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Women and Men, Love and Power: Parameters of Chinese Fiction and Drama

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Women and Men, Love and Power: Parameters of Chinese Fiction and Drama SINO-PLATONIC PAPERS Number 193 November, 2009 Women and Men, Love and Power: Parameters of Chinese Fiction and Drama edited and with a foreword by Victor H. Mair Victor H. Mair, Editor Sino-Platonic Papers Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305 USA [email protected] www.sino-platonic.org SINO-PLATONIC PAPERS is an occasional series edited by Victor H. Mair. The purpose of the series is to make available to specialists and the interested public the results of research that, because of its unconventional or controversial nature, might otherwise go unpublished. The editor actively encourages younger, not yet well established, scholars and independent authors to submit manuscripts for consideration. Contributions in any of the major scholarly languages of the world, including Romanized Modern Standard Mandarin (MSM) and Japanese, are acceptable. In special circumstances, papers written in one of the Sinitic topolects (fangyan) may be considered for publication. Although the chief focus of Sino-Platonic Papers is on the intercultural relations of China with other peoples, challenging and creative studies on a wide variety of philological subjects will be entertained. This series is not the place for safe, sober, and stodgy presentations. Sino-Platonic Papers prefers lively work that, while taking reasonable risks to advance the field, capitalizes on brilliant new insights into the development of civilization. The only style-sheet we honor is that of consistency. Where possible, we prefer the usages of the Journal of Asian Studies. Sinographs (hanzi, also called tetragraphs [fangkuaizi]) and other unusual symbols should be kept to an absolute minimum. Sino-Platonic Papers emphasizes substance over form. Submissions are regularly sent out to be refereed and extensive editorial suggestions for revision may be offered. Manuscripts should be double-spaced with wide margins and submitted in duplicate. A set of "Instructions for Authors" may be obtained by contacting the editor. Ideally, the final draft should be a neat, clear camera-ready copy with high black- and-white contrast. Sino-Platonic Papers is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 543 Howard Street, 5th Floor, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA. Please note: When the editor goes on an expedition or research trip, all operations (including filling orders) may temporarily cease for up to two or three months at a time. In such circumstances, those who wish to purchase various issues of SPP are requested to wait patiently until he returns. If issues are urgently needed while the editor is away, they may be requested through Interlibrary Loan. N.B.: Beginning with issue no. 171, Sino-Platonic Papers has been published electronically on the Web. Issues from no. 1 to no. 170, however, will continue to be sold as paper copies until our stock runs out, after which they too will be made available on the Web at www.sino-platonic.org. _______________________________________________ “Women and Men, Love and Power: Parameters of Chinese Fiction and Drama” Sino-Platonic Papers, 193 (November, 2009) Women and Men, Love and Power: Parameters of Chinese Fiction and Drama Edited and with a Foreword by Victor H. Mair, University of Pennsylvania Contents Foreword by Victor H. Mair 1 1. The Deviant: Examining the Relationship between Foxes and Humans in Chinese Literature by Kailun Wang 4 2. Shrew Stories: Social and Moral Commentary on Women in Society by Yukwah Kwok 16 3. The Influence of Maidservants on Courtship and Marriage as Portrayed in Li Yu’s Tower for the Summer Heat and Selected Works by Hadi Kaakour 26 4. Prison or Power: Feminine Sexuality in Jin Ping Mei and Mudan ting by Shu-min Wee 35 5. Exploration of the Chinese ‘Dangerous Woman’: Femme Fatale or Anti-Heroine? by Diana Zhou 51 i “Women and Men, Love and Power: Parameters of Chinese Fiction and Drama” Sino-Platonic Papers, 193 (November, 2009) 6. The Courtesan and the City in Han Bangqing’s Sing-Song Girls of Shanghai by Madeleine Wilcox 71 7. Tang Tragedies: Men and Love in the Tang Dynasty by Jennifer Jen 88 8. Magical Weapons, Adorable Exotica: Imperial Fetishism in a Sixteenth- Century Chinese Novel by Yuanfei Wang 98 9. The Paradox of Wang Mien: The Conflicts of Eremitism in The Scholars by Belle Eberhart 122 10. History vs. Fiction in The Romance of the Three Kingdoms by Steven A. Vaughn-Lewis 133 11. The Dichotomy between Popular Opinion and the Novel: Morality in Water Margin by Lei Kang 145 12. Incoherence and Intoxication: Alcohol as a Rare Source of Consistency in Outlaws of the Marsh by Josh Vittor 159 13. The Values of the Mountain Liang Outlaws and of Contemporary Gangs by Jin Guan 169 ii “Women and Men, Love and Power: Parameters of Chinese Fiction and Drama” Sino-Platonic