"How time has passed"
游園驚夢 [Peony Pavilion] dir. 楊凡 Yonfan, 2001
and
Judith T. Zeitlin, "Shared Dreams: The Story of The Three Wives' Commentary on the Peony Pavilion" (Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, vol. 54, no. 1 (June 1994), pp. 127-179)
See also: Dorothy Ko, Teachers of the Inner Chambers: Women and Culture in Seventeenth Century China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994); Susan Mann, Precious Records: Women in China's Long Eighteenth Century (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997)
For the sake of simplicity, I will be referring to 游園驚夢 as Peony Pavilion and 牡丹亭 as Mudan Ting
Nothing like a little kunqu opera with your angst.
I'll cop to being a closet Chinese opera fan; I really like how stylized it is, and I think the costumes and makeup are really cool. Sometimes I really like the songs, and sometimes I don't - Peony Pavilion does a pretty good job of presenting it in snippets that aren't overwhelming (and it helps that the songs selected are very pretty and pretty low on the caterwauling scale).
While the movie in & of itself fell pretty flat for me in the end, I think some of the things presented in Peony Pavilion dovetail pretty neatly with discussions of women's relationships developed over art and literature, specifically 牡丹亭 Mudan Ting ("The Peony Pavilion"), the Ming play written by 湯顯祖 Tang Xianzu.
But for the moment, let's take a flying tour of Yongfan's Peony Pavilion - the opera does figure heavily (several of the best scenes of the movie involve operatic scenes from Mudan Ting), but the main focus is the love between two women.
Well, sort of. From what I've read, a lot of people enjoyed the superb production values of the film (my copy is pretty poor quality & it's still beautiful), but compared it to a crappy version of 霸王別姬 Farewell My Concubine.
We have Lan, played by 王祖賢 Joey Wong, a new woman who would do Ah Ying of New Women proud. A teacher, daughter of a formerly rich family, she says her parents left her with little but "a modern mind." On the other hand, we have Jade, played by 宮澤理惠 Rie Miyazawa, who is an opera singer-turned-fifth wife in a very rich household (she's married to Lan's cousin).
Lan likes to play at crossdressing, and the two met while Jade was still singing at "The Moonlit Chamber".
They bond over songs taken from Mudan Ting; Lan is enchanted, and though Jade marries off into a rich household, they maintain a very close friendship - which is where we meet them.
The household is decadent and lavish, languid and dreamy - and dying out. Based on Jade's clothes, I think we can safely place the movie in the early 1930s (interestingly, Lan wears qipaos that are much, much more like the 'first wave' - ie, men's scholar robes), and old patterns of life are dying out. The family is selling off its treasures, everyone's too wrapped up in mahjong or opium smoking to get with the times and so on.
Etc. etc. etc.
What follows is an hour and a half of beautiful & dreamy cinematography (there's a reason the household scenes are wonderful, and it's because the languid pace and dream-like state the family seems to be suspended in is mirrored in the cinematography and pacing of the whole movie) and a lot of undeveloped angst. Usually I wouldn't complain about the angst being undeveloped, but you know, it was the point of the damn film. Still, the production is spectacular, from the costuming to the backdrops. And the opera is good too.
It's not enough to save the plot, which has these buildups and abrupt switches - after a good 45 minutes of buildup with Jade's situation, where you're expecting some New Women-esque "I just can't take it anymore!" freak out, Jade and her daughter are sent packing from the rich household for an unspecified reason; Lan says of course they can come live with her. Well, that's enough of Jade's story and sad life, on to Lan!
Lan is "in love" with Jade, though you have to wonder how much of it is actually infatuation - the other part seems like a deep and genuine friendship, a sort of soul mate connection. Still, she hides it from Jade when a handsome school official from Nanjing shows up (played by 吳彥祖 Daniel Wu) & she begins a relationship with him. They fall in love. Things are looking good for Lan!
Then Jade finds out, and Lan becomes conflicted. The school official breaks it off with her.
So it's just the two (three, if we count Jade's daughter) of them again - Jade has TB (is there a melodrama set in the fairly early 20th century or earlier that doesn't involve someone's imminent death via consumption?), they sit and reminisce about a lot of things, it's a beautiful friendship etc.
