The Making of Wu Weiye’s Loyalist’s Identity：Material Objects, Talented Ladies and Departure of Soul in Linchun Hall and Moling Spring
Date Issued
2014
Date
2014
Author(s)
Yang, Chung-Wei
Abstract
The influence of the popular cultural phenomena in late Ming dynasty, such as the culture of talented women, of material objects and the cult of qing, has been clearly visible in the character figures, plots and detailed narrations of Wu Weiye’s dramas Moling Spring and Linchun Hall. These cultural phenomena were not only witnessed and experienced by the author but also part of life familiar for the readers of the time. In the works of Wu Weiye, they became therefore a mobilizable system of resources, by which Wu conveyed his loyal identity at the Ming-Qing transition in composing a meaningful network commonly comprehensible for his contemporary readers. And during this process, a further question is that: How did he mobilize and transform the features of these late Ming cultural phenomena to enable tactfully his readers to understand his purpose?
First, in Linchun Hall, although the women of talent were adorable, their outstanding talents could not be viewed only as a breakthrough in gender bias under the influence of the recognized talented women culture in late Ming. Rather, their talents placed in a political environment full of crisis represented the ideals unable to be realized. Second, in Moling Spring, the material object appreciation was not only part of the literati’s leisure or aesthetic life, but also invoked Wu Weiye’s anxiety on how to keep the loyalist identity through object exchange and circulation. Third, both plays adopted the narrative model of the departure of the soul, but still maintained a slight hesitation or even rejection in regard to the authenticity of qing connoted in this model. Furthermore, the fragility of female ghosts departing from the bodies was used as a metaphor for the uncertain feelings as a loyalist and the difficulty of cultural inheritance, which increased more variety in the literary tradition of the departure of the soul in late Ming. Such observations may reveal the political impacts of the dynastic transition on Wu Weiye’s literary imaginations.
To conclude, written from the perspective of cultural interpretations, this thesis attempts to supplement the current research on Wu Weiye’s dramas, exclusively focusing on characters, plots and rhetoric. This new perspective helps us to better capture the dynamic process of Wu Weiye’s political identity transformation during the dynastic transition and, meanwhile, to discern how both dramas reflect the distinctive features of the relationship between the old and new culture and spirit, not only closely tied but constantly changing, during the Ming-Qing transition.
Subjects
物
才女
離魂
文人文化
遺民意識
Type
thesis
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