s abandonment of her son. The editor’s commentary directly addresses the reader’s anticipated discomfort: To abandon one’s son and keep one’s nephew … is not necessarily in accordance with the middle way of sages and worthies. Nevertheless, examining her heart, indeed there is also an idea of acting worthily. But she slightly stumbles into excess. If we think about it from the perspective of public and personal, then one also can call it a difficult-to-attain capability. Even if not, if she had abandoned her nephew to keep her son, would peoples’ hearts be slightly more at peace? Or not at peace? Therefore the Upright Woman forthrightly spoke a single discourse and the Qi general retreated. Uprightness’ benefit to the state is like this! 棄子留姪，…… 雖未必即合於聖賢之中道，然窺其心，實亦有意為賢，    而微傷於過者。若以公私論，則亦可謂之難能矣。倘不然，而棄姪留 子，稍有人心安乎？不安乎？故義姑姊侃侃一論而齊師退矣。義之有 益於國如此。48

After laying out the woman’s ethical quandary, the editor throws up his metaphorical hands and asks readers whether they would feel any better if she had 48  Gujin lienü zhuan yanyi, 4:12–13.

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made the opposite choice. The Expanded Biographies has changed the terms of the discussion from those we saw in late Ming editions. It neither diverts the reader’s attention to politics nor uses the logic of patrilineal kinship to evaluate the woman’s choice between her husband’s heir and her brother’s. Rather, the reader’s emotional difficulty is the editor’s main concern, and the reader’s heart is the final court of appeal. The editor ultimately chooses neither to defend nor to criticize the righteous aunt’s virtue, but to engage the reader’s imaginative sympathy with her impossible dilemma. Only then does he conclude by triumphantly underlining the benefits her final choice brought to the state. The commentary in the Expanded Biographies is very different from that in the Han Biographies, in which the woman’s emotions serve mainly to underscore her virtue—virtue is maximized as the woman resists her personal inclinations—and the reader’s emotional response is expected to be one of uncomplicated admiration. In the early Qing yanyi, the heroine’s emotions continue to figure mainly as a temptation to favoritism, but the reader’s heartmind has become the source of openly emotional judgment. Though emotions are not a motivation for virtue in the Expanded Biographies, they are central to the editor’s interpretive process. 2.2 The Loving Younger Sister of Heyang Jier, who committed suicide and abandoned her three children after her husband killed her brother, met with sharp critique in both the Exemplars and the Illustrated Biographies. The Expanded Biographies recuperates Jier as a heroine by giving her a much longer speech, in which she vividly describes her emotional conflict and also appeals to early Qing ideological norms. This speech begins in the same way as the one in the Biographies: it would be contrary to righteousness either to kill her husband or to serve her brother’s killer. But then, addressing her husband, Jier continues to explain exactly why she has nowhere to go: If I desire to return to my brother’s home, although you are the one who killed my brother, nevertheless I have shared pillow and mat with you; because of this, the fact that you killed my brother is just as though I had killed him. What face would I have to return there? If I desire to remain in my husband’s home, my husband is my brother’s enemy; to serve him with a harmonious countenance would be contrary to ritual propriety. A husband is the wife’s Heaven; if one follows him while nursing hatred, this again would be contrary to affection.

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欲往兄家，兄雖汝殺，而妾與子同枕蓆，則是汝之殺兄，即妾之殺兄 也，有何面目而復往？欲留夫家，夫是吾兄之讎也，和顔事之，則又 非禮。夫者婦之天，若飲恨從之，則又非情。 49

One point of interest here is the strong identification of the wife with her husband, reflecting the increased ties of a woman to her marital family in the Qing dynasty relative to the Han. In Liu Xiang’s original biography, Jier says that she cannot return to her natal family because she has not carried out her duty to avenge her brother. But in this retelling, it is no longer the burden of unfulfilled duty that keeps her from returning home; the imperative to avenge her natal kin is no longer primary. Rather, Jier’s reasoning in the Expanded Biographies reflects the late imperial incorporation of a woman into her marital household: “the fact that you killed my brother is just as though I had killed him.” Jier’s marriage has tied her so closely to her husband that she shares his guilt. Another feature of Jier’s speech in the Expanded Biographies is the emphasis on her internal world, the emotional content of the marital relationship. In the Han Biographies, Jier states, “I am unable to live in peace with my husband’s family.” (不能和夫家)50 In the Expanded Biographies, however, Jier’s interiority is more fleshed-out. The emphasis moves from strife within the marital household to strife within Jier herself: “A husband is the wife’s Heaven; if one follows him while nursing hatred, this again would be contrary to affection.” Jier refuses either to follow a husband she hates or to give up her justified resentment of her brother’s killer. The counterpoint between qing and li here is particularly interesting. Serving her brother’s killer would transgress ritual propriety, and hating her husband would violate the norms of affection. Their demands on Jier have equal weight. The Expanded Biographies does not emphasize passion in the marital relationship, but neither does it allow a woman to conceal hatred beneath a wife’s ritual service to her husband. There must be unity between Jier’s emotional life and the ritual demands of her family roles. Both the Biographies and the Expanded Biographies reveal the tragic consequences for the heroine when interior unity is shattered. But the nature of the interiority has changed from the interior of the household to the inner world of the heart. The editor’s commentary on Jier’s story in the Expanded Biographies acknowledges that Jier’s suicide was not, strictly speaking, necessary. In the context of new early Qing policies forbidding widow suicide, we might expect an even harsher critique from the Expanded Biographies than from a late Ming 49  Gujin lienü zhuan yanyi, 5:32–33. 50  Kinney, Exemplary Women, 106; Wang Zhaoyuan, Lienü zhuan buzhu, 96.

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publication. But this editor’s critique is actually far more nuanced than either Lü Kun’s or Wang shi’s, and he ends on a note of praise: “The affair had already happened; the ardently virtuous spirit had already dissipated; this death also could have been avoided. To carefully weigh affection and righteousness, not to tolerate remaining even for an instant and actually to kill herself resolutely: one can say this is ‘to attain death calmly.’” (事已往矣，激烈之氣已消 矣，死亦可以免矣。乃斟情酌義，毫不假借略不留連，竟毅然自經，可謂 從容就死矣。 )51 The editor acknowledges that Jier’s death could not restore

her brother to life. But the final line denies that her suicide resulted from an impetuous excess of passion. It rephrases a well-known aphorism, first recorded by the Song author Xie Fangde 謝枋得 (1226–1289), “To pursue death fervently is easy, to attain righteousness calmly is difficult.” (慷慨赴死易，從 容就義難。 )52 The original saying sets up an opposition between the relatively easy choice to die, which might be impulsive rather than resolute, and the relatively difficult choice to pursue rightness in a calm and steadfast way. Its language is echoed in the Qing dynasty Yongzheng Emperor’s edict criticizing widows who committed suicide for throwing their lives away.53 The Expanded Biographies revises the saying to remove the implied criticism of suicide as impulsive. It suggests that Jier combined passion and righteousness, pursuing death calmly after weighing all her options thoroughly. This echoes the policy distinction between reckless and principled suicide—the former forbidden, the latter praised—which emerged over the course of the Shunzhi, Kangxi, and Yongzheng reign periods.54 The editor agrees that Jier had no need to die, but he praises her decision as balancing both qing, emotion, and yi, righteousness; her passion did not disqualify her from righteousness. Jier’s biography, in which she is torn between loyalty to husband and brother with murder in the balance, had a polarizing effect on Ming and Qing editions of the Biographies. Lü Kun and Wang shi dismiss the need for suicide and deemphasize Jier’s obligation to her brother. The Expanded Biographies praises Jier, but does so in terms that reflect a set of values characteristic of the early Qing. In her expanded speech, the new Jier portrays herself not as an impulsive martyr, but as a wife implicated in her husband’s guilt. Passionate, principled, 51  Gujin lienü zhuan yanyi, 5:33. 52  Xie Fangde 謝枋得, Dieshan ji 曡山集, Wenyuange ed. (Hong Kong: Dizhi wenhua chuban gongsi, 2006), 2:13. 53  Susan Mann, “Widows in the Kinship, Class, and Community Structures of Qing Dynasty China,” The Journal of Asian Studies 46, no. 1 (1987): 45; Mark Elvin, “Female Virtue and the State in China,” Past & Present, no. 104 (1984): 128. 54  Theiss Janet, “Managing Martyrdom: Female Suicide and Statecraft in Mid-Qing China,” Nan nü 3, no. 1 (2001): 59.

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and strongly identified with her husband, the Jier of the Expanded Biographies has become an unmistakably late imperial heroine. 2.3 The Principled Woman of the Capital Plot expansion and added dialogue also play a key role in the Expanded Biographies’ presentation of another biography of a woman caught between duty to her father and her husband, “The Principled Woman of the Capital.” In its treatment of this account, the Expanded Biographies not only mediates the ethical tensions between the original text and contemporary norms, but also responds, point for point, to Lü Kun’s sharp critique of the same protagonist in his Exemplars. In this story, the heroine’s husband has an implacable enemy with designs on his life. This enemy kidnaps the woman’s father to pressure her into unlocking the gate for him. In order to save her father’s life, she agrees. In order to save her husband’s life, she sleeps in her husband’s usual place that night, so that the assassin cuts off her head instead. When he realizes whom he has killed, he gives up his grudge against the husband.55 The story is included in both the Supplemented Biographies and the Illustrated Biographies, but neither adds commentary. Lü Kun’s commentary in the Exemplars, however, is caustic. Not only does he criticize the enemy’s cowardice for trying to suborn a woman rather than openly kill the husband during the day, he also criticizes the woman’s stupidity. Since she had advance warning of the murder plot, why not just have the father and husband flee together to a safe place?56 The Expanded Biographies’ version of this biography is one of the most extensively embellished in the collection, and it adapts the narrative in ways that respond specifically to Lü Kun’s critique. First, the enemy tries many strategies to kill the husband, but he is so well guarded that all the attempts fail. The enemy then captures the woman’s father, locks him up in an interior room, and threatens to kill him unless he sends a messenger to his daughter demanding her compliance: Taking out a sharp blade, he threatened the father, saying, “Your son-inlaw is my enemy. I wish to kill him to relieve my anger. But because his gates are securely guarded, I cannot get in. Now I have heard that his wife is your daughter; therefore, I dare to trouble you to send a letter to your dear daughter, asking her to point out a way in so that I may carry out the 55  B  iographies 5.15, Kinney, Exemplary Women, 107–08; Wang Zhaoyuan, Lienü zhuan buzhu, 97. 56  Lü Kun, Gui fan, 3:61. His commentary here is discussed as an example of his focus on women as problem solvers in Handlin, “Lü K’un’s New Audience,” 22.

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assassination. If she can accomplish this, I will not begrudge a thousand in gold and rich rewards; but if she does not agree, then I will have to cut off the head of her elderly father in place of your honorable son-in-law’s head!” When he had finished speaking, he slammed the knife down on the table, and pointing straight at the father, said, “Old man, do you agree or not?” 取出利刃，恐嚇他道: “汝之婿吾之讎也，吾欲殺之以泄其憤，但因他 門戶嚴緊，不能得入。今聞其妻乃汝之女，故敢煩你通一信，與令愛 求他指一條路徑，以便我好行刺。若能成事，不惜千金厚報，倘若 不充，便請先斷老翁之首，以代領婿之頭。” 說罷，因將刀在槕上一 拍，指定其父道: “老丈還是肯也不肯？”57

These additions counter Lü Kun’s critique of both the enemy and the woman. The enemy has tried numerous direct attacks before resorting to hostagetaking. And since the father remains in captivity until after the murder, communicating with his daughter only by letter, she cannot orchestrate a flight as Lü Kun had suggested. In fact, both the heroine and the villain are more admirable in the yanyi version of the story. The father complies with the enemy’s demands, but he suspects that the threat to her father will not be enough to move his daughter to betray her husband: “I am only afraid that the love between husband and wife is deep.” (只怕 他們夫妻恩愛深。 )58 In other words, he believes that his daughter has in fact transferred her loyalty to her husband. But when his daughter hears the news, she is torn: In her heart, she hesitated for a long time, saying “If I do not obey and do not do this, then that desperate man will certainly kill my father, and if he kills my father, then I will have been unfilial. But if I obey and do it, then he will kill my husband, and if he kills my husband, I will have failed in righteousness. To be unfilial and unrighteous—even if I remain alive, how could I walk on the earth? I’d better take his place with my own body; then I can preserve them both.” 心下大費躊躇道: “我若不聼不行，則此狂徒必然殺父，殺之又則不孝 矣。我若聼而行之，則殺夫矣。殺夫則不義矣。不孝不義，雖生亦不 可以行於世。莫若以身當之，可以兩全。”59 57  G  ujin lienü zhuan yanyi, 5:24–25. 58  Gujin lienü zhuan yanyi, 5:25. 59  Gujin lienü zhuan yanyi, 5:25.

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The daughter’s internal monologue, like the enemy’s speech earlier, justifies her conduct. She thinks carefully about how to preserve both father and husband, calmly deciding that her life would be forfeit if she failed either one. While it is impossible to be sure that the Expanded Biographies was responding directly to Lü Kun’s critique, the Exemplars was extremely popular, and the Expanded Biographies’ expansion matches the Exemplars’ remarks closely. Like the various commentaries on Jier’s story, the competing editorial interpretations of the “Principled Woman of the Capital” show the extent to which editions of the Biographies existed in conversation with one another. The changes to this biography show the Expanded Biographies negotiating its “horizontal” relationships to other recent books in a similar market niche as well as its “vertical” relationship to the canonical source text. 3

The Yanyi Genre and the Rise of Qing

The Expanded Biographies rewrites many of the same biographies that late Ming editions grapple with, those that present heroines caught between natal and marital family loyalties. Its interpretive strategies include vernacularization, added dialogue, and plot expansion. All three processes are mutually imbricated, and all three allow the Expanded Biographies to harmonize Han dynasty virtues with late imperial values. The emotional development afforded by the dialogue and plot expansion is especially noteworthy because it reflects an important development in late imperial China: the rise of the cult of qing. This valorization of qing (passion, sentiment, emotion), which reached its apogee in the late Ming dynasty, created new ideals of relationships based on emotional connection, most famously the scholar-courtesan romance. It also advocated new paths to self-cultivation in which qing motivated virtuous behavior,60 although this positive view of qing never entirely replaced the earlier understanding of passion as an unruly force needing to be channeled and guided by ritual.61 In the Qing dynasty, explicit reverence for qing receded, but it left its mark on mainstream discourses surrounding both kinship and virtue. The passionate scholar-courtesan liaisons of the late Ming gave way to new ideals of companionate marriage and qing between husband and wife.62 The Expanded Biographies is one example of a Qing work that was influenced by the cult of qing without being a proponent of it. When the editor discusses qing explicitly, he remains cautious. After one description of a 60  Ko, Teachers of the Inner Chambers, 78–89. 61  See the discussion in the Introduction. 62  Mann, Precious Records, 22.

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harmonious marriage, he states: “As to the harmony of today’s husbands and wives, if I can keep from wallowing in affection or failing in ritual propriety, then whatever kind of person the sage consorts were, I am also that kind of person.” (今之夫妻和好，若能不溺於情，不失於禮，則二妃何人，予亦何 人哉。 )63 And later, he comments, “Between husband and wife, though there must be no wallowing in affection, there must also be no insufficiency of affection.” (夫妻之間，雖不可溺於情，亦不可不及於情。)64 His explicit discussion of qing is guarded: a good woman has sincere qing for her spouse, but not to excess. Virtue and ritual propriety are her guiding principles. Nevertheless, the cult of qing’s influence on the Expanded Biographies reveals itself indirectly. Both the protagonists’ speeches and the editor’s commentary appeal to the reader’s emotions rather than the logical demands of competing philosophical principles. This sets the Expanded Biographies apart from late Ming editions of the Biographies. Though Lü Kun’s Exemplars also shows the influence of the rising cult of qing,65 he does not ask the reader to get emotionally involved with a biography to the extent that the Expanded Biographies does. This difference in editorial tone arises partly from chronology. Although the cult of qing was already flourishing during the late Ming dynasty, it remained a distinct subculture. Attempts to harmonize passion and propriety in vernacular fiction, reflecting the integration of qing with more mainstream values, became more common in the early and high Qing dynasty.66 More importantly, however, the transformation of the Biographies into a vernacular yanyi, or expanded history, brought qing ineluctably to the fore. The added details and dialogue in Expanded Biographies are calculated for emotional impact, and the editor’s preface shows that he saw the work’s new emotional impact as an outcome of the rewriting process. In the preface to the Expanded Biographies, the editor begins by describing his linguistic translation project and ends by realizing the affective power of his achievement: [I] took that which was deep in meaning and extended and simplified it; where the language was concise, drew it out and added detail to it; where it was limited to one character, broadened and explained its roots and branches; where it was one phrase, analyzed it to make clear that which was dim and difficult and make familiar and well-known that which was 63  Gujin lienü zhuan yanyi, 1:7. 64  Gujin lienü zhuan yanyi, 1:22. 65  Handlin, “Lü K’un’s New Audience,” 29–34. 66  Epstein, Competing Discourses, 61–92.

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not understood. Rereading the book, I suddenly realized: the ancient women’s faces and eyes, sobbing and smiling as though alive, spirit and soul of past beauties, whether hidden or flaunted, were all there … if family members who cherish all human beings peek at it now and then, perhaps being moved because it is easy to understand, perhaps attempting it because it is near to their thoughts, how could this not be a great stratagem for encouraging the inhabitants of the inner quarters? 取其義深者，演而淺之；文簡者，繹而細之；約於一字者，廣詳其本 末；該於一語者，遍析其源流；使難晦者大明，不解者悉著。再一 流覽，忽覺古媛面目啼笑如生，往淑精神隱顯具在。…… 然室家之好 盡人窺見，或易解而感通，或近思而企及，又豈非鼓舞閨人之大機  栝哉？67

In the process of making the text linguistically comprehensible, the author has also made it come alive with the emotions of joy and sorrow. He presents himself as surprised by this result of his labors, but optimistic that the narrative’s emotional impact on the reader will lead to moral transformation. Vernacular transformation simultaneously makes the narratives easier to understand, closer to home, and more vividly moving; the expansion and explication of the yanyi version led inevitably to emotional development that transformed both the protagonists and the imagined reader. Linguistic translation from the classical to the vernacular is inseparable from the shift toward increased dialogue and detail; the combined result is generic transformation. The connection between emotional development and vernacularization in the Expanded Biographies is all the more interesting because the yanyi was a broad and ill-defined category having no particular association with passion. The term yanyi was common in titles and prefaces, and books described as yanyi typically took existing historical records and popularized them by expanding and explicating them in the vernacular. But as a lower-status literary form, the yanyi genre was not clearly defined: some late imperial authors used the term yanyi to refer to popularized history, others for fiction (xiaoshuo 小説) based on historical events, while still others used it as a general term for all vernacular fiction (tongsu xiaoshuo 通俗小説).68 Modern readers often think of yanyi as equivalent to “historical fiction,” and the most famous works in the yanyi genre, such as the Romance of the Three Kingdoms (Sanguo zhi yanyi 67  Gujin lienü zhuan yanyi, preface. 68  Huang Lin 黄霖 and Yang Xurong 楊緒容, “Yanyi bianlüe 演義辨略,” Wenxue pinglun 6 (2003): 10.

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三國志演義) do represent milestones in the artistic maturation of traditional

Chinese fiction.69 But late Ming critics often treated yanyi as a type of historiography rather than fiction,70 and historical writing itself allowed for rhetorical embellishment in the form of speeches.71 It is clear that many critics saw the yanyi, and many yanyi authors saw themselves, not as engaging in imaginative creation, but simply as explaining and popularizing a factual narrative. The Expanded Biographies lies on the “popular history” rather than the “historical novel” end of the capacious yanyi spectrum.72 Both preface and main text suggest that the editor saw himself as an interpreter of a didactic historical text, and that his choice of the term yanyi for the title reflects that vision. His techniques and results are different than Lü Kun’s, but his fundamental intellectual project is similar. The changes the Expanded Biographies makes to Liu Xiang’s biographies are limited to added details and dialogue, with no major plot developments: the father’s imprisonment in “Principled Woman of the Capital” is the most significant plot addition to any biography in the collection. And the author’s preface presents the book as a work of explication, not invention. But explaining the Biographies in yanyi form meant more than making a classical text linguistically comprehensible. Commentary and illustration could do that. It also meant making the text more logically comprehensible, by filling in gaps in the plot, and more ethically comprehensible, by accommodating the moral and emotional expectations of contemporary audiences. As an interpretive strategy, vernacular transformation went along with plot development and ethical mediation, allowing the Expanded Biographies to handle its problem biographies in a more nuanced way than the late Ming editions studied above. The editor uses rewriting alongside commentary to negotiate the competing demands of natal and marital family loyalty, fidelity to its source text and coherence with contemporary norms. The result is a coherent

69  David Rolston, Traditional Chinese Fiction and Fiction Commentary (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 166–88. 70  Huang Lin and Yang Xurong, “Yanyi bianlüe,” 8–10; Chen Weizhao 陳維昭, “Lun lishi yanyi de wenti dingwei 論歷史演義的文體定位,” Ming Qing xiaoshuo yanjiu (2000): 34–35; Sheldon Hsiao-peng Lu, From Historicity to Fictionality: The Chinese Poetics of Narrative (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 141. 71  Anthony Yu, “History, Fiction and the Reading of Chinese Narrative,” Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews (CLEAR) 10, no. 1/2 (1988): 7; Rolston, Traditional Chinese Fiction, 139–40. 72  Other authors did develop selections from the Biographies into full-fledged vernacular short stories, e.g., “Li Yuying Appeals for Justice from Jail” (Li Yuying yuzhong suyuan 李玉 英獄中訴冤), story 27 in Feng Menglong 馮夢龍, Xingshi hengyan 醒世恒言 (Nanjing: Jiangsu guji chubanshe, 1988). The story is discussed in Hanan, The Chinese Vernacular Story, 123.

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vision of ancient feminine virtue that has been profoundly, yet subtly shaped by contemporary mores. Each edition studied here functions in a complex network of illustrious textual ancestors and contemporary sibling books. Ming and Qing texts attempt to bring the divided loyalties of Han and Warring States heroines more fully into the marital household, bringing their unruly biographies into line with late imperial expectations for married women. They use textual, paratextual, and visual strategies to negotiate the demands of the canonical past and the clamoring present. Their commentaries, illustrations, and interpretive retellings worked to position each edition for success in the book market, to gain capital both from fidelity to an ancient source text and from adherence to current ideological norms, and to move and persuade their readers. Vernacular rewriting proves to be an especially powerful strategy in the early Qing Expanded Collected Biographies of Women, which creates a comprehensive accommodation between its ancient protagonists’ unfashionable virtues and the changing norms of the seventeenth century. Translation into the more expansive vernacular language opens the text to further expansion in the form of added details and dialogue, which subtly introduce new ethical standards into the source text. As the next chapter will show, vernacular rewriting in the fictional sphere follows the same pattern, in which translation leads to expansion and thence to ideological transformation.

chapter 2

The Marvelous in the Everyday: Domestic Space and Colloquial Fiction Rewriting earlier texts in new genres was a widespread phenomenon in late imperial China. The interventions performed by each rewriting are as unique as the stories and authors themselves, but characteristic patterns still emerge. When Qing dynasty authors rewrote classical tales as vernacular stories, they performed the same kind of interpretive work that characterized the transformation of liezhuan biography into yanyi popular history: harmonizing difficult-to-reconcile ideologies. This chapter examines three short stories with a strong domestic theme from the anonymous collection Parallel Words to Awaken Dreamers (Xingmeng pianyan 醒夢駢言, undated, hereafter Parallel Words), each of which translates and transforms a classical-language tale from Pu Songling’s (蒲松齡, 1640–1715) collection Liaozhai’s Records of the Strange (Liaozhai zhiyi 聊齋志異). These stories illustrate the connection between the colloquial written idiom, the short story genre, and gendered domestic space. Compared with their Liaozhai source tales, they reveal how two different genres associated with two different linguistic registers handle the same basic plot structure, illuminating the relationship between the classical tale and the vernacular story as genres. The linguistic and thematic characteristics of the vernacular short story make it uniquely suited to exploring the nexus of the everyday and commonplace, the concrete household space, and the tensions between affection (qing) and ritual propriety (li) in family relationships. In each of these stories, the feminine household space is conceptually linked to the common speech which describes it. Li Yu’s advice on teaching concubines to read in Casual Reflections of Idle Feeling suggests some reasons why: Seek out dramas with changing action and fiction with no holes in the plot, and let her leaf through them…. Why? Because the language contained in dramas and fiction is all common dialogue and ordinary language. When women read it, it is like encountering a familiar object.

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急覓傳奇之有情節，小説之無破綻者，聼其翻閲。…… 其故維何？以 傳奇小説所載之言，盡是常談俗語，婦人閲之若逢故物。1

Li Yu highlights the nexus of the feminine, the colloquial, and the quotidian. He likens common speech to an everyday object: it is easy to recognize and uniquely suited to women. Here, I will offer close readings of the written language used by the author of Parallel Words, then go on to consider the specific functions of late imperial vernacular as revealed in the collection. In these stories, the familiar idiom is used to render the inner, private world of the household. The household in turn has its own dynamics of high and low and its own subdivisions between relatively public spaces and relatively private ones, between ritualized behaviors and unscripted activities. These stories use extensive detail about domestic architecture to depict the complex ritual and emotional relationships between their female characters. These details reveal the connections between the colloquial register, the household space, and the everyday; they also point toward the complex network of other relationships between genres fictional and nonfictional, literary and nonliterary. 1

From Chuanqi to Huaben

Each story in the collection Parallel Words transforms a classical tale from Pu Songling’s Liaozhai’s Records of the Strange in genre, language, and theme. Liaozhai circulated in manuscript during its composition from roughly 1670 to 1690 and thereafter until its first printing in 1766. Parallel Words, which bears an attribution to the pseudonymous “Old Man who Maintains Simplicity” (Shoupu weng 守普翁), also known as “Master of the Chrysanthemum Plot” ( Juqi zhuren 菊畦主人), most likely dates from the second half of the eighteenth century. It was reprinted at least once, suggesting a fairly wide distribution.2 The literary transformation of Parallel Words operates on several 1  Li Yu 李漁, Li Yu quanji 李漁全集 (Taibei: Chengwen chubanshe, 1974), 5:2293–94. In the “Voice and Appearance” (Sheng rong 聲容) section, “Literature and Art” (Wen yi 文藝) subsection. 2  Parallel Words is undated and its author remains unidentified. Comparison of Parallel Words with the print edition and extant manuscript editions of Liaozhai shows that where print and manuscript differ, Parallel Words follows the print edition. It therefore postdates 1766. There are two extant woodblock print editions of Parallel Words: one with no printer given, and one printed by Jiashixuan press, which is a reprint of the other edition with a recarved

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levels: a linguistic translation from the classical to the colloquial idiom, a stylistic transformation from concise and ambiguous to expansive and explicatory, and a thematic shift away from an emphasis on the strange and uncanny toward a focus on the everyday tensions of the household space. Linguistic, stylistic, and thematic changes combine to effect the stories’ generic transformation from the chuanqi (tale of the strange) to the huaben or vernacular story genre.3 This analysis will use “classical” and “vernacular” not as immutable categories of language but as placeholding descriptors for the specific written language used by Pu Songling and Juqi zhuren in their collections. It will consider Juqi zhuren’s translation project on its own terms, first through analysis of the linguistic and thematic changes between the Liaozhai source tales and Juqi zhuren’s translations of them, then through examination of the preface to Parallel Words to see what the contemporary editor has to say about the book’s language and themes.4 The collection as a whole shows that the stylistic shift toward detailed explanation enables the thematic shift toward regulating the complex emotional and ritual tensions of the household space. The stories in Parallel Words focus on making sense of the quotidian domestic world, even when their source tales are ambiguous and uncanny. In arguing that the differences between the vernacular stories and their classical source tales are rooted in the change from one genre to another, I and altered title page. The Jiashixuan press flourished in the Qianlong and Jiaqing reign periods (1735–1820). Given that the vernacular story maintained its vitality primarily up to the end of the eighteenth century, and that the Jiashixuan edition is a reprint of an earlier printing, a date for Parallel Words in the second half of the eighteenth century is most plausible. On the dating of Parallel Words and its relationship to Liaozhai editions, see Gu Qing 顧青, “Xingmeng pianyan erkao 醒夢駢言二考” Wenxue yichan, no. 6 (1997): 94–96. On Liaozhai’s textual history, see Allan Barr, “The Textual Transmission of Liaozhai Zhiyi,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 44, no. 2 (1984): 517–37. 3  The chuanqi, strange tale, was already a recognized genre well before the Ming dynasty, while the term huaben to describe the colloquial short story did not become standard until the early 20th century. I retain it here for clarity, since more common contemporary terms, e.g., xiaoshuo 小説, baiguan 稗官, and baishi 稗史, are less specific. On these genres and the extent to which they were or were not codified in the Qing dynasty, see Lydia Sing-chen Chiang, Collecting the Self: Body and Identity in Strange Tale Collections of Late Imperial China (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 18–25; Hu Lianyu 胡蓮玉, “Zai bian ‘huaben’ fei ‘shuohuaren zhi diben’ 再辯 ‘話 本’ 非 ‘説話人之底本’,” Nanjing shida xuebao (shehui kexue ban), no. 5 (2003): 108–10; Zhou Zhaoxin 周兆新, “Huaben shiyi 話本釋義,” Guoxue yanjiu 2 (1994): 11; Charles J. Wivell, “The Term ‘Hua-Pen’,” in Transition and Permanence: Chinese History and Culture, ed. David C. Buxbaum and F. W. Mote (Hong Kong: Cathay, 1972), 299–301. 4  Patrick Hanan, “The Making of the Pearl-Sewn Shirt and the Courtesan’s Jewel Box,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 33 (1973), uses a similar analytical approach, comparing two vernacular stories from the well-known Sanyan collection edited by Feng Menglong to their classical source tales.

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bracket the historical and social changes that took place between the composition dates of Liaozhai and Parallel Words, which may have been as much as a century apart. For example, the rise in numbers of unmarried vagrant men or “bare sticks” (guanggun 光棍) over the course of the eighteenth century contributed to a new urgency to define family and gender roles.5 And the Qianlong emperor (r. 1735–1796) framed both widow suicides and chastity martyrs as reckless and irrational. Although widow suicide was banned from the earliest years of the Qing, the more comprehensive policies of the Qianlong era reflected a distinctively eighteenth-century preference for sober, principled, and steady expressions of feminine virtue, rather than passionate or dramatic ones.6 Thus, the late eighteenth-century Parallel Words’ selection of domestically-focused stories from the late seventeenth-century, thematically varied Liaozhai collection can be traced to the contemporary concern with family stability as the foundation of the political order. Such changes in historical context do not render genre unimportant, however. It is no coincidence that the vernacular story genre became the medium for the reworked tales: moral didacticism, a wealth of concrete detail, and a relatively middlebrow social locale were characteristic features of the vernacular story from its earliest stages in the Ming.7 Genres as social institutions have a certain inertial longevity, but their cultural impact varies with the sudden timeliness of particular historical concerns.8 Such is the case here: the existing generic characteristics of the short story form dovetailed neatly with particular historical tensions and, perhaps, with the author’s personal preoccupations. The short colloquial narrative as a genre thus provided the author of Parallel Words with a uniquely appropriate vehicle for elaborating family ideology and reconciling its inherent tensions by adding a wealth of domestic detail. 1.1 “Gengniang” and “The Reluctant Bigamist” In the first story pair I will examine, both tale and story depict a harmonious co-wife relationship based on mutual affection, but expanded depictions of the household space allow the vernacular story to address the ritual challenges to their relationship more thoroughly. This is the Liaozhai tale “Gengniang” (庚娘)9 and its vernacular counterpart in Parallel Words, entitled “Linking New Verses, Lovers Swear by Oceans and Mountains; Reciting Old Lyrics, The 5  Sommer, Sex, Law and Society, 12–14. 6  Theiss, “Managing Martyrdom,” 68–74. 7  Hanan, The Chinese Vernacular Story, 16, 22–27. 8  On genres as social institutions, see Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 106–115. 9  This is entry no. 111 in the variorum edition edited by Zhang Youhe or the 28th story in the 3rd juan of the Zhang manuscript (hereafter referenced as 3.28). Pu Songling 蒲松齢, Liaozhai

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Jade is Reunited and the Pearl Returns” (Lian xinju shanmeng haishi yong jiuci bihe zhuhuan 聯新句山盟海誓詠舊詞璧合珠還, hereafter “The Reluctant Bigamist”). The basic plot is as follows: Couple A sets off on a boat journey and meets Couple B; Husband B covets Wife A and pushes Husband A overboard, then attempts to seduce Wife A. Wife B rebukes Husband B and he throws her overboard. Husband A and Wife B are rescued separately, while Husband B drags Wife A to his home, where she kills him and commits suicide. Husband A eventually encounters Wife B and reluctantly agrees to marry her. Meanwhile, Wife A is miraculously resurrected and unearthed by tomb robbers. Husband A and Wife A are reunited, and Wife A is delighted to see Wife B, who greets her with the ritual appropriate to a concubine greeting a main wife. A refuses to accept this honor and insists on treating B as a co-wife and addressing her as sister. The trio lives happily ever after.10 In both the tale and the story, the depiction of a harmonious polygynous household relies on the analogy of sibling affection: the two wives treat each other as sisters. In so doing, the narrative draws on an extensive body of romantic stories about two-wife polygyny, which are distinct from both monogamous romances and those in which one man has three or more women. In stories where two roughly equal-status women marry the same man, one or both of the women usually initiates the marriage, and the emotional bond between the women is commonly foregrounded, sometimes subsuming the relationship between the husband and either of his wives.11 This motif contrasts sharply with the vision of polygyny found in other genres. Morality books (quanshanshu 勸善書), those offering prescriptive visions of how to live, overwhelmingly insist that the key to harmony in the women’s quarters is for both the concubine and the husband to uphold the wife’s primary status. To quote the revered Sima Guang on the wife-concubine relationship: “The concubine serves her mistress just as the minister serves the ruler. Their relative status is completely different, and the ritual observances should make this clear.” (妾事 女君，猶臣事君也。尊卑殊絕，禮節宜明。 )12 In morality books and household codes, highly popular genres in the late Ming and early Qing, it is assumed that adult women who marry into the same household (whether concubines and wives, mothers- and daughters-in law, or sisters-in-law) will naturally tend zhiyi: huijiao huizhu huipingben 聊齋誌異: 會校會注會評本, 2nd ed. (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 2011), 383–88. 10  I have used A and B to facilitate comparison, since the characters have different names in each version. 11  Keith McMahon, Polygamy and Sublime Passion: Sexuality in China on the Verge of Modernity (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2010), 44–47. 12  Sima Guang 司馬光, Jia fan 家範, Siku quanshu, Wenyuange ed. (Hong Kong: Dizhi wenhua chuban youxian gongsi, 2006), 10:6.

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to quarrel, and that strict ritual observance of their hierarchy is the sine qua non of household harmony.13 Thus, the first wife’s refusal of the second wife’s ritual bows is not simply a graceful form of humility or a refusal to dominate a potential rival. Rather, the first wife rejects the entire relational logic in which ritual propriety overwhelmingly trumps emotion and in which it is assumed that affection cannot possibly exist between unrelated women—let alone those competing for the affections of the same man. “Gengniang” and “The Reluctant Bigamist” unite in their relative valorization of qing over the ritual observance of status boundaries as a key to happy family life. But neither version of the story allows the wholesale rejection of ritual: aspects of ritual are still important in creating this new domain of affection. For example, in both versions the husband is reluctant to remarry; he feels that taking a second main wife would be a betrayal of Wife A. But in the classical tale, taking a concubine is not a betrayal in the same way that remarrying would be. As long as the husband does not elevate another woman to Wife A’s status, it remains perfectly acceptable for him to take another sexual partner (as we will see, the husband of the vernacular story remains sexually faithful as well). His loyalty to his first wife’s memory is a valorization of qing, but his expression of that loyalty is determined by li, by maintaining Wife A’s ritual primacy. At the same time, Wife B’s ritual mourning for Husband A’s parents is the main way by which she expresses her love and loyalty to him and eventually convinces him to take her as a concubine. In the classical tale, affection supersedes ritual, but the enactment of affection relies on ritual. There are, however, significant differences between the Liaozhai tale and Parallel Words’ reworked version. Parallel Words translates the formal and concise idiom of the Liaozhai tale into a colloquial register and expands the story in the process. Here, for example, are the opening lines of “Liaozhai”: Jin Dayong, the son of an old Zhongzhou family, had gotten betrothed to the daughter of Prefect You, styled Gengniang, who was beautiful and worthy. 金大用，中州舊家子也。聘尤太守女，字庚娘，麗而賢。14 13  On the popularity of didactic literature in the Ming and Qing, see Cynthia Joanne Brokaw, The Ledgers of Merit and Demerit: Social Change and Moral Order in Late Imperial China (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 25–27; Catherine M. Bell, “‘A Precious Raft to Save the World’: The Interaction of Scriptural Traditions and Printing in a Chinese Morality Book,” Late Imperial China 17, no. 1 (1996): 159–63; Tadao Sakai, “Confucianism and Popular Educational Works,” in Self and Society in Ming Thought, ed. Wm. Theodore de Bary (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970), 330–41. 14  Pu Songling, Liaozhai zhiyi, 383.

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And here are the corresponding sentences at the beginning of “The Reluctant Bigamist”: During the Chongzhen period of the Ming dynasty, in Yifeng county in Kaifeng prefecture in Henan, there was a man named Song Dazhong. His father was Song Zhuojie and his mother was from the Weng clan. He was their only child. His ancestors were also scholars and the family property they’d handed down, though not wealthy, was still enough to get by and make a living on. When Song Dazhong got to be twenty years old, Song Zhuojie found a wife for him. She was the daughter of Licentiate Shi in the same county, and her nickname was Xinniang. Xinniang looked just like a flowerbud, one hundred percent beautiful. 明朝崇禎年間，河南開封府儀封縣地方，有一個人，姓宋名大中。父 親宋倬喈，母親翁氏。只生下他一個。祖上也是讀書的，傳下家業，    雖不厚，也還將就過活得。宋大中到了二十歲，宋倬喈與他娶一房媳 婦，是同縣史秀才的女兒，小名喚做辛娘。辛娘生得如花朵一般，十 分嬌美。15

There are differences on several levels. One is purely linguistic: the vernacular story uses numerous binomes: difang 地方 (place), fuqin 父親 (father), muqin 母親 (mother), shengxia 生下 (to give birth to), and jiaye 家業 (family property), among others. The classical tale has only one binome, the title taishou 太守 (prefect). The vernacular story uses less formal words and some colloquialisms: qu 娶 (to take a wife) instead of pin 聘 (to send betrothal gifts), xiao­ming 小名 (nickname) instead of zi 字 (courtesy name), and the long colloquial phrase ye hai jiangjiu guohuo de 也還將就過活得 (still enough to get by and make a living on). The vernacular story also inserts numerous grammatical particles and clarifying phrases: “in the region,” “during the years,” “there was a person,” “although,” “but still,” and so on, which are absent in the classical tale. Finally, the vernacular story adds information: the exact years and place of the story’s background, the names of the protagonist’s parents, the fact that he is an only son, and details about his family and property. The changes wrought by translation as the story opens shift the atmosphere from elegant formality to chatty comfort. But the same kinds of linguistic changes have a very different effect in another episode in the story, in which Wife A kills both her kidnapper and his mother. Here is the scene from the Liaozhai tale “Gengniang”: 15  Xingmeng pianyan 醒夢駢言, Qing Qianlong reprint (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1990), 11:1.

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Gengniang took the vessels and extinguished the candle, saying she was going to urinate. She left the room, then entered with a knife. In the darkness she groped for Wang’s neck with her hand; Wang grasped her arm and made affectionate noises. Gengniang cut him forcefully, but he did not die—he howled and sat up. She wielded it again; only then did he die. The old woman thought she heard a noise and hurried to ask about it, and the woman killed her also. 庚娘撤器滅燭，託言溲溺。出房，以刀入，暗中以手索王項，王猶捉 臂作昵聲。庚娘力切之，不死，號而起；又揮之，始殪。媼仿佛有 聞，趨向之。女亦殺之。16

And translated into the vernacular, in “The Reluctant Bigamist”: Xinniang put him off deliberately. She put away the cups, the wine pot and the other dishes and blew out the candle. Saying only that she wanted to relieve herself, she left the room and went into the kitchen, where she got a kitchen knife and returned to the room. She approached the side of the bed, and in the dark she stretched out her left hand and felt for Li Thirteen’s neck. Li Thirteen grasped that arm and held it, saying “How soft and smooth!” But Xinniang had already fixed her aim on his neck. With force she struck a blow, but he did not die. Li Thirteen felt great pain. He sat straight up and yelled “What are you doing?” Xinniang again gave a forceful strike. Li Thirteen fell over on the bed, neither making a sound nor breathing. Xinniang kept on striking blindly a few more times. When she felt him, his head was no longer attached to his neck. That Yang shi’s room was on the other side of the wall. She heard the shouting in her sleep and woke up, alarmed, but the shouting had stopped, and she heard something being chopped. She couldn’t stop worrying, so she put on some clothes and went over. Seeing that the door of the room was open, but there was no light, she asked “Why haven’t you two closed the door and gone to sleep? What was the shouting about just now?” As she was speaking, her two feet walked into the room. Xinniang heard Yang shi coming and thought to herself, “Perfect. This old beast didn’t know how to manage her son, letting him go out and harm people—I’ll kill the whole family.” Thereupon she turned around and struck full on, but this time lower than before, striking her in the chest. Yang shi screamed “Why are you starting to hit me?” Yang shi couldn’t see in the dark and 16  Pu Songling, Liaozhai zhiyi, 385.

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just kept asking who was hitting her. The knife struck with great force, breaking several of her ribs. Yang shi yelled that one sentence, then fell over and passed out. Xinniang went down to the floor again, felt for her head, struck several times, and cut that off too. 辛娘故意挨延，收拾了杯壺器皿，吹滅了火，只說要淨手，出房去到 廚下，拿了把廚刀，回進房來。走到牀邊，黑暗裡伸左手去摸那李十 三脖頸。李十三還捧住了那條臂膊，道聲: “好嫩滑。” 早被辛娘照著 項上，用力切下一刀，卻切不死，李十三痛極了，直坐起來喊道: “做 什麼？” 辛娘又用力一刀砍去。李十三倒在牀上，聲息俱無。辛娘又 瞎七瞎八亂砍了幾刀，去摸他時，頭已不在頸上。那楊氏的房就在 間壁，睡夢中聽得叫喊，驚了醒來，卻不喊了，像在那裡砍什麼東 西。放心不下，披了衣服走過來。見那房門還開著，卻沒有火。問 道: “你們為什麼房門都不閉了睡？方才喊甚的？” 嘴裡說，兩隻腳便 走入去。辛娘聽見楊氏來，心中道: “正好，這老畜生平日間不曉得管  兒子，放出去害人，我也殺他一家。” 便回身把刀劈面砍來卻砍來，    卻砍低了些，砍著胸脯。楊氏嚷道: “怎便打起我來？” 楊氏暗中不見，    還只道誰打他。那刀砍得勢重，把肋骨都砍斷了幾根。楊氏喊得那 一句，就便跌倒暈去。辛娘又去地上，摸著他頭，連砍幾刀，也砍  下來。17

Here, the added information includes dialogue—we learn what kind of “affectionate noises” the kidnapper makes to the wife—as well as information about the woman’s motivations—for example, why she kills the old mother as well. We also learn more about the architecture of the household space and the location of specific rooms. Most notably, the translation provides new and gory details about the violence, turning a murder scene into one of wild butchery. In both scenes translated into the vernacular and re-translated into English above, the vernacular’s greater expansiveness creates a decrease in ambiguity from tale to story: The linguistic process of adding syllables and words and clarifying grammatical relationships goes hand in hand with the stylistic process of filling in details and dialogue, giving motivations and adding explanations, and providing the reader with clear emotional cues. “The Reluctant Bigamist” adds material throughout its version of the story, but two more episodes of significantly increased detail shed particular light on the translator’s thematic and generic concerns. The first episode is the struggle to get the husband to accept Wife B as a concubine; this occurs in the middle of 17  Xingmeng pianyan, 11:7.

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the story. The second is its greatly expanded conclusion, after Wife A returns, which describes how the three make their unusual marriage work. In both tale and story, the husband is reluctant to accept Wife B as a concubine, but the story makes the process both longer and more dramatic. In “Gengniang,” the process happens as follows: Wife B and Husband A are both rescued from the river, and she begs him to marry her > He refuses because he is mourning his parents > She weeps for his parents > He refuses out of loyalty to his wife’s memory > She says she is willing to be a concubine > He goes on a long military campaign > He finally marries her. In “The Reluctant Bigamist,” this is the chain of events, with additions to the vernacular story italicized: Wife B and Husband A are both rescued from the river, and she begs him to marry her > He refuses because he is mourning his parents > She weeps for his parents > He refuses out of loyalty to his wife’s memory > She says she is willing to be a concubine > He goes on a long military campaign > On his return, he learns she has observed three years of ritual mourning for his parents > He still refuses to marry her and decides to be a monk > A friend intervenes and persuades him that he has to have offspring to be a filial son > He finally marries her but still does not consummate the marriage until after the reappearance of Wife A. One key addition is that the husband does not consummate the marriage with Wife B before Wife A returns. This establishes him as a man of qing. For a widow to be faithful to her dead husband was praised, for a man to do the same was not only unnecessary but downright eccentric—but of course, eccentricity was one of the hallmarks of qing. Thus, the discourse of qing is strengthened in the story: the husband does not simply wait a decent interval after his wife’s and parents’ deaths before taking a new concubine, he actually refuses to consummate the new marriage even after this interval. Second, ritual is noticeably more important in the story version. Wife B does not simply weep on Husband A’s parents’ grave: she carries out three full years of ritual mourning, with all its restrictions on food and clothing. This is a more onerous duty than an afternoon of passionate weeping; it underlines that Wife B has taken on the ritual duties of a wife and daughter-in-law. Incidentally, this undercuts her assertion that she is willing to be a mere concubine; these ritual duties were a major part of what distinguished a wife from a concubine. Thus, in both tale and story,

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ritual gesture underlines the characters’ emphasis on affection; however, the vernacular story makes ritual even more significant. In the next episode of the story, in which the husband finally agrees to accept the concubine, spatial and physical description is much fuller than in the tale, serving to establish the characters’ relationships: Chen Zhongwen [a friend] arranged a room for them, chose a day, and brought them together. When Song Dazhong [Husband A] got into the room, he just wept and wouldn’t get into bed. Wang shi [Wife B] didn’t blame him even so, but instead arranged another place for him to sleep facing in a different direction, and during the day she served him attentively. Song Dazhong felt great compassion for her and said with intense regret, “I wish I could split my body in two, remain faithful to Xinniang’s [Wife A’s] memory with one, and be a full husband to you with the other!” Wang shi repressed a smile and said nothing. 陳仲文便收拾間房，揀個日與他兩人配合。宋大中到房中，只是涕 泣，不上牀。王氏倒也不怪他，另與他側首開了個睡場，日間小心代 侍著他。宋大中也十分憐憫，對王氏自恨道: “我怎麼不能把身子分做 兩個，一個守著辛娘，一個周全你。” 王氏忍著笑，不開口。 18

The first thing the friend does when he wants to complete their marriage is to set up a room for them; then the husband enters the room but won’t get into bed, then Wife B sets up a sleeping place at a different angle emphasizing their non-sexual relationship. And finally, the husband expresses a desire to literally have two bodies with which to fulfill his separate relationships to his two women. These physical and spatial details, present in the vernacular story but not in the classical tale, are key to depicting the characters’ emotional interactions. Increased attention to ritual gesture and spatial detail is equally noteworthy in the vernacular story’s greatly expanded conclusion. In the Liaozhai tale “Gengniang,” the dénouement is narrated as follows: Tang shi [Wife B] met Gengniang [Wife A] with the ritual appropriate to [greeting] the legal wife. Gengniang was surprised and asked about her, and Jin [Husband A] told her the whole story. Gengniang took her hand and said “After one conversation on our shared boat ride, my heart has never forgotten you, but I would never have guessed that [the warring 18  Xingmeng pianyan, 11:18.

