Misers, Shrews, and Polygamists: Sexuality and Male-Female Relations in Eighteenth-Century Chinese Fiction
392
Misers, Shrews, and Polygamists: Sexuality and Male-Female Relations in Eighteenth-Century Chinese Fiction
392eBook
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Overview
In many examples of rare erotic fiction, and in other works as well-known as Dream of the Red Chamber, Keith McMahon identifies a sexual economy defined by the figures of the "miser" and the "shrew"—caricatures of the retentive, self-containing man and the overflowing, male-enervating woman. Among these and other characters, the author explores the issues surrounding the practice of polygamy, the logic of its overvaluation of masculinity, and the nature of sexuality generally in Chinese society. How does the man with many wives manage and justify his sexual authority? Why and how might he escape or limit this presumed authority, sometimes to the point of portraying himself as abject before the shrewish woman? How do women accommodate or coddle the man, or else oppose, undermine, or remold him? And in what sense does the man place himself lower than the spiritually and morally superior woman?
The most extensive English-language study of Chinese literature from the eighteenth century, this examination of polygamy will interest not only students of Chinese history, culture, and literature but also all those concerned with histories of gender and sexuality.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822397298 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 03/08/1995 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 392 |
| Lexile: | 1540L (what's this?) |
| File size: | 4 MB |
About the Author
Keith McMahon is Associate Professor of Chinese Language and Literature at the University of Kansas. He is the author of Causality and Containment in Seventeenth-Century Chinese Fiction.
Read an Excerpt
Misers, Shrews, and Polygamists
Sexuality and Male-Female Relations in Eighteenth-Century Chinese Fiction
By Keith McMahon
Duke University Press
Copyright © 1995 Duke University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-9729-8
CHAPTER 1
POTENT POLYGAMISTS AND CHASTE MONOGAMISTS
Sexuality and Male-Female Subjectivity in Qing Fiction
Having multiple wives was one of the main badges of male privilege in Ming and Qing China (1368-1644 and 1644-1911). This book is about how such male sexual privilege plays itself out in vernacular novels from about the mid-seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries. I will read fiction for its representations of sexuality and male-female subjectivity, at the same time investigating the gender roles of the patriarchal polygamous family. I will use the terms Miser and Shrew as metaphors to caricaturize male and female extremes implied in the construction of these roles and often illustrated in these works. The two poles define a sexual economy in which man and woman occupy mutually alien positions from which each can theoretically take Vital essence from or lose it to the other. In order to protect himself from such loss, the polygamous man must distance himself from any one woman and instead master and have healthy intercourse with many women. Miser is the caricature of this retentive Self-containment at its extreme. Pofu, "shrew," is the caricature of the overflowing, male-enervating woman. She metaphorically "scatters" (po) her polluting fluids on the man, who is fragile unless he builds his defenses and masters her. With the miser and shrew in the periphery, the potent Polygamist and his alter ego the Wastrel are the central characters of these novels, positive and negative versions of the filial progenitor upon whom everyone's future is supposed to depend.
From the study of these and other characters, the main issues that will emerge are these: How does the man with many wives manage and justify his sexual authority? What factors condition the Wastrel's ruination? Why and how does the socially privileged man often escape or limit his presumed authority, sometimes to the point of portraying himself as abject before the shrewish woman? How do women accommodate or coddle the man, or else oppose, undermine, and sometimes remold him? Finally, with what logic and what limits does the man place himself lower than spiritually and morally superior women—as in the case of the Feminized scholar-poet—and to what extent does he thereby repair his own or other men's bad image?
The reasons for my focus on polygamy have to do with the realities of both Qing society and the contents of Qing fiction, and with the fact that scholars have tended to discuss this topic only briefly or in passing. Few so far have examined its constructedness according to the aspects of Sexuality, gender, and subjectivity. Perhaps they have considered it as a mere aspect of patriarchy and the rule of the male elite and therefore too narrow a topic of study. In terms of the social-symbolic order, however, polygamy was a model of success, a kind of perfected form of marriage aspired to by lower-class men and even women (who would rise by becoming concubines or chambermaids in wealthy households, for instance). The access to multiple sexual partners, whether marital or not, was legalized, glorified, and widely enjoyed by Ming and Qing men, a great number of whom were the most powerful and competitive members of their local and national elites. To be sure, polygamy was not the model or ideal for every man and woman; and in fact Monogamy was the usual form of marriage, while polygamy was a matter of privilege and means. Furthermore, many variations of marriage existed, including the uxorilocal (called ru zhui), in which a man married into a woman's family, and which plays a significant role both within and in place of polygamy in many Qing novels discussed here. Nevertheless, to study sexuality and gender in premodern China is also to study polygamy and its particular assumption of the primacy of the Male cycle of energy.
