Engendering Order: Structure, Gender, and Meaning in the Qing Novel Jinghua yuan

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Engendering Order: Structure, Gender, and Meaning in the Qing Novel Jinghua yuan Author(s): Maram Epstein Source: Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews (CLEAR), Vol. 18 (Dec., 1996), pp. 101-127Published by: Chinese Literature: essays, articles, reviews (CLEAR)Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/495627Accessed: 10-10-2015 20:52 UTC

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Engendering Order: Structure, Gender, and Meaning in the Qing Novel Jinghua yuan*

Maram Epstein University Of Oregon

Although particular episodes of Li Ruzhen's - E (ca. 1763-1830) novel

Jinghua yuan M - a • (Flowers in the Mirror) have received critical attention for their depiction of women, reflections of mid-Qing literati values, or brilliant use of allegory, twentieth-century scholarly opinion is unanimous in judging the hundred-chapter novel as flawed due to its rambling episodic structure.1 Indeed, the novel's structural integrity is so weak that most scholarship has focused on discrete episodes or themes rather than consider the novel in its entirety. Those rare studies which attempt to do

justice to the entire novel likewise resort to breaking it down into episodes, without

elaborating the narrative logic that connects or unifies the parts. The hundred-chapter novel splits into two roughly equivalent halves: the first section narrates the unsuccessful scholar Tang Ao's W V maritime voyage through mythic lands (chapters 9-53), and the second half records the preparation of the hundred reincarnated flower

spirits for the special examination for girls and their literary gathering in an enclosed

An earlier version of this paper was presented to the AAS annual meeting in 1992. Since then the paper has benefited greatly from the generous advice, criticism and encouragement given to me by many friends and colleagues, especially Cathy Silber, Ding Naifei, Patricia Sieber, and Wendy Larson. Robert E. Hegel and the editors of Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, and Reviews deserve special thanks and praise for their critical yet gracious guidance. This article was completed with support from a Summer Research Fellowship from the University of Oregon.

1 On Jinghua yuan as a feminist text, see: Hu Shi, "A Chinese Declaration of the Rights of Women, (The Ching-hua yiian of Li Ju-chen)," Chinese Social and Political Science Review 8.2 (1924), pp. 100-109; Nancy Evans, "Social Criticism in the Ch'ing: The Novel Ching-hua yiian," Papers on China 23 (1970), pp. 52-66; Frederick Brandauer, "Women in the Ching-hua yiian: Emancipation Toward a Confucian Ideal," Journal of Asian Studies 36.4 (1977), pp. 647-660; Bao Jialin jlR , "Jinghua yuan de nannii pingdeng sixiang" gt• 0 -k kPI T, in Zhongguo funii shi lunji, 4

W•W 0 -krP

, ed. Bao Jialin (Taipei: Daoxiang chubanshe, 1988), pp. 221-38; Wu Qingyun, Female Rule in Chinese and English Literary Utopias (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1995), pp. 82-87, 90-97, and passim; on the celebration of literati culture, see: C. T. Hsia, "The Scholar Novelist and Chinese Culture: A Reapraisal of Ching-hua yiian," in Chinese Narrative, ed. Andrew H. Plaks (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), pp. 249-90; for treatment of allegory, see: H.C. Chang, Allegory and Courtesy in Spenser: A Chinese View (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1955); and Hsin-sheng Kao, "Allegory and Satire in Li Ju-chen's Ching-hiia yiian" (Diss. University of California, 1977); and for discussion of Daoist content, see: Wang Jiwen TE2•f- , "Jinghua yuan de shenhua guodu yanjiu" E$It'aEn K F~f O (MA thesis, Furen University, Taiwan, 1979); Yue Hengjun 0

- , "Penglai guixi - Lun Jinghua yuan de shijie guan" Z~ fti--- $A-

tA*~ n f NL , Xiandai wenxue ftEf ?C 5 49 (Feb. 1973), pp. 92-105; and Leo Tak-hung Chan, "Religion and Structure in the Ching-hua yiian," Tamkang Review XX, no.1 (1991), pp. 46-66. Translations of the text have focused either on episodes from the voyage or the epilogue: see Lin Tai-yi's heavily abridged Flowers in the Mirror (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1965), or H. C. Chang, Chinese Literature: Popular Fiction and Drama (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1973), pp. 405-60 (chapters 32-37) and his Allegory and Courtesy, pp. 39-71 (chapters 96- 100).

101



102 Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews 18 (1996)

garden (chapters 54-93). Yet, as I shall detail, a broad yin-yang D PJ allegorical framework informs the novel at the levels of structure and characterization and gives it a

high degree of formal coherence. Li Ruzhen's uses of the feminine are a crucial aspect of the aesthetic

patterning in Jinghua yuan. Most studies on the treatment of women in the novel have followed Hu Shi's lead in reading it as motivated by feminist concerns, even if only to

suggest that women could be the intellectual equals of men.2 However, since the idealization of beautiful and talented young women and girls had become a common theme of Qing-dynasty scholar-beauty (caizi jiaren :t #- f A) romances to the extent that these women were often treated as interchangeable with their male counterparts,3 Jinghua yuan is not unusual in this regard. My purpose here is to read Jinghua yuan against this body of politically-engaged interpretations in order to question the

contradictory meanings associated with the feminine in the characterizations of the historical figure Empress Wu Zetian A ~IJ ) (624-705) and the idealized hundred talented beauties which fracture the novel on a semantic level. By shifting attention

away from the question of Li's "feminist intent," I read his characterizations of women as a metaphorical projection of his ambivalence toward the literati's place in society as moral and political leaders.

Jinghua yuan is only one of many late-imperial novels that depict the position of scholar-bureaucrat as increasingly diminished in authority. The figures on the almost paralyzing competition in the examination system are too well known to rehearse here.4 By the early nineteenth century, fictional accounts often treat being raised to official status, one of the crowning achievements in a scholar's life, with as much trepidation as joy due to the precarious nature of official service. In chapter 7 of Jinghua yuan, Tang Ao is demoted from third-place tanhua fJ* 4T• in the imperial examination to the lowest-level scholar xiucai A 1 status. In the mid nineteenth- century novel Ernii yingxiong zhuan tXiha f4 (The Heroic Youths), which follows the cliched ending of scholar-beauty romances by endowing the hero at the end with two beautiful wives and success in the examination system, both the father and son of this banner family seem to regard news of official postings to distant provinces as a form of exile; even worse, the father is fined heavily and imprisoned within months of

2See Hu Shi, "A Chinese Declaration of the Rights of Women"; Ono Kazuko /J] %f I• - has

argued that the depiction of women learned in evidential studies in Jinghua yuan suggests that scholarly knowledge was not the exclusive purview of men. See her "Kydka gen no sekai" $tc1 ) JE t Ft~, Shiso ,T , (1984:7), pp. 40-55.

3See Keith McMahon, "The Classic 'Beauty-Scholar' Romance and the Superiority of Women," in Body, Subject, and Power in China, ed. Angela Zito and Tani E. Barlow (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), pp. 229, 236; and Richard Hessney, "Beautiful, Talented, and Brave: Seventeenth-Century Beauty-Scholar Romances" (Diss. Columbia University, 1979), pp. 166-69.

4See Ho Ping-ti, The Ladder of Success in Imperial China: Aspects of Social Mobility, 1368-1911 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1962), pp. 186-90; Benjamin A. Elman estimates that of the total two million candidates who participated in the examination system, 1.5% made it to licentiate status, and 0.01% made it through the highest level metropolitan examinations. See his "Changes in Confucian Civil Service Examinations from the Ming to the Ch'ing Dynasty," in Education and Society in Late Imperial China, 1600- 1900, ed. Benjamin A. Elman and Alexander Woodside (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), p. 117.



EPSTEIN Engendering Order 103

assuming office.5 A second trend which seems to have left certain of the literati

questioning their status as leaders of the Confucian order was the displacement of neo-Confucian practices of self-cultivation (zixiu 0 ) by evidential studies (kaozheng xue ) as the central intellectual discourse during the Qing.6 As Stephen Roddy and Martin Huang have observed, this loss of an ethics-based discourse as the core of a scholar's intellectual identity seems to have left the fiction of the period with a great deal of ambivalence about the moral adequacy of the scholar class.7 Jinghua yuan's spatial organization, where China's political center is scattered and dispersed outside of China's borders, can be read as emblematic of literati fears of displacement and

marginalization during this period of increased social mobility and competition, as well as concern about their role as society's political and moral leaders. Indeed, given that Li Ruzhen was working on the novel only decades before the outbreak of the

Opium War in 1839 and the Taiping uprising in 1851,8 one is almost tempted to read the scattering of the Tang court as prescient of the turmoil that was soon to expose the limits of imperial power.

I. Structural Patterns

Although modem readers and critics are often apologetic regarding the novel's length and episodic structure, the work was a great success among nineteenth-

century readers who kept up a steady demand for it, resulting in the publication of editions of varying quality.9 The popularity of Jinghua yuan may in part be due to its rich intertextual weave of elements from earlier masterpieces of the classical and vernacular canon, as well as the erudite knowledge culled from Li's own research in

5Wen Kang 5C R, Ernii yingxiong zhuan (Taipei: Sanmin shuju, 1983), chapter 1, pp. 13 and chapter 40, pp. 573-76 (for the family crises engendered by official promotion), chapter 2, p. 24 (for imprisonment of the father).

6For the rise of evidential studies, see Benjamin A. Elman, From Philosophy to Philology: Intellectual and Social Aspects of Change in Late Imperial China (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Council on East Asian Studies, 1990), esp. pp. 26-36.

7Stephen Roddy, "Rulin waishi and the Representation of Literati in Qing Fiction" (Diss. Princeton University, 1990), pp. 9-10, 19-23, and passim; and Martin Huang, Literati and Self-Re/Presentation: Autobiographical Sensibility in the Eighteenth-Century Chinese Novel (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), pp. 27-36, 145, and passim.

