Organizer and Chair: Stephen H. West, University of California, Berkeley
Discussant: Wilt Idema, Leiden University
This is a back-to-back panel on Yuan drama, presented in honor of James I. Crump's contributions to Yuan drama and sanqu. The panel is divided into two portions, the first on love, desire, and power in Yuan drama and the second on little-studied aspects: pilgrimage in drama, the figure of ghosts, pornography, and on the importance of naming. The panel explores both relatively understudied texts and little-researched areas of interest of relevance to literature, history, and cultural anthropology.
For Love or Money: Marriage in Three Plays by Kuan Han-ch'ing
Ching-hsi Perng, National Taiwan University
Kuan Han-ch'ing's sympathy for women is well-known. At least six of the extant plays attributed to him deal with women's suffering from love; of those six, three actually focus on marriage. In Chiu feng-ch'en Sung Yin-chang sneers at true love in the face of a marriage for money, and her marriage ends in a fiasco. With the able assistance of the crafty Chao Pan-erh, she is liberated from this loveless relationship and marries a second time, this time for love. Chin-hsien-ch'ih features Tu Jui-niang, another courtesan, who is coerced into marrying the scholar Han Fu-ch'en, her lover. Although forced to marry him, she at least has the knowledge she has married for love and against the wishes of her "mother." Less lucky is Liu Ch'ien-ying in Yü-ching t'ai, who is tricked into a marriage with an elder cousin, Wen Ch'iao, where there is little money and even less love. She refuses to let him into the bridal chamber and their marriage is saved only the intervention of the Prefect, who arranges a feast in which Liu Ch'ien-ying is saved from disgrace by Wen Ch'iao's literary talents. It would appear that the women in the plays are, to varying degrees, simply either objects of male desire or foils for male talents. The present paper attempts to examine the phenomenon both as a thematic convention and against the historical background of the Yuan dynasty.
For Money or Love: Configurations of Romance in Early Drama
Cynthia Y. Ning, University of Hawai'i
A subset of the Yuan plays focuses on romance in the caizi jiaren tradition, in which illicit love between the offspring of respectable families culminates in marriage. These plays, including the best-known of the Yuan drama, have something in common with the romantic comedies of classical Western literature, as exemplified by the plays of Shakespeare and Moliere. Of course there are differences, the most notable of which is that, in the Chinese plays, it is not generational conflict between obstructing members of the parental clan and the idealistic young that drives the play, but rather the tacitly acknowledged but publicly condemned impulse of young lovers to find each other in spite of time-honored social strictures designed to keep them safe, and apart-and the clan's subsequent efforts to reconcile and reintegrate these transgressing young into the social whole.
Jinxianchi (The Golden Coins), Yuanyang bei (The Marriage Quilt), Zhuwu ting qin (Listening to the Zither in a Bamboo Grove), and Dongqiang ji (The Romance of the Eastern Wall) are clearly variations on a theme. They begin with a context that excuses (but does not entirely justify) transgression-namely, there is disorder in a family, which propels a daughter through the cracks and into the arms of a lover. Comedy thrives on the grotesque behavior of people impelled by passion-a scholar scrambling over a wall in the night, a lady bundling an embroidered marriage quilt to a borrowed cell-in a nunnery. Discovery allows the continuation of comedy, in the comic (impermanent) humiliation of the principals, but which ultimately paves the way to reconciliation and the required happy ending. Qiangtou mashang (At the Wall & On Horseback) on the other hand is an example of the comedic romance radicalized. It omits the context of disorder in the natal family, and presents instead a morality tale of inexcusable transgression and severe punishment, softened only by its similarity in premise (caizi jiaren romance) and ending to the gentler comedic romances. These plays illustrate the premises of the classical tradition in China. Comedy distorts convention; differences in comedy between east and west ultimately illuminate gaps between the underlying social principles of the societies which produced them. Yuan romantic comedy is particularly productive a target of comparison, given the extent to which its western counterpart has been delineated and developed.
Keep the Door Shut: Sex, Love, and the Power to Rule
Stephen H. West, University of California, Berkeley
Two dramas passed through Ming injunctions against portraying emperors on stage unscathed: Hangong qiu and Wutong yu. These two stories, one of Yuandi of the Han and the other on Xuanzong of the Tang, are "mirror" plays, one obviously written against the other. Both were written to portray the emperor as a sympathetic figure and both explore the relationship between rulership and passion. While passion is denied neither emperor, the moral drawn from the two plays is that passion must be contained within a personal realm, a niche carved out of the public life where human desire can be exercised within a private and protected ambit (HGQ). Passion displayed in the public realm or even (in Ming editions) shared without knowledge with one's border generals has a clear parallel with the sharing of imperial prerogative and power. The release of personal desire into political realms spells doom, doom for the man, the woman, the emperor, and the state (WTY). Both plays end tragically and both, in their own ways, substantiate the need to control personal, human desire in order to rule. While one (HGQ) holds out hope that by exercising self-control and higher moral commitment, one need not lose one's humanity to rule, the other reinforces the inseparable relationship between personal moral worth and the right to rule.
"Obscene, Lewd, Lascivious, Filthy or Indecent?" Song, Drama, Printing,
and Discourses on Eroticism in Early Modern China
Patricia Sieber, Ohio State University
This paper will explore the circulation of the notions of 'obscene songs' and 'pornographic books' in conjunction with the codification of early drama and the expansion of commercial printing in 16th and 17th century China. The paper wants to establish when, how and why the notion of yin began to be a significant category in the reception of vernacular literature in the late Ming. Thus rather than seeking to define whether or not a text was deservedly designated 'obscene,' the paper aims to construct the cultural logic that made such designations possible in a late Ming context. Via a much invoked genealogical relation the Classic of Songs, songs and drama were more readily tied to preexisting discourses on 'obscenity.' In order to delineate the circulation of the critical category of obscenity, the paper will draw on the material surrounding successive sixteenth and seventeenth century recensions of the Xixiang ji [The Story of the Western Wing], the most influential romantic zaju play. The paper will pay particular attention to the notion of 'pornographic book' in order to determine whether or not the commercialization of printing and the concurrent diffusion of texts among an increasing number of socially marginal readers contributed to the coinage and currency of this category. Thus ultimately, the paper addresses the question to what extent the notion of pornography may have served to preemptively (re)inscribe the socio-moral boundaries printing and commercialization threatened to undermine.