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states of] Wu and Yue could become one family. Now I am grateful to you for mourning my parents-in-law in my stead—I should thank you first, what need to greet me with this ritual?” Thereupon they went in order of age. Tang was a year younger than Gengniang, so Gengniang treated her as a younger sister. 唐氏以嫡禮見庚娘。庚娘驚問，金始備述其由。庚娘執手曰: “同舟一 話，心常不忘，不圖吳越一家矣。蒙代葬翁姑，所當首謝，何以此禮 相嚮？” 乃以齒序，唐少庚娘一歲，妹之。 19

The classical tale ends with no further discussion of the marital situation. In “The Reluctant Bigamist,” the meeting between the two wives is narrated in very similar fashion, but the story adds the detail that the wives “bowed equally to each other with four bows.” (並拜了四拜)20 Again, physical, ritual action is central to defining the characters’ emotional state as well as clarifying their family status. The four equal bows cement the parity of the two wives, which was initiated verbally when they decided to address each other as sister. But the story does not end there. It continues: The first night, Song Dazhong [the husband] stayed in Xinniang’s [Wife A’s] room talking about old times with her. Only then did Xinniang learn that though her husband and Wang shi [Wife B] were married in name, they were still only “dry husband and wife,” and she wanted to send him over there that same night, but Song Dazhong didn’t listen. The second night, Xinniang bolted the door to her own room first, and Song Dazhong had no choice but to come to Wang shi’s room…. Then he told Wang shi how Xinniang had wanted to send him over the night before, and on this night had bolted her door before he got there. Wang shi was extremely grateful…. After this he spent one night in each place, going back and forth between the two rooms. 宋大中到那西首屋裡，第一夜先在辛娘房中，與他敘了些舊。辛娘才 曉得丈夫和王氏雖號成親，還只是乾夫妻，便連夜要送他那邊去。卻 是宋大中不聽。第二夜辛娘先把自己房門閉了，宋大中只得來到王氏 房中。…… 便將昨夜辛娘要送自己過來，並今夜先閉了房門，對王氏 說。王氏十分感激。…… 從此他一夜一處，往來兩邊房裡。21 19  Pu Songling, Liaozhai zhiyi, 387. 20  Xingmeng pianyan, 11:21. 21  Xingmeng pianyan, 11:21–22.

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Song’s movements through the house sketch out this portrait of a marriage. Each wife has her own bedroom, while the husband travels between them; the first wife’s bolted door forces him into the second wife’s room. His equitable division of time between these spaces represents and enacts the two wives’ unusual parity, even as the first wife’s initiative in the process indicates her subtle primary status and authority. The vernacular narrative contains numerous areas of added physical and spatial detail, from the darkened room that forms the setting for the first wife’s killing of her abductor, to the bed in which the husband and his second wife lie side by side but with their heads at opposite ends, using posture to enact their “dry” marriage. In the discussion of the triple marriage at the end of the story, the sheer volume of discussion reveals the problematic nature of the situation. Even this excruciatingly fair spatial distribution of the husband’s marital attentions is unsustainable. His back-and-forth movement between the two rooms can only be a temporary solution to the problem of two-wife polygyny. How can two women share the same ritual status and authority? The story continues: [The friend, Chen Wenzhong] persuaded Song Dazhong to let Xinniang remain in Zhenjiang and have Wang shi always live in Huaishang, and Song Dazhong listened. After this he had two places to live, and he himself came and went between the two, going back and forth many times in the course of each year. 勸宋大中留辛娘常住鎮江，令王氏永居淮上。宋大中依言，從此他有 兩個住居，自己來去其間。一年裡頭，要走好幾回。22

Two wives cannot govern the same household for long. Instead, the household itself undergoes mitosis to create a separate sphere of authority for each woman, concretized in their separate domestic spaces. Instead of splitting his body in two as he had expressed a desire to do earlier, the husband splits the household in two and travels between them. Unlike the classical tale, the vernacular story cannot simply present the victory of qing affection—between the husband and each woman, or between the women themselves—as a fait accompli. Rather, the ritual tension that co-wife marriage presents is a major obstacle, until added detail about the household and its boundaries serves to justify the strange marriage, giving its conditions of possibility. 22  Xingmeng pianyan, 11:23.

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“Gengniang,” like all Liaozhai stories, centers on the strange: yi 異 or qi 奇. The tale contains several strange elements: the resurrection and return of the dead first wife, the reunion of the original couple by means of poetry, and the dénouement in which the man ends up happily married to two wives of equal status (a common event in fiction and drama, but illegal and rare in real life).23 The terms yi and qi between them encompassed a cluster of meanings including different, unusual, outstanding, foreign, heterodox, eccentric, original, amazing, odd, and deviant.24 In this light, both the two-wife polygamous marriage and the resurrection of the original wife qualify as qi. But the two events are unusual in different ways, and the relative emphasis on them in tale and story reflects that difference. For a dead woman to revive years after her burial is physically impossible; for a man to marry two wives was illegal and socially heterodox.25 “The Reluctant Bigamist” contains both these qi plot elements, but with the emphasis reversed. In “Gengniang,” the text spends 263 characters, or 13.6% of the text, narrating the resurrection/tomb opening sequence; in “The Reluctant Bigamist,” the same episode takes up 464 characters, representing only 4.1% of the text. In contrast, the dénouement of “Gengniang,” with its discussion of the marriage, takes up 86 characters, or 4.5% of the text, while the vernacular story devotes 1526 characters, or 13.3% of the text, to the protagonists’ marital arrangements.26 (Fig. 5) Thus, the two narratives offer almost perfectly mirrored differential emphasis: the tale foregrounds the supernatural through its relatively lengthy description, while narrating the socially unorthodox more briefly. The vernacular story retains the supernatural event, but its impact is diminished by the wealth of extra detail and dialogue that pads the rest of the plotline. Thus, the space of the supernatural shrinks beneath the pressure of the everyday, and the homely details of domestic architecture impose clarity on 23  On two-wife polygyny in fiction, see Keith McMahon, Misers, Shrews, and Polygamists: Sexuality and Male-Female Relations in Eighteenth-Century Chinese Fiction (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), 113–22. On the legal impossibility of marriage to more than one main wife, see article 103 of the Qing Code, Da Qing lüli (Beijing: Falü chubanshe), 206. 24  For a discussion of the semantic nuances of yi, qi, and guai, see Judith T. Zeitlin, Historian of the Strange: Pu Songling and the Chinese Classical Tale (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 5–6. 25  As Zeitlin points out, the category of the “supernatural” in Western thought cannot be automatically applied to other cultures or time periods; and indeed, it is precisely the blurring of categories like “possible” and “impossible” that gives many Liaozhai tales their “strange” quality (Zeitlin, Historian of the Strange, 7). Nevertheless, I believe these two events would have struck Chinese readers as categorically different. 26  These calculations are based on narrative text, omitting prologues and epilogues.

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the plot. Through translation and expansion, the ambiguity so central to the Liaozhai tale has been drastically reduced.27 Parallel Words’ translation project has linguistic, thematic, and generic implications: increased linguistic detail goes hand in hand with increased spatial and psychological detail. These linguistic and literary strategies reinforce the story’s increased thematic emphasis on both passion and propriety and allow the author to harmonize these two very different discourses. 1.2 “Danan” and “The Virtuous Concubine” A second story pair also explores the wife-concubine relationship; in this case, Parallel Words’ expansion of the Liaozhai tale allows it to balance romantic passion with two competing values, ritual and thrift, within a larger extended family setting than the tale. This is Liaozhai’s “Danan” (大男)28 and Parallel Words’ fourth story, “A Jealous Wife Is Fittingly Recompensed with Hardship; A Noble Consort Greatly Enjoys Honor” (Dufu qiaoshang ku’e shuji daxiang ronghua 妒婦巧償苦厄淑姬大享榮華, hereafter “The Virtuous Concubine”). The shared plot goes like this: A man flees home when his harsh wife (A) abuses his virtuous concubine (B); the concubine bears his son after his departure. Later, the wife forces them to live in a separate household. When the son runs away to look for his father, the wife forcibly sells the concubine, who ends up marrying 27  On ambiguity as central to the Liaozhai tales, see Zeitlin, Historian of the Strange, 5. 28  Variorum edition no. 447 or Zhang edition 11.35.

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her original husband as his main wife. When she cannot have children, she urges her husband to take a concubine, who turns out to be the original harsh wife, A. B offers to treat A as a sister and co-wife, but the husband insists that A show B the respect due from a concubine-maidservant to a wife and punishes A until she complies. Eventually, the grown son returns to the family as well. Again, the main changes from tale to story consist in translation to a colloquial idiom and expansion through added detail, and again, the changes in emphasis are significant. The difference is present even in the titles: Liaozhai’s “Danan” is the name of the son who seeks and finds his father, while Parallel Words’ “A Jealous Wife Is Fittingly Recompensed with Hardship; A Noble Consort Greatly Enjoys Honor” draws the reader’s focus to the wife and concubine’s role-switching. Then, in its narration of the years when the protagonists are separated, the tale devotes roughly equal space to the saga of the son in search of his father, and to the experiences of the concubine, wife, and husband. The vernacular story reduces the account of the son’s journey to a brief flashback after the family has been reunited, while the complexities of the household relationships take center stage. Here I will examine the added material at the beginning of the story leading up to the concubine’s banishment from the house. Here is the opening paragraph of “Danan”: Xi Chenglie was a scholar of Chengdu. He had a wife and a concubine. The concubine’s name was He shi, called Zhaorong. His wife had died young and he had married again to a Shen shi, who was extremely jealous by nature and abused He shi and even Xi himself. With the daylong quarreling, he could not endure life. Xi became angry and fled. After he left, He gave birth to a son, Danan. When Xi did not return, Shen drove He out, unwilling to share a hearth with her, giving her a regular allotment of grain. 奚成列，成都士人也。有一妻一妾。妾何氏，小字昭容。妻早沒，繼 娶申氏，性妒，虐遇何，因並及奚；終日嘵聒，恆不聊生。奚怒，亡 去。去後，何生一子大男。奚去不返，申擯何不與同炊，計日授粟。29

These initial facts set up the main part of the tale, but are presented in concise and unadorned fashion. “The Virtuous Concubine,” on the other hand, goes into extensive detail to explain the initial household setup of one previously married and widowed husband, one (second) wife, and one concubine. 29  Pu Songling, Liaozhai zhiyi, 1564.

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First, the text carefully justifies the presence of the concubine through a lengthy and tearful conversation between the husband and his first wife (a character who does not appear at all in the tale). She is ill and suspects that she will die before bearing children, so she urges her reluctant husband to keep her maid as a concubine: Chen shi [the first wife] urged her husband several times to keep her [the maid], but because the husband and wife were so sincerely affectionate, he was unwilling to agree, saying “Even though you’re sick, it’s not certain that you won’t get better someday. Besides, you and I are still young. Why worry that we won’t be able to have a son?” Chen shi saw that her husband wouldn’t agree and she began to cry despite herself, saying: “If I could have a son of my own, do you really think I’d insist on urging you? It’s just because I believe I not only can’t give birth, even this life of mine won’t last much longer! This maid has been with me since she was a child, growing up by my side. If you keep her on as a concubine after I’m dead, when you look at her, it will be just like looking at me.” 陳氏幾次勸丈夫留他，俞大成因夫妻情篤，不肯應許，道 : “你雖有 病，未必沒有好的日了。況你我年紀都還不大，何必便憂到生不出 兒子。” 陳氏見丈夫再四不從，不覺掉下淚來，道: “我若自己養得出兒 子，難道必要來勉強你？只因我自問不但個能生育，這性命也不久在 世上的。這丫頭是從小在我身邊長大起來，若在留得他做妾，我死後 你看了他，猶如看我一般。”30

Why does the concubine’s presence need explanation in the vernacular story but not in the tale? Concubinage, after all, was an accepted privilege of wealth. As Keith McMahon points out, it was a powerful cultural norm even if the percentage of men who could actually practice polygyny was relatively small, under ten percent.31 Nevertheless, the husband’s reluctance to take a concubine is a key element in the story. First, it signals to the reader that the husband is a man of qing, just as it did in “The Reluctant Bigamist.” His initial unwillingness to take a concubine is because of the husband and wife’s mutual sincere affection, the text informs us. Even the wife’s final and successful argument is one based on affection: the maid is close to her, so if he keeps the maid as a concubine, she will be a kind of human memento of the wife.

30  Xingmeng pianyan, 4:2. 31  McMahon, Misers, Shrews, and Polygamists, 22.

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There is also another, less obvious meaning in the husband’s aspiration to sexual fidelity. Though concubinage was socially acceptable, it was also an expensive luxury and potentially morally suspect when it proceeded from lust rather than the praiseworthy desire for an heir. One eighteenth-century morality book promises an evil fate to husbands who wrong their wives and children by taking concubines when they already have children.32 Concubines could represent problematic sexual indulgence and wasteful excess: Mainstream values of sexual moderation and thrift would discourage the taking of a concubine by a relatively young man of modest means. In representing the husband as reluctant to take a concubine (as the tale does not), the vernacular version of the story simultaneously appeals to two sets of values: the unorthodox “cult of qing” so often celebrated in the scholar-beauty romance, and the middlebrow propriety of morality books and household codes. Though the explicit emphasis is on affection, “The Virtuous Concubine” keeps its foot in the door of Confucian morality with its portrayal of the hero. In the end, however, the husband finally bows to his wife’s affectionate pressure and takes her servant as concubine. When the first wife dies, the vernacular story goes on to portray the husband as reluctant to seek another main wife, preferring to live out his days with the concubine. Eventually, of course, he does remarry, and this decision is also painstakingly justified. Here the world of the vernacular story diverges even more strikingly from the tale, reaching beyond the chuanqi’s minimalist cast of characters to portray the complex web of family and clan obligations within which the three protagonists act. In place of the tale’s simple statement that the man had been married before, was widowed, and remarried, “The Virtuous Concubine” describes the scolding from the clan elders that eventually forces the husband to remarry: “With no wife you cannot establish a household! Huilan, after all, is only a maidservant-concubine. How can she be a helpmeet of the inner quarters?” (無婦不成家，惠蘭到底只是婢妾，如何算得內助？)33 Ritual necessity, like affection, is more explicit and intrusive in the vernacular story text than in the classical source tale “Danan.” The husband may be personally satisfied with the sexual companionship and household management of his concubine, but she is unable to fulfill a wife’s ritual place in the family structure. The clan elders—who are completely absent from the tale—take 32  Shi Chengjin, Chuanjia bao, 1:1:24. For biographical information on Shi Chengjin (1659– sometime after 1739), a prolific author of short stories and moral maxims who never took the civil service examination, see Roland Altenburger, “Early Qing Yangzhou in Shi Chengjin’s Vernacular Vignettes,” in Lifestyle and Entertainment in Yangzhou, ed. Lucie B. Olivová (Copenhagen: NIAS Press, 2009), 150–51. 33  Xingmeng pianyan, 4:3.

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charge and insist that the protagonist establish a ritually complete household. Though our hero’s affection for his first wife’s memory and his current concubine makes him reluctant to remarry, the story is frank about the family pressures and ritual obligations that oblige him to do so. In the classical tale, the presence of the wife and concubine merely sets the stage for the truly marvelous events: the journey of the son in search of his father, and the elevation of the concubine to main wife status. The conflicts between inclination and obligation that combine to create the story’s opening tableau are simply not on the radar of “Danan.” The last significant piece of added information in the opening scenes of “The Virtuous Concubine” (we are still dealing with the first few lines of the tale, and already several pages into the story) concerns the concubine’s departure from the household. In “Danan,” the wife takes the initiative: “When Xi [the husband] did not return, Shen [the wife] drove He [the concubine] out, unwilling to share a hearth with her, giving her a regular allotment of grain.” The vernacular story, however, again describes a far more complex process involving the clan elders. In “The Virtuous Concubine,” the wife makes the concubine’s life miserable, beats her while she is pregnant in an attempt to make her miscarry, and finally tries to drown her infant son in the chamber pot. This is the last straw for the long-suffering concubine Huilan: At this, Huilan became furious, knowing that it was Sun shi [the wife] and no other who had done it. She took her baby in her arms, went to the clan elders, and told them all about it, weeping. The whole clan was troubled and agreed to speak to Sun shi together. Sun shi, however, denied it. Huilan kept crying and insisting that everyone come up with a plan to preserve the flesh and blood of the master. Everyone then told Sun shi to give mother and son a certain amount of rice and a certain amount of money every year, brick off two little rooms from the rest of the house and open a separate doorway, and let the two of them live by themselves. When Sun shi saw that this was the whole clan’s common decision, she had no choice but to force herself to agree. 惠蘭當下，卻也發起怒來，情知是孫氏的作為，沒有別人的，便抱了 小孩子到族長處去哭訴。那合族都心中不平，約齊了同來和孫氏說 話。孫氏卻賴了，惠蘭不住地哭，要眾人設出個法來，保全那主公的 骨血。眾人便向孫氏說，要每年給他母子若干飯米，若干銅錢，把兩 間低小些的屋砌斷了，另開個門戶，令他母子兩個自去度日。孫氏見 是合族公義，不得不依，只得勉強應允。34 34  Xingmeng pianyan, 4:7–8.

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Again, the protagonists appear embedded in a complex network of family relationships. In “Danan,” we see unilateral action by the wife, while “The Virtuous Concubine” depicts the entire clan acting for the benefit of the lineage as a whole and the husband’s branch in particular. Furthermore, the story—like “The Reluctant Bigamist” earlier—employs concrete details about the household space to articulate the changing relational situation. Instead of simply being “driven out” as in the tale, the concubine’s space is subdivided from the household in such a way as to highlight the family’s social status and her position within it. The family’s resources are comfortable but not lavish: they repurpose existing household space by bricking up an old door and opening a new one rather than buying or renting separate rooms. The small size of the suite underlines the low but not negligible status of a concubine who has borne a child. Like the added detail about the large and opinionated clan, the increased texture and complexity of household architecture in the vernacular story inflects the events that form the backbone of the shared plot, giving them new meaning. The story’s events unfold in a richer architectural and relational space through the textual medium of the colloquial written language. The language register, the sharp focus on details of ritual and economic status for the family as a whole and for individuals within it, and the shifts in moral emphasis combine to create a remarkably vivid family drama. The increased use of spatial detail in the story underlies and enables the new themes that it brings out. The story shows a profound anxiety, not only about the possibility that human beings’ inner worth and ritual status may be mismatched—as they are at the beginning of the story for the cruel wife and the virtuous concubine—but that a strong social emphasis on ritual order may lead to the creation and reinforcement of such discrepancies, as the clan forces the husband into remarriage with a disastrous wife, not because of any fault in the virtuous concubine, but simply because she is only a concubine. In its very anxiety to correct the incongruity that the author has taken such pains to heighten, however, the story betrays the strength of its drive toward a ritually ordered world in which passion, virtue, and status all align. 1.3 “Shanhu” and “The Harsh Mother-in-Law” Parallel Words’ expansion of another Liaozhai tale illuminates a married woman’s natal and marital family networks and highlights the role of ritual gesture in giving meaning to the household and differentiating the subspaces within it. The tale is “Shanhu” (珊瑚) from Liaozhai,35 which becomes the seventh story in Parallel Words, “Meeting a Virtuous Daughter-in-Law, Even Poisonous 35  Variorum edition no. 407 or Zhang edition 10.20.

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Serpents would Hesitate to Strike; Encountering a Shrewish Wife, Even Wolves would Deserve Pity” (Yu xianxi huishe nanfan zao hanfu langbei kanlian 遇賢 媳虺蛇難犯遭悍婦狼狽堪憐, hereafter “The Harsh Mother-in-Law”). Both tale and story tell of a model young wife, married to the older of two brothers, whose mother-in-law becomes increasingly hostile and finally forces her husband to divorce her. Too ashamed to return to her family, the wife secretly takes refuge, first with her mother-in-law’s husband’s brother’s wife, then with the mother-in-law’s widowed sister, where she remains for several years. Meanwhile, the mother-in-law arranges a marriage for her second son, but his bride turns out to be even fiercer than her mother-in-law. She takes control of the household and abuses her mother-in-law. Finally, the widowed sister comes to the rescue, brings the mother-in-law to her senses, and reconciles her with her first daughter-in-law. Both the Liaozhai tale and the Parallel Words story depict a complex feminine social network, and the details they give highlight the instability of a woman’s place in Qing kinship discourse. The question of where a woman belongs after a failed marriage is complex. The bride’s refusal to return to her natal family when her mother-in-law casts her out emphasizes her irrevocable transfer of loyalty to the marital family. When that loyalty is rejected, she does not withdraw it. She first takes refuge with her mother-in-law’s sister-in-law (zhouli 妯娌, the wife of one’s husband’s brother). That is, she goes to another household belonging to her husband’s lineage, but to a woman of a different surname than either her husband or her mother-in-law. This strategy reflects her determination to maintain loyalty to her husband’s patriline. Unfortunately for her, the mother-in-law finds out that she is there and confronts her zhouli, leading to a vicious argument.36 The bride cannot stand to be the cause of further family strife, so she leaves. The bride then takes refuge with her mother-in-law’s widowed older sister ( jiejie 姐姐). This represents a change of tactics: it is an appeal neither to her own natal family nor to her husband’s patriline, but to a member of her adversary’s natal family. This strategy is successful. The mother-in-law and her sister have belonged to different marital families for decades, and they visit so rarely that the young bride’s presence in her mother-in-law’s sister’s household remains undiscovered for years. Nevertheless, the bond between the two older women remains strong enough that the mother-in-law calls on her older sister 36  Conflict between zhouli is not only treated as a common failing of women in household manuals, but is a standard explanation for conflict between brothers. A common saying went ‘Brothers are a piece of meat, and their wives are knives and awls.’ Lü Kun, Gui fan, 1:81.

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for help when she is ill and neglected, while the older sister’s combination of affection and seniority eventually allows her to reprimand the mother-in-law for her harshness. In both tale and story, the relationships between women in their marital households, between zhouli and between mother- and daughter-in-law, appear demanding but brittle. They govern a woman’s ultimate identity—the bride would rather kill herself than return to her parents—but they can be broken by divorce, by dividing the household, and by open conflict. The relationships of the natal family, those between sisters, appear unobtrusive but resilient.37 The married sisters rarely communicate and make little visible mark on each other’s lives. Yet after a lifetime spent in different marital households, the older sister retains the obligation to help her younger sister, the authority to criticize her effectively, and the kindness to do so subtly. The depiction of conflict between unrelated women of the same marital household aligns with the vision of household life as it appears in didactic genres such as conduct books and household codes, but the emphasis on the continuing strength of sisterly affection is rare in male-authored didactic writing. Thus, fiction both formal and colloquial offers one of the most multifaceted views of women’s social networks in the world of Qing text. If “The Virtuous Concubine” showed its protagonists acting under pressure from a large clan gendered predominantly male, both “Shanhu” and “The Harsh Mother-in-Law” depict the feminine counterpart to this web of connections: attenuated in space, but strongly present and occasionally prickly. The physical movement of the banished bride from one nexus of this web to another—from her parents’ home to her husband’s, to the zhouli, to the older sister, and back to her husband’s home—depicts the complexity of a woman’s ritual and emotional ties by showing the places she does and does not belong. “The Harsh Mother-in-Law” follows its classical source tale “Shanhu” closely, and both of them focus in detail on women’s relationships. However, as in the previous case studies, added detail about the household space helps articulate the relationships the story depicts. In fact, it goes even further than the stories previously analyzed in describing how gesture and posture occur within and transform space. Henri Lefebvre, in his seminal work The Production of Space, explains how the articulated movement of the human body embodies ideology and binds it to practice: “Gestural systems connect representations of

37  Although the bride in this story refuses to return to her natal family, women’s natal family relationships did provide an important safety net for them in late imperial China. Bossler, “‘A Daughter is a Daughter’,” 91.

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space with representational spaces.”38 In other words, representational spaces (meaningful spaces that echo a culture’s larger worldview) gain meaning from gestures and actions within them that connect them to representations of space (the way we think about space and mentally organize the universe), so that the constant cycle by which meaningful spaces reinforce our ideas about space, and vice versa, is held together throughout by bodily gesture.39 This applies neatly to the traditional Chinese household space. In the pre-modern Chinese context, the household with its central hall and ancestral shrines was not merely a shelter, but a sacred ritual space and a microcosm of the harmonious social order. Rules of spatial organization equating man with the outer world and woman with the inner one expressed the correlative thinking that governed all aspects of the universe. A wife’s role as her husband’s ritual partner was physically articulated as she climbed steps, bowed, and made offerings in ancestral worship. It was these ritual gestures that a concubine was unqualified to perform.40 It was also these gestures that made the house a representational, not merely a social, space. These meaningful gestures contribute to the production of space under special conditions, in what Catherine Bell terms “ritualized” activity. However, to understand how place and gesture mutually constitute social space in everyday life, we must consider the link between ritualized activity (space, time) and everyday activity (space, time). Bell’s subtle analysis rejects a global definition of ritual in favor of close attention to how specific ritual activities create their own sense of distinction and differentiation from other activities: Ritualization is a way of acting that is designed and orchestrated to distinguish and privilege what is being done in comparison to other, usually more quotidian, activities. As such, ritualization is a matter of various culturally specific strategies for setting some activities off from others, for creating and privileging a qualitative distinction between the ‘sacred’ and the ‘profane,’ and for ascribing such distinctions to realities thought to transcend the powers of human actors.41 (emphasis added)

38  Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Malden: Blackwell, 1991), 215. 39  For a profound reflection on the body as a stratum of spatiality in both Chinese and European contexts, see Ling Hon Lam, The Spatiality of Emotion, 203–09. 40  Bray, Technology and Gender, 98–105. 41  Catherine M. Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 73.

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While I agree with Bell’s overall approach and find the concept of “ritualization” particularly useful, her portrayal of ritualization as distinguishing itself from the quotidian ignores the significance of ritual in daily life. For colloquial fiction as well as popular educational works, matters such as the seating order at daily family meals, the morning and evening greetings by children to their parents, and the bodily discipline of how children were taught to sit, stand, and walk, all count as ritual. Ritualization appears not as a discourse dividing special from quotidian activity, but rather as a special inflection of activity that could be unique, seasonal, or daily. When ritual inflects everyday actions, such as family greetings, bows, and the daily observance of gender segregation, such actions are not necessarily seen as “sacred,” nor do they transcend the powers of human actors. They inhere precisely in human action. Nevertheless, they are understood as ritual by late imperial sources. One popular eighteenthcentury conduct book contains two sections entitled “Necessary Knowledge for Children’s Rituals” and “Essential Knowledge for Common Rituals,” with information on how to wash one’s face, straighten one’s clothes, stand, kneel, walk, sweep a room, enter and exit a room, greet others, sit in order of precedence at meals, and so forth.42 Such ritualized actions and gestures woven into the fabric of everyday life articulate human relationships and construct social space, anchoring the household to the macrocosmic structure of the universe. They differentiate themselves from the relatively unscripted activities that take place in the interstices between ritual punctuations, yet they are deeply quotidian in nature. It is in depicting these daily rituals that “The Harsh Mother-in-Law” adds a wealth of detail to its classical source tale. Ritual activities are key to the story’s plot and characterization. They are particularly instrumental in the second, shrewish daughter-in-law’s rise to power. Her gradual conquest of the household is narrated by means of her movement through household spaces and ritual (or ritually inappropriate) gestures within them. She begins by subverting a daughter-in-law’s ritual morning visit to her parents-in-law. According to the Classic of Rites, Wives serve their parents-in-law as they served their own. At the first crow of the rooster, they wash up, rinse their mouths, comb and arrange their hair, and get dressed … In this fashion they go to their parents or parents-in-law. When they arrive, with bated breath and gentle voice, they ask if their clothes are warm or cold, whether they are ill or in pain, 42  Shi Chengjin, Chuanjia bao, 1:6:35.

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or where they are uncomfortable…. They ask what they desire and respectfully bring it in, with gentle mien to make them feel comfortable. 婦事舅姑，如事父母。雞初鳴，咸盥漱，櫛縰，笄總，衣紳。…… 以 適父母舅姑之所，及所，下氣怡聲，問衣燠寒，疾痛苛癢。…… 問所 欲而敬進之，柔色以溫之。43

The proper observance of this ritual includes grooming, clothing, actions, posture, tone of voice, and facial expression. In “The Harsh Mother-in-Law,” a small mutiny during this quotidian ritual initiates a cascade of rebellion that ends with the mother-in-law, Huang shi, firmly under her daughter-in-law’s thumb. The story relates that after driving out her first daughter-in-law, Huang shi finds a second daughter-in-law, Ligu, for her younger son. After the wedding, when Ligu first pays her ritual visit to Huang shi’s room for the morning ritual of greeting, Huang shi gives her a grunt of displeasure. Instead of being cowed by this hint of harshness to come, Ligu turns the tables on her: Ligu immediately shouted “I came to ask after you nicely, but you treat me this way—you don’t deserve such consideration!” She turned around and left at once, and actually went back to her own room…. The next day, from morning till evening, not the shadow of Ligu’s footprint appeared. The third day, it was already noon, and again Ligu did not come…. Huang shi could not stand her boredom and irritation, so she went to Ligu’s room instead and asked “Daughter-in-law, are you feeling unwell? Why have I not seen you for two days?” Ligu imitated [Huang shi’s] turnedaway face of two days before and grunted, “I’m fine.” Then to prevent Huang shi from objecting to this behavior, she turned to the maidservant she had brought from home and yelled, “You bit of bone just asking for a beating, you see someone coming to my room and don’t report to me first?” … Huang shi saw that she had completely abandoned a daughterin-law’s tone of voice and was very angry, but when she saw [Ligu’s] wide stare of rage and her posture, fierce as an evil spirit about to pounce, she bottled up her own fiery rage and tried to appease her: “She saw I was a member of the household, so she didn’t report first. Don’t blame her. Next time I come, I’ll send beforehand to tell her to let you know.” Ligu finally released some of her anger, though she still gave the maid a few glares for the mother-in-law to see. After this, Huang shi privately feared Ligu somewhat. In the next year, Ligu came to her mother-in-law’s room 43  Zheng Xuan and Kong Yingda, Li ji zhushu, 27:4–5.

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only three or four times, and if she did happen to come, Huang shi would immediately order the maids to bring over stools and tables and make a huge fuss. Huang shi, however, would visit Ligu in her room two days out of three, gauging her mood and temper, always calling her “daughter-inlaw.” Ligu would never smile, and if she did happen to smile or say anything, Huang shi would be overjoyed. 戾姑倒就嚷起來道: “我好好的來問你信，你卻這般待我，好不受人抬 舉。” 掇轉身就走，竟回自己房中去了。…… 到得次日，從早至晚，戾 姑的腳影也不見踅來。再到明日，已是中午時候，並不見來。…… 黃 氏氣悶不過，倒自己走去戾姑房中，問道: “媳婦你身子可有什麼不自 在？原何兩日不見？” 戾姑也學他前日變轉了那臉，喉嚨頭轉氣應道: “好的。” 防黃氏看這光景要惱，倒先把贈嫁來的丫頭，亂嚷道: “你這 討打的骨頭，見有人來房裡，也不先通報一聲？”…… 黃氏見他脫盡媳 婦腔拍，十分動氣；又看了他睜圓怪眼，煞神般跳的猛惡勢子，倒把 那怒火捺了下去，反勸道: “他見我是一屋裡人，因此不先稟白，卻不 要怪他。後次我來時，我自先叫他說一聲便了。” 戾姑方才息了些怒，    還幾個白眼瞧那丫頭，來與做婆婆的看。從此黃氏心裡，倒有些怕著 戾姑。戾姑一年裡頭，沒有三四回到婆婆房裡，偶然到了，黃氏連忙 叫丫鬟掇凳揩台，亂個不住。黃氏卻三日兩遭到戾姑那裡去，看了戾 姑面孔和顏悅色的媳婦長，媳婦短，叫上去。戾姑卻一些笑容也沒 有，偶然含笑，說了一句，黃氏便快活個不住。44

Ligu’s rude tone, fierce glare, and threatening posture precisely reverse a dutiful daughter-in-law’s ritual obligation to use “bated breath and gentle voice.” Her refusal to visit Huang shi and her rudeness when Huang shi visits her instead continue the striking reversal. Social histories of Chinese women have shown that women’s seclusion in certain areas of the home could be a site of power, resistance, privacy, and safety as well as a tool of oppression: the women’s quarters could become a privileged homosocial space.45 In this story, the degree to which a woman is privileged to remain in her room reveals the extent of her power over other women who must visit her there, on her terms. A mother-in-law has the privilege of remaining in her room, where the visits of her sons and daughters-inlaw reinforce her dignity. Thus, Ligu’s power over Huang shi begins when Ligu remains in her room, at the center of a web of inferiors, and Huang shi falls into

44  Xingmeng pianyan, 7:9. 45  Bray, Technology and Gender, 145–50; Ko, Teachers of the Inner Chambers, 203–18.

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the trap of joining them. Her deferential behavior begins with her obedience to the gravitational pull of her daughter-in-law’s shrewish authority. The meanings of space, however, are flexible. Ligu does not remain in her room, in a position of static power, for long: At the beginning, [Ligu] just stayed in her own room, sitting at ease, and all outside matters were still under Huang shi’s management. Afterwards she gradually began to come out of her room. In everything that needed to be taken care of, she made the decisions, and everyone was afraid of her. Huang shi had no say in anything. 先前只在自己房內清坐，外面事情還是黃氏主持。以後漸漸出房來， 百凡事體，盡是他出主意，眾人也都怕著他。黃氏的說話，算不得  數了。46

Ligu’s own room is a seat of power, and her refusal to leave expresses her consolidation of that power. Then, the exercise of that power over the household is enacted as she comes out of her room and takes an active role in managing day-to-day tasks. The emphasis on ritual gesture and the correct (and incorrect) ways to navigate the ritual boundaries of domestic architecture connects “The Harsh Mother-In-Law” and the other vernacular stories of Parallel Words to the ideological world of morality books and household codes. The collection’s explicit valorization of qing emotion, not merely as a dangerous force to be kept in check but as a source of well-being and vitality, goes beyond them. Spatial description serves the author as a key literary strategy to increase the emphasis on ritual propriety while maintaining the source tales’ focus on emotional impulse; it also allows the author to navigate the ideological tension between the discourses of passion and propriety. 2

Literary and Thematic Critique in Parallel Words

The editor’s preface to Parallel Words offers a deeper thematic critique of Liaozhai as a whole; though it does not explicitly describe the collection’s language, its rejection of the uncanny offers a way to understand the book’s use of the vernacular. Here is the preface in full: 46  Xingmeng pianyan, 7:10.

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I often think it strange that when people speak to guests about dreams, they go on and on unceasingly. Yet how could it be that one must dream in order to speak of dreaming? What was done yesterday is changed and destroyed today; what is done today will be changed and destroyed in the same way tomorrow; at every turn, all is a dream. So to say that one can only occasionally have it while arranging quilts and placing pillows, is this not absurd? If one manages to be at peace in the commonplace, to follow the natural order, his dreams will be plain and peaceful without attack or ambush; there is nothing to prevent him going to sleep and waking up at will. Only those whose intentions are impure, who in managing affairs frequently transgress the natural order, whose vision is entangled by karmic hindrances which they are unable to polish away— these will have evil dreams. When the nightmare sufferer tosses and thrashes, not knowing himself to be dreaming, and the one who shares his couch sees his gasping breath catching in his throat, can he refrain from jostling the bed and striking the mattress to wake him? The Master of the Chrysanthemum Plot eagerly desires to drive away the sleep devil. Therefore he has gathered a certain number of anecdotes and entitled [the collection] “Parallel Words to Awaken Dreamers” [meaning] thus to save them. This is the meaning of this book’s title. Ah, this book! At a profound level, it shall be interpreted thus; at a shallow level, it also hopes to lead those desiring sleep to become engrossed in reading it and forget to go to bed. 每怪人對客談夢，剌剌不休。夫豈必夢乃云夢？昨日所為，今已變 滅，今日所為，明又變滅，在在皆夢，而若偶得諸施衾設枕之會，不 亦誣乎？人苟安常處順，為夢平平無奇正，不妨任其自寐自覺。獨有 居心未凈，處事多乖，以致孽障目纏，麾之不去，是得惡夢也。病魘 者顛倒錯亂，不自知其為夢，而同榻之人，見其喉喘氣結，能不振床 拍席以呼之耶？菊畦子蓋迫慾為若人驅睡魔也，因集逸事如干卷，顏 曰《醒夢駢言》以救之。是是書命名之意也。吁！是書也，深言之，    作如是解，淺言之，殆亦慾善睡者愛讀而忘寢乎？47

This sustained meditation on dream is central to the self-positioning of the story collection. First, the writer undercuts the distinction between reality and dream by insisting that life itself is fundamentally ephemeral and dreamlike. Then, he claims that it is misguided to speak of dreams as a privileged space of meaning or fantasy. In fact, marvelous dreams—equated with 47  Xingmeng pianyan, preface.

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nightmares—come only to those who have not yet learned to rest in the commonplace and follow the natural order. The preface writer’s perspective is that of the waking companion who watches the nightmare sufferer; the sleeper does not know he is dreaming, but the watcher understands both waking and sleep from his privileged epistemological position. His response is one of pity and he acts on it by waking the sleeper; hence the book’s title, Parallel Words to Awaken Dreamers. The preface locates the sleeper as well as the watcher firmly in the household space—the study, the bed. The dream space is not allotted any kind of reality. It is a hallucination, and the suffering of such nightmare hallucinations has a distinct moral stigma attached. The preface writer vividly paints the author rescuing a suffering, sinning dreamer by bringing him back to the reality of the commonplace. The link between dream and classical language is left implicit, but the reader who knows the linguistically dense, dream-oriented Liaozhai will immediately recognize the implied comparison. This eighteenth-century preface contains a deft polemical thrust against the seventeenth-century obsession with dream, using elegant classical language to defend the waking world, the commonplace, and—by implication—the vernacular language that serves as the language of the commonplace and of these stories. The goal of Parallel Words is not merely translation, but transformation of the meaning and central locus of the Liaozhai tales. It is no accident that when we compare Parallel Words stories to their Liaozhai source tales, the space of the uncanny has shrunk and the texture of quotidian life has grown richer: that is precisely the point of the collection as a whole. In each story, the author uses linguistic and generic transformation to negotiate between the competing ideologies that governed daily life. 3

Vernacular Ethics

The preface to Parallel Words frames its rewritten stories by praising their differences from their more famous sources. This is rewriting as critique, in which the changes from tale to story express judgments both ethical and artistic about the places where the source tale was found wanting—or expressions of fundamental psychological hungers both awakened and left unsatisfied by the original work. From this point of view, Parallel Words embodies the same expansive and explanatory drive as the vernacular Expanded Collected Biographies of Women discussed in chapter 1. As in the Expanded Biographies, vernacularization goes along with expansion. The resulting retellings mediate the conflicting ideologies that the source tales bring into focus and satisfy the

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reader’s desire for clarity by adding motives for action when the elliptical style of the source tales leaves them unstated. How should we understand the relationship between these three changes: the linguistic change from classical to vernacular, the narrative change from elliptical to explicit, and the thematic change from an emphasis on passion and the uncanny to a more homely mediation of affection and ritual? The 494 Liaozhai tales tell of clams and crabs and talking stones; gender transformations, ghosts, and dreams. From this banquet of marvels, Parallel Words selects a high proportion of stories with a domestic focus. Eleven of its twelve stories center on marriage and family life, including extensive descriptions of sibling, in-law, and co-wife relationships. It is no coincidence that the Master of the Chrysanthemum Cliff both chose these particular stories and chose to transform them into huaben. The focus on quotidian life, the drive to depict characters’ motivations with precision and enable readers to judge them with clarity—these characterize not only Parallel Words, but vernacular short stories as a group. The huaben’s vernacular language and quotidian themes contribute to its vision of a world where almost every ambiguity and tension can be explained away. Almost all late imperial vernacular fiction claims some didactic role for itself in title or preface, and in Parallel Words, the didactic theme of awakening from dream to live well in daily life is clearly evident in each story. But even when the works in question are blatantly pornographic, these claims should not be dismissed as insignificant. The idea that popular literature could communicate ethical truths to the simpleminded was an important justification for authors and publishers promulgating vernacular texts to new audiences in late Ming and early Qing China.48 Vernacular stories competed for readers in a book market where examination essays, histories, and classics were far more widespread, and household encyclopedias, precious scrolls (baojuan) and morality books were at least as popular with less-educated readers as vernacular stories. Each of these kinds of text had a moral imperative, a purpose beyond entertainment, and colloquial stories were no exception. And despite the lack of a systematic taxonomy of fictional genres, the huaben’s distinctive drive toward clear moral judgment in situations that resonated with daily life shaped its relationship to other kinds of text. Thus, the differences shown above between Parallel Words and Liaozhai illuminate the differences between the

48  Anne McLaren, “Constructing New Reading Publics in Late Ming China,” in Printing and Book Culture in Late Imperial China, ed. Cynthia Joanne Brokaw and Kai-wing Chow (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 154–58.

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classical tale and vernacular story as genres. They also offer clues to the way that both the tale and the story functioned in a broader ecology of genres. Tales of the strange and vernacular stories exhibit distinctive forms of ethical reflection, but that is not to say that they were clearly distinct in the minds of contemporary readers. The genre terms used to refer to them overlapped, and critics’ definitions of those terms disagreed.49 The chuanqi or classical tale of the strange was a recognized generic label long before the eighteenth century, but usage of chuanqi and other genre terms such as zhiguai 志怪, baiguan 稗官, and xiaoshuo overlapped. Although literary critics often used these terms to refer to different categories of text, there was no consensus between critics on what the difference actually was.50 The vernacular story was an even fuzzier category, referred to by terms such as baishi 稗史 (trivial history), xiaoshuo (idle chat), and so on, each of which also referred to forms other than the huaben or “vernacular short story” to which modern scholars refer in Chinese and English. But these terms, however loosely defined, alerted authors and readers to a work’s self-positioning in the textual landscape. Late imperial readers, like modern scholars, observed that zhiguai records of the strange offered short narratives taking the form of hearsay, that chuanqi tales offered longer and more carefully crafted stories of the uncanny, and that colloquial short stories narrated dramas of human interaction in familiar language. Authors crafted their narratives with an awareness of similar stories. This awareness of similarity was not a fully codified genre system, but it operated under the same “horizon of expectations” that Jauss famously uses to define genre, in which subjective awareness of prior works, mediated by ideas about genre, enables readers to make sense of texts.51 Although Jauss focuses on reception rather than production, the horizon of expectations is also a useful way to think about the ways that authors, as readers of earlier texts, shape their own work 49  For one example of Qing authors disagreeing about genre, see Ji Yun’s (紀昀, 1724–1805) criticism of Pu Songling for mixing xiaoshuo (idle tale) and zhuanji 傳記 (biographical narrative) in the same story collection, collected in Zhu Yixuan 朱一玄, Liaozhai zhiyi ziliao huibian 聊齋志異資料彙編 (Tianjin: Nankai daxue chubanshe, 2012), 497–98. The remark’s significance for our understanding of late imperial genre is analyzed in Takhung Leo Chan, The Discourse on Foxes and Ghosts: Ji Yun and Eighteenth-Century Literati Storytelling (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1998), 159–67; Zeitlin, Historian of the Strange, 39–40; and Allan Barr, “Pu Songling and Liaozhai Zhiyi: A Study of Textual Transmission, Biographical Background, and Literary Antecedents” (1983): 192–94. 50  Chiang, Collecting the Self, 10–27. Some late Ming critics attempted to create clear subdivisions within the category of xiaoshuo, including the subcategories of zhiguai and chuanqi, but these were not universally adopted. See Chan, The Discourse on Foxes and Ghosts, 10. 51  Jauss, “Theory of Genres,” 138.

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in relation to those texts. The relationship of vernacular stories to their source tales is one of self-differentiation. But this self-differentiation from the classical tale is empowered by vernacular stories’ similarity to each other: the vernacular mode became a natural vehicle for Parallel Words’s critique of Liaozhai precisely because late imperial authors and readers associated colloquial language with particular themes and settings. One vernacular story collection that uses readers’ horizons of expectation about genres to frame its ethical mission is Du Gang 杜綱’s Stories to Delight the Eye and Awaken the Heart (Yumu xingxin bian 娛目醒心編, 1792, hereafter Stories to Delight the Eye).52 The editor’s preface to this collection praises it by explaining why it is better than other kinds of books readers would have known: Among the innumerable “trivial histories” circulating in the world, some use fantastic and wild language, while others use luxurious and lustful discourse. The events are not always true, and their words are not always elegant. Upon spreading out the pages, there is no way to avoid having one’s spirits dazed and confused…. As for the “books of karmic retribution,” it is not that they are insufficient to persuade people; however, straightforward discourse is something people get tired of hearing. If they don’t think of it as the heterodox teaching of old Buddhists, they think it is the usual talk of classical scholars. Before they have read more than a few lines, they roll it up and abandon it…. [As for this collection], its events are verifiable and true; its language is proper; in it are events to inspire surprise and alarm, respect and admiration…. As to the principle of karmic retribution, it is secretly contained in [stories which] bedazzle the spirit, causing the reader to gradually come into the realm of sages and worthies without knowing it; it is not without advantages for the customs of people’s hearts. I therefore hastily printed it to question the world; may the gentlemen of the world not dismiss it as a “trivial history”! 稗史之行於天下者，不知幾何矣。或作詼奇詭譎之詞，或為艷麗淫邪 之說。其事未必盡是，其言未必盡雅。方展卷時非不驚魂眩魄。 …… 至若因果報應之書，非不足以勸人。無如侃侃之論，人所厭聞。不以 爲釋老之異教，即以爲經生之常談，讀未數行，卷而棄之矣。…… 考 必典核，語必醇正，其間可驚可愕可敬可慕之事。…… 而因果報應之 理，隱寓於驚魂眩魄之内。俾閲者漸入於聖賢之域而不自知，於人心

52  Chapter 3 will analyze two stories from this collection.

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chapter 2 風俗不無有補焉。余故急為梓之以問世，世之君子幸勿以稗史而忽  之也！53

The editor introduces the book by a process of generic triangulation, locating it among contemporary genres: “trivial histories” (baishi) or fiction, and “books of karmic retribution” (yinguo baoying zhi shu) or morality books. He advertises it as more edifying than the former and more interesting than the latter, but ultimately closer to the “trivial history” model, more in danger of being mistakenly identified with it. The preface assumes a reader who is familiar with other kinds of text and their collective characteristics. Even though baishi and yinguo baoying zhi shu were fuzzy terms, the preface expects readers to know the kinds of books they refer to. This expected recognition allows Stories to Delight the Eye to stake out its territory in the borderland of didactic fiction and assert that this collection of vernacular short stories is not trivial, but engaged in critical ethical reflection. And though the preface does not go on to make this point, the particular ethical concerns of Stories to Delight the Eye are shared by other huaben collections, including Parallel Words. Thinking about the relationship between Liaozhai and Parallel Words in terms of genre, rather than as an instance of one individual text transforming and critiquing another, provides a way of thinking about the relationship between language, narrative style, and theme. Classical tales and vernacular stories tend to emphasize different realms of existence—the uncanny and the homely—and their ethical concerns differ accordingly. This alignment between the linguistic and narrative form of the stories in each collection, the settings that it characteristically renders, and the thematic concerns of each, recalls Jamieson and Campbell’s synthesis of literary and rhetorical theories of genre, in which genres are “fusions of substantive, stylistic, and situational elements.”54 And a particular fusion of substance (the ethics of daily life), style (vernacular language), and situation (middlebrow home and village) characterizes not only Parallel Words, but also other vernacular transformations of classical tales. Many late imperial authors rewrote classical-language strange tales (chuanqi and zhiguai) as longer colloquial stories. The best-known examples of the vernacular story genre are the three late Ming story collections collectively known as the Three Words (Sanyan 三言) compiled by Feng Menglong (馮夢龍, 1574– 1645), and the two collectively known as the Two Slaps, Erpai 二拍 compiled by 53  Du Gang 杜綱, Yumu xingxin bian 娛目醒心編 (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1988), preface. 54  Jamieson and Campbell, “Rhetorical Hybrids,” 146.

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Ling Mengchu (淩懞初, 1580–1644). Many of the stories they contain are transformations of classical sources.55 Some stories are based on such well-known classical allusions that it is difficult to point to a single prior version of the story. Others, however, transform individual classical-language chuanqi tales with a known author. In Patrick Hanan’s seminal article comparing two stories from Three Words with their classical source tales by Song Maocheng (宋懋 澄, 1569–1620), he observes the reduced moral ambiguity and more detailed characterization in the vernacular transformations and describes them as “the result of choices which the genre forced upon its author.”56 “Forced” may be too strong a term, but a mixture of decreased moral ambiguity and increased explanatory detail is recognizable across different vernacular story collections and the work of different authors, which suggests that authors’ and readers’ expectations for the vernacular story genre did guide authors as they sat down to write. The ethical territory of Parallel Words, like that of the vernacular transformations of Song Maocheng’s two tales, and as we will see in the following chapter, that of Stories to Delight the Eye, is the quotidian dilemma writ large and carefully explained. The events narrated are surprising, but they resonate with experiences close to home, and the narrators carefully guide the reader’s judgment. If we compare Parallel Words’ transformation of Liaozhai to the Expanded Biographies’ transformation of Liu Xiang’s Biographies studied in chapter 1, patterns emerge around the intersection of theme and language in exemplary biography, popular history, classical tale, and vernacular story. In both the Han Biographies and the Qing Expanded Biographies, the protagonists navigate extreme situations of conflicting loyalties and competing virtues, enacting ethical ideals and creating hierarchies of value for readers. The stories of Parallel Words function similarly when they depict a perfectly submissive daughter-inlaw under the thumb of a harsh dowager or a husband helplessly torn between his wife and his concubine. Parallel Words thus has much in common with the canonical Biographies as well as with its vernacular yanyi transformation, the Expanded Biographies. All three offer visions of ideal feminine virtue under extreme versions of normal domestic tensions. These narratives function, in Ricoeur’s phrase, as imaginative “laboratories of moral judgment.”57 The didactic dimension of the narrative mode is widely 55  The sources for the stories in these collections are traced in Sun Kaidi 孙楷第, Xiaoshuo pangzheng 小説旁證 (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 2000) and Tan Zhengbi 谭正 璧, Sanyan liangpai ziliao 三言兩拍資料 (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1980). 56  Hanan, “The Making of the Pearl-Sewn Shirt,” 151. 57  Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 140.