The whole thing just felt half-baked. And I don't mean in the sense of "That's preposterous!", I mean it really felt unfinished. The men of the story (the butler Jade sort of has a thing for, and it turns out he has a thing for her, though she only discovers this after he dies; Lan's Nanjing official) only serve to divert the focus away from the relationship between Jade and Lan, not deepen our understand of the bonds between them. Yes, I get that both women are jealous at alternate points of the other woman being more interested in a man than them - it still feels very shallow. The wishy-washy "We're going to leave a lot unsaid" tact taken through much of the film doesn't heighten the mood, make me intrigued, or lead my mind in interesting directions - it just feels, well, unfinished. The jealousy on Jade's part and the conflicted feelings of Lan while she's seeing the Nanjing official aren't particularly well-developed, and they really just make both women look flakey. It's one of those films that had a lot of potential, but just winds up sort of middling in the plot department.
(The costuming was great; I want this jacket Jade is wearing when she meets Lan for the first time copied. 我很喜歡)
So it's worth a look-see for the cinematography, some particularly well-acted scenes (let me say that the acting itself isn't half-baked in the least, but they weren't working with much - I think with the cast, it would have been possible to delve much deeper than the superficial look at the love between two women Peony Pavilion winds up with), as well as the beautiful way the opera is presented, especially Mudan Ting & the bond it strengthens between these two very different women. I was really interested in it from that perspective, and the fact that it's tangentially related to many of the studies of elite women in 17th and 18th century Jiangnan I've read - Mudan Ting figures prominently in the lives & scholarship of elite women of the Ming and Qing periods.
***
Mudan Ting
***
By way of background for those who haven't had to slog through several books on the elite women's culture of Ming-Qing Jiangnan, I'll quote from Judith T. Zeitlin's introduction, since I certainly can't do it this well:
In 1598, Tang Xianzu 湯顯祖 completed his romantic comedy, The Peony Pavilion, subtitled The Soul's Return (Mudan ting huanhun ji 牡丹亭還魂記). Written in an unusually dense and poetic style, this southern drama (chuanqi 傳奇) in fifty-five acts tells the story of a young maiden, Du Liniang 杜麗娘, who is ravished in a dream by a handsome young scholar. When she awakens, overcome with longing, she falls ill with a wasting disease, and after painting her self-portrait, she pines away and dies. Grief-stricken, her parents establish a shrine to consecrate her memory. But the dead woman's desire is so strong that three years later she returns as a ghost to the land of the living. In the vicinity of her shrine, she finds the scholar of her dream and enters into a passionate union with him. After they pledge their love forever, she haltingly reveals to him that she is actually a ghost, imploring him to exhume her remains so that she may be resurrected. Once he brings her back to live, they elope, and after he passes the highest palace examination, her resurrection and their secret marriage are officially sanctioned by imperial decree. (Zeitlin, 127-8)
***
The culture of elite women of the Ming-Qing & later periods defies the common assessment of "Chinese women" as bound-footed, illiterate, powerless, and totally cloistered: extraordinarily educated, gifted women were encouraged to excel at things like poetry and calligraphy; families proudly collected and published the writings of their learned women, and women themselves put together anthologies to showcase the work of women poets. "In a patriarchal culture," Mann says of women's writings in particular, "they created a women's discourse that upheld Confucian honor while voicing the passions and sentiments that threatened to violate it. Their poetic voices carried them beyond their place in the family and the household and into the public discourse of the imperium itself." (77) Women read, wrote, and shared outside the confines of male dominated culture.
