Feminization, Gender Dislocation, and Social Demotion in Pinhua Baojian

The nineteenth-century Chinese novel Pinhua baojian (Precious Mirror for Appreciating Flowers), by Chen Sen (ca. 1796–1870), contains several drinking game scenes. One such scene takes place in chapter 37, involving a group of men of letters and their actor friends. At his turn, Xiao Cixian, one of the scholars, composes a line using the word shi, which means “power” or “force” and which can also refer to “strategic advantage” in a political or military situation.¹ Xiao, however, uses the word here in a different sense. Flaunting his wit, one of his friends gleefully quips with the others: “Have you all forgotten that the male organ is also called shi?”²

In a blatantly phallocentric manner, the polysemous word shi reflects the situation of gender politics in traditional China. The male genitals became cognate with power, force, and “strategic advantage.” Yet in the case of some eunuchs, it was actually the removal of their male genitals that helped them ascend to the top of the power hierarchy.³ The male sexual organ per se was thus never literally the source of any social privilege, but only a convenient symbol for the hegemonic power of masculinity. What the word shi suggests is therefore a metaphorical connection between sexuality, gender identity, and social capital. This metaphorical connection summarizes one salient dimension of the novel Pinhua baojian (PHBJ) itself.

Until recently, PHBJ, set in late eighteenth-century Beijing, has been known primarily for its presentation of male homoerotic love. As the late-Qing critic Qiu Weixuan observes, the novel reflects the lifestyle of many scholar-officials during the heyday of the Qianlong reign (1736–95): “The practice of dallying with actors was more prevalent in the capital than anywhere else. It was a hobby shared by many high officials and eminent personages, who did not even feel the need to hide it from each other.”⁴ Lu Xun labels PHBJ a work of “courtesan fiction” (xiaxie xiaoshuo), but he considers its main characters akin to the scholar-beauty (caizi jiaren) tradition, “the only difference being that the ‘beauties’ here are young men.”⁵ Since Lu Xun, PHBJ has received little critical attention in China, largely due to the ideological discomfort with its content. One of the newest histories of Chinese literature mentions it only in passing: it is said to center on a set of homosexual relationships but, as the verdict goes, “while the subject matter is quite special the author fails to generate any new meaning.”⁶

In recent years, in the context of a surging interest in homosexuality and especially male homoeroticism in traditional China,⁷ scholars in the West have made new efforts in reassessing PHBJ. In her “Shifting Boundaries: Gender in Pinhua baojian,” Chloe Starr argues that homosexuality, the term traditionally used to characterize the scholar—boy actor relationship in PHBJ, is neither accurate nor very useful to serve as the central notion in the study of the novel. Drawing attention to the novel’s manipulation of the gender ambiguity of the characters, especially of the boy actors, Starr proposes a reading of PHBJ “in terms of gender because gender is one inextricable part of the network of cultural ideas and practices that inform the relationships in the novel.”⁸ Martin Huang’s Negotiating Masculinities in Late Imperial China also includes a discussion of PHBJ. Like Starr, Huang focuses on the instability of the boundary line between masculinity and femininity, but he proposes that the characters in the novel “have definite notions of masculinity that are closely associated with the broad concept of wen in terms of cultural sophistication.”⁹ In the meantime, David D. Wang in his Fin-de-Siècle Splendor discusses PHBJ’s dilemma in presenting the female impersonators as mere surrogates of the absent “women” or conventional literary image of women. By doing so, the novel exalts women and femininity while paradoxically “usurp[ing] feminine discourse for men’s use.”¹⁰ Consequently, the male homoerotic story becomes little more than a fantasy, because “its legitimacy is derived from an endorsement of the validity of heterosexual...