Ameliorative Satire and the Seventeeth-Century Chinese Novel, Xingshi yinyuan zhuan -Marriage as Retribution, Awakening the World (review)

Satire has been a dominant mode in Chinese literature, prevalent in poetry, philosophical and historical writings, jokes, folk songs, drama, and fiction written in both the classical and the vernacular languages. Yet, prior to the twentieth century, satire was not used as a standard term in the discussion and classification of Chinese fiction. There have been very few systematic and serious studies of satire as a significant fictional mode or genre in Chinese literature. In Ameliorative Satire and the Seventeenth-Century Chinese Novel, Xingshi yinyuan zhuan—Marriage as Retribution, Awaking the World (ca. 1661), Yenna Wu makes a pioneering and vital contribution to fill in this gap.¹ Wu attempts to address the importance of a satiric mode within the development of Chinese fiction, highlighting the appearance of what she calls the "ameliorative satiric novel" in the Ming-Qing period. According to Wu, Journey to the West by Wu Cheng'en marked the birth of this genre, and Xi Zhou Sheng's Xingshi yinyuan zhuan and several others qualified as its representatives. Focusing on the seventeenth-century novel Xingshi yinyuan zhuan, Wu meticulously and convincingly demonstrates how this novel serves the authorial purposes of "admonition" and "amelioration" by using satirical representation, combining the themes of retribution through reincarnation and of cowed husbands and ferocious wives.

Wu's book enriches the scholarship on the Ming-Qing novel in at least two ways. First, in challenging Lu Xun's claim that The Scholar is the first and only novel written in a satiric mode, this book offers a much broader definition of the satiric novel. It claims for many even earlier novels, such as Jin ping mei (The plum in the golden vase), Yin-Yang Dreams to Caution the World (1628), The Jealous Wife (ca. 1639), Ding Yaokang's (1599-1669) A Sequel to Jin ping mei, and Xingshi yinyuan zhuan, the classification of "ameliorative satiric novel," as indicated by their authorial goals, literary targets, treatment of material, and tone. In so doing, Wu opens doors for the study of the satiric genre, calling for thorough and systematic research on satire as a significant fictional mode, an area that has been previously neglected in the field of Chinese fiction. Her insights on the formation of the "ameliorative satirical novel" and her analysis of Xingshi yinyuan zhuan provide the groundwork for further study on fictional satire. In his recently published book The History of Ameliorative Satiric Fiction (Fengyu xiaoshuo shihua) , the Chinese scholar Cai Guoliang echoes Wu's belief that a time-honored satiric tradition existed in the history of Chinese fiction, and that an established genre of the satiric novel indeed emerged in the Ming-Qing period.

Second, as the first and only full-length critical study in English on Xingshi yinyuan zhuan, Wu's book incorporates some of the exciting findings of Andrew Plaks' studies on the Ming masterpieces² and Xingshi yinyuan zhuan,³ providing students of Chinese literature with an extensive study of this very complex and important novel. It embraces Plaks' conceptions of literati novels and of self-cultivation to illustrate how the novel's descriptions of deviation from the normative husband-wife relationship serve a dual purpose by calling attention to the collapse of hierarchical authority in the society at large, while also allowing the author to deal with his internal experiences. Moreover, Wu's book emphasizes the moral commitment of the novel, further exploring how Xi Zhou Sheng employs the complex process of ganying (the mutual and reciprocal influences between the human and the divine) and the scheme of retribution to express the Confucian moral judgment of good and evil. Like many other "ameliorative satiric novels," Wu asserts that Xingshi yinyuan zhuan does not stop at mere satire, but uses negative examples for instruction...