Androgyny in Late Ming and Early Qing Literature

Chapter 4. The Peony Pavilion: A Paean to the Androgynous Ideal

The Peony Pavilion A Paean to the Androgynous Ideal The androgynous ideal is most passionately celebrated in Tang Xianzu’s masterwork The Peony Pavilion (1598),1 where a chamber-cloistered girl, Du Liniang, having passed away for lovesickness, is miraculously restored to life once she has banished her maiden reserve to pursue love as a ghost. In preaching the revalorized value of qing, Tang Xianzu aYrms the deviation from orthodox maidenhood in Liniang’s characterization, a gender stand which is intrinsically related to his own defiant stance in political and ideological confrontation as a marginal man. As far apart as their social stations can be, Liniang and Jinlian are subjected to similar feminization of their identity: while Jinlian is pushed to the extreme of femininity in her forced slavery, Liniang is trapped in the spiritual jail of patriarchy by “memorizing Ban Zhao’s ‘Four Precepts’ from end to end”2 (B 20.106; M 20.104). Accordingly, when the animus surfaces in their souls, the former reacts in violence; the latter languishes in solitude. The indoctrination of Tang’s heroine is orchestrated by her father, Du Bao, and carried out by her tutor, Chen Zuiliang, who compares himself to the “ancient Dong Zhongshu” (B 9.41) and is comically addressed as “anc h a p t e r 4 other Ban Zhao” (B 5.16). As a replica of the ancient Confucian authorities, who separated human genders, the tutor is commissioned with the duty to feminize the girl. To cultivate a gender in his daughter, Du Bao resorts to a Confucian canon, The Book of Songs, which he believes to manifest “the virtues of imperial wives” (houfei zhide) (M 5.19), following the ancient-Han Confucian allegorical exegesis. The term “houfei zhide” originates in “The Great Preface” in the Mao edition of The Book of Songs as a comment on Ode I, “Guanjiu” (osprey), which initiates an ideologically driven reading of the canonical work.3 The mention of “the virtues of imperial wives” in the Ming context carries strong overtones of gender enforcement, for the “exemplary deeds” of royal consorts exerted tremendous impact on fashioning womanhood during that period. Thirty-eight out of forty royal consorts “dedicated ” their lives to keep eternal company with the founding emperor in his tomb to demonstrate their loyalty,4 and one princess stayed in “widowhood ” for many years after her would-be husband died before the marriage could take place, to prove her “chastity.”5Such life-devouring “virtues” constituted part and parcel of the Ming ideology that shaped the ideal femininity. To be molded into a “perfect lady,” Liniang is symbolically caged in her chamber for sixteen years, insulated from the male world and male values. Although recent scholarship on seventeenth-century Chinese cultural history tends to emphasize the fluid inner/outer boundaries of woman’s sphere,6 historians are soberly aware that the “elite women had the fewest opportunities to venture beyond their own wall.”7 The boudoir that strictly sequesters the heroine in Tang’s play thus functions as a gendered image of her confined femininity, and her incipient longing to break boudoir con- finement signals an impulse to deviate from the prescribed gender. Jung’s theory indicates that the suppressed gender identity, such as animus , is bound to be integrated into one’s personality in a growth process known as “individuation.”8 Viewed in such a light, Liniang’s spiritual agitation during her puberty crisis may be attributed to the severe suppression of her animus in its inevitable assimilation into her identity. Similarly, in traditional Chinese medical theory, as Charlotte Furth’s research indicates, the human body is conceived as a meeting ground of yin and yang energies, the balance of which is believed to be indispensable for the maintenance of the “androgynous ideal of health.”9 Yet this medical wisdom was often ignored in social practice, particularly in dealing with female adolescents’ sexual desire, which was deemed problematic. Explicating social suppression of maidens’ desire in imperial China, Furth remarks, “The idea that youth 70 c h a p t e r f o u r was a phase of life cycle marked by ascending yang force competed with representation of adolescent girls as delicate.” To maintain the facade of maiden reserve and feminine delicacy, medical theory dictated that “Adolescent girls should remain sexually unaware for ten years after puberty and be married promptly thereafter.”10 According...