Let me say here that there is a definite difference between the world Ko discusses (17th century Jiangnan, ie the Ming-Qing period) and the world Mann discusses (18th century Jiangnan, the High Qing). Mann describes the differences thus: "Studies of classical texts [during the High Qing] drew attention to learned women in times past - with dramatic results, including the gradual empowerment of women writers as moral wives, participants in an emerging discourse of what I call familistic moralism in High Qing times. This discourse clearly distinguishes the High Qing era from the late Ming period studied by Ko, when the cult of qing - passion, love, or desire - dominated the literary imagination of elite writers, male and female ... the chaste Qing couple 'replaces sex with words: poems, letters, and polite conversation.'" (22)
Even so, the ideal of a literary and emotional match made in heaven held firm in both the Ming-Qing and High Qing periods; parents worried endlessly about making an appropriate match for their daughters. Unmarried girl suicide wasn't entirely uncommon, and miserable letters from daughters in unhappy marriages were the stuff of elite parent nightmares. "Unhappiness was usual, disaster unsurprising," writes Mann. "Women's misery in arranged marriages was so commonplace in upper-class families that it pervades their memoirs. Brothers write sorrowfully about their married sisters; fathers lament the suffering of married daughters." (60)
Mann quotes a poem of Fan Jing of Tongcheng entitled "To My Sisters, In Memory of Times Past":
As little girls, we matched shoulders to line up according to height,
How hard it is to forget those splendid days of our childhood! ....
Even if we could return to the old days, the path back is all worn away.
This white head cannot bear to dwell on what happened long ago,
My poem takes shape, each word a taste of bitter sorrow. (110)
Mudan Ting was a particular favorite of many women (Zeitlin describes "the unprecedented intensity of the female reaction" (130)) - it exemplified the ideal of a happy marriage between two talented people, as well as passion and love. The play became sort of a figurehead for what Ko terms "the cult of qing" (情, Ko & Mann use the translations of "passion, love, or desire" while Zeitlin translates it as "sentiment or love" (128)); many girls understood that they might very well wind up in unhappy marriages, but the passionate love between Du Liniang and Liu Mengmei 柳夢梅 - love that transcends even death - was something to be held up as the ideal, what everyone was striving for.
One of the most interesting aspects of this publishing culture (see Chapter 1 of Ko for a thorough discussion of the rise of publishing & the economic situation that made all this possible) is the publication of commentaries, and it's here that we see women's response to Mudan Ting. Women aren't responding to seeing the play, they are responding to reading it, as well as responding to other readers and commentators. Ko spends a lot of time discussing the networks of elite women and their shared writings, and the discourse surrounding Mudan Ting provides a wealth of material for looking at women's lives in the Ming-Qing period.
Why were women so drawn to the play? Ko argues towards the angle of qing, that is, an idealization of romantic love, a woman circumventing Confucian mores. She points out that this was often unattainable & many women realized it was a goal out of reach (especially when they were already stuck in an unhappy marriage), which led to a lot of disillusionment & sometimes even suicide or death by depression and various wasting diseases. Still, it was an attractive idea. Zeitlin has a problem with "explanations that stress only a positive, vicarious identification with fulfillment of Du Liniang's desires," because "in almost every story about women's response to the play, the result is untimely death." (130) She continues:
"Why should a play, a romantic comedy at that, which celebrates the triumph of life over death and the triumph of love over social constraints, induce such a response? ... The recurrent cultural myths about the deaths of the readers, commentators, and actresses who come in contact with The Peony Pavilion point to an infectious danger emanating from the play - the allure of women dying young and the exquisite pleasure and pain produced in contemplating those deaths." (130)
Zeitlin selects the famous Three Wives' Commentary (also discussed in Ko) to illustrate her points and flesh out her arguments (the commentary also has a huge body of supporting/framing materials, drawn from different periods and from different voices, which give it a timeline that emerges, as opposed to a singular, overarching narrative).
So, what of the Three Wives' Commentary, which can be roughly traced out thusly (see Zeitlin, 132-136):
Wu Wushan 吳吳山 was betrothed to one Chen Tong 陳同, who died before he even met her. However, she left behind the first volume of Mudan Ting, which Wu was delighted to discover was covered with the girl's writings and commentary (and also depressed that the second volume had been burned). Wu then marries a well-read poet, Tan Ze 談則, who also reads Chen Tong's annotated volume, laments that the second volume is missing, is delighted when Wu brings home a complete edition of the volume Chen Tong was reading, and sets out to annotate the second volume in a style copying Chen Tong's. She then publishes both commentaries under her husband's name & it reaches a wide audience. Then she dies. (Are we noticing a pattern yet?)