8 Li Ruzhen wrote the novel during a period of over ten years; he seems to have completed it in 1817, and it was first printed in 1818. He continued to revise the novel several times between the appearance of the earliest edition in 1818 and the illustrated 1828 Jiezi yuan IF -T-0 edition; most changes were minor linguistic substitutions and the strengthening of the characterization of the central female character, Tang Guichen, by assigning other characters' speeches to her. See Sun Jiaxun , J1R , Jinghua yuan gong'an bianyi /

*~-F~~,• • (Jinan: Qilu shushe, 1984), pp. 37-48. In contrast to Sun Kaidi , *

who identified the earliest extant text as the 1828 Jiezi yuan edition (Zhongguo tongsu xiaoshuo shumu g i

- f/J ] ~ 1 [1933. Reprint. Beijing: Renmin wenxue, 1982], p. 178), Sun Jiaxun has tentatively pushed

back the date of this text to 1818 and identified the place of publication as Suzhou, pp. 48-49, 133). My page references are to the reprint of the illustrated 1888 Shanghai Dianshi zhai

5, e edition entitled Huitu

Jinghua yuan *M @! ab4 (Beijing: Zhongguo shudian, 1985). 9 The Beijing Library alone houses ten editions, dated 1830, 1842, 1858, 1877, 1888, Guangxu 6

* (1875-1908), 1890 (2), 1895, and 1897.




phonetics.10 The encyclopedic range of allusions to the classics, vernacular fiction, and recondite information in Jinghua yuan, though daunting and often frustrating to the

modem reader who is accustomed to reading for tight narrative development, would have appealed to the taste of traditional readers trained in the pleasures of identifying intertextual resonances and structural patterning. The thematic climax, the thirty- chapter gathering of the hundred flower spirits banished to earth as talented girls, is a clear attempt to outdo the poetry gatherings of the twelve flower spirits in Honglou meng jJ ,4 (Dream of the Red Chamber, also known as The Story of the Stone)." In fact, one of the girls self-consciously remarks on the historical uniqueness of the gathering of one hundred girls (chapter 71, p. 3a). Though the sentimental Jinghua yuan idealizes the feminine, it also borrows from the violent and often misogynist Shuihu zhuan 7J j4 jq (Outlaws of the Marsh). In chapter 48, one hundred jade tablets list the names of the hundred flower-spirits; as in Shuihu, the tablets are inscribed in the "tadpole" (kedou tJ

t4,) calligraphic style which only Tang Guichen Jf A (literally, Lady Minister of the Tang), the leader of the flower spirits, is able to read. The gradual accumulation of the full complement of girls, accomplished only in chapter 69, is reminiscent of the

gathering of the Liangshan heroes in chapter 70 of Shuihu zhuan; similar to Shuihu zhuan, the discussion of the seating arrangements for the hundred successful examination candidates serves as an opportunity to record the name of each girl.12 By setting the novel during the Tang Dynasty, Li Ruzhen ensured that Tang Ao's voyage through many of the lands listed in the mythic Shanhai fing LU i t (Classic of the Mountains and Seas) would evoke both that Han geographical classic and Xuanzang's 3 quest in Xiyou ji Mf E (The Journey to the West).13 Similar to the allegoric structure of Xiyou ji, Tang Ao's quest simultaneously brings geo-political order to the countries he passes through while culminating in his own enlightenment.14 The conclusion, the architectural rendering of the allegory of the four vices of excess (sitan V9 ], chapters 94-100) is similar to Dong Yue's f* 1 (1620-1686) Xiyou bu W PfM (Supplement to the Journey to the West) in the way the protagonists become physically entrapped in their own desires.15

10Li's own study of phonology, Yin jian g B, is no longer extant. Chapters 17 of Jinghua yuan contains a discussion of historical changes in pronunciation, and chapter 31 diagrams a phonetic system to record contemporary pronunciation.

11 As C.T. Hsia has discussed, the gathering in Jinghua yuan is an extended celebration of high- Qing literary culture. The girls discuss card games (chapter 74, pp. 1b-2b), go and other chess games (chapter 74, pp. 2b-3a), quoits and archery (chapters 74, pp. 3a-3b, and 79, pp. la-2a), swinging (chapter 74, pp. 3b-4a), and drinking games (chapter 78, pp. la-lb). The brilliant drinking poem which spans chapters 82 to 87 is a phonetic tour deforce of rhyme and alliteration.

12 A further allusion to Shuihu zhuan may be the huntress Luo Hongqu ~I , one of the twelve central flower spirits, who appears in chapter 10 camouflaged in a tiger skin. Unlike Li Kui ?p whose battle with a tiger leads to his mother's death, Luo Hongqu hunts in order to avenge her mother.

13 In addition to culling details from the Shanhai jing, Li also borrowed from the Bowu zhi fj~ '

,,, Huainanzi

--, and Shenyi ji $$ E. See Wang Jiwen, "Shenhua guodu yanjiu," pp. 7-11.

14 Unlike Xiyou ji, Tang's enlightenment is clearly Daoist. See Yue, "Penglai guixi," and Chan, "Religion and Structure."

15 Xiyou bu has been translated into English as Tower of Myriad Mirrors by Shuen-fu Lin and

Larry Schultz (Berkeley: Asian Humanities Press, 1977). The epilogue to Jinghua yuan has been translated in Chang, Allegory and Courtesy, pp. 39-71.




Li Ruzhen's seemingly exhaustive attempts at intertextual inclusion produced a text which almost defies a unified reading. Yet there are clear indications that Li was

cognizant of some of the structural features of the "canonical" novels and used them to shape his own sprawling work. In accordance with novelistic conventions, Jinghua yuan opens with a supernatural frame story which motivates the action of the main

plot. Though it does not divide into ten-chapter units, it follows the normative structural pattern of the hundred-chapter novel by dividing neatly into two narrative

hemispheres at the midway point, and in using numerically "mirroring" chapters to establish a series of structural frames.16 By mirroring chapters I mean those paired numbers that are inverse but symmetrical in position, so that in a hundred-chapter work, chapter 10 mirrors chapter 90, chapter 25 mirrors chapter 75, etc.; parallel numbers are those that fall in the same position in a sequence, so that chapters 9, 19, and 29 are parallel to each other. Where mirroring emphasizes static structural

patterns, parallel sequences lend a sense of narrative progression. The first section, set

largely outside China in a geographically dispersed space vaguely referred to as "overseas" (haiwai i ?? ), architecturally contrasts with the second half, which takes

place within China, mostly in the enclosed space of a garden. Though the novel clearly breaks into two halves, there is some ambiguity about which narrative moment

represents the midway point. In chapters 49 and 50, the exact numerical midpoint, the two most important of the girls descend from Little Penglai Mountain, a utopian Daoist fairlyland replete with magical plants, waterfalls, and numinous aura, and

begin the voyage back to China. The structural importance of chapter 50 as a

"centering" chapter is.heightened when the voyagers return to Two-Faced Country Pg ff i, a country they had first visited in chapter 25. However, an equally strong caesura falls in chapter 48, which concludes with Tang Ao's enlightenment on Little

Penglai Mountain, and is paralleled in chapter 95 when Tang Ao's daughter, the reincarnation of the Hundred-Flowers Fairy -- "f , returns to Penglai Island for her own enlightenment. That Small Penglai Island contains many of the places named in the mythological prologue strengthens the argument for considering chapter 48 as the

centering chapter. Mirroring chapters frame the narrative in the events of the mythological

prologue (chapters 1-6) which are invoked and brought to closure in the six-chapter allegorical conclusion (chapters 94-100). In the prologue, the hundred flower fairies are exiled to earth as punishment for blooming out of season. On earth, the celestial

disruption is matched by Wu Zetian's usurpation of the Tang throne and establishment of the Zhou FJ dynasty (690-705), the scattering of the Tang loyalists (among whom are many of the flower spirits), and Wu Zetian's forcing of her garden to bloom in the dead of winter. In the epilogue, the cycle of karmic retribution is

brought to a close when Tang Ao's daughter reverts to her celestial identity, Wu Zetian is defeated by an army of Tang loyalists, and the Tang dynasty is reinstated. Connections between the mirroring chapters 36 and 66 also shore up the structure of

16 Andrew Plaks has argued that the inviolability of the hundred-chapter length for xiaoshuo novels was established by 1592, as shown by the Shidetang tL?

,f I edition of the Xiyou ji which

maintained a hundred-chapter format despite its textual rearrangement of the material on Xuanzang's childhood which makes up chapter 9 of other editions. See his The Four Masterworks of the Ming Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), pp. 202-203.




the novel; the fact that characters from chapter 36 reappear quite abruptly and

seemingly arbitrarily in chapter 66 indicates that the parallelism was motivated by structural concerns, not plot. Though the numbers 36 and 66 are not perfect numeric mirrors, for reasons I discuss below, they form a perfect numeric pun based on the use of a double six (36 of course equalling 6 times 6).17

II Yin-yang Numerology and Structure

In contrast to Honglou meng where the structural framework is intricately woven into the details of the plot and characterization, the structural patterns in

Jinghua yuan often seem to be mechanically superimposed over a pastiche of loosely- connected episodes. However, enough evidence exists to argue that Li Ruzhen

consciously manipulated a well-articulated narrative code based on yin-yang symbolism to give structural and thematic unity to his novel. Yin-yang patterning has been given comparatively little attention in the scholarship on traditional xiaoshuo fiction, though it is an important key to understanding specific aspects of structural

organization and characterization in many late-Ming and Qing texts.18 This is

especially true of Jinghua yuan as a novel about female rule in China. The abstract yin- yang patterning is foregrounded in key chapters where Li Ruzhen makes conscious use of numerological "puns" based on the yin number six and the yang number nine. In Yijing A *? (The Book of Changes) numerology, six and nine are the numerical values ascribed to the extreme manifestations of yin and yang when they are at the peak of their volatility; thus, in interpreting hexagrams, yin and yang lines are numbered six and nine respectively. Different phases of change are assigned different values, so that

quiescent yin and yang were equated with eight and seven respectively.19 Recent scholarship has made great progress in mapping out the poetics of

Ming and Qing xiaoshuo fiction to shed light on how long narratives are structured and derive meaning from five-element i {] correlative symbolic systems, yin-yang bipolarity, and karmic retribution, as well as specifically Buddhist, Daoist, and

syncretist neo-Confucian enlightenment narratives.20 However, since neither sexual

17 Another example of structural parallels occurs in chapters 7-8 where Tang Ao prepares to flee China, and chapters 57-58 where the loyalist forces begin to assemble.

18 One exception is the introduction to Wang Shifu, The Moon and the Zither: the Story of the Western Wing, trans. Stephen H. West and Wilt Idema (Berkeley: University of California, 1991), where West and Idema contrast the the structural use of yang-associated terms (e.g. light, the sun, heat, maleness, the public world, generative force, and activity) to yin-associated terms (e.g. darkness, the moon, cold, femaleness, the private world, receptivity, and passivity), pp. 77-78.

19Hellmut Wilhelm, Change: Eight Lectures on the I Ching, trans. Cary F. Baynes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), p. 41.

20 For example, see Andrew H. Plaks, Archetype and Allegory in Dream of the Red Chamber (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), and his Four Masterworks; David Roy, "Translator's Commentary," Renditions 24 (1985), pp. 18-24, and "Introduction," The Plum in the Golden Vase or Chin P'ing Mei (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. xxxii-xlviii; Katherine Carlitz, The Rhetoric of Chin p'ing mei, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986); Paul Martinson, "Pao, Order, and Redemption: Perspectives on Chinese Religion and Society Based on the Chin P'ing Mei" (Diss. University of Chicago, 1973); Anthony Yu, "Introduction," The Journey to the West (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977) vol. 1, pp. 36-62.




differences nor gender are included in traditional commentaries as a substantial category of analysis, modem scholars have overlooked their importance as structuring devices. My analysis of the yin-yang narrative codes in Jinghua yuan, including their relevance to gendered roles and identities, is meant to complement other structural research on traditional Chinese fiction by adding gendered differences as a tool of structural analysis.21 A point that I elaborate in greater detail below is that the relationship between the meanings embedded in the yin-yang framework and the

gendering of specific characters is complex and frequently contradictory.22 In metaphysical discourse, yin and yang are posited as mutually comple-

mentary and interdependent forces, where yang is the sun, the male, brightness, fire, heat, activity, etc., and yin is the moon, the female, darkness, water, cold, receptivity, etc. Procreation, the processes of change, and the full range of experiences and phenomena depend on a free and endless mixing of these two equal properties; at various points of the calendrical or life cycle, one or the other will gain in force until it is dominant, but soon thereafter it peaks and begins to recede until the other is dominant. The pure yang position is represented as the Qian $ hexagram .; as described in Richard John Lynn's translation of the Yijing, the function of the Qian hexagram is regulative:

[Qian] manifests its fitness and constancy by making the innate tendencies of things conform to their natures .... The power in Qian to provide origins is such that it can make all under Heaven fit by means of its own beautiful fitness. One does not say how it confers fitness; it just is great! How great Qian is! It is strong, dynamic, central, correct, and it is absolutely pure in its unadulteredness and unsulliedness.23

The parallel description of the pure yin Kun }J hexagram 1 shows that its reproductive potential was thought to be unstable and could result in the creation of disorder unless properly controlled:

How great is the fundamental nature of Kun! The myriad things are provided their births by it, and in so doing it compliantly carries out Heaven's will.... For one who is yielding and compliant, it is fitting to practice constancy here, and the noble man who sets out to do something, if he takes the lead, will be in breach of the Dao, but if he follows and is compliant, he will find his rightful place.24

Where the Qian hexagram tends toward continuation of a stable order, inherent in the very mutability of the Kun hexagram is a potential for transgressive (re)production if it fails to conform to the proper patterns established by Qian.

