Androgyny in Late Ming and Early Qing Literature

Introduction: Androgyny Defined

Androgyny Defined The gender deviation in late-imperial Chinese literature has in recent decades stimulated growth of scholarship in the sinological field, to which the present inquiry aims to add a new dimension. Scholars’ mounting political dissidence and thriving individualistic impulses during this period engendered destabilization of their gender status, traditionally a yin position, when they questioned decadent politics and conservative ideology. Viewing gender from both Chinese and Western theoretical perspectives, this study explores the strategies and rhetoric with which literati scholars appropriate the “symbolic female” for their own purposes and inscribe their own recalcitrant drives for political/ideological confrontation in their characterizations of gender abnormality. Through the analysis of gendered implications in literary texts, this inquiry strives for novel interpretations of canonical works and seeks to unveil a trend of androgyny (as defined herein) in the late Ming and early Qing literature (roughly 1550–1750).1 A fashionable trope frequently used in late Ming/early Qing literature is “heroes among women” (nüzhong zhangfu). It can be traced to the writings of the scholar-oYcial Lü Kun (1536–1618), the social critic Li Zhi (1527– 1602), the poet Yu Huai (1616–1696), the playwrights Xu Wei (1521–1593) and Tang Xianzu (1550–1616), the fiction editor Feng Menglong (1574– i n t r o d u c t i o n 1654), the story writer Ling Mengchu (1580–1644), and numerous authors of scholar-beauty romances.2 With its implied female adoption of male attributes , this term may be conveniently associated with the concept of gender fluidity or sexual equality, but such a notion has been challenged by Western feminist scholars in recent decades in their observations on its androcentric import and manipulation by patriarchy. In her study of the nüzhong zhangfu in Records of the Strange at the Studio of Leisure (Liaozhai zhiyi), Judith Zeitlin indicates that such a heroine “violates social norms to accomplish a goal that itself embodies the highest social ideals,” so that “she can be contained under the old rubric ‘exemplary woman’ or treated as an honorary male.”3 Likewise, in discussing the woman warrior Lin Siniang in The Dream of the Red Chamber (Honglou meng), Louise Edwards remarks that such an Amazon is “primarily instrumental in ensuring its [patriarchal power’s] continued existence because the deeds she performs are undeniably consolidating the existing Confucian social and moral order.”4 What lies behind such feminist visions is an assumption that most works written in the classic age were composed by men who inevitably brought with them patriarchal bias, or what Fredric Jameson terms “political unconsciousness ,” in creating their characters, the masculine women in particular . Although such feminist readings help us gain some insights into the character of masculine women by contextualizing them in patriarchal culture , the multifaceted identity of the small army of nüzhong zhangfu emerging from Ming-Qing literature is endowed with a complexity that invites further critical scrutiny. Contemporary feminist theory enlightens us on the identical gender status between women and marginalized men; what determines one’s gender is not his sexual identity, but his social/political/ ideological position.5 This feminist insight applies well to premodern Chinese culture, in which marginal men often compare themselves to women. The word “marginal, ” extensively used in the following study,must be taken as a relative term. A scholar who has passed the imperial examination might remain marginal in his political stand if he is alienated from the emperor or the prime minister. Similarly, a boy born to an aristocratic family might become spiritually marginal if he renounces the values attached to his given status. Marginality, therefore, can emerge as a consequence of one’s alienation complex, alienation from the ruling clique, and orthodoxy. Correspondingly , in premodern Chinese culture, the politically and ideologically alienated/marginalized scholars tended, most likely, to identify with the female and the feminine. Maram Epstein argues elegantly that in the late Ming 2 i n t r o d u c t i o n the feminine, “as the potentially pure embodiment of qing [love, feeling, sentiment],” began “to be idealized as an authentic subject position untainted by the frustrations, sacrifices and moral compromises demanded by participating in the bureaucratic system.”6 The late Ming liberals’ provocative writings that initiated the cult of qing and the idealization of the feminine often convey criticism of the orthodox, defiance of the rigid Cheng-Zhu neoConfucianism...