Not to be defeated, Wu marries the "third" wife, Qian Yi 錢宜. After she's been educated to Wu's "satisfaction" (135), she is given a copy of the annotated Mudan Ting to read; she, too, falls in love with it, just as Tan Ze fell in love with Chen Tong's commentary. In fact, she bristles that Wu is getting credit for the book, and offers to sell her jewelry to pay for publication - under the names of the rightful authors (she also adds some commentary to both volumes).
Here we have three women bound through Mudan Ting: Chen Tong, though dead, affects her two fellow "wives," just as Tan Ze affects Qian Yi. There is a sense of literary kinship, though this of course takes place after one or two participants are dead. Emotions are transferred to writings and books; Tan Ze mourns the loss of volume two of Mudan Ting (which is the part containing the resurrection of Du Liniang and the happy part of the play; it is telling that it is this volume is the missing one), but also the loss of Chen Tong. In the case of the relationship between Tan Ze and Chen Tong, Zeitlin argues that Tan Ze tries to become Chen Tong's replacement, to almost merge with her (and in the commentary, she succeeds at that, not signing her name to her additions); Qian Yi, on the other hand, "does not seek to imitate or repeat [the commentary] of her predecessors ... Although she, too, enters into a dialogue with the dead, she attempts to summon the vanished souls instead of joining them - and she survives." (141) In adding her own voice and pulling the commentary of her predecessors out of the obscurity many similar commentaries found, it would seem that Qian Yi saved herself from joining Chen Tong and Tan Ze in an early grave.
In addition, Zeitlin discusses the creation of a women's community surrounding the commentary - postscripts, laudatory prefaces and the like were commonplace, but in the case of this commentary, all the supporting inscriptions were written by women.
Of the operatic setting of Mudan Ting, Zeitlin explains that the refined kunqu 崑曲 style was well-suited for small scale performances (as all the operatic performances seen in Peony Pavilion are) and that "performed in such a setting [ie, a courtyard or hall of a household], a scene from The Peony Pavilion would have been seamlessly integrated into domestic life ...." (156-7)
Zeitlin goes on to explore various other facets of the story of the commentary & the women who wrote it (or wrote about it), as well as the authorship controversy.
***
"In the rhetoric of Chinese dreams, if a dream is shared by more than one dreamer, then the dream is proved to be real. Once a dream ceases to be a private, solitary experience, it acquires a new ontological status, just as fictional characters can be said to become real once they leave the author's private imagination and enter the public domain." (Zeitlin, 173)
I did really like the bond formed between the two women of Peony Pavilion through Mudan Ting - Zeitlin's point about the presentation of kunqu dramas in the home or intimate spaces was present through much of the movie, and indeed, the very first scene has this really trippy, dream-like quality to it, with actors mingling with family members. Jade herself is asked to perform for the family on (one would assume) multiple occasions, though only one is shown in the movie itself.
The line between the tragic heroine of Mudan Ting who pines for a lover she has only seen in a dream and Jade, who longs for a lover who will care for & understand her (and then she receives the butler's diary after his death - is she being pined for by someone from beyond the grave?) blurs when she sings her songs from Mudan Ting. After beginning her relationship with the Nanjing official, Lan spends time in a half-dreamy state, thinking of his touch.
Still, the "happiest moments of [their] lives," as described by Lan, takes place on Jade's birthday. Jade's young daughter & Lan surprise her with one of those intimate performances of a scene (or song, in this case) from Mudan Ting. In an almost timeless courtyard of a rich family's complex (certainly dreamy enough by most standards), amidst falling blossoms, Liu Mengmei does appear. The lines between dreams and reality are blurred.
Is Lan the scholar who will save Jade's tragic, talented, beautiful heroine? Is Jade the shadowy dream-figure who will eventually come to life for Lan? Peony Pavilion doesn't tell us how the relationship ends, or when; nor does the film go deep enough into the complex relationship between the two women (this is the most disappointing part of the movie for me, because the potential is so great). Still, I appreciated this modern depiction of Mudan Ting as something fairly pivotal in the relationship of two women, and the scenes of the line blurring between fiction and reality, dreams and real life, friendship and something more were really brilliant, if sort of fleeting; the movie is worth watching for those alone.
