Session 72: Late-Ming Courtesans and Afterlives: Transaction, Transmission, Transfiguration

Organizer: Lawrence C. H. Yim, Academia Sinica

Chair: Keith McMahon, University of Kansas

Discussant: Giovanni Vitiello, University of Hawaii, Manoa

Keywords: China, Chinese literature, Ming-Qing times, portrayal of women.

This panel probes the nuances in the portrayal of women—physical, representational, supernatural—in Ming-Qing literary discourses. Focusing on late Ming courtesans and the afterlives they lead in textual recapitulation and fanciful revenance, the presentations revolve around three axes: "transaction," "transmission," "transfiguration."

"Transaction" brings us beyond economic exchange to the circulation of cultural capital, gaze and body between courtesans and patrons. Lawrence Yim argues that while the male gaze structures Qian Qianyi’s poems to Liu Rushi, Liu’s lyrical response simultaneously engages and detaches from her body to constitute the agency of her own. This on-site interaction of contending desires was then re-inscribed into the symbolic of history after the Qing conquest; accordingly, "transmission" refers to the representation of courtesans in a certain historical mode, which itself was mediated in different contexts and genres. Hongyu Huang explores how Wu Weiye allegorized a courtesan’s tragedy in the rejuvenated poetry-as-history convention (shishi), which was in turn appropriated by eighteenth-century fiction and late Qing political poetry. Undercutting the circularity of desire and the narrativization of history, "transfiguration" (dis/embodiment or metamorphosis) suggests radical subjectivity attributed to women or the involution of subjectivity itself. Ling Hon Lam studies an obscure, "untalented" courtesan-playwright, who defied her biographers’ narrative closure with erratic performance of prescribed emotions and aptitudes even in her apparition coeval with the Ming’s downfall. In another direction, Keith McMahon argues that the woman (courtesan, ghost, swordswoman) vacillating between attachment and detachment in Pu Songling’s tales defines the human subject par excellence in contrast to male ontological deficiency.

The Female Body as Agency for Romance and Interiority: A Study of Qian Qianyi and Liu Rushi’s Exchanged Poems in the Late Ming

Lawrence C. H. Yim, Academia Sinica, Taiwan

Qian Qianyi and Liu Rushi created a sizable corpus of "exchanged poems" at the beginning of their romance in the late Ming. This body of poetry feeds the sensual imagination of their contemporaries and posterity, and has become a fascinating item in the repertoire of the Ming-Qing cultural and literary memories. The purpose of this study is, however, not to rehash the Qian-Liu legend. Rather, it probes the intriguing element of the female body in their exchanged poems. It argues that Qian’s obsession with Liu’s body is ubiquitous in his verses for Liu: the male gaze shapes the structure of his poems and is the agency for Qian to demarcate his romance with Liu. In her poems in response, this paper suggests, Liu whimsically engages and detaches from "her" body at the same time. In her maneuver, the body serves as an agency for her to reveal her interiority and counteract the male fixation on her legendary beauty. Using the notion of the female body as point of convergence, this study explores the two poets’ rhetorical strategies in formulating their subjectivities, explores the contours of the qing cult of the late Ming, and evaluates the significance of "exchanged poems" in Ming-Qing literature.