21Angelina C. Yee analyzes how reversed gender positions between Jia Baoyu and Wang Xifeng adds to the complementary structure of the masculine and feminine worlds in Honglou meng in her "Counterpoise in Honglou meng," Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 50 (1990), p. 641.

22Alison H. Black discusses the connections between gender and correlative thinking in her "Gender and Cosmology in Chinese Correlative Thinking," in Gender and Religion: On the Complexity of Symbols, ed. Caroline Walker Bynum et al. (Boston: Beacon, 1984), pp. 166-95.

23Richard John Lynn, The Classic of Changes, A New Translation of the I Ching as Interpreted by Wang Bi (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 130.

24Ibid., p. 143.




Though yin and yang are treated as equal, complementary, and fluid from a

metaphysical perspective, the regulatory function of yang and the unstable fertility associated with yin took on a fixed moral valence within the socio-ethical discourse of Confucianism. When trying to stabilize human interactions and fix patterns of behavior through the five cardinal relationships (wulun Eft) and other aspects of ritual, the Confucian philosophers idealized a fixed hierarchical order where the yang subject position (as ruler, parent, elder, male) is always superior to yin (subject, child, cadet, female).25 Whereas yang connotes regulative order in society and nature, yin when

properly controlled supports and regenerates the metaorder, and when not properly contained can become a transgressive force that subverts the metaorder.26

Yin and yang can be thought of as two poles on a continuum. At one pole is

yang, represented by Confucian orthodoxy; though necessary to guarantee the smooth continuation of the social order, when taken to extreme it can be overly rigid and

repressive. At the other end of the continuum is extreme yin, an inchoate and volatile

space where radical transformations, such as that between birth and death, occur.27

Though the procreative powers of yin are essential for the regeneration of order, when taken to extreme they are so chaotically unstable that they are able to threaten the continuation of order.28 Ideally, the two should work in generative concert, as in the

25 As Angela Zito has argued, ritual position rather than biology determines hierarchical status, so that women could fill the ritually superior yang role. See her "Silk and Skin: Significant Boundaries," in Body, Subject and Power in China, p. 106.

26 The anthroplogist Steven Sangren has argued that the unchanging metaorder, posited as yang, hierarchically encompasses the myriad manifestations of yin-yang interactions. See his History and Magical Power in a Chinese Community (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987), p. 134.

27The multivalent quality of yin is captured in the symbolism of popular life-cycle rituals where yin is paradoxically associated with both life and death. As James Watson has described in Cantonese funeral ceremonies, women play a prominent role in burial ceremonies where they help absorb and control the polluting airs associated with death; he suggests that this passive aspect of death pollution is linked to women's fertility as the coins and cloth used in the funeral ceremony are often rewoven into the harnesses women use to carry children (James L.Watson, "Of Flesh and Bones: The Management of Death Pollution in Cantonese Society," in Death and the Regeneration of Life, ed. Maurice Bloch and Jonathan Parry [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982], pp. 155-186). Birth, although a happy event, is also seen as highly polluting. The parturition ceremonies (zuoyuezi 4I JP ) treat the delivery of life as a highly unstable period where great care needs to be taken with certain yin-associated items: the afterbirth must be disposed of properly, and the mother herself is contained within her room for a month where she may not wash her hair (Emily M. Ahern, "The Power and Pollution of Chinese Women," in Women in Chinese Society, eds. Margery Wolf and Roxane Witke [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975], pp. 171-73). As Watson explains, hair is associated with yin ("Of Flesh and Bones," p. 162). During her confinement, the mother traditionally replenishes her yang energy (buyang " %J ) by consuming large quantities of a yang-rich chicken and rice-wine broth. The inherent instability of yin is encapsulated in the symbolism of these two transitional events: death, which is negative, is linked to fertility; and birth, a positive event, is filled with pollution. Both rituals function to contain the unstable, polluting, and even destructive potential of yin energy and channel it to ensure that it nurtures life. This dual conceptualization of yin in ritual parallels the descriptions of blood in traditional medical compendia. Yin blood was always paired with a male principle qi, but blood was further divided into the categories of vitality and decay. The constant flux in blood crucial to the menstrual cycle was used to explain women's physical vulnerability and emotional instability. See Charlotte Furth, "Blood, Body, and Gender," Chinese Science 7 (1986), pp. 45, 58.

28The renowned late-Ming play Mudan ting ft - # (Peony Pavilion) illustrates the tension between the two poles of regulative yang, represented by Magistrate Du's t rigid neo-Confucian values, and the constantly metamorphizing yin world of feeling occupied by his daughter Du Liniang I

~ , where she appears variously as dream, flesh and blood, painting, and ghost.




case of ritual, where the regulative force of impartial ritual shapes the proper expression of subjective feelings (qing 14). Jinghua yuan betrays an ambivalent attitude toward the often contradictory cultural values associated with yin and yang. Despite the novel's obvious sympathy for the creative talents of the beautiful flower spirits which are allowed to flourish under the rule of the usurping Empress Wu Zetian, the

very fact of Wu Zetian's rule threatens the regulative metaorder. The yin number six is exploited repeatedly in the structuring of Jinghua yuan.

The novel is unusual in that, despite its hundred-chapter length, the structural

patterns are based on the number six rather than on the more usual complements of five or ten.29 The introductory and concluding sections of the novel are both six

chapters long, as I have argued chapter 48 (6 times 8) overshadows chapter 50 (the numerical center) as a midway point,30 and chapters 36 and 66 are intentionally paired. The importance of the yin number six to the structure of Jinghua yuan corresponds to the novel's thematic exploration of a yin-dominated cosmos where men are eclipsed by women in both the heavenly and political spheres.

Women and topics related to the feminine are foregrounded in the six-chapter prologue. The novel begins with a brief discussion of proper behavior for women as

presented in Ban Zhao's *)Mw (32-92 C.E.) Nii jie t ("Instructions for Women").31

In ancient times Grand Instructress Cao [Ban Zhao] said: "Women have Four Aspects: the first is called feminine virtue; the second is called feminine speech; the third is called feminine appearance; the fourth is called feminine work. These are the four principles women cannot do without. Why do I use Ban Zhao's "Instructions for Women" as an introduction for this work? Because, though this book records the trivial events of the women's quarters and the casual affections between men and women, these are just what the Grand Instructress referred to as the Four Aspects.

29 For a discussion of narrative "decades," see Plaks, Four Masterworks, pp. 73-75. Though ten seems to be the favored number for structural patterns, other novels use different numbers: nines dominate the allegorical numerology of Xiyou ji (Plaks, Four Masterworks, pp. 204-5); Zhou Ruchang J)$ & 8 has argued for the structural and thematic importance of nines and twelves in Honglou meng when he suggests that the original design for the novel was 108 chapters (Honglou meng yu Zhonghua wenhua A ff f Ai N l • It [Taipei: Dongda tushu gongsi, 1989], pp. 241-44). The forty-chapter Ernii yingxiong zhuan, which was consciously written in reaction to Honglou meng, juggles tens and twelves in its structure. See Maram Epstein, "Beauty is the Beast: The Dual Face of Woman in Four Ch'ing novels" (Diss. Princeton University, 1992), pp. 296-97. The Qing novel Lin Lan Xiang # M W (earliest extant edition 1838) is sixty- four chapters long and divided into eight eight-chapter units. See Keith McMahon, Misers, Shrews, and Polygamists: Sexuality and Male-Female Relationships in Eighteenth-Century Chinese Fiction (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1995), pp. 206-207.

30Though the return home in chapter 50 marks the spatial division of the novel, a stronger thematic caesura falls in chapter 48 where Tang Ao becomes a Daoist immortal, and the girls learn their true identity from the hundred jade steles on the pinnacle of Little Penglai Mountain.

31Opening with a token nod toward this classic for women may have been a defensive move designed to mitigate the political dangers of writing a novel about usurpation while the foreign Manchu court was in power. For a traditional reading of Jinghua yuan as an anti-Manchu political allegory, see You Xinxiong t fah, "Jinghua yuan de zhuzhi ji qi chengjiu" •0 It 19 ) -

- , Li Ruzhen yanjiu ziliao S

j j~of Iof* (Taipei: Tianyi chubanshe, 1981), pp. 31-33. In Female Rule, Wu Qingyun argues that the reference to Ban Zhao's "Instructions for Women" is an ironic subversion of the four feminine virtues, pp. 95-97.




P-Wtt fiM r , 9M ?Zk '

, Af 9 1 ' W

,,•P M p--uf Vff (chapter 1, p. la).

The narrative that follows this didactic warning to women pointedly illustrates what

happens when women do not respect their proper social roles. All the goddesses gather at Mount Kunlun to celebrate the birthday of the Daoist figure Mother-Queen of the West, Xiwangmu iNTi E . Xiwangmu's birthday is celebrated on the third day of the third lunar month; in China this date was a traditional festival day, and in Japan continues to be celebrated as the girls' holiday.32 According to the Yueling ,J (Monthly Ordinances) section of the Liji E (Book of Rites), the third day of the third month marks that point of the lunar calendar where cosmic yin energy is at the peak of its strength; this is a critical juncture in the calendrical cycle, for if yin failed to cede to yang on this date, the cosmic order would be thrown into disarray.33 In Ming-Qing fiction, the date is often associated with periods of political upheaval or excessive female power.34 Significantly, Nii xian waishi .k& f[ 5 P (The History of the Female Immortal), another novel about female leadership, also begins with the celebration of Xiwangmu's birthday. That the cycle of yin excess has drawn to a close in Jinghua yuan is shown in chapter 96, when the Tang loyalists choose the third day of the third lunar month as the date to begin the uprising against Wu Zetian (chapter 96, p. la). Further repetitions of the doubled-three highlight the yin associations of the motif: for example, the episode in the Country of Women begins in chapter 33; and in chapter 65, perhaps in anticipation of the yin chapter 66, a group of the girls inconclusively debate the significance of the coincidence that there are 33 of them gathered together, that the apricot flowers have 33 petals, and that they have drawn a divination stick with three-three written on it (chapter 65, pp. 3a-4a).

The six-chapter prologue is set during a period of yin ascendency. A full panoply of goddesses gathers for Xiwangmu's birthday banquet; as one of them points out, it is unusual that no male deities are present. Stranger yet is that the god of

32See Suzanne Cahill, "Performers and Female Taoist Adepts: Hsi Wang Mu as the Patron Deity of Women in Medieval China," Journal of the American Oriental Society 106.1 (1986), pp. 155-68.