On a final note, this last subtitle is a perfect example of why literary Chinese makes my blood run cold.
and
Judith T. Zeitlin, "Shared Dreams: The Story of The Three Wives' Commentary on the Peony Pavilion" (Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, vol. 54, no. 1 (June 1994), pp. 127-179)
See also: Dorothy Ko, Teachers of the Inner Chambers: Women and Culture in Seventeenth Century China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994); Susan Mann, Precious Records: Women in China's Long Eighteenth Century (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997)
For the sake of simplicity, I will be referring to 游園驚夢 as Peony Pavilion and 牡丹亭 as Mudan Ting
Nothing like a little kunqu opera with your angst.
I'll cop to being a closet Chinese opera fan; I really like how stylized it is, and I think the costumes and makeup are really cool. Sometimes I really like the songs, and sometimes I don't - Peony Pavilion does a pretty good job of presenting it in snippets that aren't overwhelming (and it helps that the songs selected are very pretty and pretty low on the caterwauling scale).
While the movie in & of itself fell pretty flat for me in the end, I think some of the things presented in Peony Pavilion dovetail pretty neatly with discussions of women's relationships developed over art and literature, specifically 牡丹亭 Mudan Ting ("The Peony Pavilion"), the Ming play written by 湯顯祖 Tang Xianzu.
But for the moment, let's take a flying tour of Yongfan's Peony Pavilion - the opera does figure heavily (several of the best scenes of the movie involve operatic scenes from Mudan Ting), but the main focus is the love between two women.
Well, sort of. From what I've read, a lot of people enjoyed the superb production values of the film (my copy is pretty poor quality & it's still beautiful), but compared it to a crappy version of 霸王別姬 Farewell My Concubine.
We have Lan, played by 王祖賢 Joey Wong, a new woman who would do Ah Ying of New Women proud. A teacher, daughter of a formerly rich family, she says her parents left her with little but "a modern mind." On the other hand, we have Jade, played by 宮澤理惠 Rie Miyazawa, who is an opera singer-turned-fifth wife in a very rich household (she's married to Lan's cousin).
Lan likes to play at crossdressing, and the two met while Jade was still singing at "The Moonlit Chamber".
They bond over songs taken from Mudan Ting; Lan is enchanted, and though Jade marries off into a rich household, they maintain a very close friendship - which is where we meet them.
The household is decadent and lavish, languid and dreamy - and dying out. Based on Jade's clothes, I think we can safely place the movie in the early 1930s (interestingly, Lan wears qipaos that are much, much more like the 'first wave' - ie, men's scholar robes), and old patterns of life are dying out. The family is selling off its treasures, everyone's too wrapped up in mahjong or opium smoking to get with the times and so on.
Etc. etc. etc.
What follows is an hour and a half of beautiful & dreamy cinematography (there's a reason the household scenes are wonderful, and it's because the languid pace and dream-like state the family seems to be suspended in is mirrored in the cinematography and pacing of the whole movie) and a lot of undeveloped angst. Usually I wouldn't complain about the angst being undeveloped, but you know, it was the point of the damn film. Still, the production is spectacular, from the costuming to the backdrops. And the opera is good too.
It's not enough to save the plot, which has these buildups and abrupt switches - after a good 45 minutes of buildup with Jade's situation, where you're expecting some New Women-esque "I just can't take it anymore!" freak out, Jade and her daughter are sent packing from the rich household for an unspecified reason; Lan says of course they can come live with her. Well, that's enough of Jade's story and sad life, on to Lan!
Lan is "in love" with Jade, though you have to wonder how much of it is actually infatuation - the other part seems like a deep and genuine friendship, a sort of soul mate connection. Still, she hides it from Jade when a handsome school official from Nanjing shows up (played by 吳彥祖 Daniel Wu) & she begins a relationship with him. They fall in love. Things are looking good for Lan!
Then Jade finds out, and Lan becomes conflicted. The school official breaks it off with her.
So it's just the two (three, if we count Jade's daughter) of them again - Jade has TB (is there a melodrama set in the fairly early 20th century or earlier that doesn't involve someone's imminent death via consumption?), they sit and reminisce about a lot of things, it's a beautiful friendship etc.
