Paste your essay in here… Spanning fifty-five scenes, traversing earthly and unearthly realms, and inhabiting the hybrid genre of tragicomedy, Tang Xianzu’s Ming chuanqi (“romance”) play, The Peony Pavilion, is an expansive meditation on love.1 (Birch, 3) Buffeted by what he perceived to be divergent, sensibility-stifling claims of monks, family elders, bureaucratic elites, and Daoist thinkers in his own lifetime, Tang sought to craft a play that animated what late-Ming thinkers called qing—translated as “love” or, by extension, “feeling”—in all imaginable spheres of human existence, including the spiritual and imaginary.2 (Birch, x) Passionate love of exceptionally devotional caliber, which embraces but is not limited to sexual attraction, is placed under the scrutiny of various tertiary, elder characters. Their interpretations, however, fall short. Ungovernable, the qing central to this story reaches across realms, like a boomeranging heat-seeker between two predestined souls. Tang’s dramaturgy enables a shifting sense of “place”: since no sets are used, the space of performance may be a garden, a boudoir, a jail cell, a mountain-top, heaven, hell—or any place imaginable, and the people on stage can change locations any time they wish by merely promenading in a circle and announcing arrival.2 (Birch, 3) Qing propels lovers Bridal Du and Liu Mengmei down many dangerous paths across these numerous places, and since performers fill and navigate the stage space, primacy is given to their relations rather than forces of the material world. How the lovers see the natural world inspires and inflames their desire. Desire guides their movements through space toward the object of their one and only love. This essay will map the journey from nascent sexual desire to the miraculous unions and flowering of qing shared by Bridal Du and Liu Mengmei and how this powerful love triumphs over the judgment of others. Secondarily, this essay will examine the sacrifices exacted by this potent qing and how these sacrifices are gendered.
Following the vivid, peripatetic prologue, the first character to introduce himself is Liu Mengmei, the impoverished scholar, antsy and unfulfilled: “My days are a daze of thought of love’ and about two weeks ago I had a dream out of nowhere. () Time becomes a blur when sights are set on an as yet immaterial desire. His psychic space has been captured by the image of a woman “of pleasing height, and manner…inviting” whose insistence that they must meet so that she can set him on the path to love and high office inspires him to change his name to reflect the flora at the site of the fleeting meeting, a flowering apricot. In the Daoist philosophy, nature is taken to be eternal, stable, and harmonious, a paradigm to be emulated through disciplined practice. Liu, however, finds alluring beauty in nature that prompts him to transform himself and cultivate space in his heart to allow sentiment for another to flower, rather than individual freedom, as is the goal of one pursuing the Way of the Dao: “In my heart a hundred blooms/not yet their time to open/seek first the support/of an enduring brance.” () Rather than balancing in the present to ensure secure futurity, Liu is stirred by dreams of a more sublime nature and an ideal, particular woman. He consents to chase an alternate fate: the promise of the pairing of souls rather than the stoic cultivation of his solitary longevity. Dreamscapes of beauty and love appeal to Liu in a more immediate and spontaneous way than the prospect of endurance through an unimaginative reality. The pursuit of escape through nourishing love from one end of the vast terrain begins.
From the beginning, Bridal Du suffers derision and seclusion at the hands of her sternly Confucian father and her pedantic tutor. The elder man’s sternness becomes a powerful but comic force in the play, as they confront the behavior of the young and the sensivity of women with furious incredulity. “Confucianism emphasizes maintenance of social harmony through hierarchical relationships in which the subordinate person (such as a child or wife) remains obedient and loyal to the higher-ranked person (such as a father, older brother, or husband)” (Theatre and Histories 120). Characters within a play are bound to appear narrow-minded and ridiculous if they condemn all art and feeling as they stand on a state. Condemned as a pariah, Bridal turns inward to longing and daydreaming. Prefect Du bemoans his lack of a son and frustration with his daughter’s idle embroidery and painting. He believes that such activities serve no rational purpose. Averted from her generative pleasures, Bridal is impelled to turn to books: “then at some future date when you enter your husband’s family, your understanding of learning and of the rites will reflect credit on your own” () Prefect Du’s focus on lineage and status neglects the interpersonal and imaginative facets of life. His understanding of marriage as an exchange of credit is direct and rational from his perspective, but the exchange of knowledge is more conceptual than real. As the story unfolds, the lovers and consequently the audience gradually but vividly discern in countless instances that real love may be just as abstract and immaterial as credit, however, it is infinitely more powerful and rewarding.
