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In Saying All That Can Be Said, Keith McMahon presents the first
full analysis of the sexually explicit portrayals in the Ming novel
Jin Ping Mei 金瓶梅 (The Plum in the Golden Vase). Countering
common views of those portrayals as “just sex” or as “bad
sex,” he shows that they are rich in thematic meaning and loaded
with social and aesthetic purpose. McMahon places the novel in the
historical context of Chinese sexual culture, from which Jin Ping
Mei inherits the style of the elegant, metaphorical description of
erotic pleasure, but which the anonymous author extends in an
exploration of the explicit, the obscene, and the graphic. The
novel uses explicit description to evaluate and comment on
characters, situations, and sexual and psychic states of being.
Echoing the novel’s way of taking sex as a vehicle for reading
the world, McMahon celebrates the richness and exuberance of Jin
Ping Mei’s language of sex, which refuses imprisonment within the
boundaries of orthodox culture’s cleanly authoritative style, and
which continues to inspire admiration from readers around the
world. Saying All That Can Be Said will change the way we think
about sexual culture in premodern China.
This volume completes Keith McMahon's acclaimed history of imperial
wives and royal polygamy in China. Avoiding the stereotype of the
emperor's plural wives as mere victims or playthings, the book
considers empresses and concubines as full-fledged participants in
palace life, whether as mothers, wives, or go-betweens in the
emperor's relations with others in the palace. Although
restrictions on women's participation in politics increased
dramatically after Empress Wu in the Tang, the author follows the
strong and active women, of both high and low rank, who continued
to appear. They counseled emperors, ghostwrote for them, oversaw
succession when they died, and dominated them when they were weak.
They influenced the emperor's relationships with other women and
enhanced their aura and that of the royal house with their acts of
artistic and religious patronage. Dynastic history ended in China
when the prohibition that women should not rule was defied for the
final time by Dowager Cixi, the last great monarch before China's
transformation into a republic.
Chinese emperors guaranteed male successors by taking multiple
wives, in some cases hundreds and even thousands. Women Shall Not
Rule offers a fascinating history of imperial wives and concubines,
especially in light of the greatest challenges to polygamous
harmony-rivalry between women and their attempts to engage in
politics. Besides ambitious empresses and concubines, these vivid
stories of the imperial polygamous family are also populated with
prolific emperors, wanton women, libertine men, cunning eunuchs,
and bizarre cases of intrigue and scandal among rival wives. Keith
McMahon, a leading expert on the history of gender in China, draws
upon decades of research to describe the values and ideals of
imperial polygamy and the ways in which it worked and did not work
in real life. His rich sources are both historical and fictional,
including poetic accounts and sensational stories told in
pornographic detail. Displaying rare historical breadth, his lively
and fascinating study will be invaluable as a comprehensive and
authoritative resource for all readers interested in the domestic
life of royal palaces across the world.
Chinese emperors guaranteed male successors by taking multiple
wives, in some cases hundreds and even thousands. Women Shall Not
Rule offers a fascinating history of imperial wives and concubines,
especially in light of the greatest challenges to polygamous
harmony-rivalry between women and their attempts to engage in
politics. Besides ambitious empresses and concubines, these vivid
stories of the imperial polygamous family are also populated with
prolific emperors, wanton women, libertine men, cunning eunuchs,
and bizarre cases of intrigue and scandal among rival wives. Keith
McMahon, a leading expert on the history of gender in China, draws
upon decades of research to describe the values and ideals of
imperial polygamy and the ways in which it worked and did not work
in real life. His rich sources are both historical and fictional,
including poetic accounts and sensational stories told in
pornographic detail. Displaying rare historical breadth, his lively
and fascinating study will be invaluable as a comprehensive and
authoritative resource for all readers interested in the domestic
life of royal palaces across the world.
Having multiple wives was one of the mainstays of male privilege
during the Ming and Qing dynasties of late imperial China. Based on
a comprehensive reading of eighteenth-century Chinese novels and a
theoretical approach grounded in poststructuralist, psychoanalytic,
and feminist criticism, Misers, Shrews, and Polygamists examines
how such privilege functions in these novels and provides the first
full account of literary representations of sexuality and gender in
pre-modern China.
In many examples of rare erotic fiction, and in other works as
well-known as Dream of the Red Chamber, Keith McMahon identifies a
sexual economy defined by the figures of the miser and the
shrew--caricatures of the retentive, self-containing man and the
overflowing, male-enervating woman. Among these and other
characters, the author explores the issues surrounding the practice
of polygamy, the logic of its overvaluation of masculinity, and the
nature of sexuality generally in Chinese society. How does the man
with many wives manage and justify his sexual authority? Why and
how might he escape or limit this presumed authority, sometimes to
the point of portraying himself as abject before the shrewish
woman? How do women accommodate or coddle the man, or else oppose,
undermine, or remold him? And in what sense does the man place
himself lower than the spiritually and morally superior
woman?
The most extensive English-language study of Chinese literature
from the eighteenth century, this examination of polygamy will
interest not only students of Chinese history, culture, and
literature but also all those concerned with histories of gender
and sexuality.
For centuries of Chinese history, polygamy and prostitution were
closely linked practices that legitimized the 'polygynous male',
the man with multiple sexual partners. Despite their strict
hierarchies, these practices also addressed fundamental antagonisms
in sexual relations in serious and constructive ways. Qing fiction
abounds in stories of female resistance and superiority. Women -
main wives, concubines, and prostitutes - were adept at exerting
control and gaining status for themselves, while men indulged in
elaborate fantasies about female power. Keith McMahon introduces a
new concept, 'passive polygamy', to explain the unusual number of
Qing stories in which women take charge of a man's desires, turning
him into an instrument of female will. To this he adds a story that
haunted the institutions of polygamy and prostitution: the tale of
'sublime passion', in which the main characters are a 'remarkable'
woman and her male lover. Throughout McMahon examines how polygamy,
prostitution, and the story of sublime passion encountered the
first stages of paradigmatic change in the nineteenth century,
decades before the legal abolition of polygamy. By the end of the
Qing dynasty in 1911, love stories were celebrating the exploits of
street-smart prostitutes who fleeced gullible patrons in the
bustling city of Shanghai. What do these characters have in common
with their early counterparts as men and women became inhabitants
of a new city in an era flooded with ideas from radically foreign
sources - all of this taking place in a time of economic and
cultural dislocation? McMahon reads late Qing love stories in a
historically symbolic way, taking them as part of a larger fantasy
of Chinese civilization undergoing a fundamental crisis. The
polygamous marriage and the affairs of the brothel became
metaphorical staging grounds for portraying the destiny of China on
the verge of modernity. Finally, McMahon speculates on the changes
polygamous sexuality underwent after the Qing dynasty ended and
whether it exerted a residual influence in later times.
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