The whole thing just felt half-baked. And I don't mean in the sense of "That's preposterous!", I mean it really felt unfinished. The men of the story (the butler Jade sort of has a thing for, and it turns out he has a thing for her, though she only discovers this after he dies; Lan's Nanjing official) only serve to divert the focus away from the relationship between Jade and Lan, not deepen our understand of the bonds between them. Yes, I get that both women are jealous at alternate points of the other woman being more interested in a man than them - it still feels very shallow. The wishy-washy "We're going to leave a lot unsaid" tact taken through much of the film doesn't heighten the mood, make me intrigued, or lead my mind in interesting directions - it just feels, well, unfinished. The jealousy on Jade's part and the conflicted feelings of Lan while she's seeing the Nanjing official aren't particularly well-developed, and they really just make both women look flakey. It's one of those films that had a lot of potential, but just winds up sort of middling in the plot department.
(The costuming was great; I want this jacket Jade is wearing when she meets Lan for the first time copied. 我很喜歡)
So it's worth a look-see for the cinematography, some particularly well-acted scenes (let me say that the acting itself isn't half-baked in the least, but they weren't working with much - I think with the cast, it would have been possible to delve much deeper than the superficial look at the love between two women Peony Pavilion winds up with), as well as the beautiful way the opera is presented, especially Mudan Ting & the bond it strengthens between these two very different women. I was really interested in it from that perspective, and the fact that it's tangentially related to many of the studies of elite women in 17th and 18th century Jiangnan I've read - Mudan Ting figures prominently in the lives & scholarship of elite women of the Ming and Qing periods.
***
Mudan Ting
***
By way of background for those who haven't had to slog through several books on the elite women's culture of Ming-Qing Jiangnan, I'll quote from Judith T. Zeitlin's introduction, since I certainly can't do it this well:
In 1598, Tang Xianzu 湯顯祖 completed his romantic comedy, The Peony Pavilion, subtitled The Soul's Return (Mudan ting huanhun ji 牡丹亭還魂記). Written in an unusually dense and poetic style, this southern drama (chuanqi 傳奇) in fifty-five acts tells the story of a young maiden, Du Liniang 杜麗娘, who is ravished in a dream by a handsome young scholar. When she awakens, overcome with longing, she falls ill with a wasting disease, and after painting her self-portrait, she pines away and dies. Grief-stricken, her parents establish a shrine to consecrate her memory. But the dead woman's desire is so strong that three years later she returns as a ghost to the land of the living. In the vicinity of her shrine, she finds the scholar of her dream and enters into a passionate union with him. After they pledge their love forever, she haltingly reveals to him that she is actually a ghost, imploring him to exhume her remains so that she may be resurrected. Once he brings her back to live, they elope, and after he passes the highest palace examination, her resurrection and their secret marriage are officially sanctioned by imperial decree. (Zeitlin, 127-8)
***
The culture of elite women of the Ming-Qing & later periods defies the common assessment of "Chinese women" as bound-footed, illiterate, powerless, and totally cloistered: extraordinarily educated, gifted women were encouraged to excel at things like poetry and calligraphy; families proudly collected and published the writings of their learned women, and women themselves put together anthologies to showcase the work of women poets. "In a patriarchal culture," Mann says of women's writings in particular, "they created a women's discourse that upheld Confucian honor while voicing the passions and sentiments that threatened to violate it. Their poetic voices carried them beyond their place in the family and the household and into the public discourse of the imperium itself." (77) Women read, wrote, and shared outside the confines of male dominated culture.
