In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

115 CHAPTER SEVEN Cultural Destiny and Polygynous Love in Zou Tao’s Shanghai Dust The Pathos of the Polygynist’s Claim to Pleasure A missed chance to marry a remarkable Shanghai prostitute was Zou Tao’s (1850– 1931) inspiration for writing the novel Shanghai Dust (Haishang chentian ying).1 Zou Tao was a close friend to Yu Da, as we have seen, and in addition was a disciple of Wang Tao. His novel, however, takes after Traces of the Flowery Moon far more than after Courtesan Chambers and Later Tales of Liaozhai. Mostly written in the mid-1890s but not published until 1904, it begins with the premise that China has been cruel to women by forcing them to bind their feet and tolerate polygyny (which goes by the term yiqi shuqie, “having a wife and concubines,” 1.13). Like Dream of the Red Chamber and Traces of the Flowery Moon, Shanghai Dust features the scene of failed love and the man who is a victim of split loyalties, immobilized by his linkages to more than one woman. What makes Shanghai Dust more than an embellishment upon earlier models is the significance of this male figure as a kind of last Chinese polygynist. He and his plural female lovers together embody high-cultural identity threatened with extinction, this time with no regeneration in sight. The last chapter said that two masters stand behind the man who would be a polygynist, the Confucian father and the potent polygynist, with a third master , the Western conqueror, now entering the scene and signaling fundamental change. Han Bangqing registers the shift and proposes a new man and woman in the form of the brothel facilitator and the Shanghai prostitute. The overseer of the love fantasy stands ready to advise patrons of the brothel about their transformation into citizens of Shanghai. The sense of transformation implies a framework in which China as a symbolic whole finds itself opposed to an alien order in the form of the combined forces of Europe, America, and Japan. While this opposition is implicit in Han Bangqing, it is repeatedly and explicitly foregrounded in Zou Tao. Like writers in many other contexts since the first Opium War, Zou Tao presents the situation of a weak and defiled China against aggressive outsiders. But a turning point was reached after China’s disastrous and humiliating defeat by Japan in 1895. The imperial form of government still lasted for more than a decade, but in the eyes of many, including Zou Tao, China as it had been known for millennia had become definitively obsolete. If his novel can be taken as a historical marker of this turning point, then it is as if the pathos of the polygynous claim to pleasure now intensifies. The first articulations of China as a modern nationalist whole began to emerge in the next few years, but Zou Tao already conveys the sense of definitive change that Han Bangqing pronounced more subtly in Flowers of Shanghai. The change has the effect of raising the level of urgency to depart from the obsolete past in order to assume a newly globalized sense of self-positioning. Zou Tao’s novel, however, is distinctive not because of its forward -looking attempt to resolve crisis. Instead, it engages in an act of sentimental retrospect that crystallizes the past into something that is over or about to be over and that designates the love death of the prostitute and her lover as the culminating act. Two overlapping tasks will occupy me in this chapter by way of examining the grand narrative of polygynous love. Through detailing the way Shanghai Dust plots the parallel love affairs of its two main male characters, the first task is to demonstrate the novel’s strategy of passive polygyny, especially in terms of the recurrent theme of the exaltation of women and the way that theme treads a thin line between the polygynist’s self-dissolution before women, on the one hand, and his elevation as a man who wins many women’s love, on the other. Both enjoyment of this love and the failure to enjoy it represent sublime and beautiful states of being in the manner of the qing aesthetic. The second task is to return to the theme of the resonance between the polygynous love story and cultural destiny that began to emerge in Traces of the Flowery Moon and that Shanghai Dust carries to fruition three and a half decades later. The central feature...

Share