Obscene Things: Sexual Politics in Jin Ping Mei

by Naifei Ding

In Obscene Things Naifei Ding intervenes in conventional readings of Jin Ping Mei, an early scandalous Chinese novel of sexuality and sexual culture. After first appearing around 1590, Jin Ping Mei was circulated among some of China’s best known writers of the time and subsequently was published in three major recensions. A 1695 version by Zhang Zhupo became the most widely read and it is this text in particular on which Ding focuses. Challenging the preconceptions of earlier scholarship, she highlights the fundamental misogyny inherent in Jin Ping Mei and demonstrates how traditional biases—particularly masculine biases—continue to inform the concerns of modern criticism and sexual politics.
The story of a seductive bondmaid-concubine, sexual opportunism, domestic intrigue, adultery and death, Jin Ping Mei has often been critiqued based on the coherence of the text itself. Concentrating instead on the processes of reading and on the social meaning of this novel, Ding looks at the various ways the tale has been received since its first dissemination, particularly by critiquing the interpretations offered by seventeenth-century Ming literati and by twentieth-century scholars. Confronting the gender politics of this “pornographic” text, she troubles the boundaries between premodern and modern readings by engaging residual and emergent Chinese gender and hierarchic ideologies.

Genres: Nonfiction

368 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2002

Reviews

[Nick]

Although I was initially somewhat put off by the aggressive density of her writing, I found myself increasingly impressed with Ding Naifei’s ability to pinpoint the misogynist assumptions which underpin Zhang Zhupo (and by extension, Roy)’s reading of JPM, while also allowing for a possibility of ‘leaks’ of agency for characters such as Pan Jinlian. She also seems to have a certain amount of empathy for Zhang others who would read moral messages into the work, demonstrating that the moral messages play an important role in recasting the novel as a subject worthy of study for the literati / academic.
I was particularly taken with a question she raises in the last chapter of her book: If the author of JPM wanted to convey a moral message, why did he include exclusively bad women (yinfu) rather than good ones in his story? The conclusion she comes to (if I understand it correctly) is that the author found sexual pleasure in writing the stories of yinfu, much in the same way readers such as Zhang Zhupo found illicit pleasure in imagining themselves into the role of an yinfu (while at the same time also being able to rationalize their interest in an otherwise prurient text by pointing to the embedded moral messages).
This agrees with my own reading of the novel, in which I both agree with Zhang Zhupo/Roy in finding an underlying moral structure to the novel, while also questioning to what extent this moral structure supersedes the violent misogyny which is used to convey this moral message. As the Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan famously said, “The medium is the message.” In the context of the JPM, it is virtually impossible to separate the two layers of meaning imparted by the text.
It would be instructive, for example, to consider what a ‘good’ household in the world of the JPM (and by extension, Wanli era Ming dynasty) would look like. Even if Ximen Qing was a kind husband, he could hardly be expected to treat his women humanely, because the very structure of society defined women as the property of men, either as wives, concubines or bondservants. At best they would have been allowed a modest level of education, placed in charge of affairs within the household (for the primary wife), and provided with sufficient quantity of loving affection from their husband and children in accordance with the strictures of filial piety.
This is not to say that I get the impression that the women in JPM feel oppressed, or that the men feel the guilt of taking on the role of oppressor. Quite to the contrary, I think that the most challenging aspect of this novel to modern readers is that in many ways it shows how women could have seen a patriarchal society (upheld with the implicit or explicit threat of violence for transgressors) as not only acceptable, but even desirable. By the same token, JPM allows men to enter a world of ultimate male power, in which the subjugation of women is not only possible, but necessary.
Ding’s book provides an important deconstruction of the cult of the JPM which so far only C.T. Hsia seems to have come close to doing. Hsia gets bogged downed in comparative aesthetics, however, and seems to make the argument that the novel is not worth reading because it fails the litmus test of world literature (as defined by authors from the Western canon such as Dickens and Shakespeare). I don’t think that Ding would go so far as to say that JPM is not worth reading, but instead I think she would argue it is worth reading carefully, within the wider context of potential human experience rather than the one narrowly conscribed by neo-Confucians such as Zhang Zhupo.