Emotion and Female Authority: A Comparison of Chinese and English Fiction in the Eighteenth Century

From Firenze University Press Book: East and West Entangled (17th-21st Centuries)

Wen Jin, East China Normal University

The publication of Hau Kiou Choaan in 1761 as the first English translation of a vernacular Chinese novel has long been discussed. One pattern of mistranslation, however, has been paid scant attention. The Chinese novel figures a male protagonist who looks like an elegant lady and a lady protagonist with intelligence that exceeds those of all male characters. The English translation struggles to convey these details, with the editor Thomas Percy parsing them to mean that there is a lack of «gallantry» in the Chinese novel. Ironically, however, «gallantry» is a masculine ideal that steadily lost appeal in the eighteenth century in England. Despite the late-century exaltation of Gothic heritage, such cultural stereotypes as «gallant men» and weak damsels are continually reformed in English novels of the eighteenth century, culminating in Anne Radcliffe’s resourceful ladies and sensible embodiment of female self-possession in Burney and Austen. This essay first discusses Percy’s famous comment (and other related mistranslations in eighteenth-century England) and then traces how «strong women» who make gallantry seem outmoded function differently in eighteenth-century novels from China and England and how the differences illustrate a set of diverging cultural dynamics.

British and Chinese Moral Fiction

In the beginning of Book II of Hau Kiou Choaan, the first English translation of Haoqiu zhuan (好逑), which came out in 1761, the male protagonist praises the female protagonist behind her back, as 闺阁中须眉君子 (translated as «who, with all the delicacy of her sex, hath all the capacity of ours»). Thomas Percy feels compelled to explain in his commentary that it constitutes «a high compliment among a people, who entertain so unfavorable an opinion of the ladies’ understandings» (Hau Kiou Choaan: or The Pleasing History 1761, II: 10).2 In making this comment, Percy seems unaware that the phrase and its variations made frequent appearances in huaben stories (stories based on scripts for oral storytelling) and prose romances since at least the Yuan Dynasty. That an expression sounding to Chinese ears, then as now, as a formulaic compliment should require an explanation makes one think. Percy’s translation also indicates a misreading: 闺阁中须眉君子 (literally «a virtuous man within a woman’s private chamber») is not a woman with masculine capacity, but a woman with as much courage and wit as an honourable man. Courage and wit, after all, are not male-gendered attributes in early modern China. Haoqiu zhuan falls squarely within the perimeters of caizijiaren xiaoshuo (the scholar-beauty romance), a type of vernacular fiction popular in the second half of the seventeenth century, at the beginning of the Qing Dynasty. The male Chinese literati who authored caizijiaren romances by no means endorsed masculine women. They merely articulated a notion of the ideal woman as having the ability both to provide good companionship and to be a moral model for men. Authors of these scholar-beauty novels display a high opinion of women and a certain identification with the opposite sex. In his commentaries, Percy did not grasp the fact that severe patriarchal norms could coexist with a tendency to endorse the wit and judgment that some women have, though this paradox did appear prominent in the fictional and theatrical works of late Ming and early-to-mid-Qing China (roughly early seventeenth to mid-eighteenth century). Percy’s misreading betrays the central anxieties and concerns beguiling the cultural context into which Haoqiu zhuan was translated.

DOI: 10.36253/979–12–215–0242–8.06

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