Emotions in Non-Fictional Representations of the Individual, 1600-1850: Between East and West 3030840042, 9783030840044

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Emotions in Non-Fictional Representations of the Individual, 1600–1850 Between East and West Edited by Malina Stefanovska · Yinghui Wu Marie-Paule de Weerdt-Pilorge

Emotions in Non-Fictional Representations of the Individual, 1600–1850

Malina Stefanovska  •  Yinghui Wu Marie-Paule de Weerdt-Pilorge Editors

Emotions in Non-­Fictional Representations of the Individual, 1600–1850 Between East and West

Editors Malina Stefanovska Department of European Languages and Transcultural Studies University of California, Los Angeles Los Angeles, CA, USA

Yinghui Wu Asian Languages and Cultures University of California, Los Angeles Los Angeles, CA, USA

Marie-Paule de Weerdt-Pilorge UFR Lettres et Langues Université de Tours Tours, France

ISBN 978-3-030-84004-4    ISBN 978-3-030-84005-1 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84005-1 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

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Contents

Part I Introduction   1 Introduction  3 Malina Stefanovska and Yinghui Wu Part II Debates and Tensions  13 Nou Nou: A Chinese Inheritance Quarrel at the Académie royale des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres (1713–1743) 15 Frédéric Charbonneau  Buddhism and Emotions: Asian Enlightenment and the Anxieties of European Identity 31 Daniel Williford Part III Empathies and Immersions  43  Rewriting Addison, Antiquity, and Female Agency: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s “Remarks on Italy” 45 Shirley F. Tung

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Contents

 Shakespeare’s Art of the Dervish: Voltaire, Elizabeth Montagu, and National Sentiment 75 Angelina Del Balzo Part IV Writing Emotion: Problems and Strategies  93  How to Manage Emotions in “The Classic of Whoring” 95 Yinghui Wu  Genre and Emotion in Chen Jiru’s Biographies113 Tina Lu  Self Reconfigured in Recollected Dreams: Xue Cai’s (1595–1665) Journal During the Manchu Conquest of China133 Xiaoqiao Ling Part V Personal Memoirs: From Elite to Popular Expressions 157  Emotions in the Face of Silence in the Memoir of 1805: The Memoirs of Lady Hyegyŏng. The Autobiographical Writings of a Crown Princess of Eighteenth-Century Korea159 Marie-Paule de Weerdt-Pilorge  Hemlock and Hair Shirts: Class Mobility and the Emotional Habitus in the Mémoires of Valentin Jamerey-Duval173 Dorthea Fronsman-Cecil Index197

Notes on Contributors

Frédéric Charbonneau  is a professor in the Department of Francophone Literatures, Translation and Creation at McGill University. He specializes in the literary history of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and has published a dozen books on memoirs, literature and sciences, and the history of gastronomy. His most recent essay, Les Ondes de choc, paysage intérieur de Saint-Simon, was published by Classiques Garnier (Paris, 2019). His research concerns the Académie royale des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres and the historical work of Nicolas Fréret. Angelina Del Balzo  is Assistant Professor of Humanities in the Program in Cultures, Civilizations, and Ideas (CCI) at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey. She received her PhD in English with a concentration in Gender Studies from UCLA in 2019. Her work has been published in  Eighteenth-Century Fiction,  Eighteenth-Century Studies, and  SEL Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, and has been supported by grants from the Huntington, the Clark Library, the Université de François Rabelais de Tours, and McGill University. In addition to her academic work, she has served as script reader and dramaturg with the theater at Boston Court Pasadena. Marie-Paule  de Weerdt-Pilorge a scholar of eighteenth-century memoirs, teaches French Literature at the University of Tours. Jointly with Malina Stefanovska, she led the research program (2016–2020) “From Passions to Emotions: Non-fictional Representations of the Individual (1680–1850),” financed by the Partner University Fund (PUF) of the French American Council on Education (FACE). This resulted in the ix

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publication in 2021 of a co-edited book titled Récits de vie et pratiques de sociabilité 1680–1850. She has published extensively on Old Regime memoirs. Dorthea  Fronsman-Cecil  is Visiting Assistant Professor of French at Lafayette College. Her work, which investigates questions of labor and leisure in modern and contemporary French cultural productions, including punk music and writing, has appeared in Modern and Contemporary France and Etudes Francophones. In 2019, her manuscript “Nous bâtirons un monde nouveau:” Punk Polemics, Aesthetics, and Everyday Life in Metropolitan France, won the Peter Lang Young Scholars Competition in French in the Media and Culture Category. It will be published in 2022 by Peter Lang Oxford. She thanks UCLA, l’Université François Rabelais de Tours, and the Partner University Fund for supporting her research and allowing her to develop a transhistorical perspective on class identity in French literature. Xiaoqiao  Ling is Associate Professor of Chinese at Arizona State University. Her main field of interest is late imperial Chinese literature with a focus on performance texts, vernacular fiction, and the print culture. She has published in both Chinese and English on fiction and drama commentary, legal imagination in literature, memory and trauma in seventeenth-century China. Tina Lu  is Colonel John C. Trumbull Professor of East Asian Languages and Literatures at Yale University, Tina Lu is a specialist on Chinese literature from 1550 to 1750. She is the author of two monographs and numerous articles. Malina  Stefanovska is a professor in the Department of European Languages and Transcultural Studies at University of California, Los Angeles. She specializes in French Literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. She has published widely on memoirs, writing about the self, politics and literature, with a recent edited book, From the Margins to the Centre: Casanova and the Enlightenment, and her own literary memoirs on growing up in ex-Yugoslavia, Sevdah: élégie pour un sud rêvé. Shirley  F.  Tung  is Associate Professor of English Literature at Kansas State University. She specializes in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British Literature and is completing a monograph on how travel narratives function as crucial sites for the mediation of narrative and national

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identities. Her work on the literature and culture of the long eighteenth century has been published in The Age of Johnson, Eighteenth-­ Century Studies, European Romantic Review, Huntington Library Quarterly, Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Restoration: Studies in Literary Culture, 1600–1700, and SEL Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900. Daniel Williford  is a librarian and researcher in Los Angeles. He holds a PhD in English from UCLA (2015) and his MLIS from UCLA (2019) with a specialization in the materiality of textual transmission. He is focused on issues of information access and social justice. Yinghui Wu  is Assistant Professor of Chinese Literature at University of California, Los Angeles. She specializes in Chinese literature from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, with a focus on drama, print culture, and the interaction of text, sound, and visual media. She is currently completing a monograph that explores woodblock-printed plays as a nexus of new publishing and reading practices and as a productive space for cultural innovations in seventeenth-century China.

PART I

Introduction

Introduction Malina Stefanovska and Yinghui Wu

In the heyday of post-structuralism, we were taught that Inuit languages have more than twenty different terms to designate snow. Whether this truism was right or wrong, as it may have proved since, it was meant to alert us to the inextricable relationship between language, culture, and the ways of experiencing the world. An awareness of this relationship in the realm of human emotions— more intangible even than snowflakes!—is what started this project. A three-year collaborative project between UCLA and the University of Tours, in France,1 was meant to highlight the historical development of passions and emotions during the long eighteenth century in genres such as journals, memoirs, conduct manuals, or correspondences which, we felt, might give a different account of emotions in real lives: closer to the individual self, less codified by literary rules, or influenced by philosophical perspectives. Our interest was tied to the study of emotions at large, a newly blossoming area of inquiry, in particular for the literature of our period in France.

M. Stefanovska (*) • Y. Wu University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, USA e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Stefanovska et al. (eds.), Emotions in Non-Fictional Representations of the Individual, 1600–1850, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84005-1_1

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As the initial project developed, wishing to give our investigations a broader cultural bearing, a Conference at UCLA in 2018 titled “Between East and West: Emotions in Non-fictional Representations of the Individual (1600–1850)” welcomed researchers from other cultural and linguistic areas and slightly broadened the periods. As was to be expected, taking our inquiries outside of the European tradition brought some unforeseen encounters. It elicited differences as well as similarities, tensions as well as congruence, translations as much as (at times willed) mistranslations. Our ambition in presenting them here is not to compare “emotions East and West”, but rather to place alongside each other, at times quite distinctive variations in representing feelings and their embeddedness in the self, in society, and in language. It also enables us to draw unexpected parallels and to question apparent similarities. Let us start with the encounters between what scholars have termed different ‘regimes’ of affect and what we very freely incorporated under the umbrella of ‘emotions.’2 Freely, because the consistency of this notion across historical periods, genres, and geo-cultural regions is at best uncertain. Linguists have underlined, for instance, the extent to which apparent homonyms in French, and English, such as emotion/émotion, sentiment, sensible, or sensitive are ‘fake friends’ that carry different meanings. In Slavic languages,3 the late import and appropriation of Latinate, Western, terms such as ‘emocija’ or ‘afekt’ alongside older Slavic ones (‘osećanje’, ‘čuvstvo’, etc.), testifies to a recent historical reorganization of the lexical and notional field. The term qing 情 used in China and Chosŏn Korea is at once semantically broader and more ambiguous than emotion.4 While in Europe, emotion (or passion) is most often contrasted with reason, Chinese conceptualizations of qing are rarely concerned with the distinction between ‘mind’ and ‘heart’, ‘reason’ and ‘feeling’, and more often preoccupied with the opposition of qing to ‘ritual propriety’ (li 禮) or ‘cosmic and moral order’ (li 理), and with the intertwined relationships between emotions and desires.5 Thus, an understanding of qing in close relation to human nature, as well as a sensitivity to moral implications of passions and desires, are central to the perception of emotions.6 To our mutual surprise, we also discovered how geo-cultural differences may be compounded by different historical evolution and scholarly periodizations.7 Thus, while the beginning of the eighteenth century and the Enlightenment in Europe coincided with a new interest in emotions, it was in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that China experienced a radical reevaluation of emotions and desires in defiance of

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state-sponsored Neo-Confucianism.8 In Korea, popular literature that began to flourish since the late eighteenth century exhibited growing fascination with emotions. The chronological readjustment that we had to introduce to our inquiry thus demonstrates that emotion is not only embedded in the lexical field of a specific language, but also conditioned by the very historicity of prevalent cultural norms and beliefs. In other ways as well, placing side-by-side examples and explorations of feelings highlighted certain core differences between an equally broadly designated ‘East’ and ‘West’. In European literature, the 250 years covered by our contributors saw the emergence of an imaginary ‘Orient’ comprising territories as varied as North Africa and Persia, and leading all the way to China. It is well known that the use of a fictional ‘Oriental’ visitor, or spy, served to ground a critique of Western institutions and life, but also to delineate their commonalities and advance their political programs.9 The examples of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Elizabeth Montagu reveal both perspectives: at times, a systematic ‘orientalizing’ was used by the author as a means of legitimizing emotional regimes of her own national culture (Del Balzo); but it could also serve to redefine her positionality as an expatriate woman (Tung). In the case study related to the European understanding of Buddhism, the fluctuations in the interpretation of emotions, display the anxieties and evolution in the Western culture that interprets it (Williford). Such perspectives are necessarily far removed from documented ‘Eastern’ ways of categorizing and expressing emotions, and in a real encounter between Chinese and French scholars, misunderstandings and misinterpretations reveal the true limits of cultural typecasting and the internal stakes of European academicians (Charbonneau). Several contributing scholars, while highlighting particular emotions expressed in a culture, also reveal their embeddedness in the literary genre practiced, and in its historical development (Lu, Tung, Wu, Fronsman-­ Cecil). In Europe, the novel interest in emotions and ‘sentiments’, rather than the traditional ‘passions’ inherited from Antiquity, coincided with the rise of the novel (itself heavily indebted to non-fictional memoirs).10 This development strengthened the attention to the physical and mental manifestations of emotions and brought about their gradual distanciation from the passions’ humoral rootedness in the body, and their exploration in the new context of eighteenth-century “sensualist” theories.11 Even more so, the non-fictional writings on which this collection focuses—from memoirs to correspondences, traces of academic debates, conduct manuals, and dream narratives—placed emotions in real-life situations, emphasizing

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their physical, mental, and moral roots in the individual and their interrelatedness with the family, the group, and the larger social structures. In early modern China and Korea, on the other hand, the powerful influence of Confucian orthodoxy posed unique challenges to the representation of personal emotions. Our contributors show that, despite the normative order for writing about interiority (Lu, Pilorge), various strategies were employed to destabilize generic conventions for the expression of heterodox or unusually intense affective experience (Lu, Ling, Wu, Pilorge). In late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century China, new attempts to “rethink the relation between the affective and moral spheres” led to a flourishing of qing discourses in the literary sphere.12 The vernacular fiction and drama opened up a new space for polyphonic explorations of emotions and desires in human life, and through such deep explorations reached an unprecedented level of verisimilitude and sophistication.13 Around the same time, the various non-fictional genres studied in this volume became either newly emphasized (women’s poetry), subtly reinvented (biography), or repackaged (e.g., conduct manuals) through the lens of qing, contributing to new and pluralistic ways of imagining the relationships between genders (Wu), between public and private versions of the self (Lu), and between elite and popular cultural forms (Wu). Some of the contributions explore real or imagined encounters between West and East (Charbonneau, Williford), others stay in their cultural realm, but highlight certain parallels and tensions: those can be between fiction and non-fiction (Lu), public and personal writings, or perception and dream (Ling), or between high-end and low-end cultural products (Wu). Others yet underscore the connection between social class and emotions (Fronsman), or between two concurrent versions of the self, produced in public versus personal texts (Tung, Pilorge, Ling). Thus, an inquiry that addressed such a broad cultural and geographical expanse was able to illuminate to a significant degree common issues of gender, class, and the private/public dichotomy at the core of the act of constructing the self through writing about emotions. Finally, placing alongside each other such different case studies brought out certain unexpected commonalities, in particular in relation to our focus on non-fictional representations of emotions. Negotiating between the codified, publicly displayed emotions and the deeply felt personal affects produces idiosyncratic writings, as is the case of Lady Hyegyŏng and her exceptional use of autobiography as a testimony (Pilorge), but also, on the opposite side of the geographical and social spectrum,

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Duval-Jamerey’s autobiography as a peasant turned intellectual (Fronsman-­ Cecil). At times, an encounter with otherness—which can be a dream (Ling), or a different geographical or social milieu (Del Balzo, Tung)— elucidates internal turmoil (Charbonneau, Tung), at other times it helps formulate personal emotions as well as cultural sentiments (Ling, Williford, Del Balzo). We hope that this series of encounters will bring about the same rich, multifaceted and many layered exploration of emotions as they were experienced, and expressed by real individuals in the period between the beginning of the seventeenth and the mid-nineteenth centuries, and between East and West.

Notes 1. Titled “From Passions to Emotions: Non-fictional Representations of the Individual (1680–1850)” and financed by the Foundation FACE (French American Council of Education) through its Partner University Fund, the project focused on a European context. The hypothesis was that of a major paradigm change from the reign of passions—where the self is a passive object, and the passions saturated with religious, or often negative connotations—to the rule of sentiments and emotions, characterized by a more active human subject, a broader range of emotions, less insistence on taxonomies and descriptions, and more interest in the diversity, contradictions, and the ephemeral character of emotions, and their rootedness in desire. The mutation is linked to a shift in the basic framework in which we understand human nature: while ‘passions’ and ‘affections’ are linked with ‘soul’, ‘sin’, ‘grace’, ‘self-love’, that is discourses of Christianity and of classical philosophers, the word ‘emotions’ is part of a different framework, influenced by psychology, and based on notions such as ‘laws,’ ‘observations’, or ‘behavior’. 2. Broomhall (p. 2), while noting that scholarship on emotions in the early modern period is vast, underlines that her collection of essays “keenly awaits comparable volumes analyzing other societies worldwide in the period which broadly speaking spans 1500 to 1800”. She also notes that her choice of the term ‘emotion’ is entirely pragmatic, locating the volume in the current ‘history of emotions’ scholarship, while avoiding to decide which of varied emotion terms from the period considered should be given pride of place over others—passions, sentiments, affections, and so on— each defined by distinct discursive contexts. Other scholars underscore the differences: Wierbicka (p. 2 ff) argues, for instance, “While feeling makes no distinction between the mental and the physical, emotions require the presence of three elements: thoughts, feelings, and bodily events or processes.”

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3. Serbian, quoted here, is the native tongue of one of the editors, but the relationship is valid in all or most other Slavic languages as well. 4. The ruling elites of Korea used literary Chinese in formal writing until the late nineteenth century, but it is worth noting that the memoirs of Lady Hyegyŏng discussed in the volume were written in Korean. For the semantic range of qing, see Eifring, “Introduction: Emotions and the Conceptual History of qing”, in Love and Emotions in Traditional Chinese Literature, p. 5. Paolo Santangelo notes that the basic meanings of qing range from “feelings or affective states of mind” and “inclinations or affection or desire” to “circumstances,” “authenticity,” and “human conditions.” Santangelo, The Culture of Love in China and Europe, p. 19. 5. As Eifring observes, the Chinese concern with qing is never primarily motivated by an interest in epistemology, as is often the case in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Western thought. Rather, it is primarily understood in relation to morality. Eifring, “Introduction,” p. 5. 6. Qing is considered an inherent element of human nature (xing) in Confucianism, a school of thinking that was fundamental to Chinese state ideology and social life. In early Confucian texts (before 206 B.C.), qing (encompassing joy, anger, sorrow, fear, love, hate, and desire) was understood as similar to, and a manifestation of, one’s inborn nature (xing 性). The understanding of emotions as negative and damaging had much to do with the influence of Buddhism (which regards emotions and desires as the cause of karma) and Daoism (for which excessive passions harm vital energy and man’s balance). However, due to the notion of nonduality, Chinese Buddhism took a more complex approach to qing than might appear, treating emotions as not simply an obstacle to enlightenment, but also a means to reach it. Santangelo, The Culture of Love in China and Europe, pp. 27–28. 7. The period under discussion in this volume falls within the early modern period. As comparative studies of early modern cultures have shown, while the concept ‘early modern’ is useful for identifying certain parallel developments in different parts of the globe, the dating of early modernity is arbitrary in every culture, and it is especially important to recognize that this conventional Eurocentric, or even Anglophone—as implied by the very term—periodization is not the norm for global early modernities. This volume proposes a broader historical period to explore plural paths of change in the representations of emotion in the cultures under study. David Porter, “Introduction,” in Comparative Early Modernities, pp. 4–5. 8. Compared to the turn from passions to emotions in eighteenth-century Europe, the shift in China towards a positive re-examination of qing was more extended across time. It began with philosophical debates in the School of the Mind (xinxue 心學) in the sixteenth century and became prevalent in literature in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

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9. Montesquieu’s Persian Letters, a bestseller published in France in 1721 which narrated the experiences in France of two Persian travelers, was only one of many novels constructed on the same premise. Titles such as “L’espion chinois” (The Chinese Spy) by Ange Goudar or Giovanni Paolo Marana’s Letters Writ by a Turkish Spy (first published in Italian) testify to a common European infatuation with the Orient which was later to serve its imperialist goals and perspective. 10. See Philip Stewart. 11. Georges Vigarello (Vigarello, pp. 241–252) notes that while Descartes and his contemporaries did not distinguish between passions and emotions, calling the passions “emotions of the soul,” the eighteenth century described emotions through the idea of a rapid change, a choc, revealed by such symptoms as palpitations and even spasms. The Enlightenment, with its dual emergence of the individual—redefined through John Locke’s sensualist philosophy (The Essay on Human Understanding dates from 1680) with its repudiation of innate ideas—and the emergence of public opinion, was a pivotal period for the ground swelling shift from passions to emotions in self-representation. 12. The so-called cult of qing was a turn in philosophy and literature to “rethink the relation between the affective and moral spheres, and a process of rehabilitation of passions and desires.” Santangelo, The Culture of Love in China and Europe, p. 117. In Chinese philosophical discourse, the meanings of qing had gone through some major shifts in the first two millennia. Believed to be an inherent element of human nature, this morally neutral term gradually acquired negative connotations. Especially, according to the Neo-Confucian orthodoxy that dominated Chinese intellectual thinking since the Song dynasty, qing was believed to damage the purity and tranquility of man’s original nature and obstruct the individual’s path toward moral perfection. A deep distrust of the affective world with an emphasis on rigorous control of emotions prevailed until the emergence of the school of Mind, which argues that the mind is the sole source of moral truth, and opens up the possibility of more positive evaluations of emotions. This new trend of thinking arose in a context of economic prosperity, loosening political control, and thriving print culture, and clearly influenced the proliferation of qing discourses in literary works. For changing meanings of qing in philosophical discourse, see Huang, “Sentiments of Desire,” pp. 153–174; Santangelo, The Culture of Love in China and Europe, pp. 27–106. 13. In particular, the full-length novel, represented by the four masterpieces that took shape in the late Ming, creates complex visions of qing by covering a broad social spectrum and interweaving a variety of generic traits and stylistic levels. Wai-yee Li, “Languages of Love and Parameters of Culture,” in Love and Emotions in Traditional Chinese Literature, p. 238.

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Bibliography Aravamudan, Srinivas. Enlightenment Orientalism: Resisting the Rise of the Novel. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2011. Bailey, Amanda, and Mario DiGangi, eds. Affect Theory and Early Modern Texts: Politics, Ecologies, and Form. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Berg, Daria. Women and the Literary World in Early Modern China, 1580–1700. London and New York: Routledge, 2013. Boddice, Rob. The History of Emotions. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018. Broomhall, Susan. Early Modern Emotions: An Introduction. London: Routledge, 2017. Chard, Chloe, and Helen Langdon, eds. Transports: Travel, Pleasure, and Imaginative Geography 1600–1830. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996. Coleman, Patrick, Jayne Lewis, and Jill Kowalik, eds. Representations of the Self From the Renaissance to Romanticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Corbin, Alain, Jean-Jacques Courtine, and Georges Vigarello, eds. Histoire des émotions, vol. 1, 2. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2016. Dixon, Thomas. From Passions to Emotions: The Creation of a Secular Psychological Category. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Eifring, Halvor, ed. Love and Emotions in Traditional Chinese Literature. Leiden: Brill, 2004. Eifring, Halvor, ed. Minds and Mentalities in Traditional Chinese Literature. Beijing: Culture and Art Publishing House, 1999. Hegel, Robert E., and Richard C. Hessney, eds. Expressions of Self in Chinese Literature. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985. Huang, Martin W. Desire and Fictional Narrative in Late Imperial China. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2001. Huang, Martin W. “Sentiments of Desire: Thoughts on the Cult of Qing in MingQing Lterature.” Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews (CLEAR) 20 (1998): 153–84. Keller, Marcus, and Javier Gracía Irigoyen, eds. The Dialectics of Orientalism in Early Modern Europe. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Kingston, Rebecca, and Leonard Ferry, eds. Bringing the Passions Back In: The Emotions in Political Philosophy. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2008. Ko, Dorothy. Teachers of the Inner Chambers: Women and Culture in Seventeenth-­ Century China. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994. Le Breton, David. Les Passions ordinaires: Anthropologie des émotions. Paris: Petite Bibliothèque Payot, 2004. Lutz, Catherine A., and Lila Abu-Lughod, eds. Language and the Politics of Emotion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

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Mathieu-Castellani, Gisèle. La Rhétorique des passions. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2000. Paster, Gail Kern, Katherine Rowe, and Mary Floyd-Wilson, eds. Reading the Early Modern Passions: Essays in the Cultural History of Emotion. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. Porter, David, ed. Comparative Early Modernities: 1100–1800. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Reddy, William M. The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Santangelo, Paolo, and Ulrike Middendorf, eds. From skin to heart: perceptions of emotions and bodily sensations in traditional Chinese culture, Wiesbaden, Harrassowitz, 2006 Santangelo, Paolo, and Donatella Guida, eds. Love, Hatred, and Other Passions: Questions and Themes on Emotions in Chinese Civilization. Leiden: Brill, 2006. Santangelo, Paolo. Sentimental Education in Chinese History: An Interdisciplinary Textual Research on Ming and Qing Sources. Leiden: Brill, 2003. Santangelo, Paolo, and Gabor Boros. The Culture of Love in China and Europe. Leiden: Brill, 2019. Schuler, Barbara, ed. Historicizing Emotions: Practices and Objects in India, China and Japan. Leiden: Brill, 2018. Stewart, Philip. L’invention du sentiment. Roman et Économie affective au XVIIIe siècle (Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 2010:02). Oxford: the Voltaire Foundation, 2010. Vigarello, Georges. “La mécanique classique des humeurs,” in Histoire des Émotions, vol. 1. De l’Antiquité aux Lumières”, edited by Alain Corbin, JeanJacques Courtine, and Georges Vigarello. Paris: Seuil, 2016. 241–252. Wierzbicka, Anna. Emotions across Languages and Cultures: Diversity and Universals. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

PART II

Debates and Tensions

Nou Nou: A Chinese Inheritance Quarrel at the Académie royale des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres (1713–1743) Frédéric Charbonneau

The first case of a young Chinese man who leaves his country to settle in Paris occurs toward the end of the Sun King’s reign; it was this reputable newcomer who gave French sinology its inaugural impulse.1 His official Chinese name in romanization (xingming) was Huang Risheng—in any case, this is the one he uses in a dedicatory letter draft to the Regent2—but he also sometimes uses Huang Jialue,3 a direct translation of Arcadio, his baptismal name. In France, all, himself included, colloquially refer to le sieur Hoange, the theme of myriad orthographic variations. Characteristic of encounters between distant cultures where uncertainty surrounds even the simplest of facts, this onomastic wavering echoes the multiplication of vantage points involved in the passage of someone like Huang. Arcadio— or Arcade, or Arcadius, still—was born on 15 November 1679 in Putian, also called Xinghua, in the coastal province of Fujian, in southern China.4

F. Charbonneau (*) Department of Francophone Literatures, Translation and Creation, McGill University, Montréal, QC Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Stefanovska et al. (eds.), Emotions in Non-Fictional Representations of the Individual, 1600–1850, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84005-1_2

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Later in life, Huang recalls his birthplace when he jokingly refers to himself as the “Prince of Putian [le Prince de Pouthiène]” (8 February 1714) or the “Prince of Hinhoa [le Prince de Hinhoa]” (6 April 1714).5 Within a month of his birth, he is baptized by a Spanish Dominican missionary, Father Arcade, for whom the boy becomes a namesake. After having lost his father at the age of seven, his mother entrusts Huang to the care of Philibert Le Blanc, priest of foreign missions, who adopts the orphaned child and bestows him with “some tincture” [quelque teinture] of Latin, religion and morals before handing over his education three years later to Artus de Lionne, a powerful personage who was to be named by Innocent XII in partibus infidelium Bishop of Rosalie (Turkey) and Vicar Apostolic of Sichuan in 1696.6 Around 1695, or his 16th year, the young man returns to his family to put things in order.7 He then spends a few years traveling, visiting his relatives in neighboring provinces and acquiring thereupon a valuable familiarity with local customs. On 17 February 1702, he embarks with Lionne on an English East India Company vessel and leaves China, despite his country’s laws which proscribed such a departure, assimilating it to the rejection of the homeland.8 In an autobiographical preface, Huang speaks of a first stop in Batavia, then on Saint-­Helen before arriving in London some eight months later, in October.9 Bishop De Lionne also brings Huang to Rome in the hopes that he will embrace priesthood; they then went to Paris, reaching the Société des Missions étrangères around 1704–1705, where Huang finds a place for himself.10 However, as years pass, Huang is gradually fraught with doubt regarding his calling. He eventually leaves the rue du Bac and takes a room on the rue Guénégaud: he endeavors to try his hand at secular life in the worldly social circles of Paris.11 Perhaps through Lionne, he is introduced to the Abbé Bignon, nephew of the chancellor Pontchartrain and director of the royal censorship, who becomes his protector in 1713 after Lionne’s death.12 Bignon, who would be appointed librarian to the King in 1719 after the incumbent abbé de Louvois’ death, was looking for someone capable of cataloguing the 1000-or-so Chinese and Manchurian works of the Bibliothèque royale,13 a task which he allocates to Huang, adding another assignment: the compilation of a grammar and a dictionary of the Chinese language. The Abbé asks his distinguished uncle to grant Huang the title of interpreter, by which the latter obtains a small pension and further gratifications.14 In concert with his social elevation, Arcadio courts a young Parisian woman, Marie-Claude Régnier, and marries her on 25 April 1713. He then gets to work. Bignon, also director of the royal