33Another possible explanation for the association of this date with women was its conflation with the Cold Food Festival (hanshi

. ) and the later Qingming *j *R (Tomb-sweeping) holiday.

Originally, Qingming was determined by the solar calendar and thus had no fixed date in the commonly used lunar calendar. However, the Yuan-dynasty Sanguo zhi ping hua = N 2 iTZ records Qingming as being fixed on the third day of the third month (Shanghai: Gudian wenxue, 1955), p. 1. Qingming replaced the Lustration Festival (xi 1V , also known as the Festival of Purgation (fuchu ?R W) which had been celebrated on the third day of the third month. Though the roots and significance of the latter festival are unclear, it was associated with spring fertility, sexual rites, purification, and the care of the dead-all yin events. See Derk Bodde, Festivals in Classical China (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), pp. 273-88. Bodde also describes the Han-dynasty "Fire Renewal Festival" which predated the Cold Food Festival and Qingming. The practice of using yang-firemakers to renew the fire also indicates a concern for ensuring the dominance of yang forces at this critical calendrical moment; pp. 299-301.

34 The first precise date mentioned in the Shuihu zhuan is the third day, of the third month, of the third year of the Jiayou reign period (Chen Xizhong NtUIi let al., eds., Shuihu zhuan huiping ben 7J*i l4# •]S• [Beijing: Beijing daxue, 19811, "Xiezi" [Prologue], p. 41). The notorious swing scene in chapter 25 of Jin Ping Mei takes place on this date. Also see the description of the temple visit in chapter 73 of Xingshi yinyuan zhuan -tfi ~f 4W (Marriage Bonds to Awaken the World). In a different vein, Jia Baoyu's W Wit dementia in chapter 70 of Honglou meng sets in on the second or third day of the third month.




the literary examinations has been transformed into female form. The Hundred- Grasses Fairy -fV ? -7- explains:

That the literary god now appears in female form leaves no doubt that this is a female [Kun I$ ] sign. I have also heard that the jade stele [announcing successful examination candidates] is particularly bright after noon or on even days; this is not as it usually is. In terms of yin and yang, afternoon and pairs belong to yin, literary glory resides in talent, pure yin resides in women. According to these portents, could it not be that surely the literary talents will all be daughters of good families!

p. lb).

Ironically, given that Ban Zhao's exhortations to female modesty directly pre- cede the celebration, the major theme of the birthday party is the perversion of the

proper political and seasonal order. Chang'e ~ j is the central character in the scene. Rather than develop the more common sympathetic aspect of the Chang'e myth, where she is portrayed as a divine and lonely beauty, this narrative draws out the subversive aspect of the myth, the story of a wife who was banished to the moon for

deceiving her husband and stealing the elixir of life. In the novel, Chang'e tries to force all the flowers to bloom simultaneously. The Hundred-Flowers Fairy refuses, explaining that each flower should bloom according to its proper season, that to

tamper with this would reverse the natural hierarchy of yin and yang (diandao yinyang 0l] ffj , chapter 2, p. ib), and that she would prefer to be exiled to earth rather than commit such an infamy:

What king of the four seas and nine continents, ruling on behalf of Heaven, would dare to invert yin and yang and force these hardships on people? Indeed, even if [you], Chang'e, were to go down to the world and become an empress and issue this immoral command, I would still refuse. At such a time were I to be confused enough to permit the hundred flowers to bloom together, I would be willing to descend to the world of red dust and suffer the endless torments of the sea of sin with no regrets.

fa • ,I -Tk2, M -,M YWA a o Jl *' I it, f-lff V' 1J* t 1M t 1

_ r'' ' Z , 7

c.i,.@lo (chapter 2, p. ib)

Chang'e eventually tricks them into flowering, and the hundred flower spirits are banished to earth.35 The indignant vow of the Hundred-Flowers Fairy exposes the fundamental split in the novel between the sympathetic female characters who, no matter how appealing to the readers, are dispersed on earth as a form of punishment, and those rebellious women who would subvert the "natural" order of yang dominance. The gathering of the flower-spirits on earth is the anomolous result of an act of transgression, not something to be emulated.

The chaotic upheavals in Heaven are paralleled on earth in the reincarnation of the Heart-Moon Fox (Xinyue hu ,1, ,J) as Empress Wu Zetian which further

35 Chang'e's deception is carried out with the help of heavy yin clouds which cause the Hundred- Flowers Fairy to be absent (chapter 2, p. 2b).




disrupts the yin-yang balance (cuo luan yinyang ijiL iDP, chapter 3, p.lb). The day the Heart-Moon Fox chooses to descend to earth is Taiyin k , the coldest part of the winter, when yin is at its peak (chapter 3, p. ib). When Wu Zetian reenacts Chang'e's transgressions by creating an artifical summer at the height of winter, the trees have

interlocking branches and the flowers bloom with double calyxes. As one of the witnesses interprets it, "these are yin portents, and yin is the symbol of women" (A

0 , 0 f V X W : W . z: , chapter 5, p. 2a.). In an earlier fictional treatment of this scene in the 1695 novel Sui Tang yanyi r R * TA (The Romance of the Sui and Tang), the weather when the flowers blossom is described as clear and warm (liangri tianqi shen shi qinghuo P F3 F Q % &9 ff l Ql), even though it is already autumn.36 That Li Ruzhen places the seasonal setting as Taiyin in his treatment of the event suggests that he was consciously manipulating yin-yang symbolism; that he further added the detail that Wu Zetian is drunk when she orders the flowers to bloom reinforces the depiction of her moral corruption.37

Mirroring the yin symbols in the prologue section are the yang terms in the

six-chapter epilogue in which the male loyalist troops gather to overthrow Wu Zetian. The auspicious double-yang holiday (chongyang jiqi R ~& •) on the ninth day of the ninth month marks the beginning of the epilogue (chapter 94, p. 2b).38 The rise of yang forces in this section is further suggested by the discussion by some of the Tang loyalists of a medicine which is able to cure a disease of the jueyin jing RJD W artery (chapter 95, p. 2b); the artery can be glossed as a pun for jueyin M ,D "cutting off the

yin." At the end of that same chapter the unnecessary repetition of the word taiyang It W (sun) in a pair of military poems may indicate an intentional mirroring of the Taiyin in chapter 5.39

Yin themes also dominate chapter 36 (6 times 6), the key yin chapter of the novel,40 and probably the most extensively discussed episode in the work. chapter 36 is set in Women's Country (Nii'er guo k;Q ), a symbolic microcosm of the novel. The most immediate source of this episode was the Land of Women at Xi Liang qW

k" M in chapters 54 and 55 of Xiyou ji. Li Ruzhen again changed his source materials to

36Sui Tang yanyi (Taipei: Shijie shuju, 1962), chapter 73, p. 562. 37 The first four lines of chapter 4 repeat the world alcohol (jiu Yj) seven times.

38G6ran Aijmer suggests that the yang Double Nine Festival (chongyang jie _ t %i) parallels the

yin Double Three Festival, in his "Chong-Yang and the Ceremonial Calendar in Central China," in An Old State in New Settings: Studies in the Social Anthropology of China in Memory of Maurice Freedman, ed. Hugh Baker and Stephan Feuchtwang (Oxford: JASO, 1991), p. 180.

39 The mention of the foundational Qian and Kun hexagrams in the second poem also suggests a direct connection to the cosmic order.

40 In his prefatory and interlinear commentary to chapter 33 of Jin Ping Mei, Zhang Zhupo three times stresses the connection between the number six and the yin principle (Zhang Zhupo, Zhang Zhupo piping Jin Ping Mei

' / j:O , 2 vol., [Jinan: Qilu shushe, 1991], pp. 492-3, 503). The introduction of the sexually unsavory character Wang Liu'er T

, \ in this chapter builds upon the "sixness" of her

name (see Plaks, Four Masterworks, p. 89ff). As Zhang Xinzhi NVFT-Zcomments, a similar pun is invoked in chapter six of Honglou meng where Liu Laolao j j * (Grannie Liu) enters the narrative (Honglou meng Sanjia pingben hI4_* E

_ -TZ [Shanghai: Guji chuban she, 1988] p. 6; translated by Andrew H. Plaks, in

How to Read the Chinese Novel, ed. David L. Rolston [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990], "Dufa" 3- a [how-to-read essay] items 23 and 26, pp. 333-36). In his postchapter comments to chapter 36, Zhang Xinzhi echoes Zhang Zhupo in calling the double six "the ultimate yin number" yinji zhi shu W4Z. a (Sanjia pingben, p. 574).




heighten a sense of yin subversion of yang. Where the Women's Country in Xiyou ji is inhabited only by women, the Jinghua yuan version inverts male and female gender roles so that the Women's Country functions as a microcosm of China under Wu Zetian's rule.41 In this country, not only are men under the political control of women, they suffer bound feet, are sequestered within the house, and spend their time doing needlework and raising children, while women enjoy the freedoms usually reserved for men. As in the Land of Women episode in Xiyou ji, the licentious female "King" is smitten with Lin Zhiyang # Z *, the most handsome of Tang Ao's fellow travellers.42 In an inversion of the usual topos of the kidnapped beauty, palace retainers imprison Lin, bind his feet, and pierce his ears in preparation for making him "Queen." Parallel to this example of yin g excess inside the palace walls are the flood waters which threaten the inhabitants of the Women's Country. In return for Lin's release, Tang Ao

promises to dredge the river using scrap metal from the ship's hold. In addition to placing this episode in chapter 36, Li Ruzhen also makes a

number of other changes to the Xiyou ji material to foreground the yin-yang symbolism. The chief minister of the government is surnamed Kun f*, and the name of the "crown-prince" is the feminine Yin Ruohua ; (Yin Like a Flower). Though H. C. Chang may be correct that the flood in chapter 36 reflects Li Ruzhen's own interest in flood control,43 the placement of the flood, an emblematic expression of yin excess, precisely in this key yin chapter suggests, however, that the event should be read symbolically. That Tang Ao succeeds in dredging the river due only to his access to metal, a yang element that is so rare in the Country of Women that laws forbid the

fashioning of it into tools (chapter 36, p. la), further implies the need for a symbolic reading.

The connection between women, flooding, and sexually transgressive behavior in Jinghua yuan is consistent with the long tradition in China which linked the three terms: women and water are both yin elements, and a common epithet in traditional fiction for women is "watery-natured" (shuixing 7j jI,), meaning fickle or

dissolute.44 A semantic association between the yin principle and the yin meaning excess in the terms yinshui g 7j*, flood, or yinxing E It, dissolute, most often sexually, was fully consolidated in the writings of the great Han cosmologist Dong Zhongshu

S1frf (179-104 B.C.E.). The Wuxingzhi •t ,~ (Records of the Five Elements) section of the Hanshu • (Han History) explicitly linked flooding to women of the inner court who used their sexuality to empower themselves.45 The associative connection

41That the travellers arrive in Women's Country in chapter 33 may be an intentional allusion to the double-three with which the novel began.

42Given the nature of this scene, it is tempting to read the the Zhiyang .

' in Lin Zhiyang's name as an intentional pun on Y %, approaching yang.