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recognized by Chinese preface writers of every dynasty as well as by modern scholars in many fields.58 It is not, however, uniformly distributed across genres. Liaozhai’s Records of the Strange, despite the moral judgment of the Historian of the Strange appended to each tale, is actually thematically farther from either the Han Biographies, the early Qing Expanded Biographies, or Parallel Words than the latter three are from each other. The ambiguity and strangeness of the Liaozhai tales belong to a different universe than the exemplary quality of biographical subjects and the idealized female protagonists in didactic vernacular fiction, who often exhibit similar virtues (like thrift and patience) in the face of similar challenges (like poverty and demanding mothers-in-law). Didacticism is present in the strange tale, but it takes a very different form. The uncanny is used to illustrate the universality of principles like retribution or to hold up a mirror to the corruptions of human society, and it is precisely the strangeness of the stories that brings home the point.59 But in biographies, as in popular history and colloquial stories, the situations are extreme versions of homely tensions, different in quantity rather than quality from their readers’ everyday problems. Language further differentiates these thematically linked genres, as the vernacular mode creates a kinship between Expanded Biographies and Parallel Words that the classical Biographies does not share. The ethical mediations in Parallel Words are very similar to those of the Expanded Biographies. In both, the expansive vernacular mode becomes a vehicle for detailed depictions of character motivations in accounts that meticulously guide the reader’s judgment through uncomfortable moral tensions. But language does not tell the whole story either: the important differences between the popularized biographies of the Expanded Biographies and the didactic stories of Parallel Words will be one focus of the next chapter. The particular moral concerns of Qing domestic fiction cannot be reduced to some universal quality of narrative, or even of late imperial vernacular narrative. The ethical dimension of narrative manifests differently in historically particular genres, in each of which stylistic choices and linguistic mode influence the rendering of themes and content.

58  Examples in philosophy, bioethics, literature, and theology include Helmut Dubiel, “What Is ‘Narrative Bioethics’,” Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience 5 (May 4, 2011; https://doi .org/10.3389/fnint.2011.00010, accessed March 10, 2020); Adam Zachary Newton, Narrative Ethics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997); Stanley Hauerwas and L. Gregory Jones, Why Narrative?: Readings in Narrative Theology (Eugene: Wipf & Stock Publishers, 1997). 59  For a discussion of didacticism as a requirement of the zhiguai genre in Ji Yun’s thought, see Chan, The Discourse on Foxes and Ghosts, 151–85.

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The vernacular stories of Parallel Words carefully describe the household space. Through concrete details of walls and thresholds and doors, of who sleeps where and who bows to whom, the stories use space and gesture to articulate the emotive and ritual aspects of the family relationships they depict. Ritual negotiations are a more pressing concern in the vernacular stories than in their classical source tales: though both valorize qing, the stories have a far stronger imperative than the tales to show that the ultimate victory of emotion is compatible with and supported by ritual. Spatial description becomes a key strategy in negotiating the dynamics of qing and li, as well as in constructing characters and their relationships. Descriptions of the domestic interior often stand in for depictions of emotional interiority. Throughout this series of close readings, I have argued for an organic linkage between vernacularity and domestic space. I have supplemented the more common discussion of vernacular fiction in terms of “high” and “low” discourse or “central” and “peripheral” literary status with the concept pair of “inner” and “outer,” suggesting that vernacularity aligns itself with the inner, the familial, and the everyday. This is not, of course, a universal redefinition of “vernacular literature.” Not only is the category of “vernacularity” itself linguistically untenable, but colloquial literature in general does far more than encode domesticity. Nevertheless, vernacular fiction is one of the key textual sources for thick renderings of domestic life. In the intimacy of the everyday, these stories use an idiom close to the familiar, spoken language to describe concrete scenes of household space and quotidian ritual gestures. They reveal that the process of rewriting is far more than a linear journey from point A to point B, and that vernacularization is inseparable from thematic and ideological transformation. In Parallel Words, detailed vernacular representation of domestic space articulates a detailed ethical critique of the classical Liaozhai. The next chapter further explores the interactions between classical and vernacular modes by considering how vernacular yanyi and huaben compare to classical accounts that already focus on spatial practice: depictions of clever female protagonists navigating the gendered boundaries between the “inner” and “outer” worlds.

chapter 3

Savvy Women and the Inner–Outer Divide The previous two chapters compared versions of the same narrative written in different genres, showing that genre transformation is an effective tool for authors working to reconcile competing ideologies, and that different genres have characteristically different ethical and ideological preoccupations. Here, I develop the comparison between the vernacular transformations of the Expanded Biographies, discussed in chapter 1, with those of Parallel Words, discussed in chapter 2, in order to better situate the vernacular story in the context of other Qing dynasty genres. Both Liu Xiang’s Biographies and Liaozhai’s Records of the Strange contain accounts featuring sagacious and loquacious women who act outside the normal bounds of the feminine sphere in ways that are nevertheless presented as virtuous. And both the Expanded Biographies and Parallel Words contain vernacular expansions of these accounts. But the vernacular mode has very different effects in each collection: the Expanded Biographies criticizes and downplays its heroines’ unorthodox spatial practice, while Parallel Words celebrates the ways they act on behalf of the patriline’s absent or helpless men. The same celebration of expedient action by clever women also marks another eighteenth-century huaben collection, Du Gang’s 杜綱 (fl. 1775) Stories to Delight the Eye and Awaken the Heart (Yumu xingxin bian 娛目醒心編, preface dated 1792), whose stories include both expansions of classical tales and new compositions in the vernacular. Both Liaozhai and the two vernacular story collections present women who transgress spatial gender norms as virtuous. They contrast not only with the Expanded Biographies but also with depictions of intelligent women in other genres, like poetry and tanci 彈詞 (plucking rhymes), which usually emphasize talented women’s observance of spatially conceived gender norms. Ming and Qing vernacular fiction is rich in memorable female characters, including savvy, sharp-tongued women who dominate and manipulate the men around them. But such women, like Wang Xifeng in Dream of the Red Chamber (Honglou meng 紅樓夢) and Pan Jinlian in Plum in the Golden Vase ( Jin Ping Mei 金瓶梅), are often portrayed as dangerous to themselves and others. “Man rules without, woman rules within” went a common axiom, but shrew and virago characters try to rule a space beyond the female domain. Late imperial Chinese women’s words, acts, and bodies were all expected to remain secluded within the household space, or less concretely, in a feminine

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sphere of action; women who overstepped these boundaries were often seen as threats to the social order. But the exceptions prove the rule. In the stories presented here, clever women test the definition of feminine virtue by acting admirably outside normal gender boundaries. These female protagonists argue, meddle in men’s business, divert property from the patriline, and even lose their chastity—yet each of them is presented as unquestionably virtuous. The rhetorical approaches by which their male authors present them in a positive light illuminate the strategies available to men and women for thinking creatively about gender in Qing China and show how different genres and linguistic modes offered different avenues for such creative thinking. The dividing line between “inner” and “outer” could be drawn in many different ways. Men who wrote about clever and capable women exploited this multiplicity by playing different definitions of womanly virtue and the feminine sphere against each other in order to present their boundary-crossing heroines as admirable. In the vernacular story collections Parallel Words and Stories to Delight the Eye, capable and bossy heroines are certified as virtuous by their drive to safeguard the biological and social reproduction of the patrilineal family, which motivates and justifies the varied ways in which they cross the inner–outer divide. Their characterization draws on elements from the classical tradition, many of which are visible in the Han dynasty Collected Biographies of Women, and it differs significantly from depictions of talented women in other Qing genres, including the Qing vernacular transformation of the Biographies studied in chapter 1, the Expanded Biographies. There is common ground in the discourse on female talent: appeals to patrilineal thinking allowed both early and late imperial authors, both men and women, to frame “inner” and “outer” in flexible ways in order to praise women’s expedient, pragmatic actions. But writing about female talent branched out in different directions as it developed in different genres, and male-authored classical tales and vernacular stories both redefined the bounds of feminine virtue more daringly than female-authored or nonfictional writing could do. This analysis clarifies the distinct role of the vernacular mode in different genres and the way it intersects and interacts with the fictional imagination. Vernacular transformation consistently yields greater explanations of characters’ motivation and more detailed moral accounting. But the balance sheet that results—the ideological commitment of the text—is not consistent across vernacular texts; the vernacular is a tool with many potential uses. The revaluation of values around female seclusion is strongly present in both chuanqi and huaben compared to other genres, and the vernacular mode allows authors to carry out this revaluation at greater length and in more detail in the huaben.

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Biographies: Classical Paradigms and Qing Negotiations

I will begin by returning to Liu Xiang’s Biographies and its Qing yanyi transformation, the Expanded Biographies. Highlighting elements of plot and characterization in the Biographies makes it easier to identify them when they recur in the more complex vernacular stories, and analyzing the changes that late imperial editors made to the Biographies exposes the ways that Qing texts and genres diverged in their depictions of female intelligence. As chapter 1 showed, the anonymous author-editor of the Expanded Biographies used expansion and vernacular translation to mediate a key ethical conflict between Han and Ming-Qing ethical norms: the strong natal family loyalty of its Han dynasty heroines with the late imperial demand for wives to transfer their loyalty to their marital families. Genre transformation allowed more flexibility of interpretation around this particular ethical tension than other late imperial commentary editions of the Biographies. However, the Expanded Biographies’ transformations of Liu Xiang’s accounts of intelligent women show the limitations of this interpretive flexibility. Its skepticism about female talent aligns closely with other late imperial Biographies editions that downplay the intellectual virtues in favor of chastity. Liu Xiang’s Biographies put intelligent women front and center, but its late imperial editions marginalized them; the Expanded Biographies does so more subtly than most, by erasing Liu Xiang’s heroines’ spatial negotiations. 1.1 Space and Gender in Early and Late Imperial China In the Han Dynasty, spatial practice in the form of female seclusion was an important aspect of gender performance for elite women, even if it was not yet as widespread as it would become in late imperial society.1 Ideals of female seclusion applied not only to women’s physical cloistering in the home but also to the topics men and women were supposed to discuss: The Classic of Rites, one of the Five Classics codified in the Han dynasty, enjoined: “Men do not speak of what is within; women do not speak of what is without.”2 In the biographies I will discuss, spatial separation is an important ritual norm for the 1  A gendered division of agricultural and textile labor had resulted in a de facto separation of men and women during most daytime activities as early as the Shang, but it seems to have been in the Eastern Zhou period that this cultural pattern was codified into a ritual norm, and elite women’s movement outside the home began to be constrained in practice as well as discourse. This likely impacted only the uppermost social stratum in the Warring States era and the Han dynasty; however, the biographies I will discuss here are those of elite women. See Hinsch, Women in Early Imperial China, 141–43. 2  Zheng Xuan and Kong Yingda, Li ji zhushu, 27:11.

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protagonists to negotiate. But “within” and “without,” nei and wai, were complex and overlapping concepts, not clearly demarcated areas, and the terms “inner” and “outer” were applied to a wide range of human activities. And Liu Xiang acknowledged considerable interpretive flexibility in women’s application of gendered spatial separation. Ideas of gender were also subject to competing definitions. There were two main frameworks for discussing gender in early imperial Chinese thought, which Bret Hinsch has termed “patrilineal” and “essentialist” discourse. Patrilinealism defined women according to their multiple social roles, particularly kinship roles. This kind of thinking valorized the family defined by the male descent line, but it could provide power and strategic flexibility to individual women as well as to men, depending on their specific family role. Essentialist views of gender drew parallels between men and women and several other abstract binary concepts: Heaven and Earth, yang 陽 and yin 陰, and so forth. These cosmological arguments emphasized the superiority of men as men over women as women to a greater extent than patrilineal discourse. These two frameworks were well developed by the end of the Han, and they combined to frame the discourse on gender for the rest of imperial history.3 But patrilinealism and essentialism were not perfectly parallel, nor was essentialism always rigid. Historical narratives of Han elite women focus on their strategic negotiation of social roles and treat ritual norms as only one factor in their decision-making process.4 Early Confucian philosophers also recognized that abstract concepts like “inner” and “outer” were too complex and subtle to map onto male and female humans.5 Finally, in late Imperial China, cosmological analyses of gender produced gendered subjectivities only in and through the family context.6 In other words, patrilineal kinship should be seen as the primary framework within which essentialist or cosmological notions of gender operated in imperial China. Using “patrilinealism” and “essentialism” as broad terms to categorize types of discourse on women, I argue that the conceptual pair of “inner” and “outer,” commonly associated with an essentialist view of gender in the formulation “man rules without, woman rules within” (男主外，女主内), actually lends 3  Hinsch, Women in Early Imperial China, 174–76. 4  Michael Nylan, “Golden Spindles and Axes: Elite Women in the Achaemenid and Han Empires,” in The Sage and the Second Sex: Confucianism, Ethics, and Gender, ed. Li Chenyang (Chicago: Open Court, 2000), 211. 5  Paul Rakita Goldin, “The View of Women in Early Confucianism,” in Li Chenyang, The Sage and the Second Sex, 148–52. 6  Tani E. Barlow, “Theorizing Woman: Funü, Guojia, Jiating (Chinese Woman, Chinese State, Chinese Family),” in Zito and Barlow, Body, Subject, and Power in China, 259.

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itself to a variety of interpretations. Both early and late imperial authors manipulate the inherently flexible concepts of inner and outer when portraying capable heroines, often drawing on patrilineal discourse to resist essentialist formulations that would strictly limit women’s participation in the world beyond the home. These women act in pragmatic and expedient ways, but authors do not simply appeal to pragmatism to justify their actions; rather, they interpret normative principles in such a way as to portray them as virtuous. 1.2 Expanding the Biographies The Biographies shows a clear tendency to re-interpret gender norms to praise women’s expedient action on behalf of family and state. Liu Xiang’s female protagonists are clever and capable, virtuous and authoritative. Writing to admonish the emperor, Liu praised women who wisely advised rulers as well as those who maintained ritual propriety; those who acted capably in a crisis as well as those who upheld social norms. Three of Liu Xiang’s six juan on virtuous women are devoted to the intellectual virtues: the second to “The Worthy and Enlightened (Xianming 賢明),” the third to “The Benevolent and Wise (Renzhi 仁智),” and the sixth to “Accomplished Rhetoricians (Biantong 辯通).”7 The Biographies narrate the lives of numerous women who observe and uphold some boundaries in order to justify crossing others.8 Liu Xiang praises women who cross gender boundaries provisionally while finally upholding the gendered order. The Biographies remained popular through the centuries between the Han and the Ming and Qing dynasties, but later editions drifted away from Liu Xiang’s celebration of female intellect. As accounts were added, subtracted, and reorganized, many argumentative heroines disappeared, most of the new biographies focused on chaste women, and many of the new editions organized chapters by family role rather than by virtue type. These cumulative changes led to a major thematic shift in which male-edited Ming and Qing versions of the Biographies emphasized chastity and family-oriented virtues while minimizing the role of the intellectual virtues.9 Later in the Qing, however, some female editors of the Biographies, such as Wang Zhaoyuan, subtly resisted the domesticating shift by correcting omissions and misreadings in the text to highlight the importance of female intelligence.10 Just as the late 7  Unless otherwise noted, all Lienü zhuan translations are from Kinney, Exemplary Women. 8  Kinney, Exemplary Women, xxix–xxx. 9  Raphals, Sharing the Light, 113–138. 10  Zurndorfer, “The Lienü zhuan Tradition,” 65. Another edition with a female editor is Liang Duan 粱端, Lienü zhuan jiaozhu 列女傳校註, Sibu beiyao ed. (Shanghai: Zhonghua shuju, 1927).

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imperial Biographies editions discussed in chapter 1 displayed a range of attitudes to women’s natal family loyalty, different late imperial editions approached Liu Xiang’s intelligent heroines differently. And just as the early Qing Expanded Biographies uses vernacular transformation to mediate between Liu Xiang’s original text and contemporary norms with respect to natal and marital family loyalty, the same kind of mediation characterizes its treatment of talented women. It retains Liu Xiang’s original chapter headings and a high proportion of his biographies, and the chapter introductions even praise female intelligence. But the editor altered and commented on each biography in ways that diminish Liu Xiang’s capable heroines, either restricting them within the domestic space or critiquing their movements beyond it. The resulting text follows the anti-intellectual trend of most late imperial Biographies editions. Chapter prefaces in the Expanded Biographies pay lip service to the idea that women were capable of more than household management. The preface to the third chapter, “The Sympathetic and Wise,” states that women’s experience and expertise should not be bounded by the walls of the women’s quarters: I have observed that though the inner quarters are deep, nevertheless situations and affairs will certainly never cease to arrive. It may happen that times and configurations of the moment will combine [in such a way that they will impinge on the inner quarters]. If [women] are ignorant and have nothing with which to respond, soft and unable to endure, then they will harm the situation and fail in the affair, lose the configuration of the moment and fail to observe the right timing. How can one speak of this? Now, the sympathetic and wise are not thus. When affairs arrive, they handle them calmly and with aplomb…. Therefore, the one who hands down training before a crisis arrives becomes a worthy mother; the one who stands out in her handling of affairs becomes a worthy wife. Beyond this, a prudent heart may speak of state government; a fragrant mouth may speak of relational norms; beautiful eyes may observe heaven and earth; weak substance may hope to attain sagely worth. 竊聞閨閣雖深，而情事之來，夫豈有既？時勢相加，或不無之，使茫 無以應，柔不能持，則傷情敗事，失勢違時，何可言也？惟仁智則不 然。事至矣，不動聲色而處之裕如情觸矣。…… 故先機垂訓，而為賢 母；當事出奇，而為賢妻；甚之惠心而談囯政，香口而論倫常，俏眼 而窺天地，弱質而希聖賢。11

11  Gujin lienü zhuan yanyi, 3:1.

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Here, seclusion is not a shield against the outside world, and a lack of practical wisdom is as much of a handicap for a woman as for a man. Furthermore, capable women are competent to speak of matters beyond the household, including state government and the cosmos as a whole. In this, the anonymous editor follows Liu Xiang’s lead: the Biographies portray women speaking with assurance on state affairs and masculine sociability. But the Expanded Biographies’ accounts retreat from the preface’s bold affirmation of women’s wisdom. This retreat is evident in the way the editor transforms two of Liu Xiang’s biographies of women who speak of “state government” and “relational norms”: Jing Jiang of the Ji lineage of Lu, and the wife of Duke Ling of Wei. The Expanded Biographies either omits key incidents of spatial negotiation from the biographies, or refers in the commentary to information not present in the original biography. These changes deliberately neutralize Liu Xiang’s dialectic between provisional boundary crossing and the reaffirmation of boundaries. Liu Xiang’s original biography of Jing Jiang of the Ji lineage of Lu shows that she observes some aspects of gender separation while flouting others. Jing Jiang was a matriarch of the Jisun lineage of the state of Lu; her husband, son, and nephew were all eminent officials. Liu Xiang’s biography in the “Maternal Models” chapter presents her as a revered teacher to her son and nephew on both moral and political matters. The account includes four episodes that combine to show the strategies by which Jing Jiang exerts her authority over both masculine and feminine spheres of action. First, she educates her son on state affairs by creating an elaborate analogy between the parts of a loom and the structures of statecraft. This discourse, which highlights her expertise and authority on politics, is rhetorically consistent with instructive arguments from male teachers to male students in early Chinese texts.12 Second, when her son asks her why she, the mother of a powerful official, is weaving her own cloth, she lectures him on the importance of hard work for both men and women at all levels of society. Third, she upbraids her son for offending a guest at a state banquet by serving him an unusually small turtle. Fourth, Jing Jiang visits her nephew at his home, but refuses to speak to him in the public area of his residence where he is holding court. When he comes to the inner quarters to speak to her, she declares: “Now, the outer court is where you attend to the affairs of our ruler, and the inner court is where you manage the affairs of the Ji lineage. I would not dare to speak about either of them.” (夫外朝子將業君

12  Lisa Raphals, “Arguments by Women in Early Chinese Texts,” Nan Nü 3, no. 2 (2001): 170–76.

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之官職焉，內朝子將庀季氏之政焉，皆非吾所敢言也。)13 Since Jing Jiang’s

biography has already narrated her physically leaving her own home and entering her nephew’s, and earlier, speaking in detail and with authority about the affairs of the ruler, this disavowal cannot be taken at face value. Rather, it is a verbal performance that reconfirms her commitment to the spatial division of men and women, and their separate spheres of action, in order to justify the provisional boundary crossings of her movements and words. By rhetorically proclaiming her observance of the practice of separate spheres, Jing Jiang increases her agency, her moral capital, and her influence over the rest of her family, both male and female. The Expanded Biographies’ version of this biography removes the dialectic between boundary crossing and boundary maintenance. It omits the first and fourth incidents completely: Jing Jiang never draws an analogy between government and the loom, and she never leaves her home to visit her nephew. What remains are two trite discourses on hard work and courtesy to guests.14 The Expanded Biographies deletes both Jing Jiang’s intimate knowledge of statecraft and her disclaimers about the bounds of her sphere of activity, erasing her negotiation of the contradictions in gendered spatial practice. Another Biographies protagonist who manipulates the spatial boundaries governing women’s bodies and discourse is the Wife of Duke Ling of Wei.15 In Liu Xiang’s biography, Duke Ling and his wife, together in their home, hear the sound of a carriage passing by. The carriage stops, then resumes. The wife immediately identifies the occupant as Qu Boyu, a worthy minister, who must have stopped outside the gate of the ruler to bow as prescribed by ritual. The duke sends someone to investigate and discovers that his wife was correct, but in order to trick her, he tells her that she was wrong. His wife congratulates him: “At first, I thought Wei had only one Qu Boyu. But now I see that we have yet another who is his equal, so that you have two worthy ministers. A state with many worthy officers is a fortunate state!” (始妾獨以衛為有蘧伯玉，爾 今衛有與之齊者，是君有二賢臣也。國多賢臣，國之福也。 )16 Liu Xiang’s commentary adds: “The wife of Wei was well versed in the art of knowing people. So great was her wisdom that she could be tricked but not deceived.” (衛夫 人明於知人道。夫可欺而不可罔者，其明智乎！)17 The wife of Wei demonstrates that her wisdom is not bounded by the walls of the women’s quarters. 13  B  iographies 1.9, Wang Zhaoyuan, Lienü zhuan buzhu, 10–12; Kinney, Exemplary Women, 14–16. 14  Gujin lienü zhuan yanyi, 1:17–19. 15  Biographies 3:7, Wang Zhaoyuan, Lienü zhuan buzhu, 47. 16  Wang Zhaoyuan, Lienü zhuan buzhu, 47; Kinney, Exemplary Women, 52. 17  Wang Zhaoyuan, Lienü zhuan buzhu, 47; Kinney, Exemplary Women, 52.

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By using only the information available to a woman observing strict physical segregation—the sound of a carriage outside as heard from within the house— the wife of Wei makes the same instantly correct evaluation of a worthy minister that normally characterized effective rulers. Her person is gendered; her intelligence is not. In fact, her seclusion in the women’s quarters, which requires her to extrapolate from a minimum of data, makes her power as a judge of character all the more striking. Her observance of physical gender boundaries empowers and reinforces her intellectual boundary crossing. The Expanded Biographies keeps the biography’s plot intact. The commentary, however, includes information not only from this biography but also from Liu Xiang’s biography of the notorious Nan Zi from the Biographies chapter “The Depraved and Favored” (Niebi 孽嬖)18 In that account, Nan Zi is identified as the wife of Duke Ling of Wei. She has an illicit affair, which is discovered by the heir apparent, so she slanders the heir to his father, Duke Ling. The duke believes her and is enraged, and the heir flees to another state, creating a succession crisis that leads to decades of unrest. It is unlikely that the Nan Zi censured in “The Depraved and Favored” and the Wife of Duke Ling of Wei praised in “The Sympathetic and Wise” were the same person.19 But the Expanded Biographies assumes that the wife of Wei is Nan Zi, and his commentary attempts to explain how the same woman could have been both a paragon of wisdom and a stereotype of depravity. The result, attached to this biography of a virtuous exemplar, reads like gratuitous criticism: With Nan Zi’s wisdom, there was nothing she did not know. If she had been established at court, she would naturally have been a worthy minister. Since she was the wife of a lord, she was also an inner helpmeet. Why then did Wei encounter defeat, the Duke of Wei encounter confusion, and she herself fall into error, in the following days? Could this be because she lacked knowledge of something? It was not because she lacked knowledge. Dissolute longings: although she clearly knew them, she did not bother to attend to them. Thus we realize that in respect to wives and daughters, one does not prize having talent but prizes having virtue. 以南子之明智，無所不知。使之立朝，自是一賢臣；即為君夫人，亦 是一内助。奈何使衛國日就於敗，靈公日就於昏，自身日就於匪？若

18  B  iographies 7.12; Wang Zhaoyuan, Lienü zhuan buzhu, 140–41; Kinney, Exemplary Women, 151–52. 19  Kinney, Exemplary Women, 222 n. 45.

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有不知者，何也？非不知也。荒淫念切，雖明知之而不暇顧惜矣。因 悟婦人女子不貴有才而貴有德。 20

The Expanded Biographies assumes that the protagonists of the two biographies, both identified as the wife of Duke Ling, are in fact the same woman, who goes from being wisely attuned to the state’s well-being to nearly destroying her state for an adulterous affair. The fact that the Expanded Biographies’ editor finds this idea more likely than the alternative scenario—that Duke Ling had more than one wife during his lifetime—says a great deal about his underlying assumptions about women. In his analysis, women’s sexual desire is an ever-present threat, and no amount of knowledge or wisdom can prevent a woman from giving way to her “dissolute longings.” He sets up a contrast between talent and chastity that is not present in the original biography, minimizing the importance of women’s intelligence in order to emphasize unchastity as a constant threat for women and assert that chastity is the preeminent feminine virtue. This seventeenth-century anxiety about women’s sexual desire reflects both the late Ming rise of the chastity cult and the early Qing commemoration of chastity martyrs who died during the Ming-Qing dynastic transition. The praise of such martyrs intensified the discursive resonance between sexual chastity for women and political loyalty for men and made chastity a highly charged topic in the early decades of the Qing.21 As in the biographies of women caught between natal and marital family loyalties studied in chapter 1, the Expanded Biographies uses both plot adaptations and commentary to mediate the anxieties that these ancient accounts of clever women provoked in their early Qing readers. In these two biographies, anxiety centers on the way that the heroines of Liu Xiang’s Biographies treat the division between inner and outer as negotiable. Some die to uphold the tiniest details of gender segregation, but others conspicuously observe some rules in order to break others.22 The Biographies praise women who act expediently for the benefit of the patriline. This is particularly evident in the three sections that focus on the intellectual virtues; heroines frequently display a combination of verbal force and 20  Gujin lienü zhuan yanyi, 3:12. 21  On the late Ming origins of the chastity cult, see Siyen Fei, “Writing for Justice: An Activist Beginning of the Cult of Female Chastity in Late Imperial China,” The Journal of Asian Studies 71, no. 4 (2012): 1002. For an analysis of the tensions in literati accounts of women who were abducted and raped during the Yangzhou massacre of 1645, see Wai-yee Li, Women and National Trauma in Late Imperial Chinese Literature (Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2014), 480–526. 22  E.g., Biographies 4.6 and 4.10.

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expertise in matters beyond the inner quarters. But the seventeenth-century Expanded Biographies tries to mute this interfering streak in its heroines. Like other late imperial editions of the Biographies, it downplays women’s pragmatic wisdom in order to emphasize chastity; in some passages, the editor even presents chastity and capable wisdom as being in conflict. One might be forgiven for wondering whether the early Qing public simply could not handle the accomplished rhetoricians and sharp-tongued advisors that Liu Xiang celebrated in the Han dynasty. But Liu Xiang’s favorable view of argumentative women was hardly undisputed in the Han. Indeed, the best known Han woman writer, Ban Zhao, wrote that an admirable woman was characterized by quiet restraint and attentiveness to household duties, not remarkable talent or skilled disputation.23 In light of Ban Zhao’s career as a political advisor, this statement itself—like Jing Jiang’s disclaimers—should be read as a strategic performance of gender norms that enabled Ban’s own political action, or equally strategic advice to younger women about how to survive court and household intrigues as a vulnerable new bride, or both.24 In the Han dynasty as in the Qing, there was more than one way to write as, or about, a clever woman. More importantly, the clever, outspoken woman did not disappear from the page when the late imperial liezhuan tradition began to squeeze her out. She simply took on different forms and moved to other genres. The xianyuan 賢媛 biographical tradition, which originated around 430 CE, overlapped in theme and content with the liezhuan tradition for centuries. But the two diverged sharply beginning in the mid-Ming dynasty, when xianyuan became a genre dedicated to the celebration of female talent and self-consciously distinct from the liezhuan tradition.25 The prefaces to anthologies of women’s poetry, which were published in increasing numbers in the seventeenth century, also praised the literary talent of their contributors.26 Finally, the able and argumentative heroine flourished in late imperial texts, first in vernacular short stories and novels, the earliest examples of which date from the late Yuan and early Ming dynasties,27 and later in written tanci by women, rhymed narratives which were popular from the end of the seventeenth to the beginning of the 23  In Ban Zhao’s biography from the History of the Latter Han, juan 84. Fan Ye 范曄, Hou Han shu 後漢書 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1965), 10:2789. 24   Yu-shih Chen, “The Historical Template of Pan Chao’s Nü Chieh,” T’oung Pao (1996): 232. 25  Qian, “Lienü versus Xianyuan,” 72–73, 82–84. 26  On the publishing boom of women’s writings, see Ko, Teachers of the Inner Chambers, 59–67. 27  Patrick Hanan, The Chinese Short Story: Studies in Dating, Authorship, and Composition (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University, 1973), 161–63.

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twentieth century.28 Therefore, the ideological shift away from the intellectual virtues in the Expanded Biographies and other late imperial Biographies editions needs to be understood not only as a result of the rise of the chastity cult, but also in the context of the development of other kinds of text that occupied new and different positions in the expanding discourse on female talent. Even in the Han dynasty, Liu Xiang’s Biographies offered only one stance in an ongoing debate about feminine virtue.29 But by the late imperial era, the print explosion meant that far more books were being published, with a greater range of interpretive positions on the classical tradition, than ever before.30 At the same time, both in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, more women than ever were writing about female talent self-consciously, as talented women in their own right.31 The discursive landscape had grown more crowded, and no single edition of the Biographies, nor even the entire Biographies textual tradition, could say everything there was to be said about female talent and virtue. In the following section, close analysis of four eighteenth-century stories of capable women highlights the complexity of the late imperial discourse on female intelligence and spatial practice. Then, I briefly compare the attitudes expressed in these stories to depictions of talented women in other eighteenth-century genres. This comparison shows that both classical tales and vernacular short stories push the boundaries of feminine virtue further out than other genres, but they do so by drawing on the resources of the classical tradition. 2

Expediency and Ethics in Qing Fiction

Smart women abound in late imperial fiction, but their archetypes are often two-edged. There is the persuasive, but greedy and dishonest, madam or matchmaker. There is the virago, marked by jealousy, courage, and violence, who can nevertheless appear as a capable manager benefiting her family and even her hapless husband.32 Finally, there is the shrew, described by Keith McMahon 28  Li Guo, “Tales of Self Empowerment: Reconnoitering Women’s Tanci in Late Imperial and Early Twentieth-Century China” (Ph.D. diss., University of Iowa, 2010), 25. 29  Sarah A. Queen, “Beyond Liu Xiang’s Gaze: Debating Womanly Virtue in Ancient China,” Asia Major 29, no. 2 (2016): 9. 30   Kai-wing Chow, Publishing, Culture, and Power in Early Modern China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 149–88. 31  Ko, Teachers of the Inner Chambers, 143–76; Mann, Precious Records, 76–120. 32  Yenna Wu, The Chinese Virago: A Literary Theme (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 190; Maram Epstein, “Turning the Authorial Table: Women Writing Wanton

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as a woman who defies the inner–outer division by “scattering” and “splashing” her words and her energies, “trying to control the man’s outer actions and replace him as tyrant.”33 But McMahon also sees a connection between shrews and talented poets: the beauties of the chaste scholar-beauty romance “take the shrew’s skill at haranguing and turn it into supreme aptitude in poetry and other literary arts.”34 Verbal skill unites positive and negative depictions of female intelligence. The characters I analyze below stand between poets and shrews. They are merchant and farmer wives, haranguers rather than poets, but they benefit their families tremendously. They verbally dominate their male relatives and neighbors, manage their marital clans’ property, inherit their natal families’ property, and leave their husbands for other men—for their own good. Like the accomplished rhetoricians of the Biographies, they understand the complexity of the discourse around women’s place and use it strategically, crossing some boundaries while upholding others. In these two vernacular story collections, the patriline’s survival outweighs the feminine virtues of meekness and chastity and justifies their female protagonists’ takeover of clan governance and property management. But the potential dangers posed by their clever female characters remain visible: usurpation of male authority, loss of clan property, failure of chastity. Each story controls these dangers by exploiting the symbolic tensions and resonances between the linked conceptual areas of women’s speech, women’s chastity, and property rights—in each of which women were expected to remain in the “inner” realm—to present their heroines as admirable and recognizably feminine, even as they appropriate aspects of masculine authority. Moving from liezhuan biography to xiaoshuo fiction entails both changes and continuities of form and content. Biography is linked to fiction by the genres’ common origins in historiography, and the boundaries between the two could be blurry. Historical biography required authors to expand on the historical record to fill in motivations and dialogue.35 Biography and fiction informed one another: many classical chuanqi tales of the strange took the form of “biographical accounts” (zhuan 傳) of a particular individual, and Women, Shame, and Jealousy in Two Qing Tanci,” in Wanton Women in Late-Imperial Chinese Literature: Models, Genres, Subversions and Traditions, ed. Mark Stevenson and Wu Cuncun (Brill, 2017), 178–79. 33  McMahon, Misers, Shrews, and Polygamists, 57. 34  McMahon, Misers, Shrews, and Polygamists, 149. 35  Susan Mann, “Scene-Setting: Writing Biography in Chinese History,” American Historical Review 114, no. 3 (2009): 633; Sheldon Hsiao-Peng Lu, From Historicity to Fictionality: The Chinese Poetics of Narrative (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 77–78.

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these accounts influenced subsequent biographies of women.36 And short story collections drew on historical and quasi-historical accounts for some of their materials. Thus, while biography’s status as a genre was higher than that of xiaoshuo fiction, the two genres overlapped. The surprising negotiability of clan governance, property management, chastity, and meekness in the vernacular story collections Parallel Words and Stories to Delight the Eye is ritually analogous to (though more extreme than) the sanctioned negotiations of the inner–outer divide depicted in the Biographies. Both draw on the classical discourse of patrilinealism, in which women could win praise by “filling in” for absent or incapable men in the family, to redefine essentialist notions of separate spheres. Unlike the Biographies, however, maleauthored vernacular stories deploy this patrilineal rhetoric in the socially modest setting of merchants and farmer families, and they do so with the freedom of self-conscious fictionality. These factors allow them to push the boundaries of feminine virtue further than other late imperial genres such as biography and tanci, which praise women’s talent but still emphasize their meekness and sexual purity and remain silent on their economic activities. Stories to Delight the Eye and Parallel Words bring a distinctively eighteenthcentury didactic imagination to the established short story genre whose heyday was already past. Du Gang’s Stories to Delight the Eye was first printed in 1792 and enjoyed a steady popularity thereafter; it was reprinted eight times in woodblock during the nineteenth century and once in lithograph in 1905.37 Parallel Words dates from the second half of the eighteenth century and was reprinted at least once.38 Both collections draw extensively on earlier classical and vernacular fiction, and both focus on the everyday world of the household and village. Stories to Delight the Eye’s sixteen chapters mingle stories of generosity, filiality, and chastity rewarded with tales of fraud uncovered and unjust convictions overturned. Du Gang composed some of its stories and drew others from earlier published works such as Feng Menglong’s Three Words collections and Rocks Nod Their Heads (Shi dian tou 石點頭), as well as lesserknown note-form literature (biji 筆記) collections.39 All sixteen chapters have 36  Beverly Bossler, “Fantasies of Fidelity: Loyal Courtesans to Faithful Wives,” in Judge and Hu, Beyond Exemplar Tales, 160–62. 37  See the entry for Yumu xingxin bian in Wang Qingyuan 王清原, Xiaoshuo shufang lu 小説 書房錄 (Beijing: Beijing tushuguan, 2002), 312. 38  For detailed publication and dating information on Parallel Words, see Chapter 2. 39  Ouyang Jian 歐陽健 et al., ed. Zhongguo tongsu xiaoshuo zongmu tiyao 中國通俗小説 總目提要 (Beijing: Zhongguo wenlian chuban gongsi, 1990), 561–63; Shao Changying 邵 長瑛 and Liang Wenyu 林文玉, Yumu xingxin bian yanjiu 娱目醒心篇研究 (Taipei: Hua Mulan wenhua gongzuofang, 2008).

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strong moralizing overtones, and as discussed in chapter 2, the editor’s preface describes the work as combining the ethical dimensions of popular morality books with the entertainment value of fiction. Parallel Words is a collection of twelve stories, each of which is a vernacular expansion of a classical tale from Pu Songling’s Liaozhai’s Records of the Strange. But as shown in chapter 2, Parallel Words is far more domestically focused than Liaozhai, both in the stories it selects and in the ways it transforms them. Eleven of its twelve stories center on marriage and family life, with 494 tales on widely varied subject matter in the Liaozhai collection to draw from.40 Its stories trace the inception and resolution of conflicts between brothers and step-brothers, wives and concubines, and in-laws. And within each story, the anonymous author greatly expands the plot elements that relate to family life and interpersonal dynamics while giving proportionately less space to distant travel and supernatural encounters. Parallel Words’ characters do engage in some legal and ritual impossibilities such as co-wife marriage. But the collection’s underlying moral imagination is conventional: filiality, thrift, and harmony are its central values, and the patriline’s prosperity is its highest imagined good. Stories to Delight the Eye and Parallel Words share a thematic focus on the household and a strong didactic dimension. Both are rich in vividly depicted female characters who are clearly coded as admirable or not-admirable. They provide several examples of heroines who push the commonly understood boundaries of female behavior while remaining recognizably both virtuous and feminine. 2.1 Verbal Dominance and Clan Governance One benevolent fictional virago manipulates her male kinsmen with her expertise in the masculine domain of inheritance law; her story illustrates the patrilineal imperative that drives the more radical transgressions of late imperial gender norms in the stories that follow. This is Cheng shi, heroine of a story from Du Gang’s Stories to Delight the Eye that I will refer to as “A Reputation for Greed.”41 She is the childless widow of the oldest of six Wu brothers. The second brother, Wu Youyuan, is a wealthy merchant who has divided the household, leaving his orphaned nephews and nieces in abject poverty. Cheng shi adopts Youyuan’s son and business manager Ruquan and makes inordinate demands of silver and food of her “son,” which he dutifully pays. At the end of the story, 40  The remaining story is about a clever woman’s use of magical arts. There are some interesting family dynamics, but the protagonist’s magical skill is relatively more important. 41  Originally “Risking a name for greed, secretly enacting great virtue” (Mao tan ming yin xing hou de 冒貪名陰行厚德), story 13.2 in Du Gang, Yumu xingxin bian.

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it turns out that she was acting the role of a greedy woman in order to make up for Youyuan’s greed by redistributing his wealth more equitably through the clan, feeding the children of all five brothers and arranging their marriages. Cheng shi exceeds the normal boundaries on women’s action throughout the story by managing her nephew’s business and manipulating his lineage. Cheng shi exerts authority when she manages Ruquan’s business, and her expertise stretches beyond the women’s quarters. She advises him on investments, but her hiring insights are especially remarkable: “When it came to hiring employees, as soon as they passed before her eyes, if she said they would do, then indeed [Ruquan] would gain from their ability; if she said they would not do, and they went elsewhere, then indeed they would cause problems.” (用 的夥計，一經他目，説道用得的，果然得他氣力；他說用不得的，到了別 家，果然壞事。 )42 Cheng shi’s business acumen is not unique in late imperial

fiction; the late Ming Rocks Nod Their Heads story “Siege of Yangzhou” shows a capable wife traveling with her hapless merchant husband and managing their capital.43 But Cheng shi remains at home, extending her authority from the stable center of the women’s quarters, and her ability to evaluate shop employees instantly and correctly recalls the Wife of Duke Ling of Wei’s ability to evaluate ministers. Like Duke Ling’s wife, her unerring perception of the world outside the home is all the more striking because she herself remains secluded in the home. Cheng shi also takes charge of lineage affairs, which were a primarily masculine concern. Furthermore, the rhetoric she uses to dominate the Wu clan elders relies on a pretense of legal expertise. She thus speaks with authority on both “state affairs” and masculine “relational norms.” It begins with a sneaky, even illicit transaction: Cheng shi uses her adoptive relationship with Ruquan to siphon money from Youyuan’s household into her own. From the standpoint of the jia household, an economic unit that shares a roof and a food supply,44 Youyuan and his five brothers “divided the household” long ago; they are legally financially independent, and Cheng shi’s diversion of resources from one to the other is little better than theft. But Du Gang justifies his heroine by criticizing Youyuan’s greed and emphasizing lineage morality in Cheng shi’s final speech: 42  Du Gang, Yumu xingxin bian, 13:13. 43  For a detailed analysis of the story’s gender politics, see Xian Wang, “Langxian’s Dilemma over the Cult of Martyrdom and Filial Piety: A World of Emptiness in ‘The Siege of Yangzhou’,” Ming Studies 2015, no. 72 (2015): 50–56. 44  Derk Bodde and Clarence Morris, Law in Imperial China: Exemplified by 190 Ch’ing Dynasty Cases (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967), 193.

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Older and younger brother, uncle and nephew, are all the descendants of one ancestral lineage. When one is in need, another must act to relieve the emergency. When your birth father was alive, his household was wealthy alone, and all the other branches were poor. But he saw members of the same stock like strangers on the street and didn’t lift a finger to help them. 人家弟兄叔姪，都是祖宗生下來的，需要緩急相通。你本生父在日，    家業獨富，各房些貧，視一本若路人，全無一毫周濟。45

Each phrase emphasizes the centrality of lineage ties and the kinship obligations that should bind wealthy households to support their poorer relatives in other households. Late imperial readers would have been familiar with this kind of rhetoric: morality books frequently exhorted wealthy men to care for poorer households of their lineage, and Wu Youyuan clearly failed in this duty. But though patrilineal logic makes Cheng shi a heroine, her actions still transgress gender boundaries. Women did frequently manage household finances in the Qing dynasty and gained oblique praise for doing so effectively,46 but the ancestral lineage was an overwhelmingly masculine concern.47 Women were central members of the jia, but they were peripheral, even suspect, in the male-dominated zu. Thus, there are two ways to read this story, and either reading shows Cheng shi verging on impropriety. If we read her speech as genuine, then she has taken control of the lineage and deceived her clan elders, overstepping her authority. Or, if her speech is more strategic than heartfelt, she has constructed a facade of lineage discourse to justify her actions on behalf of her own impoverished household. In either reading, she has skillfully blended masculine and feminine rhetorics of authority. The speeches by which Cheng shi dominates the Wu clan elders join masculine expertise with feminine tears. Her combination of masculine and feminine rhetorical tactics is especially visible during her fight to name Ruquan, 45  Du Gang, Yumu xingxin bian, 13:14. 46  Mann, Talented Women, 197–99. 47  Those who acted on behalf of a lineage were almost always men. Exceptions, such as the widows Yang and Zhou’s involvement in the Qian lineage and Yuan Jingrong’s leadership of the Wu lineage, and the way men write about these interventions by women, only underscore the rarity of this occurrence. Jerry Dennerline, “Marriage, Adoption, and Charity in the Development of Lineages in Wu-Hsi from Sung to Ch’ing,” in Patricia Buckley Ebrey and James Watson, eds., Kinship Organization in Late Imperial China, 1000–1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 190–94; Binbin Yang, Heroines of the Qing: Exemplary Women Tell Their Stories (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2016), 88–93.

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rather than one of her impoverished nephews, as her husband’s heir. Nobody wants the role, which brings only a ritual obligation to his spirit and the financial burden of supporting his widow. So the clan elders meet to choose an heir, and Wu Youyuan suggests she choose one of the poor nephews currently sharing her household. But Cheng shi, who wants to adopt Youyuan’s son and take his money, responds: May I ask, respected elders, in the statutes set down by the court, in the statute on adopted heirs, I think there must be a clear written guideline recorded in the law; when the oldest branch of a family is without heir, which branch’s nephew should inherit? I only want to act according to proper precedent and let that be the end of it. Why would I need to choose for myself? 但有一句話，請問諸位高親: 朝廷設立條例，立嗣這條，想亦有明文 載在律上，長房無後，應該那一房的姪子承繼？只要照例而行就是 了，何用自行揀選？48

Youyuan gets the message, but resists—he says he depends on his oldest son to run his business and offers his younger son instead—whereupon Cheng shi browbeats Youyuan into submission with a shrewish harangue: “I don’t care whether he’s young or old. Whatever the laws and statutes say about what to do when the senior branch of a lineage has no heir, whether one should establish the older or younger son of the second branch as heir—I’m a woman, what do I know?—just do what the law says, with no mistakes. Rather than violate the law, let the dead be a ghost with no ancestral sacrifices—let his younger brother not acknowledge him as older brother, let my brother-in-law not acknowledge me as sister-in-law. Just let it be as though the Wu clan never had this branch of the family.” When she was done, she wept loudly and freely and went into her quarters. The assembled elders looked at each other helplessly with tongues sticking out. Youyuan was reluctant to give up his oldest son, but he was helpless before his sister-in-law’s reasonable and convincing speech. “我也不管年大年小。這律例上，長房無後，還是應該次房長子承繼，   

還是應該次房幼子承繼，我婦道家那裏曉得什麽，還是要照着律上，    萬無一失。若背律另議，寧使死者為無祀之鬼，弟不認他為兄，叔不 48  Du Gang, Yumu xingxin bian, 13:10.

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chapter 3 說罷放聲大哭，竟走進去 認我為嫂，算吳氏門中沒有這一房便了。” 了。眾親族你看我，我看你，都把舌頭來伸伸。有源心中，大兒子本 割舍不得，爭奈長嫂所話又極名正言順。49

Cheng shi’s appeal to the law of which she claims ignorance is disingenuous— and effective. In fact, the Qing code did not specify which branch should inherit, much less which son of that branch.50 As paternal grandsons of the dead man’s father, all the nephews are equally eligible. But Cheng shi demands that the clan follow a strict hierarchy of seniority by selecting the oldest son of the next oldest brother as her husband’s heir. This logic goes beyond either law or custom: although many texts distinguish the oldest son as head of the patriline from his younger brothers,51 they do not make distinctions of seniority between younger brothers and their descendants. But Youyuan and the clan elders accept her implied logic of a strict chain of succession between the branches of a lineage. Would a middle-aged widow really have known the relevant statutes of the Qing code? Du Gang does not tell us, and narratively, it hardly matters whether Cheng shi is lying about what she does know or inventing where she is ignorant. She has, and instills in her listeners, a plausible sense of what lineage law might require. Since the clan elders themselves are evidently not certain of the code’s contents, they are vulnerable to manipulation by a quick-witted woman who seems to know something that they do not. Finally, Cheng shi follows her speech with a tearful exit to the women’s quarters where the clan elders would be unlikely to follow. Her tears, which silence her opposition, recall the maternal tears that inspired many late imperial 49  Du Gang, Yumu xingxin bian, 13:11. 50  It specified only that the adopted heir to a childless man must be from the same generation as his son would have been, and that nearer relations must be chosen in preference to more distant ones. See article 78 on adopted heirs. Da Qing lüli, 179. An English translation can be found in David Wakefield, Fenjia: Household Division and Inheritance in Qing & Republican China (University of Hawai’i Press, 1998), 215. See also Philip C. C. Huang, Civil Justice in China: Representation and Practice in the Qing (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 97–98. The Ming code is the same. 51  The revival of the zong system (in which the oldest son of the oldest son would always be head of the patriline) sparked lively discussions in the Song dynasty; Zhu Xi incorporated the “small zong” system into his Family Rituals, which became extremely popular in the Ming and Qing dynasties, but was not enshrined in law. Patricia Buckley Ebrey, Confucianism and Family Rituals in Imperial China (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), 104–106. For studies of lineage organization in late imperial China, see Michael Szonyi, Practicing Kinship: Lineage and Descent in Late Imperial China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002); Zhenman Zheng, Family Lineage Organization and Social Change in Ming and Qing Fujian (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2001).