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academies, puts two aspirants under his tutelage—Nicolas Fréret (1688–1749) and Étienne Fourmont (1683–1745). Both are elected to the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres in March of 1714. Fréret introduces Huang to his friends—Father Desmolet (1678–1760), the young Montesquieu and, perhaps, sibling geographers and astronomers Guillaume (1675–1726) and Joseph Nicolas Delisle (1688–1768), with whose father Fréret had studied geography. From here on, things get considerably more complicated for anyone who seeks to reconstruct an intelligible sequence of events, to document encounters and collaborations, and to understand the emotions involved in these reciprocal cultural discoveries. The bigger the issues, the more contradictory or problematic witness accounts become, to the point where certain facts are difficult—if not impossible—to ascertain. As such, it is still not precisely known how or in what timeframe such a community of sçavans, of scholars, came to revolve around Huang. As we shall see, such information would shed light onto some of French sinology’s most decisive formative moments. To give an example of one such conundrum: in his papers, Joseph Nicolas Delisle notes that his “research on Ancient Chinese Astrologie [has been] carried out with Mr Arcadius Hoang Chinese of Nation, Interpreter to the King’s Library, towards 1711 or 1712”.15 However, this note is penned quite late, as a reference to Fourmont’s 1731 Catalogue soon shows. This surely explains the uncertainty of the date, prompting caution, especially since he mentions no intermediary. Was he mandated by Bignon? Was this research conducted with or without his brother?16 Was it rather Fréret that acted as intermediary? Fréret himself, if we are to believe his own account, only met Huang in 1713. In one of the portfolios bought by Joseph Nicolas Delisle at the death of his friend, one finds the draft of a letter to the Académie written in 1732—also quite late, as it were—in which Fréret seeks to fend off Fourmont’s Catalogue’s accusations of conspiracy and jealousy: In the beginning of 1713 Mr the Abbé Sevin whom I’ve lately had the honor of meeting suggested I see Mr Arcadio Hoangh Chinese of birth from the province of Fokiene [Fujian] and examine the work he had undertaken on the language of his country by order of the King. Mr the Abbé Bignon who had conceived the project of having work done on the Chinese language wished that someone review Mr Hoangh’s method and the purpose that his work might serve for Europeans. […] Mr Fourmont states that Mr Hoangh’s work had been under his supervision since 1711 and Mr the Abbé Bignon

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declares, in a certificate issued on the 14th of September 1729, that he has indeed seen Mr Fourmont work with Mr Hoangh since 1711. While I cannot doubt this fact after such an account, I also cannot refrain from expressing my surprise, given that I have never heard Mr Hoangh speak of this during 1713 and 1714, years during which I myself worked with him. Furthermore, I do not know how to conciliate the knowledge I have of Mr Fourmont’s superior and singular linguistic talents with the state in which I found Mr Hoangh in 1713.17

The abbé Bignon would then have commissioned Fourmont as early as 1711. In any case, this is what can be read in Fourmont’s Catalogue, a contentious work at the heart of a quarrel that the Académie intended to resolve: “In 1711, given that Mr. Hoamge was making little progress, it was determined that he was to be conducted by men of letters well-versed in matters of language: & by order of the King, reporting to Abbé Bignon, I was made responsible for his direction.” 18Must we take this assertion at face value? Despite the abbot’s certificate, Fréret doubts this; it was certainly possible to refresh the 67-year-old man’s memory one way or the other. Indeed Fourmont, who had been the sole director of Huang’s work from 1715 to the interpreter’s death on account that Fréret was imprisoned at the Bastille for thought crimes,19 sought recognition of his exclusive privilege over the grammar and dictionary as they were ready to publish. He also wanted credit for “his” discovery of a system of keys and radicals at the base of the Chinese language. Admittedly, the circumstances surrounding the publication were not beneficial to a serene recollection of events, already two decades old. Between 1711 and 1713, the constitution by the Abbé Bignon of a team revolving around Arcadio Huang, set against a backdrop of men of letters and onlookers, remains partially enigmatic. Its reconstitution is overcast by subsequent conflict, rife with acrimonious salvos. These in turn form what one might call a quarrel over the inheritance left by Huang, feud that takes a turn for the worse after the interpreter’s death on 1 October 1716. Undeniably, the providential encounter between French sçavans and China via Arcadio Huang resulted in an appreciable output:20 not only did it enable European knowledge of the 214 “keys” of the Chinese language—their quantity and order had been secured hardly a century earlier by Mei Yingzuo in his Zihui (1615)21—but it also trained the two first French sinologists, Fourmont and Fréret, whose work in turn permeated the fields of Chinese language, poetry, literature, annals and history. The

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encounter also resulted in Fourmont’s completion of the Bibliothèque royale’s first catalogue of Chinese works,22 and in the first attempt at translating a Chinese novel into French—a translation by Huang under the direction of Fréret of the Yu Jiao Li, a seventeenth-century work lauded notably by Artus de Lionne for its “purity of style, its grace and its politeness”,23 first published in 1826 by Jean-Pierre Abel-Rémusat24 under the title Les deux cousines.25 Today, all this is well documented. Nevertheless, it was necessary to succinctly establish the framework in which to inscribe the diverse and often spirited emotions to which I will now turn my gaze. “I was touched by the gentleness, the modesty, and especially the more-­ than-­stoic tranquillity of this young Chinese man in a situation that would have appeared desperate to us Europeans,” notes Fréret. “Separated by more than four or five thousand leagues from his homeland, with no possessions or industry to speak of, and with no other recourse than the pension of a charge whose obligations he was sure he could not fulfil alone […], he maintained a constancy of humour and spirit that astonished me & soon enough rendered trustworthy [our] travellers’ accounts on the Character of the Chinese people.”26 Here, Fréret collates the Oriental tranquilitate animi alongside an expected Occidental state of despair; he is himself stunned and touched—in a word, moved. The portrait Fourmont paints, however, stands in contrast with Fréret’s description—even in his representation of Chinese peoples’ character: Like all Chinese people, [Huang] appeared to be of somber humor, however he was not; in presence of his friends, all his melancholy airs vanished and what rendered him contemplative, was seeing in this here country the million things he judged strange and rather extraordinary, a surprise of which he often entertained us, telling us quite distinctly that he regretted China. After the death of his wife [in March 1715] he thought quite seriously of a return voyage.27

For Fourmont, Huang’s tranquility is tinted by melancholia, fueled by nostalgia and the persistent impression of France’s oddity. Montesquieu’s Spicilège bears witness to the interpreter’s sentiment: “I’ve heard Mr Oüanges say that, having newly arrived from China, he left his hat in church because he had been told, in China, that mores were so pure in Europe and that there reigned such great charitableness that theft was unheard of nor were executions for justice and he was quite bewildered to hear that we were about to hang an assassin.”28 However, Huang’s Journal

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domestique, spanning a period from 19 October 1713 to 2 October 1714, is silent regarding this bewilderment. For the native of Fujian’s humid, subtropical weather, there are mentions of suffering in the cold Parisian climate and of the symptoms that announce Huang’s pending demise— slow fever, coughing of blood, lassitude. Despite his sorry state, the interpreter seemed more preoccupied with his wife’s emotions than with his own; incidentally, these are little more than furtive remarks amidst the humdrum of masses and visits. Certain short passages mingle both transliterated,29 and proper Chinese characters—especially those that concern his private life. For example, “tonight h[oang] na ko hoa ul [made love]” or concerning Marie-Claude’s sulkiness: “Mrs. h[oang] pou khen chouï [is indisposed to lay] in bed nou nou [she is angry]” (Entry for 19 October 1713). Two days later, she is in a sour mood once more from bedtime to sunrise—it was a good thing that Arcadio himself was of such constant humor! On another occasion, she had “lunatism” (or, elle était mal lunée; in other words, she got up on the wrong side of the bed again) (26 March 1714). On the Feast of Corpus Christi, where public processions carried the sacramental bread through the streets, the couple couldn’t go take a gander at the temporary decorated altar on the rue de Buci because “Mr. hoange became angered on the way, in such a manner that we had to return home”30 (8 June 1714). In sum, he concludes philosophically, “she lost her temper for nothing” (17 June 1714). The journal is also privy to the expression of a few blithe follies when, at the end of winter, 1714, likely after the carnival, Huang gives himself a succession of grandiose titles such as prince of Pouthiene (8 February), duke of Hoange (10 February), and lord of China (15 February). He is then marshal (17 February), governor (24 February), patriarch (5 March), or His Eminence the Cardinal of Fonchan Hoange (16 February). He does not shy away from impersonation: “Oh here, my dear reader, you know full well that his lordship the ambassador hoange always has business at hand, granting audience to all from the 18th of the month until the 25th”31 (17 February). It seems our interpreter tries his hand at a roman comique! After Huang passes, Fourmont is mandated by the Regent with the collection of his books and papers, either on behalf of the royal Library32 or to see if anything was to be gotten out of Huang’s papers.33 The French sinologist is to complete the awaited dictionary; in the preface to his Grammatica duplex, he presents himself for all intents and purposes as the sole author who possesses not only the competence, but also the commitment for the task. The Abbé Bignon, in a letter dated 11 February 1725,

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speaks with less restraint: “I had tasked sirs Fréret and Fourmont with becoming his pupils. The former possesses far more spirit than the latter; but seeing as he has occupied himself with other studies, having busied himself far too much with dealings of legitimate and legitimated Princes, & Dukes & Peers; he has not followed the Chinese man with the same assiduity: for mister Fourmont, I owe him the justice of having thrown himself into the work body and soul.”34 That being said, the two heirs did conduct parallel work for a few years. After a memoir on Chinese poetry presented to the Académie in September 1714,35 Fréret composed a Chinese grammar book “on red-lined paper”36 during his incarceration at the Bastille, and finally read an important memoir on Chinese writing and “keys” toward the end of 1718.37 For the entire following year, he often entertained “viva voce the Académie of his research on the Chinese, and many sessions were spent without any lectures proper, as they were employed in hearing answers to questions regarding the Chinese and addressed to Fréret”.38 A last memoir on the Chinese language was presented in 1720. During this time, Fourmont continued to work on the dictionary—on his dictionaries, we should say, because he promised five— and on the grammar book, all the while organizing the production of Chinese woodblocks for the Imprimerie royale: they are the 86,000 characters known as the Buis du Régent.39 He read a memoir on Chinese literature in 1722  in which he, too, speaks of the keys. Until then, the academicians’ collegiality and the civility presiding over their dealings remained intact, at least on the surface.40 Their body of thought still bore no battle scars. The field was, however, set for conflict when all their memoirs—those of Fréret in 1718 and 1720, that of Fourmont in 1722—were published in 1729, in the same two concurrent volumes of the Mémoires de l’Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres. In the abridged version of his memoir on language, Fréret writes that “the commerce he had had with Mister Hoangh, having been interrupted as he began to work on [Chinese syntax], & the death of Mister Hoangh having occurred shortly thereafter, he knows not to where this work might’ve been led”,41 then referring to the grammar book promised by Fourmont, since all of Huang’s papers, among which the work done with Fréret, had been placed in his custody. Fourmont, sensing an accusation of plagiarism, takes offense. In the Catalogue des ouvrages de Monsieur Fourmont l’aîné, published clandestinely two years later, he dubs useless the work made by Huang and his colleague, alleging the latter had revised for publication his 1718 memoir,

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antedating the discovery of the keys and usurping its attribution.42 He writes: In 1719, I had the Chinese keys printed, I placed their pronunciations, their Tones, their significations, & I had the honor, with Monsieur l’Abbé Bignon, to present them to H.R.H., then distributing a few Copies. Mr. Fréret speaks of Chinese Keys, Mem. Ac. Tom. 6. Page 622. His Memoir is dated December 6th 1718, but we all remember that it was printed in 1729, & that in retouching it, he did not recollect that prior to 1719, no man in France knew of the 214 Chinese Keys. Mr. Hoamge had never taught them.43

He also accuses Fréret of having emaciated [décharné] Huang’s teachings by abridging them in his own 1722 memoir.44 As such, he denounces a conspiracy led against him to dispossess the fruits of his labor and assume his duly earned glory. The passionate effervescence of the scholar, his rancor, his anger, his sheer bile percolate through the page, fissuring the thin academic veneer.45 He can always claim that Fréret is his friend and that he doesn’t envy the praise Fréret’s work receives: his game is easy to see through, and as such, in his review of the Catalogue, the Abbé Desfontaines has no qualms about mocking Fourmont’s vanity: Allow me to tell you, Sir, that you are a little unjust regarding M. Fourmont. In the Missive you wrote me, in sending me his Catalogue, you compare him to the Grammarian Apion, that one referred to as the Drum of all the Earth, because of the great noise he made in applauding himself in all & for all; & to justify this satirical trait, notice that he places himself above the Morins, the Muises, the Waltons, the Capels, the Grotiuses, the Ligfoots, the Scaligers, the Saumaises, the Lipses, the Martiniuses, the Vossiuses, the Milliuses […].46

Desfontaines’ satire nonetheless concludes in urging Fréret to justify the accusation of having disfigured his colleague’s text. This did not go unheard. In his 1732 apologetic letter, Fréret defends himself energetically, inviting the Académie’s commissioners,47 to re-examine the minutiae of his 1718 dissertation and proving the authenticity of his work with Arcadio Huang—if not its anteriority to the date claimed—with documents in his own hand annotated by the Chinese interpreter.48 He recounts in full detail the way in which he discovered the existence of the keys. Originally, he recalls, the Abbé Bignon had requested a dictionary in phonological order:

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In examining the Dictionary he was translating and that was arranged according to the order of sounds, it appeared to me from the first inspection that the characters were not absolutely different and independent from one another. It struck me that not only these characters had common parts, but that the parts from which they were composed were themselves complete characters that were often used alone and separate from others. After this observation I asked Mr Hoangh if the partial characters sometimes used independently lost their first signification when they entered into the composition of a more complex character. […] Mr Hoangh taught me […] that the number of these simple and elementary characters of Chinese Writing was rather small because it did not go over 214. He added that they were named sides or keys of Writing and that the 80,000 characters contained in the Dictionaries were but diverse assemblies of these 214 radicals.49

Fréret supposedly went to the Abbé Bignon to state his discovery. “I trust […] that Monsieur the Abbé Bignon will be so kind as to recall the memory of what events took place on the occasion and the instructions he gave Mr Hoangh to suspend his work on the Dictionary in phonological order in favor of the Dictionary in key order.”50 By the surreptitious publication of the “incredible” Catalogue of his manuscripts,51 by the long grievances inserted within by means of which he attacked the Academy’s unwillingness in his regard, as well as the competence and rectitude of Fréret, Fourmont subverted the rules that prevailed over debate between his peers. He paid no heed to the academic tradition of in camera courteousness. In broadening the scene, taking the entire Republic of Letters as witness, he changed the dispute into an outrage and called to duel. Fréret only answers this provocation with an “extreme repugnance”,52 deferring to the Académie the way offended noblemen deferred to the Tribunal of the maréchaux de France. His letter’s vocabulary is revealing: he asks not for “satisfaction”, he writes, but that his “soiled” reputation be “washed”, furnishing his commissioners the “instructions”53 that will allow the Company to judge whether he is “guilty” of the prevarications of which he stands accused: The parts of Mr Fourmont’s work from which I’ve drawn my claims for the Academy and of which, Sirs, I shall speak are those that attack me regarding Rectitude and Probity, interesting the reputation in so essential a point that it cannot be permitted to a man publicly accused to keep his silence, because the Public knowledgeable of these accusations would be justified in seeing them as an avowal of the Truth of the facts from which they are turned.54

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This point of honor was, indeed, judged: having received Fréret’s complaints, the commissioners communicated the resulting memoir to Fourmont at the end of February 1732, enjoining him to respond, which he promised to do within a fortnight. During the session held on 1 April, since he still had not uttered a word on the matter, they summoned him to “give him a fixed term after which they could carry out their legal report”.55 Fourmont read his rancorous two-hour response on 23 June, handing over its written form to the Académie’s secretary. On the 27th, the Assembly having “abundantly heard” the parties involved, they invited them to retire, collected opinions and concluded that Fourmont owed Fréret a “formal disavowal” to which the “present judgment shall bear witness”.56 The Académie then imposed silence on both, reminding them of the terms in the Abbé Bignon’s 30-year-old Règlement which forbade, in times of disagreement, any expression of contempt or bitterness.57 With even more clarity, Arcadio Huang himself would probably have opined that they lost their temper for nothing.

Notes 1. Translated to English from the original French by Philippe Sarrasin Robichaud. 2. Xu, 2014: 51. This letter can be found in the Institut de France’s Archives, ms 5409 (Henri Cordier fund). Apart from their given name, the Chinese were given a social surname when they reached 20 years of age. Considering the unusual path he traveled, we doubt Arcadio Huang received one. About his life, see also Elisseeff, 1985. 3. Xu, 2014: 50. See BnF ms n.a.f. 8976. 4. Elisseeff, 1993: 129. 5. Huang, 1713–1714; Leung, 2002: 146. 6. Huang, Observatoire ms B 1–14, 154 (7): 5. De Lionne arrived in Fujian province around 1690 and was sworn in by Father Maigrot in Fuzhou on 30 November 1700. 7. Spence, 1992: 12. 8. Spence, 1992: 13. 9. Huang, Observatoire ms B 1–14, 154 (7): 6. 10. Elisseeff, 1993: 130. 11. Spence, 1992: 13. 12. Fourmont, Ms. BnF N.a.f. 8974: 176–177. 13. Leung, 1995: 41; Fourmont, Ms. BnF N.a.f. 8974: 132.

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14. Spence, 1992: 13–14. See, for example, the report of the sums expended in Mr. Huang’s installation between 1712 and 1714 (BnF Ms. Archives Ancien Régime 69: 1–5). They are filed in Étienne Fourmont’s papers, although they are not in his handwriting. Spence (1992: 15–16) thinks the report might have been compiled by a clerk from the royal Library. 15. [[Ses] recherches sur l’Ancieñe Astronomie chinoises [ont été] faites avec Mr Arcadius Hoang Chinois de Nation Interprete à la bibliotheque du Roy vers 1711 ou 1712.] Joseph Nicolas Delisle, Ms. Obs. A 1/11, 12 (1, A). Delisle then notes: “This research consists of the notice on ancient Chinese books about astronomy like the Shūjı ̄ng and its commentators; with explanation of the figures that were in the edition Mr. Huang held of these ancient books.” [Ces recherches consistant sur [sic] la notice des anciens livres chinois qui traitent de l’astronomie comme le Chouking et ses commentateurs; avec l’explication des figures qui étoient dans l’édition que Mr Hoang avoit de ces anciens livres.] 16. Elisseeff-Poisle, 1978: 37. 17. [Vers le commencement de l’année 1713 monsr l’abbé Sevin que j’avois l’honneur de connoistre depuis peu me proposa de voir le Sr Arcadio Hoangh chinois natif de la province de Fokiene et d’examiner le travail qu’il avait entrepris sur la langue de son pays par ordre du Roy. Mr l’abbé Bignon qui avoit conçu le projet de faire travailler à la langue chinoise souhaittait que quelqu’un pust rendre compte de la methode que suivoit le Sr Hoangh et de l’utilité dont seroit son travail pour les Europeens. […] Mr Fourmont assure que dès l’an 1711 il avoit esté chargé de diriger le travail du Sr Hoangh & Monsr l’abbé Bignon dans le certificat du 14 septembre 1729 declare qu’il a vu travailler Mr Fourmont avec le Sr Hoangh depuis l’année 1711. Quoy qu’il ne me soit pas permis de douter de ce fait aprez un tel temoignage je ne puis cependant messieurs m’empecher de vous marquer la surprise ou je suis de n’en avoir jamais ouy parler au Sr Hoangh pendant les années 1713 et 1714 pendant lesquelles j’ay travaillé avec lui. Je ne sçay même comment concilier la connoissance que j’ay du talent superieur & singulier de Mr Fourmont pour montrer les langues avec l’estat dans lequel je trouvay le Sr Hoangh en 1713.] Ms. Obs. B 2/1, 155 (10, 3): f°5v°-6r°. The abbé François Sevin (1682–1741), welcomed in 1711 to the Académie, was secretary to the abbé Bignon. 18. [En 1711, comme M.  Hoamge avançoit peu, on jugea qu’il devoit être conduit par gens au fait des Langues: & par ordre du Roy, à la charge ­seulement de rendre compte à M. l’Abbé Bignon, je fus chargé de le diriger.] Fourmont, 1731: 75. Bignon’s certificate is transcribed on p. 103 et sq. 19. By lettre de cachet from 26 December to 31 March (according to the Bastille’s minutes) or to 28 June 1715 (according to his biographers),

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either because of his report on the origins of Franks that the abbé Vertot, it seems, denounced as injurious to the monarchy or because of the strong doubts of his Jansenism entertained by chancellor Voysin. Simon, 1961; Walckenaer, 1850: 312–316. 20. Xu, 2014: 59–60. 21. Xu, 2014: 60. 22. Fourmont, 1739. 23. Abel-Rémusat, 1826: 45. 24. Passages translated by Huang can be identified by a comparison with the BnF n.a.f. 280 manuscript. 25. Lévy, 2014. 26. [[L]a douceur, la modestie mais plus que tout la tranquilité plus que stoïcienne de ce jeune chinois dans une situation qui auroit paru desesperante à nos Européens me toucherent. […] Éloigné de quatre à cinq mille lieues de son paiys, sans bien, sans industrie & sans autre secours que celuy d’une pension attachée à un travail où il étoit sur qu’il ne pouvoit réussir seul […], il conservoit une égalité d’esprit et d’humeur qui m’estonna & qui me rendit bientost vraysemblable ce que nous disent les relations du Caractere des chinois.] Fréret, ms Observatoire B 2/1, 155 (10): f°6v. 27. [Il paroissoit d’une humeur sombre comme tous les chinois, cependant il ne l’estoit point, a la presence de ses amis, toute cette melancholie disparoissoit et ce qui le rendoit pensif, d’estoit de voir en ce pais cy un million de choses qu’il jugeoit bizarres et tres extraordinaires, il nous entretenoit souvent de ses surprises et il nous disoit tres nettement qu’il regretteroit toujours la chine. Apres la mort de sa femme [mars 1715] il songeoit tout de bon a y retourner.] Fourmont, Ms. BnF N.a.f. 8974: 190–191. 28. [J’ai oüi dire au sr Oüanges qu’etant arrivé nouvellement de la Chine il avoit laissé son chapeau dans l’eglise parce qu’on lui avoit dit a la Chine que les mœurs etoient si pures en Europe et qu’il y avoit une si grande charité qu’on n’y entendoit jamais parler de vols ny d’exécutions de justice et qu’il fut fort etonné d’entendre qu’on alloit pendre un assassin.] Montesquieu, 2002: 345; Masson, 1951: 348–354. 29. For this reason, they are difficult if not impossible to decipher entirely, given the multitude of Chinese characters that might correspond to any one of the approximately transliterated sounds. 30. [Melle hoange s’est fâchée dans le chemin, de sorte que nous sommes obligés de retourner chez nous]. 31. [Assa mon cher lecteur vous savez bien que monseigneur l’ambassadeur hoange a toujours afaire et donné des audiences a tous le monde depuis le 18e du mois jusqu’à 25]. 32. Elisseeff-Poisle, 1978: 45.

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33. “After the passing of Sir Hoamge his papers were left in my care and I received order from His Majesty to examine if either in their commencement or in general we might in any which way be able to compose a Chinese language dictionary it was then for me an occasion to penetrate deeper into knowledge of the characters.” [Apres le decez du Sr Hoamge ses papiers me furent mis entre les mains et jeus ordre de Sa Majesté d’examiner si ou sur les commencemens ou en general de quelque façon que ce fut, on pourroit parvenir a composer un dictionnaire de la langue chinoise ce fut donc pour moy une occasion de penetrer plus avant dans la connoissance des characteres.] Fourmont, Ms. BnF N.a.f. 8974: 178–179. 34. [J’avois engagé les sieurs Fréret & Fourmont, de devenir ses écoliers. Le premier a beaucoup plus d’esprit que l’autre; mais comme il s’est jeté dans d’autres études, ne s’étant que trop mêlé des affaires entre les Princes légitmes & les légitimés, & les Ducs & Paris; il n’a point suivi le Chinois avec la même assiduité: pour le sieur Fourmont, je lui dois la justice de s’y être livré à corps perdu]. Bignon’s letter is cited by Joseph de Guignes (1721–1800), Fourmont’s protégé and successor at the Académie. Guignes, 1787: 71. 35. Huang’s translation of the Yu Jiao Li must have inspired him, because Fréret uses an octameter drawn from its verse as an example. 36. Walckenaer, 1850: 317. 37. The Journal des sçavans, April 1730: 214–219, gave it a raving review: “this very-philosophically written Piece, is worthy of Readers with such tastes and curiosity, and deserves to be entirely read.” [cette Piece très-­ philosophiquement écrite, est digne de la curiosité des Lecteurs de ce goût, & mérite d’être luë en entier.] 38. Walckenaer, 1850: 320. 39. Mostly crafted between 1723 and 1730, they are now classified as historic monuments. 40. Schandeler, 2013. 41. [[Le] commerce [qu’il] avoit avec le Sieur Hoangh, ayant esté interrompu lorsqu’il commençoit à travailler à [la syntaxe chinoise], & la mort du Sieur Hoangh estant survenue peu après, il ne sçait jusqu’où ce travail aura esté poussé.] Fréret, 1729b: 309. 42. Fréret, 1729a: 622. As well, cf. Ms. Obs. B 1/14, 154 (14): f°4v–6r°, the passage comments the 214 keys. 43. [En 1719, je fis imprimer les Clefs Chinoises, j’y mis leurs prononciations, leurs Tons, leurs significations, & j’eus l’honneur avec M. l’Abbé Bignon de les presenter à S.A.R., ensuite j’en distribuai quelques Exemplaires. M.  Freret parle des Clefs Chinoises, Mem. Ac. Tom. 6. Page 622. Son Mémoire est du 6 Decembre 1718, mais on se souviendra toûjours qu’il

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est imprimé en 1729, & qu’en le retouchant, il ne s’est pas souvenu qu’avant 1719, aucun homme en France ne connoissoit les 214. Clefs Chinoises. M.  Hoamge ne les avoit jamais enseignées.] Fourmont, 1731: 77–78. 44. Fourmont, 1729. The memoir on Chinese literature was first delivered in 1722. 45. In the preparatory manuscripts of his preface to the Grammaire, Fourmont’s handwriting becomes rife with deletions, corrections, marginalia and interlineary additions as soon as he begins talking about Fréret. See Ms. naf 8977 de la Bnf: 116 et sq., rendered nearly illegible with an overabundance of corrections. While the rest is badly scribbled, it remains legible. 46. Desfontaines, 1731: 324. 47. Guillaume de La Boissière de Chambors (1666–1742), Denis François Secousse (1691–1754), and Louis Jouard de La Nauze (1696–1773). 48. Simon, 1961: 56. See: Ms. Obs. B/2–1, 155 (10,3): f°8r°–9r. 49. [En examinant le Dictionnaire qu’il traduisoit et qui estoit disposé selon l’ordre des sons, il me parut dez la premiere inspection que les caracteres n’estoient pas absolument differents et independants les uns des autres. Je crus même reconnoistre que non seulement ces caracteres avoient des parties communes, mais que les parties dont ils estoient composez estoient elles-mêmes des caracteres complets qui s’employoient souvent seuls et separement des autres. Aprez cette observation je demanday à Mr Hoangh si ces caracteres partiaux qui se trouvoient quelquefois employez seuls perdoient leurs premiere signification lorsqu’ils entroient dans la composition d’un caractere plus combiné. […] Le Sr Hoangh m’apprit […] que le nombre de ces caracteres simples et elementaires de l’Ecriture chinoise estoit assez court puisqu’il ne passoit pas 214. Il m’adjouta qu’on les nommoit costez ou clefs de l’Ecriture et que les 80,000. caracteres contenus dans les Dictionnaires n’estoient que divers assemblages de ces 214 caracteres radicaux.] N. Fréret, Ms. Obs. B 2/1, 155 (10, 3): f°9v°-10r°. 50. [J’espere […] que Monsieur l’abbé Bignon voudra bien se rappeler le souvenir de ce qui se passa en cette occasion et des ordres qu’il donna au Sr Hoangh de quitter la traduction du Dictionnaire par sons pour s’attacher à celle du Dictionnaire par clefs.] N.  Fréret, Ms. Obs. B 2/1, 155 (10, 3): f°12r°. 51. Fourmont, 1731: 73. At the date of publishing, Fourmont had only 10 or so published titles to his name, apart from the 28 dissertations read at the Académie. He announces 122! 52. N. Fréret, Ms. Obs. B 2/1, 155 (10, 3): f°1r°. 53. N. Fréret, Ms. Obs. B 2/1, 155 (10, 3): f°1r°. 54. [Les endroits de l’ouvrage de Mr Fourmont sur lesquels j’ay porté mes plaintes à l’Académie et dont je vous parleray Messieurs sont ceux qui

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m’attaquant sur la Droiture et sur la Probité, interessent la reputation dans un point si essentiel qu’il ne peut jamais estre permis à un homme accusé publiquement de garder le silence, parce que le Public instruit de ces accusations seroit en droit de regarder ce même silence comme un aveu de la Verité des faits sur lesquels elles roulent.] N. Fréret, Ms. Obs. B 2/1, 155 (10, 3): f°1v°. 55. Simon, 1961: 60. 56. Extrait des Registres de l’Académie du vendredi 27 juin 1732, Ms. Obs. B 2/1, 155 (10, 6): f°1r°-v°. 57. “The Académie will exactly oversee that, in the occasions whence certain Académiciens be of differing opinions, they use no terms of contempt or bitterness towards one another, either in discourse or writing; and even if they are combatting the sentiment of any given Learned person, the Académie shall exhort them to speak of them only with careful restraint.” [L’Académie veillera éxactement, à ce que dans les occasions où quelques Académiciens seront d’opinions différentes, ils n’employent aucun terme de mépris ni d’aigreur l’un contre l’autre, soit dans leurs discours soit dans leurs écrits; & lors mesme qu’ils combattront le sentiment de quelques Sçavans que ce puisse estre, l’Académie les exhortera à n’en parler qu’avec ménagement.] Reglement ordonné par le Roy, pour l’Académie royale des Inscriptions et Médailles, du 16 de Juillet 1701, Paris, Imprimerie royale, 1701, p. 7, article 24.