43H. C. Chang traces Li Ruzhen's interest in floods to his appointment in 1801 as assistant magistrate to a county of Honan where the Yellow River had flooded, as well as to the treatise on water conservation written by his father, Li Jieting. See Chinese Literature, pp. 411-13; Li's experiences in flood control are also discussed in Sun Jiaxun, Jinghua yuan gong'an bianyi, pp. 7-11.

44 The term shuixing is discussed in Keith McMahon, Causality and Containment in Seventeenth- Century Chinese Fiction (Leiden: Brill, 1988), pp. 65-66.

45 For example, in their anticipatory commentary to a passage from the Spring and Autumn Annals, Dong Zhongshu and Liu Xiang 9J [-J blame a flood (dashui t 7*J) in the 24th reign year of the Duke Zhuang E of Lu Z (670 B.C.E.) on the "excessively wanton and unladylike" (yinluan bufu g•T N4 f )




between flooding, improper sexual behavior, and female subversion of male control created a powerful literary trope frequently invoked in Ming-Qing fiction to signify loss of orthodox order.46 In his study of the shrew in eighteenth-century fiction, Keith McMahon defines the figure of shrew as a po & ("scattering") woman; one who

"spills" and splashes.47 Flooding was a common motif in Ming-Qing literature, perhaps due to its

ability to capitalize on growing concerns about increased flooding caused by the

overdevelopment of flood plains, while exploiting an ethically-charged yin-yang symbolism in ways that other natural disasters could not.48 Flooding has always been a potent archetype for the collapse of order in China;49 Peter Perdue writes of the Qing that the legitimation of the state was tied to its success in water conservancy.50 The

vocabulary of flooding-excess, fluidity, erasure of boundaries, loss of control-is

particularly inimical to the neo-Confucian goal of creating a stable, harmonious order.

Flooding also evokes the paradigmatic figure of the Sage King Yu &, whose virtue (de g) enabled him to regulate the flood waters.51 Late imperial writers drew upon the

myth of Yu, the ideal Confucian sage activist, to depict flood control as an individual

struggle against the forces of disorder, a battle that depended on moral purity and

behavior of the Duke's wife Ai Jiang A *, though at that time she had not yet become involved in the murderous intrigues to have her lover succeed her husband; Hanshu (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1962), 27A.1344.

46 For example, see the Women's Country episode in the Xiyou ji story cycle; Feng Menglong's 2 SR• "Bai Niangzi yongzhen Leifeng ta" n - 7 -j~a It a ., in Jingshi tongyan * f i '; Xingshi

yinyuan zhuan, chapters 19 and 28; Cao Xueqin W"f gj and Gao E -411, Honglou meng bashihui jiaoben E•J # k + ~[ 0 * (Hong Kong: Zhonghua shuju, 1985), chapters 30, pp. 320-21, and 70, p. 785; a flood in chapter 2 of Xia Jingqu's 1 ] R Yesou puyan $

S, is symbolic of social and politcal chaos; smaller

floods also occur in chapters 63, 83, 111, and 129 (154-chapter edition, Taipei: Whenhua tushu gongsi, 1985). The trope of flooding as a sign of political disorder has continued into the modem period in Liu E's WJ M (1857-1909) Lao Can youji t e1 (The Travels of Lao Can) and Zhang Xianliang's M (b. 1936) Nanren de yiban shi niiren $ A- P • A (Half of Man is Woman).

47 McMahon, Misers, Shrews, and Polygamists, pp. 55-58 and passim. 48 Since the majority of literati were from flood-prone regions in the south, it was perhaps

inevitable that floods would be used more than devastating frosts, epidemics, earthquakes or droughts as examples of natural disasters, though Ho Ping-ti has estimated that the death toll from droughts was

higher than that from floods. See his Studies in the Population of China 1368-1953 (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1959), pp. 233-36. In actuality, the aftermath of flooding often involved a cycle of other disasters including starvation, disease, and social unrest.

49 As political scientists from Guanzi to Karl Wittfogel to Pierre-Etienne Will have argued, water control was a crucial issue in traditional China; see Allyn W. Rickett, Guanzi (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985) , "Overseeing Government" pp. 102, 107; Karl Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957); and Pierre-Etienne Will, "Un cycle hydraulique en Chine: la province du Hubei du 16ieme au 19ieme siecles," Bulletin de Il'cole frangaise d'extreme orient 68 (1980), pp. 261-87. Though the exact involvement of the government bureaucracy in hydraulics projects is still under debate, the government clearly saw water control as one of its primary responsibilities. Failure to contain or avert floods was a potent symbol of moral failure; this continues to be true today: the PRC government tried to repress news of the extent of the damage of the flooding of Lake Taihu in the summer of 1991. See Human Rights Tribune 1992, pp. 6-8.

50 Perdue, Exhausting the Earth: State and Peasant in Hunan 1500-1850 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), p. 170.

51See Henri Maspero, "Legendes mythologiques dans le Chou King," Journal Asiatique 204 (1924), pp. 11-100, and Gu Jiegang a N~i, Gushi lunwenji -

Z ~t , 2 vol. (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1988), vol. 2, pp. 143-52.




courage, rather than technical know-how. As Wang Fuzhi E .

(1619-92) wrote, "[The members] of the Donglin Academy held fast to their virtue and resolutely took their stand, and were not drowned [jinyin

1-g ] in the [tide] of Buddhism and

Daoism."52 Tang Ao refers directly to Yu and his method of dredging and channeling when discussing his plan for regulating the flood waters; after the flood has been subdued, the people of the Women's Country deify him by erecting a shrine to him

(chapter 36, p. 2a). When Yu dredged the river basins, he simultaneously regulated the flood waters and extended China's civilizing influence to the far reaches of the earth. Tang Ao's tour of the lands outside of China mimics Yu in the way he extends the limits of the social and natural order.

In contrast to the yin chapters (1 to 6 and 33-37), which narrate the disruption of order, certain yang chapters, based on the yang number nine, focus on the

regulation of disorder. Though these yang chapters are not set off as independent narrative units as are the key yin chapters, they function as important thematic

complements to the yin chapters. Medical lore is foregrounded in these chapters; similar to flood control, medicine requires a clear understanding of how to regulate circulatory imbalances and blockages; traditional discussions of it are often framed in terms of yin-yang irregularities. Lui Kun g J (1536-1618), a late-Ming statesman, referred to the ideal official as a doctor to society.53 In chapter 27 (9 times 3), Tang Ao's prescriptions are called a "Way to save the world" (jishi zhi dao t tZ M, p. 4a).54 During their first stop on the voyage in chapter 9, Tang Ao takes his first steps toward enlightenment on an island that is covered with a variety of magical plants and animals which, if ingested, will bring about a number of miracles, such as satiating one's appetite for a year, enabling one to walk on air, or hastening enlightenment. The helmsman, suggestively named Duo Jiugong dv, •A (Lord ExtraYang), has the greatest knowledge of Daoist medical lore. Under Duo Jiugong's prompting, Tang Ao eats some vermillion grass (red being a yang color) that first increases his energy, but then gives him a terrible bout of gas (zhuoqi X *); after Tang breaks wind, he discovers that he can no longer remember ninety per-cent of the stale poems and essays he had written (pp. 3b-4a). Inserted into chapters 27 to 30 are discussions on how to cure a variety of ailments; chapters 29 and 30 include three complicated prescriptions.55 The couplet title of chapter 29 (another variant of a nine chapter) reads, "Taking a marvelous medicine, a youth is restored to health; Transmitting strange prescriptions, an old man saves the world" fl 0 SP )7- ~Pi ; 4 ~l l• ?g# A -T . In this same chapter, Duo Jiugong cures the crown prince and his consorts in Forked Tongue Country (Qisheguo it• W) in exchange for a phonetic table.

Though interest in yin-yang correlative thinking as an abstract way of conceptualizing the cosmos had waned by the late-imperial period with the rise of

52 Wang Fuzhi, Chuanshan yishu 1L1 jI 1 , "Saoshuo wen" 1 i~" f., pp. 64/1b-2a. Huang Zongxi tr ' (1610-1695) used the same metaphor to describe the Donglin stand, cited in Ian McMorran, "Wang Fu-chih and the Neo-Confucian Tradition," in The Unfolding of Neo-Confucianism, ed. W. T. deBary (New York: Columbia University Press, 1975), p. 428.

53 See Joanna F. Handlin, Action in Late Ming Thought: The Reorientation of Lii K'un and Other Scholar-Officials (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), pp. 103-42.

54 A yang setting is established in chapter 27 when the travellers sail past a volcano. 55 Medical cures are discussed in chapter 26, pp. 3b-4a, chapter 27, pp. la, 3b-4a, chapter 29, pp.

lb-3b, chapter 30, pp. la-2a, chapter 95, pp. 1b-2b.




evidential studies,56 yin-yang numerology and symbolism continued to be important structuring and interpretive devices in xiaoshuo fiction through the nineteenth century. The commentaries to the Xiyou ji by Wang Xiangxu # LH (fl.1605-1668), Chen Shibin

j ?? A (preface dated 1696), Zhang Shushen N,$ (fl. 18th century), and Liu Yiming JJ -

--J (1734-1820+),57 had already established a tradition that fictional texts

could be meaningfully interpreted with the aid of hexagrams from the Yijing. In the first half of the nineteenth century, Zhang Xinzhi N * j (fl. 1828-50) continued this somewhat arcane hermeneutic practice in his extensive commentary to the 120-

chapter version of the Honglou meng in which he identifies certain of the fictional characters with specific hexagrams.58

Though historically most readers might have overlooked the importance of

yin-yang symbolism to the structure and meaning of Jinghua yuan, this novel was far from unique in its manipulation of numerological punning. The structure of Xiyou ji weaves together what is probably the most intricate numerical rhythms and patterns of any traditional Chinese novel,59 while the structural importance of highlighting yin numerology was established by the time Jin Ping Mei was written.60 As Zhang Xinzhi noted about Honglou meng, the character Grannie Liu first visits the Rongguo Mansion V RR f in chapter 6, and according to his count makes a total of six visits; more

importantly, her visit (as an marker of dissolute yin) leads directly into Jia Baoyu's first sexual experience with "clouds and rain."61 Zhang Xinzhi's concluding comments to chapter 36 begins, "Appropriately, this is chapter 36, a heavenly number; it is also the number of extreme yin, the double 6. It is a major focal point of the novel" IIt1 l

The structural importance of yin-yang numerology in Qing fiction is also demonstrated by Xia Jingqu's & M (1705-1787) Yesou puyan K fl • (A Country Codger's Words of Exposure), a work roughly contemporaneous with Honglou meng.63 Chapter 66 of the 152-chapter edition exemplifies many of the yin motifs illustrated in chapters 1 to 6 and 36 of Jinghua yuan. Parallel to the Taiyin seasonal setting of chapter 5 of Jinghua yuan, the weather is unseasonably cold, leaving Nanjing blanketed by a

56 See John Henderson, The Development and Decline of Chinese Cosmology (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), pp. 149-160; and Benjamin A. Elman, From Philosophy to Philology, pp. 13-36.

57A translation of Liu Yiming's "Dufa" to the Xiyou ji can be found in Rolston, How to Read, pp. 299-315.

58A translation of Zhang Xinzhi's "Dufa" to the Hong lou meng can be found in Rolston, How to Read, pp. 324-40; the "Dufa" can be found in the Sanjia pingben. For the connection between Zhang and earlier commentaries to the Xiyou ji, see Rolston, How to Read, p. 327 n. 22.

