《聊齋誌異》夫婦情義的多重形塑 = Affection and Allegiance in Marriage: The Multiple Constructions in the Liaozhai Zhiyi

Liaozhai zhiyi (Strange Tales from a Rustic Studio) is a work by Pu Songlin which appeared during the heyday of the Qing fiction written in classical Chinese. It explores the themes of love and marriage and displays abundant insights into the ethical relationship between husband and wife. This study concentrates on the representation of marriage situations in the Liaozhai zhiyi. It investigates how Pu Songling, by way of the rhetorical strategies of falsehood-truth alternation and the mutual verification between reality and imagination, builds into the fabrics of the novel’s dialogues his multiple concerns for the questions of love and loyalty in the husband-wife relationship. The study consistently pursues a gender perspective in its explication of the dialectical interplay between orthodoxy and authenticity as it is reflected in the Liaozhai zhiyi. Such interplay encompasses the love and friendship between husband and wife, the feeling and thoughts occasioned by the separation and union between husband and wife, the perseverance of a husband’s loyalty and a wife’s fidelity, the ethical conflicts between a woman’s dual identities of "daughter" (an identity defined by birth) and “wife” (an identity retained through marriage), the confusions between an old lover and a new one, as well as the gender transfiguration between male and female. By highlighting this dialectical interplay, the study attempts to unveil and shed new light on the multifaceted interactions between men and women, as well as the entangled life experiences depicted in the Liaozhai zhiyi.