Bibliography Anon. (1826) Iu-Kiao-Li, ou Les deux cousines, précédé d’une préface où se trouve un parallèle entre les romans de la Chine et ceux de l’Europe, Arcadio Huang (tr) and Jean-Pierre Abel-Rémusat (ed and tr), Paris: Moutardier. Delisle, Joseph Nicolas. Ms Obs A1–11. Desfontaines, Pierre François Guyot (1731) Lettre XLVI (review of Fourmont’s Catalogue). In: Le Nouvelliste du Parnasse (3). Paris: Chaubert, p. 313 et sq. Elisseeff-Poisle, Danielle (1978) Nicolas Fréret (1688–1749). Réflexions d’un humaniste du XVIIIe siècle sur la Chine. Paris: Collège de France—Mémoires de l’Institut des hautes études chinoises, vol. XI. Elisseeff, Danielle (1993) Arcade Hoang, interprète chinois de Louis XIV.  In: Edward J. Malatesta, S.J. et Yves Raguin, S.J. (eds), Succès et échecs de la rencontre Chine et Occident du XVIe au XXe siècle, Taipei/Paris: Institut Ricci. Fabre, Daniel (2008) Chinoiserie des Lumières. In: L’Homme (185–186), pp. 269–299. Fourmont, Étienne n.d.-a Ms BnF N.a.f. 8974. Fourmont, Étienne n.d.-b Ms BnF N.a.f. 8977.

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Fourmont, Étienne (1729) Sur la littérature chinoise. In: Mémoires de l’Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres, V, pp. 312–319. Fourmont, Étienne (1731) Catalogue des ouvrages de Monsieur Fourmont l’aîné. Amsterdam [Paris]. Fourmont, Etienne et al. (1739) Catalogus codicum manuscriptorum Bibliothecae regiae, Parisiis: E Typographia Regia. Fréret, Nicolas. Ms Obs A1–11, B1–14, B2–1/3. Fréret, Nicolas (1729a) Réflexions sur les principes généraux de l’art d’écrire, et en particulier sur les fondemens de l’écriture chinoise. In: Mémoires de l’Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres (VI). Paris: Imprimerie Royale. Fréret, Nicolas (1729b) Sur la langue chinoise. In: Mémoires de l’Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres (V) pp. 303–312. Guignes, Joseph de (1787) Essai historique sur la typographie orientale et grecque de l’Imprimerie royale (I). Huang, Arcadio (1713–1714) Journal domestique, BnF ms n.a.f. 10005. Huang, Arcadio n.d.-a Grammaire chinoise rédigée en français, BnF ms N.a.f. 280. Huang, Arcadio n.d.-b Archives de l'Institut Ms 5409 (fonds H. Cordier). Leung, Cecile (1995) Étienne Fourmont (1683–1745): The birth of Sinology in the context of the institutions of learning in eighteenth-century France. In: Sino-Western Cultural Relations Journal (XVII), pp. 38–56. Leung, Cecile (2002) Étienne Fourmont (1683–1745) Oriental and Chinese Languages in Eighteenth-Century France. Leuven: Leuven University Press. Lévy, André (2014) À propos de de l’une des premières traductions françaises de roman chinois. In: Béatrice Didier et Meng Hua (eds), Miroirs croisés. Chine— France (XVIIe-XXIe siècles). Paris: Honoré Champion. Masson, André (1951) Un Chinois inspirateur des Lettres persanes. In: La Revue des deux mondes (May 15th) pp. 348–354. Montesquieu (2002), Spicilège. In: Œuvres complètes, (13), Rolando Minuti et Salvatore Rotta (eds). Oxford: Voltaire Foundation. Schandeler, Jean-Pierre (2013) La violence sous le verbe académique: Un débat sur les traditions historiques à l’Académie royale des inscriptions et belles-lettres au XVIIIe siècle. In: Revue d’histoire des sciences (66), pp. 299–323. Simon, Renée (1961) Nicolas Fréret, académicien. Genève: Publications de l’Institut et Musée Voltaire, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century (XVII). Spence, Jonathan D. (1992) The Paris Years of Arcadio Huang. In: Chinese Roundabout: Essays in History and Culture. New York: W. W. Norton. Walckenaer, Charles Athanase (1850) Rapport fait à l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres au sujet de la publication des manuscrits inédits de Fréret. In: Mémoires de l’Institut national de France (XVI). Paris: Imprimerie nationale, pp. 312–316. Xu Minglong (2014) Connaissons-nous Arcade Huang? In: B.  Didier et Meng H. (eds), Miroirs croisés Chine—France (XVIIe-XXIe siècles). Paris: Honoré Champion, pp. 49–60.

Buddhism and Emotions: Asian Enlightenment and the Anxieties of European Identity Daniel Williford

In 1835, a British diplomat to India named Brian Houghton Hodgson wrote to both the Royal Asiatic Society in London and the Société Asiatique de Paris inquiring if they would be interested in a set of Sanskrit manuscripts that Hodgson had discovered in a Nepalese monastery.1 The manuscripts had been in the care of Buddhist monks in Nepal for over a thousand years, and Hodgson paid scribes to hand copy the Sanskrit texts so that he could send them back to scholars in Europe. Hodgson recognized their significance, even though he did not know exactly what they were. In fact, they were some of the oldest copies of the Sutras or oral teachings of Śākyamuni Buddha, the founder of Buddhism, who was born in Nepal sometime around 500–600 BCE. In reply to Hodgson’s offer, the Parisian Orientalist Eugène Burnouf expressed a great enthusiasm for receiving the manuscripts and was expressly interested in the difficult task of deciphering and translating them.2

D. Williford (*) Los Angeles, CA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Stefanovska et al. (eds.), Emotions in Non-Fictional Representations of the Individual, 1600–1850, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84005-1_3

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In a letter to Hodgson in 1841, Burnouf writes, “I think a lot about you because I am immersed in your Buddhist manuscripts. I have finished the translation of the Lotus Sutra, but I would like to offer an introduction to this bizarre work, and I need to read many other works whose manuscript sources are not always very correct.”3 Throughout their correspondence, Burnouf expresses affection and appreciation to Hodgson for making these texts available to him; while he manages the illness that will eventually take his life, Burnouf makes quick work of translating the Lotus Sutra and in the process produces a massive volume that, as he states, is intended to serve as an introduction to the “bizarre work,” that is, one of the most significant sutras of the Northern school of Southeast Asian Buddhism. That work, called An Introduction to Indian Buddhism, is published in 1856, and effectively introduces Buddhism to a European and American audience such that it remains a key source for the remainder of the nineteenth century. The encounter between East and West in the form of translating Buddhist texts elicits from Europeans and Americans both passion and anxiety about the figure of the Buddha. For some, the Buddha embodies a new source for representing the individual that accords with the European Enlightenment in such a way that offered an important contrast to Christianity, and even a challenge to it. By examining this specific case of a non-fiction portrayal of the East in Western literature, I here draw out some of the ways in which the shifting understanding of sentiment as a method of self-understanding and Enlightenment finds a new expression in the ancient philosophy of Buddhism, and in which Burnouf’s translation and framing of the bizarre story of the Lotus Sutra both reinscribes a Eurocentric view of colonialist superiority and [also] suggests an anxious ambivalence about the primacy of Christianity in the West.

Encountering the East: Exploring Ancient Eastern Texts Hodgson is celebrated for his contributions to the natural sciences, ethnology, linguistics, and the history of Southeast Asia. In particular, he is known as a “zoological pioneer” even now, especially thanks to his 1840 encyclopedic work the Zoology of Nepal.4 But such efforts on his part as a scholar and scientist were enabled by his primary role as a representative of the British East India Company, ensuring that company’s occupation

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throughout the region and assisting in the colonization of India in the decades leading up to the establishment of formal British rule in 1858. Hodgson was trained at the East India Company College in Hertfordshire, under the mentorship of Thomas Malthus. Once appointed, he held various positions that were administrative, diplomatic, and semi-political, and had a knack for negotiating between local governors and his own company, especially to dispel some of the rebellions that were constantly taking place. His nineteenth-century biographer describes a man with a sense of European superiority and scientific authority, who had a “passion for collecting” and who “found himself set down in a part of Asia isolated from European scholarship and as a field for the collector absolutely untouched.”5 Hodgson collected animal, plant, and geographic specimens by the thousands and sent them back to Europe and to the major cities in India, and he collected texts and manuscripts also by the thousands, mostly having them copied by a staff of scribes that he kept at his own expense for the purpose, again depositing them with learned academies and in museums throughout Europe and India. Burnouf, meanwhile, was a Parisian scholar and so-called Orientalist, the son of Professor Jean-Louis Burnouf. Although sickly and unable to travel, Burnouf was adept at the study of ancient and Eastern languages and helped to bring about philology as a field. As I have already shown, his contact with Hodgson came about somewhat by happenstance, but Burnouf seized on the trove of Hodgson’s manuscripts for two of the most significant of his works: his large-scale study on the history of Indian Buddhism, and his translation of the Lotus Sutra into French. In fact, that translation was published second but done first, and while the Introduction sought to give it context, Burnouf published a single chapter of his translation of the Lotus Sutra out of enthusiasm for the project. That chapter was immediately picked up and translated into English for Henry David Thoreau’s The Dial in 1844.6 There was certainly an appetite around this time for more information on Buddhism. Although I claim that Buddhism was “discovered” at this time, it is well known that Arthur Schopenhauer was influenced by various Eastern philosophies and religions, Buddhism included. In works such as The World as Will of 1819, Schopenhauer was primarily inspired by Hindu texts such as the Upanishads, but he himself responded to the claim that he was drawing on Buddhism by noting that, while he was interested in Buddhist thought, he had had little access to it, as little was known about it in Europe.7 On the other hand, in his Philosophy of History translated in

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1835, Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel found the mysticism of Buddhism, especially transmigration and the concept of Nirvana, to be so extreme as to “almost be called a moral and intellectual self-annihilation.”8 By looking at Burnouf’s scholarship based on Hodgson’s sources, I argue here that the period leading up to the establishment of the British Raj in 1858 involved a scientific interest of Western scholars leading to the discovery, so to speak, of Indian Buddhism as an object of science, a mode of philosophy, and perhaps even a way of life.

Burnouf’s Contributions and Who Is Sakya? One of the accomplishments of Burnouf’s Introduction is his broad survey of the historical lineages of Buddhist schools, including their chronology and interrelated influences. Scholars such as Donald Lopez Jr. and Tomoko Masuzawa have noted that Burnouf’s methodology to determine such details as the age of the original Buddha was itself an important contribution toward a scientific approach to textual scholarship, and in fact that one of the most salient features of this methodology was that it was entirely textual. While some scholars have given Burnouf great credit in developing the field of philology, we should remember that he is more likely inspired by Karl Lachmann’s method of scientific textual criticism concerning Biblical and Classical sources, by this time well established. Burnouf too inspires and encourages the early work of Max Müeller, who later becomes firmly associated with philology due to his work producing the massive set of translations collectively titled the Sacred Texts of the East. But the fact that Lachmann and Müeller are taking similar scientific approaches to the study of language and the problems of textual scholarship tells us that Burnouf is part of a larger project that has at its core a passionate enthusiasm, entirely positivist, for a universal understanding of human culture and language, and speaks to the promise that post-­ Enlightenment science has for revealing Universal truths when methods are rigidly applied. Burnouf conducts a fantastic amount of intertextual and intratextual reading across languages, cultures, and time periods and uses as much internal evidence as possible to draw conclusions about the history of Buddhism. His work attempts to be objective and reasoned, and results in an intertextual synthesis that holds up surprisingly well even today, when we have a greater amount of evidence and scholarship at our disposal. So, for example, Burnouf decides between two main dates of the original

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Buddha’s life against the Chinese, who date him much earlier, and with the Sinhalese, who date his lifetime as occurring around the seventh century BCE. This is similar to today, although we tend to place the Buddha as having lived around the fourth to the sixth centuries BCE. This is one example of Burnouf’s style and authoritative approach to his study: his conclusions are decisive, his explanation reasoned and based on evidence, and his scholarly apparatus apparently all-seeing. Dating and chronology, terminology, and historical transformations of Buddhist teachings are all under the purview of Burnouf’s study. However, another one of his primary contributions is to insist on the primacy of India as the country, the people, and the culture that produced Buddhism. At this time, Buddhism was far more associated with China and Japan, having long been chased out of the areas of its historical founding, namely India. This is in fact why Burnouf titles his work An Introduction to Indian Buddhism, and his focus on restoring due credit to the people of that country is the source of some of his ambivalence concerning Buddhism and the British occupation of Southeast Asia.9 For example, in commenting on the dating of the life of the historical figure of Śākyamuni, Burnouf privileges over the Chinese the Sinhalese, a people who once occupied Northern India and now make up much of Sri Lanka. In his justification for this, Burnouf gets somewhat political when he says: I … could not avoid doing so without sanctioning by my silence the opinion already too widespread, and that people endeavor to spread even more widely each day: that it is impossible to find in India anything that is truly historical.10

Here, Burnouf pushes back on the idea that India is without its own history. Especially in England, India is described during Burnouf’s time period as filled with barbarous and backward peoples. A particularly representative example is Baron Macaulay’s progressivist notion that British culture and the Christian world represented the furthest point in human civilization, with countries like India representing a more rudimentary stage in its cultural evolution. In his infamous “Minute on Indian Education” from 1835, Macaulay says as much related to Indian literature, in order to argue that only English should be taught to schoolchildren and that Sanskrit and Arabic had little value. He writes, “I am quite ready to take the oriental learning at the valuation of the orientalists themselves. I have never found one among them who could deny that a single

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shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia.”11 While Burnouf is not directly citing Macaulay, Macaulay was indeed in touch with Hodgson, who was one of the very distinguished orientalists that he refers to here. Hodgson, too, wrote paternalistically on the topic of Indian education under British rule, although he championed education in vernacular languages and dialects, entirely at odds with the opinion of Macaulay. Still, state education under British rule and the collecting, translating, and interpreting of sacred texts are examples of epistemic violence in India dating to the late eighteenth century for Gayatri Spivak, who cites Macaulay’s text to show that education and law were two sides of constructing Indian subjects as Other during this time. Spivak notes representative examples, such as the founding of the Asiatic Society of Bengal in 1784, and the “analytic and taxonomic work of scholars” who were “both colonial administrators and organizers of the matter of Sanskrit.”12 Spivak isn’t here referring specifically to Hodgson or Burnouf, but both would fit her description. Yet, while Burnouf took part in the analytic and taxonomic work of detailing the history of Buddhism in India, he also restored to India a history that, in the European imagination, had been diminished, and in doing so, he undermined the logic of Macaulayism. More importantly, he emphasized the long history of Buddhism and its massive historical and geographical reach, while at the same time opening up lines of inquiry about the nature of Buddhism as a philosophy of life and as a spiritual doctrine. If the assumption was that Europeans like Hodgson were studying and acquiring an understanding of the culture of India in order to rule over it more completely, then the zeal for the study of religion and culture is ultimately a missionary one, as conversion to Christianity is part and parcel of the progressivist logic of colonial rule. But such a missionary zeal is missing in Burnouf’s text, although Hodgson is a little less ambivalent on the primacy and legitimacy of Christianity. One senses in Burnouf’s work the suggestion that the figure of the original Buddha predates Christ, and yet is Christ-like. Burnouf hardly goes so far as to suggest a lineage from Śākyamuni to Jesus Christ, but he enters into the many discussions around the distinguishing features of a religion that is neither theistic nor pantheistic, and which centers on a human figure as the model for the inherent divinity of all human beings. What then, Burnouf’s study tempts its

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readers to ask, might Buddhism offer to early nineteenth-century conceptions of the individual? Some of the primary questions that Burnouf discusses concerning the Buddhist worldview are the following: one, is there a God-like source of creation at the start of all existence; two, what does the Śākyamuni mean when he declares that entrance into Nirvana is the ultimate goal of existence; and three, can all people attain Buddhahood, or only a select few? In most cases, when analyzing theological questions such as these, Burnouf makes use of the Nepalese canon that Hodgson gifted him in order to argue that the oldest and most original source texts come from places like Nepal, and that focusing on these may clear away some of the later superstitions and mythologizations to get at the core philosophy that the original Buddha espoused. On the question of Nirvana, which many European scholars and philosophers found troubling because it seemed to suggest a nihilistic viewpoint, Burnouf concludes that the term can only be translated as liberation or freedom, and yet whether this refers to a kind of total annihilation of the self, and whether this annihilation signifies absorption into God or into nothingness, is only a matter of how various Buddhist sects apply the term. Noting the significance of Nirvana, which Śākyamuni endeavors to attain and finally attains through deep meditation, Burnouf asks: … is the man in nirvana in the state of individual life, maintaining, along with the sense of his personality, that of his activity? Or is he in the state of universal being, in such a way that having lost the sense of his personality together with that of his activity he can no longer be distinguished from absolute existence, this existence being either God or nature? … in short is nirvana nothingness?13

To which Burnouf then responds that the etymology of the term is insufficient to answer these questions and that the answer depends rather on the form of Buddhism in practice: It is from the use that Buddhists have made of this term, it is from the definitions they have given to it, that we must demand the explanation of these great problems. … nirvana is for the theists the absorption of individual life into God and for the atheists the absorption of this individual life into nothingness. But for both, nirvana is liberation; it is supreme freedom.

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Burnouf does not go so far as to fully identify the original intent of Śākyamuni on the question of Nirvana, but rather centers Buddhism as a practice on the grappling with such a question. In this manner, Burnouf implicitly promotes a conception of the original Buddha as more of a philosopher than a theologist and suggests that recovering the earliest and clearest forms of Buddhist thinking might revive some of the original intent of Buddhism precisely by ridding the canon of supernatural influence and superstition. At times, Burnouf seems to hold some hope that the original doctrine of Śākyamuni could be found and could be clarified, and possibly toward a continued influence and effect in the world. Again arguing for the purity of earlier texts, Burnouf suggests that their simplicity and even ambiguity are closer to the purpose of the original Buddha, whose enlightenment is really that of a greater sense of moral good and purpose in a corrupt world of pain and violence. Burnouf argues that later schools formalize Buddhist practices with greater specificity and severity, which has the effect of diluting their original character, which is always in the context of the vicissitudes of actual life. Burnouf is at times poetic on this point, as when he says: The ordinary sutras show us Śākyamuni Buddha preaching his doctrine in the midst of a society that … was profoundly corrupt. His teaching is above all moral; and although metaphysics is not forgotten, it certainly occupies a less grand position than the theory of virtues imposed by the law of the Buddha, virtues among which charity, patience, and chastity are without objection at the first rank.14

Burnouf does not attempt to describe Sā́ kyamuni Buddha as Christ, nor does he overtly attempt to reconcile the superiority of Christianity over so Christ-like a figure. Instead, Burnouf suggests that his positivist, post-­ Enlightenment rational methodology can help to clarify the doctrine of a historical figure whose own philosophy would then accord with Enlightenment Humanism and possibly strengthen it. Śākyamuni’s Buddhism, Burnouf argues, “welcomed with an equal eagerness the poor and unhappy of all conditions” while also criticizing the caste system. But, he notes, Śākyamuni’s goal is always to convert any seeking mind into the Buddhist way, and so he did not attempt to change the caste system, but rather explained it using the theory of transmigration, or in other words the belief in rebirth and multiple lives, as Burnouf puts it concisely, and

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rather accurately. Citing the Buddha’s method of advising a follower of low station, the Buddha would explain that one’s base social position was caused by one’s actions in a previous life. The Buddha, … did not fail to attribute the baseness of his birth to the reprehensible acts this man had committed in a previous life. To convert a man, whomever he was, was thus for Śākya to give him the means to escape from the law of transmigration; it was to relieve him of the vice of his birth, absolutely and relatively; absolutely, by putting him on the path that leads one day to definitive annihilation …; relatively, by making him a monk, like Śākyamuni himself ….15

Śākyamuni therefore takes on as disciples those from all social classes, no matter how high or how low, and, as Burnouf poetically puts it, “all are equally admissible in his eyes, and birth ceases to be a sign of merit as well as a title of exclusion.” In his biography called The Life of Brian Houghton Hodgson, the Orientalist scholar and politician Sir William Wilson Hunter described Hodgson as valiantly living a lonely life in the mountains of Kathmandu, where much of his research and writing was done. He led an ascetic life, “deeply versed in divine things.” “He was almost a Brahman in regard to food and drink, and was called ‘The Hermit of the Himalayas’.” Although enacting literal and symbolic violence by enabling the occupation of the British and by collecting and cataloging the land and people for that purpose, Hodgson still seems, in Hunter’s portrayal, to have assumed some of the characteristics of a Buddhist monk. While the heretofore legitimate frames for engaging with Buddhism were missionary, that is to understand in order to convert, and scientific, that is to understand in order to know, Hodgson’s case seems to indicate that Buddhism entered Europe at this time as a promise and a possibility of an alternative philosophy and a model of a way of being in the world. As a point of reference, a later text from 1879 that narrates the life of the Buddha was influential in introducing to a much wider audience his story. It comes from the English poet and journalist Sir Edwin Arnold. In The Light of Asia: or, The Great Renunciation, Arnold draws from the great many non-fiction articles and books about Buddhism in order to tell the story of Śākyamuni Buddha in poetic form.16 After describing the Buddha’s entrance into Nirvana, meaning his death, Arnold’s narrator becomes self-reflexive, noting that his understanding is only partial:

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… I cannot tell A small part of the splendid lore which broke From Buddha’s lips: I am a late-come scribe Who love the Master and his love of men, And tell his legend, knowing he was wise, But have not wit to speak beyond the books; And time hath blurred their script and ancient sense, Which once was new and might, moving all. A little of that large discourse I know Which Buddha spake on the soft India eve.17

Arnold is true to Burnouf’s Sā́ kyamuni Buddha, who finds adherents through suggestion and as an exemplary model rather than through strict doctrine, and who, most importantly, was Indian and of India.

Conclusion: Burnouf and the Peril of Translation In their exchanges, European and American Orientalists pursued knowledge of ancient Eastern texts with all of the enthusiasm as former European explorers. They were eager to be the first people from the West to locate, compile, and translate Eastern religions into English to be subjected to rigorous scientific examination. Burnouf, however, was an outsider to such colonialist politics except that he seized upon the access and authority that those politics gave him. His interest was not as a colonial administrator, but rather as a French scholar who was a genius with language. Burnouf was driven by a passion to translate the ancient Buddhist texts before he was physically unable to do so. Yet, by translating a deep exposition of Buddhism to a European idiom, Burnouf and others introduced the West to a new way of understanding human history and the philosophy of the self. A certain anxiety of faith would notoriously take hold in the nineteenth century. People in Western Europe, broadly speaking, were exploring philosophy as an alternative to religion. Burnouf offered original Buddhist texts with an effort to give them context, and these texts would stimulate the passions and the anxieties of those who encountered them. In The Light of Asia, Arnold is able to acknowledge a new source of knowledge, an “ancient sense,” which he claims to have recently encountered, “A little of that large discourse I know.” The passionate description

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of a Christ-like Buddha was itself the source of anxiety for what kind of spiritual and philosophical alternative Buddhism offered, and a source of passionate identification with a sense of knowing, in the modern age, of an ancient teaching not previously revealed.

Notes 1. William Wilson Hunter, Life of Brian Houghton Hodgson, London: John Murray, 1896, 266–268. 2. Hunter, Life of Brian Houghton Hodgson, 267–268. 3. Donald S. Lopez Jr. “Eugène Burnouf (1801–1852).” Tricycle, Fall 2010. [https://tricycle.org/magazine/eugene-­burnouf-­1801-­1852/]. 4. “An introduction to Brian Houghton Hodgson,” The Zoological Society of London, n.d. [https://www.zsl.org/library/an-­introduction-­to-­brian-­ houghton-­hodgson]. 5. Hunter, Life of Brian Houghton Hodgson, 261. 6. Elizabeth Palmer Peabody (Trans). “The Preaching of the Buddha,” The Dial 4 (Jan. 1844): 391–401. 7. Arthur Schopenhauer, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, Leipzig: F.A. Brockhaus, 1819–1844. 8. Frederick von Schlegel, Philosophy of History in a Course of Lectures, Delivered at Vienna. James Burton Robertson, Trans. London: Henry G. Bohn, 1835. 9. Eugene Burnouf, Introduction to the History of Indian Buddhism, Katia Buffetrille and Donald S.  Lopez Jr., Trans, Chicago and London: U of Chicago Press, 2010. 10. Burnouf, Introduction, 52. 11. Thomas Babington Macaulay. “Minute.” Bureau of Education. Selections from Educational Records, Part I (1781–1839). Edited by H.  Sharp. Calcutta: Superintendent, Government Printing, 1920. Reprint. Delhi: National Archives of India, 1965, 107–117. 12. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman, Eds. New York: Columbia UP, 1993: 77. 13. Burnouf, Introduction, 69. 14. Burnouf, Introduction, 16. 15. Burnouf, Introduction, 159. 16. Edwin Arnold, The Light of Asia, or, The Great Renunciation. London: Trübner & Co., 1885. 17. Arnold, Light of Asia, 171.

