Maids, Fishermen, and Storytellers: Rewriting Marginal Characters in Early Qing Drama and Fiction

This paper looks at the ways in which traditionally minor characters are rewritten and manipulated in several stories and plays published in the second half of the seventeenth century. Focusing on the characterization of the storyteller Liu Jingting in Kong Shangren’s Taohua shan (Peach Blossom Fan), the maid Nenghong in Li Yu’s story “Fuyun lou” (The Cloud-Scraper), and Fisherman Mo in Li Yu’s story “Tan Chuyu” and play derived from it, Bimu yu (Sole Mates), I elucidate a process of “character elevation” in which marginal characters who are literary representations of the lower classes are endowed with qualities traditionally seen as the prerogative of the leading characters, who represent the social elite. Rather than reading these upwardly mobile minor characters as fundamentally subversive, I argue that they may be seen instead as literati appropriation of, or fantasy about, the lower classes.