Chair: David T. Roy, University of Chicago

The past generation has seen an explosion of studies on Jin Ping Mei (The Plum in the Golden Vase), both in the Chinese-speaking world and elsewhere. Much of the focus has been philological and literary historical, centering explicitly on the level of the novel’s rich and sophisticated language. What emerges if we admit a wide range of literary and non-literary readings of Jin Ping Mei cihua? Using the novel as a focal point, our panel consists of four distinctly different approaches, each informed by and yet clearly a departure from traditional Golden scholarship. As André Lévy concludes his preface to an issue of CLEAR dedicated to the novel: "Is it not the mark of a work of genius to offer such an infinite prospect of entertainments of many kinds?"

Although the novel is famously heteroglossic and draws on an enormous range of influences, one of the few works of literature the preface names in a list of influences is the Ruyijun zhuan. In his paper, Charles Stone examines more closely the relation between the two texts. Matthew Sommer’s paper concerns the male homosexual relations in the novel; Sommer, a legal and cultural historian, discusses the place of male same-sex practices in the novel’s sexual politics, with reference as well to the world outside of the novel. Tina Lu examines the novel’s final chapters and the ways in which the family history intersects with the imperial one; how is the family unit, throughout the novel an allegory for the polity, ultimately shown to be absorbed by the Empire? Finally, James Cahill investigates the authorship of a painted series of illustrations for the novel, tracing them to a painter at the imperial court of the Kangxi Emperor and suggesting their importance in the history of high-level erotic painting.

Charles Stone, University of Chicago

On the surface, the Jin Ping Mei cihua and the Ruyijun zhuan seem to have little in common. Where one is a few thousand pages long and is written in a subtly modulated vernacular, the other scarcely amounts to forty-five pages and is written in condensed, awkward, and sometimes comically vulgar Classical Chinese. And while the Jin Ping Mei is considered one of the most stylistically advanced novels to have appeared in the Chinese language, the Ruyijun zhuan has never been celebrated for the subtlety of its rhetorical technique. Nonetheless the Jin Ping Mei owes the Ruyijun zhuan a debt far beyond the graphic vocabulary coined by the earlier text. Much more connects the two than a shared lexicon of a few dozen lewd phrases.

In this paper, I will suggest some of the ways in which the Ruyijun zhuan was an important rhetorical model for the Jin Ping Mei, arguing that the Ruyijun zhuan and Jin Ping Mei draw on other texts in a strikingly similar way. The Ruyijun zhuan deploys a wide range of allusions to classical poetry and dynastic histories just as the author of the Jin Ping Mei later used allusions to classical drama and fiction. For example, both texts draw on ironic and erudite allusions to other texts to illustrate psychological states of central characters. Ultimately, the author of the Jin Ping Mei relied upon the Ruyijun zhuan for one of his most subtle and effective techniques, the source in turn of the novel’s characteristic layered textual denseness.

Matthew H. Sommer, University of Pennsylvania

In this paper, I examine male homosexual intercourse in Jin Ping Mei to clarify how the novel uses sexual relations to map hierarchies of gender, status, and power, and how the narration of sexual acts drives along the narrative as a whole. Relations between protagonist Ximen Qing and his page Shutong illustrate the irrelevance of modern notions of sexual orientation to the novel’s phallocentric logic. Both figures are male; yet the transgressive, emphatically masculine character of the powerful libertine contrasts sharply with the dominated, feminized character of the object of his possessive desire. (Comparisons can be made with similar figures in the novel Rouputuan.)

Another key episode involves the decline of the libertine Chen Jingji on parallel hierarchies of social status, sexual role, and gender. As part of the novel’s theme of karmic retribution, Chen ends up losing both wife and property and eventually being killed by one of the husbands he has cuckolded. Along the way, he descends from the role of powerful penetrator of other men’s wives, to being himself penetrated by beggars and clergy to whom he must submit in order to survive. In the process he is feminized, as the narrative increasingly stresses those youthful physical features which make him an object of desire for more powerful men. In other words, his loss of wealth and power are underscored by a simultaneous, multifaceted loss of masculinity.

In effect, the novel employs male homosexual relations to plot individuals on hierarchies of status, power, and gender quite independent of sex itself. These same hierarchies, and the phallocentric logic which organizes them, are at work in the novel’s heterosexual relations as well; yet they appear all the more starkly in the same-sex context.

Tina Lu, University of Pennsylvania

The great Chinese prose and dramatic narratives all seem to be commentaries on the imperial system. Historical narratives explicitly deal with affairs of state, while everything else seems to fall into one of two categories, depicting either extended families that are allegories for the state or showing in detail precisely how the affairs of a family neatly dovetail with events of imperial significance. All must position either the family vis-ŕ-vis the state, or vice-versa.

Jin Ping Mei occupies a peculiar position in this literary history. The novel is set at a particularly chaotic moment of the Song Dynasty, in the town of Qinghe in Shandong Province. Nonetheless, critic after critic has argued that Qinghe is really Beijing and that the Ximen household, with its six wives led by a dissolute patriarch, represents the corrupt court of the late Ming Emperor Jiajing. By the end of the novel, though, allegory seems to have given way to the demands of history. The conclusion depicts the fall not only of the family, but of the Northern Song dynasty; both family and state find themselves bereft of a male head and in drastically reduced circumstances. The declines are parallel and also causally linked, through a complicated chain of events; I will be examining how the familial saga and the imperial history are ultimately fused together. Focusing on the novel’s final two chapters, my paper explores how the novel sustains the conflicting demands of allegory and history.

James Cahill, University of California, Berkeley

The set of 200 woodblock-printed illustrations to Jin Ping Mei which accompany the late Ming (Chongzhen era) edition is well known from reprints and from David Roy’s translation-in-progress. Less well known, and until recently undated and unattributed, is the painted series published in the 1940s as Qinggong zhencang bimei tu (or "200 Beauties Pictures [formerly] Treasured in the Qing Court"). Comparison with identifiable works by the early Qing Suzhou-school master Gu Jianlong, who served as court artist under Kangxi in the 1660s and 1670s, establishes his authorship of this series, places its production within the Kangxi court, and opens the way for a first attempt to chart the development of high-level erotic painting in the Jiangnan cities and in the imperial court, a part of my present project.