Let me say here that there is a definite difference between the world Ko discusses (17th century Jiangnan, ie the Ming-Qing period) and the world Mann discusses (18th century Jiangnan, the High Qing). Mann describes the differences thus: "Studies of classical texts [during the High Qing] drew attention to learned women in times past - with dramatic results, including the gradual empowerment of women writers as moral wives, participants in an emerging discourse of what I call familistic moralism in High Qing times. This discourse clearly distinguishes the High Qing era from the late Ming period studied by Ko, when the cult of qing - passion, love, or desire - dominated the literary imagination of elite writers, male and female ... the chaste Qing couple 'replaces sex with words: poems, letters, and polite conversation.'" (22)
Even so, the ideal of a literary and emotional match made in heaven held firm in both the Ming-Qing and High Qing periods; parents worried endlessly about making an appropriate match for their daughters. Unmarried girl suicide wasn't entirely uncommon, and miserable letters from daughters in unhappy marriages were the stuff of elite parent nightmares. "Unhappiness was usual, disaster unsurprising," writes Mann. "Women's misery in arranged marriages was so commonplace in upper-class families that it pervades their memoirs. Brothers write sorrowfully about their married sisters; fathers lament the suffering of married daughters." (60)
Mann quotes a poem of Fan Jing of Tongcheng entitled "To My Sisters, In Memory of Times Past":
As little girls, we matched shoulders to line up according to height,
How hard it is to forget those splendid days of our childhood! ....
Even if we could return to the old days, the path back is all worn away.
This white head cannot bear to dwell on what happened long ago,
My poem takes shape, each word a taste of bitter sorrow. (110)
Mudan Ting was a particular favorite of many women (Zeitlin describes "the unprecedented intensity of the female reaction" (130)) - it exemplified the ideal of a happy marriage between two talented people, as well as passion and love. The play became sort of a figurehead for what Ko terms "the cult of qing" (情, Ko & Mann use the translations of "passion, love, or desire" while Zeitlin translates it as "sentiment or love" (128)); many girls understood that they might very well wind up in unhappy marriages, but the passionate love between Du Liniang and Liu Mengmei 柳夢梅 - love that transcends even death - was something to be held up as the ideal, what everyone was striving for.
One of the most interesting aspects of this publishing culture (see Chapter 1 of Ko for a thorough discussion of the rise of publishing & the economic situation that made all this possible) is the publication of commentaries, and it's here that we see women's response to Mudan Ting. Women aren't responding to seeing the play, they are responding to reading it, as well as responding to other readers and commentators. Ko spends a lot of time discussing the networks of elite women and their shared writings, and the discourse surrounding Mudan Ting provides a wealth of material for looking at women's lives in the Ming-Qing period.
Why were women so drawn to the play? Ko argues towards the angle of qing, that is, an idealization of romantic love, a woman circumventing Confucian mores. She points out that this was often unattainable & many women realized it was a goal out of reach (especially when they were already stuck in an unhappy marriage), which led to a lot of disillusionment & sometimes even suicide or death by depression and various wasting diseases. Still, it was an attractive idea. Zeitlin has a problem with "explanations that stress only a positive, vicarious identification with fulfillment of Du Liniang's desires," because "in almost every story about women's response to the play, the result is untimely death." (130) She continues:
"Why should a play, a romantic comedy at that, which celebrates the triumph of life over death and the triumph of love over social constraints, induce such a response? ... The recurrent cultural myths about the deaths of the readers, commentators, and actresses who come in contact with The Peony Pavilion point to an infectious danger emanating from the play - the allure of women dying young and the exquisite pleasure and pain produced in contemplating those deaths." (130)
Zeitlin selects the famous Three Wives' Commentary (also discussed in Ko) to illustrate her points and flesh out her arguments (the commentary also has a huge body of supporting/framing materials, drawn from different periods and from different voices, which give it a timeline that emerges, as opposed to a singular, overarching narrative).
So, what of the Three Wives' Commentary, which can be roughly traced out thusly (see Zeitlin, 132-136):
Wu Wushan 吳吳山 was betrothed to one Chen Tong 陳同, who died before he even met her. However, she left behind the first volume of Mudan Ting, which Wu was delighted to discover was covered with the girl's writings and commentary (and also depressed that the second volume had been burned). Wu then marries a well-read poet, Tan Ze 談則, who also reads Chen Tong's annotated volume, laments that the second volume is missing, is delighted when Wu brings home a complete edition of the volume Chen Tong was reading, and sets out to annotate the second volume in a style copying Chen Tong's. She then publishes both commentaries under her husband's name & it reaches a wide audience. Then she dies. (Are we noticing a pattern yet?)