The fiction that most frequently illustrates the miser, shrew, polygamist, and other character types I discuss in this book often goes under the rubric of renqing xiaoshuo, a term used by numerous scholars in modern China meaning, literally, "fiction about human situations," with a strong emphasis upon qing, "feelings, sentiment." This loosely termed group of works includes stories about love affairs, sexual encounters, marriage, family life, and upbringing (not included are works primarily about suchthings as dynastic history, battles against real and demonic enemies, or court cases, which nevertheless contain material relevant to the study of sexuality and which often make their way into works otherwise focused on renqing). The issue of desire and how to regulate it runs through all these situations. These domestic topics and the accompanying array of male and female character types are most fully charted in a number of lengthy novels of the Ming and Qing, including Honglou meng (Dream of the Red Chamber, also known as Story of the Stone) and several lesser-known literati novels, as well as numerous shorter works both erotic and nonerotic.
The organizing principle of my discussion is in fact to treat works according to whether or not they contain sexual detail and according to relative length and complexity of portrayal. The shorter works (twenty chapters or so) provide idealistic and rather formulaic portraits of monogamy and polygamy. These are the scholar-beauty romances (caizi jiaren xiaoshuo) of chapters 5 and 6 and Shenlou zhi (The Mirage of Love) of chapter 12. The lengthy novels (of one hundred or so chapters) contain highly detailed and problematizing representations of gender and sexuality. These are the works examined in chapters 7 to 11 and 13—that is, Yesou puyan (A Country Codger's Words of Exposure), Honglou meng, Lin Lan Xiang (The Six Wives of the Wastrel Geng), Qilu deng (Lantern at the Fork in the Road), Lüye xianzong (Trails of Immortals in the Green Wilds), and Ernü yingxiong zhuan (Tales of Boy and Girl Heroes). The shrew and the miser appear in many of these works but are often the subjects of individual novels and stories—especially in the case of the shrew—and as such form their own subgenres. They will be treated in chapters 3 and 4.
The period during which most of this fiction was written is between the early Qing around the 1650s and the end of the mid-Qing in the early 1800s. Exact dates are often hard to establish: some works may very well have been written as early as the late Ming, others as late as the 1860s. Ernü yingxiong zhuan is from the third quarter of the nineteenth century, but I include it because of the example it offers as a novel in critical revision of Honglou meng, which—along with other lengthy works like Rulin waishi (Scholars), Yesou puyan, Lin Lan Xiang, Qilu deng, and Lüye xianzong—is from the core years of this period, the mid-eighteenth century and the middle of the Qianlong emperor's reign, from 1736 to 1796. In their survey of Chinese society in this period, Susan Naquin and Evelyn Rawski define the "eighteenth century" that they cover as extending from about 1680 to 1820, roughly corresponding to the time covered here. This segmentation of time has to do with the stability and prosperity that obtained then, and the fact that China had not yet begun to suffer the massive invasion of Western power and influence. These works of fiction are the last to give a rendition of Chinese social life in an as yet relatively undisturbed state, though of course influence did not occur overnight after the Opium Wars in the 1830s and 1840s, nor was contact and economic or social influence absent before decline began. Prosperity is evident in the growth of agricultural output and the amount of internal and external trade. Decline is apparent from the tripling of population to reach approximately 300 million by 1800, and the overtaxing of China's economic capacity, which seems to have reached its limit given the technical levels of production and transportation. The late eighteenth century saw the beginning of widespread opium addiction, though this was not very evident in fiction of the time, which instead occasionally portrays the vogue of Tobacco smoking. If Rulin waishi and other works are any sign, then the eighteenth century saw a high degree of cynicism about success in the examination system (the government-supervised method of selecting candidates to serve in the local, provincial, and national administrations), which was accessible by legitimate means to an ever smaller percentage of men. Instead, the practice of buying lower degrees increased toward the end of the dynasty and made it easy for wealthy but otherwise ineligible men to gain the attendant prestige and serve in office, as numerous novels illustrate.
The method of this research will be to examine the constructedness of fictional character types such as Miser, shrew, henpecked husband, doting mother, wastrel, and benevolent polygynist. That is, I will investigate them according to the ways they are informed by both the ideology of political and economic orders, and by the collective fantasy of the symbolic order. In what follows, I will explain my application of the concepts of ideology and symbolic order, which I keep separate in order to delineate my greater focus on the symbolic. Although densely related and perhaps in the long run distinguishable only for heuristic reasons, ideological and symbolic orders name the political and economic field on the one hand, which is not necessarily or always commensurate with the personal and collective field of fantasy and sexual unconscious on the other. This distinction is especially useful in illustrating the ways in which various texts or character types enact conformity or subversion within the patriarchal system without necessarily representing the interests of groups or classes in a politically and economically defined hierarchy.
Gender derives central meaning from the kinship structure. The laws of kinship define the symbolic order, which is primarily structured by the paternal family—its rules of descent, incest prohibitions, and the binaries of male and female, senior and junior, and inner and outer. The symbolic function of this order is in effect to assign each subject a place and a role in the kin group even before he or she is born. A basic premise of my study is that the rules or laws of kinship—including gender definition and hierarchy—are such because of historical and social construction, not innate or natural necessity. With this in mind, I will be particularly interested in subjectivities that appear to escape the normative symbolic order defined by patriarchal polygamy.