59Plaks, The Four Masterworks, pp. 204-19; in contrast to Jinghua yuan, the "three" chapters of Xiyou ji, 23, 53, 73, 83, 93, are sites of sexual temptation. See Plaks, pp. 247-48.

60See note 66 below.

61Rolston, How To Read, pp. 335-36; Sanjia pingben, p. 6.

62Sanjia pingben, chapter 36, end comment p. 574. 63 This translation of the title is from McMahon, Misers, Shrews, and Polygamists, p. 3. Two main

editions of Yesou puyan exist: the 152-chapter woodblock Piling huizhen lou ~E k * edition dated 1881, which contains the sexually explicit passages but has other lacunae (available in a lithograph reprint Taipei: Tianyi chubanshe 1985); and the 154-chapter edition, which deletes sexually explicit passages. Berkeley has a typeset commentary edition dated 1882 of the 154-chapter version (Shanghai: Shenbao guan). As modem editions follow the bowdlerized 154-chapter format, my citations from chapter 65 and 66 are to the unexpurgated 152-chapter edition.




thick snow. The loyalist Confucian hero, Wen Suchen ~ 1, is kidnapped by a

perverse eunuch, a member of the anti-government faction, who seeks to obtain the semen of a man whose yang essence is still intact.64 As in the Women's Country episode of Jinghua yuan, a man is held captive by women who use sexual means to assault and overpower him.65 The Yijing symbolism in chapter 66 is literally enacted in the characterization of the scene when Suchen realizes that the five female servants

attempting to arouse him must refer to the Fu f (to return) hexagram which is

composed of one yang line at the bottom and five yin lines on the top.66 Although modem readers have focused predominantly on the role of women

in Jinghua yuan as a vehicle for analyzing the status of women in Qing China, the above discussion of the yin-yang structuring of this and other Qing novels suggests that these politically-engaged readings need to take account of structural patterns in their analyses. Numerically significant chapters are sites for explicit yin-yang symbolism: in key yin chapters, marked by unusually cold weather or threatening floods, dissolute women or heterodox anti-government groups displace proper male rule and

stage attacks on the male body. It bears noting that though both yin and yang terms are invoked in Jinghua yuan, yin-associated motifs are much better developed in terms of range and complexity than those associated with yang.67 The compositional pattern suggests the totality through implication and inference, rather than working out the

yin-yang allegoric schema in full detail. Moreover, as Andrew Plaks has written of five-elements periodicity in Xiyou ji and Honglou meng, the allegorical importance of a

particular character lies not so much in assigning him or her a fixed symbolic value, but in the formal structure that shapes the relations between the characters.68

III The Gendering of the Battle for Order: Excessive Yin and Deficient Yang

In Jinghua yuan, the yin world of counterhegemonic female rule (celestially, in the China of Wu Zetian, and in the Women's Country) is counterposed against the

yang world of the Tang loyalists. The narrative progresses from a state of yin disruption of normative order to the reinstatement of a yang orthodoxy. During the

64A man's yang essence is stored in his bone marrow and semen (jingzi I~N j-, literally essence); each time a man ejaculates, his essence loses some potency; though Wen Suchen is not a virgin, his yang energy continues to be unusually powerful.

65For translations of some of the more bizarre passages in this episode; see McMahon, Misers, Shrews, and Polygamists, pp. 162-65.

66 Yesou puyan, chapter 66, p. 9a. Zhang Zhupo commented in chapter 33 of Jin Ping Mei, the Fu hexagram marks the exhaustion of yin dominance; his comment reads, "Six is the yin number; together, Pan Liu'er and Wang Liu'er form the double yin number; yang is already completely exhausted, how could it not lead to death? When the Kun hexagram is exhausted, it becomes the Fu hexagram; the one yang line of the Fu hexagram must be quiescent in order to preserve itself," -

' o ~ A ? E 3

)A-rA Z.It ' 9MbJA -i- c TN E - ? l 41i- Z- ' , , i??,ti• ,•9,r.•i, Jin Ping Mei, chapter 33, p.

503.

67The Xiyou ji may have the most fully developed structural use of yang terms in the use of nines in the completion of the 81 (9 x 9) trials in chapter 99. Chapter 90 also introduces a number of demons and places with 9 in their names. See Plaks, Four Masterworks, pp. 204-205.

68Andrew H. Plaks, "Allegory in Hsi-yu Chi and Hung-lou Meng," in Chinese Narrative, p. 177.




yin phase of the cycle, China's center is literally "scattered" to the margins; only during the later yang phase are these elements "centered"69 in their rightful places- the hundred girls are sequestered in the garden and eventually in marriages, while the

Tang loyalists return to the imperial court. In marked contrast to the images of

threatening yin chaos are the yang scenes of restoring order by reinstatement of orthodox rule, returning women to their families (zhijia i0 Aj), curing sickness (zhibing S

pg), and regulating flood waters (zhishui 37*). It must be noted that though characterization is an important axis of the yin-

yang narrative code, no easy correspondence exists between the sex of a character and his or her functional value: in Jinghua yuan, the flower-sprits, all staunch Tang loyalists, enable their husbands and brothers to overthrow Wu Zetian in the final six

chapters of the novel. Wu Zetian's closest allies are her four brothers who control the four allegorical passes. Indeed, there are many examples in Ming-Qing fiction where virtuous wives and matriarchs are the most efficacious supporters of the Confucian order, and depraved and rebellious monks and eunuchs represent the greatest threat to the normative order. Though the yin sphere does not exclusively mean women (as demonstrated by the cabal of traitorous eunuchs and monks in Yesou puyan), it articulates an arena of meaning within which particular characterizations of women define the most extreme expression of yin disorder. Moreover, not every character in the novel functions as an actant of the yin-yang metanarrative. In Jinghua yuan, the structure only loosely shapes the various narrative strands; many characters and events exist independently of, and even in opposition to, the main values expressed in the structural frame. Thus, the celebration of female talent for which the novel is justly famous conflicts with the negative depiction of female rule.

The main representatives of yin disorder in Jinghua yuan are Chang'e, Wu Zetian, and the "King" of Women's Country. The three women form a figural chain:

Chang'e initiates cosmic transgression at the birthday party of the Mother-Queen of the West; Wu Zetian subverts the proper political order; and the King tyrannizes Lin

Zhiyang rather than attend to her responsibilities as ruler. Though the transgressive aspects of Chang'e and Wu Zetian's actions are not as well developed as those of the

King, when read together as a composite character the three clearly function as agents of chaos who appear at key structural moments. Motivated by their uncontrolled

arrogance, desire for power, and lust, these female characters willfully disrupt the smooth continuation of the natural order. Since the degree of transgression depicted in Jinghua yuan is understated compared to other Qing novels, readers might overlook their significance. However, aspects of their characterization only hinted at in the novel take on more serious implications when read against the intertextual stereotype of the yinfu ~ .

One of the surprising features of Jinghua yuan is the muted depiction of Wu Zetian, which contrasts sharply with the cruel and pornographic image of her prevalent in other works of fiction.70 No acts of murder or sexually explicit details

69 Zito defines the verb zhong Lp "centering" as creating itself "through the correct separation of upper and lower, the correct bounding of inner and outer," see "Silk and Skin," p. 105.

70 The lack of sexually explicit material in Jinghua yuan may be a result of its genealogical links to the sentimental scholar-beauty genre; the novel may also have been conceived of, and marketed as, suitable for women of good families, as suggested by the fact that it begins with a short exposition on Ban




color her rule in court; in fact, the closest Jinghua yuan comes to showing Wu Zetian's moral decadence is the description of her drunken state when she arrogantly orders all the flowers to bloom in the dead of winter. The twelve-point decree she promulgates in chapter 40, instituting honors and protections for virtuous women and girls, even lends her a positive image. Though Wu Zetian is not villified in Jinghua yuan, it could be assumed that readers' perceptions of her would be informed by the popular image of her as a symbol of political and sexual transgression. One of the most notorious depictions of Wu Zetian may be the pornographic sixteenth-century Ruyi jun zhuan 4il g if 4! (Lord As You Like It).7' This pseudo-biography uses annals format, and covers the period from her entrance into Tang Taizong's t (r. 626-649) harem at fourteen sui, through Tang Gaozong's '

~- (r. 649-683) incestuous establish-

ment of her as Empress, to her founding of the Zhou Dynasty. The bulk of the text narrates her erotic liaisons with various of her high ministers. The title of the

biography is based on the apocryphal story that she named the five-month reign period Ruyi (the fifth to the eighth month of 692) after her well-endowed lover Xue Aocao # ~ V , the eponymous "Lord As You Like It."72 Though Wu Zetian outlives two emperors, she remains girlishly young by living off the yang energy she absorbs from her many male lovers. Woven through the descriptions of her sexual conquests is the political narrative of Wu Zetian's usurpation of the throne and her banishment of the heir apparent.

Wu Zetian also appears in the many historical novels recounting the history of the Tang dynasty, the best-known of which is the Sui Tang yanyi.73 In contrast to Ru Yi Jun zhuan, these novels foreground Wu Zetian's political rise to power. Though some of the events in Jinghua yuan, such as the blooming of the flowers and the unsuccessful uprising of Li Jingye 4 4k 74 and Luo Binwang g Ti T in 684, are most likely drawn from this earlier material, Li Ruzhen glossed over Wu Zetian's reputation for ruthless killing by leaving out the scenes which impute her involvement in the murder of Empress Xiao ft, or the murder of her own daughter in order to blame it on her rival Empress Wang T.75 Though the image of the composite female ruler in Jinghua

Zhao's "Instructions for Women," and that at least one fine edition, the Huitu Jinghua yuan, contained prefatory lyric ci SpJby female readers.

Wu Zetian was a favorite symbol of both sexual and political transgression. She appears in Ruyi jun zhuan 4t[

f#XE, (Lord As You Like It), Sengni niehai fE ##re (Monks and Nuns in a Sea of Sins), Sui Tang

yanyi, and Chanzhen houshi Jq AJJ (Later Tales of the True Way). The association between Wu Zetian and illicit sexuality is so immediate that her mirror is one of the first erotic objects listed when Baoyu enters Qin Keqing's boudoir, the site of his sexual awakening (Honglou meng, chapter 5, p. 47).

71 Though the earliest extant edition of this rare text is dated 1763, it was in circulation by at least 1540 when it received its first bibliographic notice in Huang Xun's JJi11 (1491-1540) Dushu yide - -- % (published 1562). My pagination refers to a reprint of the edition stored in the Tokyo TOyO bunka kenkyfijo, with a preface by Huayang sanren * W ff A, dated Jiaxu F3 qf, which has been tentatively identified as either 1634 or 1754. See Ota Tatsuo and Ida Yoshio, Chagoku hiseki gy5kan r

E, * O :F9IJ

(Tokyo: Ky6ko shOin, 1987), p. 14. 72 Ruyi jun zhuan, p. 21.

73For a discussion of the sources of this hunded-chapter novel, see Robert E. Hegel, "Sui T'ang yen-i and the Aesthetics of the Seventeenth-Century Suchou Elite," in Chinese Narrative, pp. 126-31.

74Both Sui Tang yanyi and Jinghua yuan mistakenly refer to the historical figure Li Jingye as Xu

, Jingye.

