The Butterfly Lovers: The Legend of Liang Shanbo and Zhu Yingtai: Four Versions, with Related Texts ed. by Wilt L. Idema (review)

CHINOPERL Papers No. 29 274 The Butterfly Lovers: The Legend of Liang Shanbo and Zhu Yingtai: Four Versions, with Related Texts. Edited and translated with an introduction by Wilt L. Idema. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company. 2010. xxxvi + 220 pp. Paper $14.95; Cloth $44.00. This is the latest volume in a series produced by Wilt L. Idema that seeks to unlock the riches of China‘s traditional oral and vernacular literature for an English-speaking readership. As with previous volumes from the same author,9 The Butterfly Lovers focuses on a significant story cycle from the Chinese tradition, provides translations of a number of exemplars, a scholarly introduction, explanations of cultural items, background material, a bibliography for further study, and a glossary of Chinese terms. The legend of Liang Shanbo and Zhu Yingtai is a perennial favorite. It tells the story of how an intelligent and literate young maiden, Zhu Yingtai, with her parents‘ permission, dons male costume and sets off in disguise to study at a famous academy for the imperial examinations. At the academy, she becomes a close friend with fellow scholar, Liang Shanbo. The two study by the same window and sleep in the same bedroom, without the latter ever realizing his close friend is a woman. Zhu eventually has to leave for home because it is too difficult to keep up the pretense (or is summoned home by her family, as in some versions) before she is able to tell Liang the truth, but she does tell him to pay a visit and ask for her ‗sister,‘ while hinting broadly at her true sex. Liang does not guess her meaning and arrives too late—she has already been affianced by her parents to a man called Ma. She appears to Liang in female attire and the latter is shocked to find that his schoolmate is actually female. He pines away due to love sickness and, on learning of his death, Zhu dies as well (in some versions she flies into his coffin). The pair are buried 9 Idema has recently published three other works of similar format with Hackett: Filial Piety and Its Divine Rewards: The Legend of Dong Yong and Weaving Maiden, with Related Texts (2009); The White Snake and Her Son: A Translation of The Precious Scroll of Thunder Peak, with Related Texts (2009), and (with Shiamin Kwa), Mulan: Five Versions of a Classic Chinese Legend, with Related Texts (2010), as well as Personal Salvation and Filial Piety: Two Precious Scroll Narratives of Guanyin and her Acolytes, with University of Hawai‘i Press (2008), and Meng Jiangnü Brings Down the Wall: Ten Versions of a Chinese Legend, with The University of Washington Press (2009). BOOK REVIEWS 275 together and venerated as man and wife. In many versions they appear after death as a pair of butterflies. In terms of traditional moral values, Zhu Yingtai violated the central canon of female virtue. Women were sometimes able to or even helped to become literate in their home settings. However, they were never encouraged to depart from their homes and travel to study with an illustrious teacher, as was often the case with educated males. As for cross-dressing as a male, studying in the same room with men, and sharing the same bedroom with a male, this was regarded as a certain compromise of maidenly virtue. The story thus presents a paradox in that it offers seeming sympathy for a woman who is ―immoral‖ by conventional standards, and for a man who, at best, appears to be gullible or at worst, lacking in integrity, in that he had violated the codes of propriety governing contact with the opposite sex. In the twentieth century, the Liang-Zhu story has been promoted as one that reflects the iniquities of ‗feudal‘ marriage practice, the longing of ordinary men and women to choose their own spouse, and of women‘s desire for equality in education. The Liang-Zhu story cycle has been retold in different versions in stories and plays, and more recently in movies, for over a millennium. Over the generations, each redactor has placed the tale in a new interpretive framework that illuminated different aspects of the...