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Bibliography Arnold, Edwin. The Light of Asia, or, The Great Renunciation. London: Trübner & Co., 1885. Burnouf, Eugene. Introduction to the History of Indian Buddhism. Katia Buffetrille and Donald S.  Lopez Jr., Trans. Chicago and London: U of Chicago Press, 2010. Lopez, Donald S.  Jr. “Eugène Burnouf (1801–1852).” Tricycle, Fall 2010a. [https://tricycle.org/magazine/eugene-­burnouf-­1801-­1852/]. Lopez, Donald S.  Jr. “Introduction to the Translation” in Eugene Burnouf, Introduction to the History of Indian Buddhism, Chicago and London: U of Chicago Press, 2010b (1–29). Macaulay, Thomas Babington. “Minute by the Hon’ble T. B. Macaulay, dated the 2nd February 1835.” Bureau of Education. Selections from Educational Records, Part I (1781–1839). Edited by H. Sharp. Calcutta: Superintendent, Government Printing, 1920. Reprint. Delhi: National Archives of India, 1965, 107–117. [http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00generallinks/ macaulay/txt_minute_education_1835.html]. N.s. “An introduction to Brian Houghton Hodgson,” The Zoological Society of London, n.d. [https://www.zsl.org/library/an-­introduction-­to-­brian-­houghton­hodgson]. Peabody, Elizabeth Palmer (Trans). “The Preaching of the Buddha,” The Dial 4 (Jan. 1844): 391–401. Schlegel, Frederick von. Philosophy of History in a Course of Lectures, Delivered at Vienna. James Burton Robertson, Trans. London: Henry G. Bohn, 1835. Schopenhauer, Arthur. Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung. Leipzig: F.A. Brockhaus, 1819–1844. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman, Eds. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993 (66–111).

PART III

Empathies and Immersions

Rewriting Addison, Antiquity, and Female Agency: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s “Remarks on Italy” Shirley F. Tung

Eighteenth-century travel narratives were not merely guidebooks detailing exotic locales and cultural oddities, nor meticulous records of scientific discovery—they were literary works intensely invested in portraying the personal effects of travel on the traveler narrating his or her journey. The titles of such travel narratives place emphasis on the individual traveler’s commentary (e.g., “observations” or “reflections”), his or her first-hand method for recording this commentary (e.g., “letters,” “journals,” or “accounts”), and the duration of trip undertaken by the traveler (e.g., “tour,” “residence,” or “journey”). Consequently, eighteenth-century travelogues are contingent upon the travel writer’s slippery negotiation of national, personal, and narrative identities. The role of the eighteenth-century travel writer bears the influence of seventeenth-century philosophy, which saw travel as part of a Humanist education. Francis Bacon’s “Of Travel” (1625) presents the traveler as a

S. F. Tung (*) Kansas State University, Manhattan, KS, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Stefanovska et al. (eds.), Emotions in Non-Fictional Representations of the Individual, 1600–1850, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84005-1_4

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repository of knowledge gathered from “suck[ing] the experience of many,” who, in turn, must disseminate collective knowledge through the verbal and written transmission of that experience, either by “keep[ing] a diary,” by “maintain[ing] a correspondence,” or by “let[ting] travel appear … in his discourse.”1 Bacon’s call for shared discourse anticipates the eighteenth-century popularization of the Grand Tour, which intended to cultivate a “trans-European class consciousness” and supplement the classical education of the young British elite.2 The resulting proliferation of published travel accounts forms part of the Enlightenment project to advance human knowledge through social, political, and scientific texts.3 Yet, the “exalted objectives” set for Grand Tourists and traveling scientists, explorers, politicians, and social commentators alike were often unmet, sabotaged by the logistical realities of travel, and at times, by the disenchanted travelers themselves.4 By the mid-eighteenth century, Grand Tourists were widely criticized for drinking, gambling, and whoring their way through the continent.5 Likewise, the authorized, published accounts of eighteenth-century scientific expeditions and exploratory voyages, which promoted the mythology of British “progress and empire-­building,” reveal themselves to be carefully constructed fictions that elide unauthorized stories of “defeat, humiliation, and vulnerability.”6 This essay puts two such “factual fictions”—Joseph Addison’s Remarks on Several Parts of Italy, in the Years 1701, 1702, 1703 (1705) and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s unpublished correspondence from her residence in Italy from 1739 until 1761—in conversation with each other to expose how these respectively “authorized” and “unauthorized” texts operate as creative autobiographies in which lived experience is translated as narrative experiment.7 In particular, Montagu’s self-aware epistolary commentary on life as a British expatriate in Italy upends the nationalistic construction of British superiority offered by Addison’s Remarks on Italy, which is celebrated for establishing the model of the consummate Grand Tourist and shaping the genre of eighteenth-century travel writing.8 Reprinted in over a dozen editions by the turn of the century, Remarks on Italy attempts to “compare the Natural face of the Country with Landskips [sic] that the Poets have given it,” both to elevate the travelogue as unequivocally literary and to demonstrate the virtuosity of its hitherto unknown author.9 A precursor to his eponymous persona in the famed periodical, The Spectator (1711–1712), Addison in Remarks on Italy offers a model of spectatorship that attempts to reconcile a literary past with the literal present, and hence, the traveler’s educationally biased cultural expectations with the

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experience of traveling through the modern-day country itself. Accordingly, Addison frames his sea voyage from Naples to Rome “to trace out the Way Aeneas took” as an opportunity to emulate the hero of the Aeneid as well as its author, Virgil, seeking traces of Roman antiquity in “Capes, Islands, and other Parts of Nature” and eschewing the “change or decay [in] Towns, Cities, and the Works of Art.”10 When Montagu ventures to Italy in 1739, she aims neither to reanimate scenes from classical literature, nor to pursue literary fame, but rather, to find her “little Aenas [sic]”—the 27-year-old Italian man of letters, art collector, and Newtonian popularizer, Francesco Algarotti, who had broken Montagu’s heart when he left England three years earlier.11 Casting herself in the role of “the sad Dido,” Montagu characterizes her departure for the continent as a viable alternative to the Phoenician queen’s suicide by deeming it a lover’s “leap for another world.”12 While Montagu’s plans for otherworldly happiness with Algarotti were never fully realized, her brave “leap” enabled her to pen an exhaustive epistolary account of her 22-year residence in Italy, which recounts the transition from her life as an English socialite to a philosophical afterlife of Italian solitude. A possible sequel to her posthumously published Turkish Embassy Letters (1763), Montagu’s Italian letters present her account as a corrective to the “antiquated [and] trite observations [of] statues and edifices” from Grand Tourists who “think themselves qualified to give exact accounts … when a very long stay … [is] requisite even to a moderate degree of knowing a foreign country.”13 Montagu’s implicit critique of Addison’s Remarks on Italy—which was “so focused … upon traces of classical times that the ‘Italy’ of its title can sometimes appear to be a land entirely lacking in living inhabitants of post-classical edifices”—highlights the necessity for a discourse about traveling that is embodied, cosmopolitan, and ultimately transformative.14 I argue that, as a counterpart to Addison’s affinity with Aeneas, Montagu’s identification with Dido—a literary figure who transcends national and socio-cultural boundaries— enables her to embody hybrid subjectivity while rewriting the Queen of Carthage’s tragic narrative to instill it with proto-feminist agency. By mediating her depiction of Italy through the imaginary landscapes of classical literature much like Addison, Montagu concomitantly critiques and deploys this limiting and patriarchal discourse to unsettle her British national identity and open up the possibility of personal transculturation.

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I. Remarks on Italy was not the first work by Addison that Montagu critiqued. In early 1713, prior to the first performance of Addison’s Cato, A Tragedy (1712), Montagu reviewed the play at the behest of her husband, Edward Wortley Montagu, who was Addison’s close friend.15 Intimating that a stronger adherence to the neo-classical unities would better suit Addison’s tragedy, Montagu criticized Cato for introducing what she considered unnecessary love scenes to the main plot devoted to Cato of Utica’s doomed resistance against the tyrannical rule of Julius Caesar: The love of Marcus, the rivalry of his Brother, etc have no relation to the death of Cato; he appears ignorant of it from one end t’other, nor can I perceive one considerable Event it produces. I think this hinders the Play from being one Action and in my opinion Shakespear’s [sic] manner of Transgression is more pardonable.16

Montagu suggests that the removal of the love scenes would emphasize the dramatic movement toward Cato’s suicide and the final soliloquy that precedes it, which she also requested be lengthened: “I could only wish the soliloquy of Cato had been longer; the subject affords manny Beautifull [sic] Reflections. I know a Long Speech is not easily sufer’d on Our stage, but when it is printed I wish he would Enlarge on the Immortality of the Soul.”17 Although Robert Halsband notes that Addison “altered his play in several ways to conform to [Montagu’s] suggestions,” these alterations were minor as Cato retained the love scenes much to the derision of its eighteenth-century audience.18 Furthermore, an alternative epilogue that Montagu also wrote for Cato lambasts the existing epilogue that concludes Addison’s play text. In contrast to Cato’s epilogue, which begins by misattributing the play’s fatal outcome to the irrational sway of feminized passions—“What odd fantastic things we women do!” (l.1)— Montagu satirically condemns the “folly [of] British men” (l.2) driven not by “glory” (1.8), but rather, dissipation (i.e., “girls, champagne, and gaming” [l.14]) to commit suicide.19 Ultimately, Montagu’s epilogue distinguishes the noble Ancient Roman origins of self-murder that Cato practices from its eighteenth-century incarnation: “In times so differing, who shall harshly blame/ Our modern heroes, not to act the same” (ll.25–6).20 Perhaps, spurred to address similar inadequacies in Remarks on Italy, Montagu takes the way of Dido to correct the course of Addison’s

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Aeneas-inspired journey. Addison and Montagu visit many of the same locales—Brescia, Florence, Genoa, Leghorn, Milan, Padua, Rome, Turin, and Venice—and respectively comment upon the sights and cultural practices they witness there. Much like her alternative epilogue to Cato, Montagu’s epistolary travelogue targets what she sees as the “folly … stupidity and knavery” of British men: the Grand Tourists who “gained [Britons] the glorious title of Golden Asses over Italy.”21 By incisively examining her own subject position as an Englishwoman, Montagu’s travel writings offer a reverse ethnography that challenges the Grand Tour’s model of cosmopolitanism and reveals that “[t]ravel across geographical boundaries in Europe does not engender flexible conceptions of selfhood for European travelers but instead rebinds these travelers’ identity to their homeland.”22 As Donatella Abbate Badin posits, Montagu’s travel letters portray a “feminized way of travelling quite distinct from the Grand Tour [in its] experiential approach,” which can be read as “an act of self-fashioning and deflected autobiography.”23 Since Montagu’s epistolary account of her 22-year residence in Italy responds to and reshapes the models of “poetical landskips” and classically inflected hybrid spectatorship presented in Remarks on Italy, Addison can be seen as a figurative specter that haunts the pages of her travel narrative. Offering an alternative account to masculine fetishized depictions of antiquity and the superficial cultural engagement of male Grand Tourists, Montagu seeks to represent the woman travel writer’s capacity for what Felicity Nussbaum has termed “hybrid … female subjectivity.”24 As we shall see, Montagu ventriloquizes the voice of Dido to indicate that the formation of Ancient Rome—the cultural touchstone to which Augustan British masculinity is indebted—is built upon the betrayal of a powerful North African female ruler’s love and hospitality.25 Signaling how women are elided from nationalistic narratives and sacrificed to the great engine of imperialism, Montagu suggests that women’s tenuous ties with their countries of origin grant them the “ability to conceive otherwise” and attain a “cosmopolitan subjectivity [that] comes from the othering of one’s self.”26

II. On 10 September 1736, upon learning that her lover, Francesco Algarotti, intended to leave London and her behind, Montagu writes to him27:

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I am a thousand times more to be pitied than the sad Dido, and I have a thousand more reasons to kill myself. But since until now I have not imitated her conduct, I believe that I shall live either by cowardice or strength of character. I have thrown myself at the head of a foreigner just as she did, but instead of crying perjurer and villain when my little Aenas [sic] shows that he wants to leave me, I consent to it through a feeling of Generosity which Virgil did not think women capable of.28

Here, Montagu likens herself to Dido to illustrate the extent of her grief, but refuses to pursue the comparison to its self-destructive conclusion and instead, voices her dissatisfaction with Virgil’s depiction. The initial parallels between Montagu and Dido’s respective situations encourage this comparative interpretation: they are both married (in Dido’s case widowed), powerful noblewomen who are abandoned by faithless, Italy-­ bound lovers and left to suffer as martyrs for their unrequited devotion. Yet, Montagu’s claim that “imitat[ing] [Dido’s] conduct” runs counter to her own character indicates that the Phoenician queen serves as an inadequate model for female abandonment. Dido in the Aeneid curses Aeneas before killing herself: “Go, follow Italy down the winds … Though far away, I will chase thee with murky brands and, when chill death has severed soul and body, everywhere my shade shall haunt thee.”29 In deliberate contrast, Montagu lives “by cowardice or strength of character” and generously contributes to financing Algarotti’s future travels.30 Montagu not only elevates herself above Virgil’s ill-configured heroine by exceeding her both in suffering and benevolence, she also mocks Algarotti as an ungrateful “little Aeneas,” trivializing the reasons for his departure and insinuating that Algarotti does not live up to his legendary predecessor.31 Furthermore, Montagu chooses to pursue Algarotti in Italy, imagining her journey as a happier “afterlife”—both for her and her literary avatar— in a letter dated 24 July 1739: At last I depart tomorrow with the resolution of a man well persuaded of his religion and happy in his conscience, filled with faith and hope. I leave my friends weeping for my loss and bravely take the leap for another world. If I find you such as you have sworn to me, I find the Elysian fields and happiness beyond imagining.32

Using the metaphor of Elysium, which appears in Ancient Greek mythology as the final resting place for heroic and virtuous souls, Montagu

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reconfigures her departure for Italy—her first extended journey away from England since her famed trip to Turkey in 1716–1718—as a voluntary death. Much like the ancient heroes who crossover into the otherworld, Montagu acknowledges that she will need to relinquish the vestiges of her past (i.e., the “friends weeping for [her] loss”) as well as her English life and identity to attain her paradise. Montagu, however, presents this loss as preferable to suicide, because it allows her to reunite with her Aeneas, rewrite a tragic narrative, and thus exercise an agency that is unavailable to Virgil’s Dido. Nearly a year and a half later after this “leap for another world,” Montagu writes a confessional letter to Lady Pomfret. In the correspondence dated 11 November 1740, Montagu reveals to her close friend that she did not find the Elysian Fields in Italy, but rather, she discovered a postlapsarian Eden tainted by despair and regret: I go to bed every night at ten, run about all the morning among the antiquities, and walk every evening in a different beautiful villa; where if amongst the fountains I could find the waters of Lethe, I should be completely happy.

Like a deer that is wounded I bleed and run on, And fain I my torment would hide. But alas! ’tis in vain, for wherever I run The bloody dart sticks in my side, and I carry the serpent that poisons the paradise I am in.33

Algarotti had repeatedly thwarted Montagu’s attempts to settle near him upon her arrival in Italy, as her letter to Algarotti written on 12 March of the same year makes clear: “I still have one of your letters in which you assure me that whatever town I establish myself in you will not fail to go there yourself, and I chose Venice as that which suited you the most.”34 “Torment[ed]” by the memory of her now broken love affair, Montagu’s reflection to Pomfret highlights the failure of her self-mythologization as a figure of feminine agency. To allay her emotional distress, Montagu builds upon her initial conceit, wryly suggesting that her self-conceived Italian paradise lacks the River Lethe, from which the spirits entering Elysium would drink to forget their earthly concerns. With this reference, Montagu revises her claim

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in a 1717 letter addressed to Alexander Pope, which features in the Turkish Embassy Letters and proposes that the abdication of one’s former self is a necessary part of traveling: The heats of Constantinople have driven me to this place [Belgrade-Village], which perfectly answers the description of the Elysian fields … But what persuades me more fully of my decease is the situation of my own mind, the profound ignorance I am of what passes amongst the living … Yet I have still a hankering after my friends and acquaintance left in the world … I think Virgil is of the same opinion, that in human souls there will still be some remains of human passions: Curae non ipsa in Morte relinquunt and ’tis very necessary to make a perfect Elysium that there should be a river Lethe, which I am not so happy to find.35

For Montagu, the eternal bliss promised by the Elysian Fields stems from a “profound ignorance” of everything outside of Elysium, but it is also dependent upon the pain that comes with severing ties with her former life.36 In this letter to Pope, Montagu is reluctant to forget “the living … friends and acquaintance left in the world,” comparing her feelings to Virgil’s depiction of the underworld in the Aeneid, where the dead pine away for their lovers and where Aeneas is confronted by Dido’s ghost. While Montagu in 1717 simultaneously wishes for and rejects Lethe’s promise of oblivion, choosing neither active remembrance nor blissful forgetfulness, in 1740, she decides that she will be “completely happy” to find it.37 But, Montagu’s revision of this conceit also further aligns her anguish with that of the Carthaginian queen. By attempting to escape Dido’s fate, Montagu actually succumbs to a similar demise, yearning for her faithless lover in a spectral Italy like Dido’s restless shade in Virgil’s underworld. The four-line poem that Montagu included in her letter to Pomfret adapts the following lines from the Aeneid, which characterize Dido as a deer wounded by a dart: Unlucky Dido is consumed, And through all the city, raving, she wanders, just as a deer when an arrow having been hurled, a shepherd hunting with weapons fixed, it unaware among the Cretan grove at a distance,

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and released the volatile iron; she traverses the forest and brush of Dictaen in flight; the lethal shaft clings to her side.38

Unlike her reference to Dido in her 1736 letter to Algarotti, Montagu does not critique the limitations of her classical avatar in her verse, nor does she offer an alternative ending to Dido’s foreshadowed doom. Montagu reworks Virgil’s epic simile, which, in its reference to the unseen shepherd waiting to fire a fatal arrow at the startled deer, implies that the love-struck Dido is unaware that she is destined to die from the moment she meets Aeneas. In Montagu’s version, there is no hunter that lurks in the Cretan grove; instead, the deer is already injured, running to deny its mortal wound and thus exacerbating its pain. While mixing the metaphors of a bloody dart with a poisonous serpent, Montagu jarringly shifts from poetry to prose, and from a classical to a biblical protagonist to subvert expectations about the poem’s denouement. Using the figure of Eve, she equates her anguish over discovering that Algarotti is unwilling to “live [with her] in tranquility” to the loss of an Edenic paradise.39 Nonetheless, Montagu’s insistence that she “carri[es] the serpent” implies that she is not a hapless victim beguiled by a talking snake into eating from the Tree of the Knowledge like Eve. Rather, she is seduced by her own fallacious rhetoric to tempt her fate by leaving the security of England in order to follow Algarotti to Italy.40 Montagu’s preoccupation with the visibility of her secret “torment” motivates her subsequent candid explorations of women’s movements within public and private spaces. Responding to the restrictions that hegemonic forces, both institutionalized and internalized, pose to women’s intellectual and bodily agency, Montagu’s travel narrative emphatically insists upon the relative autonomy of Italian women. This proto-feminist Italian ethnography is driven by Montagu’s effort to combat the limitations that her failed romance with Algarotti— and later, her aging body and her decade-long extortion by Count Ugolino Palazzi—presented to her circumnavigation of Italy. To subvert the descriptions recorded by Grand Tourists like Addison, she offers alternative versions of the Venetian carnival and the Catholic nunnery. As I will demonstrate, writing her account preempts Montagu’s conscious reexamination of her subject position as a traveler and travel writer amid her 22-year-long Italian nativization.

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III. The Turkish Embassy Letters have often been read through the lens of feminist critique, with Montagu “praising the Other in order to expose— in her case from a female and even a feminist angle—the faults of home,” but her seldom-discussed Italian letters are also instrumental to reexamining and reconfiguring the prescribed gendered spaces to which women have been traditionally confined.41 Consequently, much has been said about Montagu’s letter dated 1 April 1717 to an unspecified correspondent, which details Montagu’s experience in a Turkish bathhouse42: the ladies [were all] in a state of nature, that is, stark naked, without least wanton smile or immodest gesture among them … They walked and moved with the same majestic grace which Milton describes of our general mother. There were many amongst them as exactly proportioned as ever any goddess was drawn by the pencil of Guido or Titian.

Addressing male travel writers’ accounts of the Ottoman Empire, like George Sandys’s 1652 travelogue, which sensationalizes the “unnatural and filthy lust … said to be committed daily in the remote closets of these darksome Bannias’ (public baths),” Montagu offers an aestheticized portrait of an intimate “feminotopia,” containing “two hundred women” who received her with “all the obliging civility possible.”43 Montagu contests the sexual implications of the bathhouse, emphasizing that it is, above all, a place where female visitors can partake in intellectual camaraderie and become storytellers—rather than remaining the passive object of art and literature—through the dissemination of their knowledge and the creative reimagining of current events: “In short, ’tis the woman’s coffeehouse, where all the news of the town is told, scandal invented etc.”44 Similarly, Montagu’s Italian letters combat the objectifying sexualization of Italian women in Grand Tour accounts like Addison’s Remarks on Italy. In particular, she offers caveats to the assumed unrestricted sexual freedoms afforded by Carnival and reimagines the Catholic convent as a potentially gynotopic space rather than a hotbed for illicit lust. As with the depiction of the Turkish “bagnio,” Montagu’s evolving portrayal of masquerade dress and the convent exposes masculine anxieties over the inability to penetrate, codify, or control women-only spaces as well as the impulse to ascribe unbridled sexuality to female bodies free from male surveillance.45 Furthermore, her Italian travel narrative charts the

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progression of her own ideas on femininity, gradually turning away from the patriarchal fantasy of hypersexualized womanhood to champion, instead, a female intellect and agency that transcends the physical body and the gendered distinctions of the body politic. In two brief passages that appear in Remarks on Italy, Addison depicts the Venetian Carnival and the Catholic convent as interconnected venues for clandestine affairs. Opening with the admission that “The Carnaval [sic] of Venice is every where talked of,” Addison’s short description of the event focuses on how disguises, and particularly masks, facilitate sexual liaisons: The Venetians, who are naturally Grave, love to give into the Follies and Entertainments of such Seasons, when disguised in a false Personage … These Disguises give Occasion to abundance of Love Adventures; for there is something more intriguing in the Amours of Venice, than in those of other Countries, and I question not but the Secret History of a Carnaval [sic] would make a Collection of very diverting Novels.46

Rather than detailing the spectacles of Carnival itself—the flamboyant costumes and wild revelry in the streets—the Spectator expounds upon what he cannot see, imagining secret stories that may not otherwise exist beyond fiction. In a similar fashion, Addison sexualizes the Venetian nuns, explaining that the financial circumstances motivating their entry into the convent (“They generally thrust the Females of their Families into Convents, the better to preserve their Estates”) make them unfit for a sexless life of religious contemplation. While Addison himself does not witness any of the reported “Liberties” for which “the Venetian Nuns [are] famous,” he devotes the majority of his perfunctory depiction to recounting their scandalous behavior: they “often go out of their Bounds to meet their Admirers … They have many of them their Lovers, that converse with them daily at the Grate, and are very free to admit a Visit from a Stranger.”47 Addison’s account purports that while the nuns may be privy to sensual freedoms unavailable to other women, their “liberty” is a desperate bid for male attention and for a part within a sexual economy of which their family has defrauded them. Montagu’s 1739–1740 letters to Pomfret also contemplate the “liberty” of Italian women by progressively reassessing the freedoms accorded to women who venture out in public concealed and disguised. When

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Montagu writes to Pomfret on 6 November 1739, she initially describes Venetian society in glowing terms: It is the fashion for the greatest ladies to walk the streets, which are admirably paved; and a mask, price sixpence, with a little cloak, and the head of a domino, the genteel dress to carry you everywhere … And it is so much the established fashion for every body to live their own way, that nothing is more ridiculous than censuring the actions of another.48

For Montagu, the fashionable dress of the Venetians, which is designed to disguise one’s identity, is related to the social fashion of living openly without fear of public censure. As a result, Montagu conflates paying for a sixpence mask and other accouterments with purchasing a carte blanche that gives her access to all facets of the public sphere (“the genteel dress to carry you everywhere”) and sanctions the public performance of otherwise private passions. Writing only four months after her arrival in Italy, Montagu possibly views Venice with its mixture of “spectacular self-­ presentation with masked anonymity” as the ideal setting to enact her love affair with Algarotti.49 Not only does her praise of “the secrecy of masks and dominoes” present Italy as a “permissive, easy-going country of relaxed mores,” it harkens back to her description of the veil in Turkish Embassy Letters. In Montagu’s letter to her sister, Lady Mar, on 1 April 1717, she claims to correct the widely held misapprehension regarding the oppression of Turkish women by portraying the veil as an instrument of social and sexual liberation, instead of subjugation: ’Tis very easy to see, they have more liberty than we have, no woman of rank soever being permitted to go in the streets without two muslins, one that covers her face all but her eyes, and another that hides the whole dress of her head … You may guess how effectually this disguises them, that there is no distinguishing the great lady from her slave, and ’tis impossible for the most jealous husband to know his wife when he meets her, and no man dare either touch or follow a woman in the street. This perpetual masquerade gives them entire liberty of following their inclinations without danger of discovery.50

Montagu’s observation that the veil makes women indistinguishable from one another characterizes it as an equalizing force that unites all women in their subversion of patriarchal control. As Ludmilla Kostova has noted,

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Montagu claims that the veil “gives Turkish women the freedom of anonymity, which enables them to move from place to place undetected,” rather than restricting their access to the public sphere.51 In addition, Montagu does not view the veil as restricting, but as granting women agency over their sexuality by prohibiting husbands from keeping their wives under surveillance. This semblance of parity among Turkish women of all classes is quickly dissolved, though, by Montagu’s comparison of the veil to a masquerade, which transfers onto Turkish society an “ideologically charged English classification,” whereby an “aristocratic lady might disguise herself as a servant girl to take a young lover from a more common class.”52 Montagu’s reference to the veil as masquerade indicates that the physical mobility of going incognito pertains only to the upper classes. This view is reinforced by her 1739 description of Venetian masquerade dress as allowing one to go “everywhere,” provided that one has already has access to “genteel dress.” By projecting onto the veil her aristocratic fantasy of masquerading as a commoner, Montagu also fails to acknowledge the fundamental difference between masquerade and the veil: while the former depends upon lavish display to highlight the visibility of its wearer, the latter operates by making its wearer homogenous and thus invisible. Montagu’s confusion over the visibility of the female body and its relationship to a woman’s agency in the public sphere leads to her initial misreading of Italian manners during her residence. In a February 1740 letter to Pomfret, Montagu admits that she finds Italian social conduct to be more restrictive than she had assumed in her previous letter: I am surprized [sic] at the way of acting I find in Italy, where, though the sun gives more warmth to the passions, they are all managed with a sort of discretion that there is never any public éclat, though there are ten thousand publick engagements; which is so different from what I had always heard and read, that I am convinced either the manners of the country are wonderfully changed, or travellers have always related what they have imagined, and not what they saw; as I found at Constantinople, where, instead of the imprisonment in which I fancied all the ladies languished, I saw them running about in veils from morning to night.53

Dispelling the popular assumption that Italians express their passions openly, Montagu marvels at their emotional reserve despite the multiple opportunities for public outbursts. While she sets out to correct previous

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travel accounts of Italy, she inadvertently contradicts her earlier claim that the disguise offered by Venetian fashionable dress allowed for the genteel to “live their own way.” In place of the socially liberated and self-indulgent masqueraders, the Italians she characterizes here are wary of public censure and regulate their behavior accordingly. Though the “surprize” Montagu expresses regarding Italian manners may initially be taken as a compliment, her comment follows a disparaging remark about the Duchess of Manchester’s callousness. Possibly conveying her frustration with keeping her own emotional turmoil over Algarotti private, Montagu responds to the recent suicide of Manchester’s fiancé, the Earl of Scarborough, by retorting, “I could pity the Duchess of Manchester, though I believe ’tis a sensation she is incapable of feeling for any body.”54 Montagu’s discussion of “the way of acting … in Italy” follows not as a non sequitur, but rather, as an extension of her critique of the Duchess of Manchester’s inability to display emotion, despite the tragic death of her husband-to-be. Taken together, these observations are examples of restrained female sociability that Montagu sets in opposition to what she perceives as the comparative freedom of Turkish women “running about in veils from morning to night.” Montagu’s misreading of the liberties of the Venetian masquerade retrospectively undermines her assessment that Turkish women are not “imprison[ed]” by the veil. In both Turkish and Italian contexts, the concealment of women’s faces, bodies, and identities does not preclude social restrictions on their behavior, but rather reinforces the patriarchal regulation of when, where, how, and to whom women are physically and emotionally exposed. Montagu, like the travelers before her, imagines liberated women’s trysts with secret lovers, but only witnesses the circumscription of naked female bodies to women-only spaces like the Turkish bathhouse, and experiences the social pressure to disguise passions unfit for public consumption. Her later Italian letters address and attempt to resolve the issues that the body poses for female agency.

