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CHAPTER ONE Sublime Passion and the Remarkable Woman The Idealization of Women The idealization of the woman has a long history in China, but in the late Ming it received a new burst of energy under the influence of the notion of qing, “sublime passion.” The reason for this translation of qing has to do with the idea of qing as a leveler of boundaries, where it is beyond man and woman, high and low, subject and other. Qing evokes a sense of universality that lifts all burdens of social hierarchy and individual constraint. It is an equalizer, however, that does not extend to the real world outside qing’s glowing environs. Real women patterned their behavior after the prescribed models of feminine behavior, and they also suffered the pressures and condemnations directed at them in case of deviation from the norms. Their ordeals are the focus of qing-inspired male authors who create scenarios in which the inherent imbalances of social and gender boundaries fleetingly evaporate. This and the next chapter focus on qing and the remarkable woman in the late-Ming and early- to mid-Qing literature that is foundational for the late-Qing literature that is my main subject. The key linking this entire body of literature is the notion of a polygynous and philandering outer world surrounding an insulated and gender-fluid domain in which detachment and sensitivity are of supreme value. It is the notion of qing that best defines this realm.1 In its late-Ming formation qing was a concept of radical subjectivity.2 By this I refer to its potential for signifying the subject’s sheer evanescence and boundless connection with other beings and things. The remarkable woman is a kernel figure in capturing the sense of radical evanescence. From the mid-Ming to the end of the Qing, a long line of literary works takes the remarkable woman as the ideal subject in ultimate situations. In a moral sense she is innately superior to the man, as men in those times often actually spoke and wrote.3 In an ontological sense she is the supreme figure when it comes to portraying the problem of subjection in the symbolic order. She embodies purity and transcendence, qualities that endow her with an ability to act decisively and in utter disregard of social and material 16 constraints. Hence we have the famous courtesan and the chaste gentry woman in numerous works of drama, fiction, biography, and poetry from the Ming to the end of the Qing or the cross-dressing woman in both male and female-authored narratives who engages in social and political action beyond her normative role as bound-footed and sequestered woman and beyond the capacities of her male counterparts. The dramatization of radical subjectivity likewise persists in Ming and Qing literature about feminine young men like Jia Baoyu in the mid-Qing Dream of the Red Chamber, who is repulsed by the grossness of dominant masculinity . He is an example of the male consort of the remarkable woman, surrounding both of whom are the wastrel polygynists and philanderers who, to put it in a composite sense, “ride” many women but never love any of them.4 If the remarkable woman could be reduced to a definition in a few sentences it would be as follows: She embodies a demand to commit utter self-sacrifice and to lift or cast oneself out of one’s normative state of self-definition. In this way she evokes an existential condition of pure possibility. The idealization of the feminine sounds like a static motif. It can be that, but at its passionate extreme it implies a kind of magic transformation best defined as the act of becoming feminine. If we take the example of lovers, then the true sign of qing love is shown when the partners at least hypothetically exchange with each other, that is, when they look alike and are both masculine and feminine. However, the more valuable direction of exchange is becoming feminine or subjectivizing oneself in the direction of femininity. The reason for this is that being feminine is more conducive to realizing the subjectivity of the other person, whether one’s lover or friend, than being masculine is. In the normative social order, as I said in the introduction, masculinity is by rule the universal standard, the absolute position from which all else is perceived and directed, and perceived in a way that presumes its own exceptionality. By rule...

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