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Reviewed by:
  • Obscene Things: Sexual Politics in Jin Ping Mei
  • Giovanni Vitiello (bio)
Naifei Ding . Obscene Things: Sexual Politics in Jin Ping Mei. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002. Paperback $22.95, ISBN 0-8223-2901-8.

Obscene Things is an important book. It features a wealth of original insights and poses a number of crucial questions that point at previously uncharted critical directions within Jin Ping Mei (hereafter JPM) studies, while contributing at the same time to a growing body of scholarship on late Ming and early Qing culture, in particular on the emergence of the book market and the role that intellectuals played in it.

Above all, the book can be said to be about Pan Jinlian and the destiny of a fictional character that ends up crystallizing the ultimate, haunting version of dangerous femininity: the sexy murderer. Naifei Ding argues that this cultural formation is the product of specific reading strategies, influentially championed by Zhang Zhupo in his commentarial edition of the novel of 1695. Ding also shows how Zhang's mysoginistic tactics have been singularly resilient, informing an entire critical tradition and shaping readers' positions and the Chinese imaginary from the seventeenth century up to the present time. Central to Zhang Zhupo's reading of JPM, Ding argues, is the equation of woman with sex and evil—epitomized by the yinfu, or "lascivious woman," the ultimate embodiment of which is, in turn, Pan Jinlian. But, as Ding keenly observes, before coming to stand for "woman," Pan Jinlian is a woman of a specific social status: a bondmaid-concubine, that is, a category of labor that became much more affordable and widespread in the late-Ming market economy. It is this woman of base legal condition, able to rely only on her beauty and reproductive potentiality to secure a more stable position within the family and society, that gets transformed into "woman." This operation is accomplished by Zhang Zhupo; in his hands Jinlian becomes the obverse of the "good woman" (liangfu), the always properly submissive daughter-wife-mother of Confucian ethics. In this sense, Obscene Things can also be said to be a contribution to the history of Chinese misogyny.

The first chapter is dedicated to a review of twentieth-century readings of JPM, that is, what constitutes the field of "Jin-ology," from the foundational (if not archaeological, as Ding convincingly suggests) readings of Lu Xun and Hu Shi to their heirs in the Chinese and American academe to the most recent critical approaches of mainland scholars, after a long period during which the novel was first frozen and then reevaluated along traditional aesthetic lines. In this invaluably lucid chapter, Ding sharply traces the continuities between all these critics, proposing that the discursive glue that joins their readings is a "gendered structure of reading" that ultimately dates back to Zhang Zhupo. While [End Page 139] adopting reading strategies from their late Ming "individualist and free-thinking" precursors, the early twentieth-century readers, Ding argues, were inventing a continuity in a Chinese modern, intellectual, moral, and aesthetic identity—but the subject that is invented is of course gendered masculine. The JPM critical tradition, Ding proposes, is unified because of similar investments, one of them being utterly unfavorable to women—the trope that links Jinlian with sex and evil, while producing an abstract truth about women in general. At the same time, as she astutely observes, traditional critical perspectives on the novel's obscenity have been unified also by their emphasis on the role of the reader-critic, as the only one able to provide a corrective reading by which obscenity can be purged, and the text itself can thereby have the self-cultivating release, the moral effect that it is supposed to have. In this sense, the reader-critic emerges as the exorcist who can tame obscenity by paradoxically making it morally advantageous —by transforming it, that is, into a "moral obscenity," an only apparent oxymoron that Ding explores throughout her book.

Chapter 2 opens with a comparison of Li Zhi's preface to Shuihu zhuan and Jin Shengtan's preface of forty years later, convincingly characterizing the shift as one from political to aesthetic concerns: while Li...

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