IV. Five years after Montagu breaks off contact with Algarotti in May 1741, she is troubled by another Italian male figure.55 From 1746–1756, while living in a self-proclaimed state of “rural retreat” in the remote northern Italian province of Brescia, Montagu is secretly exploited by Count Ugolino Palazzi.56 Though this decade of being intimidated, manipulated, and swindled by Palazzi and his influential family is largely absent from her

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travel correspondence, Montagu records it in a memoir written in Italian for the expressed purpose of bringing “Count Palazzi to account” for his refusal to “release the deeds of several properties for which she had paid money into his hands.”57 According to Isobel Grundy, this “‘Italian Memoir’ presents a shadow, a downside, and unadmitted subtext” to Montagu’s epistolary self-construction as a sage, moralist, and intellectual residing in relative tranquility, and reveals both the extent to which Montagu downplays Palazzi’s wrongdoings to avoid “constructing herself as dupe” and “her readiness to sacrifice her interests for the sake of keeping up appearances.”58 One of the biggest sacrifices that she makes during this period is her relinquishing of physical mobility. Not only is Montagu blackmailed into postponing her journey back to Venice until late 1756, she is also prevented from traveling due to recurrent bouts of illness.59 “Forced to assume the role of stoic philosopher” due to her failing health and substantial loss of wealth, she is compelled to reconceptualize feminine agency in terms of intellectual rather than bodily liberation, as well as to re-envision female spaces governed not by outward display, but introspection.60 This paradigm shift appears in Montagu’s travel narrative as early as 1748 when she compares her ascetic existence in the Northern Italian village of Gottolengo to the aesthetic lifestyle of her daughter, Lady Bute, in London: We are both plac’d properly in regard to our Different times of Life: you amidst the Fair, the Gallant, and the Gay, I in retreat where I enjoy every amusement that Solitude can afford. I confess I sometimes wish for a little conversation, but I reflect that the commerce of the World gives more uneasiness than pleasure, and Quiet is all the Hope that can reasonably be indulg’d at my Age.61

Montagu’s use of financial terminology like “worth,” “afford,” and “commerce” suggests that the comparison not only demonstrates that they are in “Different times of Life,” but operate according to different economies. Surrounded by ostentatious displays of wealth (“the Gay”), attractive women (“the Fair”), and the men who court them (“the Gallant”), Lady Bute’s value and currency in high society is dictated by her beauty, which John Milton refers to as “nature’s coin.”62 Conversely, Montagu removes herself from circulation to participate in literal commerce through

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the agricultural production of her garden, which she describes in the same letter: I never saw a more agreable [sic] Garden, abounding with all sort of Fruit, and produces a variety of Wines. I would send you a piece if I did not fear that custom would make you pay too dear for it … I have at present 200 chicken [sic], besides Turkys [sic], Geese, Ducks, and Peacocks. All things have hitherto prosper’d under my Care. My Bees and silk worms are double’d, and I am told that, without accidents, my Capital will be so in two years time.63

In the place of the Elysian Fields where Montagu’s Dido can be reunited with her Aeneas or a postlapsarian paradise poisoned by a talking serpent, Montagu describes a garden characterized by its Edenic fruitfulness. Montagu not only inhabits the role of Milton’s Eve in the virtuous and meditative practice of husbandry, which she describes as part of a “manner of life … as regular as that of any Monastery,” but also presents herself as a financially savvy entrepreneur.64 This mixture of the traditionally domestic feminine sphere of “Care” and the traditionally corporate masculine sphere of “Capital” suggests that Montagu reasserts her agency by subverting the traditional gender economy. This subversion is furthered by Montagu’s discussion of her silk worms in another letter to Lady Bute on 6 March 1749: “I am now employ’d with the care of my silk worm’s eggs. The silk is gennerally [sic] spun the latter end of May. I wish you would tell me the price it bears in London.”65 Like her previous letter to her daughter, Montagu conflates care (the nurturing of her silk worm’s eggs) with capital (her endeavors as a source of employment and financial return); she also notably shuns the figurative “commerce of the World” in favor of the literal, shifting her interest in hearing news from London to hearing about its marketplace. Although Montagu’s agricultural venture results from her forced prolonged residence in Northern Italy, her discussion of ownership engages in the rhetoric of sovereignty, not oppression. Montagu’s use of possessives to designate her ownership corresponds to her discussion of her Turkish dress in a letter dated 1 April 1717 to Lady Mar: “The first piece of my dress is a pair of drawers, very full, that reach to my shoes, and conceal the legs more modestly than your petticoats … Over this hangs my smock of a fine white silk gauze, edged with embroidery.”66 Lisa Lowe posits that Montagu’s “use of possessives—‘my shoes,’ ‘my Smock’—rhetorically

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identifies her position with that of Turkish women” while “phrases punctuated by the comparative possessive your refer to English women’s customs: ‘your side of the Globe,’ more modestly than your Petticoats … rhetorically reinforce Montagu’s Turkish context and her distance from English culture.”67 In a similar fashion, Montagu’s letters to Lady Bute regarding commerce participate in the discourse of identification with a foreign culture and her differentiation from Englishness. Whereas Montagu’s comparison of drawers to petticoats denotes Turkish and English conflicting views of femininity and modesty, her discussion of her garden and silk worms suggests differing Italian and English views on traditional female roles. Montagu’s transformation from caring about silk clothing to caring for silk worms signifies her change of status in the Empire from the English female conspicuous consumer to the foreign creator and purveyor of consumable goods. Likewise, Montagu’s claim that Turkish accoutrements like the veil signify that Turkish women are “the only free people in the Empire” resurfaces in her assessment about the greater cultural currency allowed to women in Italy: “The character of a learned woman is far from being ridiculous in this country … To say truth, there is no part of the world where our sex is treated with so much contempt as in England.”68 Inevitably, Montagu’s monastic lifestyle, which provides her with the means to participate in “commerce with the World” on her own terms, prompts her to reassess her view of the female-only space of the convent. Writing to an unspecified lady on 1 October 1716, Montagu provides her account of a nunnery she encounters while traveling through Austria. Initially, Montagu describes the St. Lawrence convent in Vienna as less restrictive than other Orders in terms of dress and behavior, much like Addison characterizes the Venetian nuns: Nothing can be more becoming than the dress of these nuns. It is fine white camlet, the sleeves turned up with white fine calico, and their head dress … only a small veil of black crape that falls behind … The grate is not the most rigid … I don’t doubt but a man a little more slender than ordinary might squeeze in his whole person. The young Count of Salmes came to the grate while I was there, and the Abbess gave him her hand to kiss.69

Montagu then shifts her attention to a beautiful young nun who “had been the admiration of the town,” but is forced into “retirement” for mysterious reasons.70 Feeling “melancholy to see so agreeable a young

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creature buried alive,” Montagu ends by condemning Catholicism for “the misery it occasions so many poor unhappy women.”71 Denys Van Renen has argued that Montagu describes the convent in deliberate contrast to the hammam to demonstrate that the latter of these female-only spaces “offers the possibility for intersubjective bonding that transgresses boundaries and stimulates cross-cultural awareness while the [former] forecloses that possibility [by] restrict[ing] women’s ability to influence society” and concomitantly “punishes women for sexual promiscuity and enables the sexual exploitation of them.”72 While Van Renen concludes that Montagu criticizes the convent’s policing of the “boundaries of female subjectivity,” it appears that Montagu’s denunciation is based primarily upon its limitation of female sexual agency.73 Montagu’s praise of St. Lawrence centers on the attractiveness of the nun’s habit and the implied opportunities for illicit sexual encounters. The nun’s “becoming” habit is described similarly to sumptuous Turkish dress, with Montagu emphasizing that coarser, inexpensive, and supposedly utilitarian fabrics like calico and crepe are used for decorative flourish in upturned sleeves and to frame, instead of cover, a nun’s face. In addition, Montagu equates the lack of rigidity of the grate with the nunnery’s lax restrictions on conversing with the male visitors through it, inferring that the grate facilitates, rather than prevents, social and sexual intercourse. Montagu follows her insinuation that a nun can sneak a “more slender than ordinary” lover through the bars with the example of a young, and by implication, svelte, Count who kisses the Abbess’s hand through the grate. Conversely, Montagu’s lament that the “only beautiful young woman [she has] seen at Vienna” is “buried alive” in the convent focuses on the nun’s refusal to admit guests from her “former life,” therefore becoming dead to the world in her prime. In a February 1749 letter to Lady Bute from Gottolengo, Montagu provides a description of a nunnery “12 mile [sic] hence” in Mantua.74 Montagu makes similar observations to her letter regarding St. Lawrence, but the sexual undertones of the nunnery, as well as her negative assessment of Catholicism, are notably absent: They are dress’d in black, and wear a thin cypress veil at the back of their heads, excepting which they have no mark of religious habit … They have no grates, and make what visits they will, always two together, and receive those of Men as well as Ladys [sic] … But what I think is the most remarkable privilege is a Country House which belongs to them … where they pass

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every vintage, and at any time any four of them may take their pleasure there for as many days as they choose. They seem to differ from the Channonesses of Flanders only in their vow of celibacy … Upon the whole I think it the most agreeable community I have seen.

Though the Mantuan nuns wear similar crepe-like veils to the nuns of St. Lawrence, Montagu restrains herself from characterizing their dress as “becoming.” Also, the relative freedom of the Mantuan nuns is reflected by the absence of a grate and their ability to receive both female and male visitors. Despite these liberties, Montagu does not imply that the nuns violate their vows, but rather highlights their celibacy by comparing them to “the Channonesses of Flanders,” a secular convent that permits its occupants to leave and marry.75 Furthermore, Montagu depicts the nuns indulging only in the “pleasure” of sociability, both during their public visits and within the contracted public of their country house. Montagu’s reconfiguration of the nunnery as a place of retirement among an “agreeable community” allows her to envision an intellectually fulfilling lifestyle, despite her physical constraints and ascetic, sexless existence as a self-­ described “Lay Nun” in Brescia.76 Upon her release from Palazzi in 1756, Montagu continues to characterize her time in Italy as a retreat from the beau monde, choosing a lifestyle of “philosophic retirement” in Venice and Padua.77 Renewing her acquaintance with Algarotti in a letter dated 1756, Montagu writes, “If we ever meet, the memory of Lord Hervey shall be celebrated; his gentle shade will be pleased in Elysium with our gratitude. I am insensible to everything but the remembrance of those few friends that have been dear to me.”78 Montagu’s use of Elysium to call up the memory of their mutual friend, and one-time rival for Algarotti’s affections, Lord Hervey, signals the change of Montagu and Algarotti’s relationship from romance to, as Halsband puts it, “intellectual camaraderie, sustained by ardent esprit instead of emotion.”79 Deploying her familiar rhetoric of departed friends, Montagu decisively rejects the idea of a sensual paradise—citing, in particular, Hervey’s letter that expresses his wish that, in Italy with Algarotti, Montagu might “enjoy [Mahomet’s] Paradise upon earth”— in favor of a transcendental reunion with the dear members of her social circle.80 Montagu’s final transfiguration of the Elysian Fields draws upon Epicureanism, otherwise known as the “garden philosophy,” and its promotion of pleasure, not as “mere sensual gratification,” but rather, the “intellectual pleasure derived from contemplating nature, the thought of

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pleasure past and present, and lastly the pleasure of friendship.”81 Accordingly, the garden that Montagu visualizes is neither a sublimated version of Virgil’s underworld nor the fallen Garden of Eden, but rather, the garden of Epicurus in Athens where a small community of individuals who valued each other as “another self”— called an “otium” (Latin for “leisure”)—would gather in paradisal harmony.82 By asking Algarotti to join her in remembrance of Lord Hervey, Montagu populates her philosophical otium in the metaphorical landscape of Elysium. * * * As Janet Gurkin Altman observes, the aim of any correspondence “is to map one’s coordinates—temporal, spatial, emotional, intellectual—in order to tell someone else where one is located at a particular time and how far one has traveled since the last writing.” Addison and Montagu’s travelogues doubly inscribe such distances between their former selves and the selves newly transformed by travel.83 In Remarks on Italy, Addison readily acknowledges that his journey would be incomplete without the ability to recount it, as the epigraph from Cicero’s On Friendship that appears on the title page reveals: “if one had ascended to heaven and had obtained a full view of the nature of the universe and the beauty of the stars, his admiration would be without delight, if there were no one to whom he could tell what he had seen.”84 Introducing Addison’s travel narrative as anecdotal, rather than prescriptive, this quotation invites the readers to witness the spectacle of Italy through his eyes and relive the formative experiences that will shape him as a “model of British self-perception.”85 Conversely, in her 1739–1761 letters from Italy, Montagu gradually erases the boundaries delineated by history, national borders, and the physical body, eventually creating her own virtual space within the epistle. If the Augustan verse epistle can summon a “moral community … into existence,” as William Dowling suggests, then the letter could also summon a self-selected, virtual otium of reader-writers.86 Montagu’s epistolary exhortation for Algarotti to participate in their mutual recollection of Hervey can also be read as an invitation to the reader—both the addressee and the implied reader of her collected volume of letters—to join her “imagined community” where hybrid subjectivity is achieved through the convergence of the multiple voices and experiences of her correspondents.87 Addison’s perspective in Remarks on Italy may be statically linked

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to relaying an idealized and aestheticized classical past to his correspondents, but Montagu’s emotive experience encapsulates Samuel Johnson’s charge to the travel writer to “make [the reader] see what [she] saw, hear what [she] heard, feel what [she] felt.”88 By combining feeling with detailed observation, Montagu’s travel narrative supplants Addison’s model of impartial spectatorship. In doing so, Montagu reveals the cosmopolitan possibilities that reside within the traveling self. Ultimately, her “remarks on Italy” pave the pathway for future travelogues that position the traveler’s identity as itinerant rather than fixed to the nation of one’s origin.

Notes 1. Francis Bacon, “Of Travel,” in The Essays, ed. John Pitcher (New York: Penguin Classics, 1986), pp. 113–4. 2. James Buzard, “The Grand Tour and after (1660–1840),” in The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing, eds. Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 41–2. 3. Clifford Siskin and William Warner note that “Bacon … recognized print’s growing power,” anticipating the transformation in forms of mediation that trigger the Enlightenment. See “This Is Enlightenment: An Invitation in the Form of an Argument” in This Is Enlightenment, eds. Clifford Siskin and William Warner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), pp. 10, 12–15. 4. Buzard, “The Grand Tour,” p. 42. 5. Ibid. 6. Carole Fabricant, “Geographical Projects in the Later Eighteenth Century: Imperial Myths and Realities,” in The Age of Projects, ed. Maximillian E. Novak (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), pp. 319–20. 7. This is adapted from Lennard J.  Davis’s coinage and his argument that “‘fact’ and ‘fiction’ … are not defining two distinct impeachable categories. They are more properly extremes in a continuum” (9). See Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983). 8. See Buzard, “The Grand Tour,” p. 40. 9. Joseph Addison, “Preface,” Remarks on several parts of Italy, &c. in the years 1701, 1702, 1703 (London: 1705), n.p. 10. Addison, Remarks on Italy, p. 271. 11. See Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, The Complete Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu: Vol. II, 1727–1751, ed. Robert Halsband, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), p. 104.

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12. Montagu, Complete Letters, p.  104. See Montagu, The Selected Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, ed. Halsband (London: Longman Group Ltd., 1970), p.  165. For further discussion about how Montagu transforms the tragic narratives of Dido (and Sappho) in her correspondence with Algarotti, see Shirley F.  Tung, “Self-Murder, Female Agency and Manuscripts ‘Mangle’d and Falsify’d’: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s ‘1736. Address’d To –’ and The London Magazine.” Journal for EighteenthCentury Studies 38.1 (March 2015): pp. 115–34. 13. Montagu, Selected Letters, pp.  255–6. It is important to note here that Turkish Embassy Letters “poses many critical challenges” (p. 12) for scholars given that “it is not safe to assume that the missives … are transcriptions of actual correspondence” (p. 13). The 1763 publication is “derived from two leather-bound volumes of continuous fair-copy text carefully written out by Lady Mary and an unknown copyist. The text was likely composed sometime between her return from Constantinople in 1718 and 1724” (p. 13), but Montagu kept this “letter-book” with her and possibly revised parts of her Turkish travel narrative throughout her time in Italy. See the “Introduction” to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Turkish Embassy Letters, eds. Teresa Heffernan and Daniel O’Quinn (Toronto: Broadview Press, 2013). 14. Buzard, “The Grand Tour,” p. 40. 15. See Halsband, “Addison’s Cato and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu,” PMLA 65.6 (Dec. 1950): p. 1122–9. I argue that Montagu’s manuscript poem, “Address’d To–” (a.k.a., “Verses on Self-Murder”) is a lyric reimagination of Cato’s final soliloquy in “Montagu’s ‘1736. Address’d To-’ and The London Magazine.” 16. Montagu, “[Critique of Cato] Wrote at the Desire of Mr. Wortley, suppress’d at the desire of Mr. Adison [sic]” in Essays and Poems and Simplicity, A Comedy, eds. Halsband and Isobel Grundy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), pp. 63–4. 17. Montagu, “Critique of Cato,” p. 67. 18. Halsband and Grundy, Essays and Poems, p. 67. Following the theatrical debut of Cato, several contemporary critics censured Cato’s love scenes for “feminine passions” unfit for tragedy. The number of attacks over the first half of the eighteenth century prompted the 1764 publication of Cato … Without the Love Scenes, which significantly reduced the role of the female characters in the play. See Lisa Freeman, “What’s Love Got to Do with Addison’s Cato?” Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 39.3 (Summer 1999): p. 468. 19. Addison, Cato: A Tragedy and Selected Essays, ed. Christine Dunn Henderson and Mark E.  Yellin (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2004),

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p. 98. Montagu, “Epilogue. To the Tragedy of Cato” in Essays and Poems, p. 180. Emphasis mine. 20. Montagu, “Epilogue. To the Tragedy of Cato” in Essays and Poems, p. 180. 21. Buzard, “The Grand Tour,” p. 42. The disdain of Montagu by a particular Grand Tourist, Horace Walpole, is well documented, and perhaps, influenced Montagu’s opinions. See Halsband, “Walpole Versus Lady Mary,” in Horace Walpole: Writer, Politician, and Connoisseur, ed. Warren Hunting Smith (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967), pp. 215–6. 22. Denys Van Renen, “Montagu’s Letters from the Levant: Contesting the Borders of European Selfhood,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 11.2 (Fall 2011): p. 8. 23. Donatella Abbate Badin, “Self-Fashioning through Travel Writing: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Letters from Italy,” Textus: English Studies in Italy, 25:2 (2012): p. 95. 24. Felicity A. Nussbaum, “British Women Write the East after 1750: Revisiting a ‘Feminine’ Orient,” in British Women’s Writing in the Long Eighteenth Century: Authorship Politics and History, eds. Jennie Batchelor and Cora Kaplan (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), p. 122. 25. Daniel O’Quinn discusses Montagu’s inclusion of a reference to Aeneas’s confrontation with the ghost of Dido, claiming that Montagu “reveals the constitutive place of the betrayal of hospitality in the history of Rome … her citation of the Aeneid brings the reader right to the fundamental conflict between the claims of Dido’s love and Aeneas’s bellicose imperial destiny.” See Engaging the Ottoman Empire: Vexed Mediations, 1690–1815 (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), p. 199. 26. Eugenia Zuroski Jenkins, “Introduction: Exoticism, Cosmopolitanism, and Fiction’s Aesthetics of Diversity,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 25.1 (Fall 2012): pp. 1, 7. 27. For further discussion of Montagu’s relationship with Algarotti, please see “Montagu’s ‘1736. Address’d To-’ and The London Magazine” and Tung, “Elysian Landscapes and Cultural Self-fashioning in Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Letters from Turkey and Italy,” Studies in English Literature 1550–1780 (forthcoming Summer 2021). 28. Montagu, Complete Letters, ii, p. 104. 29. From Book 4, ll.381–6 of the Aeneid: “I, sequere Italiam ventis … sequar atris ignibus absens/ et, cum frigida mors anima seduxerit artus/ omnibus umbra locis adero.” See Publius Vergilius Maro (Virgil), Aeneid in Virgil in Two Volumes, vol. I, Ecologues, Georgics, and Aeneid I-VI, trans. H.  Rushton Fairclough (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), pp. 421–2. 30. Halsband, The Life of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), p. 175.

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31. Cf. Cynthia Lowenthal, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and the Eighteenth-­ Century Familiar Letter (Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1994), p. 70: “Such sentiments more importantly provide her with an illusion of control: her most extravagant turn, the claim that her female strength of generosity takes the form of granting ‘little Aeneas’ his freedom, is intended to function as a means of domesticating her ‘foreigner,’ but it is clear that he, like Dido’s Aeneas, is beyond the power of her rhetoric.” 32. Montagu, Selected Letters, p. 165. 33. Montagu, Complete Letters, ii, p. 210. 34. Montagu, Complete Letters, ii, p. 175. 35. Montagu, Turkish Embassy Letters, pp.  146–7. O’Quinn translates the Latin phrase as “Their cares leave them not in death itself.” 36. Montagu, Turkish Embassy Letters, p. 146. 37. For further discussion of Montagu’s depiction of Elysium in her correspondence, see Tung, “Elysian Landscapes and Cultural Self-fashioning.” 38. From Book 4, ll.65 of the Aeneid: “Uritur infelix Dido, totaque vagatur/ urbe furens, qualis coniecta cerva sagitta/ quam procul incautam nemora inter Cresia fixit/ pastor agens telis, liquitque volatile ferrum/ nescius; illa fuga silvas saltusque peragrat/ Dictæos; hæret later, letalis harundo” (pp. 68–73). 39. Montagu, Complete Letters, ii, p. 175. 40. Cf. “the force of that fallacious Fruit” (bk.10, l.1046) in John Milton, Paradise Lost in Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1957), p. 402. 41. Grundy, “‘The barbarous character we give them’: White Women Travellers Report on Other Races.” Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture 22 (1993): p. 74. 42. For a small sampling of the range of critical analyses of this scene, see: Mary Jo Kietzman, “Montagu’s Turkish Embassy Letters and Cultural Dislocation,” Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 38.3 (Summer 1998): p. 540 (“[Montagu] transforms the potential ‘objects’ of her gaze into speaking subjects who see as well as are seen, who initiate conversation, work, persuade, probe, and surprise”); Lisa Lowe, Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), p. 48 (“She frames the praise of Turkish women … as an intervention and a challenge to the male voyage writers, [but succumbs to the] female objectification and subordination [of] male literary and rhetorical models”); Lowenthal, Montagu and the Eighteenth-Century Familiar Letter, p. 112 (“She neutralizes the implicit threat of violence and vulnerability of the uncovered female body”); Nussbaum, Torrid Zones: Maternity, Sexuality, and Empire in Eighteenth-Century English Narratives (Baltimore:

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The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), pp.  140–1 (“Montagu’s transvestite gazing [is indicative of her] sapphic desire for the sexual freedoms that she attributes to the Turkish women, [which ultimately,] relocate[s] female eroticism onto the Other [and] constrain[s] the desire for sexual freedom to the exotic”). 43. Sandys’s account is quoted in Susan Bassnett, “Travel Writing and Gender” in eds. Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs, The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 229. For the concept of “feminotopia,” see Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 155–71. Montagu, Turkish Embassy Letters, p. 101. 44. Montagu, Turkish Embassy Letters, p. 102. 45. Montagu, Turkish Embassy Letters, p. 101. 46. Addison, Remarks on Italy, p. 96. 47. Addison, Remarks on Italy, p. 95. 48. Montagu, Complete Letters, ii, p. 159. 49. Jürgen Schlaeger, “Elective Affinities; Lady Mary Wortley Montagu in Venice,” Venetian Views, Venetian Blinds: English Fantasies about Venice (Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1999), pp. 67–9. 50. Montagu, Turkish Embassy Letters, pp. 114–5 51. Ludmilla Kostova, “Constructing Oriental Interiors: Two Eighteenth-­ Century Women Travellers and their Easts,” edited Vita Fortunati et  al. Travel Writing and the Female Imaginary (Bologna: Patron Editore, 2001): p. 23. 52. Lowe, French and British Orientalisms, pp. 44–5. 53. Montagu, Complete Letters, ii, p. 173. 54. Ibid. See fn. 1, p. 173. 55. After frustrating attempts to convince Algarotti to settle near her, Montagu breaks off communication with him in May 1741 concluding, “I see so clearly the nature of your soul that I am as much in despair of touching it as Mr. Newton was of enlarging his discoveries by means of telescopes, which by their own powers dissipate and change the light rays.” See Montagu, Selected Letters, p. 186. 56. Grundy, “Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Italian Memoir.” Age of Johnson 6 (1994): pp. 321–2. 57. Grundy, “Italian Memoir,” pp. 322–3. 58. Grundy, “Italian Memoir,” pp. 321–2, 341, 344. 59. Grundy, “Italian Memoir,” pp. 332–9. 60. Grundy, “Italian Memoir,” p. 340. 61. Montagu, Complete Letters, ii, p.  405. A similar sentiment is voiced in Montagu’s letter to Lady Oxford on 27 April 1748, which echoes the social detachment she expresses in her letter to Pope: “I have a pleasure in

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all your improvements at Welbeck, when I hear them commended, tho I shall never see them. ’Tis almost the only attachment I have in this World, being every day (as it is fit I should) more and more wean’d from it” (Montagu, Complete Letters, ii, p. 385). 62. See line 739 of John Milton, A Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle (Comus), in Complete Poems and Major Prose, p. 107. 63. Montagu, Complete Letters, ii, p. 404. 64. Ibid. 65. Montagu, Complete Letters, ii, p. 421. 66. Montagu, Turkish Embassy Letters, p. 113. 67. Lowe, French and British Orientalisms, pp. 41–2. 68. Montagu, Turkish Embassy Letters, p. 116. Montagu, Complete Letters, iii, pp. 39–40. 69. Montagu, Turkish Embassy Letters, pp. 69–70. 70. Montagu, Turkish Embassy Letters, p. 70. 71. Ibid. 72. Van Renen, “Letters from the Levant,” pp. 11–12. 73. Van Renen, “Letters from Levant,” p. 12. 74. Montagu, Complete Letters, ii, p. 419. 75. Montagu, Complete Letters, p. 420, fn.2 76. Montagu, Complete Letters, p.  420. See Lowenthal, Montagu and the Eighteenth-Century Familiar Letter, p. 189. 77. See Halsband, “Algarotti as Apollo,” p. 224. 78. Montagu, Selected Letters, p. 227. 79. Halsband, “Algarotti as Apollo,” p. 224. 80. This from a letter dated 17 August 1739 quoted in Halsband, The Life of Montagu, pp. 181–2. 81. Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault, trans. Michael Chase (Maiden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 1995), p. 88. 82. William Dowling proposes that the “community surrounding Epicurus in the original Garden in Athens may be taken to demonstrate the way that the otium ideal, ostensibly involving only a withdrawal from the corrupt world, almost inevitably ends with its private circle of virtue having becomes a moral alternative to it … within the otium scene, a private circle of friends exists in perfect sympathy because they have chosen both to renounce the world and to live in the company of one another.” See The Epistolary Moment: The Poetics of the Eighteenth-Century Verse Epistle (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), pp. 46–7. 83. Janet Gurkin Altman, Epistolarity: Approaches to a Form (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1982), p. 119.

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84. My translation. See Addison, Remarks on Italy, n.p.: “Verum ergo id est, si quis in cælum ascendisset naturamque mundi et pulchritudinem siderum perspexisset, insuavem illam admirationem ei fore; quæ jucundissima fuisset, si aliquem, cui narraret, habuisset.” 85. Lawrence E. Klein, “Addisonian Afterlives: Joseph Addison in EighteenthCentury Culture,” Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 35:1 (2012): p. 102. 86. Dowling, The Epistolary Moment, p. 45. 87. See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso Books, 1991), p. 5: “In an anthropological spirit, then, I propose the following definition of the nation: it is an imagined political community— and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign.” 88. Giuseppe Baretti, A Journey from London to Genoa (London: T.  Davies, 1770), p. v.