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Chinese sons to moral and scholarly effort.52 Her speech weaves together a facade of legal expertise, a pro forma protest of womanly ignorance, and a feminine emotional outburst. In the same way, she calculates her movements between the outer area of the house and the inner women’s quarters for maximum effect. Her movement through space manipulates gender boundaries in the same way her verbal tactics do. The commentary on “A Reputation for Greed” by Du Gang’s contemporary Xu Baoshan 許寳善 praises Cheng shi precisely for exceeding feminine norms. “For a woman to understand the greater good, this is already difficult to obtain. Mother Cheng did even more: she fulfilled the greater good. When she was real, she did so well; when she was false, she did so well.” (女子而能曉 大義，已是難得；程母更有一番作用，以全大義。真也真得好，假也假得 好。 )53 Xu Baoshan sees Cheng shi’s lineage concern as unusual for a woman

but nevertheless praiseworthy. He praises her apparent greed for its underlying goodness, showing his awareness of the performative nature of virtue. Cheng shi’s sphere of concern is broader than a woman’s was expected to be, which justifies her trespass on the masculine territory of lineage finance as well as her false rhetoric of dubious knowledge and pretended ignorance. But she does it all to fill in for the dead or morally bankrupt men of the lineage, to benefit the clan as a whole. The same patrilineal logic also drives the far more radical revaluations of feminine virtue in the stories that follow. 2.2 A Filial Daughter and Female Inheritance Cheng shi’s financial shenanigans helped safeguard her marital clan’s wealth. But in the story of You Yinggu, another capable virago of eighteenth-century fiction, a woman’s masculine boldness on behalf of her natal family gains her a son’s inheritance of her father’s land—a profound upheaval of gender norms and property law. Her story is Parallel Words’ “The Capable Stepsister.”54 In the story, the You family consists of a father, his deceased first wife’s daughter, Yinggu, his second wife Cao shi, and her two sons, Shangxin and Cixin. At 52  On the power of maternal tears, see Hsiung Ping-Chen, “Constructed Emotions: The Bond between Mothers and Sons in Late Imperial China,” Late Imperial China 15, no. 1 (1994): 98–102. 53  Du Gang, Yumu xingxin bian, 13:15. 54  Original title “Bestowing kindness on a treacherous person, giving rise to danger on every side; relying on benevolent spirits, turning disaster into good fortune” (Shi guiyu suidi shengbo zhang shenling zhuan zai wei fu 施鬼蜮隨地生波仗神靈轉災為福). The story is a transformation of Liaozhai 10.18, “Qiu Daniang 仇大娘,” Pu Songling, Liaozhai zhiyi, 1391–1402. The characterization of the female protagonist is the same in both texts; the differences between them will be discussed later in this chapter.

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the beginning of the story, Yinggu has been married and widowed and lives in another province, and she has quarreled violently with her father because he is not willing to help her impoverished marital family. Early in the story, the father is exiled, and an old enemy of the family sees an opportunity to destroy them. He befriends the older son Shangxin, turns him into a gambler, and gets him to sell all the family property and even his wife Jiang shi to pay his gambling debts. Shangxin is exiled as punishment. Cao shi and the teenage Cixin are left desolate at home. The enemy writes to Yinggu, expecting that she will come to gloat and her shrewish presence will add to the family’s misery. Instead, she saves the day. She goes to both the county and prefectural yamen to bring accusations against the gamblers, pleading her case so effectively that the courts order the gamblers beaten and return the money to the family. She manages the You household business so effectively that they become wealthy. Eventually, the father and both brothers are reunited, and Yinggu reconciles the older stepbrother to the wife he sold. The father divides his estate evenly between Yinggu and her two stepbrothers, and Yinggu’s sons inherit her portion. Yinggu’s actions transgress the normal boundaries of a woman’s sphere of action and possession in several ways. First, she travels to both the county and prefecture yamens, where she pleads her case publicly and successfully: “She knelt beneath the dais and told the whole story … clause by clause, term by term, weeping and accusing.” (英姑跪在案下 …… 條條款款，哭訴一番。)55 This is her most obvious meddling in the outside world. Like Cheng shi in “A Reputation for Greed,” Yinggu combines logical and legal force—the adverbial phrase tiaotiao kuankuan suggests legal language and implies clear organization of events in her narration—with emotive outbursts that evoke both the “scattering” and “splashing” of the shrew and the tearful exhortations of a wronged mother figure. Her fourteen-sui old son accompanies her; technically, he serves as the male guarantor for her written plaint,56 but Yinggu does all the talking. The fact that she has only a teenager as chaperone lets the full force of her personality emerge. Yinggu also spends years of her life away from her marital family, managing her natal family’s affairs, and is then rewarded with an equal portion of her father’s property. Both plot elements transgress late imperial norms. The 55  Xingmeng pianyan, 8:8. 56  Women had to be represented legally by proxy in written plaints; see Matthew Sommer, Polyandry and Wife-Selling in Qing Dynasty China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015), 225; Philip Huang, Civil Justice in China, 112. This did not prevent women from being the primary litigants and defendants in historical lawsuits; for one example of a woman suing another woman, see Philip Huang, Civil Justice in China, 132–33.

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inappropriate expenditure of a married woman’s time and energy on her natal family is balanced by the inappropriate transfer of the clan’s resources to another patriline. Here, “outside” and “inside” take on multiple meanings. On the one hand, they relate to the tension between natal and marital family loyalty in expectations for married women: warnings against allowing married women to spend too much time visiting their natal families and too much money on presents to them can be found in numerous morality books and household codes.57 On the other, they indicate the male head of household’s imperative to keep the resources of the clan within the clan through the standard pattern of partible male inheritance, which is violated when Yinggu receives a full portion and passes it on to her sons, members of her husband’s lineage. But the You paterfamilias is in exile throughout most of this story, which brings us to Yinggu’s third major contravention of gender norms: her total domination of her stepmother, her two stepbrothers, and her stepsisters-inlaw. Ignoring distinctions of both generation and gender, she steps into the role of head of the family. Yinggu’s violations of a daughter’s normal role are clearly recognized as such by the story’s author and supporting characters and would have been clear to readers. For instance, Yinggu has difficulty arranging the marriage of her younger stepbrother Cixin, because their enemy tells everyone: “The You family’s property is all under Yinggu’s control—it will never return to the You brothers!” (尤家的田產，盡是英姑掌管，將來沒得歸還兄弟 的了。 )58 The family’s nemesis starts the rumor, but it gains currency because Yinggu does in fact control the You family property in a way that would have been unheard of for a married daughter. The narrator uses several strategies to distance himself from the bystandercharacters’ perceptions of Yinggu and present her as a heroic benefactor. First, Yinggu conspicuously observes some gender, family, and property boundaries. She brings her son with her on her trips to the yamen. Yinggu’s father is exiled and her husband dead, so her son is not only her legal guarantor, but also the proper male authority figure in her life according to the “Three Followings” principle.59 His presence serves a conspicuous moral function as well as a legal one. Yinggu also keeps strict account books; when the family is reunited, she brings them out to prove that she has diverted none of the You family property to her own husband’s family.60 Her father’s decision to give her a son’s 57  E.g., Chen Hongmou, Wuzhong yigui, 11:15; Shi Chengjin, Chuanjia bao, 2:4:23. 58  Xingmeng pianyan, 8:9. 59  In which a woman follows her father before marriage, her husband after marriage, and her son after widowhood. 60  Xingmeng pianyan, 8:17.

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inheritance is spontaneous—Yinggu is financially incorruptible. Like Cheng shi in “A Reputation for Greed,” she avoids shrewishness (despite her initial quarrel with her father) because she does not splatter her fierce energies indiscriminately, but contains and directs them. Both her partial observance of gender boundaries and her strict financial accounting serve to balance her misdemeanors in the story’s moral ledger. “Inner” and “outer” conceptualize both lineage property and spatial practice, and the author combines Yinggu’s partial observance of boundaries in each area to present her as a person of strict moral and financial propriety, someone who keeps things and people where they belong. Finally, although Yinggu’s status as a widowed daughter introduces the danger of property loss from her father’s to her husband’s family, it also makes her less threatening in other ways. Unlike most of the shrew figures discussed by Wu and McMahon, Yinggu shows neither sexual desire nor jealousy. Her family role is stepdaughter and stepsister rather than wife. This makes her a partial outsider, so the You family is less responsible for controlling her behavior.61 In fact, Yinggu’s unorthodox actions allow her stepmother Cao shi and her stepbrother’s wife to act as conventional models of feminine virtue, chaste widow and faithful wronged wife. The You family wives do not have to leave the house to go to the yamen: Yinggu does it for them. Cao shi does not have to persuade her daughter-in-law to return to her worthless husband: Yinggu does that, too. She enables the virtuous seclusion and harmonious mother- and daughter-inlaw relationship of the You wives. The story displaces the necessary transgressions in the You family’s path back to prosperity onto a woman who is enough of an insider to have a legitimate concern, but enough of an outsider to have freedom to act. Like Liu Xiang, the author of Parallel Words manipulates the complexity of the concepts of inner and outer to make Yinggu simultaneously unorthodox and exemplary. In late imperial China, women belonged in the marital household, and property belonged in the patriline. Yinggu leaves her marital household, acts in public, and inherits property—but she keeps the property together, keeps her mother-in-law alive, and brings back her sister-in-law. Her father’s permanent alienation of clan property to Yinggu and her sons is balanced by her years of service to them instead of her marital family in a careful calculation of boundary maintenance.

61  On lineage leaders’ legal obligation to control the younger men and wives of their clans, see Janet Theiss, Disgraceful Matters: The Politics of Chastity in Eighteenth-Century China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 65–81.

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This kind of calculation falls under the philosophical category of quan 權, literally “weighing” or “balancing.” Quan had at least three different meanings in ancient texts from the fourth to the second century BCE. It could mean assessing a situation correctly or weighing the long-term consequences of a decision before acting.62 Finally, it could refer to the principle that in unusual situations, one could be morally justified in breaking the usual moral and ritual rules. Quan in this sense is often translated as “expediency.” Expediency as defined by Chinese philosophers from Mencius onward is not a simple “the ends justify the means.” Rather, it is a conceptual framework in which the exceptions ultimately strengthen the rules.63 Expediency became an important focus of many late imperial vernacular narratives.64 Although neither Pu Songling nor the commentator of Parallel Words uses the term quan, Yinggu’s actions clearly fall within the scope of expedient action in this sense: Yinggu’s public action, near-abandonment of her marital family, dominance in her natal family, and inheritance of natal family property combine in such a way that at the end of the story, both patrilines have had their boundaries re-established and their economic foundations strengthened. As discussed in chapter 2, vernacular narratives often use detailed moral accounting to think through the ethics of unusual situations that derive from the tensions of daily life. Expediency was a useful conceptual tool in this process, and these vernacular narratives explore the ins and outs of expediency at length. 2.3 The Ethics of Sex and Property “A Reputation for Greed” and “The Capable Stepsister” explore women’s expedient action in the area of patrilineal inheritance, but fictional reflections on expediency often centered on the sexual realm.65 A final story pair from Stories to Delight the Eye establishes a connection between feminine virtue and patrilineal property, presenting heroines whose expedient and unorthodox actions successfully balance both sexual and economic norms. Du Gang uses the symbolic linkages between chastity and property to make sex and money into semi-interchangeable ethical bargaining chips in his contrasting depictions of two clever women. Stories to Delight the Eye has a strong paired format in which each chapter consists of two thematically related stories, which work in concert to illuminate a shared question: in this particular pair, the question is 62  Griet Vankeerberghen, “Choosing Balance: Weighing (Quan 權) as a Metaphor for Action in Early Chinese Texts,” Early China 30 (2005): 66–73. 63  Vankeerberghen, “Choosing Balance,” 77. 64  Epstein, Competing Discourses, 238–47. 65  For detailed analysis of one such novel, A Country Codger’s Words of Exposure (Yesou puyan 野叟曝言), see Epstein, Competing Discourses, 238–47.

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how to evaluate a capable young woman who saves her entire marital family by either really or apparently violating her chastity. The heroine of the first story, “A Bandit’s Concubine,” is Feng shi.66 Her character recalls Li Yu’s heroine, Geng Erniang (Secunda Geng), who beguiles a bandit chief without ever quite having penetrative sex with him and then returns to her husband.67 The story takes Li Yu’s thought experiment a step farther: what if a woman really did have sex with her captor but remained loyal to her husband? When Feng shi’s city is attacked, she bargains with the bandit chief who invades her home, agreeing to become his concubine if he will guarantee the safety of her husband and the rest of his family. She ingratiates herself with the bandit and his main wife and learns to ride and shoot. When the bandit chief leaves on his next expedition, Feng shi convinces his wife that her family has a hidden cache of jewels; the wife urges her to ride in male disguise to claim them. Feng shi does so, only to escape back to her original husband. During their emotional reunion, she reveals that her saddlebags are full of treasure from the bandit chief’s hoard. The entire family lives happily ever after without reproaching Feng shi for her extramarital liaison. Du Gang concludes: “Though her body is defiled, her heart can face the sun of heaven!” (身雖受污，此心可對天日。) He leads the reader into the next story by asking, if there were a woman who could preserve both her family and her chastity simultaneously, “wouldn’t that be a marvel beyond marvels, an even greater difficulty among difficulties?” (豈非更是一樁奇外出奇，難中更難之事？)68 The next chapter, “A Wife for a Field,” tells how Cui shi, a daughter-in-law of the Wang family, saves her entire marital household from starvation during a famine by volunteering to be resold in marriage at a handsome price.69 Her 66  S tories to Delight the Eye 4.1, “Keeping a Whole Family Alive, Willingly Submitting to Humiliation” (Huo quanjia yuangan jiang ru 活全家原甘降辱), is a vernacular expansion of an anecdote found in the early Qing biji anthology Miscellaneous Records from a Sunlit Garden (Kuangyuan zazhi 曠園雜志). Shao Changying 邵長瑛 and Lin Wenyu 林 文玉, Yumu xingxin bian yanjiu 娛目醒心編研究 (Taibei: Hua Mulan wenhua gongzuofang, 2008), 21; Wu Chenyan 吳陳琰, Kuangyuan zazhi 曠園雜志 (Shanghai: Shanghai shu dian, 1994), 1:16–17. 67  Heroine of “The Female Chen Ping Saves Her Life with Seven Ruses” (Nü Chen Ping jisheng qichu 女陳平計生七出), the fifth story in Silent Operas (Wusheng xi 無聲戲), in Li Yu, Li Yu quanji, 12:5341–80. The story has been translated by Patrick Hanan in Silent Operas (Hong Kong: Research Centre for Translation, Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2000), 77–96. The story’s negotiation of chastity norms is discussed in Theiss, Disgraceful Matters, 161–64, and Wai-yee Li, Women and National Trauma, 467–76. 68  Du Gang, Yumu xingxin bian, 4:9. 69  Stories to Delight the Eye 4.2, “Sacrificing Great Chastity to Show Spotless Purity” (Xun dajie shi xian qingzhen 狥大節始顯清貞) has no known source other than Du Gang’s invention. Shao Changying and Lin Wenyu, Yumu xingxin bian yanjiu, 22.

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father-in-law and husband have already sold all their household valuables and have tried to sell their barren land too, but nobody wants to buy it. Cui shi boldly negotiates her own sale price of 120 taels with the matchmaker, then demands that her father-in-law make out a deed of land sale for 120 taels to her in repayment for her dowry, which she has spent to buy food during the famine. Cui shi takes the deed of sale with her in her sedan chair in the wedding procession and strangles herself during the journey. When the horrified groom’s family, the Rens, discover her corpse, they also find the land deed, on which Cui shi has written “The field returns to the Rens; the body returns to the Wangs.” (田歸任姓，屍歸王氏。)70 Even though the original wife sale was illegal, the local magistrate praises Cui shi and rules that the Wangs should keep the money and the Rens keep the property. In effect, Cui shi has done a bait-and-switch to force a land sale at a time when land prices are low and wife prices are high. Cui shi’s gender transgressions are subtler than Feng shi’s. Feng shi yields herself to the bandit with every appearance of enthusiasm. Her loss of chastity is mirrored in her abandonment of physical seclusion, as she becomes an expert in vigorous outdoor activities like horseback riding and archery. Both the sex and the horseback riding prove to be part of her strategy to rejoin her original husband with the money to restore the family’s fortunes. Her loyalty to her first husband and his family justifies her actions, and the reader is not expected to feel any sympathy for the bandit chief. Cui shi, on the other hand, remains behind the walls of the marital household until she enters the bridal sedan chair that becomes her coffin. Her second marriage is never consummated. Her stepping out of the feminine sphere consists rather in her willingness to appear unchaste by volunteering to remarry during her first husband’s lifetime,71 in her self-positioning as her father-in-law’s equal and her husband’s superior, and in her uncharacteristic verbal boldness. She earns praise not only for saving her husband’s family but for engineering marriage and property transactions so cleverly as to rescue the impoverished Wangs without robbing the respectable Rens. Cui shi’s main conversation partner throughout “A Wife for a Field” is her father-in-law, Wang Zhiji, not her husband. This signals that the focus of the story as a whole is not the marital relationship, but the entire Wang household. When Wang Zhiji suggests to all three of his daughters-in-law that they marry 70  Du Gang, Yumu xingxin bian, 4:18. 71  Since an unwanted flirtation by a man was enough to drive some women to suicide, the importance of a reputation for chastity should not be underestimated. Theiss, Disgraceful Matters, 198–203.

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other men to survive, Cui shi calmly points out that if they are going to remarry, they might as well do so for a price that will enable everyone to survive. And she dominates her husband. When he starts crying, she rebukes him sharply: “You’re a scholar; how can you not understand principle? … If you greedily love your wife and can’t bear to sever that love, so that you’re willing to sit by and watch your father die without helping, how can you call yourself a person? How can you call yourself a son?” (你是個讀書人，如何不曉道理？…… 你  若貪戀妻子不忍割愛，是坐視父死而不知救，何以為人？何以為子？)72 This speech silences her husband. Cui shi then refuses to let Wang Zhiji ask her natal family for their permission to sell her in marriage—thus rejecting their vestigial authority over her as well. Cui shi boldly negotiates her own remarriage, which marks a change from her usual womanly reserve. Wang Zhiji finds her sharp bargaining with the matchmaker a startling departure from her usual behavior, thinking: “‘She’s usually so reserved of speech and slow to laugh, and when she sees strangers she’s always shy and timid. But today her speech is so confident and assured!’ He found it very odd.” (“他平日寡言寡笑，見面生人都是羞怯的，今日語言 侃侃若此。 ” 暗暗稱異。)73 The fact that Cui shi changes her persona so quickly to meet this crisis shows that her previous reserve was not ingrained, but that shyness and boldness are tools she uses at will in different situations. They are aspects of her expedient action in these unusual circumstances. Like Jing Jiang in the Biographies, Cui shi displays a combination of “womanly” and “unwomanly” behavior. The ease with which both women switch between orthodox and unorthodox conduct shows that even if they spend the majority of their lives acting the role of the quiet, secluded woman, this role does not define them in their authors’ eyes. In both Jing Jiang’s biography and Cui shi’s story, Liu Xiang and Du Gang highlight the women’s performance of gender norms at some times in order to set up a baseline of virtue that allows their nonstandard behavior at other times to emerge as praiseworthy. Virtue itself is a strategic performance in both texts. Cui shi does her gender bending in order to carry out some extremely shady property transactions. But like Cheng shi, who embezzles from her wealthy nephew to provide for her poor ones, and Yinggu, who takes over her natal family’s affairs with terrifying gusto, Cui shi’s financial irregularities serve a higher patrilineal good. Her goal is to get the Rens to buy the Wangs’ land so that the Wangs can survive. Her method is to offer herself for sale and then substitute the land: she is the more desirable asset, young and pretty, while the land does 72  Du Gang, Yumu xingxin bian, 4:13. 73  Du Gang, Yumu xingxin bian, 4:14.

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not produce well even in a good year. By using her death to force the land sale posthumously, Cui shi has ensured that the Rens end up with something more than a corpse in exchange for their betrothal silver. But the land is neither what they agreed to nor what they wanted. On the other hand, land sale was legal in the Qing, while direct wife sale was not; Cui shi’s fraudulent maneuver does keep her, the Wangs, and the Rens from actually breaking the law. It leaves room for the magistrate to ratify her solution to the problem, though the law did not require him to do so; indeed, the interlinear commentary praises the magistrate for not taking the opportunity to confiscate the land in question. On a symbolic level, the sleight of hand, swapping wife for land, works within the story because of the underlying similarity between land and women in the Qing cultural imaginary. There are numerous parallels between (legal) land sales and (illegal) wife sales in both sale contracts and folk proverbs of the Qing dynasty.74 Cui shi’s last decree, “The field returns to the Rens; the body returns to the Wangs,” creates a verbal parallel by using the same verb, gui (to return), for both field and body—the same word that is used to describe a bride entering her marital household. Even though Cui shi is more attractive than this particular field, her childless state mirrors the field’s infertility, and the land sale effectively returns her bride price to the Wangs.75 The symbolic resonance between the woman and the field is powerful enough, and Cui shi’s verbal manipulation of that resonance is skillful enough, to convince the Wangs, the Rens, the magistrate, and the reader that her solution is right and fitting. Cui shi remains chaste while Feng shi does not; Cui shi dies and sacrifices her marital family’s property while Feng shi lives and enriches her husband with the bandit’s wealth. But Stories to Delight the Eye treats them as equivalent. By pairing these stories and commenting on them as a unit, Du Gang and Xu Baoshan suggest that the values of chastity, life, and wealth, which are swapped around so differently within each story, are not themselves the point. Each woman has made a tremendous sacrifice, one of life and one of chastity. By praising both, Du and Xu emphasize, not what each woman has lost, but how wisely each has leveraged her sacrifice. 3

Genre and the Discourse on Female Talent

These narrative negotiations around women’s expedient boundary crossing show that vernacularization has different effects on distinct texts and topics. 74  Sommer, Polyandry and Wife-Selling, 193–96. 75  I am indebted to a reviewer for this observation.

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When we compare Expanded Biographies to Parallel Words, we can see that both vernacular sources work to increase moral clarity for the reader by adding details and attempting to mediate potential ethical tensions. But the ideological commitments that the vernacular mode clarifies in each case are quite different. In the four vernacular stories studied above, the spatial negotiations of savvy women bear a fundamental resemblance to those of the heroines of the Biographies, while the Expanded Biographies deliberately minimizes the spatially transgressive aspects of their cleverness. And in the Liaozhai tale on which “The Capable Stepsister” is based, the chuanqi version already devotes considerable detail to the machinations of the capable stepsister. So women’s expedient boundary crossings are depicted in similar ways in the Han biographies, in the Qing Liaozhai, and in the Qing vernacular stories from Parallel Words and Stories to Delight the Eye, but they are minimized in the Qing popular history Expanded Biographies. In order to understand the larger critical and linguistic project of these stories, we must compare them both to each other and to writing about intelligent women in other genres. First, let me address the similarities and differences between “The Bandit’s Concubine” and its zhiguai source, “The Clever Escape of a Marvelous Woman” (Qinü qiaotuo 奇女巧脫),76 and between “The Capable Stepsister” and its Liaozhai source tale, “Qiu Daniang.” Unlike the stories analyzed in chapter 2, these huaben do not devote a proportionately greater amount of time to household space and family interactions than their classical sources. In “A Bandit’s Concubine,” the expansion is evenly distributed and does not highlight any one aspect of the plot. Although the greater details and richer dialogue of the vernacular story add vividness, they do not shift the story’s emphasis: both the huaben and its zhiguai source emphasize the woman’s marvelous cleverness, the expedient ease with which she humbly serves the bandit’s main wife (and the bandit), tricks the wife, then arms herself and rides across the country in male disguise to return to her husband. “The Capable Stepsister” does make one important plot change that critiques its source’s moral vision, but that critique is not focused on the household. Instead, while the Liaozhai tale emphasizes the mysterious ways of Heaven and the lack of control humans have over the outcomes of their actions, the story portrays human vengeance as karmic retribution. In both tale and story, the enemy’s attempts to harm the family backfire: for example, he sets part of their house on fire, and they discover buried treasure while rebuilding. In both versions, the enemy ends as a beggar. But in the classical tale, the family decides that since Heaven has turned the enemy’s malice into their good 76  Wu Chenyan, Kuangyuan zazhi, 1:16–17.

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fortune, they will not seek further revenge; they even give him food when he begs for it. In the vernacular story, however, even after the enemy is beggared, the fathers-in-law of the You brothers cannot forget the harm he has caused their daughters (when Shangxin sold his wife, she attempted suicide and seriously injured her throat). They take him to a deserted valley, disembowel him alive, and leave him to be eaten by wild beasts. As in other vernacular transformations of classical sources, “The Capable Stepsister” expands on its source to add ethical clarity; it gives readers a cathartically gory revenge instead of the original tale’s disquieting reminder that “man proposes, Heaven disposes.” But this increased clarity is not domestically focused. Both the tale and the story present the stepsister’s expedient boundary crossings at admiring length. To summarize: vernacular expansion mediates ethical tensions around other topics in “The Capable Stepsister,” as in other Parallel Words stories. And women’s expedient boundary crossings created tensions requiring mediation in other Qing vernacular texts, such as the Expanded Biographies. But women’s expedient sacrifice of seclusion, submission, and chastity is praised with equal enthusiasm in the classical strange tales “Qiu Daniang” and “the Clever Escape” and in their vernacular expansions in Parallel Words and Stories to Delight the Eye. When it comes to the spatial tensions in the discourse on feminine virtue, vernacular texts do not all take the same attitude, and classical and vernacular texts do not always differ. The limits of expediency in redefining feminine virtue appear very different in other genres. A brief comparison between the stories studied above and some other important genres of writing about women shows that the vernacular mode and the fictional imagination serve as intersecting tools for reflecting on the ethics of female intelligence in the Qing dynasty. Writing about women in the Qing was never transparently factual, but it is useful to distinguish between depictions of clever women that hew closely to the facts of actual women’s lives (or claim to do so), and those that do not. In the former category, we may place xianyuan biographies and the prefaces to collections of poems by women, as well as the personae voiced in the poems themselves.77 In the latter, we may place tanci narratives as well as classical tales and vernacular stories and novels.

77  All these are, of course, still carefully crafted literary portrayals heavily influenced by masculine ideals of “talented women.” Anne Gerritsen, “The Many Guises of Xiaoluan: The Legacy of a Girl Poet in Late Imperial China,” Journal of Women’s History 17, no. 2 (2005): 37–38; Ellen Widmer, “Xiaoqing’s Literary Legacy and the Place of the Woman Writer in Late Imperial China,” Late Imperial China 13, no. 1 (1992): 112–14.

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In literary accounts of real women’s lives, both male and female authors directly critiqued ideas of women’s work that limited their participation in writing and publishing.78 But they were also careful to frame women’s literary production in terms of traditional feminine virtue. Women were ineligible for the civil service examinations, but they could use their talent to admonish their husbands and instruct their sons, helping them toward both moral cultivation and political success; in this way, their talent would be another resource fully devoted to the patriline.79 Titles and prefaces to poetry collections also frequently assure readers that female poets wrote only in their spare time after finishing their household tasks. Hu Wenkai lists over 170 titles of femaleauthored poetry collections along the lines of “Poems composed after weaving” (or “embroidery” or “working”).80 Accounts of historical talented women resemble the heroines of the biographies and stories above in that female authors strategically perform some aspects of virtue, such as diligence in household labor, especially cloth and clothing manufacture, which was particularly associated with virtuous femininity.81 This conspicuous enactment of womanly virtue is used by female poets and their biographers to justify their entry into the male-dominated world of writing and publishing. Virtue performance enabled verbal boundary crossing for late imperial women poets, as it did for Biographies heroines, but did not justify such drastic expedient measures as those of the vernacular story protagonists studied above. Literary tanci written by women take this boundary crossing several steps farther in their imagined worlds. In one well-studied example, Chen Duansheng’s 陳端生 (1751–1796) Karmic Bonds of Reincarnation (Zaisheng yuan 再生緣), two cross-dressing heroines become a general and a prime minister, outperforming their male counterparts in both the martial and civil domains of the masculine sphere.82 But most talented tanci heroines remain both meek and sexually chaste.83 Hou Zhi’s 侯芝 (1764–1829) sequel to Karmic 78   Kang-i Sun Chang, “Ming-Qing Women Poets and the Notions of ‘Talent’ and ‘Morality’,” Culture and State in Chinese History: Conventions, Accommodations, and Critiques, ed. Theodore Huters, R. Bin Wong, and Pauline Yu (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 252–53. 79  Mann, Precious Records, 76–120. 80  Hu Wenkai and Zhang Hongsheng, Lidai funü zhuzuo kao, 1012–13, 1017, 1021–23. 81  For more on textile work as symbolic of womanly virtue, see Bray, Technology and Gender, 237–72. 82  For a plot summary and translated excerpts in English, see Wilt Idema and Beata Grant, eds., The Red Brush (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), 734–52. 83  Ellen Widmer, “The Trouble with Talent: Hou Zhi (1764–1829) and Her Tanci Zai Zaotian 再造天 of 1828,” Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews (1999): 133; Widmer, The Beauty and the Book, 14.

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Bonds, Recreating Heaven (Zaizao tian 再造天) even describes the political disasters unleashed by the ambitious daughter of Karmic Bonds’ heroine before she is finally defeated by a more traditionally virtuous empress dowager. Ellen Widmer describes the sequel’s attitude to clever women as follows: “What it really has in mind is both practical and rhetorical: competent women have much to contribute, yet when a competent woman rules the roost, she must learn to hide the fact that she is actually in charge.”84 Though scholars have identified empowering, quasi-feminist messages in tanci, these messages are often subtle, “appropriating” the discourse of chastity or “recuperating” expressions of female jealousy.85 Virtuous tanci heroines do not usually dominate men or break chastity norms. Despite the fantastic adventures of cross-dressing heroines, the legitimate sphere of feminine action is still defined more conservatively in tanci than it is in either Liaozhai, Parallel Words, or Stories to Delight the Eye, and the explicit rhetoric of tanci, like that of the titles and prefaces to poetry collections, is often conservative about the legitimate uses of women’s intelligence. Of course, like Ban Zhao’s admonitions to meekness and verbal restraint, or Jing Jiang’s disclaimers of knowledge about statecraft in the Biographies, these statements should be taken with a grain of salt. For female poets and tanci authors, the act of writing automatically placed them in the category of talented women; it was a performative statement that they saw literary intelligence as compatible with feminine virtue, so every written message had a doubled meaning. But men writing classical tales and vernacular stories about women did not need to consider their own self-presentation, as writing women did, or the feelings of a real woman’s family, as biographers did.86 This position of relative distance from the world of actual women gives these authors greater freedom to reimagine the boundaries of the feminine sphere. In Liaozhai, Parallel 84  Widmer, “The Trouble with Talent,” 148. 85  Chen Yinke and Bao Zhenpei both argue that tanci authors’ depictions of outstanding female characters reveal their anger at unjust gender norms. Chen Yinke 陳寅恪, “Lun Zaishengyuan 論再生緣,” in Hanliutang ji 寒柳堂集 (Beijing: Shenghuo dushu xinzhi sanlian shudian, 2015), 63–66; Bao Zhenpei 鮑震培, Qingdai nü zuojia tanci xiaoshuo lungao 清代女作家彈詞小説論稿 (Tianjin: Tianjin shehui kexue chubanshe, 2002), 126–34. See also Siao-chen Hu, “Literary Tanci: A Woman’s Tradition of Narrative in Verse” (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1994), 22. On tanci appropriating discourses of chastity and filial piety, see Li Guo, “Tales of Self Empowerment,” 100–13. On female jealousy as a positive force in tanci, see Epstein, “Turning the Authorial Table,” 177–79. 86  Authorial self-consciousness and explicit self-presentation was also a generic norm in tanci, which conventionally include descriptions of the writing process and author’s mood. Such passages are minimal or nonexistent in predominantly male-authored xiaoshuo fiction. Bao Zhenpei, Qingdai nü zuojia tanci xiaoshuo lungao, 106.

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Words and Stories to Delight the Eye, this greater freedom manifests itself in more flexible negotiations around property and chastity. Many of these stories and tales depict women of non-gentry families, whose verbal intelligence manifests itself in property disputes rather than poetry. Such women rarely feature in poetry collections or xianyuan biography. And these fictional collections foreground lower-class women’s economic contributions to the family in a way that biographies of and poetry by gentry class women do not.87 As we have seen, fictional portrayals of women’s economic activities highlight the ways feminine virtue might have to fragment in the face of poverty, famine, or violent crisis. The patrilineal ideal was for a woman’s productive and reproductive abilities to be equally strictly dedicated to her husband’s family. But in extreme circumstances, the fictional imagination allowed for some flexibility in the expedient strategies of capable women, a calculus in which chastity was only one aspect of devotion. The vernacular mode allows the authors of Parallel Words and Stories to Delight the Eye to present these humble heroines in a more detailed and downto-earth style than the classical-language tales they expand, but does not significantly alter their calculations of expediency. This is in contrast to the vernacular Expanded Biographies, which does actively minimize the heroines’ capacity for expedient action. From this, we can see that the colloquial idiom offers a particular set of tools for authors engaged in a wide variety of ideological negotiations with a source text, notably expansion and explanation, but it does not dictate the endpoint of those negotiations in any predictable way. But expedient action by ordinary women does gain new significance in the huaben of Parallel Words and Stories to Delight the Eye, not because of the language but because of the collections’ format and themes. Each collection contains only a dozen or so stories, and those are narrowly focused on daily life. In Parallel Words and Stories to Delight the Eye, expedient action by women is presented as a central aspect of everyday life, which is valorized as the principal realm of human action. This transformation in the huaben context is especially evident in the way Du Gang follows “A Bandit’s Concubine,” which expands a classical anecdote and features a dramatic escape from an armed bandit, with his own composition, “A Wife for a Field,” in which the characters 87  Female authors were almost always from gentry families, as only such families would spare the resources to educate their daughters; their writing about themselves and the other women in their social networks represents primarily the uppermost layer of society. Talented gentry women did sustain their households economically, and their male relatives did recognize their contributions, but like most male literati involvement in the economic sphere, this activity was discreetly masked in their writing. Mann, Talented Women, 169–74; 198.

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confront the more common crisis of slowly dwindling food resources in a year of drought. Droughts and poor harvests occurred with some regularity in the eighteenth century, when Du Gang’s collection was published. Even though these droughts were a common precipitating factor for food riots and even peasant revolts, the poor harvest itself is a much more quotidian hardship than bandits laying siege to a city.88 Furthermore, Cui shi’s expedient remarriage plan follows the pattern of historical wife sales, which were a common survival strategy for the impoverished.89 Cases of women seducing bandits to steal their treasure do not appear in Qing legal archives with such regularity. By not only expanding the classical anecdote but also pairing it with an original vernacular composition featuring less dramatic events, and by declaring that the latter is an even greater “marvel beyond marvels,” Du Gang asks his readers to marvel at women’s expedient virtue as it manifests itself in the everyday struggle to survive. The resulting story pair reaffirms the collection’s emphasis on ordinary life. The vernacular mode is one tool authors can use for ethical reflection. So is the creation of characters that are not linked to any particular woman, where no actual reputation for virtue is at stake: to put it in the terms used by late imperial literary critics, a creative process that mixes plenty of xu 虛 (fabrication) with its shi 實 (facts). Ming and Qing fiction and drama critics insisted on a balance of xu and shi that allowed both creativity and plausibility, that liberated the author from the constraints of actual facts while satisfying the reader’s desire for believable narrative logic. Individual critics disagreed about the ideal proportions of xu and shi. But the idea that they should be combined, and that there was a proper balance between them, was central to the emerging late imperial discourse on fictionality.90 When huaben collections transform classical tales, the vernacular mode’s closer resemblance to everyday speech subtly alters the balance of xu and shi. The vernacular stories are more clearly fictional than their classical sources, whose ambiguous position on the boundary between history and fiction intensifies their uncanny effect.91 At the same time, verisimilitude, understood as “a resemblance to the real world or an internal psychological truthfulness,” was an important aesthetic value within the maturing critical discourse on fiction during the Ming and Qing.92 Vernacular texts provide both a close imitation of real world dialogue and a detailed 88  R. Bin Wong, “Food Riots in the Qing Dynasty,” The Journal of Asian Studies 41, no. 4 (1982): 767–72. 89  Sommer, Polyandry and Wife-Selling, 49–51. 90  Rolston, Traditional Chinese Fiction, 181–87. 91  Zeitlin, Historian of the Strange, 5. 92  Sheldon Hsiao-peng Lu, Historicity and Fictionality, 134.

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portrayal of psychological motivations, which contribute to both external and internal verisimilitude. This vernacular verisimilitude is not limited to self-consciously nonhistorical creative fiction; recall that the preface to the vernacular Expanded Biographies highlights both lifelikeness and emotional intensity as effects of the vernacular translation process, but presents itself as popular history rather than creative fiction.93 But vernacular fiction uses colloquial language to offer a particular vivid immediacy that late imperial critics highlighted as central to the underlying truthfulness of fictional texts.94 Thus, in Parallel Words and Stories to Delight the Eye, the vernacular mode and the fictional imagination intersect. They present women’s expedient boundary crossings in convincingly fabricated detail, allowing for ethical reflection that is both daring and grounded in the everyday. In the eighteenth century, male authors of classical tales and vernacular stories redefined feminine virtue in more shocking ways than female authors or biographers of women did. But upholding the doctrine of separate spheres verbally while performing it selectively was a versatile tactic that was also used by historical women of varied social classes and occupations. This rhetorical strategy, embodied in the Biographies and sanctioned by that work’s canonical status, persisted in a variety of discourse genres in Qing China. It empowered late imperial women to write and act in public and to justify their potentially controversial actions as virtuous. Historical women wrote and published poetry while gesturing toward keeping it private or even burning it.95 They performed womanly work like embroidery and circulated it publicly with conspicuous excellence.96 Widows intervened with authority in the business of their husbands’ lineages, and they wrote their own biographies using the discourse of female exemplarity to justify doing so.97 In some cases, late imperial women’s strategies of self-determination seem to have been inspired directly by the Biographies.98 Of course, not all feminine virtues were equally easy to redefine in real life. Women’s authoritative speech and public action could win 93  See the discussion in chapter 1. 94  Sheldon Hsiao-peng Lu, Historicity and Fictionality, 138–46. 95  Rolston, Traditional Chinese Fiction, 99. 96   I-Fen Huang, “Gender, Technical Innovation, and Gu Family Embroidery in Late-Ming Shanghai,” East Asian Science, Technology, and Medicine, no. 36 (2012): 99–102. 97  Dennerline, “Marriage, Adoption, and Charity,” 190–94; Yang, Heroines of the Qing, 88–93. 98  Faithful maidens used ethical argumentation to defy their parents in ways that recall Liu Xiang’s accomplished rhetoricians, and biographies of faithful maidens often specifically mention the Biographies’ influence on them. We can surmise that this influence included both their emphasis on ritual propriety and their sense of independent moral determination. Lu, True to Her Word, 147–49; 160.

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praise, while sexual purity and patrilineal inheritance were never seriously reexamined in nonfictional writing. But Parallel Words and Stories to Delight the Eye both offer a thorough and imaginative “revaluation of values” that differs in extent rather than quantity from the rhetorical strategies available to historical women. Thus, the shift away from the intellectual virtues and toward chastity performance in late imperial Biographies editions should be seen as a change that occurred within a genre, not within Chinese culture as a whole. Late imperial editions of the Biographies in the liezhuan and yanyi genres emphasize chastity over intellect, xianyuan biographies praise the literary talent of their gentry subjects, and vernacular stories present savvy, bossy women from a modest social background as both dangerous and praiseworthy. None of these facts exists in a vacuum. Horizons of expectation around language and genre influenced the kind of writing authors did in particular kinds of text, and the fact that different genres portray different types of heroine means that we need to read multiple genres together to understand the complexity of discourse on women in the Qing dynasty. Scrappy farmers’ widows and merchants’ mothers are rarely mentioned in the same breath or the same book as talented poetesses and the guixiu 閨秀 who kept their official husbands’ households afloat, yet it is necessary to consider them to understand the full range of culturally recognized models for female intelligence in late imperial China. In these story collections of the eighteenth century, fantasy is inseparable from moral idealization. And in vernacular transformations of classical tales, in which authors use the vernacular mode to expand and explain other writers’ accounts, combined subtle changes can result in a profound ideological shift. As the next two chapters will show, thinking of vernacular fiction as a recognized arena for serious thought experiments also gives insight into longer fictional works that respond to ideological tensions by adding to an existing narrative rather than rewriting it.

chapter 4

Reframing Household and Text in Later Dream of the Red Chamber Detailed representations of character dialogue and architectural space are two of the means by which vernacular texts sympathetically portray women negotiating the tensions between the economic, emotional, and ritual demands of household life. In long vernacular novels (zhanghui xiaoshuo), the scale of the text is far larger than that of a single vernacular story, and this expanded scale allows for increased complexity of setting, characterization, plot, and ideology. In domestic novels such as Plum in the Golden Vase and Dream of the Red Chamber, both the casts of characters and the houses they inhabit are enormous compared to those in the short stories of the previous chapters. The level of detail is often excruciating, and much of that detail is devoted to sketching out the boundaries of households, character relationships, and the text itself. The following two chapters will examine two early sequels to Dream of the Red Chamber, showing how their formal and stylistic choices enable their literary and thematic critique of the parent novel. Sequel writing and rewriting can be seen as two manifestations of the same critical instinct.1 And Dream of the Red Chamber, like other masterworks of the literati novel, inspired retellings in other genres from chuanqi 傳奇 drama to zidishu 子弟書 oral storytelling.2 But many authors responded to Dream of the Red Chamber instead by writing sequels, continuing the story in the same vernacular mode, in order to give it a different ending and retrospectively revise the meaning of the original novel. Just as the Expanded Biographies and Parallel Words make only subtle changes to their source texts, these two sequels have to hew closely enough to the plot and character outlines of Dream of the Red Chamber to be recognizable continuations of it. But sequel writing gives authors more freedom to reinvent characters and take the plot in new directions than retelling does.3 These sequels, 1  Martin W. Huang, “Boundaries and Interpretations: Some Preliminary Thoughts on Xushu,” in Snakes’ Legs: Sequels, Continuations, Rewritings, and Chinese Fiction, ed. Martin W. Huang (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2004), 31–32. 2  On the former, see Jing Shen, “Attempts to Adapt the Novel Honglou meng as a Chuanqi Drama,” CHINOPERL 29, no. 1 (June, 2010): 32–37. On the latter, see Ellen Widmer, “Extreme Makeover: Daiyu and Baochai in Two Early Sequels to Honglou meng,” Nan Nü: Men, Women, and Gender in China 8, no. 2 (2006): 297–298. 3  Widmer, “Extreme Makeover,” 307–08.

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like the vernacular transformations studied in the previous chapters, reinterpret existing texts that pose problems to a reader. But sequel writing’s greater freedom allows them to offer a more profound, direct critique of the parent novel. My analysis will focus on the way their stylistic choices enable a revision of Dream of the Red Chamber’s vision of qing. Later Dream of the Red Chamber (Hou honglou meng 後紅樓夢, 1796) is a novel in 30 chapters, consciously smaller in scale than its 120-chapter parent novel.4 Through plot events and character interactions along with metafictional discussions of its own size and purpose, the sequel offers a meditation on boundaries and their function of containment. It is a paean to practical ritual moderation that nevertheless justifies and satisfies readers’ passionate, impossible engagement with the parent novel. The characters carefully shore up the architectural and ritual boundaries of the mansion and its social norms—but they present the textual boundaries of the book itself as fair game for metafictional free play. Thus, Later Dream engages conservatively with the negotiations between qing and li that characterize the domestic novel genre, while playing creatively with the stylistic aspects of the genre and its characteristic relationship to the book market. Dream of the Red Chamber centers on the large and wealthy Jia clan, whose size is mirrored in the 120 chapters of Cao Xueqin’s sprawling novel. The scale of the Jia family and its mansion is both unrealistic and dystopic. It becomes evident throughout the novel that nobody can control the household, its expenditures, or its members: Wang Xifeng’s attempt to do so culminates in financial and moral failure and in her death from exhaustion and illness. The illicit movement of people and objects throughout the story contributes to the sense of inevitable decline that permeates the novel.5 Indeed, twentiethcentury scholars have often seen Dream of the Red Chamber as a portrayal of the traditional family in decay; the surname Jia puns with both jia 假, “false,” 4  The novel purports to be by Cao Xueqin 曹雪芹. It has several prefaces signed with different pseudonyms, including “The Free and Easy Wanderer” (Xiaoyaozi 逍遙子); “The Unauthorized Historian of White Clouds” (Baiyun waishi 白雲外史), and “The Dweller Among Scattered Flowers” (Sanhua jushi 散花居士). Following Aisin Gioro Yurui, whose critique is discussed later in the chapter, I will assume that Xiaoyaozi—whose preface claims that he found the manuscript and edited it for publication—is actually the author. The historical individual behind this pseudonym is unknown. 5  Such moments include Jia Lian’s sneaking a second wife into the Garden, the movement of pages and maids in and out of places where they do not belong and their illicit affairs, the ease Xue Pan finds in creeping out to get in trouble, the constant underhanded pawning of objects, and even the seemingly trivial case of the poria cocos powder (Lycoperdon Snow) in chapters 60 and 61.

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and jia 家, “home, family.”6 The novel’s tragedy emerges not only from the tension between Jia Baoyu’s romantic passion for Lin Daiyu and his elders’ prosaic plans for his marriage to Xue Baochai, but also from the machinations of a variety of other household members—Jia She extorts fans from a poor collector and abuses maids, Wang Xifeng skims from the household accounts and drives her husband’s concubine to suicide, and Xue Pan kills a romantic rival. The novel is much more than a love triangle: It encompasses a web of household conflicts, loyalties, jealousies and loves, a dark panorama of the domestic realm. Later Dream begins after the parent novel’s chapter 120. Jia Zheng finds Jia Baoyu, rescues him from the monk who (in this version) abducted him, and brings him home. Lin Daiyu returns to life, and we meet her half-brother, Lin Liangyu (who does not exist in Dream of the Red Chamber). Liangyu moves into the mansion next door and Daiyu lives with him, while a connecting door is opened between the Lin and Jia mansions. Liangyu divides his inheritance with Daiyu, making her a wealthy heiress. After much ado, Daiyu reluctantly agrees to marry Jia Baoyu as a primary wife, and Xue Baochai is persuaded to share her own primary wife status—a legal impossibility, though a frequent occurrence in fiction.7 Daiyu’s character changes completely—she takes charge of the household affairs in both mansions and emerges as a manager even more capable than Dream of the Red Chamber’s Wang Xifeng. With the infusion of Daiyu’s wealth and management skills, the Jia mansion soon returns to its former glory. Cao Xueqin appears as a close friend of the Jia family throughout the novel and acts as go-between for Baoyu and Daiyu’s marriage. Baoyu ends up with two wives, Daiyu and Baochai, and three concubines, Qingwen (“Skybright,” Baoyu’s maid from Honglou meng), Zijuan (“Nightingale,” Daiyu’s personal maid), and Ying’er (“Oriole,” Baochai’s personal maid).8

6  Jie Shaohua 解少华, “Guizu zhi jia de zui’e shi he shuaiwang shi—qiantan gudai changpian xiaoshuo Honglou meng 貴族之家的罪惡史和衰亡史—淺談古代長篇小說紅樓夢,” Zhonggong Zhengzhou shi weidangxiao xuebao 2, no. 86 (2007): 132; Ji Xin 季新, “Honglou meng xinping 紅樓夢新評,” in Honglou meng juan 紅樓夢卷, ed. Yisu 一粟 (Taibei: Xinwen feng, 1989), 303–304. The numerous comparative studies of Honglou meng and Ba Jin’s Family ( Jia 家) are telling in this regard as well. 7  See the discussion of the legal and historical realities of marriage to a single main wife plus concubines of markedly different status, and on two-wife polygyny in short fiction, in chapter 2. 8  Translations from Hou honglou meng are my own throughout the chapter. Due to the welldeserved popularity of David Hawkes’s English translation of Honglou meng, I include his translations of character and place names in parentheses for ease of reference.

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The Jias, Their Jia, and the Virtue of Containment

Later Dream reverses the parent novel’s tragedies by rebuilding the household’s boundaries, reaffirming its morals, and replenishing its coffers. The process of redefining the mansion parallels the sequel’s revision of the novel’s framework: the changed scale of the book itself presents an ideal of textual containment. Dream of the Red Chamber’s lengthy description of unruly passions at play in an enormous mansion is replaced, in Later Dream, by re-ordered boundaries that redefine qing and re-establish ritual order. Paradoxically, however, Later Dream also both emulates and surpasses its parent novel’s transgressive aspects by drawing directly on Plum in the Golden Vase in several key scenes.9 The sequel threatens even more drastic upheavals before re-containing events in its orderly narrative framework, and this recontainment is a critical response, not only to the parent novel, but to the xiaoshuo generic tradition. One difference between Later Dream and Dream of the Red Chamber is evident as soon as a would-be reader picks up the book: the thirty-chapter volume is only a quarter the size of its parent novel. In chapter 20, Baoyu, Baochai, and Daiyu read and discuss Dream of the Red Chamber and decide to ask Cao Xueqin to write a sequel—but on a very different scale. Daiyu rejects the idea of having Cao simply reprint the original with a different, happy ending: This big book both has a huge framework and narrates complex matters. If it didn’t intersperse loose and tight description and mingle elegance and commonness, how could such a story be told? Even the fact that it has no resolution at the end makes it like boundless mist and waves, free and unrestrained—if such a book were to end with a chapter describing a happy reunion with a bed full of official tablets [many sons gaining examination success], it would have no flavor. As to the recounting of dreams which seems annoying, it’s only a factual record which couldn’t be deleted or changed. So even if this book hadn’t been printed already, one absolutely couldn’t add or delete passages in a vulgar way. For one thing, it wouldn’t be realistic; for another, the writing style would not have the same antique flavor and elegance. 他這一大部書，間架也大，頭緒也繁，不是疏密相間，雅俗相參，如 何敍得。就是到後來沒有結束，也是煙波無際，宕逸不收。若那麽一 部書必定做一回滿床笏的團圓，也沒有趣味。到那敍夢之筆，似乎太 9  On Honglou meng’s clear debt to Jin Ping Mei, see Mary Scott, “Azure from Indigo: Honglou meng’s Debt to Jin Ping Mei.” (PhD diss., Princeton University, 1989), 79–182.

