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31 CHAPTER TWO Qing Can Be with One and Only One The Perfect Moment of Qing in Dream of the Red Chamber The two common threads between the seventeenth-century Pu Songling and the eighteenth-century Cao Xueqin are the focus on the exquisitely ephemeral nature of qing, especially as captured in the perfect moment of love that is fleeting or just missed, and the figure of the young man in his blank state, in particular as incarnated in the version of this man in Dream of the Red Chamber, Jia Baoyu. Cao Xueqin’s novel stands as the main node of passage between qing in its late Ming–early Qing manifestation and the late Qing during the period of Western incursion. Nothing written in the mode of qing in the nineteenth century can ignore the powerful effect that Dream of the Red Chamber exerted right from its first publication in the 1790s. But whereas Cao Xueqin illustrates qing in its radical mode as inherited from authors like Tang Xianzu and Feng Menglong, other authors claim the same qing inheritance but deradicalize it by plugging it into situations of polygynous marriage, something that would be impossible in Dream of the Red Chamber. Moving into the mid-Qing period and after, this chapter begins with Dream of the Red Chamber’s influential presentation of sublime qing passion, then details ways in which qing becomes deradicalized, first focusing on the midQing novel An Old Man’s Radiant Words (Yesou puyan), which reverses the blank male of Pu Songling and Cao Xueqin by transforming qing into radiant masculine energy, and then examining the mid- to late-Qing sequels to Dream of the Red Chamber, which in their perfection of the scene of passive polygamy erase the gap between sublime love and its real and practical fulfillment. I finish with a special instance of polygamy in which authors construct a marriage that paradoxically allows the man more than one, but only two, remarkable woman, thus adhering as closely as possible to the qing aesthetic without relinquishing the hallowed practice of polygyny. The mid- or high Qing can be referred to as the “long eighteenth century,” to use Susan Mann’s words, an age of relative stability and prosperity extend- 32 ing from the 1680s, after the final pacification of Ming loyalist resistance, to the Opium War in 1839 and the massive changes that began to occur around that time.1 But the word stability is deceiving since Chinese society in this period was in fact characterized by high and open social mobility and intense competition for status and material gain. A novel like The Scholars (Rulin waishi) crystallizes this atmosphere in its rapid shifts from one character and scenario to another, to paraphrase Shang Wei, where all that the participants experience (the noise and commotion, the rumors and scandals) “inflames desire, enhances vanity, and motivates them in the competition for worldly gain.”2 For women the situation can be broadly characterized as one that “put daughters at special risk” because of the fact that virtually all of them were expected to marry. Girls of lower-class families or families in severe distress were commonly sold as slaves, maids, and concubines, while the daughters of elite families risked that their husbands would take (or already had) concubines. As played out in Dream of the Red Chamber and as recorded in biographies by men and in poetry and other writings by women, unhappy marriage was a “constant theme.”3 These same sources, including tanci rhyme-narratives by women, reveal that stories of gallant women were especially attractive to young female readers. Female heroism and martyrdom provided them with grand images of strength and independence. In this chapter, the unhappy woman appears alongside the blank male in Dream of the Red Chamber, while strong and happy women marry successful polygynists in An Old Man’s Radiant Words and the sequels to Dream of the Red Chamber. The stories of twowife polygyny that the chapter ends with do away with the unhappy woman, keep the blank man, and match him with two remarkable women who agree to rise above jealousy. The Dream of the Red Chamber begins with the famous statement by the male narrator about how all the “remarkable girls” are “vastly superior to me” (1.1).4 Like Pu Songling, Cao Xueqin chooses never to portray such women in the mode of the erotic and polygynous romances that are legion since at least the mid-Ming...

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