Bibliography Abbate Badin, Donatella. “Self-Fashioning through Travel Writing: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Letters from Italy.” Textus: English Studies in Italy 25:2 (2012): pp. 91–100. Addison, Joseph. Cato: A Tragedy and Selected Essays. Edited by Christine Dunn Henderson and Mark E. Yellin. Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2004. ———. Remarks on several parts of Italy, &c. in the years 1701, 1702, 1703. London: 1705. Altman, Janet Gurkin. Epistolarity: Approaches to a Form. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1982. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. New York: Verso Books, 1991. Bacon, Francis. “Of Travel.” In The Essays, edited by John Pitcher, pp.  113–4. New York: Penguin Classics, 1986. Baretti, Guiseppe. A Journey from London to Genoa. London: T. Davies, 1770. Bassnett, Susan. “Travel Writing and Gender.” In The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing, edited by Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs, pp.  225–41. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Buzard, James. “The Grand Tour and after (1660–1840).” The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing, edited by Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs, pp. 37–52. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Davis, Lennard J. Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1983. Dowling, William. The Epistolary Moment: The Poetics of the Eighteenth-Century Verse Epistle. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991.

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Fabricant, Carole. “Geographical Projects in the Later Eighteenth Century: Imperial Myths and Realities.” In The Age of Projects, edited by Maximillian E. Novak, pp. 318–43. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008. Freeman, Lisa. “What’s Love Got to Do with Addison’s Cato?” Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 39 (Summer 1999): pp. 463–82. Grundy, Isobel. “‘The barbarous character we give them’: White Women Travellers Report on Other Races.” Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture 22 (1993): pp. 73–86. ———. “Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Italian Memoir.” Age of Johnson 6 (1994): pp. 321–46. Hadot, Pierre. Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault. Translated by Michael Chase. Maiden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 1995. Halsband, Robert. “Addison’s Cato and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu.” PMLA 65.6 (December 1950): pp. 1122–9. ———. “Algarotti as Apollo: His Influence on Lady Mary Wortley Montagu.” In Friendship’s Garland: Essays Presented to Mario Praz on His Seventieth Birthday, edited by Vittorio Gabrieli, pp. 223–41. Rome: Storia et Letteratura, 1966. ———. The Life of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956. ———. “Walpole Versus Lady Mary.” In Horace Walpole: Writer, Politician, and Connoisseur, edited by Warren Hunting Smith, pp. 215–26. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967. Kietzman, Mary Jo. “Montagu’s Turkish Embassy Letters and Cultural Dislocation.” Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 38.3 (Summer 1998): pp. 537–51. Klein, Lawrence E. “Addisonian Afterlives: Joseph Addison in Eighteenth-Century Culture.” Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 35:1 (2012): pp. 101–18. Kostova, Ludmilla. “Constructing Oriental Interiors: Two Eighteenth-Century Women Travellers and their Easts.” In Travel Writing and the Female Imaginary, edited by Vita Fortunati et al., pp. 17–33. Bologna: Patron Editore, 2001. Lowe, Lisa. Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991. Lowenthal, Cynthia. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and the Eighteenth-Century Familiar Letter. Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1994. Milton, John. A Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle (Comus). In Complete Poems and Major Prose, edited by Merritt Y.  Hughes, pp.  86–113. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1957a. ———. Paradise Lost. In Complete Poems and Major Prose, edited by Merritt Y.  Hughes, pp.  173–470 Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1957b.

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Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley. The Complete Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu: Vol. II, 1727–1751 Edited by Robert Halsband. 3 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966. ———. “[Critique of Cato] Wrote at the Desire of Mr. Wortley, suppress’d at the desire of Mr. Adison [sic].” In Essays and Poems and Simplicity, A Comedy, edited by Robert Halsband and Isobel Grundy, pp. 63–4. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977a. ———. “Epilogue. To the Tragedy of Cato.” In Essays and Poems and Simplicity, A Comedy, edited by Robert Halsband and Isobel Grundy, p.  180. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977b. ———. The Selected Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Edited by Robert Halsband. London: Longman Group Ltd., 1970. ———. Turkish Embassy Letters. Edited by Teresa Heffernan and Daniel O’Quinn. Toronto: Broadview Press, 2013. Nussbaum, Felicity A. “British Women Write the East after 1750: Revisiting a ‘Feminine’ Orient.” In British Women’s Writing in the Long Eighteenth Century: Authorship Politics and History, edited by Jennie Batchelor and Cora Kaplan, pp. 121–37. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. ———. Torrid Zones: Maternity, Sexuality, and Empire in Eighteenth-Century English Narratives. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995. O’Quinn, Daniel. Engaging the Ottoman Empire: Vexed Mediations, 1690–1815. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019. Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. New York: Routledge, 1992. Schlaeger, Jürgen. “Elective Affinities; Lady Mary Wortley Montagu in Venice.” In Venetian Views, Venetian Blinds: English Fantasies about Venice, edited by Manfred Pfister and Barbara Schaff, pp. 63–72. Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1999. Siskin, Clifford and William Warner. “This Is Enlightenment: An Invitation in the Form of an Argument.” This is Enlightenment, edited by Clifford Siskin and William Warner, pp. 1–36. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. Tung, Shirley F. “Elysian Landscapes and Cultural Self-fashioning in Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Letters from Turkey and Italy,” Studies in English Literature 1550–1780 61.3 (forthcoming Summer 2021). ———. “Self-murder, Female Agency, and Manuscripts ‘Mangle’d and falsify’d’: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s ‘1736. Address’d To –‘and The London Magazine.” Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 38.1 (March 2015): pp. 115–34. Van Renen, Denys. “Montagu’s Letters from the Levant: Contesting the Borders of European Selfhood.” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 11.2 (Fall 2011): pp. 1–34.

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Vergilius Maro (Virgil), Publius. Aeneid in Virgil in Two Volumes, vol. I, Ecologues, Georgics, and Aeneid I-VI, translated by H.  Rushton Fairclough. 2 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986. Zuroski Jenkins, Eugenia. “Introduction: Exoticism, Cosmopolitanism, and Fiction’s Aesthetics of Diversity.” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 25.1 (Fall 2012): pp. 1–7.

Shakespeare’s Art of the Dervish: Voltaire, Elizabeth Montagu, and National Sentiment Angelina Del Balzo

One of the most enduring legacies of eighteenth-century literary and theatrical culture is the creation of the cult of Bardolatry, which elevated Shakespeare (1564–1616) from one of many talented playwrights from the Elizabethan Golden Age of Drama to the greatest writer of the English language and a representative for British national identity. What cannot be overstated is the crucial part that the French writer Voltaire (1694–1778) played in the process of Shakespeare’s canonization as the English poet par excellence, not just through his active work in simultaneously promoting and criticizing Shakespeare on the Continent, but also in the way he was placed by eighteenth-century English commentators as Shakespeare’s symbolic French counterpart. Now best known in the Anglophone world for his radical philosophy and the novel Candide, Voltaire was arguably most famous in eighteenth-century England as a dramatist of French tragedy. He was a defender and innovator of the French drama’s neoclassical tradition at a time when French taste and culture were the European

A. Del Balzo (*) Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Stefanovska et al. (eds.), Emotions in Non-Fictional Representations of the Individual, 1600–1850, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84005-1_5

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standard and the French language served as an international lingua franca, and so his plays served as a metric for British writers to assess Shakespeare’s work and legacy. While the English theaters were closed amidst the violence of the Civil Wars and the following Cromwellian regime, France was enjoying a dramatic golden age defined by the work of Pierre Corneille (1606–1684), Molière (1622–1673), and Jean Racine (1639–1699). Mid-seventeenth-­ century French playwrights turned away from the Baroque Senecan tragedy dominant in the aftermath of the bloody Wars of Religion toward Aristotelian tragedy and the development of neoclassicism.1 Neoclassical French tragedy was governed by three core tenets. The first was vraisemblance, which meant the adherence to truth, but as defined by reason and moral sense rather than by realism. This principle required that vice be punished and virtue be rewarded. In addition, French tragedy insisted upon convenance—that is, authenticity and historical accuracy—and, most importantly, bienséance or propriety, meaning no reference to carnal or corporeal behavior. With regard to Aristotle’s unities, strict adherence to the unity of subject was demanded with no subplots or intermixture of comedy, while the unities of time and place were less important.2 Of course, it would be reductive to argue that French tragic aesthetics closely adhered to a clear set of precepts; Corneille himself said that while there are always rules in art, it is not constant what those rules are.3 But the idea of aesthetic “rules” was central to French neoclassicism and, more importantly for my purposes, was the central framework through which English commentators viewed French drama. The debates in England around tragedy were not delineated by the differences in form (i.e. alexandrine couplets versus blank verse) but centered on the supposed difference in emotional response those forms induced. This counterintuitive pairing of an English playwright writing over a century earlier and a very much living and active French playwright is at the center of Elizabeth Montagu’s (1718–1800) critical essay An Essay on the Writings and Genius of Shakespear, Compared with the Greek and French Dramatic Poets. With Some Remarks Upon the Misrepresentations of Mons. De Voltaire (1769), where she theorizes Shakespearean tragedy’s emotional and dramatic power is in opposition to neoclassical French tragedy, embodied by the writings of Voltaire.4 The elevation of Shakespeare in the eighteenth century is in part a demarcation of the aesthetic value of originality at the expense of imitation; paradoxically, this great period of adaptation viewed his work as exemplary of “grace beyond the reach of art.”5

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This originality is located in feeling rather than content, and so Shakespeare’s plays, made fit for the stage conventions of the eighteenth century, are more innovative than Voltaire’s, which primarily stress an adherence to the formal expectations and history of French tragedy. While Shakespeare’s plays across many different genres were popular performance texts, his work on tragedy in particular became central to the formation of a theory of tragedy. Today, comedies are the most frequently performed eighteenth-century plays (Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s evergreen The School for Scandal being the exemplar), but tragedy was at that time at the center of aesthetic theory as well as a staple of the repertoire, both in new plays and revivals.6 In particular, commentators were interested in how tragedy provoked appropriate emotion, which often served as a metric of national health. English translations of Voltaire’s Oriental tragedies are marks of expanding cosmopolitanism, performed in parallel with the work of Shakespeare, the English playwright whose status as a national figure was consolidating in this period. These Oriental tragedies at the same time do evidence an interest in cultures farther afield, even if mediated by France. The theater offers an imaginative space where Eastern and European representations coexist. The debate between the tragedies of Shakespeare and Voltaire is at its core an attempt to litigate genre, which was defined in part along national lines; but the prevalence of English adaptations of French plays, in particular plays set in the Middle and Far East, suggests the porousness of the very generic boundaries that Montagu and others attempted to delineate. The embracement of Shakespeare as the quintessential Englishman at the expense of the cosmopolitan Voltaire is a part at the development of English nationalism.7 Despite this apparent elevation of parochialism, Voltaire was a popular dramatist on the English stage, and of the 16 plays that were either translated or adapted into English,8 13 were tragedies, and eight of these were set in Asia, the Middle East, or South America.9 Britain’s attempts at articulating the purpose of tragedy look to their nearest neighbor. Through Montagu’s essay, this chapter will show how English commentators defined English tragedy by the performance of the passions, not just in distinguishing it from French drama but in positioning emotion as the central tenet of all tragedy. While Montagu clearly makes a nationalist argument for the superiority of British drama over the French, she is also making an argument concerning the definition of tragedy as a genre. In contrast to the strict classically informed rules of French

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tragedy, English tragedy had no codified aesthetic and the majority flouted Aristotle’s prescriptions in the Poetics. In the Essay on Shakespear, Montagu argues for taking Shakespeare as the contemporary paradigm for tragedy. In doing so, she not only links naturalism and originality to British character but also places Shakespeare as a cosmopolitan figure incorporating imagery from the world around him. Montagu’s analysis of tragedy may be within a nationalist framework, but her account of emotion cannot be restrained within these newly forming borders. As demonstrated by Elizabeth Eger and Fiona Ritchie,10 the rise of Shakespeare criticism opened up new avenues for women’s participation in intellectual culture. Elizabeth Montagu was the “Queen of the Blues,” the leader of the proto-feminist Bluestocking salon of elite artistic and intellectual women which included other female critics of Shakespeare, Charlotte Lennox and Elizabeth Griffith. In taking on Shakespeare as subject, Montagu was directly engaging with the work of many of the male intellectuals in her circle, including no lesser figures of the zeitgeist than Samuel Johnson and David Garrick. The essay’s larger argument, that Shakespeare’s power comes from his ability to engage the audience’s emotion and not from his adherence to the classical models of drama, points to the feminist claiming of Shakespeare as a male genius who shared the same lack of classical education as most contemporary women. Eighteenth-­ century women critics including Lennox, Griffiths, and Elizabeth Inchbald argued that Shakespeare’s limited formal education and travel made him seem to be a domestic genius who could be associated in particular with women. The elevation of a vernacular writer in turn opened up the nascent field of literary criticism to women.11 Voltaire in part serves as a stabilizing interlocutor for their perhaps contingent access to criticism: his cultural impact is unquestionable, but his foreignness gives both ideological and, crucially, physical distance, making him a socially safer antagonist than, say, Johnson.12 In this way, Montagu was able to claim space within the central artistic debates of the period with her first published piece of criticism. Arguably much of the oppositional framing of Shakespeare and Voltaire is owed to the latter’s familiarity with and respect for eighteenth-century English theater culture. Voltaire was first exposed to Shakespeare during his exile in England from 1726 to 1728, after a stint in the Bastille (for challenging the Chevalier Rohan-Chabot to a duel after the latter insulted him in actress Adrienne Lecouvreur’s theater box). One of the aspects of English culture that Voltaire admired was what he saw as a greater respect

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for actors, marking the difference between Anne Oldfield’s ceremonious burial in Westminster Abbey with Lecouvreur’s unmarked grave. The Church in France denied sacramental rites and Christian burial unless actors renounced their profession.13 Colley Cibber gave Voltaire a complementary orchestra seat at Drury Lane every night during his exile in England,14 enabling him to take in much of London theater. Shakespeare was more or less unknown through most of France, but Voltaire’s arrival in England came at the beginning of the Shakespeare textual editing craze,15 with new belles lettres and commercial interest in the complete works. Counter to Montagu’s claim that he minimized Shakespeare’s theatrical effectiveness, Voltaire recognized Shakespeare’s dramatic power. Dubbing Shakespeare an “English Corneille,”16 Voltaire believed his genius was so singular that it could not be imitated, amplifying Shakespeare’s value while limiting the potential that a competing tradition would emerge to rival the neoclassical tenets.17 Montagu and Voltaire have similar readings of Shakespeare in relation to dramatic aesthetics; the point of contention emerges at the role of originality in dramatic writing. Montagu makes no attempt to defend Shakespeare against all of Voltaire’s critiques, but rather claims that Shakespeare’s dramatic “originality” makes it understandable that he would not always successfully deviate from convention: Great indulgence is due to the errors of original writers, who, quitting the beaten track which others have travelled, make daring incursions into unexplored regions of invention, and boldly strike into the pathless sublime: it is no wonder if they are often bewildered, sometimes benighted; yet surely it is more eligible to partake the pleasure and the toil of their adventures, than still to follow the cautious steps of timid imitators through trite and common roads.18

Anticipating William Gilpin’s definition of the picturesque by a decade, Montagu translates writing into the visual. Shakespeare’s originality also preserves his Englishness: he has never attended university, with his “small Latin and less Greek,”19 and thus, his inspiration comes not from the classical education of Christopher Marlowe or Edmund Spenser, nor is it influenced by time spent on the Continent, as with Philip Sidney.20 If Shakespeare is a true original in his art, then the only source for his genius can be in England. In Montagu’s formulation, his language becomes the English land itself, natural and constant. Montagu’s critique of French

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tragedy employs metaphors of clothing and appropriate adornment, focusing on how applying French aesthetic norms to English narratives cheapens tragedy: Can they who have robbed the tragic muse of all her virtue, and divested her of whatsoever gave her a real interest in the human heart, require we should adore her for the glitter of a few false brilliants, or the nice arrangement of frippery ornaments? If she wears any thing of intrinsic value it has been borrowed from the ancients; but by these artists it is so fantastically fashioned to modern modes, as to lose all its original graces, and even that necessary qualification of all ornaments, fitness and propriety.21

The language of adaptation removes any possibility that French tragedy contains anything “natural,” one of the defining characteristics of Shakespeare in Montagu’s argument. But unlike English playwrights who consider the “necessary qualification[s]” of “fitness and propriety” in adapting texts, anything French tragedy has changed from classical tragedy is superficial and decadent. Montagu emphasizes the importance of Shakespeare’s stimulation of emotion through what she terms his “natural” language: “[The London spectator] can discern between the natural language in which she [the Tragic Muse] addressed the human heart, and the artificial dialect which she has acquired from the prejudices of a particular nation, or the jargon caught from the tone of a court.”22 Originality is not referring to unique phrasings or new situations; rather, Montagu defines it by how emotion is expressed and dramatized in the work. For all of Montagu’s elevation of originality, English theater of the Georgian period was marked by its lack thereof. The Licensing Act of 1737, passed about a decade after the end of Voltaire’s English exile and in force for almost a generation by the writing of the Essay, meant that eighteenth-century theater was dominated by revivals and adaptations. Even before the Act, however, fidelity to the language of the original play was not a defining characteristic of Shakespearean performance. While collected Shakespeare editions were available, the performance texts of Shakespeare’s plays were overwhelmingly adaptations, many originating in the Restoration. As Jean Marsden argues, these “radical adaptations” were based on the belief that Shakespeare’s ideas—his flights of the imagination—were where his genius lay, not in the words themselves—a formulation that shifted with the industry of publishing of Shakespeare’s works in the early eighteenth century.23

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In contrast, French neoclassical tragedy gains its power in part from a playwright’s self-consciousness about a given play’s connection to the longer tradition of tragedy. For Montagu, this is to the detriment of French dramatists, whom she claims merely imitate the precedents set by Corneille and Racine. But Voltaire actively engaged with precedents as productive elements of the artistic process. Voltaire’s first tragedy Oedipe (1719) takes on the subject of Sophocles’ exemplary Greek tragedy, which was incorporated into French neoclassical tragedy in the seventeenth century with a version by Corneille. In the first published edition, Voltaire even includes a series of letters in which he compares his Oedipus tragedy to those of his predecessors.24 So as eighteenth-century English playwrights were adapting and updating recent but now-dated texts, Voltaire and other French playwrights turned to dramatizing a set of popular and/or significant topics through contemporary neoclassical style. French dramatists shared an approach with English poets more than with playwrights, where the same subject and forms demonstrated the writer’s sprezzatura, taking on the subject matter of the greats in order to show themselves as their equals or betters. But the English drama’s tendency to highlight originality even when building upon established material points to a culture that was centering novelty across literary and artistic genres. The association of dramatic passion with British tragedy in particular created a discourse among English theater critics and playwrights, wherein Voltaire’s Oriental tragedies were not bringing French culture to London, but rather where all successful theater incorporated the characteristics of English tragedy. The denigration of French tragedy was a part of a larger rejection of the supremacy of French culture.25 These translated plays were seen not as directly “Anglicizing” a French text. Rather, by bringing Voltaire to the English stage, the theaters were recognizing the inherent hybridity of his writing: “[Zara] is borrowed originally from the Zaire of M. de Voltaire, an author, who, while he resided in England, imbibed so much of British liberty, that his writings seem almost calculated for the meridian of London. Mr. Aaron Hill, however, has made this, as well as his own [sic], that it is hard to determine which of the two may most properly be called the author of this play.”26 In this review, Zara is inscribed as a national property both through Hill’s involvement and through Voltaire’s knowledge of the British theater. Similarly, the prologue to James Miller’s Mahomet the Imposter (1744) credits Voltaire’s exposure to British culture for the play’s civic spirit:

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Britons, those Numbers to yourselves you owe; Voltaire hath Strength to shoot in Shakespear’s Bow: Fame led him at his Hippocrene to drink, And taught to write with Nature as to think: With English Freedom, English Wit he knew, And from the inexhausted Stream profusely drew.27

Voltaire ingests Shakespeare’s English genius in his works, and so in a transitive mode the British audiences are responsible for the power of this play. This framing not only defends English tragedy against claims about French superiority, it rhetorically brings in the contemporary defender of French neoclassicism as an example of Shakespearean tragedy. A similar national fusion occurs in Colley Cibber’s prologue to Zara, in which the play’s authorship is described as both French and English: “’Tis strange, that Nature never should inspire/A Racine’s Judgment with a Shakespeare’s Fire!/Howe’er, to-night,  — (to promise much we’re loth)/But—— you’ve a Chance, to have a Taste of Both.”28 Cibber writes how Voltaire fuses the formal excellence of the French neoclassical tradition with the affective strength of British tragedy. In this framing, part of the enjoyment of Voltaire’s plays on the English stage is the “palimpsestic pleasure”29 of seeing two texts and two artistic traditions fused into one production. Given his international celebrity, it is unsurprising that Voltaire was a popular dramatist on the English stage, and it was his Oriental tragedies that were of particular interest. Aaron Hill’s The Tragedy of Zara (1735), a translation of Voltaire’s Oriental tragedy Zaïre, contains echoes of Othello and served as a star vehicle for Susannah Cibber and other actresses, becoming a major part of the repertoire for the rest of the century (both in London and in the colonial theaters).30 Zara and other tragedies adapted from Voltaire were situated as taking the best of French culture and mixing it with English power and sentiment. But, as I will discuss further in the chapter, the non-European settings of the majority of these tragedies point to a dynamic not fully explained by binary cultural competition between France and England. The emotional power of tragedy necessitates expression through a global lexicon. No reactionary, Voltaire sought to modernize French tragedy by incorporating Shakespearean dramaturgy. After his return from England, he began to make changes to the structure of his plays, such as using global settings, minimizing or eliminating romantic storylines in mythical and historical plots, increasing the number of characters, depicting ghosts and

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corpses onstage, and incorporating more dramatic action with less descriptive récit. Voltaire’s attempt to show a death scene onstage, however, turned out to be a bridge too far for French audiences, who loudly protested, and the scene was removed for further performances.31 On the other hand, Voltaire argued that Shakespeare flouted both the unities and principles of decorum, though he excused the latter as emblematic of the Elizabethans’ overall barbarity.32 He believed that there was no skill in blank verse composition, by now the dominant tragic mode in English, and that the Alexandrine couplets of French tragedy required better technique to perfect.33 Worse, he contended, the growing cult of Bardolatry on the Continent threatened to obscure France’s homegrown tragedy,34 a tradition Voltaire was devoted to upholding. Yet his equivocal introduction of Shakespeare to France, still the cultural capital of Europe, magnified Shakespeare’s growing national influence on an international scale.35 An example of the multidirectional manifestation of influence can be found in George Ayscough’s Semeramis (1760), a translation and adaptation of Voltaire’s Sémiramis, about the legendary Assyrian queen. With the obvious debt that many of Voltaire’s tragedies had to Shakespeare, their English translations often use phrases and vocabulary that resonate with the Shakespearean sources. Voltaire’s incorporation of Hamlet’s Ghost into Sémiramis becomes more explicit in Ayscough’s English adaptation of the play. In a scene similar to the appearance of Old King Hamlet, the ghost of the murdered king Ninus appears to his wife Queen Semiramis, who had conspired to murder him in order to attain the throne with her favorite Assures and his son Arzaces, later revealed to be her long-lost son and grandson. As the Shade retreats into the tomb, he promises his wife and son that they will both follow him to their deaths: Forbear; But rest assur’d the hour now hastens on When ’twill be lawful for thee to descend Into this house of death.36

Translated literally, Voltaire’s text emphasizes the survivors’ reverence due toward the dead king’s tomb: Arrête, et respecte ma cendre, Quand il en sera temps, je t’y ferai descendre. [Le spectre rentre, et le mauzolée se referme.]37

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While not straying far from this meaning, the playwright Ayscough’s emphasis on temporality over the tomb simultaneously recalls the Ghost’s farewell to Hamlet: “My Hour is almost come,/When I to sulph’rous tormenting Flames/Must render up myself.”38 Another characteristic of English tragedy that appears in Sémiramis is the attention to the performance of sentiment. The appearance of Ninus’ ghost in particular seems to be a touchpoint for the tensions between French and English tragedy. In a revival of Sémiramis at the Comédie française in 1756, the actor Henri-Louis Lekain as the ghost of Ninus emerged from his tomb “with sleeves rolled back, arms bloody, hair disordered, and eyes starting.” Despite the scene’s obvious debt to Shakespeare, Voltaire took issue with Lekain’s interpretation, describing this kind of dramatic realism as “too English.”39 As acted in performance, theatrical tension should not come at the expense of French artistry and taste. Non-fictional writings about the theater were central to the understanding of how emotion fit in with the nascent discourse around cosmopolitanism. For Voltaire, theatrical affect is crucial for envisioning the potential for transnational feeling: I swear that there will be nothing so Turkish, so Christian, so full of love, so tender, so furious as what I am writing at present to please them…I will paint the manners as accurately as possible, and try to put in the work the greatest pathos and interest offered by Christianity and the greatest pathos and interest offered by love.40

Similarly, both identification with Zaïre’s suffering and the attention to the performativity of that suffering increase the potential for sympathetic exchange, creating a public united by affect.41 In his Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith uses the audience’s sympathy for the plight of Seïde and Palmira in Voltaire’s Mahomet to describe how we should sympathize with the plight of those led astray by (what he sees as) false religion42: In the tragedy of Mahomet, one of the finest of Mr. Voltaire’s, it is well represented, what ought to be our sentiments for crimes which proceed from such motives. In that tragedy, two young people of different sexes, of the most innocent and virtuous dispositions, and without any other w ­ eakness except what endears them the more to us, a mutual fondness for one another, are instigated by the strongest motives of a false religion, to commit a horrid murder, that shocks all the principles of human nature…While they are about executing this crime, they are tortured with all the agonies

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which can arise from the struggle between the idea of the indispensableness of religious duty on the one side, and compassion, gratitude, reverence for the age, and love for the humanity and virtue of the person whom they are going to destroy, on the other. The representation of this exhibits one of the most interesting, and perhaps the most instructive spectacle that was ever introduced upon any theatre.43

What makes the play tragic then, is not about one emotional feeling being more highly valued than another, but rather the triumph of reason over the emotions. It is the “sense of duty,” and so a reasonable action, that drives Seïde to murder Zopire, the leader of the Meccans and the antagonist to the fanatic Mahomet. Misguided reason can be as dangerous as misguided passion. The audience is endeared to Palmira and Seïde because their emotions are correct while their reasoning is not, and when it is corrected at the end, they go through the appropriate emotional response to unjust killing. This reading of Mahomet creates a space for articulating a vision of societal religious tolerance for Smith. Here, Voltaire’s play demonstrates that improper actions can be a result of proper feeling, making it possible to sympathize with the religious Other. Voltaire’s tragedy dramatizes an Enlightenment pluralism, particularly striking in a play with exclusively Muslim characters. For both Voltaire and Smith as philosophers, understanding theatrical emotion is pivotal to their cosmopolitan world views. The spectator’s judgment is based in how the playwright creates the conditions for sympathy, or the exchange of emotion. As seen above Montagu attributes to Shakespeare a greater sympathetic capacity than the French tragedians, whom she sees as being more interested in formal imitation than the expression of feeling. In her famous letter, Margaret Cavendish characterized Shakespeare’s power of characterization as the power of metamorphosis.44 This passage is echoed by Montagu, in her description of Shakespeare’s ability to animate the emotions of his characters, but the power becomes specifically Eastern: “Shakespear seems to have had the art of the Dervise, in the Arabian Tales, who could throw his soul into the body of another man, and be at once possessed of his sentiments, adopt his passions, and rise to all the functions and feelings of his situation.”45 The Mevlevi order of Sufi dervishes, based in modern-day Turkey, perform “whirling” as a meditation practice during the sema (worship ceremony). But even as Shakespeare’s sympathy makes him profoundly English, as in the previous examples, it also Orientalizes him; he

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has the powers described in Oriental tales of not just imagining himself in the situations of others, but of physically entering their bodies and co-­ opting their sentiments and passions. The figure of the dervish, and the Orient more generally, paradoxically gives Montagu a vocabulary for describing a specifically English artistic legitimacy outside of France’s cultural authority. Yet, this French and English artistic competition also anticipates the more troubling colonial competition that was taking part in the Caribbean at the time and would expand to include the very Oriental subjects aestheticized here as France and Britain turned covetous eyes toward the Ottoman Empire’s weakening control of North Africa and the Middle East. Montagu’s triangulation of Shakespeare, Voltaire, and a nameless Oriental figure exemplify the messiness of true cosmopolitanism. Plays like Zaïre, Mahomet, and Sémiramis show the influence of English drama on Voltaire as he looked to increase the display of sentiment, despite his defense of the French neoclassical tradition. These Oriental tragedies are translated into English and adapted to further conform to the conventions of English tragedy as defined by Shakespeare, all the while set in locations made familiar through the popularity of Oriental tales (many of which, again, were filtered through French) but also through Britain’s growing contact with the non-European world as a rising global power. In defining the aesthetics of a uniquely English tragedy, Montagu extended these attributes to the British national character: original, free, and affectively powerful. For her, this meant that national tragedy was measured in the extent of the production of sympathy, a porous process characterized by boundary crossings like adaptation itself. In spite of Montagu’s reclamation of the superiority of English tragedy, and so in extension English identity, her analysis is defined as much as by what it incorporates from the global world as it is by homegrown conditions.