The simple image of the woman’s brow evolves and accrues meaning throughout the play. The painted brow—at first brush read simply as a superficial beauty marker and trivial factor of sex appeal—transforms from a conventional physical ornament to an expressive feature that communicates qing. Prefect Du huffs in frustration in scene three, entitled “Admonishing the Daughter”. His constant anxiety about living up to and surpassing the status of his ancestors leads to a lingering on the past that dismisses the present and insults the very family members that constitute the microcosm so central to the Confucian doctrine: “He [Du Fu] at least had/ a son who could “recite his father’s verses”/ when all I have is/ a daughter who “models her eyebrows on her mother’s”.” (Tang, 8) This hyperbolic insult reduces the women to their external features. By the end of the play, Bridal returns to her father, schooling him on his misapprehension of appearances and consequent failure to recognize that her experience of sentiment connects her to a poetic ancestry: “You are grown so used to browbeating your daughter/ you fail to recognize the eminence/ of a scion of Liu Zongyuan!” Liu Zongyuan was a celebrated poet and essayist who authored a brief allegory in which a hunchbacked gardener lays down rules for the cultivation of trees which are unexpectedly discovered to be the perfect prescription for wise government.1 (Tang, 336) Bridal harkens back to the way she has been hastily “browbeaten” or chastised for her desirous female proclivities. She shakes off her father’s past admonitions, which added insult to the injuries she had bravely endured as she suffered from devotional longing. Her knit-brow serves, on other occasions, as a facial manifestation of transcendent qing. The knit-brow in her portrait speaks directly to Liu. Bridal’s delicate hand, versed in lighthearted hobbies of painting her own eyebrows, serves her in the critical moments before her premature death: “Who shall mount this portrait, so as to enhance/ the happy capture of the living model?”1 (Tang, 71) Bridal personifies the portrait as having sexual readiness, as hinted by the double meaning of “mount”. Bridal believes that her visual missive will be received, and surely it is. Liu is not only mesmerized by corporeal beauty; by gazing, he finds intuitive access to the personal emotions of the woman represented: “She gazes back at me!/…love’s longing’s locked between her brows,/…We meet each other’s eyes.”1 (Tang, 145) The portrait has the emotional import of a partially fulfilled vow from which Liu cannot turn away: “Ah my young lady,/ image without form,/ your gaze destroys me!”1 (Tang, 147) Enamored of the image, Liu sees it as the promise of the whole, loving person that he longs for all the more.
Images of nature observed by the lovers reflect their psychological states. Whereas the Daoist philosophy posits nature as neutral and meant for human emulation, The Peony Pavilion playfully inverts this connection, and nature is seen to be emulating humans instead.4 Bridal returns to her shrine and re-discovers the landscape of her dream distinctly: “For I recall/ such a pavilion by flowered pool/ witnesses to our innocent play/ of breeze and moonlight.”1 (Tang, 152) She personifies the flowered pool as a witness, a cohort in the secretive, lush union. The environment is a true match to the dream, suggesting that the human imagination can create a meeting place for yin and yang just as much as the natural world itself. The vocabulary of human expression and the language of the natural world lyrically blend when Liu’s eyes meet those of his spectral love: “Hand of celestial being/ more true, more loving than mortal woman./ Gentle is she, smiles flowering in her eyes.”1 (Tang, 182) The forces of nature serve as allies to the heroic lovers: “Fair breezes blow on purpose/ to escort the nuptial pair/ no onlooker understands the mystery of this barge”1 (Tang, 214) This vivid image is presented at the end of scene thirty-six, “Elopement”. A sly assertion, that the relationship between the lover’s mutual qing and the movement of the winds is unknowable to anyone else, flies in the face of the Daoist belief that those schooled in the ultimate truth, or The Way, can understand human existence by simply looking at the forces of nature as they plainly appear and interpreting those observations in relation to the Dao.4 This exceptional scene of teamwork between nature and lovers ennobles their place in the world as beyond the grasp of most. The aforementioned miraculous boat journey is the site of a second sexual encounter, and the cooperation of the winds seems to fuel the lovers desire, as they perceive it as a divine sign of their predestined love. Nature’s characteristic softness, as found in petals and rivers throughout the play, is celebrated and figuratively linked to the erotic experience and consequently the human capacity for maturing sentiment. Therefore, hardness as a characterizing attribute implies insensitivity and ignorance in the realm of qing. Liu, falsely accused of grave robbery and kneeling at the threshold of an unjust death sentence, cries out: “How hard this father’s heart!/ The very pattern of stern fatherhood/ with his Five Thunders he would obliterate/ my wife’s fair name and history.”1 (Tang, 329) In a figurative tour-de-force of language, Liu decries Prefect Du’s ignorant impulse to prescribe a wholly unnecessary Daoist exorcism; even in her ghostly form, Bridal, an exceptional creature in all realms, was never demonic.