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chapter 4 煩，也只是記實的話，不能刪改。所以這部書不論刻不刻，卻不可俗 手增刪，一則敍事不真，二則文筆有古今雅俗之別了。10

Dream of the Red Chamber’s vast scale and open-endedness are described as two sides of the same artistic coin. The characters agree that the novel itself cannot be changed, that the tragically unresolved ending is the best one possible. However, Baochai still wants to set the record straight on Baoyu and Daiyu’s happy marriage, so Daiyu suggests commissioning Cao Xueqin to write a sequel. Baoyu balks: “Sister Bao, listen to this joke from Sister Lin! Such a big book, 120 chapters—if I were to ask him to write another 120 chapters, who would ever be willing?” Daiyu burst out laughing and said, “… Those 120 chapters narrate so many years. If we go along with Sister Bao and just narrate the most recent year or two, a dozen or so chapters would be enough.” Baochai laughed, “The events of one or two years—if you wanted to turn them into 120 chapters, you’d have to spend ten chapters on a month. Even if you wrote about every time Baoyu went to relieve himself there wouldn’t be enough material!” “寶姐姐，你看林妹妹好說的輕巧話兒，這麼一百二十回的大書，要 請他再編一百二十回，人家誰肯的？” 黛玉大笑起來道: “…… 他這一百 二十回敘的多少年，咱們若依了寶姐姐，現敘這一二年，十幾回便夠 了。” 寶釵便笑道: “一二年的事情，要編一百二十回，也算一個月有十 回書的事情，連寶玉的出恭撒尿敘在裡頭還不夠呢。”11 The three finally ask Cao Xueqin how many chapters he thinks best. Cao sets an upper limit of thirty chapters, while Baoyu holds out for thirty-two. At this point, Cao Xueqin laughs, That’s easy enough. Just live a few more years, and if you live till you and Daiyu are a hundred years old and white-haired, I could even write 3,200 chapters. But I’ll have to ask leave from King Yama, or I won’t be able to do the work of writing! 這也容易，我再多住幾年，住到你同世嫂百歲白頭之時，就三千二百 回也有。只是我曹雪芹要向閻王告假，才好在這裡筆耕呢。 12 10  H  ou Honglou meng 後紅樓夢 (Beijing: Beijing daxue chubanshe, 1988), 267. 11  Hou Honglou meng, 267–68. 12  Hou Honglou meng, 268.

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At this Baoyu gives in. This apparently trivial exchange takes up a great deal of space on the pages of the self-consciously medium-sized Later Dream. The scale of the original novel is attributed to the complexity of the events described and the minutiae of daily life that form the narrative. At the same time, the modest scale of this particular sequel becomes a virtue worth highlighting, indicating the book’s careful selection of appropriate and interesting material. While none of the characters criticizes Dream of the Red Chamber’s scale, the repeated awed mentions of “120 chapters! Such a big book!” make it clear that this is not Xiaoyaozi’s idea of a typical xiaoshuo, nor the kind of book he is trying to write. Its size is as singular as that of the Jia mansion or Prospect Garden. The implications of a book’s size extend beyond the finished work’s ease of reading and marketability. Form and content are intimately, not contingently, related. If the act of writing a sequel to someone else’s novel is always in some way a critical commentary on the parent novel, then Later Dream’s selfconscious choice to be a smaller novel narrating a smaller slice of life is also a literary statement, not so much a direct critique as an assertion of power by a categorically different literary and familial vision. What, then, is that vision? How do differences in length affect narrative fantasies of the household? How does Later Dream present itself as a novelistic alternative to Dream of the Red Chamber? And finally, are the revisions of the household space and of the textual space connected? One answer emerges from Keith McMahon’s work on containment in seventeenth-century fiction. In Causality and Containment, he shows that the ideology of containment functions on both a thematic and a formal level. The tension between containment and rupture allows a story’s plot to progress. As regards form, the novel is “diffuse and episodic,” while the vernacular short story expresses the ideology of containment on a formal level: it consists of a clear beginning, middle, and end that bound the events it narrates.13 Later Dream, at thirty chapters, is hardly a short story. Nevertheless, contrasting ideals of containment and openness offer one way to understand the literary relationship between Dream of the Red Chamber and its sequel. Dream of the Red Chamber is indeed diffuse, and the multiplicity of meanings that readers over the centuries have managed to find in it bears witness to its open-endedness. The book’s mammoth size and openness to interpretation are matched only by the enormity and porosity of the Jia household. In contrast, Later Dream presents a self-contained and self-sustaining household space, a dramatic revision of the original Jia mansion that hemorrhaged wealth and could not balance intake and expenditure. The reformed Jia household is contained both 13  Keith McMahon, Causality and Containment (Leiden: Brill, 1988), 8.

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financially and culturally; the maintenance and firming up of boundaries is central to both the ritual and textual viability of the household, to making it “make sense” in the reader’s imagination. It is no coincidence that the book itself is more modest in size, more tightly plotted, and more controlled in potential for interpretation. Later Dream’s literary ethos of common sense and moderation serves as the formal counterpart to its thematic portrayal of the Jia family’s retrenchment and renewal, which in turn is articulated by the novel’s depiction of wealth recontained and household boundaries redefined. First, Later Dream corrects the Jia family’s financial problems by presenting the revived Daiyu as a masterful, strict, and independently wealthy household manager. She is explicitly and favorably compared to Wang Xifeng, the clever daughter-in-law whose attempts to manage the household while skimming profits for herself in Dream of the Red Chamber lead to disaster. In chapter 7 of Later Dream, Lady Wang and Aunt Xue admire Daiyu’s management of her brother’s household: “We only knew that Daiyu was clever and good at poetry and writing—how could we have known that she had this magnificent talent for management? You’d never guess it from her appearance. Compared to the situation with [Wang Xifeng] before, it’s like comparing the earth with the sky above.” (只知道黛玉精細聰明，善於詩詞筆墨，那知道他胸襟裏有此絕大的 經緯才情。外面又一毫的看他不出，比起前王鳳姐的光景，真覺得地別天 懸。 )14 Moreover, Daiyu’s inheritance from her brother provides the Jia house-

hold with a much-needed transfusion of wealth. She is both a source of capital in her own right and the means of guarding and increasing it. Daiyu’s role as wealth-bringer underlines her status as a moral agent. In Dream of the Red Chamber as in late imperial history, men control the clan property belonging to the patriline, but have little in the way of individual wealth or possessions. Women, on the other hand, have personal wealth in the form of their dowries, from which they can draw for the benefit of their uterine families; the existence of this wealth is a source of much anxiety in kinship discourse.15 Women could also turn their dowries over to their husbands to augment the communal property of the marital family. The frequency of exemplary biographies about women who do this suggests that such an action was as rare in real life as it was enthusiastically encouraged in prose. Dream of the Red Chamber presents the full ambiguity of women’s private wealth, letting us compare (and sympathize with) Wang Xifeng, who siphons wealth from the household funds for her own stores, and Grandmother Jia, who takes clothing

14  Hou Honglou meng, 85–86. 15  Bray, Technology and Gender, 139.

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and money from her private coffers to give to her sons when the Jia family meets disaster. The sequel drastically reduces this ambiguity. Later Dream mediates the tensions attending women’s private wealth on several levels. First, Daiyu both keeps and gives her wealth: she uses it for the benefit of the Jia clan, but as manager, she retains personal control of the property. By making Daiyu both donor and manager, the sequel simultaneously establishes her right to personal property and her loyalty to her husband’s family, conveniently sidestepping the contradiction between the two principles. The author dodges the ever-present conflict for a married woman between marital loyalty and filial piety. Daiyu herself frames her contributions to the Jia household as part of a broader goal to renew both the Jia and Lin mansions, making it her ultimate act of filial piety to her mother, Jia Min (as opposed to her father-in-law, Jia Zheng). As she says in chapter 27: Both of our mansions have been in serious financial trouble. My intent has always been to bring the old foundations back to wholeness and bring that mansion, too, back to full glory, and to do everything fairly and upfront. So I begged to take charge of both mansions. When that [Lin] mansion had come back to its former glory with income exceeding expenditures, and had regained its former state, I left it to others to divide the wealth. As for this [Jia] mansion, I’ll only single out Baoyu [as heir], and the remainder will go to Huan and Lan, adjusted for their different ages and statuses as sons of a concubine and a main wife. My own property will go to Uncle and Aunt in the older generation and to Zhi [Baoyu’s son by Baochai] in the younger generation. This is your niece’s way of leading her life, living by Uncle’s dictum of fulfilling filial piety to my mother while not disgracing my Lin ancestors, causing people to call me a daughter who repays her mother. 咱們這兩府裏也飢荒的很了，甥女的意思縂要將舊底子全個兒恢復全 了，便那府裏也一樣的恢復齊全，秉公分晰。所以甥女一個人請願包 顧兩府。等那府裏的舊產有進無出的長起來，恢復舊局，那府裏便按 人分晰。這府裏只提出寶玉，單分給環兄弟、蘭哥兒，也須判一個長 次嫡庶。甥女自己的，便上面侍奉了舅舅、舅太太，下面就留給芝哥 兒。這便是甥女為人一世，依着舅舅說的替母親盡一個孝道，也不辱 沒了林氏的祖先，給人家好稱一個還娘的女孩兒。16

16  Hou Honglou meng, 357–358.

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Thus, the sequel stabilizes the Jia mansion by strengthening its shaky boundaries through stricter management while lessening the pressure on those boundaries by lowering the need to cross them. The Jia mansion no longer depends on an unpredictable influx of rents from external estates, but has a significant source of financial support within its walls. At the same time, Daiyu’s potentially transgressive status as a propertied woman is re-contained within the orthodox narratives of loyalty and filial piety. Finally, Daiyu resolves the conflict between the discourses of natal and marital family loyalty by elevating her relationship with her mother (née Jia) above either her Lin father or her Jia father-in-law. This harmony is symbolized architecturally by the neighboring Lin and Jia mansions with their connecting door, a spatial arrangement that enables Daiyu to manage both households simultaneously. The strengthened boundaries of the Jia-Lin complex expand to contain the wealth of both families, as well as Daiyu’s loyalty to both families. On a symbolic level, Daiyu becomes the cultural center of the household, providing cultured entertainment so abundantly that there is no temptation for its members to stray. The clearest example occurs in chapter 18, when Daiyu leads the women to create a spectacular array of decorative lanterns within the compound for the Lantern Festival. Her original plan is to distract Baoyu (now her husband) from his sorrowful memories of their separation: Now I have a plan: we’ll simply make lanterns in the color and shape of every kind of flower; even fish, birds, people, and objects—we’ll make those into lanterns too. Anyway, the Lantern Festival is coming up. We’ll hang them from the main hall all the way to Prospect Garden, everywhere you look, even in the treetops. Baoyu loves excitement; it’ll suit him perfectly. 我而今卻有一個法兒，索性連各色各樣的花兒通扎起個花燈來，再不 然連魚鳥人物一總也扎他幾盞，橫竪元宵也進了，趕著試燈日，從上 房起直到大觀園，各到處挂滿了，連樹頂上也挂些滑溜兒扯將上去，    等寶玉愛熱鬧的，盡數的暢他意兒。17

The other women join in with stunning results: In the Rong and Lin mansions, all the women were making decorative lanterns day and night. By the eleventh or twelfth [of the first month], it was all coming together. Coming and going, everyone was looking and 17  Hou Honglou meng, 229.

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commenting on them. Indeed, it was a spectacle that put the Lantern Market by the East-West Memorial Arch to shame. 這榮囯府、林府兩邊，一眾姊妹就無夜無明的扎起花燈來。到了十一 二兩日，漸漸的齊集起來，你來我往，大家瞧著評著，著實的賭賽，    就把東西牌樓的燈市也比下去了。18

The most extended Lantern Festival scene in Dream of the Red Chamber itself occurs in chapter 18, when the Imperial Concubine and eldest Jia daughter Yuanchun’s visit home occurs on the festival day. The author focuses on the extravagance of the celebration, which Yuanchun comments on disapprovingly.19 Later Dream responds to this scene in particular by emphasizing Daiyu’s thrifty ingenuity: the women make their own spectacular lantern array, combining luxury with industry and moderation. Here, the Lantern Festival serves to highlight the new containment of wealth through fiscal management. At the same time, the sequel responds to the Lantern Festival’s role in fiction in general as a topos of both spectacle and chaos. It is a time when women often leave the house to see and—alarmingly—to be seen, leading to the possibility of abduction, rape, and adultery.20 In chapter 15 of Plum in the Golden Vase, the women of Ximen Qing’s household go out to visit Li Ping’er, another of his future wives, at the Lantern Festival. While viewing the lanterns from an open balcony, they are seen by the rowdy young men below, who take them for prostitutes.21 The women’s lack of decorum has no immediate consequences in this case, but it serves to underline and foreshadow the dissolution of Ximen Qing’s household. In Dream of the Red Chamber itself, the women do not leave the household, but the Lantern Festival leads to disaster even without a breach in gender propriety. In chapter 1, Zhen Shiyin sends his young daughter Yinglian (Caltrop) out to see the lanterns with a servant. She is abducted during this excursion, a prologue to the following tale of tragedies. Later Dream’s version of the Lantern Festival is one instance where the sequel responds directly to Plum in the Golden Vase. Daiyu’s lantern project arises from a proper concern for her husband, not from a desire to go visiting; indeed, even the timing of her plan—just when the Lantern Festival happens to be coming up—is presented as a happy accident. Her project results not 18  Hou Honglou meng, 231. 19  Cao Xueqin 曹雪芹, Honglou meng 紅樓夢 (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1996), 237. 20  McMahon, Causality and Containment, 19. 21  Jin Ping Mei cihua 金瓶梅詞話 (Taibei: Liren shuju, 2007), 1:203–04; The Plum in the Golden Vase, trans. David Tod Roy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 1:304.

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in an expedition, but in a hum of cultured industry among the household’s women. When the lanterns are finished, the women have no need to leave the house to visit the crowded, public Lantern Market, because there is nothing to gain. The best parts of the world outside are brought into the compound. Later Dream responds to Plum in the Golden Vase and a long series of other Lantern Festivals in traditional Chinese fiction by denying the necessity of this particular rupture. Rather than setting up a contrast between licentious women who leave the house to see the lanterns and virtuous women who remain at home weaving, Later Dream creates a group of privileged, virtuous women enjoying a spectacle within their walls that surpasses the one without. The best of the public world is brought into the private space. If this episode presents an uncomplicated fantasy of potential transgression contained, another interlude centered on a garden swing hints at the difficulty of containment. Like the Lantern Festival, the swing is a common topos of “interstice” or “rupture” in fiction, drama, and painting.22 Plum in the Golden Vase offers one of the most extended swing scenes in late imperial fiction. In Naifei Ding’s analysis, the swing represents not only a threatening pleasure for the women of Ximen Qing’s household, but a symbolic crossing and re-crossing of boundaries.23 In Dream of the Red Chamber, there is only one perfunctory scene involving a swing: in chapter 63, Baoyu is pushing Jia She’s two concubines Peifeng and Xieyuan (Lovey and Dove) on the swing when news arrives of Jia Jing’s death. Later Dream’s garden swing scene is much longer. It explores the swing’s common associations with voyeurism and the threatening crossing of boundaries. Here is Xiaoyaozi’s swing scene, which bridges the end of chapter 18 and the beginning of chapter 19: The whole crowd of women went to Amaryllis Eyot, where they saw a swing set up. Baoqin said, “Our garden has this swing, but I’ve only ever heard of its being used once. Why don’t we get up on it and play for a while?” Now, the frame of the swing itself was indeed splendid. The uprights were vermilion and gold lacquerwork patterned in golden clouds and dragons, and the crosspiece was a glossy dark green lacquerwork 22  James Cahill, “Three Recurring Themes in the Part-Erotic Albums,” in Chinese Erotic Painting (Digitally self-published: 2012; http://jamescahill.info/illustrated-writings/ chinese-erotic-painting, accessed November 7, 2013); Wang Shifu, The Story of the Western Wing, trans. Stephen H. West and Wilt Idema (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), x; Keith McMahon, Causality and Containment, 19. 23  Naifei Ding, Obscene Things: Sexual Politics in Jin Ping Mei (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 176–79.

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patterned with golden clouds and bats. The soft and colorful silk of the ropes, handholds and waistband were pink and soft green patterned gauze. Mirroring the hanging poplars, floating back and forth, it was indeed beautiful—small wonder that Baoqin became excited. Everyone agreed at once. Li Wan, however, said, “Sister Qin, that wouldn’t do at all. For one thing, what if your legs went soft on you and you fell? For another, you might catch a chill. Thirdly, when we went out yesterday for the Qingming Festival, even if someone had seen us, they wouldn’t have known which household we belonged to. But now, if we play on the swing and there happen to be people with powerful connections, or youths from other families, outside the walls, they might see us and spread the story around. If we really want to play on the swing, there’s another way: let’s just call the girl actresses from Pear-Tree Court to come over. We won’t force them, we’ll just tell the ones who can swing to swing. If they do the swinging, they’ll do a good job, too, and we can just watch from the ground. What could be better?” Everyone agreed. Li Wan then sent someone to call Fangguan (Parfumée) and the others. They all wore beautifully patterned jackets and pants and flowered shoes. Lingguan (Charmante), Ouguan (Nénuphar), Aiguan (Artémisie), and Kuiguan (Althée) all said they knew how, so the four girls really did get on the swing and hold on. The girl actresses and Fangguan started to push the swing. They did all kinds of maneuvers—“A Ring of Flowers,” “Coiling Dragon, Dancing Oriole,” “Shuttle Weaving a Hundred Flowers,” “Cinnabar Phoenix Facing the Sun,” “Two Immortals Crossing the Sea,” “Lone Soaring Osprey,” “Tilting Line of Geese,” “A Sail Full of Wind,” and every other kind of trick, flipping as quickly as lightning bolts, floating as high as the clouds. Then they had two flute players start playing the suite, “Rainbow Skirts and Feathered Robes.” Striking the gong, playing the transverse flute, beating the small drum, they kept the rhythm perfectly. After that, the four of them linked arms and went up on the swing again, and the musicians began the “Meeting of Butterflies,” which only uses strings and drum and is even more delicate and refined—truly immortal. Just when everyone was having a wonderful time, they suddenly heard a group of people cheering them on outside the walls. Li Wan was so agitated that she immediately called the girls to come down and hastily ordered the instruments put away. Everyone was unwilling to stop, but Li Wan was adamant about not allowing them to keep playing. Daiyu, Baochai, and Baoqin kept asking her, but Li Wan simply said, “It’s hardly

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elegant for people outside to see, and perhaps start casting suspicion on us. We can’t go on playing.” Who on earth was it cheering outside the walls? If you want to know, then listen to the explanation in the next chapter! 眾人又走到紫菱洲，看見一座秋千架子。寶琴道: “咱們園子里立了這 一座架子，也只聽見玩過一遭兒，咱們今日何不上去玩一玩。” 原來這 座秋千架子著實的華麗，本身豎架是朱紅金漆描金雲龍，橫架是油綠 彩漆描金雲蝠，一色的五色軟絲彩絛，挽手攀腰統是楊妃色、豆綠色 的交椅繡花綢，映著這幾樹垂楊飄飄漾漾十分好看，怪不得寶琴高興 起來。眾人齊聲說好，李紈便道: “琴妹妹，這個卻使不得，一則怕腿 軟了掉下來了不得，二則也著了涼，三則我們前日出去踏青，人家瞧 見了，也不知是誰家的內眷。而今玩這個，墻外有勳戚，人家子弟們 瞧見了，便要傳說開去。咱們真個要玩兒他，也有一個法兒，只叫梨 香院這班女孩子過來，也不要強他，只叫他們會上去的上去，他們打 也打得好，我們只在底下看，豈不好呢。” 眾人都說好，李紈就叫人 去傳了芳官一班來，都是麗線繡花衣褲，踏著花鞋。齡官、藕官、艾 官、葵官都說會的。當真的四個女孩子就站上去繫好了。那班女教師 就同芳官送起來。也有許多的名兒，套花環、盤龍舞、鶯梭穿百花、    鳳朝陽、雙仙渡海、一鶚凌空、側雁字、一帆風，各樣的打將起來，    真個翻翻有落電之光，飄飄有凌雲之意。也使雙枝笛吹著 “霓裳舞衣” 的套曲兒，擊雲羅吹橫笛拍板小鼓十分應了節奏。到了後面，四人又 聯臂上去，打起蝴蝶會來。這樂器就單用絲弦鼓板，越發的裊娜娉 婷，仙仙可愛。眾人正在打得有趣，只聽牆外有許多人喝採起來，慌 得李紈立時立刻叫這班女孩子下來，連忙樂器也一齊叫住了。眾人一 定不肯歇，李紈決然不肯叫她們再玩。黛玉、寶釵、寶琴等再三的問 她，李紈只說: “外面的人兒看著不雅相，不要疑心到我們身上來，不 好再玩了。” 畢竟牆外喝採的是些什麼人，要知端的如何，且聽下回分解。

[Chapter 19] It’s said that just as they were playing on the swing in Prospect Garden, they heard people start to cheer outside the walls, whereupon Li Wan immediately ordered the girls to come down. The people shouting outside the walls, it turned out, were none other than Jia Baoyu, Lin Liangyu [Daiyu’s brother], and Jiang Jingxing [Liangyu’s sworn brother]! They had just returned from taking some pages and young horses out for an outing and had seen the girls on the swing from outside the garden, so they started to shout in approval.

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話說大觀園內正在那裏打秋千玩兒，聽得墻外有人喝採，李宮裁連忙 叫女孩兒們下來了。這墻外喝採的，原來不是別人，便是林良玉、姜 景星、賈寶玉三箇人，帶著幾個小幺兒，溜著幾匹小川馬踏青回來，    正從園外望見，所以喝採。 24

There are several points of interest here. First, the passage clearly draws more from the extended swing scene in chapter 25 of Plum in the Golden Vase than from the brief swinging episode in Dream of the Red Chamber. In this scene, as in Plum in the Golden Vase, swinging is not a solo practice but a game to be played with others.25 The game reveals the players’ personalities, status and power.26 The wilder and more daring swingers are the women with the loosest morals: swinging symbolizes the crossing of both spatial and ritual or moral boundaries. However, in Plum in the Golden Vase, it is the wives and concubines of Ximen Qing who swing, along with one ambitious maidservant. Moreover, an outsider male—Ximen Qing’s son-in-law Chen Jingji—is actually present in the garden, where he does not belong, and the scene catalyzes the incestuous relationship between him and his father-in-law’s concubine Pan Jinlian. In Later Dream, no men are present. Furthermore, Li Wan does not let the young ladies swing. Instead, the actresses do the actual swinging, while the ladies take a vicarious, even voyeuristic pleasure in their skill. Only the actress-servants run the risk of being exposed to the gaze of outsider men.27 Like the painted swing itself, the actresses as lower-status women are an object of luxury consumption and visual appreciation for their mistresses. The swinging game reveals the power differentials between the women of the house. The game ends abruptly when a group of unknown men begins cheering outside the walls. Textual and physical boundaries mirror each other in the narration of this episode. Like the wall that hides the identity of the noisy males 24  Hou Honglou meng, 245–47. 25  The swing has a long history in China. As in this passage, it was especially associated with the Qingming Festival. There were different styles of frames allowing for a variety of swing practices including solo, pair, and group movements. These often required a high degree of athleticism and became a spectator sport. In the Tang and Song, watching women on the swing was a common topos in lyric poetry. See Ma Guojun 麻國鈞 and Ma Shuyun 麻淑雲, Zhonghua chuantong youxi daquan 中華傳統遊戲大全 (Beijing: Nongcun duwu chubanshe, 1990), 551–54. 26  Ding, Obscene Things, 176–79. 27  The threat of exposure and the disgrace of crossing the nei/wai boundary are consistent themes in swing scenes. See also the scene in Marriage Destinies to Awaken the World (Xingshi yinyuan zhuan 醒世姻緣傳), chapter 97, when a disfigured woman insists on swinging above the garden wall and is mocked by a neighbor who sees her. The scene is discussed in Epstein, Competing Discourses, 125–27.

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from the women within the garden, the chapter division creates a threatening suspense, making the reader wait to learn who they are. When the wall is crossed and the next chapter begun, both the women and the reader learn the men’s identity with relief. They are Baoyu himself, Daiyu’s brother, and his sworn brother, all three of whom are married to women of the household. The reputation of the women is doubly safe—only the actresses were seen, and only by men who had a right to see them. The apparent rupture is thus sealed, and the temporary sense of threat is eased. But the resolution undermines its own reassurance by revealing the thinness of the divide between “men of the family” and “outsiders”—until their identity is known, Baoyu, Liangyu and Jingxing behave exactly as strangers might, and their anonymous shouts evoke exactly the same fear that those of strangers would. This scene suggests that the difference between “our men” and “somebody else’s men” is entirely contingent. If all strange men are a threat, their individual character irrelevant, the difference between them and one’s own husband and brother can only be one of coincidence rather than character. These are the men that these women happened to marry, that is all. To another household’s women on another swing, Baoyu and his friends would have been a true threat, of exposure and embarrassment if nothing worse. This ominous sense of the men of one’s own household as a potential threat to other women recurs even more strongly in chapter 21. In this episode, Zhen Baoyu (Baoyu’s physical double, mentioned frequently in Dream of the Red Chamber) and Jia Baoyu attend the same party. Immediately after Jia Baoyu leaves, Zhen Baoyu rapes a female guest. The next morning, a garbled rumor arrives at the Jia mansion that Jia Baoyu, who has not yet returned home, has been arrested for rape. The household’s response is one of unquestioning grief: Daiyu even attempts suicide. It is unclear at this point whether they believe that Jia Baoyu has been falsely accused, or whether they believe the accusations as well as the news of his arrest. In due course, however, Shi Xiangyun revives Daiyu, and Baoyu returns to the mansion. His response shows that he thinks the women have believed the rape accusations, as he says indignantly, “But it was all Zhen Baoyu! Our host invited me to spend the night, so I stayed elsewhere last night. How could you pile Zhen Baoyu’s crimes on my, Jia Baoyu’s, shoulders?” (全是甄寶玉乾的事情，我被房師留住了，在房師處住 了一夜，如何將甄寶玉的事裝在我賈寶玉身上！)28 How could Baoyu’s family believe him capable of such a thing? Traditional commentators use the Zhen/Jia doubling as a springboard for a discussion of illusion and reality that deliberately blurs the distinctions 28  Hou Honglou meng, 285.

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between them. The Qing commentator Yao Xie, writing on Jia Baoyu’s dream of Zhen Baoyu in the parent novel, states: “No truth is not false; no falsehood is not true.”29 The sequel’s author takes a different tack, assuming that both Zhen Baoyu and Jia Baoyu are equally real and inhabit the same world. His use of the Zhen/Jia doubling is more prosaic than Cao Xueqin’s, but it has equally ominous implications. Rather than undermining our certainty in reality as Cao Xueqin does in Dream of the Red Chamber, Xiaoyaozi’s use of Zhen Baoyu casts doubt on the meaningfulness of differences in character, essence, qing. What really differentiates Jia Baoyu the sensitive lover of women from Zhen Baoyu the rapist? If every woman in the Jia household finds the slander so easy to believe, does that mean that they do not know Jia Baoyu at all, or does it simply mean that knowing Baoyu at home means nothing when it comes to predicting his behavior outside the household? In the world of Later Dream, the personality difference between Jia Baoyu and Zhen Baoyu appears negligible. What matters is the difference in their family identity. Zhen Baoyu, not Jia Baoyu, committed the crime: their Baoyu, not our Baoyu; the outsider, not the insider. And that family identity appears not transcendent, but contingent. It is a matter of circumstance that placed “our” Baoyu in the Jia household and “that” Baoyu in the Zhen household, just as it is a matter of circumstance that the actresses were seen swinging by Jia men and not by other men. In each of these episodes, the real or potential rupture of the physical and symbolic household boundaries is first acknowledged, then denied, minimized, or reclaimed. Each episode explores what “inner” and “outer” really mean for text, household, and family, and there is a progression in depth and dystopic vision from scene to scene. The Lantern Festival scene successfully denies the outside world: no boundaries need be crossed. The swing episode uses physical and textual boundaries, the wall and the end of the chapter, to both create and resolve tension. The danger is embodied by outside men, which foreshadows the drama of the last and most serious incident. In this scene, whose implications remain troubling even after Baoyu’s name has been cleared, Xiaoyaozi reflects on the different worlds of the women cloistered in the household and the men who are free to go in and out. On the one hand, the men enjoy a freedom that the women do not; on the other, to the extent that they belong to the outer world, they are inherently threatening. The women, for their part, have unreliable access to information about the outside, learning a garbled version of the affair from incompetent messengers. Nevertheless, the wrong version is easy to believe, for if outside men are threatening, so is any man who happens to 29  Cao Xueqin 曹雪芹 and Feng Qiyong 冯其庸, Bajia piping Honglou meng 八家批評紅 樓夢 (Beijing: Wenhua yishu chubanshe, 1991), 1369.

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be outside. The world beyond the home is a place where anything can happen and any man can behave in any way. Knowledge of Baoyu’s character gained inside the home does not necessarily apply outside it. From a reader’s point of view, the confusion of this episode is surprising in a different way. Baoyu’s actions and personality in previous chapters are generally consistent with his childish and emotional behavior in the parent novel, which, in that novel, are generally sympathetically portrayed. Baoyu is prone to a variety of indiscretions, but none of them would be described in Dream of the Red Chamber as rape.30 The women’s unquestioning belief in a serious criminal accusation thus strikes a jarring note in the transition from parent novel to sequel, one that emphasizes a darker vision of Baoyu’s foibles. Xiaoyaozi’s version of Baoyu himself is immediately recognizable: it is the response by surrounding characters that has changed.31 Nevertheless, Xiaoyaozi ensures that readers will not be deceived by narrating the events at the party from an omniscient perspective before recounting the next morning from the women’s perspective, so that we as readers know of Baoyu’s innocence even when the women do not. The implication is that only explicit narration can give the reader the global vision necessary to keep the facts straight. The textual boundaries of the book and of chapters and episodes within it reflect a degree of control over the narrative that none of the characters exert over their surroundings. Later Dream’s rewriting of the Jia family corrects the parent novel’s dystopic vision of a hemorrhaging household by stabilizing its boundaries. Its primary strategy in this process is to change Daiyu from a forlorn, lovestruck orphan to a source of internal wealth capable of financing any expenditure, a financial and moral manager capable of governing and policing the boundaries of family and household, and a source of cultural capital obviating the need to leave the house. In that the household is indeed happy, stable, and strictly managed 30  One partial exception is Baoyu’s flirtation with the maid Jinhuan (Golden). In the narrator’s version of the story, Lady Wang overhears the flirtation and is furious with Golden, who then commits suicide. Baoyu’s father hears and immediately believes a twisted version of this story in which Baoyu attempted to rape Golden, and beats Baoyu nearly to death (Chapters 30–33). The difference is that Jia Zheng is the only one who believes Baoyu guilty. 31  Baoyu’s childish and licentious behavior typically meets with less sympathy in the sequel: his resumed affair with Xiren (Aroma) in chapter 25 is treated as an embarrassment by everyone, and his childishness is remarked on negatively throughout the book. Moreover, in chapter 23, Daiyu gives her father-in-law Jia Zheng suggestions about a government dilemma and considers him, not her husband Baoyu, to be her true friend (zhiji 知己). This is not only a major transformation in her character, but a clear rejection of childlike passion in favor of the orthodox adult masculinity that Jia Zheng represents.

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at the end of the narrative, the general cast of the story is both comic in mode and conservative in tone. Nevertheless, it is precisely the strength of the novel’s impulse to contain its characters and their wealth effectively that makes the ever-present threat of rupture, leakage, and boundary crossing so clear and poignant. The reality of rupture is carefully minimized but never disappears: This is no hermetically sealed household. Rather, the internal generic logic of the novel demands a certain level of openness and potential for leakage. The narrative dilemma of Later Dream as a novel is not how to deny that demand, but how to balance it with the virtue of containment. Indeed, the sequel balances its greater drive toward containment with even more dramatic threats to the new order. It is not a choice between shoring up boundaries and undermining them, but only of the proportions in which to portray the two processes. In the novel’s simultaneous response to Dream of the Red Chamber and Plum in the Golden Vase, those massive volumes of domestic dystopia, moderation of scale is the formal counterpart to the sequel’s ideological drive to shore up the ritual boundaries channeling human passions. 2

The Boundaries of Marriage: Qing and Li in Co-wife Marriage

The greater size of the novel allows for increased complexity in long fiction’s textual negotiations between qing and li. Xiaoyaozi’s depiction of Baochai and Daiyu’s relationship to each other as co-wives in Later Dream has much in common with Parallel Words’ depiction of the sister-wives in “The Reluctant Bigamist,” discussed in chapter 2. But the difficulties as well as the strategies characters use to resolve them are far more involved. Dream of the Red Chamber famously centers on qing in all its manifestations. In Jia Baoyu’s idyllic youth among the talented beauties of Prospect Garden, romance and sisterly affection form a nebulous cloud of undifferentiated qing. Baoyu is brother to some girls, distant cousin to others, and master to still others. The complexity of human relationships within the novel is precisely the source of its enduring fascination and most central conflicts. Traditional commentators such as Zhang Xinzhi point out that Baoyu blurs emotions and relationships that ought to be qualitatively different when he lumps together all the girls he grew up with as sisters even though some of them are actually his half-sisters and paternal cousins, off-limits for marriage, while others are distant relations and highly eligible marriage partners. For Hong Qiufan, another Qing commentator, this does not represent troubling confusion, but is simply a manifestation of Baoyu’s essentially sentimental (duoqing 多情)

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nature.32 Zhang and Hong disagree, not on the nature of Baoyu’s feelings, but on the relative importance of distinctions within qing. Baoyu’s confusion of feelings may be problematic for Zhang Xinzhi and understandable for Hong Qiufan. Indisputably, however, this liminal, adolescent state of feeling must eventually collapse into adulthood and marriage. Normatively, this would mean that Baoyu would have only one main wife, who would live in the Jia household as daughter-in-law, while the rest of the girls would marry out, be separated from their natal families, and go to live with their new husbands’ families. This is how Dream of the Red Chamber ends. Baoyu can have either Xue Baochai or Lin Daiyu, but not both. He loses all the girls that he does not marry, and they themselves lose the sisterly community of Prospect Garden: the sentimental tragedy doubles in poignancy as it functions on both a romantic and a familial level. Keith McMahon’s recent work uses Baoyu’s relationship with Daiyu to illustrate his concept of sublime passion, showing that sublime passion is defined in Dream of the Red Chamber by the “missed moment,” while the sequels, by creating harmonious and unjealous resolutions to the love affair, tend to undo the image of the two as passionate lovers.33 While the overall effect of Daiyu and Baoyu’s restored relationship in Later Dream is certainly less sublimely passionate, this is not merely because it erases tragedy and jealousy. It is also a result of Later Dream’s attempt to incorporate passion into the family structure by mingling the sublime and the quotidian. The sequel tries to redraw the boundaries of marriage in order to contain qing in all its differentiated senses of romantic passion, marital love, and familial affection. Repairing the Jia family dynamics is not a side effect of resolving the love triangle and vindicating Daiyu; it is integral to the process. The ultimate resolution of the love triangle and success of the co-wife marriage make a statement about the compatibility of romantic and familial love, in which patterns of feminine relationships drawn from the natal family are continued into and co-opted by married life. In Later Dream, Daiyu is revived and becomes Baoyu’s main wife. The process is far from straightforward, because Baoyu already has a wife: Baochai. Since a man could legally have only one main wife, who was his ritual partner and the legal and social mother of all his children, and since Later Dream is generally quite conservative in tone, the novelist spills a great deal of ink making this marriage both believable and palatable. All the characters except Baoyu (including Daiyu herself) initially resist the idea, but when Baoyu becomes seriously ill with longing for Daiyu, they are forced to consider this 32  Cao and Feng, Bajia piping Honglou meng, 2489, 2496. 33  McMahon, Polygamy and Sublime Passion, 31–37.

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unorthodox marriage to save his life. Hierarchy is the central problem: if Daiyu marries Baoyu as his main wife, what will Baochai’s status be? Cao Xueqin, the go-between, runs into difficulties in chapter 12: The next day, Cao Xueqin brought back the news that Lin Liangyu was hesitant to agree to the marriage because of the difficulty of deciding on Baochai’s status. Jia Zheng said, “I’ve also been worried about that.” … Jia Zheng quietly called Baochai out and gently explained to her, “… How about if you just make do for a little while, and once we get through this difficulty, in the future you can call each other sisters and rank yourselves by age?” Although Baochai was generous, at the idea of this rank and status she began to murmur in doubt. 曹雪芹回來將良玉因寶釵的次序難定，故此遲疑的緣故說了。賈政道: “這個我也慮到。”…… [賈政] 就悄悄地請了寶釵出來，婉婉轉轉地告訴 她，說道: “…… 怎麼樣一會子從個權，暫且哄過了這個關兒，將來姊 妹相稱依然序齒。” 寶釵雖則大方，到這個名分上也就沉吟起來。 34

Confucian orthodoxy expected a wife to refrain from jealousy when her husband took a concubine, particularly for the purpose of bearing a son, but it also expected a husband to safeguard his wife’s primary status in the household regardless of his sexual vagaries. Even the calm and proper Baochai finds Jia Zheng’s proposal of allowing Baoyu to take a second main wife alarming. Though she does not openly demur, she becomes depressed and silent in the days following this conversation. Daiyu’s brother and Baoyu’s father are hesitant, and Baoyu’s mother Lady Wang is furious about the affront to Baochai. From Jia Baoyu’s standpoint of indiscriminate qing, these worries are entirely unnecessary. He suggests an alternate form of sisterhood that elides hierarchy and bridges the natal and marital households, in which Baochai and Daiyu’s affectionate relationship from childhood and adolescence persists after marriage and enables the two-wife co-marriage to exist: “But now Mother’s getting involved, and she wants to argue about ‘order’ on Sister Bao’s behalf. What’s this ‘order’ business? Before, when I was with Qingwen (Skybright) and Fangguan (Parfumée) and the rest of the sisters, we didn’t worry about great and small. Sometimes they’d be sitting and lying down, and I’d be standing and serving them. Not to mention that Sister Bao is a little older, and Sister Lin gets along well with her 34  Hou Honglou meng, 155–56.

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and yields to her. Even if Sister Lin did sit above Sister Bao, what would be strange about that? I’m younger than Sister Bao and I’ve taken precedence over her before…. Even our Third and Fourth Sisters have taken precedence of Sister Bao before! Who’s ever worried about order? … Now, if I just say that, Mother will have no reason not to go along with it.” Baoyu paced back and forth, thinking of nothing but such childish ideas. “巧巧兒碰著了太太在裡頭，替寶姐姐評什麼次序兒。有什麼次序的，我  從前同晴雯、芳官這班姊妹也不拘大小，有時候她們坐著躺著，我盡 著地站定了服侍她也有的。不要說寶姐姐的年紀原長些，林妹妹也和 她好，也讓她。就算林妹妹坐在寶姐姐上頭，有什麼奇的？我怎麼小 似寶姐姐，我也曾僭她。…… 咱們家三妹妹、四妹妹也曾僭著寶姐 姐坐過。誰還拘什麼次序兒。…… 看來也不過將這番話說了，太太 就沒有不依的了。” 寶玉走來踱去，總不過是這些孩子的想頭。 35

For Baoyu, the problem is nonexistent, because he himself never observed status hierarchies with the girls of Prospect Garden. Where status is unimportant, its loss is insignificant. Both the narrator and the characters mock Baoyu’s “childish ideas,” but in the end, Baoyu’s approach prevails. Tanchun persuades Lady Wang that in daily life, the two wives can easily continue to treat each other like sisters. Finally, Jia Lian suggests that when Baoyu receives official honors necessitating a parade—a ritual occasion—his two primary wives can simply be carried shoulder to shoulder in two sedan chairs forming a horizontal line: “As long as you only choose broad streets to go along, it will be fine!” (只揀闊的街道走也好。)36 Opposition fizzles out, the marriage takes place, and the intractable problem of wifely status is swept neatly under the rug. This sleight-of-hand is accomplished by dividing the state of wifehood into two separate spheres. One is private, and the casual logic of emotion can legitimately prevail. On the rare occasions when a wife has a public role to play, ritual must be observed. There, however, the problem of status can be transposed into a logistical issue of physical space and solved—if the street is broad enough for two, neither wife needs to go in front. What other problems could possibly arise? This solution recalls the spatialization of relationships in order to resolve ritual difficulties observed in the huaben of chapter 2, particularly the husband who built a separate house for each wife. This suspension of hierarchy in married adulthood is presented in the novel as exceptional, not as a precedent; indeed, it would appear that even 35  H  ou Honglou meng, 164. 36  Hou Honglou meng, 172.

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Xiaoyaozi is not entirely convinced of its validity. It is evident from the other relationships in the novel that the absence of hierarchy is possible only because the characters themselves agree to a willing suspension of disbelief in their own story. But this suspension is fundamentally limited in scope. Daiyu and Baochai treat each other as equals, but there is a clear hierarchy between them and their personal maids, who are also Baoyu’s concubines, and again between the maidservant/concubines and the rest of the servants, whom Daiyu governs with legendary strictness.37 The actresses, too, clearly form an essentially separate class throughout most of the novel, despite Baoyu’s insouciance about their status. Recall that, in the swing scene, it is the actresses, not the mistresses, who are available to the male gaze and therefore allowed to swing. Thus, in Later Dream, ritual propriety and the hierarchy it entails are presented as an inevitability of adult life that must be acknowledged and negotiated. Since ritual hierarchy is represented in the sequel as a fundamental social norm, it is worth examining Baoyu’s strategy for persuading everyone to ignore this elephant in the room in the specific case of Daiyu and Baochai. He does so by appealing to childlike structures of affection, and his proposal of sisterhood succeeds even though Jia Zheng’s—seemingly identical—fails. This is because Jia Zheng treats the marriage relationship as pre-eminent and sisterhood as completely instrumental to it, while Baoyu appeals to the logic of an affectionate relationship that previously existed between Daiyu and Baochai. Rather than urging the women to create a new and impossible relationship, he asks them to continue a relationship from their childhood that they would normally have been unable to continue. This realization of the impossible, the continuation of girlish friendship and sisterhood after marriage, mirrors the fascination of sequels in general with continuity past breaks discussed by Martin Huang, along with the nostalgic mode of Dream of the Red Chamber sequels in particular.38 The “sisterhood” here is of course just as instrumental to the masculine fantasy of unjealous polygyny as Jia Zheng’s invented “sisterhood” would have been, the more so because Baochai and Daiyu actually 37  H  ou Honglou meng, 251–52. In chapter 19, Daiyu institutes a set of rules for the household in which she increases the servants’ salaries but also the punishments for disobedience, and requires them to behave with far greater respect toward their masters and mistresses. This too reinforces the contrast between the new Daiyu and the parent novel’s Wang Xifeng. The latter, of course is also known for her strict treatment of servants (see Dream of the Red Chamber, chapter 13). The difference is again one of attitudes to money: Xifeng’s power leads her to accept bribes for favors. Daiyu’s wealth inoculates her against such temptations. 38  Martin Huang, “Boundaries and Interpretations,” 35; Keith McMahon, “Eliminating Traumatic Antinomies: Sequels to Honglou meng,” in Martin Huang, Snakes’ Legs, 98–99.

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share no blood kinship. Though equally disingenuous, Baoyu’s proposal is successful because it appeals to a genuine emotional phenomenon as presented in both the parent novel—Baochai’s and Daiyu’s relationship is modeled on sisterhood—and in late imperial women’s experience. Marriage for a woman normatively formed a boundary between girlhood and adulthood across which few relationships could persist, and those, such as a married woman’s continuing but limited filial duty to her parents, in greatly attenuated form. Married women could expect little ongoing contact with the sisters they had grown up with. Later Dream creates a fantasy of girlhood affection continuing across the divide opened by the marriage ceremony. If Daiyu and Baochai follow Baoyu’s naïve plan, each can obey the injunctions to women found in every household code and didactic reader for girls, centering her labor and emotional energy on the marital household, but without leaving her own “sister” behind. Just as Daiyu organizes a private Lantern Festival within the Jia compound, enabling the women to enjoy the spectacle of the market without leaving the safety and decorum of the walls, Baoyu offers Daiyu and Baochai a form of family life in which sisterly affection is contained within the ritually appropriate framework of supreme loyalty to the marital family. Both episodes construct a fantasy in which household and family boundaries are simultaneously enlarged and strengthened within the novel’s covers. That which is normally both coveted and excluded is now contained and accessible without transgression. It is a fantasy of virtue without sacrifice. 3

Commentary, Metafiction, and the Borders of the Book

Another boundary explored by both Dream of the Red Chamber and Later Dream is that between reality and fiction. Later Dream affirms and participates in its parent novel’s metafictional game. But rather than exploring the notions of dream and illusion in depth, the sequel uses metafictional episodes to explore its relationship to the world outside the text through new valorizations of both affective bonds and commercial exchanges between author, characters, and readers. It offers glimpses of how Xiaoyaozi and his readers thought about fiction and its place in society: what it meant to Later Dream to be (unlike its parent) a novel written for immediate publication and sale, and how financial transactions related to the emotional ties between fiction authors, characters, and readers. Later Dream’s characters plan the sequel’s creation for a particular reason: Cao Xueqin, Baoyu, Daiyu, and Baochai all pity people who are sad after reading Dream of the Red Chamber. As Baochai says to Daiyu and Baoyu in chapter 20:

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It’s just that you two are enjoying prosperity and happiness to the fullest. Now [Dream of the Red Chamber] is circulating widely, sure to make future generations sorrow and snivel for you; how can one be at ease with that? My idea is to take Dream of the Red Chamber’s second part and not change it—keep it the way it is—but we must add on some more again. 只是你們兩人享盡榮華。若這部書傳開了，反使千秋萬古之人，爲你 傷心流涕，於心何安？我的意思這《紅樓夢》的后半段，也不用改 他，也存他的真面目，要得好再得續上些才好。39

The authors of Dream of the Red Chamber sequels respond to readers’ sorrow with textual production. This group of novels, then, is conceived of not as a pure expression of the author’s will, but as the product of dialogue between author, readers, their fictionalized counterparts, and purely fictional characters. Indeed, the preface to Later Dream takes the form of a letter purporting to be from Cao Xueqin’s mother requesting him to write a sequel. Dialogue between authors and readers and responsiveness to readers’ emotions are valorized even before the story begins. On one level, the discussions between “Cao Xueqin” and his characters about sequel writing are Later Dream’s homage to and participation in the metafictional, auto-commentarial, and self-sequeling mode of the parent novel. Just as Cao Xueqin appears as a character in the first and last chapters of Dream of the Red Chamber’s 1791 print edition, Later Dream creates ever more elaborate relationships between Cao and his characters. Moreover, the last forty chapters of Dream of the Red Chamber, with their disputed provenance, read as a selfconscious sequel themselves.40 In chapter 120 of the 1791 edition, the Daoist 39  H  ou Honglou meng, 267. 40  Dream of the Red Chamber circulated in manuscript form for decades before its first printing in 1791, but no extant manuscript goes beyond chapter 80, and all end in medias res. The 1791 and 1792 print editions have 120 chapters and bring the story to a conclusion. These first print editions appeared decades after Cao Xueqin’s death and were edited by Cheng Weiyuan 程偉元 (c. 1745–1818) and Gao E 高鶚 (c. 1738–1815), who claimed in their preface to the 1791 edition to have pieced together the last forty chapters from manuscripts by the original author. The three main theories are that 1) Cheng and Gao were telling the truth; 2) Cheng and Gao had the editing role they claimed, but the fragments they pieced together were by someone other than the original author; and 3) Cheng and Gao wrote the last 40 chapters and attempted to pass them off as part of the original novel. For Cheng’s preface to the 1791 edition, see Yisu 一粟, Honglou meng juan 紅樓夢 卷 (Taibei: Xinwen feng chuban gongsi, 1989), 31–32. For an English translation, see the Hawkes-Minford translation of the novel, The Story of the Stone, trans. David Hawkes and John Minford (London: Penguin, 1973), 4:385–88. For further details about the novel’s textual history and editions in English, see David Hawkes’s introduction to that translation,

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Vanitas passes by the Stone again and discovers a new section added to the previous ending of the story. Whatever this means for Cheng and Gao’s claims of Cao Xueqin’s authorship, this passage clearly shows that this final section of the story is already, in some way, an addition to the original eighty chapters. Every subsequent sequel follows in the footsteps of the 1791 edition’s last forty chapters. Indeed, when Baochai states above: “we must add on some more again,” she confirms that for her (and thus for Xiaoyaozi), Later Dream is not the first sequel but only the first to be printed separately. Dream of the Red Chamber’s complicated commentaries are another metafictional game. David Rolston points out that the novel’s many commentators include its real author, Cao Xueqin; the stone (the “author” in the text); Vanitas (the reader in the text); and the Zhiyan zhai 脂硯齋 or Red Inkstone commentators who recognized themselves and their family members in the characters.41 As commentators multiplied, so did the avenues for emotional connection between readers and the novel’s world. Anthony Yu discusses the odd intimacy that occurs between author, readers, and characters when commentators use familial endearments to describe characters.42 For Yu, the deeper message of this interplay of reality and illusion or fiction is precisely the opposite of the Buddhist doctrine that life is illusion and one should detach from it. Rather, Dream of the Red Chamber defends fiction, illusion, and dream as worthy of deep and emotional engagement. The novel’s final quatrain ends: “Do not mock the reader’s tears” (xiu xiao shiren chi 休笑世人痴), or more literally “Do not mock the foolishness of people in the [real] world.”43 It emphasizes both the illusion and the potency of fiction. Qing is not only the central theme of the book, but the deepest mode of readerly engagement with it. Later Dream’s portrayal of affection between author-as-character, characters, and readers is in part a deliberate participation in the parent novel’s defense of passionate engagement with fiction. As in Dream of the Red Chamber, the reader’s sorrow at the characters’ fates is explicitly pitied. As in a number of other sequels, this sorrow motivates Daiyu, Baochai, and Baoyu, as well as the author/character Cao Xueqin, to produce a sequel. Not only does the sequel defend readers’ emotional investment in the fictional world, it suggests a fantasy of requited qing: members of the fictional world can respond with sympathy to their real-world readers’ tears. 1:15–46. In Chinese, see Zhao Gang 趙岡 and Chen Zhongyi 陳鍾毅, Honglou meng yanjiu xinbian 紅樓夢研究新編 (Taibei: Lianjing, 1975), 73–138; 237–311. 41  Rolston, Traditional Chinese Fiction, 342. 42  Anthony Yu, Rereading the Stone: Desire and the Making of Fiction in Dream of the Red Chamber (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 11–12. 43  Yu, Rereading the Stone, 149, 169–70.