Notes 1. See Christian Biet, “French Tragedy during the Seventeenth Century: From Cruelty on a Scaffold to Poetic Distance on Stage,” in Politics and Aesthetics in European Baroque and Classicist Tragedy, eds. Jan Bloemendal and Nigel Smith (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 294–316. 2. See John D. Lyons, Kingdom of Disorder: The Theory of Tragedy in Classical France (Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1999).

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3. “Il est constant qu’il y a des préceptes, puisqu’il y a un art, mais il n’est pas constant quels ils sont,” Pierre Corneille, Discours de l’utilité et des parties du poème dramatique, quoted in Lyons, Kingdom of Disorder, 2. 4. Seventeenth-century French tragedy is referred to as neoclassical in English and called classical in French; they refer to the same genre and movement. 5. Alexander Pope, “An Essay on Criticism,” in Poetry and Prose of Alexander Pope, ed. William Aubry (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1969), 152. 6. Felicity Nussbaum, “The Challenge of Tragedy,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Georgian Theatre, 1737–1832, eds. Julia Swindells and David Francis Taylor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 368–72. 7. Kathryn Prince, “Shakespeare and English Nationalism,” in Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Fiona Ritchie and Peter Sabor (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2012), 282. 8. These adaptations are William Duncombe’s Junius Brutus (1734); Aaron Hill’s Zara (1735), Alzira (1736), Merope (1749) and The Roman Revenge (1753); James Miller and John Hoadley’s Mahomet the Imposter (1744); Arthur Murphy’s The Orphan of China (1759), No One’s Enemy but His Own (1764), and Alzuma (1772); Charles Macklin’s The Man of the World (1766); George Colman the Elder’s The English Merchant (1767); Thomas Francklin’s Orestes (1769) and Matilda (1775); Dorothea Celesia’s Almida (1771); Joseph Cradock’s Zobeide (1771); and George Ayscough’s Semiramis (1776). See Harold Lawton Bruce, “Voltaire on the English Stage,” Modern Philology 8, no. 1 (1918): 1–152. 9. These include Zara, Alzira, Mahomet, The Orphan of China, Almida, Alzuma, Zobeide, and Semiramis. Tragedies based on Voltaire with classical or European settings are Junius Brutus, Roman Revenge, Orestes, Merope, and Matilda. Almida is set in Sicily under Saracen control, so I count it with the Oriental tragedies. 10. Elizabeth Eger, “‘Out Rushed a Female to Protect the Bard’: The Bluestocking Defense of Shakespeare,” Huntington Library Quarterly 65, no. 1/2, Reconsidering the Bluestockings (2002): 127–51 and Fiona Ritchie’s Women and Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 11. Ritchie, Women and Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century, 55. 12. Eger, “The Bluestocking Defense of Shakespeare,” 151. 13. Martin Carlson, Voltaire and the Theatre of the Eighteenth Century (Westport and London: Greenwood Press, 1998), 39–40. 14. Carlson, Voltaire and the Theatre, 23. 15. Voltaire arrived the year after the first edition of Alexander Pope’s The Works of Shakespear (1725), the second edited edition of Shakespeare’s work after Nicholas Rowe’s The Works of William Shakespear (1709). That

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year also saw the publication of Lewis Theobald’s Shakespeare Restored (1726). 16. Carlson, Voltaire and the Theatre, 25–26. 17. Eric Gidal, “‘A gross and barbarous composition’: Melancholy, National Character, and the Critical Reception of Hamlet in the Eighteenth Century,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 39 (2010): 243. 18. Elizabeth Montagu, An Essay on the Writings and Genius of Shakespear, Compared with the Greek and French Dramatic Poets. With Some Remarks Upon the Misrepresentations of Mons. de Voltaire (London: J.  Dodsley, Baker and Leigh, J. Walter, T. Cadell, J. Wilkie), 8. 19. Ben Jonson, “To the Memory of My Beloved the Author, Mr. William Shakespeare,” in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, vol. B, ed. Stephen Greenblatt, Barbara K.  Lewalski, George Logan, and Katharine Eisaman Maus (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., Inc., 2012), 31. 20. Shakespeare as a domestic genius was also politically gendered, and many female critics emphasized how Shakespeare’s limited formal education and travel associated this English genius with the experiences of women. See Eger, “The Bluestocking Defense of Shakespeare,” 141–42. 21. Montagu, Essay on Shakespear, 31–32. 22. Montagu, An Essay on Shakespear, 3. 23. Jean I.  Marsden, The Re-imagined Text: Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Eighteenth-Century Literary Theory (Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press, 1995), 16–17. 24. Voltaire, Oedipe, tragedie. Par Monsieur de Voltaire, (A Paris: Chez Pierre Ribou, Quay des Augustins, vis-à-vis la descente du Pont-Neuf, à l’Image saint Louis. Au Palais: Chez Pierre Huet, sur le second Perron de la Ste. Chapelle, au Soleil Levant. Jean Mazuel, au Palais, et Antoine-Urbain Coustelier, Quay des Augustins, 1719). 25. Jack Lynch, “Criticism of Shakespeare,” in Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Fiona Ritchie and Peter Sabor (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2012) 54. 26. The Whitehall Evening Post; or, London Intelligencer, 21 October 1766. 27. James Miller and James Hoadley, Mahomet the Imposter. A Tragedy as it is Acted at the Theatre-Royal in Drury Lane, by his Majesty’s Servants. By Mr. Voltaire (Edinburgh: Printed by J. Baillie and Company, 1755), prologue. 28. Aaron Hill, The Tragedy of Zara, As it is acted at the Theatre-Royal in Drury-Lane. By His Majesty’s Servants (London, 1735), prologue, http:// find.galegroup.com/ecco. 29. Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation (New York: Routledge, 2006), 173. 30. See Angelina Del Balzo, “The Sultan’s Tears in Zara, an Oriental Tragedy,” SEL Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 55, no. 3 (2015): 685–704.

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31. John Pemble, Shakespeare Goes to Paris: How the Bard Conquered France (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2005), 35–36. 32. R.W.  Babcock, “The English Reaction against Voltaire’s Criticism of Shakespeare,” Studies in Philology 27, no. 4 (1930): 612. 33. Samuel Foote satirized Voltaire’s problems with Shakespeare in The Englishman Returned from Paris (1756), through the foppish aristocrat Buck who hates the “Blood and blank Verse” of English tragedy; see Prince, “Shakespeare and English Nationalism,” 284. 34. John R. Iverson, “The First French Literary Centenary: National Sentiment and the Molière Celebration of 1773,” Studies in Eighteenth-­Century Culture 31 (2002): 150–51. 35. Pemble, Shakespeare Goes to Paris, xv. 36. George Ayscough, Semiramis, a Tragedy: as it is acted at the Theatre Royal in Drury-Lane (London: Printed for J. Dodsley, in Pall-Mall, 1776), III. vi, p. 46. 37. [Stop, and respect my ashes, / When it is time, I will get you down there. The specter returns, and the mausoleum closes.] Voltaire, La tragédie de Sémiramis (Dublin: Imprimé chez S. Powell, en Crane-Lane, 1750), III.vi, p. 63. My translation. 38. William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. A tragedy. By William Shakespear. Collated with the best editions (London: Printed for the Company of Stationers, 1743), I.iii, p. 16. 39. Carlson, Voltaire and the Theatre, 104. 40. Voltaire to Jean Baptiste Nicolas Formont, 29 May 1732, in Carlson, Voltaire and the Theatre of the Eighteenth Century, 42. 41. See Bridget Orr, “Empire, Sentiment, and Theatre,” in The Oxford Handbook of The Georgian Theatre, 1737–1832, ed. Julia Swindells and David Francis Taylor (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2014), 621–37. 42. There is no record of a public performance of Voltaire’s text in London. The character of Seïde in Le fanatisme is renamed Zaphna in Miller’s English translation. Smith uses the former rather than the latter, which suggests a literary reading rather than an interpretation of a specific performance. Smith did visit Voltaire at Ferney in 1765, after the publication of The Theory of Moral Sentiments. For more on Smith’s relationship to French theater, see Deidre Dawson, “Is Sympathy so Surprising? Adam Smith and French Fictions of Sympathy,” Eighteenth-Century Life 15, no. 1 (1991): 147–61. 43. Adam Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1984), 177. 44. Margaret Cavendish, Letter 123 “On Shakespeare,” in Sociable Letters, ed. James Fitzmaurice (Peterborough, ON, Broadview Press, 2004), 176–178. 45. Montagu, Essay on Shakespear, 37.

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Bibliography Ayscough, George. Semiramis, a Tragedy: As It Is Acted at the Theatre Royal in Drury-Lane. London: Printed for J. Dodsley, in Pall-Mall., 1776. Babcock, R.W. “The English Reaction against Voltaire’s Criticism of Shakespeare.” Studies in Philology 27, no. 4 (1930): 609–25. Biet, Christian. “French Tragedy during the Seventeenth Century: From Cruelty on a Scaffold to Poetic Distance on Stage.” In Politics and Aesthetics in European Baroque and Classicist Tragedy, edited by Jan Bloemendal and Nigel Smith, 294–316. Leiden: Brill, 2016. Bruce, Harold Lawton. “Voltaire on the English Stage.” Modern Philology 8, no. 1 (1918): 1–152. Carlson, Martin. Voltaire and the Theatre of the Eighteenth Century. Westport and London: Greenwood Press, 1998. Cavendish, Margaret. Sociable Letters. Edited by James Fitzmaurice. Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2004. Dawson, Deidre. “Is Sympathy so Surprising? Adam Smith and French Fictions of Sympathy.” Eighteenth-Century Life 15, no. 1 (1991): 147–61. Del Balzo, Angelina. “The Sultan’s Tears in Zara, an Oriental Tragedy.” SEL Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 55, no. 3 (2015): 501–21. Eger, Elizabeth. “‘Out Rushed a Female to Protect the Bard’: The Bluestocking Defense of Shakespeare.” Huntington Library Quarterly 65, no. 1/2 (2002): 127–51. Gidal, Eric. “‘A Gross and Barbarous Composition’: Melancholy, National Character, and the Critical Reception of Hamlet in the Eighteenth Century.” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 39 (2010): 235–61. Hill, Aaron. The Tragedy of Zara. As It Is Acted at the Theatre-Royal, in Drury-­ Lane, by His Majesty’s Servants. London: J. Watts, 1736. Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Adaptation. New York: Routledge, 2006. Iverson, John R. “The First French Literary Centenary: National Sentiment and the Molière Celebration of 1773.” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 31 (2002): 145–68. Jonson, Ben. “To the Memory of My Beloved the Author, Mr. William Shakespeare.” In The Norton Anthology of English Literature, edited by Stephen Greenblatt, Barbara K. Lewalski, George Logan, and Katharine Eisaman Maus, Vol. B. New York: W.W. Norton and Co., Inc., 2012. Lynch, Jack. “Criticism of Shakespeare.” In Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century, edited by Fiona Ritchie and Peter Sabor, 41–59. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Lyons, John D. Kingdom of Disorder: The Theory of Tragedy in Classical France. Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1999.

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Marsden, Jean I. The Re-Imagined Text: Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Eighteenth-­ Century Literary Theory. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1995. Miller, James, and James Hoadley. Mahomet the Imposter. A Tragedy as It Is Acted at the Theatre-Royal in Drury-Lane, by His Majesty’s Servants. By Mr. Voltaire. Edinburgh: Printed by J. Baillie and Company, 1755. Montagu, Elizabeth. An Essay on the Writings and Genius of Shakespear, Compared with the Greek and French Dramatic Poets. With Some Remarks Upon the Misrepresentations of Mons. de Voltaire. London: J. Dodsley, Baker and Leigh, J. Walter, T. Cadell, J. Wilkie, 1769. Nussbaum, Felicity A. “The Challenge of Tragedy.” In The Oxford Handbook of the Georgian Theatre, 1737–1832, edited by Julia Swindells and David Francis Taylor, 368–81. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Orr, Bridget. “Empire, Sentiment, and Theatre.” In The Oxford Handbook of the Georgian Theatre, 1737–1832, edited by Julia Swindells and David Francis Taylor. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Pemble, John. Shakespeare Goes to Paris: How the Bard Conquered France. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2005. Pope, Alexander. “An Essay on Criticism.” In Poetry and Prose of Alexander Pope, edited by Aubry Williams, 37. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1969. Prince, Kathryn. “Shakespeare and English Nationalism.” In Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century, edited by Fiona Ritchie and Peter Sabor, 277–94. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. “Review of Zara.” The Whitehall Evening Post; or, London Intelligencer. October 21, 1766. Ritchie, Fiona. Women and Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Shakespeare, William. Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. A Tragedy. By William Shakespear. Collated with the Best Editions. London: Printed for the Company of Stationers, 1743. Smith, Adam. Theory of Moral Sentiments. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1984. Voltaire. La Tragédie de Sémiramis. Dublin: Imprimé chez S. Powell, en Crane-­ Lane., 1750. ———. Le Fanatisme Ou Mahomet Le Prophète. Edited by Jean Goldzink. Paris: GF Flammarion, 2004. ———. Oedipe, Tragedie. Par Monsieur de Voltaire. A Paris: Chez Pierre Ribou, Quay des Augustins, vis-à-vis la descente du Pont-Neuf, à l’Image saint Louis. Au Palais, chez Pierre Huet, sur le second Perron de la Ste Chapelle, au Soleil Levant. Jean Mazuel, au Palais, et Antoine-Urbain Coustelier, Quay des Augustins., 1719.

PART IV

Writing Emotion: Problems and Strategies

How to Manage Emotions in “The Classic of Whoring” Yinghui Wu

In Miscellaneous Records of the Plank Bridge (Banqiao zaji 板橋雜記) published in 1693, the literatus Yu Huai 余懷 (1616–1696) describes the pleasure quarters of Nanjing as a lost world of elegance, style, and grace. Through Yu’s recollection, the brothel space of high-class courtesans comes to life with boundless sensual delights and romantic indulgence— the enchanting beauty of its houses and gardens; the alluring fragrances wafting from flowers, incense, and women’ clothes; the lingering music from string instruments and Kun opera performances; and, most importantly, the elegant courtesans and their gentlemen clients mingling with one another with effortless grace.1 Yu offers a window on the elite courtesan culture, the upper echelons of a large prostitution and female entertainment industry that flourished in the late Ming (ca.1550–1644). The period from the second half of the sixteenth to the first half of the seventeenth century was a time of rapid economic growth in China. Commercial expansion, maritime trade, and

Y. Wu (*) University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Stefanovska et al. (eds.), Emotions in Non-Fictional Representations of the Individual, 1600-1850, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84005-1_6

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the increase of wealth stimulated the unprecedented development of urban centers. In particular, cities in the Yangtze River Delta region (known as the Jiangnan) were leading the empire with the latest consumption trends and fashions.2 They were also home to a thriving courtesan and entertainment culture, which attracted a wide range of clientele, “from literati and students seeking relief from the pressures of studying for (and failing) the civil service examinations, to sojourning merchants requiring lavish, conspicuous entertainment for doing business and for their own gratification.”3 Late Ming writers noted the ubiquity of prostitutes, stating that “they run to the tens of thousands” in the big cities and can be found “in every poor district and remote place as well.”4 Although these women were known under the common category of ji 妓, the clients they serviced and the ways in which they associated with their patrons were widely different. While the lowly prostitutes openly peddled sex for a living, the top-class courtesan, in addition to her offer of sexual favors, was expected to “indulge with her patrons in the fine arts.”5 The true function of a courtesan, as Harriet T. Zurndorfer aptly summarizes, was “that of a ‘professional hostess’ who was educated and cultivated in skills such as conversation, knowledge of classical literature, recitation of poetry, dancing, and musical performance.”6 Male patrons of courtesans did not merely look for sexual gratification, but also cultural companionship, entertainment, and emotional solace. It sounds paradoxical that the brothel world, a most highly commodified place in the late Ming, was also projected—primarily by the male literati—as the most emotionally rich and romantically inspiring space. The love story involving a male scholar and a passionate and talented courtesan features prominently in literature and art of this period. Relationship with courtesans became a popular subject in commercial publications as well, ranging from anthologies of popular songs and love letters to practical guidebooks such as the brothel manuals that this chapter explores. Although the Chinese literati had been writing about dalliance in the pleasure quarters for centuries, the intense interest in the emotional life of men and their courtesan lovers, as well as the degree of verisimilitude and nuance in the representation of their affective experience, was unprecedented. This new phenomenon was part of a larger trend in philosophy and literature to valorize qing 情, variably understood as feelings, passion, emotion, and desire, which had been considered morally suspect since the rise of Neo-Confucian orthodoxy in the Song dynasty

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(960–1279).7 In the late Ming, changes in intellectual attitudes in a context of economic prosperity, loosening political control, and thriving print culture, gave rise to the rehabilitation of passions and desires and the exaltation of qing as the basis of life, cosmos, and morality. Among some of the elite, it was worshiped with a fervor that was almost religious, and thus also known as “the cult of qing.”8

“The Cult of qing” The Confucian ideology that dominated Chinese society since the Southern Song was lixue 理學 (the School of Principle), often called the Cheng-Zhu school after its leading philosophers, Cheng Hao 程顥 (1032–1085), Cheng Yi 程頤 (1033–1107), and Zhu Xi 朱熹 (1130–1200). This Confucian orthodoxy emphasized the moral perfection of the individual through the study of Confucian classics and history. Qing is problematic in this system of thinking, since it is a threat to the state of tranquility and equilibrium in which one carries out self-­cultivation and returns to one’s original good nature. Emotions and passions should be kept within proper bounds, and any excess of qing is potentially dangerous.9 Since the sixteenth century, however, the rise of xinxue 心學 (the School of the Mind), represented by the statesman and philosopher Wang Yangming 王陽明 (1472–1529), challenged the idea that li 理 (principle) could be found only in the Confucian classics. Wang argued that all human beings were born with an “innate consciousness of the good” (liangzhi 良 知) that would enable them to understand the Way directly. For Wang, the mind is the sole source of moral truth, and self-cultivation means looking for one’s moral conscience from within. Wang’s ideas thus opened up the possibility of more positive evaluations of emotions.10 Literati writers under his influence, such as the playwright Tang Xianzu 湯顯祖 (1550–1616) and the prominent editor and writer of vernacular short stories, Feng Menglong 馮夢龍 (1574–1646), began to valorize qing in their works, advocating genuine emotions as expressions of the authentic self and celebrating romantic sentiments and sexual desire between man and woman as the origins of life and the universe. Qing was elevated to the level of ontological importance, a mysterious force that transcends life and death.11 Discussions of qing were also expanded to themes such as the nature of qing in women versus men, emotions versus physical desires, and private feelings versus public moral sentiments.12

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In the gendered discourse on qing during the late Ming, women were believed to have more natural and spontaneous qing since they were not subjected to the negative influences of a Confucian education, civil service examinations, and political affairs. Women’s marginality was viewed as “a blessing in disguise.”13 For the first time, women’s poetry was collected and published by the male literati to celebrate their authentic qing. In his preface to the anthology Mingyuan shigui 名媛詩歸 (Sources of Notable Women’s Poetry), Zhong Xing 鍾惺 (1574–1625) claims that “as for the poetry of those prominent ladies from the ancient times to the present, it expresses their qing and has roots in their nature; they never imitate [famous masters], nor do they know poetic schools” 若夫古今名媛, 則發 乎情, 根乎性, 未嘗擬作, 亦不知派.14 By idealizing women as subjects of qing, male anthologists like Zhong Xing downplayed the status difference between courtesans and well-educated women of gentry families and highlighted their artistic talent and expression of sincere feelings. Courtesans writing in the voice of passionate lovers, due to their challenge to orthodox norms of modesty, were especially perceived as the embodiment of qing. Although the male literati often projected their own ideal of qing onto the reading of women’s poetry, women writers in this period also took advantage of the qing discourse to articulate their own feelings. The proliferation of such discourses from different gender perspectives and in different discursive contexts makes the study of emotions in this period particularly challenging and fascinating. Their subsequent appropriation by a fashion-oriented, profit-seeking print culture only adds on to the complexity of this issue. It is in this context that I will explore representations of qing in “The Classic of Whoring” (Piao jing 嫖經), a text that emerged in urban popular culture and traveled across a wide range of printed materials in the late Ming. While briefly touching on the various versions of the text, my focus is the intersection of “The Classic of Whoring” with courtesans’ poetry in a poetry collection titled Stylistic Verses from the Green Bower (Qinglou yunyu 青樓韻語), in which competing perspectives on qing, as embedded in different linguistic registers and in gender, were juxtaposed and displayed for consumption. What new insight into qing was created by interlacing a brothel manual with courtesans’ love poems? How were emotions and desires codified in commercial publishing in relation to different prospective audiences? These are the questions to be discussed below.

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Late Ming Printing Boom and the Production of Brothel Manuals The cult of qing would never have made its tremendous impact on the late Ming society without a printing boom that produced popular reading materials in great quantities at increasingly affordable prices. In the Jiangnan cities, the flourish of woodblock publishing met the demands of a growing readership for knowledge, entertainment, and practical advice.15 The book trade also actively “reshaped the social expectations as to what one should read and possess,” feeding readers with books that promise to keep them up-to-date with trendy lifestyles and ever-shifting fashions in the urban milieu.16 Publishers were quick to see profit in the cultural fascination with qing, churning out anthologies of women’s poetry, love letters, popular songs, and plays that turn private feelings into objects of public consumption. Courtesans and the demimonde, being a site of romance, commerce, and sensual indulgence, likewise inspired numerous publishing innovations. Most notable among them were the “flower registers” (huapu 花譜), or rankings of courtesans in the fashion of civil service examination candidates, which staged alluring public displays of women in the demimonde while ironically playing with the examination culture. The editors presented themselves as savvy frequenters of pleasure quarters and connoisseurs of beauty and talent.17 Another group of texts, broadly known as whoring and gambling manuals, appealed to an intense interest in social skills in brothel visits and gambling, as well as romanticized fantasies about courtesans’ qing. This group of texts circulated widely under the title “The Classic of Whoring” or “Tricks and Traps in Whoring and Gambling” (Piao du jiguan 嫖賭機 關) in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. They survived as independent volumes as well as within larger collections such as the daily-use encyclopedias.18 The daily-use encyclopedia was a new book type in the late Ming that promised to aid the readers in understanding and acting independently in all aspects of everyday life.19 In addition to practical knowledge that appeared in traditional encyclopedias, such as geography and guides to drafting letters, daily-use encyclopedias highlight categories of knowledge or skill relating to pleasure-seeking, such as “Aid to drinking,” “Gaming and fun,” and “Breeze and moonlight”—a euphemism for love and sex. Brothel manuals in daily-use encyclopedias often bear the alternative title “Tricks and Traps of Breeze and Moonlight” (fengyue jiguan 風月機關) and are similar in content with some variations in

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length.20 There have been several studies of those manuals in Japanese and English. Ogawa Yōichi provided a Japanese translation and annotation of the “Tricks and Traps of Breeze and Moonlight,” with cross-references to a broad range of literary texts.21 Yuming He offered a brilliant analysis of the whoring treatise in the independent volume “Tricks and Traps in Whoring and Gambling,” arguing that its gamut of linguistic styles embodies a new urban vernacular writing, which enhances the appeal of the book to readers aspiring to qualify as cosmopolitan and up-to-date with the latest fashions.22 This chapter focuses on a version of the brothel manual that appears in an anthology of courtesans’ poetry—Stylistic Verses from the Green Bower (hereafter referred to as The Green Bower) published in 1616. It is referred to as “The Classic of Whoring” and bears closer resemblance to the brothel manuals in daily-use encyclopedias than the independent volume discussed by Yuming He.23 Compared with the other versions, it also received less scholarly attention.24 I find “The Classic of Whoring” in juxtaposition with courtesan’s poetry worth studying, as they offer competing visions of emotions at the intersection between poetic representation and lived experience of the brothels. In The Green Bower, the text of “The Classic of Whoring” is divided into 144 entries and inserted in between groups of poems. Short phrases such as “flirtation” (tiaoqing 調情), “longing for someone” (siren 思人), or “sending regards” (jiyi 寄意) are selected from those entries to serve as thematic rubrics under which courtesans’ poems are grouped. The editor justifies this organization by discussing brothel experience in terms of qing and embedding “The Classic of Whoring” in a framework of prefaces and commentaries signifying cultural sophistication. The hybrid structure of the book and tensions between “The Classic of Whoring” and the poems are the focus of the following sections. I will first analyze the representation of qing in “The Classic of Whoring,” and then discuss how meanings of qing are further complicated through its juxtaposition with courtesan’s poetry.