75Sui Tang yanyi, chapters 70, p. 542 and 71, p. 551.




yuan is markedly different from more pornographic and cruel treatments of Wu Zetian in other fictional texts, the difference is one of degree rather than kind. Thus,

though Wu Zetian does not murder in cold blood in Jinghua yuan, the kidnapping of Lin Zhiyang by the King of the Women's Country and the insubordinate actions of

Chang'e and Wu Zetian are suggestive of the sexual vampirism and political ruthlessness which defined her in the broader cultural imagination.

That Wu Zetian is depicted as the reincarnation of a fox-sprit suggests a further layer of violent sexuality. Fox-spirits had long been associated with sexual

desire; though in early fox-spirit tales foxes transformed themselves into both men and women, by the Song Dynasty, fox-spirits had become increasingly associated with beautiful, and often lascivious, young women.76 The fox-spirit's name, Xinyue hu

,L% ] 5 , the Heart-Moon Fox, suggests a rebus for the character qing 1' (desire),77 and

further points to the sexual underpinning of her characterization. Two of the most

sexually-violent female characters in seventeenth-century fiction, the infamous Pan

Jinlian A t - of Jin Ping Mei, and the less well-known Xue Sujie 4i , 1 of Xingshi yinyuan zhuan, are also reincarnated fox-spirits.78 Strong intertextual similarities link the negative depiction of the dominant female in Jinghua yuan to the stereotype of the

yinfu, a typology of female sexual energy that embodies the most destructive aspects of yin excess. As Keith McMahon has shown, the Chinese yinfu is closely related to other types of Chinese shrews, the pofu & a and hanfu ~F

-, who defy all attempts at

containment.79 Chinese shrews are most often beautiful young women who use their sexual attractiveness to dominate men; their beautiful exterior hides a power-hungry, cruel, jealous, and degenerate nature. These young wives or concubines, at the center of the home or imperial court, are perfectly situated to invert, and even shatter, the

proper functioning of familial and state relations.

Though the yinfu may be the most potent emblem of disruptive yin energy, heterodox male characters also perform the same narrative role. In Yesou puyan, for

example, the yin valuation of the conspiracy of eunuchs and monks is made evident

through the ways they manipulate yin markers to attack the normative social order:

they undermine the stability of the family by kidnapping daughters and wives, and then employing these women as sexual tools to victimize other men. One of the most

telling indicators of their yin agency is the frequent flooding associated with their illicit activities.80 It is not surprising that the most destructive aspects of yin energy are

76 See Remi Mathieu, "Aux origines de la femme-renarde en Chine," Etudes mongoles 15 (1984), pp. 95-97, and Ylva Monschein, Der Zauber der Fuchsfee; Entstehung und Wandel eines "femme-fatale"-Motivs in der chinesischen Literatur (Frankfurt: Haag und Herchen, 1988), pp. 149-59, 187-256.

77 The name of the character Little Moon King, Xiaoyue Wang iJ'b ,

E, forms a perfect rebus for qing I*in the 1641 novel Xiyou bu.

78For a discussion of how Xue Sujie functions similarly to Wu Zetian in disrupting the proper yang socio-political order, see Epstein, "Beauty is the Beast," pp. 75-106.

79 McMahon, Misers, Shrews, and Polygamists, pp. 55-81 and passim. Significantly, the three terms hanfu, yinfu and pofu are etymologically linked to water. For discussions of Chinese notions of the shrew, see Yenna Wu, The Chinese Virago: A Literary Theme (Cambridge MA: Harvard University, Council on East Asian Studies, 1995), and "The Inversion of Marital Hierarchy: Shrewish Wives and Henpecked Husbands in Seventeenth-Century Chinese Literature," Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 48 no.2 (1988), pp. 363-382; Epstein, "Beauty is the Beast," pp. 54-108;

80See note 46.




projected on monks and eunuchs; though they are biologically male, their gender is indeterminate within the context of Confucian ritually-defined social roles since they perform none of the defining "male" roles of father, son, or husband.81

Counterposed to the destructive yinfu who are emblematic of the yin state of chaos are those male characters who metonymically embody the yang metaorder.

Tang Ao's fortunes-the choice of his family name is surely no coincidence-are intertwined with the fate of the exiled Tang court. His brother-in-law, the hapless Lin

Zhiyang, similarly reveals the vulnerability of male control. The absolute identification of Wen Suchen with beleaguered yang orthodoxy is made explicitly clear in his divination of the Fu hexagram as he is being attacked by a crowd of women (as mentioned above, the Fu hexagram has only one yang line).

These male actants of the yang metaorder actively, even if somewhat

belatedly, battle the encroaching yin chaos through acts of statecraft. On one level this reflects the extent to which activism through statecraft had become an ideal of the

late-imperial literati; these novels, however, touch on only a small number of topics covered in actual treatises on statecraft which covered a wide spectrum of issues, including problems with overpopulation, taxation methods, military defense, agriculture, and the financing and building of granaries.82 Jinghua yuan foregrounds precisely those expressions of statecraft which are most deeply rooted in yin-yang symbolism, namely flood control, medicine, and the ordering of the family, achieved

through strengthening the crucial boundaries between inner and outer by arranging marriages and positioning displaced women within the proper kinship and architectural structures.83

One of the more puzzling aspects of Jinghua yuan, as is true of so many novels from the Ming and Qing, is the vulnerability of the orthodox order. Though the novel

ultimately concludes with the triumph of orthodoxy over heterodoxy, the process of rectification is slow and uncertain. The problem lies with the male protagonists who, though posited as a microcosm of yang, are insufficient to carry the full burden of the yang metaorder. While the shrews are more than able to fulfill their roles as the extreme expression of disruptive yin, the male keepers of orthodoxy are either ambivalent about their roles or inefficacious within it. Tang Ao presents an impotent image of an engaged Confucian. The character Ao V in his name is suggestive of aoyou a , to roam, and seems to reflect his lack of enthusiasm for participating in the official examination system and preference for free and easy wandering. Moreover, though he initiates the turn of the cosmic cycle from yin dominance to increasing yang, he escapes into a state of detached enlightenment halfway through the novel. As for the Tang loyalists, though they finally manage to overthrow Wu Zetian and settle the flower spirits into proper domestic status, they are so morally

81See Tani Barlow, "Theorizing Woman," pp. 257-61. 82 There are many secondary studies on statecraft including Handlin, Action in Late Ming

Thought; Madeleine Zelin, The Magistrate's Tael: Rationalizing Fiscal Reform in Eighteenth-Century Ch'ing China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984); and Peter Perdue, Exhausting the Earth, State and Peasant in Hunan 1500-1850.

83This pattern is also true of Yesou puyan and Lao Can youji where the Confucian heroes return kidnapped girls to their families and amaze others with their medical expertise.




inadequate that they are caught and almost destroyed in the four allegorical "self- extermination" mazes of the final chapters.

According to the logic of neo-Confucian practices of self-cultivation, imbalances in the socio-political order arise from an individual's refusal or inability to

regulate himself. Though the sex of the subject of self-cultivation practices is not made

explicit, except in those texts prepared specifically for women, implied in the process is that the subject is being prepared for governing, a male activity. As explained in the Daxue tC f (Great Learning), one of the Four Books of the neo-Confucian canon, the

regulation of the state is an extension of the moral state of the individual:

Through the investigation of things, one's knowledge is extended; once one's knowledge has been extended, one's will can be stabilized; once one's will has been stabilized, one's mind can be rectified; once one's mind has been rectified, one's self can be cultivated; once one's self has been cultivated, one's family can be ordered; once one's family is ordered, the state can be properly ruled; once the state is properly ruled, the entire world can be kept in harmony.

Andrew Plaks has recently argued the importance of this theme to the masterworks of

Ming fiction.85 Though Jinghua yuan clearly reflects the intellectual interest in evidential studies dominant during the Qing, similar to the syncretic neo-Confucian

allegorical narratives of the Ming, its ultimate focus is on the moral legitimacy of the central male characters.

Two of the most memorable episodes in Jinghua yuan suggest that the

vulnerability of the male characters arises from their moral turpitude. Lin Zhiyang's misadventures at the hands of the "King" of the Women's Country refer to his lack of control.

After waiting briefly, several "ladies-in-waiting" escorted Lin Zhiyang to the top of a tower and spread out a banquet for him. After he had finished the food and wine, he heard a commotion below. A number of ladies-in-waiting came running up the tower shouting "Mistress, Mistress," kowtowing and offering their congratulations. Behind them came another group of ladies-in-waiting bearing a phoenix bridal gown and headpiece, a jade girdle and ceremonial dragon robe, as well as skirts, undergarments, hairpins, earrings, and other such jewellery. Then without discussion, they all grabbed hold of Lin Zhiyang's clothing and stripped him bare. As these ladies-in- waiting had boundless strength, it was just like a hawk nabbing a finch, how could he be master of the situation (zuozhu

ft. )?

--f B E@~l • ? (chapter 33, p. la)

84Da xue, in Sishu jichu V g Xi (Taipei: Shijie shuju, 1968 reprint), p. 2; translation from Plaks, Four Masterworks, p. 158.

85plaks, Ibid., esp. pp. 157-68, 497-512.




This is not the first time Lin fails to "master" himself. When he first entered the King's palace to sell cosmetics, Lin broke one of the cardinal rules of sexual segregation, a fundamental tenet of Confucian sexual protocol, by approaching the female "King." Rather than see her in her roles of ruler (as Tang Ao does) or potential consumer of his cosmetics (his supposed purpose in entering the palace), Lin is only able to notice her sexualized beauty (se

_): he "saw that though the King was over thirty years old, her

fair complexion and red lips gave her a most beautiful appearance" ~BP 1M ?3 E - J t % ' I M

, E iE '

X, R • (chapter 33, p. la). Implied in the narrative

order of the scene is that Lin's desires initiate the transgressions. By the end of the episode in the Women's Country, Lin has learned to master his desires and is able to see through the King's beauty. On their wedding night,

[He] saw that although the King was young and attractive, he felt that her beautiful face emitted a killing air. Although he had not seen her kill anyone, her type of gentle demeanor actually seemed to be more fierce than a knife.

BPfM-p Mt9JkiL •• )•J3*f (chapter 36, pp. 2b-3a).

When he was unable to master his desire for her, Lin was transformed into a woman, the passive object of the King's desires. After he has learned to master his own desires, he returns to a more appropriate male role and leads in the rescue of the crown prince of Women's Country (chapter 37).

Lin's self-inflicted victimization at the hands of the lascivious King prefigures the entrapment of the Tang loyalists in the four allegorical mazes. The names of the "self-exterminating" formations M • A (zizhu zhen) are rebuses for the four vices: alcohol fi z (youshui), anger

,I ,, (wuhuo), sex E 7J (badao), and wealth *

R, (caibei). The loyalists repeatedly reveal their inability to see through the illusory traps. One loyalist, Zhang Hong * iV, volunteers to enter the wealth formation and is immediately so dazzled by the huge coin blocking the road that he ignores the crowds of people gambling, fighting, and stealing at its base and climbs up a ladder to pass through the hole. He forgets his military mission and passes sixty years enjoying his new life of luxury and wealth. Only at his eightieth birthday celebration does Zhang remember his original goal. When he attempts to escape, he gets caught in the eye of the cash through which he first entered (chapter 99, pp. la-4a). Similarly in each of the passes, several of the loyalist troops are entrapped by their own desire and die.

