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137 Conclusion The Postpolygynous Future Goddess Nüwa Repairs Heaven The man’s ruin because of his affair with a wanton woman is an ancient motif in times of dynastic decline. The vilification of the Shanghai prostitute in works like Nine-times Cuckold is a sign of the same motif, as is Zhang Qiugu’s victory over wanton women, which is a metaphor of dynastic renewal. He is a sexual adept and master of the brothel, as if to say that these features represent a fundamental inheritance of the modern, internationally adept Chinese man. Who are his modern female counterparts? If we conjure an image of such a woman based on the new standards established in the early 1900s, then she is absent from Nine-times Cuckold since she cannot be the main wife, concubine, or prostitute anymore. The man whom the modern woman marries, if she marries at all, has to be the sexually chastened monogamist who forswears polygamy and prostitution. A form of modern liberated women can be found in a novel like the 1905 The Stone of Goddess Nüwa (Nüwa shi), which promotes the grand notion that “if women change, so will the whole nation” and which in grand fashion then shows how the prostitute-heroines of the story will change and what they will do to save the world. First they will stop binding their feet, and then they will assassinate male leaders and force polygynists to liberate their concubines.1 Such acts indicate that in order to be politically active in the new China, women must subvert the regime in which sex is inherently the polygynist-philanderer’s sex. According to the old logic, a woman in public is either an improperly exposed main wife or concubine or else a prostitute. By way of transcending this sexual structure, the prostitute-heroines in The Stone of Goddess Nüwa utterly disavow marriage and sexual intercourse, and will conceive children only by newly invented scientific methods. They still in fact do what women resisting the polygamous sexual regime have always done, that is, divorce themselves from sexual activity with men. This book has shown that the polygynist-philanderer and his main wives, concubines, and prostitutes were the dominant characters in the portrait of sexuality that China presented to itself and the world at the verge of modernity. At that time, the decline of the Qing dynasty also meant the decline of the polygynistphilanderer , for China as a social and symbolic whole was so deeply formed by this sexual practice that when one was in decline, so was the other. This statement does not mean that a plan was already forming to abolish polygyny or that polygynists necessarily thought their days were coming to an end. China did legally end polygyny in the 1930s (that remnants of it continued to exist for decades, and that forms of it continue to exist today, is a story for another study). Why and how China did so is still a question that needs careful examination, as is how men and women remolded themselves in order to become postpolygynist subjects. Suffice to say for now that the rationale for the abolition of polygyny was similar to that for ending such things as footbinding and the sequestration of women, namely, that in the face of what came to be defined as modernity, these customs were to be defined as relics of the past. So were the practices of patronizing boy female impersonators and associating with “famous courtesans.”2 A key factor in these changes—though again one that needs careful examination—had to do with the fact that the JudeoChristian West was monogamous and antihomosexualist and that it succeeded in imposing the standards of monogamy and antihomosexuality upon China and other non-Western cultures. The late-Qing sources studied in this book bear no imprint of the imposition of monogamy from the West. But they do bear marks of paradigmatic changes that I want to examine in this conclusion both by looking back in overview and by taking a forward glance at what the weight of the polygynous past must have had on its future. In ending at a point that I call the verge of modernity, this book emphasizes both the continuity and the break between the verge and what comes after in terms of polygynous sexuality, including the status of the qing aesthetic. Simply put, what changes, what stays the same, and what goes underground but still exerts residual...

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