Papers, 193 (November, 2009) Women and Men, Love and Power: Parameters of Chinese Fiction and Drama Foreword by Victor H. Mair University of Pennsylvania What happens when you turn a group of bright undergraduate and graduate students loose on the world of Chinese fiction and drama, inviting them to read whatever in that world strikes their fancy, and to write about whatever aspects of the works they have chosen that they think are the most significant? The results are both surprising and refreshing, to say the least. Before giving a brief summary of what transpired in this experiment, I should mention that the participants ranged all the way from first-year freshmen who knew no Chinese whatsoever to PhD candidates who were about to take their comprehensive examinations in Chinese literature. Their majors ran the gamut from nursing and business to history and engineering. The only academic concern they shared was their curiosity about Chinese fiction and drama. In previous years when I taught this course, I provided much more guidance about which works to choose and the types of approaches and topics to employ in studying them. This year, I decided to concentrate more on letting the students know what was available and telling them just enough about what was out there to whet their appetite for one or another text, group of texts, theme, method, author, and so forth. My rationale for adopting this new strategy was prompted by my observation that Penn students are becoming more and more creative and self-motivated. The papers in this collection are a good indication of the truly thoughtful and insightful research and analysis that students are capable of doing on Chinese fiction and drama, even without a background in Chinese studies. Perhaps most impressive of all is that students without 1 “Women and Men, Love and Power: Parameters of Chinese Fiction and Drama” Sino-Platonic Papers, 193 (November, 2009) any Chinese language training are capable of making genuine contributions to the study of Chinese fiction and drama by relying on translations and their own intelligence. Incidentally, the papers in this collection constitute about half of the papers submitted in my class. While I have selected them for inclusion because they are truly outstanding and because I wanted to keep this collection to a manageable size, this is not to say that the other papers in the class were lacking merit. Quite the contrary, all of the papers I received that semester (Spring, 2009) made valuable observations. If there is a difference between the papers included here and those that were omitted, it is because — in general — these are better written, clearer, and more logically organized. The most obvious outcome of this relatively laissez-faire procedure is that, given their druthers, students overwhelmingly (more than 95%) will choose to write about fiction rather than drama. I do not care to speculate why this is so, but have my own suspicions, and I am sure that many of those who encounter this collection and its Foreword will have various explanations for this unmistakable phenomenon. Secondly, without any prompting from me, by far the most popular focus was on women’s issues. Thus we have in this collection papers on vixens, shrews, maidservants, nymphomaniacs, femmes fatales, and courtesans. Students were also deeply intrigued by the implications of foot-binding and all manner of love stories. This preference for women’s issues was held by both male and female students, although the latter (who made up slightly more than half of the class) had a somewhat greater predisposition for women’s issues than the former. Some of the discussions that emerged in the class revealed that the students thought that, despite the fact that traditional Chinese society and historiography were heavily masculine-oriented, literary resources show women to have been incredibly resourceful and capable. In other words, women in pre-modern China — although severely constrained by institutional, social, and moral norms and standards — were able to assert themselves by cleverly and intrepidly working through and around the system. Although I have been studying Chinese literature for nearly forty years, it is only the innovative and perceptive investigations of my students that have enabled me to realize the subtleties of women’s issues in traditional Chinese literature and society. Next, as a countercurrent to this fascination with everything pertaining to women, there 2 “Women and Men, Love and Power: Parameters of Chinese Fiction and Drama” Sino-Platonic Papers, 193 (November, 2009) was also a strong interest (particularly among a certain segment of the male students) in misogyny, heroes, outlaws, hoodlums, alcohol, and similar macho themes. In the papers that deal with such “men’s issues,” we find an appropriately critical, even clinical, type of inquiry, not the sort of sensationalism into which such subjects might devolve in the hands of less serious students.
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