The allegorical passes serve as a moral litmus test for the Tang loyalists who are able to reestablish the Tang dynasty only once they have passed through them; curiously, the men are dependent on their flower-spirit wives to survive these deadly tests. The wives of the men who get trapped in the Passes of Anger, Desire, and Greed find protective talismans to allow them and the other troops to pass through unharmed.86 Despite the magic, the moral burden ultimately rests on the male loyalists. One woman brings back amulets from Small Penglai Island to protect the

86 As Steven Roddy has discussed, a similar pattern of male dependence on female help appears in Yesou puyan: Wen Suchen's strongest support is his mother, whose management of her household is so ideal that it becomes a model for reforming the imperial court. See his "Rulin waishi and the Representation of Literati," pp. 259-61, 269-70.




men who are stuck in the Pass of Alcohol, but the charms are useless until the men realize they must refrain from drinking for twenty-four hours prior to entering the maze (chapter 97). When read against these flawed male protagonists, the un-

equivocally positive depictions of the women who play crucial roles in restoring the

yang metaorder heighten the sense that something is wrong with the male guardians of the Confucian order.

IV Literati Ambivalence and the Fascination with the Feminine

Rather than being an attempt at mimetic description of women in early nineteenth-century China or an idealization of how women's lives should be, the

depictions of women in Jinghua yuan seem to be part of a complex yin-yang aesthetic

design in which the feminine is counterposed against the masculine, and the

counterhegemonic is mirrored by the orthodox. What is most curious about this novel is that women represent both poles on the continuum between moral orthodoxy and

heterodoxy, while the male characters, the real scholars and rulers, are displaced to the margins. I discussed above how the procreative capacity of the Kun hexagram, the

pure yin symbol, is inherently unstable and therefore potentially transgressive. Confucian teachings on women project this ambivalent view onto the feminine; thus, despite the veneration of mothers in the Confucian tradition, neo-Confucian manuals on household regulation insist on the need to take great care in managing the women's quarters.87 Jinghua yuan simultaneously depicts certain of the female characters as the moral and intellectual superiors of their male counterparts while

showing the transgressive nature of female leadership. When read as a product of the male imagination, these contradictory constructions of the feminine, both of which

displace and disempower male literati, seem to reveal a deep ambivalence about the role of the scholar class during the rapidly changing late-imperial period.

Jinghua yuan was written and circulated in a culture that seemed fascinated by all the meanings associated with the feminine. The late Ming and Qing saw an

explosion of writing about women; handbooks for domestic living, exemplary lives, sentimental romances, and pornography were only some of the genres of materials

being circulated in the expanding book trade. Katherine Carlitz has observed that women in all forms of print and illustration had become prized objects of connoisseur-

ship and market consumption.88 Orthodox writings expanded upon the neo- Confucian imperative to separate women from men, sequester them in the contained inner quarters of the home, and the need for women to maintain their own and their

family's good name. The virtuous mothers and widow-suicides, who were ready to

87See Patricia Ebrey, Family and Property in Sung China: Yuan Ts'ai's Precepts for Social Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), pp. 206-207, 286-89; Charlotte Furth, "The Patriarch's Legacy: Household Instructions and the Transmission of Orthodox Values," in Orthodoxy in Late Imperial China, ed. Liu Kwang-ching (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), pp. 187-211.

88 Katherine Carlitz, "Desire, Danger, and the Body: Stories of Women's Virtue in Late Ming China," in Engendering China, Women, Culture and the State, ed. Christina Gilmartin et al. (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), pp.122-24.




sacrifice all, were glorified as the bulwark of society.89 Perversely enough, pornographic writings were aligned with orthodoxy in their shared concern about the

power of women to destroy a family from within. As Susan Mann has argued, the

widespread interest in controlling women's lives in eighteenth-century China may be read as a metonym for regulating social order; she writes, "By fixing the place of wives within the domestic sphere, they [the literati] also sought to fix the fluidity of social change that threatened to erode the boundaries of their own respectability."90 This anxiety about loss of social stability is reflected in Jinghua yuan in the way the hundred girls are scattered throughout China and beyond. The optimistic ending to the novel seems to be more than just aesthetic closure, for it expresses a longing to return to the stability of an idealized Confucian society based on the moral principles of loyalty and filiality.

In contrast to those texts which posed women as an essential but dangerously unstable component of orthodoxy, a second discourse idealized the feminine as an alternative to the Confucian status quo. These "pro-girl" texts, of which Honglou meng is the most famous example, were a legacy of the late-Ming celebration of passion and sentiment (qing).91 In Honglou meng, the feminized garden world functions as Baoyu's refuge from what he regards as the degradation and drudgery of careerism. During the late Ming the "apologists of qing," including such influential writers and

publishers as Tang Xianzu )M&fi(1550-1616), Feng Menglong (1574-1646), and Yuan

Hongdao -EMi (1568-1610), championed the polyvalent concept of qing as a counter- balance to, and an escape from, what was conceived as the rigid and morally bankrupt institutionalization of neo-Confucianism.92 It must be pointed out that even Li Zhi ~V (1527-1602), one of the most polemical social critics of the sixteenth

century, did not reject Confucian values; he was protesting what he saw as corrupt deviations from them. Many orthodox and non-conformist figures from the late-Ming and Qing idealized the feminine as an authentic (zhen #f) subject position that was

89 For the prevalence of widow suicide, see T'ien Ju-k'ang, Male Anxiety and Female Chastity, A Comparative Study of Chinese Ethical Values in Ming-Ch'ing Times (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1988).

90 Susan Mann, "Grooming a Daughter for Marriage: Brides and Wives in the Mid-Ch'ing Period," in Marriage and Inequality in Chinese Society, ed. Rubie S. Watson and Patricia Buckley Ebrey (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), p. 205.

91As awkward as the the term "pro-girl" may appear to late twentieth-century sensibilities, it is important to note that late-imperial literati culture seemed to distinguish between the various stages of women's lives, and that idealizing a beautiful sixteen year-old girl was not the same as desiring to change the living conditions of a young wife. Whereas young, unmarried, beautiful girls were celebrated for their sensually-charged purity, writers of fiction seemed to lose interest in them once they married (the mark of a mature woman)-unless of course they became exceptional as either transgressive pofu or yinfu or virtuous martyrs. As Baoyu, who exemplifies this pro-girl aesthetic, put it, "Strange, strange! How is it that as soon as these people [girls] marry a fellow, they become infected by his male air and end up even worse than men?" -.%) -q ' ) & tA5 M-'

, A.' •*

, kI• i~T (Honglou meng, chapter 77, p. 873).

92 For a description of the meanings associated with qing during the late Ming, see Epstein, "Beauty is the Beast," pp. 109-180; and Wai-yee Li, Enchantment and Disenchantment, Love and Illusion in Chinese Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. 47-88.




untainted by the frustrations, sacrifices, and moral compromises demanded by participating in the bureaucratic system.93

On many levels, the rewards for participating in the examination system were

widely perceived as incommensurate with the sacrifices demanded. The intellectual

integrity of the body of knowledge candidates needed to master in order to succeed in the examinations was being undermined by the New Text/ Old Text debate. By proving that certain passages in the Confucian classics were third-century forgeries, evidential scholarship was challenging the legitimacy of Song-dynasty Cheng-Zhu neo-Confucianism. Though by the mid eighteenth century provincial examinations had started to include philological questions reflective of the change in intellectual

climate, the ideologically conservative metropolitan examinations continued to be based on Cheng-Zhu neo-Confucianism.94 Moreover, the conjunction of power with

knowledge was readily apparent in the process by which political factions would determine which school of interpretation would find favor with the examiners.95

Cynicism toward the examination system, which forced literati to commodify their talents in order to be recognized, was so widespread that even the socially conservative scholar Zhang Xuecheng N f A (1738-1801) may have felt that the lives of cloistered women could provide the best site for nurturing the disinterested ideals of classical learning.96 In Jinghua yuan, the sharp contrast between Tang Ao's reservations about, and the girls' enthusiasm for, the examination system suggests Li Ruzhen's ambivalence toward the institution. Restaging the examinations by having attractive and virtuous girls act out male roles worked well to mask literati cynicism about the moral and logistical compromises that were required to participate in the examination and bureaucratic systems; the fact that all hundred girls succeed may also have allowed male readers to forget momentarily the tremendous odds against their own success.

Though phonological and geographical knowledge is emphasized in Jinghua yuan, the novel remains greatly concerned with testing the moral adequacy of the male characters. As discussed above, the reader is repeatedly forced to confront the limitations of the men's moral leadership while the virtue of the flower-spirits is

unquestioned. Given the late-Ming and Qing activist redefinition of the Confucian ideal, it should have fallen to the scholar class to bring order to these troubled times. In Jinghua yuan, where the efficacy of all the male protagonists is sharply circumscribed, there is no positive model of Confucian activism. The uprootedness and powerlessness of the scholar Tang Ao seem an accurate reflection of the

eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century loss of confidence in literati authority and prestige. A desire and nostalgia for the Confucian ideal are fully evident in the

93For example, see Joanna F. Handlin's discussion of the Wanli official Li Kun's identification with women during times of moral uncertainty in "Lii Kun's New Audience: The Influence of Women's

Literacy on Sixteenth-Century Thought," in Women in Chinese Society, pp. 30-31.

94For a discussion of the impact of the New Text/ Old Text debate on the examination system, see Benjamin A. Elman, "Changes in Confucian Civil Service Examinations from the Ming to the Ch'ing Dynasty," pp. 134-43.

95For example, see Kai-wing Chow, "Discourse, Examination and Local Elite: The Invention of the T'ung-ch'eng School in Ch'ing China," in Education and Society in Late Imperial China, pp. 185-86.

96Susan Mann, "Fuxue (Women's Learning) by Zhang Xuecheng (1738-1801): China's First History of Women's Culture," Late Imperial China 13.1 (June 1992), p. 42.




fantasy of the hundred talented girls, but the overwhelming impression created by the male characters is of their inadequacy to carry out the Confucian mandate.

V Conclusion

My reading of the yin-yang allegorical structure of Jinghua yuan, where

transgressive yin forces threaten the stability of the yang order, is just one of many plausible readings of how gender is used in the novel. It is possible, and even likely, that some nineteenth-century women and men had alternative reading strategies which emphasized the positive depictions of independent female action as a form of resistance. This has certainly been the dominant critical strategy since Hu Shi's seminal article in 1924. I have chosen to focus on the disjuncture in meanings associated with the feminine, between the frame story and the idealization of the flower spirits, to highlight the aesthetic and structural importance of Li Ruzhen's manipulation of yin-yang narrative codes, and to complicate the debate about Li Ruzhen's feminist intent. In composition at least, this hundred-chapter novel is less about the lives of or possibilities for actual women and girls than an articulation of intertwined male literati anxiety and nostalgia projected onto a symbolic feminine. Literati anxiety about social change and the erosion of their own power and status was played out in symbolic terms in the fictions the elite wrote and read. In this sense, Jinghua yuan follows trends established in other works of mid-Qing fiction, for though Li Ruzhen's novel exaggerates male vulnerability and displacement, it is far from unique and should not be treated as a special "manifesto" for women's rights. Similar to Cao Xueqin's Honglou meng, Jinghua yuan exploits the polysemous cultural meaning associated with the feminine to voice a strong nostalgia for the stability associated with the traditional Confucian social order while expressing a deep ambivalence about the ways the system actually functioned.



Engendering Order: Structure, Gender, and Meaning in the Qing Novel Jinghua yuan

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