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However, the metafictionality in Later Dream has a different effect than in the parent novel. Dream of the Red Chamber creates a three-way interplay between fiction, reality, and dream or illusion. The story participates in both reality and illusion and associates itself with both. On one hand, the novel depicts its characters’ lives in incredibly convincing detail; together with the comments of Red Inkstone and others who say “Yes, I remember that too,” this leaves readers in no doubt that the novel is rooted in personal experience. At the same time, the themes of illusion and dream are developed with unprecedented skill, so that we are never sure what dynasty or city provides the backdrop, whether the characters are Manchu or Han, or even whether the Zhens or the Jias are truly “real” within the story’s world. The story encompasses and surpasses both reality and illusion, but, despite the longings of generations of real-world readers, it is never quite real. The sequel operates within a simpler dialectic of reality and fiction, playing with the line between the world within the novel and the world outside the novel. Despite occasional fantastic elements, the third dimension of dream or illusion is far less marked in Later Dream.44 Though less sophisticated than Cao Xueqin’s tour de force of fantasy, Xiaoyaozi’s boundary-crossing between reality and fiction allows for a focused exploration of the relationship between fiction and the extra-textual world. Certain aspects of Later Dream’s metafictionality take on new significance considered in this light.45 For example, Lin Daiyu buys a house for Cao Xueqin to express her gratitude for his writing about her, Baochai, and Baoyu: From the beginning, Daiyu and Baochai greatly revered Cao Xueqin. First, because he was Jia Zheng and Baoyu’s close friend, and second, because they were deeply grateful to him for writing both Dream of the Red Chamber books, which were entirely about the three of them as husband and wives. Thus, when they did some discreet asking around and learned that Xueqin planned to return to the south, they knew that he would be proud because of his talent and unwilling to curry favor with powerful people, but at the same time, taking a long and exhausting journey south, he would have no means of alleviating its hardships. Furthermore, his elderly mother was getting on in years, and this Mr. Xueqin was a 44  The most notable of such elements is the magical goldfish amulet that preserves Daiyu’s corpse, discussed and compared to Baoyu’s jade in chapter 7. Another is the blossoming tree of unknown variety that springs from the grave of the flowers buried by Daiyu in chapter 18. Though the sequel by no means excludes the unreal, its overall ambience remains more matter-of-fact than the parent novel’s. 45  For another angle on the increasing overlap between readers and characters in Dream sequels, see Martin Huang, “Boundaries and Interpretations,” 38–39.

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straightforward person who would find it difficult to humble himself to beg for a few bushels of rice. And with Daiyu’s store of money, what could she not accomplish? So they secretly sent out Cai Liang and Dan Sheng [two stewards of the household] to buy a house for Cao Xueqin worth three thousand in gold, with garden plots, orchards, bamboo groves, and lotus ponds, and also laid out ten thousand in gold to buy eight hundred acres of good fields that were not vulnerable to drought, and furthermore gave him several water mills and storehouses that brought in around a hundred in gold of disposable income each month, so that he would have no worries about his daily expenses and could travel around the famous peaks and scenic sites to his heart’s content. 原來黛玉、寶釵平日很敬重曹雪芹，一則是賈政、寶玉的至交，二則 是前後《紅樓夢》兩書總為他夫婦三人寫照，心裏十分感激。因此上 悄悄地探知雪芹有回南之意，知道負才高傲，不肯干謁諸侯，倦遊遠 回，卻又無以自樂。且曹老太太漸漸年高起來，這位雪芹先生又是一 個光明磊落之人，不肯低首下心，再去求這五斗米的。這黛玉有的是 銀子，什麼事情辦不出來？便悄悄地打發蔡良，單升往曹雪芹家鄉置 下三千金一所住宅，也有菜畦、花園、竹園、藕池，又將一萬金替他 置了八百畝水旱不竭的良田，又送他幾所水碓棧房，每月有百金花 利，可以日用無憂，趁意地遨遊名山五嶽。46

This is not only a metafictional in-joke in which a character expresses gratitude to her author, who now appears as a character from the brush of yet another author. It also lines up with Xiaoyaozi’s consistent emphasis on reformed fiscal management by women in general and Daiyu in particular as previously discussed. Finally, the scene can be read as a broader ideological defense of the booming print economy beginning in the late Ming dynasty and continuing through the Qing, which enabled authors to benefit financially from the characters they created. Elite anxiety about the increasing monetization and commercialization of the Ming economy has been well documented.47 The trade in books was a particularly fraught aspect of the overlap between elite culture and commerce.48 46  Hou Honglou meng, 397. 47  Craig Clunas, Superfluous Things (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2004), 141–65; Timothy Brook, The Confusions of Pleasure: Commerce and Culture in Ming China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 218–19, 238–40. 48  He, Home and the World, 3–6; Shang Wei, “Jin Ping Mei and Late Ming Print Culture,” in Writing and Materiality in China: Essays in Honor of Patrick Hanan, ed. Judith T. Zeitlin and Lydia H. Liu (Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2003), 188.

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The anxiety and tension inherent in the overlap between literary and commercial spheres of production is not limited to Ming and Qing literati, however. Contemporary scholarship on Dream of the Red Chamber sequels frequently points out that these sequels were explicitly commercial products that capitalized on the parent novel’s popularity to make money.49 The implied conclusions are, first, that the commodified sequels are qualitatively different from a literati novel like Dream of the Red Chamber or Plum in the Golden Vase that circulated for decades in manuscript form and is thus exempt from the charge of hucksterism, and second, that this commodification directly leads to the sequels’ relative lack of literary quality. Both points are valid: there is certainly a close relationship between Dream of the Red Chamber sequels and the market, and no sequel approaches the parent novel in scope of vision or enduring power. But the connection between the two claims is suspect: it need not be true that commercialism and literariness form two ends of a zero-sum game, so that a work can be literary only to the extent that it turns up its nose at commerce. These sequels are selfconscious interventions in the sphere of cultural production with both literary and commercial ramifications; neither their relationship to commerce nor the fact that they fall short of Cao Xueqin’s artistry renders their own artistic claims invalid. I suggest that we read this passage from Later Dream not only as a metafictional joke, but also as a serious discussion of its own relationship to the book market and of commercial novel publishing in general. In Daiyu’s gift of a home to Cao Xueqin, a character literally puts a roof over her author’s head. The financial aspects of the purchase are recorded in great detail. At the same time, it is cast in terms of a generous gift proceeding from an established relationship, rather than a purely commercial transaction. It is tempting to read this paragraph in light of Marcel Mauss’ theory of gift exchange as a pattern that establishes and solidifies relationships between people in a way that commerce does not.50 His classic analysis has been questioned and refined over the years, but the idea of commerce as impersonal at best remains pervasive. Mayfair Yang’s discussion of gift exchange and guanxi in modern China critiques this assumption. She suggests that in the guanxi context, gifts are both affective and instrumental, not either/or. Moreover, for Yang, the entire network of unofficial gift-giving and relationships is gendered feminine. In response to the discussion of bride exchange in Mauss and in 49  Lin Yixuan 林依璇, Wucai ke bu tian: Honglou meng xushu yanjiu 無才可補天—紅樓夢 的續書研究 (Taibei: Taibei wenjin, 1999), 34–35. 50  Marcel Mauss, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies (New York: Routledge, 1990), 91–100.

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Lévi-Strauss’ development of his theory, where women function as objects of exchange between men, she emphasizes the role of women as agents in gift networks.51 Each of these points resonates with Daiyu’s role as a female character created by one male author (Xiaoyaozi) who serves as an owner and giver of wealth in relationship to another male figure, who is both author and character (Cao Xueqin). Daiyu’s gift of a house to Cao Xueqin recalls her gift of a fortune to the Jia family: She contributes from her store of apparently inexhaustible wealth not only to the family of her husband and her mother, but also to the family of the author who created her and his mother. Both actions underscore her generosity and virtue, asserting that money may be morally suspect, but it is also a primary instrument through which virtue may be expressed. This passage builds on the earlier section, in which Daiyu’s personal wealth smooths the tension between her wifely and filial duties, in order to ameliorate many of the tensions between elite views of writing and commerce. Here, Xiaoyaozi reframes an author’s profit from the sale of his books as a spontaneous gift from his female creation. Making Daiyu’s gift affective and grateful is one strategy for casting the transaction in a positive light. Another is the triple reframing of commercial book production in terms of values that are simultaneously orthodox and tasteful. Daiyu’s gift takes the form of agricultural land in a time when many elites were wringing their hands over the decline in agriculture and rise in commerce as a livelihood for the lower classes.52 It will enable Cao Xueqin to be a filial son and support his aged mother. Finally, it will enable Cao Xueqin to lead the cultured life of a gentleman-scholar by visiting famed mountains. These strategies reframe the monetary relationship between Lin Daiyu (or the text) and Cao Xueqin (or the author), blunting many of its most problematic edges. Instead of portraying characters who live in a fictional world and explore the boundaries of an even less real world (the dream within the dream), Later Dream plays with the boundary between textual and social reality, crossing the divide between author and characters. It is still at one remove from historical reality: the author who would have benefited financially from Later Dream and its version of Lin Daiyu is not Cao Xueqin, but Xiaoyaozi. Nevertheless, this metafictional scene represents both a reflection on the relationship between 51  Mayfair Mei-hui Yang, Gifts, Favors, and Banquets: The Art of Social Relationships in China (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 312–17. 52  In this context, it is interesting that Honglou meng’s portrayal of agriculture, unlike its sequel’s, is by no means uniformly positive. See Yiqun Zhou, “Honglou meng and Agrarian Values,” Late Imperial China 34, no. 1 (2013): 33–52.

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text and society and a positive vision of the relationship between literary and commercial reality, between novel writing and profit earning. We have less evidence for the reception of Later Dream than we do for its parent novel, but what we have suggests new ways to understand the book’s metafictional expansion of the borders of text. The sequel’s first editions were commercial woodblock prints complete with illustrations, poems, prefaces, and fanli 凡例 (readers’ instructions).53 Extant comments on the sequel found in other writings include both praise and critique. Its eighteenth-century detractors typically mock the inconsistencies between sequel and parent novel and deny that Cao Xueqin could have been the author.54 Other readers appear to have enjoyed the book and accepted the logic of the revised ending: not only was the book reprinted several times, it also became the basis for the ending of the chuanqi drama Drama of the Dream of the Red Chamber (Honglou meng chuanqi 紅樓夢傳奇).55 Still others copied out selections from the parent novel and the sequel to create their own private combined manuscripts, reversing the common pattern of manuscript circulation followed by commercial printing.56 These combined editions are no longer extant, but their existence is intrinsically interesting. The fact that some readers became book-makers themselves, combining the sequel with the parent novel (or excerpts of both) in single books need not reflect a conscious acceptance of Cao Xueqin’s authorship, but it does imply a fundamental acceptance of the newly expanded story arc. The sequel’s attempt to expand the borders of Dream of the Red Chamber was at least partly successful with its audience. Readers who rejected the sequel offer insight into the limits of its expansion project. One of the most interesting and sophisticated negative reviews of Later Dream comes from Aisin Gioro Yurui’s (1771–1838) Idle Notes from the Date-Tree Window (Zao chuang xianbi 棗窗閒筆): [This book] is absolutely not from Xueqin’s pen, but is Xiaoyaozi’s work with a false attribution…. Its opening chapter has a letter purporting to 53  Yisu 一粟, Honglou meng shulu 紅樓夢書錄 (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1981), 91–93. 54  Aisin Gioro Yurui 愛新覚罗裕瑞, Zaochuang xianbi 棗窗閒筆 (Beijing: Wenxue guji kanxingshe, 1957), 20–44; Yao Xie 姚夑, Honglou meng leisuo 紅樓夢類索 (Shanghai: Zhulin shudian, 1940), 151–52. 55  Yisu, Honglou meng shulu, 91. 56  These manuscripts of extracts are mentioned in Zheng Guangzu 鄭光祖, Xingshi yiban lu 醒世一斑錄, 1844 ed. (Shanghai: Hangzhou gujiu shudian, 1982), 10:25–26. Another mention of such a manuscript from Liang Gongchen 梁恭辰, Quanjie silu 勸戒四錄 (1848), juan 4, is quoted in Yisu 一粟, Honglou meng shulu, 92. I have not been able to locate a complete edition of this work to confirm the citation.

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be from Xueqin’s elderly mother, placed at the very beginning as a preface, as though begging to present this magnificent proof, which nobody would dare contradict. This is the author thinking himself very clever! Doesn’t he realize that Xueqin originally, entrusted with his own family affairs and unable to overcome his indignation, poured out his heart to become this book? He was no outside observer! If an outsider had used the sweetness and bitterness of others’ lives to pour out his own gloom in a general way, it would certainly not be as earnest and true-to-life as this [original] book! 斷非雪芹筆，確為逍遙子僞託之作。…… 其開卷即假作出雪芹老母家 書一封，弁之卷首為序，意謂請出如此絕大對證來，尚有誰敢道個不 字，作者自覺甚巧也。殊不知雪芹原因拖其家事，感慨不勝，嘔心始 成此書，原非局外旁觀人也。若局外人徒以他人甘苦澆己魂曡泛泛之 言，必不懇切逼真如此書者。57

Yurui is obviously aware of Xiaoyaozi’s metafictional games, but he dismisses them as clever gimmicks. His presupposition is that sincere emotion (kenqie) and realistic writing (bizhen) are both grounded in personal, factual experience, and no one outside the Cao family could possibly write a book with the parent novel’s realistic and powerful descriptions; authorship of a book like Dream of the Red Chamber depended on being a real part of a real family with these experiences, and no amount of authorial cleverness can substitute for authenticity. On the one hand, this echoes the familiar critique of fiction’s falsehood, especially as measured against the veracity of history and the authenticity of lyric poetry, and recalls the long scholarly tradition of reading Dream of the Red Chamber as a disguised autobiography. On the other hand, it begs the question of how to define the borders of family and novel: if only an insider has the power to tell a story, what defines an insider? For Yurui, textual authenticity demands the author’s real-world “family insider” status. Later Dream explicitly rejects this principle—not indeed in specific response to Yurui’s critique (which naturally postdated the book’s publication), but to the attitudes his critique encapsulates. Later Dream’s portrayal of author, characters, and readers as existing on the same plane of story is another way of expanding the borders of the book. In contrast to the contingency of birth in or marriage into a family, membership in a textual community is chosen. Outsiders may choose to become insiders to the book. 57  Aisin Gioro Yurui, Zao chuang xianbi, 29–31.

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This follows Later Dream’s general thrust toward expanding boundaries in order to contain new or renewed forms of qing. The important boundary for Xiaoyaozi is no longer the one between text and reality, but between insiders and outsiders to the expanded story’s “family” or community. By this standard, Cao Xueqin, Baochai and Daiyu, and invested Dream of the Red Chamber readers (who become a collective group of unnamed characters, since Daiyu and Baochai know about them and their feelings) are all emotional insiders to the book(s). They have more in common than Cao Xueqin as a real individual did with other real individuals who did not read or enter passionately into his book. It follows that making Cao Xueqin from an author into a character is a comparatively simple process; either way, he is an insider to the story. This is why Cao Xueqin serves as go-between for Daiyu’s marriage and why she buys him a house. If the insiders to a story are defined by their qing, regardless of their different relationships to the real world, then the idea that Cao Xueqin owes it to Daiyu to repair her tragedy from the parent novel, like the idea that she owes him a return for her happiness in the sequel, makes sense: the two are both “insiders”; they have a relationship and can contract obligations to each other. The distance between matchmaker and author, between bringing two people together or keeping them apart and writing a happy or tragic ending for a story, becomes negligible. Later Dream represents one of the most thorough and interesting explorations of a question posed by Dream of the Red Chamber: what it means to get emotionally involved with a book. But ultimately, like every previous attempt at expansion and recontainment, the sequel’s expansion and recontainment of the parent novel’s story to include lovers of that story is profoundly undermined. Cao Xueqin, Daiyu, and real-world readers may appear on the same plane, but Xiaoyaozi is excluded from the reframed textual world. We may presume that his decision to write a sequel indicates a passionate engagement with Dream of the Red Chamber. Nevertheless, he is the one author who cannot appear in the story, who must remain even farther outside the text than historical reality would make him, as “editor” rather than author. As we saw in the prefaces to short story collections quoted in chapter 2, genre has everything to do with how a work presents itself to its audience; that is, with issues of circulation and marketing. Later Dream’s engagement with the novel genre relates emotion to economics as it reflects self-consciously on its own readership and its relationship to the world beyond the text. By making authors and readers into characters, the novel experiments with the line between fiction and nonfiction, xu and shi, using this particular literary categorization as a springboard for playful participation rather than belonging.

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Like the short fiction of the previous chapters, Later Dream provides a narrative fantasy of accommodation between passion and ritual. Its modest scale is integral to its textual emphasis on boundaries and containment as well as to its self-conscious discussions of what a novel ought to be. But while its scale is typical of a commercial scholar-beauty novel and its ethical vision strongly conservative, its approach to the boundary between reality and fiction was unorthodox and unusual enough to merit criticism from some contemporary readers. The next chapter will show how a much longer Dream sequel, in one hundred chapters, pairs a massive textual scale with detailed architectural description to revalue qing and li more profoundly, and to sketch out a different relationship both to the parent work and to the scholar-beauty romance.

chapter 5

The Ethos of Expansion in Dreaming Again of the Red Chamber In a second sequel to Dream of the Red Chamber, Dreaming Again of the Red Chamber (Honglou fumeng 紅樓復夢, preface dated 1799), the dialectic of appreciation and revision is even more explicit than in Later Dream of the Red Chamber. Dreaming Again responds simultaneously to the parent novel and to the scholar-beauty romance genre as a whole. In this sequel written by Chen Shaohai 陳少海 and edited by his sister Chen Shiwen 陳詩雯 (dates unknown), architecture fundamentally shapes Chen’s revision of affection, ritual propriety, and the novel genre. Dreaming Again sublimates sexual desire (yu 欲) completely to sentiment (qing), which it redefines to include both romantic sentiment and familial affection. Therefore, it can be seen as a point near the end of the “trajectory from yu to qing” that characterized one strand of fictional development from the late Ming through the high Qing.1 To a certain extent, it also foreshadows the nineteenth-century novel A Tale of Boy and Girl Heroes (Ernü yingxiong zhuan 兒女英雄傳), which distances qing from desire by equating qing narrowly with filial love.2 But rather than focusing specifically on the filial relationship, Dreaming Again’s vision of ideal qing is diffuse—its reborn hero extends affectionate consideration not only or even primarily to his wives and concubines, but to a wide cast of male and female relatives, sworn kin, and household dependents. Chen’s sequel drives toward expansion rather than containment, both in the scale of the polygynous marriages and expansive fictive kin networks it depicts, and in the scale of the text itself. At one hundred chapters long, it is the longest Dream sequel by far. This choice to emulate the parent novel’s massive scale governs the terms of the sequel’s critical engagement not only with the parent novel, but also with other Qing dynasty novels and with the caizi jiaren (scholar-beauty) subgenre. As one analysis of the mid-eighteenthcentury novel Preposterous Words (Guwangyan 姑妄言) points out, the term yin 淫 can refer either to licentiousness or to a narrative mode of excess; late imperial novels engage with qing in ways largely determined at the level of 1  Martin W. Huang, Desire and Fictional Narrative in Late Imperial China (Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2001), 313. 2  Epstein, Competing Discourses, 297.

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narrative form, and support for qing means simultaneous opposition to both sexual licentiousness and stylistic excess.3 We saw that Later Dream upholds this opposition, using narrative containment to reject both sexual and stylistic excess even more strongly than Dream of the Red Chamber and to restructure the boundaries of a mansion, a marriage, and a book. Dreaming Again also opposes qing to licentiousness through a narrative mode that avoids excess, but it does so through clarity and obsessively tidy detail rather than containment. This sequel expands the boundaries of the household, the family, and the novel itself for a more profound revaluation of qing and li that broadens and flattens the parent novel’s vision. In so doing, it positions itself explicitly against other popular fictional genres, notably the scholar-beauty romance. The expanded scale of the novel and the characterization of its female protagonist, the chaste widow Baochai, allow Chen Shaohai to separate his work from a fictional genre that he recognized and rejected. 1

Rewriting Emotion and Ritual

Dreaming Again begins after chapter 120 of the parent novel. Baoyu, Daiyu, and numerous minor characters are reincarnated in other wealthy families. Zhu Mengyu, Baoyu’s reincarnation, is the sole grandson of the Zhu family. He ends up with a total of twelve wives and concubines, all of whom swear sisterhood with each other as well as with Xue Baochai, who takes center stage in her original incarnation as Baoyu’s chaste widow.4 The Zhu family, its affines the Meis and the Guis, and the Jia family become extremely close. Numerous cross-marriages occur, and both the older and younger generations of women in these families swear sisterhood with each other. The Jia family moves back to Nanjing, where Mengyu repairs their ancestral Nanjing mansion and restores its garden. When pirates attack the empire, Baochai leads an army to 3  Gary Gang Xu, “Ethics of Form: Qing and Narrative Excess in Guwangyan,” 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: Harvard University Asia Center, 2005), 248. 4  The wives and concubines are 梅海珠 Mei Haizhu (Qingwen 晴雯/Skybright reborn); 枚掌珠 Mei Zhangzhu (寳琴/Baoqin reborn); 松彩芝 Song Caizhi (林黛玉/Lin Daiyu reborn); 鞠秋瑞 Ju Qiurui (Xiangling 香菱/Caltrop reborn); 賈珍珠 Jia Zhenzhu (Xiren 襲人/Aroma, not reborn but now adopted by Lady Wang; she returns to her original name); 鄭汝湘 Zheng Ruxiang (秦可卿/Qin Keqing reborn); 芳芸 Fangyun (Jinchuan 金釧/ Golden reborn); 紫簫 Zixiao (Wu’er 五兒/Fivey reborn); 韓友梅 Han Youmei (an immortal from Prospect Garden who takes on flesh); 芙蓉 Furong (Sheyue 麝月/Musk reborn); 桂蟾珠 Gui Chanzhu (Zijuan 紫鵑/ Nightingale reborn); and 竺九如 Zhu Jiuru (史湘云 Shi Xiangyun reborn).

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repel them. Eventually, Mengyu moves back to the capital to live in the original Jia mansion; his twelve wives alternate living with him in the capital and with his family in Nanjing in shifts of six each year. Throughout the novel, the relational dynamics within and between families serve as the raw material from which Chen Shaohai sculpts his revised vision of qing. Mengyu, the new and improved Baoyu who wins the hearts of all his family and not only young girls, becomes the ultimate hero of qing. Dreaming Again presents several great families equal to the Jias and gradually dissolves the boundaries between them. The multiplicity of noble clans and luxurious mansions stems partly from the plot device of reincarnation. The Jias still exist, and the Zhu family must be their equal if Zhu Mengyu is to equal his previous incarnation Jia Baoyu. The boundaries between the Zhu and Jia families grow so blurred through the dual processes of marriage and sworn kinship that they become in essence one large family: from a reader’s perspective, they are the family of Baoyu/Mengyu. Zhu Mengyu’s identity persists through death, so, the Zhus and the Jias share a son. Tina Lu points out in her discussion of Plum in the Golden Vase and its sequel that the idea of reincarnation in principle demands the total dissolution of each life’s kinship ties at death, otherwise incest between people who were related in previous incarnation would be a constant threat. But in Plum, as in Dreaming Again, it is precisely the persistence of old relationships into the new life that makes the story of the reincarnated characters interesting and relevant.5 In Dreaming Again, all reincarnated characters feel a sense of recognition and instant kinship upon their first meetings, and Zhu Mengyu/Jia Baoyu unites his two families precisely because he is not a clean slate. Mengyu is, recognizably, Baoyu—but he is an improved version of Baoyu, and Chen Shaohai’s transformation of Baoyu into Mengyu is central to Dreaming Again’s critique of the Dream of the Red Chamber. Mengyu has all Baoyu’s tender sympathy for women, but the parameters of his qing-filled nature and the relationship of his passions to ritual boundaries have changed dramatically. The clearest statement of Chen Shaohai’s corrective vision occurs in chapter 44, when several characters explicitly praise Mengyu by exclaiming how superior he is to Baoyu. As the chapter opens, Mengyu has just adopted Aunt Xue, mother of Baochai and Xue Ke, as an honorary mother. Here, Xue Ke talks about Mengyu to his mother after meeting him for the first time:

5  Tina Lu, Accidental Incest, Filial Cannibalism: And Other Peculiar Encounters in Late Imperial Chinese Literature (Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2008), 198–99.

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As I see it, Brother Bao was nowhere near as good. Brother Yu is warm, cultured, and elegant, nimble of speech and generous of action; he really is a handsome and graceful noble youth, very likeable. When was Brother Bao ever like that? He’d hide all day in Daguan yuan (Prospect Garden), kicking up a ruckus with a bunch of girls, either getting sick or else fainting, and causing you no end of wasted anxiety. After Sister Bao married him, he got even more feeble-minded, never sitting down to chat with us, and even with you, he was never particularly warm. It’s just as well he got lured away to become a monk. If he’d stayed home, I don’t think he’d ever have made anything of himself. 我瞧寶兄弟差的多著呢，像玉兄弟溫文風雅，語言敏捷，舉止大方，    真是一位翩翩佳公子，令人喜愛。當年寶兄弟何曾有這光景，成天躲 在大觀園，同幾個姑娘們鬧做一堆的，不是病就是發昏，你老人家白 著了好些急。自寶妹妹完姻後，他更鬧的呆不癡兒的，同咱們從來沒 有坐下說幾句話兒，連你老人家跟前，也不見怎樣親熱。幸虧被人騙 去出家，若是留在家裡，我瞧著一點兒沒有出息。6

Xue Ke’s criticism of Baoyu’s social failings is pointed. Baoyu failed not only as a husband and scholar-official, but as a friend, brother-in-law, and son-in-law. But the grace notes of masculine sociability that Baoyu despised are precisely where Mengyu excels. A few pages later, Chen Shaohai adds another turn of the screw, this time through Aunt Xue’s internal dialogue. Aunt Xue, her brother’s wife Lady Shen, and several other older ladies are sitting together on the occasion of Lady Shen’s birthday, when Mengyu comes in to pay his respects to Lady Shen as her adopted nephew: Mengyu saw that on the sideboard were a pair of “good fortune and longevity” goblets. He went over himself, took one down and poured in fine wine, then knelt before his aunt and presented it with both hands. This made Lady Shen extremely happy; she said, “Good boy! How do you know just how to make yourself liked?” At once she took the wine and drank it down slowly. When Mengyu had drunk three cups in her honor while kneeling, he got up; carrying the wine jug, he drank a cup in honor of each of the older female relatives there. Finally he turned and knelt to his adoptive mother and drank three cups in her honor. Aunt Xue was 6  Chen Shaohai 陳少海, Honglou fumeng 紅樓復夢 (Beijing: Beijing daxue chubanshe, 1988), 464–65.

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so happy she couldn’t even speak. She thought of how Baoyu had never had such a grasp of the rules of propriety and etiquette; even if someone taught him, he could never do it. It was a waste of time giving him examples. If he wasn’t falling ill, he was out of his wits, completely unlikable. It was just as well he had wandered off. 夢玉見那多寶槅上有個福壽雙喜樽，親自過去取下來斟上美酒，跪在 三舅母跟前，雙手敬奉，將個沈夫人實在樂極，說道: “好兒子，你怎 麼這樣叫人疼？” 忙接了酒，慢慢飲畢。夢玉跪敬三杯起身，執著酒 壺，各位舅母、嫂子、姐姐、小姨媽跟前各敬一杯。轉身給承繼的媽 媽也跪敬三杯。薛姑太太喜的說不上來，想起寶玉何曾有這些規矩禮 數，教著他都是做不來的。真是白長了那樣范兒，不是害病，就是發 呆，令人討嫌，走掉倒也罷了。7

Aunt Xue’s transports of joy in her adopted son Mengyu spring from his mastery of ritual in the form of social etiquette. Ritual places no limits on emotion in this scene. Rather, the social rituals of greeting, kneeling, and offering birthday wine are the means of expressing and solidifying affectionate family relationships, and Mengyu’s mastery of ritual stimulates feelings of love and liking in those around him. This mastery of etiquette was completely foreign to Baoyu. Finally, Mengyu himself calls Baoyu devoid of qing—damning him in the strongest terms possible within the world of Dream of the Red Chamber and its sequels. Later in chapter 44, Mengyu hears Lady Shen and Aunt Xue discussing a young woman of their acquaintance, Zhu Jiuru. Miss Zhu lives with her elderly widowed mother, a friend of Lady Shen’s, and has sworn to marry no one but Mengyu, whose reputation she admires. After hearing her described, Mengyu realizes that he has already met her in a dream and thinks to himself: “This Miss Zhu is actually my true friend, met in the spirit world. If I betray her, wouldn’t it be the case that between heaven and earth had appeared yet another heartless Baoyu?” (這竺姑娘竟是個神交知己，我若負了他，豈 不是天地間又出了一個無情的寶玉？)8 It would be one thing to call Baoyu, widely acknowledged as passionate (duoqing), a lovestruck lunatic. To call him heartless, devoid of feeling, wuqing, is something else entirely: not only a dramatic departure from the parent novel’s portrayal of Baoyu, but also the strongest possible critique of Cao Xueqin’s vision of qing. In these three passages, Mengyu retains Baoyu’s trademark romantic sympathy for women, but 7  Chen Shaohai, Honglou fumeng, 468. 8  Chen Shaohai, Honglou fumeng, 470.

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combines it with flawless etiquette, easy masculine sociability, and affectionate consideration for middle-aged aunts. This is Chen Shaohai’s epitome of qing, sharply and self-consciously different from Cao Xueqin’s. Thoughtful observance of social rituals in the extended family setting is the means by which Chen Shaohai demonstrates the superiority of Mengyu’s qing to Baoyu’s. Other Qing dynasty novels also situate qing in a family context, notably the eighteenth-century Preposterous Words and the nineteenth-century Tale of Boy and Girl Heroes, but Chen’s exploration of familial affection is more flexible and expansive than either of those two novels’. Prosperous Words emphasizes family intermarriage as a means of creating a stable local community against the breakdown of the larger social order.9 In Dreaming Again, however, there is no backdrop of social breakdown, and the networks formed by intermarriage span multiple provinces. Wen Kang 文康’s Tale of Boy and Girl Heroes, published three-quarters of a century after Dreaming Again, parallels it more closely: Wen Kang critiques the way Baoyu’s obsession with qing leads him to neglect his duties to family and state, and his novel revises qing by equating it narrowly with filial love and marital devotion.10 But Chen Shaohai’s redefinition of qing is far more radical than Wen’s. Chen’s protagonist Mengyu keeps Baoyu’s wide-ranging qing for all women, but also extends it across affinal and agnatic networks. Furthermore, while Wen Kang blends emotion and ritual by “ensur[ing] that ritual is imbued with authenticating qing,”11 Dreaming Again reverses the causality: in the scenes above, both ritual and authentic emotion are present, but it is ritual that authenticates Mengyu’s qing, not the reverse. Dreaming Again shares its focus on the family with other high Qing novels, but its vision of the family is uniquely broad, both geographically and in the kinds of kinship it encompasses. 1.1 Qing and Sworn Kinship The extended family setting plays a key role in Chen Shaohai’s revaluation of qing and his rebalancing of qing and li. The members of the Zhu family establish bonds with numerous members of other families in a way that Dream of the Red Chamber never imagines. First, unlike the Jias of the parent novel, the Zhus establish many happy marriage alliances for the clan’s male and female youngsters. But marriage is not the only nor even the most important means 9  Qing Ye, “Reading Bodies: Aesthetics, Gender, and Family in the Eighteenth Century Chinese Novel Guwangyan (Preposterous Words)” (Ph.D. diss., University of Oregon, 2016), 192–225. 10  Epstein, Competing Discourses, 297. 11  Epstein, Competing Discourses, 299.

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of establishing kinship between previously unrelated individuals and families: Dreaming Again portrays sworn siblinghood and adoptive parenthood even more frequently and at greater length. Sworn sisterhood in particular enables the rapid expansion of the Zhu household and the blurring of family boundaries between the Zhus and others. It enables characters to manipulate the dynamic of ritual propriety and affection and allows Chen Shaohai to shift his definition of qing away from the marital/romantic domain and toward the extended family, now further extended by the incorporation of sworn kin. Like numerous short stories and romance novels, Dreaming Again creates a happy polygynous marriage for its protagonist in which the wives have a sisterly relationship with each other. But uniquely in this novel, sworn sisterhood takes on primary importance in its own right, not merely as a means of smoothing the rocky path to polygamy. Zhu Mengyu lives with twelve wives and concubines (including Song Caizhi, the reborn Daiyu) in the adult, polygamous version of Prospect Garden.12 The wives and concubines swear sisterhood with each other and treat each other as effective equals. But the sisterhood that includes Mengyu’s wives and concubines has a nucleus consisting of five women, only three of whom end up married to Mengyu; eventually, it expands to include maids, Baochai as chaste widow, women married to other men, and the ghost of Lin Daiyu. Sworn sisterhood thus crosses boundaries of marriage, status, and death itself. Moreover, Mengyu’s wives are not the first characters to swear sisterhood; they do so in imitation of their mothers and aunts. Mengyu’s mother, several of his wives’ mothers, and Lady Wang (Jia Baoyu’s mother and Xiren/Aroma/Zhenzhu’s adoptive mother) are the first to swear sisterhood with each other, and their emotional lives take up as much space throughout the novel as the younger characters’. Sworn sisterhood is a fantasy in its own right throughout the sequel, not a mere instrument to a masculine polygynous fantasy. Dreaming Again’s older women initially swear sisterhood with each other in order to circumvent burdensome ritual practice. As Chapter 35 opens, Jia Qiaojie (Lady Wang’s greatniece) and Gui Tang (Mengyu’s mother’s brother’s son) are about to be officially betrothed. Gui Tang’s mother Madam Gui (née Jin) is much younger than the other women of her generation, including Madam Zhu/Lady Bai, Mengyu’s father’s brother’s wife and Madam Gui’s distant affine. Her deference shows in her reluctance to take an honored seat even though she is the mother of the groom:

12  The novel’s polygynous fantasy is discussed in Lin Yixuan, Wucai ke bu tian, 62–66, and in McMahon, “Eliminating Traumatic Antinomies,” 105–10.

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After fussing around for half a day, they finally began taking their seats. Madam Gui refused to take precedence over Madam Zhu. She refused for a long time, and she was also unwilling to take precedence over Lady Wang, mistress of her son’s fiancée’s household. She kept saying she was unwilling to usurp anyone’s position, and kept yielding and yielding. She yielded until Lady Bai (Madam Zhu) got agitated and said, “My dear younger sister, please go along with us and sit down here and let us all sit quietly. You’ve been yielding so much my head is spinning! If you keep yielding, I shall faint!” Hearing this, Madam Gui could only obey and sit down. 整整鬧了半日，這才讓坐。桂太太定不肯僭祝太太的坐位，謙讓半日 又不肯僭王夫人親家媽的坐位，總說不敢有僭，讓個不了。將柏夫 人讓的著急說道: “好妹妹，你且依著咱們，坐這一位，等我坐下定一 定。我這會兒叫你讓的頭都發暈，你再讓一會兒，我可要栽倒了。” 桂 太太聽見這樣說，只得遵命告坐。13

The ritually appropriate forms of address that Madam Gui uses with her new in-laws are equally cumbersome: At this time, all the women were sitting in the hall exchanging humble and polite remarks. Madam Gui kept calling Lady Wang “Old Mistress, Great Co-Parent-in-Law.” Lady Wang said over and over, “You’re the mistress of a related family, yet you keep addressing me this way. Indeed, I can’t be at ease! We’re four related households! If you want to stand on ceremony to this extent, I can’t feel close to you.” Madam Gui said: “You were an older relative to begin with, and when you also have such high status, I don’t dare not to address you this way.” 此時太太們在正廳上說些謙虛客話。桂太太稱王夫人是太親媽老太 太，王夫人再三說道: “親家太太，你這樣稱呼，我實在不安。咱們是 四門親家，你要這樣拘禮，我就不敢親近你了。” 桂太太笑道: “本來是 長親，名分在此，不能不這樣稱呼。”14

Chen Shaohai has constructed a complicated ritual situation. The betrothed couple each have several senior relatives with distinct ritual roles and multiple names and titles. The groom’s mother, Madam Gui (also referred to by 13  Chen Shaohai, Honglou fumeng, 373. 14  Chen Shaohai, Honglou fumeng, 375.

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her own surname as Lady Jin), and aunt Madam Zhu (also referred to as Lady Bai) are both present, and so are the bride’s stepmother Ping’er (Patience, also referred to as Second Madam Lian), her grandmother Lady Xing (who does not appear in the selection I have translated but is present in the scene), and the senior female member of the bride’s natal household, Lady Wang (also referred to simply as “Madam”). The reader need not have a full grasp of the family trees involved to understand that the group dynamics make complex ritual demands on the participants. The scene continues: Madam Zhu said, “ I have the perfect method to resolve the situation, but I don’t know if it will work, to save the two Madams-In-Law the trouble of constantly humbly yielding to each other.” Lady Wang immediately asked, “What method? Please, tell us!” Lady Bai (Madam Zhu) said, “Today is an auspicious day, and all of us relatives are gathered in one place. Why don’t we three swear sisterhood? Then addressing each other would be easy, and it would be good for talking things over affectionately and getting things done. It would save a lot of polite talk! I don’t know if that would work?” Lady Wang didn’t wait for her to finish speaking, but immediately said, “Very good! Let’s do it!” 祝太太道: “我倒有一個調停的法兒，不知可還使得，省得兩位親家太 太彼此謙讓。” 王夫人忙問道: “怎麼個調停法兒？倒要請教。 ” 柏夫人 道: “今兒是上好吉日，咱們又是至親聚在一處，何不咱們三個人拜了 姐妹，彼此既好稱呼，又好關切商量辦事，省了多少客氣！這件事 不知可還使得？” 王夫人不等說完，歡喜的連忙說道: “好極！咱們竟是  這樣。”15

Throughout this extended scene, Chen Shaohai amplifies the reader’s confusion by using multiple names and titles in rapid succession to refer to the same woman. In this excerpt, Mengyu’s paternal aunt is referred to alternately as Madam Zhu and Lady Bai. Into this tangle of names, titles, relationships, bows, and seating precedents, Madam Zhu/Lady Bai’s suggestion to swear sisterhood comes as a breath of fresh air. She presents a simplified hierarchy of age that takes precedence over the competing hierarchies of rank, age, and relatedness that have created confusion up to this point. She offers the women a way of relating to one another based on sisterly affection and practical efficiency. They can “talk things over affectionately and get things done.” Guanqie (paying close 15  Chen Shaohai, Honglou fumeng, 375.

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attention to, being intimate with, showing concern for) is now the operative mode under which the women will talk things over, shangliang, and do things, banshi. Chen Shaohai next uses the ritual of sworn sisterhood to bring textual clarity to the chaos of names and titles. The women begin by writing their names and ages in order of seniority on a piece of red paper: Lady Wang ordered Baochai to take brush and inkstone and a piece of red paper. Then the three ladies calculated their order of age: Lady Wang was the oldest, then Madam Zhu, and Madam Gui was third. Lady Wang read out and had Baochai write down: Of the Jia household, Wang shi, named Rongzhuang, aged 56 sui, born in the zhen hour of the eighteenth day of the ninth month. Madam Zhu read out: Of the Zhu household, Bai shi, named Baozhen, aged 53 sui, born in the yin hour of the tenth day of the twelfth month. Madam Gui read out: Of the Gui household, Jin shi, named Xiangshu, aged 37 sui, born in the zi hour of the eighth day of the eighth month. 王夫人命寳釵取筆硯、大紅全帖。三位太太敍了年齒: 王夫人居長，    祝太太次之，桂太太第三。王夫人先念著，叫寳釵寫道: 賈門王氏容莊，年五十六歲，九月十八日辰時生。 祝太太念道: 祝門柏氏抱貞，年五十三歲，十二月初十日寅時生。 桂太太念道: 桂門金氏香樹，年三十七歲，八月初八日子時生。16

After deliberately increasing the reader’s confusion at the beginning of the chapter, Chen uses the list-making aspect of the sworn sisterhood ritual to create clarity for the reader here. He presents the full ritual courtesies between members of different families as cumbersome and confusing, while the streamlined rituals of fictive kinship make social interaction comprehensible again. Obligatory ritual observance inconveniences both characters and reader, while 16  Chen Shaohai, Honglou fumeng, 375–76.

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the relatively unorthodox sworn-sibling ritual simplifies the characters’ social obligations, allows for the flourishing of affection, and creates lucidity for the reader. As we will see, Chen Shaohai’s emphasis on clarity is an important aspect of his narrative engagement with qing. Later in chapter 35, the younger women of the Zhu and Jia households follow the older women’s example by swearing sisterhood with each other. Their circle creates a more visible tension with ritual norms than the older women’s. The five initial sisters are Zhang Shujiang (Jia Rong’s wife), Xue Baochai, Jia Zhenzhu (Xiren/Aroma), Jiang Furong (a senior maid in the Zhu household) and Gui Chanzhu (Mengyu’s maternal cousin and fiancée). Two of the five, Zhang Shujiang and Jiang Furong, are ritually problematic. Furong is a maid. Zhang Shujiang is the wife of Jia Baoyu’s nephew Jia Rong, which makes her a member of the generation junior to Xue Baochai and Jia Zhenzhu. Shujiang resists being included, and she is even more shocked to discover that as the oldest in years, she has been listed as the “oldest sister” of the group: “I don’t care if my age is young or old, I’m generationally junior—if you want to pull me in and make me swear sisterhood, please let me be at the very end as the youngest sister!” (我不管年紀大不大，我輩分兒小，這會兒要拉上我拜姐 妹，我情願在盡後做個妹妹。 ) To which Baochai replies, “You really are trying to make trouble! Whoever heard of a little sister older than her older sister?” (你真是搜攪，那裡有個妹妹的年紀比姐姐的大呢？) Zhenzhu (Aroma) then laughs, “I’ll tell you how to address people: in future you can just address us as Aunt Little-Sister, and that’ll be that.” (我倒教你一個稱呼，以後你竟叫嬸子 妹妹、姑姑妹妹就完了。 )17 And so she does. In contrast to the simplicity of the older women’s ritual, swearing sisterhood means the young women must create new and paradoxical terms of address for each other. The young women’s upending of the generational hierarchy is ritually transgressive in its own right, eliciting laughing criticism from the older generation of sworn sisters when they hear about it in the next chapter. In fact, the girls’ generational mixing disturbs the older characters more than their status mixing; after a moment of surprise about the maid Furong’s inclusion in the group, Lady Wang simply adopts Furong as her daughter.18 But every time a new 17  Chen Shaohai, Honglou fumeng, 378. 18  Another potential reason that Jia Rong’s wife is a more disturbing presence than a maid is the resonance with chapter 5 of Dream of the Red Chamber, in which a sleepy Jia Baoyu insists on taking a nap in the bedchamber of Qin shi, his nephew Jia Rong’s first wife. Bystanders are shocked by the impropriety of the suggestion, while Qin shi claims that Baoyu is too young to do anything inappropriate. But during this nap, Baoyu has a mysterious dream, which turns into his first wet dream and leads directly to his first sexual experience. Though only women are involved in the sequel’s generational mixing, the Chen

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character hears Shujiang addressing one of her sworn sisters as “Aunt LittleSister” in subsequent chapters, everyone comments on the oddity again. This is the only hint of tension in the sequel around sworn sisterhood’s abrogation of ritual norms: that the older characters bring it up repeatedly even though they treat it as a joke each time. The young women’s sisterhood expands throughout the sequel to include each of Mengyu’s wives and concubines, along with Mengyu’s sisters and their sisters-in-law. But as cozy as the women become with each other, and as much as the sisterhood blunts the jealous overtones of twelve-wife polygamy, this sisterhood is also where Chen Shaohai locates one of the sequel’s few hints of discomfort with ritual lapses. The fact that the older women’s commentary on the generational mixing recurs for nearly ten chapters is an anemic tension to be sure, but it stands out in a novel that consistently resolves tensions within a few pages of presenting them. The lasting tension between affectionate sisterhood and ritual norms reflects the centrality of ritual in this novel. In this sequel, even more than in A Later Dream, ritual has replaced desire (yu) as passion’s opposite number, allowing the narrative to set up its dance of conflict and resolution.19 Physical desire is entirely absent from the sequel. But, as in Dream of the Red Chamber, “the inhabitants of the novelistic world … seem to have little recognition that what they invent as the laws of nature and the principles of human rites are in actuality forms of desire.”20 Desire-as-ritual provides the combined fulfillment of and tension with affection that drives the plot. Neither Chen Shaohai nor his characters appear cognizant of this fact, but the sequel’s plot relies heavily on the tension between human desires for connection through kinship and friendship and the equally deep-rooted desires for order and distinctness that manifest themselves in ritual norms. This tension manifests itself not only in the fictive kin relations that the characters establish throughout the sequel, but also in the ways that Chen Shaohai portrays their numerous marriages. 1.2 Marrying and Giving in Marriage Sworn sisterhood starts as a way for both generations of women to streamline ritual demands, but the emotional charge of these relationships soon grows more significant than the convenience they provide. The older women siblings’ choice of Jia Rong’s wife as the out-of-place “sister” recalls the quasi-incestuous connection from the parent novel. 19  For analyses of Dream of the Red Chamber that situate it in a longer tradition of works exploring the polarity of qing and yu, see Epstein, Competing Discourses, 150–98; Martin Huang, Desire and Fictional Narrative, 271–314; and Anthony Yu, Rereading the Stone, 53–109. 20  Yu, Rereading the Stone, 217.