One of the most important aspects of gender that I will examine is the representation of male and female sexual capacities, especially as found in the ars erotica. Inherent in that portrayal is the assumption of the primacy of the male cycle of energy (what I will sometimes call the miserly-ascetic paradigm, defined in chapter 4). In the ars erotica, that cycle of fullness and depletion and the economization of yang essence centrally define and justify the polygynist's role and, by association, those of the other gendered subjects surrounding him. The order of the patriarchal-polygamous family; the representation of sexuality in sexual intercourse; and the playing out of hierarchical binaries such as man and woman, masculine and feminine, husband and wife, mother and son, and so forth (up to and including what might be called subsidiary binaries such as polygynist and concubine, main wife and concubine, mother-in-law and daughter-in-law, or son and father's sister's daughter)—I will survey all these as they function in their particular symbolic order in the context of the economic mode of production of Qing China, which I will briefly define as follows.
For my purposes in this study, the miser and his practice of usury metaphorically define the economic mode of production in the society of Qing fiction. In other words, he and his miserly-ascetic paradigm encapsulate the imaginary version of real conditions as allegorized in these works. According to that allegory (which I discuss more fully below), the miser is in the business of collecting night soil from everyone and then selling the product to farmers. The night soil fertilizes crops, which when they fail lead farmers to go into debt to the miser, who exacts higher and higher rates of interest from the farmers and hoards more and more of their debt-paying rice. Soon famine occurs because the price of rice is too high. Some benevolent officials and members of the local elite may provide relief to some folk who are left and perhaps punish a few misers.
According to Confucian state values, the one who deals in money and trade is a grade lower than the one who plows the earth. Nevertheless, in spite of this traditional denigration of mercantilism, in fact the miser and the hedonist merchant have wealth and/or life-styles that far outstrip their supposed superiors, that is, the peasants and even the officials. Of course, the miser is an allegorical reduction of the mercantilist landlord or businessman, who is an acquisitive materialist and lover of luxury—not a filthy, self-denying, shit- and gold-collecting miser. But from the perspective of the lowest and poorest in the social hierarchy, who are supposed to be satisfied with little to feed their minds and bodies, the mercantilist's wealth is usury by another name.
In nonallegorical terms, the social and economic order in the works I discuss is roughly as follows: The emperor reigns in the guise of a Benevolent polygamist-patriarch called the Son of Heaven. He rules with the help of an underpaid but powerful officialdom ostensibly steeped in the Confucian canon and holding highly coveted positions. Parallel to the civil bureaucracy, a hereditary military class also exists with its own set of examinations for selecting leaders who are nevertheless held to be subordinate to civil officials. The military is useful in guarding border regions and quelling internal unrest due, for example, to popular religious uprisings, famine rioting, or rebellious non-Han minorities. The major portion of the population consists of peasants and urban commoners, who produce and market agricultural and other goods and engage in numerous menial occupations. Many hereditary and semihereditary classes exist (the latter being ones from which the individual could choose to depart), e.g., artisans, slaves, servants, actors, doctors, etc. Buddhist and Taoist religious personnel are numerous, many but not all government-registered, and including hermits, mendicants, and esoteric practitioners (e.g., the suppliers of aphrodisiacs and secret erotic arts in Qing fiction), as well as relatively wealthy and heavily patronized abbots and abbesses. Finally, there are merchants of all levels, the richest of whom, however, are still insecure if they rely only on money for their well-being. In other words, in Qing China the rich merchant still felt it necessary to, for example, place his son on the road to officialdom, buy himself or his son an official position (as I have said above, an increasingly viable option in die mid- to late Qing), or use his money to curry favor with (underpaid) officials. Otherwise he was too vulnerable to official harassment and intervention in his mercantile activities. In short, the hierarchy of power (ming, name, politically recognized fame) over money (li, profit) was always clearly in place.
How are the aspects of ideology and symbolic order projected onto and embodied by individual and collective subjects? Fiction can be seen as part of a broad representational system consisting of the repertoire of images and stories through which a society identifies itself and its subjects, or through which it "figures consensus" (in Kaja Silverman's words). It is through these images and stories that subjects are enlisted in ideological and symbolic orders in light of such things as kinship rules, political ideology, economic conditions, and class rank. In other words, fiction can also be seen—like dreams, psychic symptoms, and types of patterned behavior—as registering the workings of conscious and unconscious fantasies, or of what can also be called the "fantasmatic." In Jean LaPlanche's and J.-B. Pontalis's terms, the primary function of the fantasmatic is the "mise-en-scéne of desire"—that is, the staging of scenarios in which subjects play parts, defending and justifying themselves and acting out wishes, in all this basing themselves on the collective repertoire of social and symbolic roles.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Misers, Shrews, and Polygamists by Keith McMahon. Copyright © 1995 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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