Geschichte, Frauenbild und kulturelles Gedächtnis: Der ming-zeitliche Roman Shuihu zhuan (History, the image of women, and cultural memory: The Ming-period novel Shuihu zhuan) (review)

Reviews 499 Lily Xiao Hong Lee University of Sydney LilyLee is the coordinator ofthe Biographical Dictionary ofChinese Women project. NOTES1. Jinghuayuan provides a graphic, step-by-step description offootbinding. See Li Ruzhen. Jinghua yuan (Beijing: Zhonghua Shuju, 1965), pp. 235-241. 2.Chung Hui-ling, "Jin Yi," in Biographical Dictionary ofChinese Women: Qing Period (Armonk, New York: M. E. Sharpe, forthcoming). 3.The story ofYinglian in the Honglou mengshould provide a good example ofthe kidnapping and selling ofyoung girls. See Cao Xueqin. Honglou meng (Beijing: Zuojia Chubanshe, 1957), chap. 1, pp. 8-9, and chap. 4, pp. 36-39. 4.Examples ofwomen with impious motives when visiting religious establishments can be found in stories ofthe San yan hangpai. For example: Feng Menglong, ed., Jingshi hengyan (Taibei: Shijie Shuju, 1983), vol. 3, juan 39, p. 7b. Also see Ling Mengchu, ed., Chukepai'anjingqi (Taibei: Shijie Shuju, 1975), vol. 3, p. 645, Klaus Mühlhahn. Geschichte, Frauenbild und kulturelles Gedächtnis: Der ming-zeitliche Roman Shuihu zhuan (History, the image ofwomen, and cultural memory: The Ming-period novel Shuihu zhuan). Berliner ChinaStudien , vol. 23. Munich: Minerva-Publ, 1994. 218 pp. Paperback. Klaus Mühlhahn's study ofthe Shuihu zhuan, a revised version ofhis M.A. thesis submitted to the Freie Universität Berlin, is ofparticular interest not only to the student of Chinese literature but also, and perhaps even more so, to the student of Chinese history, and especially women's history. This may appear surprising as women are certainly not the most prominent feature in the Shuihu zhuan. The bulk of the novel deals with men and their adventures, and in the few instances in which women appear, they are portrayed—according to die greatest number of critics throughout this century—from a chauvinist, even misogynist, point of view. Nevertheless, Mühlhahn decided to focus on the image and depiction of women in the Shuihu zhuan in a systematic and rather novel attempt to understand the work as reflective of its own time and of structures of cultural memory.© 1998 by UniversityThis clear and well-written study is organized in five parts: part 1 (pp. 11-28) ofHawai'iPressprovides a methodological introduction. Part 2 (pp. 29-82) is a discussion ofhistorical realities, social and economic developments, and their influence on everyday life and the position ofwomen during the time ofdie genesis ofthe Shuihu 500 China Review International: Vol. 5, No. 2, Fall 1998 zhuan. Part 3 (pp. 83-112) introduces the Shuihu zhuan as a text, focusing on sources, audience, and structural questions, in an attempt to describe it as the product and manifestation of a collective cultural memory. In part 4 (pp. 113-195), the author provides textual analyses ofpassages from the Shuihu zhuan, discussing women according to four types: chaste and virtuous, immoral, militant, and mythical. He concludes in part 5 (pp. 197-205) with a discussion of the relationship between the portrayal of and the realities for women during the late Ming. This study is indebted to a stimulating scholarly debate on die genesis, influence , and importance of cultural memory as pioneered in the work of the French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs1 and taken up recently by Jan and Aleida Assmann, Renate Lachmann, and Siegfried Schmidt, among others.2 In accordance with this theoretical construct, as he explains in part 1, the author intends to interpret the Shuihu zhuan as a hillock of memory scraps and leftovers. He states that the ambivalences , the subversive discourses, and counter-discourses—in short, the polyphony contained in the novel—are "aesthetic characteristics of syncretic memory" (p. 13). He then takes up an argument familiar from Bakhtin describing these ambiguities in the text of the Shuihu zhuan as the mnemonic reflection of times of change. The author thus establishes a very close and retroactive relationship between literature and its symbolism and history and its discourse: he argues that, on the one hand, the form that cultural memory takes is historically determined and that, on die other hand, literary imagination may operate on the historical memory and thus change collective mentalities (p. 14). His analysis of die depiction ofwomen in the novel is to serve as a case study to prove his point. Before...