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broaden their relationship networks throughout the next twenty chapters by adopting more youths, arranging more marriages for a series of increasingly distantly-related adolescents, and creating ever more sworn and affinal kin of their own generation. In several of the sequel’s descriptions of marriage, the affectionate bonds between the matchmaking older women actually eclipse both marriage’s significance for the patriline and its romantic dimensions for the young couple. In chapter 45, for example, Mengyu marries a girl named Zhu Jiuru. He first meets the maiden and her widowed mother in a dream at the end of chapter 43. There is little romantic development—Mengyu’s encounters with the daughter and with the mother are described in a paragraph each—and Dreaming Again describes their journey to marriage primarily from the viewpoint of the older women who arrange it. These are the bride’s mother Madam Zhu and her neighbor Old Madam Zhou, Lady Wang, Aunt Xue (who has adopted Mengyu as a son), and Lady Shen, the sister-in-law of Lady Wang and Aunt Xue. The sequel continues this emphasis on the senior women in its description of the wedding: Aunt Xue arranged a day-long festive banquet in Lady Shen’s home, inviting several sisters, aunts, and sisters-in-law with whom she was close to stay and receive the bride and her mother on the following day. Lady Shen furnished the bridal suite and the new apartment for Madam Zhu. Just when all was ready, the third day arrived, and she invited Old Madam Zhou and her friends to deliver the bride. The Minister’s residence was noisy and bustling. Mengyu and his bride were very grateful to his adoptive mother Xue and his aunt Wang; after the ritual bows, they continued to kowtow. Madam Zhu was also extremely grateful and bowed her thanks repeatedly. The Xue and Wang families had imperceptibly become relatives with Mistress Zhu; they were mutually very intimate and close. 薛姑太太在沈夫人宅裡擺了一天喜席，將幾位親熱些的姐妹、姑嬸留 著，後日接新人同親家太太回來。沈夫人收拾新房同竺太太的住處，    剛料理完畢，不覺已是三朝，請周老太太們做送親塚宰，第甚屬熱 鬧。夢玉夫妻十分感激薛家繼母同王三舅母，拜見之後，另又磕頭。    竺太太亦感戴之至，再三拜謝。薛、王兩家無意中與竺太太成了眷 屬，彼此甚為親熱相契。21

21  Chen Shaohai, Honglou fumeng, 476.

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The warm relationships between the various parties to arranging the marriage are more central to this narrative than Mengyu’s feelings for his bride or the wedding ritual itself. The emphasis on marriage as a joy to the senior members of both families continues after the wedding. Later in chapter 45, Mengyu brings his new bride, her mother, Lady Wang, Aunt Xue, and Lady Shen home to meet his family, including his two previous wives, his sister, and Madam Gui (his father’s brother’s wife). Madam Gui smiles and says “Fourth elder sister Shen, ever since I was separated from you at thirteen sui, who would have guessed that we’d meet again at last today, and that you’d have found a daughter-in-law for me?” (沈四姐姐，自從我十三歲同你分手，誰知今日才得見面，還給我 娶個媳婦。 )22 Though the sequel does not go into detail, Madam Gui’s address to Lady Shen as “Fourth Elder Sister” despite the lack of blood kinship between them implies that the two had been sworn sisters or at least close friends as girls. Here, the author repairs a severed girlhood friendship, not by marrying both young women to the same man as in Later Dream of the Red Chamber, but by reconnecting middle-aged women after decades of separation through a marriage in the younger generation. Furthermore, it is not actually the marital connection between Mengyu and Jiuru that reunites the women. Lady Shen has no relationship with the bride, so the marriage does not establish a new agnatic tie. Instead, she is distantly connected to Mengyu himself as the sister-in-law of his adoptive mother. It is her involvement in arranging Mengyu’s marriage, combined with Mengyu’s acknowledgment of Aunt Xue as an adoptive mother, that reconnects her with his aunt, her girlhood friend Madam Gui. Arranging marriages—in the mode of “talking things over affectionately and getting things done”—becomes a primary channel for feminine sociability in Dreaming Again. The sequel presents marriage as a ritual path to the fulfillment of qing, not only for the bride and groom, but for their mothers, aunts, and elderly neighbors as well. A final, striking instance of how marriage as a source of satisfaction to older relatives trumps both marriage as reproduction and marriage as romance occurs later in chapter 45. Lady Shen has now arranged another marriage for Mengyu on her own behalf, this time to Zheng Ruxiang, who is already acquainted with the Zhu family. But just as they are making plans for the ceremony, news of the death of Mengyu’s uncle Zhu Lu arrives, and marriage is of course forbidden during the ritual mourning period. However, after some discussion, the senior women agree that if Mengyu marries Zheng Ruxiang on the boat home, before he actually enters the gate of the mansion and puts on 22  Chen Shaohai, Honglou fumeng, 478.

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mourning clothes, the marriage will be valid. Mengyu’s mother-in-law Aunt Mei provides the rationale for this extraordinary approach: Miss Zheng always used to say funny things to the Old Mistress to cheer her up, but after we settled the betrothal, Sister Zheng [Miss Zheng’s mother] took her home. After that, Third Brother passed away, and the Old Mistress is so grieved that she can’t swallow food or drink, and the whole household is terribly anxious. So I’ve been discussing it back and forth with Sister Zheng; as soon as Mengyu walks in the door, he will be in mourning, and we absolutely can’t have the wedding. Furthermore, our brother’s letter was urgent—attending on the Old Mistress, he is barely getting her through each day, and if anything else happens it will be even harder. So we came up with a brilliant idea, which is to ask Fourth Sister [Lady Shen] to formalize the marriage to Miss Zheng on the boat. When they’ve bowed before the flowery candles and completed this marriage, then she and Aunt Xue can each bring a new daughter-in-law with her, and it’ll make Her Ladyship happy to see it. Tomorrow is Third Brother’s seventh-day scripture reading, and the Old Mistress will be in desperate straits if she keeps grieving and weeping so single-mindedly. 鄭姑娘往常給老太太逗趣兒說個笑話，自從那天定下親事，鄭大姐姐 將他帶回家去。接著三兄弟不在了，老太太悲傷的飲食不能下咽，一 家子急的什麼似的。因此同鄭大姐姐們再四商量。夢玉一進門，身上 就有了期服，斷不能再辦喜事。況且大哥的信兒亦來的很緊，不過老 太太跟前護弄一天是一天，再有別的那更難了。這會兒商量出個絕妙 主意，請四姐就在這船上將鄭姑娘娶過來，拜了花燭完結這件親事，    同薛二姐姐各人帶個新媳婦去，叫他老人家瞧著歡喜。明日是三兄弟 頭七念經，老太太若再傷心一哭，實在要命。23

In other words, the marriage is justified, despite the dubious ritual compromises it involves, because of the joy it will bring to Mengyu’s grandmother. It will enable Zheng Ruxiang to come back as a full member of the household and tell her jokes to cheer up the old lady again. The marriages in Later Dream are often perfunctory and—as we will see— devoid of physical desire. As a polygamous fantasy, the sequel lacks spice; as a matchmaking aunt’s fantasy, it is considerably more successful. The sequel’s revaluation of qing only makes sense in the multigenerational family context. In Dream of the Red Chamber, Baoyu’s mourning for the loss of his “sisters” through 23  Chen Shaohai, Honglou fumeng, 478.

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their marriage into other families appears as one expression of his qing-crazed nature, while the women’s experience of separation on marriage is only one facet of the all-encompassing tragic vision. The virilocal marriage norm meant that the separation of sisters from their brothers and sisters through marriage was an expected part of adulthood. Dreaming Again puts the resolution of this adult trauma at center stage, not just for two favored co-wives, but for a large cast of older women. The sequel even uses several of Mengyu’s weddings to bring out this theme, by emphasizing how the marriages facilitate affectionate relations between senior women. As the author’s sister Chen Shiwen states in her preface, “Passionate ones all gain families.” (多情的都成眷屬。)24 This is a close paraphrase of the romantic play Story of the Western Wing (Xixiang ji)’s closing wish, “May lovers of the whole world all be thus united in wedlock!” (願天下有情人都成了眷屬。)25 But Chen Shiwen’s use of this passage exploits the ambiguity of the term juanshu, which can mean either “spouse” or “relatives.” In this sequel, the ultimate happy ending for a passionate person is not romantic marriage, as in the Yuan drama, but membership in a family; the nearidentical wording only highlights the difference in meaning. Furthermore, the sequel clarifies, family membership can be gained through birth, fictive kin relations, and affinal connections—this kind of happy ending can keep occurring into old age. Thus, in Dreaming Again, Chen Shaohai and Chen Shiwen dramatically shift the relationship between qing and li compared to the parent novel. There is a rapprochement between the two, to a far greater extent than in Later Dream. The Chen siblings do not advocate ritual transgression, but many rituals become a means to certify the genuineness of emotion, while other rituals appear inconvenient and in need of abridgment. But the sequel’s approach is not a simple movement from a relative emphasis on ritual to a relative emphasis on sentiment. Rather, Dreaming Again honors the ritual desire for order and distinction and presents family rituals as the fullest expression of love. It revalues the nature of qing itself by extending its vision to the farthest reaches of the family network. However, with ritual so broadly extended in the family network, and without the intensity provided by the parent novel’s indissoluble core of physical desire, Mengyu’s qing threatens to dissolve into general familial goodwill. To prevent this dissolution and keep qing recognizably passionate, Chen Shaohai uses orderly narrative form and architectural description to buttress the ritual clarity of his characters’ relationships. 24  Chen Shaohai, Honglou fumeng, 1. 25  Wang Shifu 王實甫, Xixiang ji 西廂記 (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1978), 193; Wang Shifu, The Story of the Western Wing, 285.

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The Architecture of Plot and Feeling

The geographical scope of Dreaming Again matches the scope of its family networks. The novel covers more spatial territory than Later Dream or even Dream of the Red Chamber itself. Significant households, whose architecture and family interactions the sequel describes in detail, include the Jia mansion in the capital, the Jia mansion in Nanjing, and the Zhu mansion of Baoyu’s reborn identity. Other mansions are described in loving detail as well, including the natal homes of Mengyu’s wives. Furthermore, both male and female characters lead active lives outside the home, and the novel follows them as they battle pirates and travel between cities from Beijing to Nanjing to Guangdong. This territorial expanse is mirrored in the novel’s enormous textual scale: it is the only sequel to approach the size of the parent novel. It offers not one, but two recreations of Prospect Garden (Rushi yuan in the Jia mansion in Nanjing, along with the original). More significant even than the scale of the novel’s landscape, however, is the way in which these spaces are created, with descriptive clarity replacing mystery. In Dreaming Again’s “Reading Principles” ( fanli), the Chen siblings promise the reader clearly visualized architecture and a clearer plot, which they contrast to the parent novel’s mystery and lack of closure: The former book describes only Prospect Garden and has no leisure for other matters. This [book], however, omits no events from its narration and no household from its description. Subtle and close-knit, it overlooks nothing. 前書僅寫大觀園，無暇他顧；此則無事不書，無家不敍，細微周密，    未嘗遺漏。

In the former book, many characters and events lack a proper ending. In this [book], however, there is nothing that does not have both a beginning and an end.　 前書人物事實每多遺其結局，此則無不成其始終。

In the former book, of the events within the ornamental inner gate, the arrangement of rooms is not very clear other than in Prospect Garden, so that the reader feels disoriented. As to the places outside the ornamental inner gate, one knows even less about how many rooms and chambers there are, it is simply called the “Rong Mansion.”

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chapter 5 前書垂花門以内房屋不甚明晰，除大觀園外使讀者不分方向；若垂花 門以外，更不知廳房幾進，樓閣若干，名曰 “榮府” 而已。

… In this book, both inner and outer rooms and chambers are described clearly on all sides, so that when one reads it, it is as though physically present. 此書内外房屋四界分明，閲之如身在境中。

… This book numbers one hundred chapters. The events it narrates are many and complex, but as though holding up a divine lamp, it illuminates the single thread of their common origin. This is not like other books, where the plot threads are multiple and they do not tie together. 此書共計百回，事繁而雜，如提九蓮燈，本於一綫，不似他書頭緒一 多不遑自顧。26

These lines inform the reader that Dreaming Again’s relationship to the parent novel is openly corrective. In place of mystery, it promises narrative closure for every plot thread. In response to the impossible-to-map Prospect Garden and uncanny dream scenes, the sequel carefully orients its readers to all the rooms in which the characters find themselves. This description is frequently tedious but always readily visualized. Chen and his sister declare that Dreaming Again will broaden the scope of the parent novel as a portrayal of a noble household and as an instance of the novel genre, clarifying its boundaries and eliminating its vagueness. Their spatial logic is both a continuation of and a correction to the parent novel’s use of space. Later Dream and Dreaming Again both engage with the parent novel on the level of spatial description and narrative mode, but differently: Later Dream uses the narrative mode of containment and architectural themes of containment to rein in the threat of excess, while Dreaming Again uses a narrative mode of expansion with obsessive tidiness to organize away the threat. Every action and every room is described in painstaking detail. Both sequels draw inspiration from the way the parent novel’s narrative form mirrors and articulates 26  Chen Shaohai, Honglou fumeng, 3.

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its engagement with qing. As Gary Xu explains: “If we insist that Honglou meng is the champion of qing, we must at least consider the degree to which the author constrained himself from writing about Baoyu’s sexual encounters. Qing, in this context, should thus be seen not only as the opposite of yin, licentiousness, but also as the opposite of yin, the narrative mode of excess.”27 Dream of the Red Chamber’s literary restraint in the midst of passion is the narrative embodiment of Baoyu’s “lust of the mind.” Dreaming Again uses very different strategies than Later Dream to uphold this distinction between passion and licentiousness and to avoid the narrative mode of excess in its textual revision of qing. This is a particular challenge for Dreaming Again, in which emotions, characters, details, and plot events abound. The book does verge on excess, far more than Later Dream. But this abundance is always carefully tidied away within the story’s expansive and ever-subdivided walls. Using architectural description to organize abundance and prevent excess, and particularly to organize characters and their relationships, is Dreaming Again’s response to the parent novel’s tragic vision in which qing is neither successfully fulfilled nor successfully restrained. Spatial organization in Dream of the Red Chamber serves to heighten tragedy and create tension between the emotional, ritual, and economic realities of the Jia household. It is a truism that Daguan yuan (Prospect Garden) serves as a privileged realm of qing. Furthermore, the characters’ dwellings within the garden symbolize their personalities through architecture, botany, and décor. The bamboos of Xiaoxiang guan (Naiad’s House) indicate Daiyu’s melancholy nature and foreshadow her heartbreak. The austerity of Hengwu yuan (Allspice Court), Baochai’s residence, is set off by the mysterious fragrance that greets those who enter; Baochai herself has a mysterious perfume from taking Cold Fragrance pills. Baoyu lives in the Yihong yuan (House of Green Delights), which is decorated with mirrors and trompe-l’oeil illusions that recall his complex emotional life and semi-unreal status. Moreover, Baoyu and Daiyu coincidentally choose adjacent residences within the garden, and their spatial proximity mirrors the close emotional bond between them. Thus, within the garden as a privileged site of passion, subdivided spaces are key to understanding the personalities and relationships of the characters, in particular the Baoyu-Daiyu-Baochai love triangle. From a ritual and economic standpoint, however, the garden is distinctly problematic. The garden itself begins as both a ritual necessity—it was constructed to receive the ceremonial visit of the family’s oldest daughter, an 27  Gary Gang Xu, “Ethics of Form,” 248.

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imperial concubine—and an economic extravagance.28 When the Imperial Concubine suggests that Baoyu and his female cousins move into the garden after her visit, a new ritual inappropriateness emerges. As discussed in chapter 3, the underlying principles of ritual were frequently expressed through spatial division, particularly the ritual observance of physically segregated gender boundaries. In Prospect Garden, these boundaries are blurry and porous. Baoyu and his female cousins are too old for much of the book to live in such close quarters with each other.29 In addition to this internal impropriety, another layer of danger comes from the fact that the Garden itself is “leaky”; people who do not belong can get in and out.30 Ritual disaster is foreshadowed by economic peccadilloes, and there is a constant stream of petty thefts and arguments about who should pay for which meals and whether they should be cooked in the garden kitchen or the main house kitchen.31 The boundaries that should make ownership and responsibility clear are shown to be inadequate. The Garden is a place of emotional intensity, ritual impropriety, and economic problems. Throughout Dream of the Red Chamber, Cao Xueqin highlights the tensions between emotional bonds, status hierarchies, and economic realities. Examples include Daiyu’s sensitivity about being a poor cousin,32 as well as the senior maids’ emotional importance that far outstrips their social status. This disparity between emotional standing and ritual status lends pathos to characters like Qingwen (Skybright), Yuanyang (Faithful), and Ping’er (Patience).33 The tension between ritual and economic hierarchies on one hand, and emotional affinities, on the other, is replicated in the spatial realm. Just as the garden is the most privileged zone of qing, it is the most problematic space in the 28  When the family’s oldest daughter Yuanchun, now an Imperial Concubine, first sees the garden: “From within her sedan chair she saw that the garden was so magnificent inside and out, and thereupon she sighed silently that it was so luxurious and excessively expensive.” Chapters 17–18, Cao Xueqin, Honglou meng, 237. 29  Comments on this impropriety and its attendant dangers occur throughout the book, but particularly in Aroma’s conversation with Lady Wang in chapter 34. 30  For example, in chapter 62, we learn that Xue Baochai makes a point of keeping the gate between her own residence and the larger household carefully locked to avoid being entangled in the scandal that she can see threatens. 31  The kitchen debates occur in Dream of the Red Chamber, chapters 60–61. 32  Shi Xiangyun’s poverty and the potential awkwardness it creates is also addressed in chapter 37. Another example is Tanchun’s touchiness about her status as daughter of a concubine. 33  Even unliked characters like the concubines Zhao and Zhou and the concubine’s son Jia Huan become pathetic to the reader as they are constantly socially snubbed and their poverty is emphasized.

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mansion from a ritual and economic standpoint. Prospect Garden is a spatial nexus of the most intense conflicts in household life: feeling, ritual, and money. In Dreaming Again, Chen Shaohai extends the spatial reasoning of the parent novel from the garden to the mansion as a whole, but he uses strategies of spatial description and organization to resolve the same problems and tensions that the parent novel uses them to highlight. Dreaming Again’s households, their rooms and corridors and courtyards and buildings and walls, are clearly mapped in its pages. The extensive spatial description allows the sequel to resolve ideological tensions inherent to its depiction of qing by externalizing both ritual boundaries and the subjectivity of individual characters. Spatial negotiations also become an important tool for characters within the novel to advance their goals, moving the plot forward. Architectural clarity allows Chen Shaohai to clarify and unify the sequel’s plot and themes. 2.1 Spatializing Ritual and Emotion In Dreaming Again, it is the dissolution of every innate distinction that defines qing, just as fictive kinship dissolves distinctions between families. But this radical negation of boundaries creates two obstacles for the novel’s quest to harmonize ritual and emotion. First, Chen Shaohai and his sister present this sequel as appropriate for women, with no sexual immorality.34 The book blurs some ritual boundaries but remains fundamentally committed to the observance of others. How can it simultaneously deny the reality of difference and maintain the boundaries of propriety? Even more critically, by weakening distinctions between individuals, the sequel dissolves the very qing it attempts to satisfy. Boundary creation and distinction are critical for subject formation, and ritual in the Chinese context was the ultimate principle behind boundary creation and maintenance.35 Ritual comprises the distinguishing and centering processes without which no emotional center could exist. The sequel uses spatial description to resolve these ideological tensions by externalizing both ritual boundaries and the distinctions between characters. Among Mengyu’s wives and concubines, both the women and their families consistently disregard questions of status. For example, at the end of chapter 10, Song Caizhi’s father is planning her marriage to Mengyu with his sister, Mengyu’s oldest aunt, Lady Bai. Mengyu has two wives already, the twin sisters Mei. But far from being concerned about Mengyu’s existing wives, Song Zhu sees their presence as an advantage for his daughter, who as the reincarnation 34  Chen Shaohai, Honglou fumeng, 4. See the discussion of this point in Widmer, The Beauty and the Book, 219–47. 35  Zito, “Silk and Skin,” 106; Angela Zito, “Ritualizing Li,” 321–348.

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of Lin Daiyu is in frail health. She will not likely be able to bear children, and his only concern is to give her a good husband during her short life. To which Mengyu’s aunt replies amiably, “In the future we’ll arrange things just as we did when we gave the two Mei girls, my sister’s daughters, to Mengyu: make no distinction between this one and that one.” (將來照著梅大妹妹的兩個女兒給 夢玉的一個樣兒，不分彼此就是了。 )36 This laissez-faire attitude would have been unthinkable in Later Dream, where it takes considerable effort to persuade Baochai and Daiyu to “call yourselves sisters and rank yourselves by age,” and where the elders are anxious about Baochai’s potential loss of wifely status. But in Dreaming Again, even Song Caizhi’s father shows no concern about his daughter’s status in the household, while Lady Bai is content for the young women to “make no distinction between this one and that one.” These characters go one step beyond undermining the distinction between main wives and concubines to ignoring the distinction between persons. There is one remaining clear distinction between characters in the novel: gender. And gender difference is strongly spatialized. The narrative pays special attention to the various barriers within the house, especially the ornamental inner gate (chuihua men 垂花門) that divides the women’s quarters from the outer part of the house. In the Zhu mansion: The narrow walkway behind the eastern wing proceeded from these two gates straight back to the ornamental gate behind Zhongshu tang, and there stopped. This was the place of the boundary between inner and outer…. Outside the ornamental gate was a group of servants minding it; inside the ornamental gate, the rooms to east and west were all occupied by respectable old serving women, who took it in turns to mind the gate. 東廂房後身夾道，由二門起一直通到忠恕堂後身垂花門止，是內外分 界處所。…… 垂花門外有該班家人聽差，垂花門內東西一帶門房，俱 是體面老管家婆帶著輪班的媳婦們把門聽差。37

Zhu Mengyu, Baoyu’s reincarnation, crosses the ornamental gate frequently, moving freely between the inner and outer regions of the house. And as we will see, he ignores the gender difference between himself and his wives and maidservants. But he is the only character who does so. His father and uncles spend their days in their studies in the outer part of the house, except when ill. The page boys are not allowed inside the ornamental gate. In chapter 25, Mengyu 36  Chen Shaohai, Honglou fumeng, 116. 37  Chapter 15. Chen Shaohai, Honglou fumeng, 169–70.

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crosses the ornamental gate without realizing it, and even he is shocked to see, as he thinks, page boys on the inner side of the ornamental gate.38 In a sequel where distinctions of status, generation, and identity are unimportant or at least negotiable, the immutability of gender’s dividing line stands out. Whatever other aspects of ritual propriety may be abrogated, Chen Shaohai’s fictional mansion upholds the ritual demand for spatialized gender distinctions, with Mengyu as the privileged exception. This consistent observation of gender distinctions for other characters allows Chen to present Mengyu’s total elision of all distinctions—including that of gender—as the pinnacle of qing. The sequel uses this redefinition of qing to distance Mengyu’s passionate nature (duoqing) from a love of sex (haose 好色): [Mengyu] had no other Way of sentiment than to start with his own feelings. If he wanted to eat, he thought others also wanted to eat; if he wanted to put on clothes, he thought others also wanted to put on clothes; if he disliked cold and heat, he thought others also disliked cold and heat; if he was happy, he thought others were also happy; if he felt badly treated, he thought others also felt badly treated. It wasn’t like this only with one person, but with person after person, with everyone, numerous as grains of sand or drops of water, in the wide world, it was the same way. So when he was thrown together with all these girls, he didn’t even realize that he was male and they were female. He thought their bodies were his body and his body was their body. It got to the point where the maids and married women servants saw this practice of his, completely infested with the poison of sentiment, and forgot that he was a master; they never avoided him whatever they were doing. Even if they were wiping or washing themselves, if the master wanted to come he could come, if he wanted to go he could go, whatever he wanted. Not only was he not aroused by these people, but even with his wives Haizhu and Zhangzhu, that joy of fish in water was simply not on his mind. 他也沒有別的情法，只就他自己情起。他要吃飯，想著人也是要吃 飯；他要穿衣，想人家也要穿衣；他怕冷嫌熱，想人家也怕冷嫌熱；    他歡喜大樂，想人家也歡喜大樂；他心中委屈，想人家也心中委屈。    不但一人如此，人人如此，就是大千世界恒河沙數的人皆如此。所以 同這些姑娘們攪在一堆，並不知自身是男，他人是女。覺得他的身子 就是我的身子，我的身子就是他的身子。以至那些姑娘、嫂子們見他 如此一個中了情毒的道學，也就忘了他是位爺們，不拘是什麼事，從 38  Chapter 25. Chen Shaohai, Honglou fumeng, 274.

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chapter 5 不避他。那怕遇著擦身洗澡呢，大爺來就來，要去就去，聽其自然。    他不但在這些人面前不動色念，就是同海珠們做了夫妻，那魚水之歡 也是慢不在意的。39

Mengyu’s sentimental nature in this passage is based on indiscriminately extrapolating his own self-awareness. Unlike the parent novel’s Jia Baoyu, who dislikes older married women, Mengyu extends his sympathy for women to old and young, married and single, mistress and servant, beautiful and ugly; indeed, his sympathy for ugly women is even stronger because he feels he is the only one who cares about them.40 Keith McMahon points out that these attempts to “hypersublimate male and female sexual differences” try to remove qing from the realm of sex.41 It is one way Chen Shaohai tries to create a novel of qing without the taint of licentiousness. This entails a number of sacrifices on the author’s part; most obviously, it rules out the existence of romantic passion even between Mengyu and his wives. Even Mengyu’s relationship with the reborn Daiyu, Song Caizhi, is special only because it is the last of his marriages to occur. He plays no favorites. But the problem goes beyond a lack of passion. This definition of qing is so extreme as to undermine itself. If nobody is different from anybody else, then how can any relationship—sexual or not—be unique? An anecdote in chapters 23 and 24 offers a clue. Mengyu persuades some of the wealthier maidservants to lend money and clothing to two poorer maids whom he happens to overhear bemoaning their situation. The better-off maids agree to help, but ask good-naturedly how he ever happened to think of those two.42 Mengyu’s impulse springs from no special emotional affinity. Since Mengyu’s qing is defined as sympathy with all women, explanations for his particular kindness to particular women cannot be based on any kind of emotional logic. That would reintroduce the distinctions that Chen Shaohai has assured us Mengyu does not see. The reader has never met the maids in question before, and they fade out of the story afterwards. Mengyu just happened to be walking by the window of the room where they were talking. Spatial logic allows for the existence of literal, if not emotional, closeness and distance. More subtly, the novel uses subdivisions of space, much like sworn kinship, to create minimal but “just-enough” distinctions between its female characters. Like Dream of the Red Chamber, Dreaming Again often identifies characters by 39  Chen Shaohai, Honglou fumeng, 287. 40  Chen Shaohai, Honglou fumeng, 139. 41  McMahon, “Eliminating Traumatic Antinomies,” 108. 42  Chen Shaohai, Honglou fumeng, 261.

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their place of residence. Unlike the parent novel, the sequel uses this strategy, not as an indicator of personality or emotive connection, but as a way to soften status hierarchies in order to allow for a greater flourishing of qing emotion. Subdivisions of space orchestrate Mengyu’s twelve-wife setup and the rest of the household: wives are addressed and referred to by the name of the suites they reside in, and all maids are identified by the names of the suites of the mistresses they work for. Mengyu’s first two wives, twin sisters, live in adjacent suites and are referred to by all the characters as “East Mistress” and “West Mistress.” By emphasizing distinction along the east-west axis, the novel minimizes the need for a hierarchy of status.43 As Mengyu adds more main wives, all of whom have the same title, Chen Shaohai’s use of their residence names to refer to them minimizes the reader’s confusion, just as his listing of women’s names and ages during the sworn kinship ritual did. Spatial detail produces narrative clarity. Mengyu’s wives are not the only group of women to pose a status problem for the sequel. Chen Shaohai depicts a mansion filled with large groups of women of similar status at each of several different status levels: wives, concubines, and maids. The sequel therefore faces two simultaneous and pressing problems: how to present harmony between these women (instead of power struggles), and how to create meaningful distinctions between them (instead of a homogeneous crowd). One strategy Chen uses is to divide their household duties of labor and financial management. For example, Mengyu’s father Zhu Yun has four concubines. However, unlike Baoyu’s father’s concubines Zhao and Zhou from the parent novel, who are poor and idle, both pitiable and repellent, each of Zhu Yun’s concubines has her own carefully delineated sphere of responsibility, within which her abilities are respected and valued: Aunt Tao was responsible for the accounts and expenditures of the salt boats, pawnshop, and silk shop; the birds, beasts, fish, and trees in the mansion’s inner and outer gardens; almsgiving; and the purchase of actors and salaries of teachers. Aunt Li was responsible for the accounts and expenditures of the inner and outer kitchens’ food and drink, dishes and utensils; the rents of land and buildings; paper, flowers, and plants; rice, fuel, candles, and coal. Aunt Jing was responsible for expenditures on clothing and ornaments, repairs and refurbishments; the board and salary of all the servants, both inner and outer, older and younger, male 43  In the Chinese conception of the four cardinal directions, east and west connote the host-guest relationship, while north and south symbolize the starker hierarchies of rulersubject and teacher-student.

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and female; repairs to household implements; and the salaries of senior and junior clerks in the pawnshop, salt boats, and silk shop; as well as the donations to temples and shrines of lamp oil, rice, and gilding for the Buddhas; and the acting troupes’ harness, weapons, and armor. Aunt Zhu was responsible for home décor in all four seasons—upholstery, lanterns, calligraphy, painting, and antiques; salaries and gifts to teachers and clients; ceremonial gifts, letters, tea, wine, and snacks; house repair and room construction; needlework supplies, screens and stages, arbors and fireworks; and all the fabric costumes of the acting troupe. These four ladies each fulfilled her duty to the utmost, handling each item with precision, and the household was orderly inside and out. Madam Gui [the main wife] kept track of the overall sum and reported once a quarter. Zhu Yun was overjoyed when he saw that they were all capable at managing affairs. Thus, all four of them were favored. 原來祝筠有四位姨娘，是陶姨娘、李姨娘、荊姨娘、朱姨娘。陶姨娘 是專管銀錢出入，盤查鹽船口岸、當鋪綢莊一切銷算各帳並內外花園 裡的鳥獸魚樹，施材捨藥，戲子身價，教師修金等項；李姨娘是專管 內外廚房日用飲食，什物器具，田莊地土，房產租息，紙張花草，慶 壽上墳，柴米燭炭等項；荊姨娘是專管衣穿首飾添修改造，內外大小 男女月錢工食，修添傢伙器皿，當鋪鹽船、綢莊鹽店大小伙計薪俸，    以及各寺廟燈油月米、裝金修佛，戲班的套頭、刀槍、頭盔等項；朱 姨娘專管內外四季陳設鋪墊、燈彩、字畫、古玩，各位大小師爺、相 公束脩賞封，慶弔禮文、茶酒、小菜果品，修房建屋，花粉針線，圍 屏戲台，涼棚花炮，戲班一切軟行頭等項。這四位姨娘各盡其職，條 清條款，內外肅然。桂夫人總其大略，每三個月一報銷。祝筠見他們 都能幹辦事，十分歡喜。因此四個人都得寵愛。44

Rather than invent a personality and meaningful interiority for every minor character, Chen Shaohai uses this division of responsibility to create meaningful difference without power struggles. This organized system of management for the household and its trade and farming income is in stark contrast to Dream of the Red Chamber’s Jia household economy, where income and expenditure are wildly out of balance. The Jia household’s most capable manager is unquestionably Wang Xifeng, but her very level of responsibility leads not only to abuse of power, bullying, and extortion, but also to her own death from overwork. In Dreaming Again, four concubines do Wang Xifeng’s job, with the result that everything gets done and done well with no arguments. Furthermore, 44  Chen Shaohai, Honglou fumeng, 179.

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it is precisely the equality of the concubines’ capability that brings them equal favor with their husband. Thus the sequel’s division of labor not only corrects the Jia mansion’s financial problems as shown in the parent novel, it also solves the jealousy and backbiting so rampant in the Jia household by providing for an equitable division of favor and love. The concubines’ division of labor maps back onto the sub-spaces of the household. Since each woman occupies her own room or suite of rooms, each residence becomes not only a metonymic indicator for the woman in question, but also the location of a particular set of labor activities. The maids assigned to each room are identified by that room, as we see in chapter 18, when various household women get together to plan a welcome-home party for Mengyu and write down a list of the planners organized by room, generation, name, and rank. The women include Zhu Yun’s concubines, Mengyu’s sister, Mengyu’s wives, and assorted maids: Jirui tang: Aunt Tao Fangzhi tang: Aunt Zhu Zaogui tang: Aunt Jing Ningxiu tang: Aunt Li Pinghua ge: Second Young Mistress Xiuyun [Mengyu’s sister] Haitang shuwu: Mistress Haizhu; Mistress Zhangzhu [Mengyu’s wives] Jieshou tang: Miss Jixiang; Miss Ruyi; Miss Wufu; Miss Sanduo [maids] Qia’an tang: Miss Lansheng; Miss Shaoyao; Miss Chunyan; Miss Zixiao [maids] Chengying tang: Miss Qiuyan; Miss Shudai [maids] Pinghua ge: Miss Shuangmei; Miss Wenlai [maids] Haitang yuan: Miss Cuiqiao; Miss Jinfeng; Miss Dieban; Miss Yanshu [maids] Jirui tang: Miss Wanchun; Miss Shuying [maids] Fangzhi tang: Miss Qing’er; Miss Runmei [maids] Zaogui tang: Miss Qiuyun; Miss Xianfeng [maids] Ningxiu tang: Miss Xiuchun; Miss Sulan [maids] 集瑞堂: 陶姨娘 芳芷堂: 朱姨娘 棗桂堂: 荊姨娘 凝秀堂: 李姨娘 瓶花閣: 修雲二小 海棠書屋: 海珠大奶奶、掌珠大奶奶 介壽堂: 吉祥姑娘、如意姑娘、五福姑娘、三多姑娘

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chapter 5 怡安堂: 蘭生姑娘、芍藥姑娘、春燕姑娘、紫簫姑娘 承瑛堂: 秋雁姑娘、書帶姑娘 瓶花閣: 雙梅姑娘、文來姑娘 海棠院: 翠翹姑娘、金鳳姑娘、蝶板姑娘、雁書姑娘 集瑞堂: 婉春姑娘、疏影姑娘 芳芷堂: 慶兒姑娘、閏梅姑娘 棗桂堂: 秋雲姑娘、仙鳳姑娘 凝秀堂: 秀春姑娘、素蘭姑娘45

This list exemplifies several different kinds of organizational logic. The order proceeds from senior generation to junior generation, subdivided by rank. But the overall effect of listing the women by residence is, again, to emphasize horizontal divisions of space over the vertical divisions of hierarchy. Chen Shaohai maps wives, concubines, and maidservants onto the different spaces of the household within the inner gate. These consistent spatial divisions, across which Mengyu moves freely, organize the remaining characters’ actions. They organize the reader’s experience of the novel and provide the last bastion of ritual propriety and the distinction that allows emotion to exist. 2.2 Building Plot and Agency The spatial division of women and their labor becomes central to the sequel’s plot as well as its characterization. One example occurs in chapter 20. Sulan, one of the senior maids in Aunt Li’s residence Ningxiu tang, has fallen ill. Since the work in Ningxiu tang is particularly complicated, a capable replacement must be found. Grandmother Zhu’s first choice is the maid Zixiao. Now, Zixiao and Mengyu are in love. The reader has just witnessed a tearful scene in chapter 19, in which master and maid lighted incense and vowed eternal love to each other, but Mengyu declared that he had no say in who would become his concubine. Mengyu also offered that night to suggest Zixiao as Sulan’s replacement in Ningxiu tang, which would give her an opportunity to impress his mother and be selected as his concubine. Zixiao refused in no uncertain terms, but without explaining why. So when Mengyu’s grandmother spontaneously chooses Zixiao as Sulan’s replacement in chapter 20, Mengyu is pleased and excited. Zixiao, however, kneels before Grandmother Zhu and pleads that Ningxiu tang’s work is too complicated for her. She begs to be sent instead to Chengying tang—the residence of Mengyu’s uncle Zhu Lu. Uncle Zhu Lu is ill and testy, and none of the maids want to work there. Grandmother Zhu and Zhu Lu’s 45  Chen Shaohai, Honglou fumeng, 203–204.

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wife Madam Gui are deeply touched. Mengyu himself is upset with Zixiao for rejecting what he sees as a golden opportunity to worm her way into chamberwife status. But Zixiao tells him not to be stupid—that working for his uncle is the best way for her to become his concubine, and she intends to fulfill her duties to the utmost as the only way to fulfill their oath of love. As with Mengyu’s father’s four concubines, whose capability gained them favor, Zixiao’s fulfillment of particular household duties leads to emotional closeness—touching the hearts of Grandmother Zhu and Madam Gui in order to fulfill the romantic attachment between herself and Mengyu. Zixiao’s ultimate emotional conquest is the ill Zhu Lu himself, whom she captivates when she slices her own arm to provide blood for his medicine. Zhu Lu and his wife decide on the spot to make her Mengyu’s concubine—making Zixiao the only female character in either Dream of the Red Chamber or Dreaming Again of the Red Chamber who successfully engineers her own happy marriage. Chen Shaohai frames both competing strategies available to Zixiao in spatial terms. Mengyu focuses on the division of labor between the residences and wants her to go where she can best display her abilities. Therefore, he pushes Zixiao toward the job in Ningxiu tang, a place for which the other maids are competing. He thinks of the invalid’s residence Chengying tang as a dull backwater. But Mengyu has overlooked the emotional aspects of spatial division. By asking for reassignment to Chengying tang, Zixiao puts herself in a position to make a dramatic and emotionally touching gesture of filial piety. Since Zhu Lu himself is childless, Mengyu stands in for his son throughout the novel.46 When Zixiao cuts her flesh to give blood for his medicine, she acts as his filial daughter-in-law, a masterful role-play that Zhu Lu and Madam Gui are practically forced to ratify by arranging her real-life marriage to Mengyu. Furthermore, by telling Mengyu that he needs to keep his distance from her while she works, Zixiao makes it clear which dimensions of spatial closeness need to take priority in order for the strategy as a whole to work. By distancing herself from her lover and entering Zhu Lu’s space, she prioritizes the demonstration of filial affection over that of romantic passion. Thus, she achieves her own goals for both an affectionate marriage relationship and a secure social and ritual status as Mengyu’s official concubine. Spatial boundaries operate in several ways in this sequel. As a literary technique, Chen Shaohai’s clear spatial descriptions do make the sequel easier to 46  The fact that Mengyu’s uncles are childless is one of the novel’s justification for his multiple main wives—each of the three brothers in Mengyu’s father’s generation needs a ritual heir of his own, so the characters agree that each needs a daughter-in-law to provide that heir (as opposed to having each simply adopt an heir, the traditional real-life solution).

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follow and more approachable than the parent novel; it is the scene-setting analogue of the way the plot and its various subplots all work out neatly. Thus the sequel as literary critique emphasizes clarity, tidiness, and closure in both walls and stories; whether one finds this approach artistically satisfactory or not, it is certainly deliberately and effectively carried through. But the relationship between plot closure and spatial clarity is no mere analogy. Spatial divisions actually drive the plot towards closure. The spatial organization of both household labor and emotional relationships, and the linkage that the novel sets up between performance of duty and satisfaction of emotion, provide the clever maid Zixiao with a set of strategic options for fulfilling her individual marriage goals, which encompass emotional fulfillment, ritual status, and financial security. Finally, as a strategy for depicting the large-scale family and household dynamics, spatial logic creates a clear division of labor among concubines and a spatial rather than hierarchical distinction between Mengyu’s wives. It allows whole groups of characters to enjoy equal affection and status. Spatial dynamics thus provide both the characters and their author with strategies to maximize emotional fulfillment while minimizing humiliation or power struggles. The sustained use of spatial description to manage a wide variety of ideological and plot tensions is one example of the range of possible literary experiments with the novel form. The less-successful corollary of this particular experiment, from the reader’s point of view, is that space takes on much of the burden of creating meaningful distinctions between people. The parent novel depicted characters with distinct personalities sharing unique emotional and metaphysical bonds, but Mengyu’s qing in the sequel is so indiscriminate and diffuse that it loses much of its force and potency. The only sense of uniqueness is provided by reincarnation on the one hand (Mengyu enjoys a unique bond with women he knew in a previous life), and spatial divisions on the other. Women of equivalent status or within the same residence tend to blur together in the sequel’s weaker characterization. Thus, the sequel’s deeper critical work as a serious revaluation of qing passion is, with one notable exception, unconvincing. 3

Tragedy and the Caizi Jiaren Genre

That exception is Mengyu’s relationship with Xue Baochai, the widow of his previous incarnation. Xue Baochai is the sequel’s main female protagonist.47 47  One scholar identifies her as the single main protagonist of the novel, above Mengyu. Lin Yixuan, Wucai ke bu tian, 54–58.

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She is the recognized leader of the younger generation of sworn sisters, and she appears more frequently in the book than any other single female character (far more frequently than Daiyu’s reincarnation, Song Caizhi). She is depicted as the pre-eminent capable household manager, and when the novel switches gears to depict the martial achievements of various Jia and Zhu family members, Baochai’s victories as a female general take central stage.48 She vacillates throughout the novel between sorrow and laughter, between lamenting the bitterness of her widowhood and lecturing with ironic philosophical detachment. The complexity of Baochai’s characterization allows Chen Shaohai to respond simultaneously to the deep sorrow of the parent novel, Dream of the Red Chamber, and to the frivolity of the scholar-beauty genre as a whole. 3.1 Baochai as a Tragic Figure Baochai’s friendship with Mengyu, which takes the form of a sworn sibling relationship, is the sequel’s only approach to the sublime passion that Keith McMahon locates in the missed or unfulfilled moment, exemplified by Baoyu’s and Daiyu’s tragic passion in the parent novel. Baochai is a widow; by the ethical code of Qing gentlewomen, she is off-limits for marriage. In chapter 55, Mengyu proposes that they swear brother- and sisterhood, and she is overwhelmed by emotion: Baochai heard that Mengyu wanted to swear sisterhood with her, and unwittingly her heart ached and two lines of teardrops rolled down without restraint. Everyone saw and didn’t understand, and Mengyu couldn’t understand why Baochai was crying. He just stared and didn’t dare say anything else. Baochai came over and took hold of him and sobbed for ages. With a face covered in tears, she nodded and agreed: “All right.” 寶釵聽見夢玉要同他拜姐妹，不覺一陣心酸，兩行淚珠忍不住直掉下 來。眾人看見不解其意，夢玉摸不著寶釵為什麼哭的緣故，睜著兩 眼不敢再說。寶釵過來拉著夢玉嗚咽了半日，淚流滿面，點頭應道 : “使得。”49

There are numerous sworn sisters and a sprinkling of sworn brothers in Dreaming Again, and Mengyu acknowledges several adoptive mothers, but this is the only instance of a fictive kin relationship between a man and a 48  Ellen Widmer discusses Baochai’s transformation into a military general as an instance of increased personal agency, comparing it to Daiyu’s transformation into a capable household manager in Later Dream, in “Extreme Makeover,” 291–92, 311–15. 49  Chen Shaohai, Honglou fumeng, 596.

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woman of the same generation. Their relationship sidesteps ritual boundaries by allowing an unrelated man and woman to spend time in each other’s company, potentially threatening the gender separation that the novel generally upholds. Thus, even though Baochai never compromises her chastity, her sworn siblinghood with Zhu Mengyu provides a rare hint of ritual tension and emotional depth. She is the only woman who is simultaneously within reach of Mengyu’s qing, unrelated by blood, and off-limits for marriage. The sequel presents both Baochai’s fate as a young widow and the impossibility of marriage between Baochai and Mengyu as sorrowful. Baochai appears cheerful and capable throughout the novel; indeed, she often laughs at other characters when they let the vicissitudes of life upset them. Even so, she periodically bemoans her lot. When some tears escape her upon parting from friends, she explains that the parting itself was not the source of her grief: I was crying over this: such a person as me, why didn’t I get to die young? And if I couldn’t die young, I shouldn’t have had to meet Baoyu. And if I had to meet Baoyu, there shouldn’t have been Lin Daiyu, Shi Xiangyun, Xiangling (Caltrop), Miaoyu (Adamantina), and Yingchun and her sisters. But now, in the blink of an eye, all is emptiness; all that is left are just myself and my son. For years now, my heart has been like a withered tree. 我哭的是我這樣一個人，為什麼不叫我早死？既不早死，就不該叫我 認得寶玉。既叫我認得寶玉，就不該有林黛玉、史湘雲、香菱、妙 玉、迎春姐妹這一班人。而今轉眼皆空，所有者，惟我二人而已。數 載以來，心如槁木。50

In this passage, Baochai’s comprehensive bitterness stems from more than just her abandonment by Baoyu; it includes the loss of all her girlhood friends. It taints her entire life, so that she regrets not having died young. When Baochai later witnesses Mengyu’s marriage to Song Caizhi, the reincarnation of Lin Daiyu, she is overcome with even sharper grief: When she saw the two of them kneel and bow, she felt her whole body tremble with cold, and her hands were cold as ice, and her heart felt as though pierced with a knife: she was miserable with sorrow…. When they got to the door of the honeymoon suite, she saw that this was a bamboo pavilion, elegant and uncommon. Baochai felt even sadder. Going into the pavilion, the other women gave her a celebratory cup of tea. 50  Chapter 36. Chen Shaohai, Honglou fumeng, 386.

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Baochai had just taken it into her hand, when she lifted her head and saw a bamboo board on which was written Xiaoxiang guan (The Naiad’s House). Baochai’s heart went numb, the silver vessel in her hand fell to the ground, and she could no longer support her body. She rushed out of the pavilion and into another little pavilion and fainted. 這會瞅著他們兩個拜堂，只覺身上發起寒顫，手冷如冰，心口裡就 如刀紮，正是十分難過。…… 來到洞房門口，見是幾間竹閣，精雅非 凡。寶釵越覺心中難過，進到閣中，有姑娘、媳婦們遞上洞房喜茶。    寶釵剛接在手中，抬頭見上面一塊竹匾，寫著 “瀟湘館” 三字。寶釵心 上一麻，手中銀鑲果茶杯掉了下地，身子有些支持不住，急忙走出閣 來，趕到一座上亭上，不覺昏昏暈了過去。51

Mengyu’s wedding to Caizhi resolves the tragedy of Baoyu and Daiyu’s love affair from the parent novel. But by narrating the scene from Baochai’s point of view, Chen Shaohai creates a new tragedy from the resolution of the old. The echoes of Daiyu’s identity, the bamboo pavilion, and the name Xiaoxiang guan or “Naiad’s House,” bring the tragedy of the parent novel back to Baochai— and to the sensitive reader, who sees them only through Xue Baochai’s eyes. It seems that Mengyu’s marriage to Daiyu’s incarnation, while not uniquely romantic in itself, has a unique power to wound Baochai. With all other distinctions undermined or sublimated, the fictive kin relationship between Baochai and Mengyu provides the sequel with a final foothold for tragic passion. It allows the two characters to be spatially proximate and emotionally close, yet eternally unable to marry. In a sense, this artistic success relies on the failure of Chen Shaohai’s attempted redefinition of qing. If distinctions of identity and sexual desire are both meaningless, it is hard to see why marriage should be so important that Baochai’s permanent separation from Mengyu can affect either her, or us as readers, so powerfully. There is a kernel of passion at the core of this diffuse version of qing, one that relies on separation even as it attempts to deny it. But when Baochai revives from her faint, she offers a different explanation of her grief. She declares that her greatest bitterness is not her separation from Baoyu, but the fatally flawed origins of their marriage: Zhangzhu (Mengyu’s wife) said to her, “Sister, why did you get so sad today?” Zhenzhu (Aroma) said, “I know why Sister Bao is sad. Other things can be understood, but the saddest thing was the three characters 51  Chapter 91. Chen Shaohai, Honglou fumeng, 996.

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‘Xiaoxiang guan.’” Baochai put her hand on Zhenzhu’s shoulder and said: “You really are a kindred spirit! I don’t blame anyone else—I just blame the Old Mistress, sending me into a deadly situation with her eyes wide open. Whoever heard of duping someone about marriage? Duping Miss Lin was already foolish, but why did they think even Baoyu could be duped? Making me pretend to be Miss Lin, making a maid from Miss Lin’s residence support me during the ceremony—what kind of plan was that? As for Huige, my son with Baoyu—I just bore a child in Miss Lin’s stead. Baoyu never had an atom of romantic destiny with me. Why would the Old Mistress harm me so bitterly?” 珍珠道: “我知寶姐姐傷心的緣故，別的還可分解，最令人難過的是 ‘瀟 湘館’ 三字。 ” 寶釵將手撫著珍珠肩上道: “真是知己！我不怨別人，只  怨我家老太太，眼睜睜將我推入死地。豈有做親瞞人之計，瞞林姑娘 已經可笑，仔嗎連寶玉都要瞞他？將我充做林姑娘，叫林姑娘院裡的 人過來扶我拜堂，這是什麼話呢？我同寶玉養這慧哥兒，我是替林姑 娘養的孩子，寶玉同我竟無一點情分。你想老太太為什麼害的我這  樣苦？”52

Neither loss of her girlhood friends nor widowhood, then, but the impossible situation into which the teenage Baochai was placed by the matriarch who arranged her marriage, is the ultimate tragic rupture in Baochai’s story. The sequel’s frequent references to Baochai’s blighted life suggests another rationale for Chen’s consistent attention to older women and their matchmaking endeavors: they are his critique of the mismade and unhappy marriages with which the parent novel is rife. The parent novel shows that Daiyu’s death can be laid at the feet of the older relatives who deceived her and, more broadly, to the overwhelming social imperative to subordinate the desires of the individual to the needs of the patriline.53 Chen Shaohai resolves Daiyu’s tragedy by marrying her reincarnation to Mengyu, but he uses that very wedding to highlight Baochai’s personal tragedy. Baochai’s bitter life, like Daiyu’s death in the parent novel, is attributed to the dysfunctions of the Jia family’s older generation. Chen’s attention to the senior women’s marriage negotiations throughout the novel can be seen as a way to resolve both tragedies: the untimely death of Daiyu and the blighted life of Baochai. Baochai is the 52  Chapter 92. Chen Shaohai, Honglou fumeng, 997. 53  For an analysis of Daiyu as a tragic heroine that contrasts her passion for Baoyu as an individual with Baochai’s willingness to subordinate both her own desires and Baoyu’s to the family’s needs, see Yu, Rereading the Stone, 219–255.

