Feng Menglong and the Late-Ming Articulation of Sentiment

FENG MENGLONG AND THE LATE-MING ARTICULATION OF SENTIMENT Victoria B. Cass University of Colorado at Boulder Between the years 1618 and 1626, Feng Menglong published his famous volumes of short stories, Tales Old and New, Penetrating Words to Startle the World, and Everlasting Words to Awaken the World. The Ming audience of the urban educated class received the collections with apparent enthusiasm. The initial collection of Stories Old and New was followed soon after by the second and third anthologies, and these later anthologies were quickly reprinted; within the final decades of the late Ming, three editions of Penetrating Words were published and four editions of Everlasting Words appeared.! Feng's three anthologies-known as The Three Words (San yan)-were then followed by many similar collections,2 and modem critics have hailed The Three Words as one of the more significant documents in the history of vernacular literature.3 The stories have generally been praised for reflecting the social and ethical life of the Song and Ming urban worlds. The doyens of the elite world-magistrates, filial friends, loyal widows-as well as the denizens of the non-elite worlds-geishas, handicraft workers, merchants, farmers, and even local thieves-all appear in the pages of the three anthologies. Not all the stories of the collection are concerned, however, with the everyday lives of the citizens of the Ming. Indeed, about one-sixth of the collection is concerned with the lore of the supernatural: with demonic possession, Daoist transcendents, avenging ghosts, and journeys to the realm of the dead. One of these ghostly tales, "Yang Siwen Encounters an Old 1 Miao Yonghe ~pj(*, Feng Menglong he San yan ~~~f3~fD.=.§, Shanghai guji ehubanshe (Shanghai, 1979), p. 79. 2 Ibid., pp. 79-85. 3 Hu Shiying iiJ3±~, Huaben xiaoshuo gai lun §15~/J \~)M~gOO, Zhonghua (Peking, 1980), pp. 569-610. CHINOPERL Papers No. 20-22 (1997-99)© 1999 by the Conference on Oral and Performing Literature, Inc. CHINOPERL Papers No. 20-22 Friend at Yanshan", 4 is a particularly successful story of ghostly love, noted by Jaroslav Prusek and Patrick Hanan for its use of setting.5 In this paper I seek to establish how complex a literary piece this apparently simple ghost story is. I am especially interested in exploring the ways the story exploits .important features of late Ming literary and religious cultures: how the author relied on Ming views of qing or love, on Ming views of the feminine and the demonic, and relied as well as on the "new interiority" found in late Ming writing-especially xiao pin. In this finely achieved tale, Feng Menglong not only tells a story of demonic possession but narrates a complex account in which setting, character, event, voice and tone combine to create a poignant study in nostalgia and enthrallment. C o n v e n t io n a l c h a r a c t e r s The story of Yang Siwen' s strange encounter is fundamentally a story of ghostly encounters. Yang Siwen, the narrator, encounters Zheng Yiniang, the dead wife of Han Sihou, as Yang observes the city of Yanshan on Lantern Festival night; the majority of the tale then details Yang Siwen's and Han Sihou's series of encounters with the dead wife, Zheng Yiniang. In the story Zheng is the woman who refuses to go away; even in death she has her clutches firmly in the flesh of the living. She first appears to Yang Siwen; then we hear her tell the story of her chaste sacrifice at the fall of Kaifeng, and of the series of hauntings that follow her husband's neglect of her grave; she twice takes demonic possession of Han's new bride and, finally, drowns her husband and the new bride. This female revenant-who does indeed return again and again-is at the apparent core of the story. She is the ghost of the ghost story, and her series of haunting appearances motivates the plot at every tum of events. This conventional plot is peopled with two of the most familiar characters from Ming fiction and nonfiction: victim and demon. As the ghost-woman...