Not to be defeated, Wu marries the "third" wife, Qian Yi 錢宜. After she's been educated to Wu's "satisfaction" (135), she is given a copy of the annotated Mudan Ting to read; she, too, falls in love with it, just as Tan Ze fell in love with Chen Tong's commentary. In fact, she bristles that Wu is getting credit for the book, and offers to sell her jewelry to pay for publication - under the names of the rightful authors (she also adds some commentary to both volumes).
Here we have three women bound through Mudan Ting: Chen Tong, though dead, affects her two fellow "wives," just as Tan Ze affects Qian Yi. There is a sense of literary kinship, though this of course takes place after one or two participants are dead. Emotions are transferred to writings and books; Tan Ze mourns the loss of volume two of Mudan Ting (which is the part containing the resurrection of Du Liniang and the happy part of the play; it is telling that it is this volume is the missing one), but also the loss of Chen Tong. In the case of the relationship between Tan Ze and Chen Tong, Zeitlin argues that Tan Ze tries to become Chen Tong's replacement, to almost merge with her (and in the commentary, she succeeds at that, not signing her name to her additions); Qian Yi, on the other hand, "does not seek to imitate or repeat [the commentary] of her predecessors ... Although she, too, enters into a dialogue with the dead, she attempts to summon the vanished souls instead of joining them - and she survives." (141) In adding her own voice and pulling the commentary of her predecessors out of the obscurity many similar commentaries found, it would seem that Qian Yi saved herself from joining Chen Tong and Tan Ze in an early grave.
In addition, Zeitlin discusses the creation of a women's community surrounding the commentary - postscripts, laudatory prefaces and the like were commonplace, but in the case of this commentary, all the supporting inscriptions were written by women.
Of the operatic setting of Mudan Ting, Zeitlin explains that the refined kunqu 崑曲 style was well-suited for small scale performances (as all the operatic performances seen in Peony Pavilion are) and that "performed in such a setting [ie, a courtyard or hall of a household], a scene from The Peony Pavilion would have been seamlessly integrated into domestic life ...." (156-7)
Zeitlin goes on to explore various other facets of the story of the commentary & the women who wrote it (or wrote about it), as well as the authorship controversy.
***
"In the rhetoric of Chinese dreams, if a dream is shared by more than one dreamer, then the dream is proved to be real. Once a dream ceases to be a private, solitary experience, it acquires a new ontological status, just as fictional characters can be said to become real once they leave the author's private imagination and enter the public domain." (Zeitlin, 173)
I did really like the bond formed between the two women of Peony Pavilion through Mudan Ting - Zeitlin's point about the presentation of kunqu dramas in the home or intimate spaces was present through much of the movie, and indeed, the very first scene has this really trippy, dream-like quality to it, with actors mingling with family members. Jade herself is asked to perform for the family on (one would assume) multiple occasions, though only one is shown in the movie itself.
The line between the tragic heroine of Mudan Ting who pines for a lover she has only seen in a dream and Jade, who longs for a lover who will care for & understand her (and then she receives the butler's diary after his death - is she being pined for by someone from beyond the grave?) blurs when she sings her songs from Mudan Ting. After beginning her relationship with the Nanjing official, Lan spends time in a half-dreamy state, thinking of his touch.
Still, the "happiest moments of [their] lives," as described by Lan, takes place on Jade's birthday. Jade's young daughter & Lan surprise her with one of those intimate performances of a scene (or song, in this case) from Mudan Ting. In an almost timeless courtyard of a rich family's complex (certainly dreamy enough by most standards), amidst falling blossoms, Liu Mengmei does appear. The lines between dreams and reality are blurred.
Is Lan the scholar who will save Jade's tragic, talented, beautiful heroine? Is Jade the shadowy dream-figure who will eventually come to life for Lan? Peony Pavilion doesn't tell us how the relationship ends, or when; nor does the film go deep enough into the complex relationship between the two women (this is the most disappointing part of the movie for me, because the potential is so great). Still, I appreciated this modern depiction of Mudan Ting as something fairly pivotal in the relationship of two women, and the scenes of the line blurring between fiction and reality, dreams and real life, friendship and something more were really brilliant, if sort of fleeting; the movie is worth watching for those alone.
On a final note, this last subtitle is a perfect example of why literary Chinese makes my blood run cold.