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126 CHAPTER EIGHT The Polygynous Politics of the Modern Chinese Man in Nine-times Cuckold Polygyny as a Structure of Feeling When cultural reformists of the early 1900s declared fiction the ideal format for portraying models of China’s new men and women, they did not have in mind the extremely popular Nine-times Cuckold (Jiuwei gui, 1906–1910), by Zhang Chunfan (?–1935). As in numerous other novels of the time, the focus was on men and prostitutes, as if to say that they constituted one of the chief arenas for witnessing what the new Chinese man and woman would look like. Since Nine-times Cuckold was a publishing success for decades to come, it must have struck a deep chord.1 Its fame is evidence of the continuing influence of polygyny as a social and cultural formation, in spite of the resistance of reformist politics. The 192-chapter novel twists reformism to its own purposes by portraying a polygynist-philanderer who fully answers the call of the times by insisting on the legitimacy of his form of sexual and romantic pleasure. The egalitarian man and woman sung of elsewhere at the time are absent. The hero’s polygynous politics is both a correction of an old and faltering regime and a defiant demonstration against egalitarianism, which he implies can only worsen the already wanton and untamable Shanghai prostitute. Since Qing fiction long linked successful polygyny with the reestablishment of mastery over chaotic reality, it is not surprising that Nine-times Cuckold identifies the success of the polygynist-philanderer as a nodal point in the transition to the new modern man in the form of its hero Zhang Qiugu (whose name is homophonous with “modeling after the ancient”). Nevertheless, by the early 1900s the blatant promotion of the philandering man should amount to a literary scandal . As already pronounced in fiction, essay, school textbooks, journalism, and public speeches, the true reformist mottoes of the day were monogamous marriage and equality between the sexes. Although legal measures to abolish polygamy were still decades away, abolitionism was in the air in the form of new models of women and men who married monogamously or, even more rebelliously in the case of new women, did not marry at all.2 Zhang Qiugu’s self-confidence was scandalous because it carried no sense of obligation to the new-style women establishing themselves at the very same time. Zhang Chunfan serialized his novel during the same years in which the first cohort of girls and women of good family took relatively unsequestered life for granted. These were the years in which the Qing government first sanctioned schools for girls (1907), in which women had their first opportunity to study abroad under government sponsorship in Japan (1905) and the United States (1907), in which women gave public speeches and worked for newspapers promoting their very formation as new women, and in which biographies , translations, textbooks, and journalistic and fictional accounts all apprised readers of the possibility of female independence.3 The correspondingly new man, both real and ideal, not only no longer took concubines, but actually admired and in some cases extolled the newly independent women who went to women’s schools, studied abroad, worked for newspapers, became doctors, and entered politics as reformists, anarchists, and even assassins—all famous prototypes of the new woman in the early 1900s.4 Of what relevance then is a novel like Nine-times Cuckold, which is not only devoid of these new women and men, but promotes what they would see as their domineeringly retrograde other? My point is that the shameless prostitute of Flowers of Shanghai, Shanghai Splendor, Nine-tailed Fox (Jiuwei hu), and Ninetimes Cuckold, among many others, coexisted with the new independent woman just as polygyny, concubinage, and prostitution were inextricably bound with the egalitarian formation that emerged at the same time. If we were to take the egalitarian man and woman as the representatives of new China to the exclusion of the polygynist-philanderer and the concubine-prostitute, we would be dismissing what continued to be productive forces in the formation of the supposedly liberated types. Productive in this sense refers to a structure of feeling that continued to form and influence the categories and roles of sexual behavior, including destructive and self-destructive behavior. It means the continuing effect of Zhang Qiugu the master philanderer’s belief that women are always seducing men unless men acquire the skills of the master philanderer. The hierarchic...

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