No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
EMOTION AND THE LANGUAGE OF INTIMACY IN MING CHINA: THE SHAN'GE OF FENG MENGLONG
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 July 2012
Extract
In recent decades, historians of European history have produced many studies on the history of emotions. Based on the hypothesis that emotions are neither a biological essence nor a universal fixed attribute, they have sought to trace constructions of human emotionality as reflected in literary and other works in a particular society over time. This new sub-discipline, the study of what is often termed “sentimental culture”, has illuminated the interaction between the articulation of an emotional sensibility and significant social trends of the age, including the rise of humanitarian discourse, radical Protestantism, and a destabilizing of sexual norms. From the new perspective of the cultural history of emotion, the modern idea that emotions express individual inwardness and autonomy now appears to be contingent and culture bound. In the case of China, while there has been an abundance of studies of the cult of qing 情 (‘passion, desire’) in the late Ming, there are few works dealing specifically with the historical construction of emotion in pre-modern China, particularly from a linguistic point of view.
- Type
- Review Article
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012
References
1 See for example Carey, Brycchan, British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility: Writing, Sentiment, and Slavery, 1760–1807 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
2 Gross, Daniel M., The Secret History of Emotion: From Aristotle's “Rhetoric” to Modern Brain Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
3 Nagle, Christopher C., Sexuality and the Culture of Sensibility in the British Romantic Era (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
4 Major exceptions include numerous studies by Paolo Santangelo, see later discussion, also Eifring, Halvor, ed. Minds and Mentalities in Traditional Chinese Literature (Beijing: Culture and Art Publishing House, 1999)Google Scholar; Ko, Dorothy, “Thinking about Copulating: An Early Qing Confucian Thinker's Problem with Emotion and Words,” in Remapping China: Fissures in Historical Terrain, eds. Hershatter, Gail et al. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), pp. 59–76Google Scholar; Epstein, Maram, “Writing Emotions: Ritual Innovation as Emotional Expression,” Nan Nü 11 (2009), pp. 155–96CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and studies by Janet Theiss, Hu Ying, and Bryna Goodman in the same volume. For a treatment of romantic love in China of the twentieth century see Lee, Haiyan, Revolution of the Heart (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007)Google Scholar. For a study of the language of love in the famous play “Xixiang ji” see the Introduction to West, Stephen H. and Idema, Wilt L., trans. and eds., Shifu, Wang, The Story of the Western Wing (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1995), pp. 90–97Google Scholar; orig. publ. as The Moon and the Zither, 1991.
5 A notable exception is Lowry, Kathryn, The Tapestry of Popular Songs in 16th- and 17th-Century China: Reading, Imitation, and Desire (Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2005)Google Scholar, which devotes a chapter to Feng Menglong's Shan'ge collection, see Chapter 5. See also Pi-ching, Hsu, Beyond Eroticism: A Historian's Reading of Humor in Feng Menglong's Child's Folly (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 2006)Google Scholar.
6 Ōki Yasushi, 大木 康, Fū Bōryū ‘sanka’ no kenkyū: Chūgoku Mindai no tsūzoku kayō 馮夢龍『山歌』の研究: 中国明代の通俗歌謡 (Tokyo: Keisō Shobō, 2003)Google Scholar.
7 Shan-ko. Von Feng Meng-Lung. Eine Volksliedersammlung aus der Ming-zeit. Wiesbaden, Franz Steiner Verlag, 1973Google Scholar.
8 These studies are listed in Ōki and Santangelo, Shan'ge, the ‘Mountain Songs’, pp. 7–8.
9 Ōki and Santangelo understand these lines differently, as if the woman is here wary of seduction, unwilling to reciprocate. However, in a more literal interpretation, one could argue that the woman is encouraging seduction not rejecting it. The final couplet about the millstone and candle wick could be considered an aphorism paralleling two contrasting situations (that is, failing to seduce on the one hand and completing the deed on the other). In this reading, the axle and candle wick obliquely refers to the male role. Conversely, the millstone needing an axle to grind and the water absorbing the candle wick refer to the female role. This song is one of a series in Chapter 1 where the unmarried woman actively seeks out a lover.
10 Santangelo refers to the text as “marginal” in the sense that it was not considered part of the Great Tradition of Chinese letters; Preface, p. ix.