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sequel’s site of greatest emotional depth, Chen’s answer to the tragic passions of Dream of the Red Chamber. Her melancholy sisterhood with Mengyu shows that Dreaming Again does have a tragic vision that encompasses both reunion and eternal separation. 3.2 Baochai’s Laughter The figure of Baochai has, however, another and entirely different significance in the context of Dreaming Again’s critical response to the entire caizi jiaren genre. Together with the massive scale of the sequel, her presence on the page distinguishes the book from a scholar-beauty romance. Like Later Dream, Dreaming Again intervenes self-consciously in the existing book market of the high Qing. Like the story collections of chapters 2 and 3, it does so by situating itself in critical relation to recognized book genres. Chen Shaohai’s “Reading Principles” state, In every novel (xiaoshuo), the “scholar” (caizi) always meets a reversal of fortune, the “beauty” ( jiaren) always encounters an evil ghost. Moonlit nights and flower gardens, fragrant boudoirs and red chambers, these become the sites of seduction and hidden immorality. Or if not, the youth inevitably flees upheaval, the maiden disguises herself, and perhaps they meet with official punishment or abductions, or take refuge in a nunnery, or ascend to another realm. But these scholars fleeing difficulties, whatever they encounter inevitably ties in with beauties and talented maidens. No matter how extreme the worldly problems and difficulties they face or how desperate their partings, in the end the scholar always passes the examinations in first place and gains the post of censor. He gets his revenge and wipes out his humiliations, marries the beauty, and is reunited with his family. Every novel has these basic plot points; not one follows the principle of imagination. This book has one hundred chapters and has a different layout. 凡小說內才子必遭顛沛，佳人定遇惡魔，花園月夜，香閣紅樓，為勾 引藏奸之所；再不然公子逃難，小姐改妝，或遭官刑，或遇強盜，或 寄跡尼庵，或羈樓異域，而逃難之才子，有逃必有遇合，所遇者定係 佳人才女，極人世艱難困苦，淋漓盡致，夫然後才子必中狀元、作巡 按，報仇雪恨，聚佳人而團圓。凡小說中，捨此數項，無從設想。此 書百回，另成格局。

As this book ends, it concludes yet does not conclude. Its charm is carefree and profound; I bequeath it to the talented scholars within the

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seas to sketch other portraits of famed beauties. Jade flowers and jasper grass—their fragrance and color last forever. 此書收筆，結而不結，餘韻悠然，留為海內才人再為名花寫照，琪花 瑤草，香色常存也。54

For Chen Shaohai, one critical function of his book’s scale is to separate his book structurally from the popular scholar-beauty romance. His sarcastic description of the canned plot of the typical romance novel has a modern ring to it; surely, for Chen, the caizi jiaren xiaoshuo was “genre fiction” in the pejorative sense. The breadth of his hundred chapters allows him not only to revise the meaning of qing passion but also to change what it means to be a book about qing. The scale of Dreaming Again’s noble mansions, its cast of characters, and the book as a whole should be understood not just as imitation of the singular novel Dream of the Red Chamber, but as Chen’s critical response to an entire family of literature. His combination of clarity and expansiveness represents his attempt to distinguish himself simultaneously from the parent novel and from the caizi jiaren genre. Reading Dreaming Again’s critique of the scholar-beauty novel in the twentyfirst century is ironic, because modern scholarship tends to critique Dream of the Red Chamber sequels, including Dreaming Again, in similar terms. Scholars from Lu Xun onward have criticized the sequels for their lack of a tragic vision, their predictable plots, and their insistence on providing a happy ending. To such critiques, several responses are possible. In making a case for the literary importance of the sequels, Zhao Jianzhong presents a lengthy defense of the “happy reunion” (da tuanyuan 大團圓) theme in Chinese literature, connecting it to historical, religious, and philosophical traditions.55 He argues that traditional Chinese literature’s penchant for comic endings should not be dismissed automatically as inferior, but analyzed and historicized. Several pages later, he points out that Dream of the Red Chamber sequels may be inferior to the parent novel in originality, power, and language; however, he argues, they are as far above the scholar-beauty novels of the early to mid-Qing as they are below Dream of the Red Chamber itself.56 And of course, “literary value” is both a problematic concept and a dubious criterion for scholarly attention.

54  Chen Shaohai, Honglou fumeng, 4. 55  Zhao Jianzhong 趙建忠, “Honglou meng xushu de yuanliu shanbian jiqi yanjiu 紅樓夢續 書的源流嬗變及其研究,” Honglou meng xuekan, no. 4 (1992): 323–326. 56  Zhao Jianzhong, “Honglou meng xushu,” 331.

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But more intriguing than any of these arguments is the simple fact that Dreaming Again anticipates them. It defines itself consciously against the scholar-beauty novel genre with its impoverished literary imagination. It specifically criticizes the cardboard cut-out characterization and the automatic happy ending of so many other novels and presents itself as a refreshing and open-ended alternative. Whether Dreaming Again’s attempt to escape the shallow predictability it despises is successful or not, it does present itself, not only as a sequel, but as a corrective to the scholar-beauty generic tradition and a new way of being a novel. The narrative mode of obsessive tidiness that characterizes most of the novel sorts a broad cast of characters neatly into suitable residences and suitable marriages. But Chen Shaohai seems to be aware of the artistic danger of too much tidiness as well, and he uses the singular figure of Baochai—one of the only truly complex personalities in the novel, and one of the few to remain unmarried at the end—to avoid it. If we consider the entire genre to which Dreaming Again self-consciously responds, tragedy is not the only framework for understanding Chen’s portrayal of Baochai. Despite occasional scenes of “hot and bitter tears,” Baochai’s most characteristic affect throughout the sequel is laughter. Her frequent gentle mockery of the other characters’ sorrows leavens the novel. In one scene in chapter 40, the young sworn sisters are bidding tearful goodbyes to one another over a farewell banquet when Baochai enters and jokingly scolds them: “I was standing outside the window listening to you three talking stupidly and couldn’t help laughing. My mother spent money to buy wine and food today—was it so you could look at it and cry?” (站在窗外聽你們三個人說傻話，我實在好 笑。今兒媽媽花了錢弄的酒兒菜兒，叫你們瞅著哭的嗎？)57 The other three burst out laughing in response. Interrupting another tearful farewell scene against the backdrop of a thunderstorm, Baochai jokes, “This rain, thunder, and lightning is all a result of your crying! Hurry up and drink wine and enjoy yourselves so the heavens can be at peace!” (這風雨雷電，都是你們四個人哭 出來的，還不快些飲酒歡笑，以感天和！)58 She follows up her joking reprimand with a long philosophical lecture on the inevitability of parting and reunion, sorrow and joy, telling her sworn sisters that no human being can avoid the vicissitudes of human life. Since they are unavoidable, the only thing to do is to control one’s emotional responses to events, not allow one’s emotions to be controlled by events.59 This quasi-Buddhist philosophy of detachment finds its ultimate fulfillment in the book’s final chapter when Baochai, after raising 57  Chen Shaohai, Honglou fumeng, 429. 58  Chapter 36. Chen Shaohai, Honglou fumeng, 385. 59  Chen Shaohai, Honglou fumeng, 385.

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her son to attain official success, devotes herself to meditation, “sees through the illusion of red dust” (看破紅塵), and becomes a Daoist immortal.60 Her main responsibility is to her son; once he is an established adult, she is free to leave the world altogether. In Chen Shaohai’s portrayal, Baochai’s abortive marriage and long widowhood have a double function: they not only make Baochai the sequel’s emotional counterpart to the parent novel’s Daiyu, but also enable Baochai to be more loosely integrated into the kinship networks of the book than the other characters. Baochai is the only female character in the novel to escape the prevailing narrative mode of spatial and familial organization. She is never assigned to a particular residence, never married. Her broad emotional and intellectual range—from tragic widow to laughing philosopher, from capable household manager to brilliant military general—resists categorization. Her attainment of immortality at the end of the story mirrors Baoyu’s leaving the family at the end of Dream of the Red Chamber. Her contradictory speeches about the bitterness of her own life and the importance of handling life’s inevitable bitterness philosophically recall the paradoxes of Cao Xueqin’s novel, which have led generations of readers to disagree on whether Baoyu’s romantic vicissitudes are tragedies in the fullest sense, or merely steps on the path to the hero’s final enlightenment. Baochai thus represents Chen Shaohai’s nearest approach (admittedly, still not very near) to both the emotional and philosophical depths of the parent novel. But she responds to more than a single novel. Her characterization also allows Chen to set his work apart from the popular caizi jiaren genre that he clearly despised. To the extent that Dreaming Again fulfills its promise “to conclude yet not conclude,” it does so primarily through the figure of Baochai. The scale of the vernacular novel is a textual and material embodiment of the genre’s open-endedness and the spatial enormity of the world it depicts, whether a massive geographical and temporal span as in Journey to the West (Xiyou ji 西遊記) and Three Kingdoms, or a luxurious mansion, as in Plum in the Golden Vase and Dream of the Red Chamber. Dreaming Again responds to the novel as a genre of size. Its choice to emulate the scale of a masterwork rather than the more restricted thirty to forty chapter range of a scholar-beauty romance reflects its self-conscious separation from genre fiction and its ideology of expansion. Like Later Dream, this sequel attempts to unravel the tangled knot of affection and passion that characterizes Jia Baoyu’s inchoate “lust of the mind” (yiyin 意淫) in the parent novel and imagine a family and marriage in which an adult Baoyu could conceivably live happily ever after. It draws not 60  Chen Shaohai, Honglou fumeng, 1100.

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only on discourses of love, unjealousy, and polygyny, but also on alternative affective relationships, especially natal family and fictive kin networks. The sequels to Honglou meng have many commonalities and many common failings, but their unique strategies showcase a range of individual possibilities for literary experimentation in the nineteenth century. They creatively extend, not only the parent novel, but the domestic fictional tradition as a whole.

Conclusion The texts and genres studied here provide a framework for thinking about literary representations of women and the household in late imperial China. Compared to classical texts, vernacular texts offer particularly dense renderings of domestic life through their abundant dialogue, detailed architectural settings, and complex portrayals of the social networks within which characters act. But the term “vernacular” brings up several questions: To what extent was this a recognizable category of language in the Qing? Did vernacular texts target particular audiences? And if the answers to those questions are complicated, as they are, then what broader conclusions can we draw about the connection between vernacular language and domestic space? As discussed in the introduction, written vernacular Chinese was both inherently hybrid (one might strive to write in pure classical wenyan, but there was no such thing as pure vernacular that borrowed no phrasing or grammar from wenyan), and inherently heteroglossic, made up of as many registers and vocabularies as there were contexts for the spoken word. Colloquial and classical texts both appealed to readers across social classes, and both could be either accessible or difficult. The cultural status of vernacular texts was also in flux during the period of time covered by this study, roughly the late sixteenth through the early nineteenth centuries. There was certainly an upward trend in the cultural importance of colloquial literature, evidenced by the prevalence of luxury illustrated and/or commentary editions of novels and story collections as well as by the increasing involvement of sociocultural elites with the writing and criticism of fiction.1 But vernacular fiction continued to be considered vulgar or common (su 俗), and authors almost always published their works under pseudonyms. We may start to untangle the complexities of vernacularity by thinking about how these texts describe their own language. Authorial and editorial prefaces to vernacular works are fond of assuring the reader that the pages ahead will be easy to read, suitable for children or for the less-educated reader. But these descriptions should be taken with a grain of salt. Even the preface to the cihua edition of Plum in the Golden Vase claims, “Though this narrative is all common speech of the well and marketplace, scattered language of the 1  The number of luxury editions peaked in the seventeenth century, while critical commentary continued to flourish through the nineteenth century. Robert Hegel, Reading Illustrated Fiction in Late Imperial China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 152–63; Rolston, Traditional Chinese Fiction, 91–92.

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women’s quarters, if you read it to a three-foot-high child, he would feel as though he were sated with heavenly nectar, able to pluck out a whale’s teeth— he would see right through it and understand it perfectly.” (此一傳者，雖市井 之常談，閨房之碎語，使三尺童子聞之如飲天漿而拔鯨牙，洞洞如易曉。)2 The reference to drinking heavenly nectar and plucking whale’s teeth alludes to a famous Tang poem by Han Yu praising the poetic talent of Li Bai and Du Fu. The juxtaposition of the child auditor and the renowned poets promises a combination of artistry and simplicity. But the pledge of simplicity is mainly honored in the breach. Plum in the Golden Vase is a densely figured textual tapestry, weaving the language of the ancient classics together with the argot of the floating world, which no child could have appreciated. Claims for the easy readability of works in the vernacular must be seen in this preface and others as the rhetorical tactics that they are. The real importance of statements about the ease of vernacular texts lies not in which written idiom would have been more accessible to a semiliterate audience, but in the difference between how readers interacted with colloquial and formal writing. Ease has as much to do with comfort as with possibility. The single most common description of the colloquial language in the prefaces to these works is qianjin 淺近, often glossed as “easy,” but literally meaning “shallow and close at hand.” It is opposed to the “deep” (shen 深) and “mysterious” (ao 奧) classical language. The terms suggest that classical writing demands hard interpretive work even for an elite and highly-educated reader, while the colloquial is approachable and transparent in a way that enables that same elite reader to relax and enjoy the text. In the preface to the eighteenth-century huaben collection Parallel Words to Awaken Dreamers, for example, the editor assures the reader that the book can be appreciated on either a deep or shallow level: I often think it strange that when people speak to guests about dreams, they go on and on unceasingly. Yet how could it be that one must dream in order to speak of dreaming? … The Master of the Chrysanthemum Plot eagerly desires to drive away the sleep devil. Therefore he has gathered a certain number of anecdotes and entitled [the collection] “Parallel Words to Awaken Dreamers” [meaning] thus to save them. This is the meaning of this book’s title. Ah, this book! On a deep level, it shall be interpreted thus; on a shallow level, it also hopes to lead those desiring sleep to become engrossed in reading it and forget to go to bed.3 2  Jin Ping Mei cihua, 2. 3  Xingmeng pianyan, preface. The preface is translated in full in chapter 2.

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The preface’s opening reference to people discussing dreams with their visitors evokes the figures of cultured literati. So the written vernacular is not an advertisement to the uneducated. Rather, the ease and charm of the book’s everyday content and colloquial language promises to beguile even the welleducated reader who could be meditating on the Classics if he bestirred himself to do so. The vernacular becomes the idiom of the page-turner, and the promise of transparency creates an appealing picture of relaxed amusement in the bedchamber. Prefaces also emphasize the greater lifelikeness of the vernacular language. In the preface to the seventeenth-century popularized history Expanded Collected Biographies of Women, Ancient and Modern, for example, the author sees his vernacular translation of the Collected Biographies of Women as more vivid than the original. He describes this new immediacy as an effect of the vernacular’s simplicity and clarity: [I] took that which was deep in meaning and extended and simplified it; where the language was concise, drew it out and added detail to it; where it was limited to one character, broadened and explained its roots and branches; where it was one phrase, analyzed it to make clear that which was dim and difficult and make familiar and well-known that which was not understood. Rereading the book, I suddenly realized: the ancient women’s faces and eyes, sobbing and smiling as though alive, spirit and soul of past beauties, whether hidden or flaunted, were all there.4 The greater clarity of the vernacular language is presented as easier. But here, it is not simply more accessible or more entertaining. Rather, the vernacular of the Expanded Biographies is supposed to more effectively stir the reader to emulation of these newly vivid role models: “perhaps being moved because it is easy to understand, perhaps attempting it because it is near to their thoughts.”5 The colloquial medium shrinks the distance between the reader and the text so that the text can act on the reader more powerfully. Parallel Words and Expanded Biographies translate classical sources into the vernacular language, which makes their prefaces especially rich sources for understanding how authors saw their own use of the vernacular in contrast to the classical language. For these two authors, colloquial language is simple, but simplicity is neither an end itself nor a means of appealing to a greater number of readers by lowering the educational bar needed to read the 4  Gujin lienü zhuan yanyi, preface. This preface is translated at greater length in chapter 1. 5  Gujin lienü zhuan yanyi, preface.

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text. Rather, these prefaces describe the vernacular as an avenue to a particular kind of reading experience marked by immediacy, intimacy, informality, and impact. It is not a new observation that the vernacular served as an informal language relative to the classical with its state functions.6 But the realm of the informal and unofficial can and should be framed in ways that acknowledge its complexity and prevalence in every level of society. Thinking of the vernacular as a language of unofficial life and the quotidian domestic space clarifies some of the important commonalities in the way colloquial texts manipulate the conceptual divide between inner and outer. Inner and outer function fractally in late imperial sources, as each “inner” and “outer” space can be further subdivided. They also function semiotically, in that they signify the proper kind of behavior or ideology to employ in a given space.7 These semiotic demands were as complex as the fractal subdivisions of space themselves. The complexity of the behaviors appropriate to particular spaces can be seen in the second story from Stories to Delight the Eye, in which a young widow named Changgu arranges for her father-in-law to marry her younger sister Yougu in order to carry on his lineage. During and after the wedding, Changgu solemnly treats her younger sister as her mother-in-law: Changgu carried out to the fullest the ritual of a son’s wife, taking the lower place and giving four double bows. Yougu publicly took the higher place and accepted her bows with no hint of humble avoidance. This, however, was when Yougu was in the principal rooms. When they saw each other in their own rooms, then they acted according to sisterly affection. 長姑盡子婦之禮，在下四雙八拜。幼姑公然上受，絕不遜避。此卻是 幼姑能達大體處。及房中相見，則敍姊妹之情。8

Not only does the sisters’ household have relatively inner and outer spaces, the man’s study and the women’s quarters, but even the spaces normally 6  McMahon, Causality and Containment, 12. 7  I have drawn this idea of the semiotics of “inner” and “outer” from Susan Gal’s analysis of the roughly analogous concept pair of “private” and “public.” Susan Gal, “A Semiotics of the Public/Private Distinction,” in Going Public: Feminism and the Shifting Boundaries of the Private Sphere, ed. Joan W. Scott and Debra Keates (Champaign and Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 261–67. 8  Du Gang, Yumu xingxin bian, 2:27. The story is titled “Ma Yuanmei Seeks a Lady for His Son; Tang Changgu Betroths Her Younger Sister to a Frail Old Man” (Ma Yuanmei wei er qiu shunü, Tang Changgu pin mei pei shuaiweng 馬元美為兒求淑女唐長姑聘妹配衰翁).

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frequented by the sisters can be further subdivided into the interiority of their own rooms and the exteriority of everywhere else. Furthermore, the interiority or exteriority of a space governs the behavior appropriate to that space at every level, even the smallest subdivisions. The spatial segregation of men and women is only one aspect of the semiotic function of the inner–outer divide. It is the division between the bedrooms and the central household spaces, a smaller-scale manifestation of “inner” and “outer,” that determines whether the sisters should act as affection urges or as ritual enjoins. Vernacular renderings of household space foreground this kind of intimate, particular negotiation between affection and ritual, and the semiotic claims that they make about spaces are doubled in the intimate, detailed language of the text itself. Vernacular texts do not always privilege affection over ritual, or vice versa. They do not always justify women’s expedient sacrifices of chastity and decorum, nor do they always criticize them. But they do consistently privilege the working-out of competing ideals at the smallest and most particular scale in their characters’ lives, and they use an expansive, detailed, and intimate colloquial style as a means to negotiate those competing ideals in text. The vernacular mode allows authors simultaneously to flesh out and to challenge the norms codified in other texts. Thus, the vernacular mode is central to the critical dialogue with other texts in which many of the narratives studied here are engaged. But even in works that explicitly transform the language of their source texts, such as Parallel Words and Expanded Biographies, the critique is never merely linguistic. In Expanded Biographies, the vernacularized biographies are ethically transformed, the protagonists more loyal to their husbands and their motivations more congenial to a late imperial audience than in Liu Xiang’s original Biographies. In Parallel Words, the huaben transformations of classical tales represent the heroines’ negotiation of ritual norms and the household space in expanded detail, downplaying both the extreme qing and the extraordinary events of their Liaozhai sources. In other sources, the vernacular mode is a potent vehicle for a more indirect thematic criticism. In Stories to Delight the Eye, Du Gang pairs a story originating from a classical account of the marvelous with a story of his own composition featuring more common circumstances, and he assures readers that the latter is the true marvel. Here, it is not the linguistic transformation of the story itself that effects his critique, but its new context, defined by the quotidian domestic focus of its paired story and the collection as a whole. Finally, in Later Dream of the Red Chamber and Dreaming Again of the Red Chamber, the vernacular mode’s penchant for thick renderings of domestic space makes it an ideal vehicle for the sequels’ ideological criticisms of the parent novel. But

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their explicit stylistic critiques focus on length and scale rather than details of language. All these sources use colloquial language to further their critical dialogue with other texts, but that language always operates within a matrix of other formal, thematic, and situational elements. It is the patterns within this matrix that I have attempted to illuminate by writing about genre. These patterns shape and reflect readers’ horizons of expectations for particular genres, and authors use those patterns of expectations to further their critical projects. Genres are not just groups of texts, but sets of ideas about how texts relate to each other, and authors use these ideas to define and present their own books in relation to other texts. This kind of criticism is especially obvious when authors and editors compare their own texts favorably to other kinds of books that they describe in pejorative generic terms. In Stories to Delight the Eye, for example, the editor’s preface lures readers by assuring them that this book is truer and more elegant than “trivial histories,” but more interesting than “books of karmic retribution.”9 In Dreaming Again of the Red Chamber, the fanli or reading guidelines promise that this book has a broader vision and a more imaginative plot than hackneyed scholar-beauty romances.10 These dismissive references to other genres use a combination of formal and thematic elements both to designate the genres they dismiss and to describe how their own works are different from those genres. Trivial histories are untrue and their language is vulgar; scholar-beauty romances are short and rehash predictable plot elements. In this kind of marketing tactic, authors and editors do not talk about the genre of their own works; instead, they disparage popular, low-status genres in order to present their own books as unique. When a text responds critically to a higher-status text or genre, genre consciousness operates in a subtler but equally important way. In Parallel Words, for example, the preface does not refer directly to either Liaozhai’s Records of the Strange or the chuanqi genre. But the author does criticize the themes of dream and the marvelous that characterize the chuanqi genre, implicitly elevating the thematic focus on the everyday that characterizes the huaben genre to which his own stories belong. “If one manages to be at peace in the commonplace, to follow the natural order, his dreams will be plain with nothing marvelous; there is nothing to prevent him going to sleep and waking up at will…. On a shallow level, [this book] also hopes to lead those desiring sleep to become engrossed in reading it and forget to go to bed.”11 In contrast to the 9  Du Gang, Yumu xingxin bian, preface. See the fuller translation in chapter 2. 10  Chen Shaohai, Honglou fumeng, 4. See the fuller translation in chapter 5. 11  Xingmeng pianyan, preface. See the full translation and discussion in chapter 2.

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dismissal of “trivial histories” in the preface to Stories to Delight the Eye, the preface to Parallel Words praises not only the book itself but the qualities that it shares with other huaben stories. This kind of statement simultaneously elevates a book and the genre or genres in which it participates. The presence of different genres, and the framework for interpretation and critique that ideas about genre provided, enabled authors and readers to navigate the complex ritual and emotional demands governing women’s lives within the home. They also allowed these texts to follow the Qing cultural imperative to create a new accommodation between ritual propriety and qing affection. The stylistic medium of colloquial language appears particularly central to discussions of domesticity across genres that vary in size and degree of fictionality. In vernacular texts, the detailed representations of women’s lives and domestic spaces are no less crafted and no more transparent than those in classical texts. They are not necessarily closer to historical, lived, reality. But the nature of the crafting, the relationship between reality and representation, is qualitatively different in vernacular texts. Let us return to Aisin Gioro Yurui’s criticism of Later Dream of the Red Chamber, that sincere, true-to-life (kenqie bizhen) writing necessarily arises from personal experience, and no outsider can replicate the emotional immediacy of a factual personal narrative.12 The sources studied here prove Yurui wrong: they do not relate personal experiences, but find in colloquial language a different wellspring of sincerity and immediacy. Both fictional and nonfictional vernacular sources use expansive detail and thoughtful embellishment to create characters and spaces that embody the rich texture of daily life, and they imagine a correspondingly sincere and personal engagement with the text on the reader’s part. In the process, they emphasize the moral agency of the female characters who inhabit these spaces and the weightiness and complexity of ordinary, everyday actions. 12  Aisin Gioro Yurui, Zao chuang xianbi, 29–31. See the fuller translation and discussion in chapter 4.

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Index actress 138–142, 149 adoption 106–10, 163–65, 167, 171, 173–74, 189n46 See also kinship, fictive affection see qing agency 30n22, 32, 99, 134, 156, 188–90, 191n48, 206 Aisin Gioro Yurui 157–58, 206 ambiguity, literary 58, 70, 89–90, 125, 131–34, 177–78, 198 architecture see household architecture arguments by women 72, 98–99, 102, 104, 108–12, 118, 126n98 See also rhetoric; shrew and verbal harangue audience 5, 20–22, 54, 85, 159, 200–01 authority exerted by women 68, 77, 82, 98–99, 104, 107–8, 113, 126 exerted over women 113, 118 baihua see vernacular Chinese “Bandit’s Concubine, A” 116–17, 119–20 Ban Zhao 27, 102, 123 Bell, Catherine 15, 78–79 bigamy see marriage, two-wife biography 104–5 See also liezhuan biography; xianyuan biography book market 26, 85, 87–88, 154–55, 159, 195, 205 boundaries enlarging 136, 150, 158–59, 162, 167 family 115, 141–46, 150, 163, 167 gender 94–96, 108, 112, 122, 182–83 household 6–9, 12, 68, 131, 134, 136, 143–45 simultaneously crossing and reaffirming  96, 98–100, 104, 114, 122–24, 143–45 strengthening 115, 129, 131, 136, 150 textual 21, 129, 131–34, 141–45, 150–53, 156–59 See also ritual as boundary creation; seclusion, female Bray, Francesca 10

brother 8–10, 106–10 and sister 29, 31–41, 46–48, 112–14, 145–46, 175–76 caizi jiaren 104, 160–62, 191, 195–98, 205 Campbell, Karlyn Kohrs 17, 88 Cao Xueqin as character 130–32, 147, 151–56, 159 as author see Honglou meng “Capable Stepsister, The” 111–15, 120–21 Casual Reflections of Idle Feeling (Li Yu)  10–11, 56–57 characterization 89, 144, 163–66, 190–91, 197–98 of clever women 92–93, 101–6, 113–14, 122–24 and motive 43–44, 64, 85, 90, 104, 125–26 and spatial description 66–68, 75, 91, 179, 184–88 See also vernacularization and added dialogue chastity 26–27, 94, 96, 100–5, 123–24, 127 for men 65–66, 72–73 loss of 116–19 and political loyalty 101 and property 104, 115–19, 124 Chen Duansheng 122 Chen Duxiu 4 Chen Hongmou 12, 30 See also Jiaonü yigui Chen Shaohai 161 See also Honglou fumeng Chen Shiwen 161, 176 See also Honglou fumeng Chow, Kai-wing 16 Chuanjia bao (Shi Chengjin) 3, 13, 73, 79, 113 chuanqi (classical tale) see classical tale clan 7–8, 38, 73–75, 77, 106–111 property 106–8, 112–14, 116–19, 134 See also patriline; patrilineal discourse

220 clarity, literary 69–70, 85, 120–21, 170–71, 177–79, 185, 189–90, 202 See also ambiguity, literary; vernacularization and explanation classical Chinese 4–6, 20–21, 58, 61–64, 71, 84, 200–1 Classic of Rites 1, 7–8, 15, 79–80, 94 classical tale 57–59, 84–91, 104–5, 124–25, 204–5 See also zhiguai “Clever Escape of a Marvelous Woman, The” 120 Collected Biographies of Women see Lienü zhuan Collections of Refined Literature (Xiao Tong)  17–18 commentary 43–46, 116, 119, 200 as evidence of interpretive difficulty 25, 32–42 See also critique; Honglou meng; interpretation; Lienü zhuan; paratext commerce see book market commodification 155 concubine 60–61, 65, 72–75, 149, 185–90 containment 131–34, 136–38, 145–46, 150, 159–62 co-wives see marriage, two-wife critique 82–84, 157–58, 177–78, 204–6 genre-based 18–21, 87–88, 195–98, 204–6 ideological 25, 38–42, 47–49 rewriting as 84–85, 120–21 sequel writing as 128–29, 133, 163–66, 190, 194–98, 204–6 See also commentary; paratext “Danan” 70–75 daughter 49–51, 111–15, 134–36, 181–82 daughter-in-law 30–31, 65, 75–82, 114, 116–18, 135–36, 174–75, 189 see also mother-in-law Da xue 7–8 Derrida, Jacques 19 desire (yu) 101, 161, 172, 175, 183–84 dialogue see vernacularization and added dialogue didacticism 12–13, 52–54, 85–90, 105–6 See also ethical dimension of narrative; morality book Ding, Naifei 138

Index domestic space 6–13, 21 and gender 2, 6–9, 56–57 and ritual 7–9, 11–12, 78–82 subdivisions of 8–9, 66–68, 75, 80–82, 110–11, 184–90, 203–4 and vernacular language 3–6, 21, 56–57, 91, 200, 203–4, 206 See also characterization and spatial description; household; inner–outer concept pair dream 83–85, 152–53 Dreaming Again of the Red Chamber see Honglou fumeng Dream of the Red Chamber see Honglou meng Du Gang see Yumu xingxin bian emotion see jealousy; qing; tears Epstein, Maram 14 Ernü yingxiong zhuan (Wen Kang) 161, 166 ethical dimension of narrative 84–90, 123–27, 133–34, 161–62, 178–79 See also didacticism ethical judgment by reader 44–46, 89–90 everydayness 10, 146, 205–6 and ritual 15, 78–80 and vernacular Chinese 3–6, 56–58, 125–26 and vernacular story genre 69–70, 82–86, 88–91, 124–26 Exemplars for the Inner Quarters see Gui fan Expanded Collected Biographies of Women Ancient and Modern see Gujin lienü zhuan yanyi expanded history see yanyi Expanded Meaning of the “Inner Standards” (Fu Yijian) 30–31 expedient action see quan family see boundaries, family; brother; clan; daughter; daughter-in-law; father; household; kinship; marriage; mother; mother-in-law; patriline; qing as familial affection; sister; sister-in-law fanli see paratext father 49–51, 111–15, 121, 181–82 feeling see qing Feng Menglong 16, 43n46, 88–89 fenjia see household division

Index fiction see classical tale; fictionality; tanci; vernacular novel; vernacular story; yanyi; zhiguai fictionality 53–54, 104–5, 121–26, 152, 158, 206 See also illusion; metafictionality form 161–62, 176–79, 190 See also style; scale of narrative gender and family role 6–7, 9, 29–30, 76–77, 95 patrilineal and essentialist views of  95–96, 105, 114–15 performance 102, 108–11, 113, 118, 126 spatially conceived 1, 6, 9, 11–12, 92–100, 182–83 See also boundaries, gender; seclusion, female; womanly virtue “Gengniang” 59–70 passim genre 17–22, 119–27, 205–6 as fusion of substance, style, and situation 17, 20–21, 88–90, 205–6 fuzzy definitions of 19, 23, 53–54, 85–88, 104–5 horizon of expectations for 19–20, 86–87, 89, 127, 205 ideology of 11, 16, 20, 58–59, 69–70, 73, 77, 84–91, 127, 204–6 as lineage of text 18, 21–22, 102–3 mediating between society and text 21, 23–24, 126–27, 206 participation in 2, 19, 159, 206 and setting 20–21, 57–59, 87–88, 105, 124–25, 128, 198, 204–5 as strategic resource 19–22, 43–45, 54–55, 70, 84, 121, 123–26, 205–6 as system of classification 17–18, 86–88, 205 transformation 44–45, 51–59, 84–85, 88–93, 124–25, 128–29, 204 See also caizi jiaren; classical tale; liezhuan biography; morality book; poetry; tanci; vernacular novel; vernacular story; xianyuan biography gesture 11–12, 66–68, 77–82, 164–65 gift exchange 155–56 Great Learning 7–8

221 guanxi 155–56 Gui fan (Lü Kun) 7, 10, 27–28, 30, 33–34, 49–51 critique of Lienü zhuan heroines 38–41, 49–51 Gujin lienü zhuan yanyi 25–26, 43–45, 89–90, 120–21 influenced by cult of qing 44–45, 47, 51–53 interpretive strategies of 43–55, 120–21, 204 minimizing female talent 94, 96–103 response to Gui fan 49–51 and yanyi genre 53–54 Guo Yingde 19 Guwangyan (Cao Qujing) 161–62, 166 Hanan, Patrick 89 Handlin, Joanna 30n22 “Harsh Mother-in-Law, The” 75–82 hierarchy see ritual hierarchy Hinsch, Bret 95 Honglou fumeng (Chen Shaohai) 161–99 characterization in 161–66, 190 fictive kinship in 166–72, 191–92 matchmaking in 172–76, 193–94 qing in 161–67, 175–76, 179–84, 190, 193 ritual in 164–72, 174–76, 181–83, 185 spatial description in 177–83, 189–90 Honglou meng  (Cao Xueqin) 128, 137–38, 141–46 commentary on 142–43, 145–46, 151–53 Daguan yuan (Prospect Garden) 179–81 Grandmother Jia 134–35, 193–94 metafictionality of 150–53 qing in 145–46, 165–66, 175–76, 179–81 scale of 132–33 spatial description in 177–81 tragic vision of 129–30, 146 Wang Xifeng 92, 129, 134, 149n37, 186 See also Jia Baoyu; Lin Daiyu; Xue Baochai Hong Qiufan 145–46 horizon of expectations see genre, horizon of expectations for Hou honglou meng 129–60 containment in 131–38, 143–45, 159–60 marriage in 145–50

222 Hou honglou meng (cont.) metafictionality in 150–59 qing in 146, 149–50, 152, 159 ritual in 145, 147–50 household 6–13, 21, 56–57 architecture 12–13, 74–75, 136, 176–79, 181–83 division (fenjia) 8, 106–8 and lineage 6–7, 107–8 management by women 82, 108, 112–13, 134–37, 185–87 and state 7–8, 59 tensions between women in 10, 60–61, 68, 77 and text 12–13, 128, 131, 133–34 See also domestic space; mansion Hou Zhi 122 huaben see vernacular story Huang, Martin 149 Huitu lienü zhuan 28–29, 34–35, 39, 41–43 Hu Shi 4 Hu Wenkai 122 identity 77, 141–43, 163, 184–88, 193 See also subjectivity Idle Notes from the Date-Tree Window (Aisin Gioro Yurui) 157–58, 206 illusion 142–43, 152–53 Illustrated Biographies 28–29, 34–35, 39, 41–43 illustration 27–29, 32–34, 37–38, 41, 55 inheritance law see law inner–outer concept pair 1, 6–9, 92–96, 114, 143, 203–204 and gender 6–7, 78, 95–96, 104, 113–14, 126–27 and language 1, 6, 91, 204 and property 113–14 interiority 6, 47, 91, 186, 204 interpretation 28, 31, 96, 133–34, 201, 206 genre transformation as 42–46, 51, 54–56, 94 illustration as 34–35 Jameson, Fredric 20 Jamieson, Kathleen Hall 17, 88 Jauss, Hans Robert 86

Index jealousy 14, 114, 123, 146–47, 172, 187 jia see household Jia Baoyu 142–50, 171n18, 179, 184, 198 criticism of 144, 163–66 Jiaonü yigui (Chen Hongmou) 12, 30, 113 “Jing Jiang of the Ji Lineage of Lu” 98–99, 118, 123 Jin Ping Mei 137–38, 141, 163, 200–1 “Ji, Wife of Duke Mu of Qin” 31–35 Karmic Bonds of Reincarnation (Chen Duansheng) 122 kinship 7, 95, 107–8, 110–11 fictive 163, 166–72, 191–92 women and 7, 10, 30, 38–39, 76–77, 95, 149–50 See also adoption; clan; patriline Ko, Dorothy 16 Kuangyuan zazhi (Wu Chenyan) 116, 120 land 111, 114, 116–19, 156 See also clan property Lantern Festival 136–38, 150 law 30, 59, 114n61 inheritance 109–10, 112–13 marriage 69, 119 Lefebvre, Henri 77–78 legal action by women 112–14 li (ritual) see ritual  Liaozhai’s Records of the Strange see Liaozhai zhiyi Liaozhai zhiyi (Pu Songling) 57–59, 82–85, 90, 205–6 3.28, “Gengniang” 59–70 10.18 “Qiu Daniang” 111, 120–21 10.20, “Shanhu” 75–77 11.35, “Danan” 70–75 licentiousness see yin Lienü zhuan (Liu Xiang) 25–55 passim, 94, 96–97, 101–3 1.9, “Lu Ji Jing Jiang” 98–99, 118, 123 2.4, “Qin Mu Gong Ji” 31–35 3.7, “Wei Ling furen” 99–101, 107 5.6, “Lu yi guzi” 35–39, 45–46 5.14, “Heyang you zi” 39–42, 46–49 5.15, “Jingshi jie nü” 49–51 7.12, “Wei er luan nü” 100

Index as canonical text 25, 31, 42–43, 51 commentary on 25–28, 32–34, 36, 38–41, 55 difficulty of interpretation in late imperial era 29–32, 38, 41–42, 44–45 increased emphasis on chastity in late imperial editions 26–27, 96–97, 102–3, 127 liezhuan biography 102, 104–5, 127 Li ji 1, 7–8, 15, 79–80, 94 Lin Daiyu 134–37, 144, 146–50, 153–56, 179–80, 193 lineage see patriline Ling Mengchu 88–89 Literary Mind Carves Dragons, The (Liu Xie)  17–19 Liu Xiang 25, 96 See also Lienü zhuan Liu Xie 18 Li Yu 10–11, 56–57, 116 “Loving Younger Sister of Heyang, The”  39–42, 46–49 Lü Kun 10, 30 See also Gui fan lust see desire Lu, Tina 163 Lu Xun 196 maid 72–73, 149, 171, 180, 184–85, 187–90 See also actress; concubine; servant mansion 128–31, 133–36, 162–63, 177, 181–87 passim manuscript 57, 151n40, 155, 157 Mao Kun 28 marital and natal family 76–77, 112–14 conflict of loyalty between 7, 10, 28–30, 113 fantasy of combining 135–36, 146–47, 149–50 late imperial women’s increased incorporation into marital family 29–31, 38, 47 marriage arrangement of 173–76, 189, 193–94 companionate 14, 51 husband-wife relationship 46–52, 60–61, 65–68, 72–74, 183–84 polygynous 167, 172, 185–87

223 two-wife 59–70, 145–50 virilocal 29n20, 146, 176 matchmaking see marriage, arrangement of Mauss, Marcel 155 May Fourth movement 4 McMahon, Keith 72, 103–4, 133, 146, 184 metafictionality 150–58 Miscellaneous Records from a Sunlit Garden (Wu Chenyan) 116, 120 morality book 30–31, 60, 73, 79, 87–88 mother-in-law 75–82 Mou, Sherry 30n22 narrative see ethical dimension of narrative; form; scale of narrative mode of excess see yin natal family see marital and natal family Nei ze yanyi (Fu Yijian) 30–31 Parallel Words to Awaken Dreamers see Xingmeng pianyan paratext and critique 82–84, 177–78, 195–96, 205–6 and descriptions of language 87–88, 200–3 and marketing 87–88, 200–1 and statements about genre 87–88, 195–96, 205–6 See also commentary; illustration passion see qing patriline 108–110 wifely devotion to 76, 115–19, 122, 124, 134, 150 women as threat to 9–10, 32, 38, 104, 113–14 patrilineal discourse 6–7, 30, 38, 95–96, 107–8 Peng Yang 28 perspective 84, 144, 193 Plum in the Golden Vase 137–38, 141, 163, 200–1 poetry 102, 104, 122–24, 126 point of view see perspective polygamy see concubine; marriage, two-wife; marriage, polygynous popular history see yanyi preface see paratext

224 Preposterous Words (Cao Qujing) 161–62, 166 “Principled Woman of the Capital, The”  49–51 printing see book market; manuscript property see clan property; women’s property propriety see ritual Pu Songling 56–57 See also Liaozhai zhiyi qi (strangeness) see strangeness qing (passion, emotion, affection) 9–11, 13–16, 145–46 as character or essence 14, 143 between co-wives 60–61, 147–50 cult of 2, 20, 51–53, 73 as emotion 9–10, 48 excess of 47–48, 51–52 as familial affection 146–50, 161, 165–67, 169, 173–76, 189 between husband and wife 46–47, 50–52, 65–66, 68, 72–73 indeterminate 145–46, 198 indiscriminate 147, 183–84, 190 as mode of readerly engagement 44–46, 52–53, 152, 158–59, 206 redefinitions of 146, 150, 161–67, 175–76, 179–84, 190, 193 as romantic passion 146, 161, 188–90, 193 superseding ritual 60–61 See also genre, ideology of; ritual as expression of qing; ritual as obstacle to qing; vernacularization and increased emphasis on qing “Qiu Daniang” 111, 120–21 quan (expedient action) 115, 119–22, 124–26 quotidian see everydayness rape 142–44 Raphals, Lisa 30n22 reader 19–21, 85–88, 150–52, 157–59, 200–1 See also audience; ethical judgment by reader; qing as mode of readerly engagement “Reluctant Bigamist, The” 59–70 remarriage 61, 65, 73–74, 116–19 “Reputation for Greed, A” 106–11

Index rewriting 43–45, 52–58, 84–85, 88–89, 98–101, 120–21 See also genre transformation, Gujin lienü zhuan yanyi, vernacularization, Xingmeng pianyan rhetoric 102, 123, 126–27 of authors and editors 93, 201 of characters 98–99, 107–11 and genre theory 17 Ricoeur, Paul 89 “Righteous Aunt of Lu, The” 35–39, 45–46 ritual 7–9, 11–16, 78–79, 164–72 as boundary creation 9, 15, 181 as expression of qing 15–16, 61, 65–67, 91, 163–67, 172 hierarchy 60–61, 73–74, 147–49, 167–69, 171–72, 185 as obstacle to qing 15–16, 68, 148–50, 169–172 See also genre, ideology of; gesture; seclusion, female; vernacularization and increased emphasis on ritual ritualization 15, 78–79 Rocks Nod Their Heads 105, 107 Rolston, David 152 Sanguo zhi yanyi 53–54 scale of narrative 21, 128, 131–34, 160–62, 177, 195–96, 198 scholar-beauty novel see caizi jiaren seclusion, female 81–82, 92–100, 114, 117, 137–38, 141–44 sequels and sequel writing 128–29, 149, 151–52, 155 See also Hou Honglou meng; Honglou fumeng servant 149 See also maid setting see genre and setting; household architecture “Shanhu” 75–77 Shi dian tou 105, 107 shrew 79–82, 103–104, 109, 112, 114 and verbal harangue 80–81, 108–11, 112 Siku quanshu 17 Sima Guang 60 sister 76–77, 149–50, 203–4 sworn see kinship, fictive

225

Index See also brother and sister; marriage, two-wife; marriage, polygynous; qing between co-wives sister-in-law (zhouli) 10, 76–77 situation see genre as fusion of substance, style, and situation social class 21, 124, 127, 200–2 Sommer, Matthew 119n74 Song Maocheng 89 Sourcebook for the Education of Women (Chen Hongmou) 12, 30, 113 space see domestic space; strategy, spatial reasoning as; spatial description spatial description 66–68, 75, 82, 91, 177–83, 204, 206 See also characterization and spatial description; strategy, spatial reasoning as; vernacularization and added spatial description state 7–8, 31–39, 59, 98–101 status see ritual hierarchy Stories to Delight the Eye and Awaken the Heart see Yumu xingxin bian strangeness (yi, qi) 69, 90 strategy gendered 95, 98–99, 102, 104, 122, 126–27 genre as 17, 20, 205–6 interpretive 28, 44–45, 54–55, 204 rhetorical 93, 102, 104, 113, 126–27 spatial reasoning as 82, 91, 148, 181, 184–85, 188–90 style 20–21, 84–85, 88–90, 204–6 See also form; scale of narrative; vernacular mode subjectivity 9, 15, 95, 181 See also identity suicide 39–42, 46–48, 59, 117, 119 Supplemented Biographies 28, 32–33, 36–38, 42–43 swing 138–41 talented women 92–93, 101–4, 122–23, 127 Tale of Boy and Girl Heroes, A (Wen Kang)  161, 166 tanci 121–23 Tang Xianzu 16 tears 110–12, 152, 191–92, 197 thriftiness 73, 137

tragedy 129–30, 191–95 repair of 131, 146, 176, 193–94 Tuan, Yi-Fu 10 verisimilitude 125–26, 158, 202, 206 vernacular Chinese 3–6 characteristics of 62–64 ease of reading 4–5, 200–1 hybridity of 5, 200 See also vernacularization; vernacular mode vernacularization 43–44, 52–56 and added dialogue 46, 49–53, 63–64, 125 and added spatial description 66–68, 74–75, 77–82, 91, 204 and emotional impact 52–53, 202, 206 and expanded cast of characters 73–75 and explanation 54, 64, 72, 84–85, 89, 125–26 and ideological negotiation 54–55, 84–85, 88–91, 120–21, 124–26, 204–5 and increased emphasis on qing 52–53, 65, 72, 75 and increased emphasis on ritual 65– 66, 68, 73–75, 91 See also genre transformation vernacular mode 17, 20–23, 87, 90–91, 121, 124–27, 204–6 vernacular novel 128–29, 133, 145, 159–62, 195–99 vernacular story 56–59, 85–91, 104–5, 124–27, 205–6 virago see shrew virtue see womanly virtue “Virtuous Concubine, The” 70–75 voyeurism 138, 141 Wang Yangming 16 Wang Zhaoyuan 96 wealth see clan property; social class; women’s property Wen Kang 166 Wenxin diaolong (Liu Xie) 17–19 Wen xuan (Xiao Tong) 17–18 wenyan see Classical Chinese Widmer, Ellen 123

226 widow 106, 112, 114, 191–92 “Wife for a Field, A” 116–19 “Wife of Duke Ling of Wei, The” 99–101, 107 wife sale 116–19 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 18, 21 womanly virtue 25, 46, 89, 114, 150 historical changes in 26–27, 29–31, 59, 96, 101–3 performative nature of 111, 113, 118, 122 redefinitions of 93, 103–5, 121–24, 126–27 See also chastity; jealousy; patriline, wifely devotion to; thriftiness women’s property 111–15, 134–36, 153–56 women’s work 122, 124n87, 126, 137–38, 185–90 See also household management by women women writers 96, 102–3, 122–23, 126 work see women’s work Wusheng xi (Li Yu) 116 Wu, Yenna 103n32, 114 Wuzhong yigui (Chen Hongmou) 12, 30, 113 Xianqing ouji (Li Yu) 10–11, 56–57 xianyuan biography 102, 121–22, 127 xiaoshuo see classical tale; fictionality; vernacular novel; vernacular story Xingmeng pianyan 56–91, 105–6, 120–21, 201–2 4, “Dufu qiaoshang” 70–75 7, “Yu xianxi” 75–82 8, “Shi guiyu” 111–15, 120–21 11, “Lian xinju” 59–70 Xu Baoshan 111

Index Xue Baochai 146–50, 179, 190–98 Xu, Gary 179 Xunzi 15–16 Yang, Mayfair Mei-hui 155–56 yanyi (expanded history) 51–55 Yao Xie 143 yin (licentiousness, excess) 161–62, 178–79 yu see desire Yu, Anthony 152 Yumu xingxin bian (Du Gang) 87–88, 105–6, 115–16, 120–21, 124–25, 204–6 2.27, “Ma Yuanmei” 203–4 4.1, “Huo quanjia” 116–17, 119–20 4.2, “Xun dajie” 116–19 13.2, “Mao tan ming” 106–11 Zaisheng yuan (Chen Duansheng) 122 Zaizao tian (Hou Zhi) 122–23 Zao chuang xianbi (Aisin Gioro Yurui) 157– 58, 206 Zengbu quanxiang pinglin gujin lienü zhuan 28, 32–33, 36–38, 42–43 zhanghui xiaoshuo (chapter-length novel) see vernacular novel Zhang Xinzhi 145–46 Zhao Jianzhong 196 zhiguai 86, 120 See also classical tale Zhiyan zhai (Red Inkstone) 152–53 Zhou, Yiqun 9 Zito, Angela 14–15 zong system 110n51 zu see patriline