Competing Discourses: Orthodoxy, Authenticity, and Engendered Meanings in Late Imperial Chinese Fiction

375 Pages·2001·8.587 MB·English

by  Maram Epstein

C O M P E T I N G D I S C O U R S E S
O R T H O D O X Y ,
A U T H E N T I C I T Y ,
A N D E N G E N D E R E D
M E A N I N G S I N
L A T P E R I A L
C H I N E I C T I O N
Harvard East Asian Monographs 197

Competing Discourses
Orthodoxy, Authenticity, and
Engendered Meanings in
Late Imperial Chinese Fiction
Maram Epstein
Published by the Harvard University Asia Center
and distributed by Harvard University Press
Cambridge (Massachusetts) and London, 2001
© 2ooi by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
Printed in the United States of America
The Harvard University Asia Center publishes a monograph series and, in coordination with
the Fairbank Center for East Asian Research, the Korea Institute, the Reischauer Institute of
Japanese Studies, and other faculties and institutes, administers research projects designed to
further scholarly understanding of China, Japan, Vietnam, Korea, and other Asian countries.
The Center also sponsors projects addressing tnultidisciplinary and regional issues in Asia.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Epstein, Maram.
Competing discourses: orthodoxy, authenticity, and engendered meanings in late
Imperial Chinese fiction / Maram Epstein
p. cm. — (Harvard East Asian monographs; 197)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 0-674-00512-0 (alk. paper)
1. Chinese fiction—Ming dynasty, 1368-1644—History and criticism. 2. Chinese
fiction—Ch'ing dynasty, 1644-1912—History and criticism. 3. Women in literature. I.
Tide. II. Series.
PL2436.E67 2001
S95.134609—dc2i
00050598
Index by the author
@ Printed on acid-free paper
Last figure below indicates year of this printing
10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 01
To Barbara and Leo and Amos,
for seeing me through the last millennium and into the new

The research for this book began over fifteen years ago as an attempt to fill
in some of the silences of my graduate training. Many of the details in the
novels we read for seminars were so odd, and sometimes even disturbing,
that none of us, including myself, felt comfortable discussing the implica-
tions of what was so clearly laid out before us. I have been fortunate that the
fields of Chinese gender studies and late imperial fiction have come into
maturity as I continued to wrestle with these long and unruly novels, for re­
cent scholarship in both fields has provided me with the vocabulary to ex­
plain why I believe gender (what I naively called ’’women” back then) is so
central to the study of Chinese fiction.
My intellectual and scholarly debts exceed what can be expressed in the
notes. I remain grateful to my dissertation committee, Andrew H. Plaks,
Yu-kung Kao, and Willard Peterson, for insisting on the primacy of the text
and for setting such high standards of scholarship. I hope to challenge my
own students with these same humanistic goals. I could not have finished
my dissertation without the support and critical insights of Thamora Fishel;
she helped me to understand that people and texts can speak their truths in
many voices and that being a good listener, or reader, requires listening for
the contradictions and points of conflict.
I would like to express my gratitude to the many people who have read all
or portions of the manuscript: Barbara Altmann, Katy Carlitz, Elise Han,
sen, Wilt Idema, Andrea Goldman, Wendy Larson, Hongwei Liu, Cathy
Silber, Rui Shen, Ellen Widmer, and Shiyi Yu. I owe a special thanks to
Waiyee Li and David Rolston, who went beyond the call of friendship in
providing me with their generous criticism and corrections, and to the two
anonymous readers for the press, who went beyond the call of collegial duty
in pointing out an embarrassment of necessary corrections. It has been a de­
light to work with John R. Ziemer of the Harvard University Asia Center;
viii Acknowledgments
throughout the process, he has treated the manuscript with as much care as
any author could hope. This book is much stronger for the contributions of
all these readers. For my own reading, I would like to thank Bob Felsing of
Knight Library at the University of Oregon, who always manages to do the
impossible during this period of budget cuts, and the staff, especially Martin
Heijdra, of Gest Library at Princeton University. Those who taught me
how to read the Chinese novel deserve my greatest thanks because I still re­
member the bewilderment I felt as an undergraduate after my first attempt,
Andrew Plaks and David Rolston showed me the importance of -comment
taries; Naifei Ding and Pat Sieber modeled the necessity of reading against
received traditions; the work of Katherine Carlitz and Keith McMahon, al­
ways seeming to appear just as I am noticing a certain textual issue, has
opened up many new texts and methodologies to me.
Over the years, I have been fortunate to receive support from Princeton
University, the Gest Library at Princeton, the University of Oregon, and the
American Council of Learned Societies. I would also like to thank my chairs
from the Department of Bast Asian Languages and Literatures at the L/ni-
versity of Oregon, Wendy Larson and Mike Fishlen, for allowing me to en­
gineer several terms off for writing. The most precious support comes from
one’s family. My greatest thanks go to Barbara Altmann and her sons, Leo
and Amos, for opening their hearts and home to me; and to Susan Sygall
and Tom Broeker for their contagious joy in celebrating all of life.
Contents
Abbreviations
Introduction
1 The Narrative Structures of Orthodoxy
Orthodox Constructions of Self 20/ Ritual, Yinyang
Cosmology, and the Construction of Gender 29/ Wen
and the Aesthetics of Orthodoxy 38
2 The Late Ming Reinterpretation of Human Nature
and the Gendering of Desire
The Paradoxical Meanings of Qing 62/ Subjective Qing Versus
the Objective Ideal in Orthodox Neo-Confucianism 65/ The
Late Ming Reformulation of Human Nature 69/ Li Zhi,
Desire, and Authenticity 74/ Ritual and Desire Reconciled
in Qing Thought 79/ From Philosophy to Fiction: The
Aesthetics of Qing 87
3 Xingshi yinyuan zhuan: Orthodoxy and the Making of the Shrew
Inversions of Orthodoxy: Xingshi and Failed Self-Cultivation 126/
Fox-Spirits and the Wounds of Self-Cultivation 135/ The
Shrew and Yinyang Symbolism 142
4 Reflections of Desire in Honglou meng
The Feminization of Baoyu s World 152/ Prospect Garden
and che Staging of Qing 155/ Desire and the Dissolution of
Ritual Identities 163/ Yinyang Numerology and the Precious
Mirror Chapters 173/ Responding to Discursive Ambiguity:
The Commentaries of Red Inkstone and Zhang Xinzhi 184
X Contents
5 Expanding Orthodoxy: Narrative Excess and Expedient
Authenticity in Yesou puyan 199
Xia Jingqu and Yesou pufan 207/ Yinyang iconography in
Yesou puyan 215/ Yesou puyan and the Masculinization of the
Scholar-Beauty Genre 229/ Expediency, Qing, and the Ethics
of Sexuality 238
6 Heroic Women and Deficient Men injinghua yuan and
Ernu yingxiong zhuan 249
The Rule of Women injinghua yuan 250/ Ernti yingxiong
zhuan: Playing with Gender/Genre 272
7 Conclusion: From the Symbolic to the Political 303
REFERENCE M ATTER
Bibliography 315
Index 341