11 McLaren, Anne E., “Folk Epics from the Lower Yangzi Delta Region: Oral and Written Traditions”, in The Interplay of the Oral and the Written in Chinese Popular Literature, eds. Børdahl, Vibeke and Wan, Margaret, Copenhagen: NIAS Studies in Asian Topics No. 46 (NIAS Press, 2010), pp. 157–86Google Scholar. In an unpublished early transcript of the story of Wu guniang that I collected on a recent field-trip (Wu guniang ziliao ben 五姑娘資料本), one also finds sexual inferences based on the same homely imagery that one finds in the Shan'ge. Examples include breasts likened to steam buns, and old and young women likened to water chestnut and lotus root respectively. Raunchy references were often eliminated in the edited versions one finds in published anthologies.
12 Wang Xiaolong, 王小龍, “Feng Menglong ‘Shan'ge’ yu ‘Bai mao shan'ge’” 馮夢龍, ‘山歌’ 與 ‘白茆山歌’, Changshu gaozhuan xuebao 常熟高專學報 3 (May 2004), pp. 101–8Google Scholar.
13 On the structure of siqing tales in modern Wu narrative songs see Zheng Tuyou, 鄭土有, Wuyu xushi shan'ge yanchang chuantong yanjiu 吳語敘事山歌演唱傳統研究 (Shanghai: Cishu Chubanshe, 2005), pp. 78–81, 213–25Google Scholar.
14 For this date see Lowry, The Tapestry of Popular Songs, p. 249.
15 For stories of retribution in huaben and the motif of the femme fatale see McLaren, Anne E, The Chinese Femme Fatale: Stories from the Ming Period (University of Sydney East Asian Monographs, No. 8, Wild Peony Press, 1994)Google Scholar.
16 “The Making of the Pearl-sewn Shirt, the Courtesan's Jewel Box,” HJAS 33 (1973), pp. 124–53Google Scholar. Hanan argues rather that the storytellers’ rhetoric, including the verse conveying a moral message, detracts from the psychological complexity of the story.
17 For a full translation of these earlier Wu songs see Birrell, Anne, China's Bawdy: The Pop Songs of China, 4th–5th Century (Cambridge: McGuinness China Monographs, 2008)Google Scholar. Birrell regards these as the pop songs of the era. On the sexualized character of the songs and their associations with female entertainers and courtesans see especially pp. 16–21.
18 I have discussed one such example in “Folk Epics from the Lower Yangzi Delta Region.”
19 Lowry The Tapestry of Popular Songs, pp. 272–74. Compared with Ōki and Santangelo, Lowry's analysis places more weight on the notion that Feng's Shan'ge belonged to the provenance of Jiangnan courtesans and was an aid to social exchange and entertainment in the pleasure quarters.
20 Ibid., pp. 272–73.
21 Ibid., p. 277. Feng's compilation of songs were also singable, with a relatively small number of familiar tunes known to people in the region (see the previously mentioned study by Wang Xiaolong, 2004).
22 He does so more particularly in Sentimental Education in Chinese History: An Interdisciplinary Textual Research on Ming and Qing Sources (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2003), pp. 51–68Google Scholar. Here he notes that literary works may well be conservative but they can also “idealize” persons condemned by official ideology (see p. 55). Citing West and Idema, he acknowledges that literary conventions mold the expectations of readers (p. 63). He justifies his use of literary sources as follows: “notwithstanding the exceptionality and unreality of some of its products and the stereotypes of the genres, literature provides not only a more or less impressionistic or historical description of emotions but also presents the psychological context in which they developed” (p. 68).
23 Paolo Santangelo's works on the history of emotion in China are voluminous. The most relevant to his work on Shan'ge would appear to be “The Cult of Love in Some Texts of Ming and Qing Literature,” East and West 50:1/4 (Dec. 2000), pp. 439–99Google Scholar; Santangelo, Sentimental Education in Chinese History; Santangelo, , “An Attempt at a History of Mentality in Late Imperial China,” Frontier History of China 5:3 (2010), pp. 386–424CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Santangelo, Paolo and Guida, Donatella, eds. Love, Hatred, and Other Passions: Questions and Themes on Emotions in Chinese Civilization (Leiden: Brill, 2006)Google Scholar.