National Crisis and the Femme Fatale in the Meicun Style of Poetry

Hongyu Huang, Yale University

Wu Weiye (1609–1672) was a groundbreaking figure in Chinese literature for inaugurating a new poetic style known as the Meicun ti. Wu’s sequence of long narrative songs/ballads in the seven-syllabic line (gexing) conveys the Ming-Qing dynastic upheaval, with emphasis on human predicaments in the face of national and personal crises. This paper examines the thematic, rhetorical and narrative repertoire of the Meicun Style, and locates it in the context of Chinese narrative poetry. I focus on Wu’s famous verse "Ballad of Yuanyuan," which has been customarily construed as a bitter sarcasm against the turncoat general Wu Sangui and sympathy for the unintentional femme fatale Chen Yuanyuan. I caution against such a moralistic reading, and argue that in addition to portraying Wu Sangui as a national traitor, Wu Weiye also renders him as a romantic and pathetic hero trapped in a desperate situation. Through the agency of historical allusion, dramatic monologue and situational irony, Wu creates a tension between sympathy and judgment. Subliminally, we feel the poignancy of the poet’s own personal dilemma. Wu carried on the shishi (poetry as history) tradition initiated by Du Fu, but also embraced Bai Juyi’s romantic subjectivity; meanwhile he demonstrated striking originality in regard to both influences. I further trace the afterlife of the Meicun Style, as it evolved in the high-Qing novel the Dream of the Red Chamber, and catalyzed the flowering of topical poems at the fall of the Qing (as epitomized by Fan Zengxiang and Yang Qi).

The Heart in Suspense: A Portrait of an Untalented Ghost Courtesan in Seventeenth-Century China

Ling Hon Lam, University of Chicago

Late Ming courtesans traversed gender boundaries by adept self-performance as poets, knights-errant or loyalists. Paradoxically, these added up to an auratic image that the male subject, intact rather than challenged, could still hold onto (in sympathy and nostalgia) when the world around him was falling apart. But what if a courtesan’s performance went awry, which suspended the otherwise smooth traffic in emotion and undercut any recuperation of the past? This paper discusses an obscure courtesan, Xu Feng, to whom a chuanqi opera titled Xinghua shan (Apricot Mountain) is attributed. She married into a gentry family of Changshu in Liu Rushi’s steps shortly after the latter’s wedding with Qian Qianyi. Incompetent in poetry and overacting amidst her patrons, Xu Feng performed like a parody of Liu. So does the heroine of the play, who confesses her poetic incompetence and whose transvestism, a bizarre failure and over-success, thrusts her into a carnivalesque riot. Two biographies by Qian’s associates recount the mysterious murder of Xu Feng and her ferocious apparition coincident with the surrender of Nanjing. Echoing the opera (and her portrait found in the play that misappropriates the emotional markers of Chen Hongshou’s Cui Yingying), Xu Feng’s awkward performance even in her afterlife frustrated her male biographers’ effort to wrap up her case and impose a nostalgic closure upon the memories of the historical catastrophe. Rather than invoking a traumatic past alive, Xu Feng the ghost with her murderous spree to no end suggests a future of radical beginnings opened by erratic reenactment.

Pu Songling and the Ontology of the Feminine

Keith McMahon, University of Kansas

A singular feature of Pu Songling’s stories of sexual and romantic encounter is the woman’s lack of attachment to the man whom she chooses to approach. In its most concentrated form, that attachment comes down to the very moment of her appearance in the world of sensory effects. The focus on this moment has to do with the critical effect that the passage between visibility and invisibility has upon her. Her entrance and appearance bring her into a social order in which she becomes both visible and nameable, and thus someone who will be set alongside other subjects with whom she can potentially be compared and measured. The moment of her appearance and disappearance, moreover, captures an ontology of the feminine in which the woman—whether courtesan, ghost, or swordswoman—constitutes a figure of the human subject par excellence. The ontology of the feminine is another way of defining the qing aesthetic’s emphasis on radical subjectivity, which is in turn defined by the fact that the woman is the better choice than the man for these writers when it is a matter of examining subjects in symbolic and ontological crisis. The importance of qing, which I translate as sublime passion, has to do with the special tonality of the way in which the female subject takes on her particular form of appearance. From all this emerges the subdued political message that links Liaozhai with both earlier and later renditions of the grand theme of qing, the man’s detachment from normative masculine subjectivity through his assumption of feminine subjectivity. It is through the remarkable woman herself and the imaginary figure of that woman that the man arrives at the very definition of himself and that he in effect is called into being.