Qing in “The Classic of Whoring” Whoring was a problematic matter even in the notoriously hedonistic culture of the late Ming. To apply the term of “classic” (jing 經) to a printed brothel manual was a public offense to the authority of the Confucian classics. For this reason, the author of the independent volume “Tricks and Traps in Whoring and Gambling,” Shen Hongyu 沈弘宇, keeps a low

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profile in his preface and speaks self-deprecatingly of the text as “crude and shallow” (qianlou 淺陋).25 The editor of The Green Bower, however, took a different strategy toward courtesan-client relationship by focusing on qing. The editor Zhang Mengzheng 張夢徵 (fl. seventeenth century) was a Hangzhou literatus, a painter, and a popular figure among courtesans. His book opens with several prefaces that appear to justify the project as a moral warning in disguise against the destructive powers of unrestrained passion. One preface claims that Zhang’s purpose is to enlighten talented men and “courtesans well-versed in literature” (ciji 詞妓), who are particularly susceptible to the influence of their overwhelming emotions.26 Yet, from their exaggerations and classical allusions that go as far as to draw an analogy between the Master Zhu (Zhu Xi) and Zhang Mengzheng, we can tell that the prefaces were meant to be read ironically, as a parody of Confucian moralists who assign a didactic purpose to any book, regardless of how absurd the reasoning may sound.27 Those playful remarks set the stage for a fresh presentation of “The Classic of Whoring” in association with courtesans’ poetry. Qing is identified as the central theme and each entry of the brothel manual is followed by commentary that mimics the didactic tone of commentaries on canonical texts. “The Classic of Whoring” begins with a general observation on qing in courtesan-client relationships: “Although men and women differ, in passion and desire they are the same,” 男女雖異, 愛慾則同.28 The commentator Zhu Yuanliang 朱元亮 further explains, “Although clients and courtesans are not married couples, their qing is the same,” 客與妓非居室 之男女也, 而情相同.29 If these remarks give the impression of a romantic and egalitarian view of emotions between both genders, the following entries quickly lean toward the male perspective by saying, “if you do not lay wily plans, you will fall into the net,” 若不運籌, 定遭設網.30 This opening illustrates the tension between an idealized versus a cynical view on qing throughout the text, foreshadowing the central questions that the text grapples with: How to tell fake emotion from authentic emotion? How to manipulate its subtle modalities in a game of flirtation and sexual transaction? Firstly, “The Classic of Whoring” sheds new light on qing by offering a rich qing-related vocabulary, such as real qing (zhenqing 真情), false qing (xuqing 虛情), stirring up one’s qing (tiaoqing 調情), expressing qing (shenqing 伸情), begging for qing (taoqing 討情), repressing qing (quqing 屈情), and so on, which shows how qing was practiced in social interactions. The meanings of qing in those phrases range from a socially directed

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favor to feelings and desires and to love. To take tiaoqing as an example, the act of “stirring up one’s emotion,” or flirtation, is key to the relationship between a courtesan and her patron. Unremarkable as it may sound today, it was rather refreshing to apply the verb “tiao” 調, which was often used in the sense of tuning up a musical instrument, stirring and mixing ingredients, adjusting, playing, to emotions. The importance of stirring up or arousing emotions was rarely recognized in conventional arranged marriages, which were mainly perceived in terms of their ritualistic functions. Also, the space of the traditional multi-generational household did not allow for public displays of affection between husband and wife. If any acts of flirtation existed, they would have to be carried out in private. The demimonde provided an ideal space for flirtation, and the whoring manual was one of the first nonfictional sources that openly elaborate on the art of flirtation. According to “The Classic of Whoring,” qing can be stirred up by means of proper and witty conversation, gifts, and through observing the personalities and responses of women and being attentive to their needs. Despite the client spending money to be with a woman, flirtation is an indispensable part of the social etiquette in brothels because it distinguishes a sophisticated man from vulgar fools. The former offers his money and feelings sensibly and wins the favors of courtesans, and sometimes even their genuine love. The latter lavishes money on prostitutes but never knows how to win their hearts. The text further notes, “flirting must come before mating; gifts must be granted before they are asked,” 調情須在未 合之前; 允物不待已索之後. A wise man knows the right timing because he understands that “qing has the richest flavor when one flirts before the love affair is consummated,” 未合而調, 情最有味.31 Therefore, the text implies that a person good at “stirring up emotions” is a person with good insight into qing and the skills to express it. These qualities were seen as key to define the masculinity of brothel visitors. The brothel space offered a challenge but also an opportunity for men to learn about qing in order to develop an intimate relationship and to triumph over their peers. Notably, flirtation is shown to be carried on mutually by men and women. The Green Bower collection includes a courtesan’s poem to the editor Zhang Mengzheng, which depicts the woman as an active participant in flirtation and also reflects back on Zhang as a lover worthy of her affection.32 Secondly, the goal of whoring, according to “The Classic of Whoring,” is to establish a long-term relationship based on mutual attraction and compatibility. Many entries speak of true feelings developed over a long

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period of contact and commitment between a man and a courtesan.33 The text teaches men not to trust superficial signs of love but to observe the words and actions of courtesans as their relationships extend through the years. However, while the text hints at the possibility of qing surviving the test of time, it ultimately seems to conclude that relationships with courtesans are impermanent.34 It covers various stages of the relationship from flirtation, rendezvous, jealousy, making vows, to breaking up or parting, longing, sending letters and gifts, meeting again, and so on. It identifies certain set patterns for a prostitute to manifest her emotions. The most remarkable among them are a series of violent actions, such as scratching, beating, hair-cutting, tattooing, and burning scars, that injure her own body and sometimes that of her client. Most of the actions leave marks on the private parts of the body as oaths of love and vows of loyalty.35 The highly performative and sensational nature of these actions tends to impress men, but the text suggests that they should be taken with a grain of salt—willingness to suffer physical pain does not necessarily indicate genuine qing.36 As “The Classic of Whoring” asserts the significance of qing, it also constantly questions its authenticity. The author’s skepticism toward qing is shown in his discussion of the triangle trade of qing, money, and material things. For instance, a courtesan’s sending of letters and words to her client is “a call to press for money” 發催錢之檄 and her sending gifts of sashes and fans is “to hurl bricks that bring in jade” 拋引玉之磚.37 The brothel is characterized as a place of tricks and traps since qing cannot be separated from commerce and material consumption. In order to avoid falling into the snares and nets, men are instructed to read the warning signs and to expend their qing calculatingly, just as they would spend money in the brothel. At its most cynical moments the text claims that “the lads squander money as if it were dust and manure; the girls offer qing as if it were ghosts and spirits,” 子弟錢如糞土, 粉頭情若鬼神.38 In other words, qing is illusory whereas money is always powerful; the intensity of the women’s qing shifts with the money men are willing to spend; it is as marvelous and impalpable as the form-changing ghosts and spirits. Here, “The Classic” echoes the pragmatism of “Tricks and Traps” in that it reminds “whoring aspirants” to set “realistic expectations”: One should “weigh one’s looks, sex appeal or lack thereof, social status, financial qualifications” to invest money and qing in a woman accordingly.39 From a business point of view, physical appearance, sex skills, literary talent, economic and social status, and feelings all constitute a man’s (and a

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courtesan’s) assets that should be managed judiciously and handed out cautiously in return for emotional and sexual devotion. The trickiest thing is that it is extremely hard to discern genuine passion from false pretense in the brothel. Both patrons and courtesans run the risk of becoming financially and emotionally broke should they be negligent in guarding themselves against potential traps. “The Classic of Whoring” urges readers to protect themselves from the cruelty of human emotions. If a relationship could not survive the vicissitudes of life and fluctuation of passion, “better that I abandon her than that she dump me” 寧使我支他, 莫教他閃我.40 This self-centered vision of qing demands one to be constantly vigilant against the other’s change of heart and be prepared to withdraw one’s devotion. Especially men are asked to avoid self-delusion about a single man’s position in the long and rich career of a courtesan: “She may receive a thousand guests and yet have true feelings for only one person,” 客交千箇假如也, 情在一人真有 之.41 It is much more likely for you to be one of the numerous nameless guests than the single person she has true feelings for, “The Classic of Whoring” suggests; so learning to be parsimonious with qing seems to be more useful than being overly generous with it. In sum, “The Classic of Whoring” brings a sophisticated view of qing that combines subtlety, practicality, and materiality. It promoted the importance of qing to self-fulfillment but warned the reader of its dangers of making the self more vulnerable. Though the text seemingly prioritizes a male perspective, it reveals the anxiety of both men and women in a particular social space that traded romance and sex, as they had to be mindful of their economic assets as well as their emotional wellbeing.

Pluralistic Visions of Qing in The Green Bower If the attitude toward qing in “The Classic of Whoring” shifts between cautious hopefulness and cynical disillusionment, it is counterpointed by the uninhibited and profuse expressions of emotions and desires in courtesans’ poetry. In The Green Bower, the juxtaposition of the brothel manual with courtesans’ poetry revised the former’s perspective in at least three ways. Firstly, although “The Classic of Whoring” serves as a structuring device for the anthology, in the selection of phrases from the manual as thematic headings for the poems, the editor often leaves out the main emphases of the brothel manual entries and instead favors phrases that are popular poetic tropes. For instance, thematic headings under which several dozens of poems appear are “separation” (libie 離別),

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“languishing in springtime” (shangchun 傷春), and “longing for someone,” which are recurrent tropes in numerous love poems including courtesan’s poems. On the contrary, a phrase such as “promiscuity” (zaqing 雜 情), despite being more reflective of the theme of “The Classic of Whoring,” has only two matching poems.42 Brothel manual entries that openly speak about courtesans’ love of money often have no matching poems, since the aspect of commercial transaction rarely emerges in the convention of love poetry. Therefore, tensions between “The Classic of Whoring” and courtesans’ poetry were already played out in the process of matching thematic headings with poems. The vision of qing in “The Classic of Whoring” is destabilized when the text is stretched to accommodate poems belonging to a different linguistic register and literary convention. Secondly, while some of the thematic headings make the reader read courtesans’ poems in an ironic light, most of the poems challenge the negative characterization of women in “The Classic of Whoring” by showing just the opposite, women’s fidelity and men’s inconstancy. In an entry from “The Classic of Whoring” quoted in the last section, we learned that a courtesan’s sending of letters and gifts is often an implicit gesture to ask for pricier returns. This statement encourages the reader to question the sincerity of emotions in the many poems under the rubrics of “sending letters” (jishu 寄書) and “sending fans” (jishan 寄扇). However, irony works both ways. Under two other headings, “promiscuity” and “constant heart” (jianyi 堅意), there are several poems that complain about men’s inconstancy. A courtesan Ge Binyue’s 葛賓月 poem titled “To my love” (ji qingren 寄情人) has a line that pinpoints the cause of the lovers’ estrangement: “thereby I lost your favor, and yet you said my heart shifted,” 遂令君意失, 翻謂妾心移.43 Another poem by Jing Pianpian 景翩 翩 compares her lover’s heart to catkins that fly in the wind with no clear directions.44 Both poems sound like powerful responses to the portrayal of female promiscuity in the brothel manual, pointing out that women’s qing are misrepresented while in fact it is the unreliable passion of men to blame. The doubled-edged irony generated between the brothel manual entries and the poems calls into question the male disparagement of courtesans as well as female vows of love, suggesting that neither is necessarily a reflection of the full reality in courtesan-client affairs. Thirdly, although many poems adopt the conventional persona of languishing, lovelorn women in boudoir poetry and convey literarily codified sentiments of longing for an absent lover, sadness for unrequited love, or melancholy in remembrance of a past affair, there are other poems

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showing distinctive emotions and modes of sociability grounded in the lived reality of the brothels.45 We encounter among these poems women’s bold expressions of love and physical desire for men, playful comments on the love affair of a fellow courtesan, and poetic exchanges between courtesan friends showing mutual admiration for each other’s beauty and talent.46 Especially worth noting is the emotional bond as well as the social etiquette in the courtesan world displayed in poems written on the occasions of banquets or a courtesan friend’s wedding.47 The social networks between specific courtesans in The Green Bower merit a separate study, but here it suffices to note that courtesan poetic exchanges constitute a significant part of the anthology and reveal a world of feminine sensibility that is not primarily concerned with passion between men and women, distinguished from the ideal of women’s qing projected by the male elite on the one hand, and from the cynical representation of it in “The Classic of Whoring” on the other. As an experiment of textual hybridity, The Green Bower creates a brothel world situated between poetic imagination and mundane practices, presenting multiple perspectives on qing as imagined in literary and realistic settings and from masculine and feminine perspectives. As “The Classic of Whoring” and courtesans’ poetry are read against each other, both are understood in a new light. The association of refined poetic diction with emotional authenticity, and of classical-sounding prose (mixed with urban slang) with worldly wisdom on the deceptiveness of emotions, draws our attention to the roles that linguistic styles and generic conventions play in shaping different perspectives on qing.48 The ironic disjunctions between two distinctive types of texts are precisely what the editor Zhang Mengzheng exploited to increase the appeal of his book. The Green Bower emerged in a world in which the ambiguities of qing were widely exploited by men of letters and publishers to various ends. Diverse publications about the demimonde adapted their modes of engagement with qing to different prospective audiences. The crude-­ looking, inexpensive household encyclopedias contain whoring manuals that mainly attract common readers curious about brothel matters, hence its focus on specific rules and detailed explanations; qing is merely one topic on its long list of Do’s and Don’ts. Love letters, which appeared in encyclopedias and miscellaneous collections, were highly fictionalized exchanges that appeal to readers not highly educated but with a keen interest in personal intimacy and adequate literacy to appreciate conventional literary expressions of private feelings.49 The Green Bower and

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anthologies of sanqu songs associated with the courtesan world were highend publications for the elegant taste.50 The fine quality of paper, editing, and illustration distinguished them from ordinary products on the market and raised their cost and prestige. Readers had to be familiar with poetic genres, literary allusions, and even musical matters to enjoy the books. In line with their cultured appearance was an emphasis in these books on literary expression of qing between the bon vivant literati and top courtesans. The Green Bower further distinguished itself from competing books on the market through its appropriation of “The Classic of Whoring.” The editor Zhang Mengzheng fashioned it from a printed text of a low cultural status into part of a high-end cultural product, not so much for its value to guide actual brothel visits as for the enhanced pleasure it offered his sophisticated readers. The new pleasure comes from appreciating the parodic tone of the prefaces and commentaries and freely shifting among the lyrical, the mundane, the playful, and the cynical modes of expression. Overall, The Green Bower provides a more comprehensive understanding of qing that encompasses its emotional modalities and material manifestations, as well as its mutability and unpredictability in the rapidly evolving urban culture of the time. The book was commercially successful and influential, precisely because it structurally and thematically embodies the refined and earthy, elusive, and barely manageable qing in this changing world.

Notes 1. Yu Huai, Banqiao zaji, in Xiangyan congshu, vol.13.3, 2a–2b. 2. For a general introduction to economic and social changes in the late Ming, see Timothy Brook, The Confusions of Pleasure. 3. Harriet T. Zurndorfer, “Prostitutes and Courtesans in the Confucian Moral Universe of Late Ming China (1550–1644),” p. 199. 4. Xie Zhaozhe 謝肇淛, Wu za zu 五雜俎, p.  196, cited by Zurndorfer, “Prostitutes and Courtesans,” p. 198. 5. The population of prostitutes was estimated at roughly 1–1.5  million. Among them there was a tremendous variation with regard to status and income, from lowly street walkers to “high-class” courtesans. Zurndorfer, p. 201. See also Dorothy Ko, Teachers of the Inner Chambers, pp. 253–55; Paul Ropp, “Ambiguous Images of Courtesan Culture in Late Imperial China,” pp. 17–45.

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6. Zurndorfer, p. 202. 7. Halvor Eifring, “Introduction: Emotions and Conceptual History of ‘Qing’,” pp. 1–36. 8. For discussion of the changing attitude toward qing in Chinese philosophical discourse, see Martin W. Huang, “Sentiments of Desire: Thoughts on the Cult of Qing in Ming-Qing Literature,” pp. 153–61. 9. In the famous metaphor of Zhu Xi, the mind is compared to water, human nature to the tranquility of still water, emotions to the flow of the water, and desires to its waves. Huang, “Sentiments of Desire,” p. 154. 10. Wang’s idea of human subjectivity inspired other thinkers to fashion the cult of qing, though Wang himself in fact frequently stressed the danger of giving free rein to feelings and desires. Eifring, “Introduction,” p.  23; Huang, “Sentiments of Desire,” p. 158. Viewing this philosophical change from a comparative perspective, Philippe Postel notes that there was a similar shift in eighteenth-century Europe toward a belief in sentiment as a guide for moral judgment. Postel, “The Novel and Sentimentalism,” pp. 27–31. 11. See, for example, Tang Xianzu, “Mudan ting tici” 牡丹亭題詞, in Tang Xianzu shiwen ji, p. 1093; Feng Menglong, “Qingshi xu” 情史序, Qingshi, pp. 1a–2a, in Feng Menglong quanji, vol.37, pp. 1–13. 12. Huang, “Sentiments of Desire,” pp. 166–74, 183; Santangelo, The Culture of Love in China and Europe, pp. 75–76. 13. Ko, Teacher of the Inner Chambers, p. 52. Santangelo, The Culture of Love in China and Europe, pp. 344–45. 14. Zhong Xing, “Mingyuan shigui xu” 名媛詩歸敘, 2a, in Mingyuan shigui. The translation is mine. 15. On the role of the publishing industry in the Ming era, see Kai-wing Chow, Publishing, Culture, and Power in Early Modern China. 16. Yuming He, Home and the World, p. 270. 17. For a recent study of “flower registers,” see Ō ki Yasushi, Fengyue Qinhuai: Zhongguo youli kongjian, pp. 207–23. See also, Liu Shiyi, Mingdai qinglou wenhua yu wenxue, pp. 89–116. 18. For discussion of different versions of the brothel manual, see Pan Minde, “Piaojing dianjiao bing xu,” pp. 99–102. Yuming He notes that the manual also appeared as a volume in one edition of Boxiao zhuji, also known as Xinke shishang huayan qule tanxiao jiuling 新刻時尚華筵趣樂談笑酒令, a book on jokes and drinking games. He, Home and the World, p. 309, note 2. 19. For a comprehensive survey of works on Ming daily-use encyclopedias, see Shang Wei, “Jin Ping Mei and Late Ming Print Culture,” pp. 222–23; for scholarship on how these encyclopedias contributed to the creation of new common knowledge for public consumption, see Shang Wei, “The Making of the Everyday World;” and Wu Huifang, Wanbao quanshu.

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20. In daily-use encyclopedias, brothel manuals and gambling manuals appear in separate categories. Brothel manual often appears under the category of “Breeze and moonlight,” alongside recipes for sexual prowess (aphrodisiacs), feminine hygiene and beauty, fertility, and love letters. For the category of “Moon and Breeze” in daily-use encyclopedias, see Wang Tzu-­ Ting, “Yule xiaofei yu yinshua wenhua,” pp.  19–52. Liu Shiyi, Mingdai qinglou wenhua yu wenxue, pp. 126–27. 21. Ogawa Yōichi, Mindai no yu ̄kaku jijō: Fu ̄getsu kikan (Tokyo: Kyūko Shoin, 2006). 22. He, Home and the World, pp. 261–73. 23. Here and in the following sections of this essay “The Classic of Whoring” refers specifically to the brothel manual in The Green Bower, since it is the title that the editor of The Green Bower uses. However, it is worth noting that “The Classic of Whoring” could also be used in its broad sense to refer to the whole range of brothel manuals available in the late Ming. 24. For reprints of Qingyou yunyu 青樓韻語, see Pan Minde, “Piaojing dianjiao bing xu,” pp.  100–101. Beside Pan Minde’s annotation of “The Classic of Whoring” in Qingyou yunyu, recent studies of the book include three master’s theses in Taiwan. See Wang Tzu-Ting, “Yule xiaofei yu yinshua wenhua,” Master’s Thesis, National Chi-Nan University, 2008; Lee Hsiao-Ning, “Wan Ming fengyue wenhua,” Master’s Thesis, National Chung Cheng University, 2009; Chueh Tong-Yu, “Zhang Mengzheng Qinglou yunyu yanjiu,” Master’s Thesis, National Taiwan Normal University, 2015. 25. He is likely the opera performer and brothel patron Shen Yuanfu 沈元甫 mentioned in Yu Huai’s Plank Bridge. He, Home and the World, p. 263. See Shen Hongyu’s preface in the Deju tang edition of Piao du jiguan in the special collections of National Central Library in Taipei. 26. “Yunyu xu” 韻語序, in Qinglou yunyu, 4b–5a. 27. “Qinglou yunyu tici” 青樓韻語題詞, Qinglou yunyu, 1b. On brothel manuals’ parody of orthodox scholarship on the classics, see He, Home and the World, p. 93. 28. Qinglou yunyu, vol.1, 1a. Here I followed Yuming He’s translation. He, p. 91. 29. Qinglou yunyu, vol.1, 1a. Unless otherwise noted, the following translations of texts from “The Classic of Whoring” are mine. 30. Qinglou yunyu, vol.1, 1b. Here I followed Yuming He’s translation. He, p. 91. 31. Qinglou yunyu, vol.1, 2a. 32. “Zeng Zhang Mengzheng” 贈張夢徵, Qinglou yunyu, vol.1, 2a. 33. Qinglou yunyu, vol.1, 7b. 34. Qinglou yunyu, vol.4, 14a.

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35. Similar practices appear in novels of the late Ming. See, for example, Ximen Qing’s burning of moxa on his lover Wang Liu’er body. Lanling xiaoxiaosheng, The Plum in the Golden Vase, or Chin Ping Mei: Volume 4: The Climax, trans. David T. Roy, chapter 61, pp. 9, 11. 36. Qinglou yunyu, vol.2, 7b–8a. 37. Ibid., vol.3, 31b. 38. Ibid., vol.4, 13b. 39. He, Home and the World, p. 266. 40. Qinglou yunyu, vol.1, 6b. Here I followed Yuming He’s translation. He, p. 92. 41. Qinglou yunyu, vol.4, 1a. 42. For a complete list of the numbers of poems under each thematic heading, see Lee Hsiao-Ning, “Wan Ming fengyue wenhua,” Appendix 9, pp. 143–44. 43. Qinglou yunyu, vol.3, 24b. 44. Qinglou yunyu, vol.3, 25a–b. 45. For the convention of boudoir poetry, see Anne Birrell, “Introduction,” in New Songs from a Jade Terrace, pp. 9–19. 46. See, for example, the direct expression of sexual desire in “Xiti” 戲題, in vol.2, 13a–b; teasing a courtesan friend for her love affair, in vol.2, 9b; and vol.3, 25b; “Zeng Li Zhao” 贈李昭, in vol.1, 12a–13b; the poetic exchanges between Xu Jinghong 徐驚鴻 and Kou Wenhua 寇文華, in vol.4, 21a. 47. See, for example, the poetic exchanges between Xu Jinghong and Chen Qiongfang 陳瓊芳, in vol.1, 10a; Xu Jinghong’s poem to Li Qingying 李 慶英, a young courtesan about to receive her first guest, in vol.2, 38b–39a; poems on seeing off Zhou Shao 周韶 who got married, vol.1, 24b–25a. 48. On linguistic features of “The Classic of Whoring,” see He, Home and the World, p. 92. 49. According to Kathryn Lowry, love letters illustrate the “strategies for making the sentiments literary.” See Lowry, “Three Ways to Read a Love Letter,” p. 69; idem, “Wan Ming qingshu,” pp. 393–95, 405. 50. For discussion of these sanqu anthologies, see Judith Zeitlin, “The Pleasures of Print: Illustrated Songbooks from the Late Ming Courtesan World,” pp. 41–65.

Bibliography Birrell, Anne, trans. New Songs from A Jade Terrace: An Anthology of Early Chinese Love Poetry. London: Allen and Unwin, 1982. Brook, Timothy. The Confusions of Pleasure. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.

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Chow, Kai-Wing. Publishing, Culture, and Power in Early Modern China. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004. Chueh Yu-Tong 闕宇彤. “Zhang Mengzheng Qinglou yuyun yanjiu” 張夢徵青樓 韻語研究. Master’s Thesis, National Taiwan Normal University, 2015. Eifring, Halvor. “Introduction: Emotions and Conceptual History of ‘Qing’.” In Love and Emotions in Traditional Chinese Literature, ed. Halvor Eifring. Leiden: Brill, 2004. Feng Menglong 馮夢龍. Qingshi 情史. In Feng Menglong quanji 馮夢龍全集. Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1993. He, Yuming. “Appendix Two: The ‘Classic of Whoring’: Demimonde Fantasy and the Formation of the Ming Vernacular.” In Home and the World: Editing the “Glorious Ming” in Woodblock-Printed Books of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2013. Huang, Martin W. “Sentiments of Desire: Thoughts on the Cult of Qing in Ming-­ Qing Literature.” Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews 20 (1998): 153–84. Ko, Dorothy. Teachers of the Inner Chambers: Women and Culture in Seventeenth-­ Century China. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994. Lanling xiaoxiaosheng. The Plum in the Golden Vase, or Chin Ping Mei: Volume 4: The Climax, trans. David Tod Roy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011. Lee Hsiao-Ning 李曉寧. “Wanming fengyue wenhua: Yi Qinglou yuyun wei tantao hexin 晚明風月文化—以青樓韻語為探討核心.” Master’s Thesis, National Chung Cheng University. 2009. Liu Shiyi 劉士義. Mingdai qinglou wenhua yu wenxue 明代青樓文化與文學. Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe, 2017. Lowry, Kathryn. “Three Ways to Read a Lover Letter in Late Ming.” Ming Studies 44 (2001): 48–77. ———. “Wan Ming qingshu: yuedu xiezuo yu xingbie” 晚明情書:閱讀寫作與性 別. In Ming Qing wenxue yu xingbie yanjiu 明清文學與性別研究, ed. Zhang Hongsheng 張宏生. Nanjing: Jiangsu guji chubanshe, 2000. 390–409. Ogawa Yōichi 小川陽一. Mindai no yu ̄kaku jijō: Fūgetsu kikan 明代の游郭事情風 月機 關. Tokyo: Kyūko Shoin, 2006. Oki Yasushi 大木康. Fengyue Qinhuai: Zhongguo youli kongjian 風月秦淮:中國遊 里空間, trans. Xin Ruyi 辛如意. Taibei: Lianjing, 2007. Pan Minde 潘敏德. “Piaojing dianjiao bing xu”嫖經點校并序. Mingdai yanjiu 明 代研究 21 (2013): 99–143. Postel, Philippe. “The Novel and Sentimentalism in Seventeenth and Eighteenth-­ Century Europe and China: A modest Proposal for Comparing Early Modern Literatures.” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 17.2 (2017): 6–37. Ropp, Paul. “Ambiguous Images of Courtesan Culture in Late Imperial China.” Writing Women in Late Imperial China, ed. Ellen Widmer and Kang-i Sun Chang. Sanford: Stanford University Press, 1997.

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Santangelo, Paolo, and Gábor Boros. The Culture of Love in China and Europe. Leiden: Brill, 2019. Shang, Wei. “Jin Ping Mei and Late Ming Print Culture.” In Writing and Materiality in China: Essays in Honor of Patrick Hanan, ed. Judith T. Zeitlin and Lydia H.  Liu, with Ellen Widmer. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2003. ———. “The Making of the Everyday World: Jin Ping Mei cihua and Encyclopedias for Daily Use.” In Dynastic Crisis and Cultural Innovation: From the Late Ming to the Late Qing and Beyond, ed. David Der-wei Wang and Shang Wei. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2005. Shen Hongyu 沈弘宇. Piao du jiguan 嫖賭機關. Deju tang 德聚堂, late Ming. Taipei: National Central Library Special Collections. Tang Xianzu 湯顯祖. Tang Xianzu shiwen ji 湯顯祖詩文集, ed. Xu Shuofang 徐朔 方. Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1982. Wang Tzu-Ting 王姿婷. “Yule xiaofei yu yinshua wenhua: yi wanli houqi qinglou de qing’ai shuxie yu yuedu wei zhongxin” 娛樂消費與印刷文化: 以萬曆後期青 樓的情愛書寫與閱讀為中心. Master’s Thesis, National Chi Nan University, 2008. Wu Huifang 吳蕙芳. Wanbao quanshu: Ming Qing shiqi de minjian shenghuo shilu 萬寶全書:明清時期的民間生活實錄. Taipei: Guoli zhengzhi daxue lishixue xi, 2001. Yu Huai 余懷. Banqiao zaji 板橋雜記. In Xiangyan congshu 香艷叢書, ed. Chong Tianzi 蟲天子. Shanghai: Guoxue fulunshe, 1909–11. Zhang Mengzheng 張夢徵, ed. Qinglou yunyu 青樓韻語. 1616. Reprint. Beijing: Wenwu chuban she, 2017. Zeitlin, Judith. “The Pleasures of Print: Illustrated Songbooks from the Late Ming Courtesan World.” In Gender in Chinese Music, ed. Rachel Harris, Rowan Pease, and Shzr Ee Tan. Rochester: Rochester University Press, 2013. 41–65. Zhong Xing 鍾惺. Mingyuan shigui 名媛詩歸. Ming Qing Women’s Writings Digital Archive and Database. https://digital.library.mcgill.ca/mingqing/ search/detailspoem.php?poemID=30857&language=ch Zurndorfer, Harriet T. “Prostitutes and Courtesans in the Confucian Moral Universe of Late Ming China (1550–1644).” IRSH 56 (2011): 197–216.

Genre and Emotion in Chen Jiru’s Biographies Tina Lu

I. Early modern writers in multiple languages and traditions continued using classical languages and genres, even as they addressed themes and content that would have been unfathomable to their classical antecedents. In this chapter, I will be discussing texts of just this sort: a handful of classical-­ language biographies by Chen Jiru 陳繼儒 (1558–1639), whose subjects are people in mésalliances who die of lovesickness. These classical texts of a later era make philological and literary historical demands on present-­ day readers that tend to exceed those of vernacular materials, and I apologize in advance for the necessary work of explaining allusions and classical precedent in my analysis. Still, these details are altogether necessary because they are key to the biographies’ reflecting on language itself, which in turn sheds light on one of the hoariest scholarly problems, what emotion has to do with language.

T. Lu (*) Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Stefanovska et al. (eds.), Emotions in Non-Fictional Representations of the Individual, 1600–1850, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84005-1_7

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At least two formidable scholars in my field of early modern Chinese literature have in recent years attempted to construct critical theories to explain emotion. Paolo Santangelo at Sapienza University delves into literature of multiple genres “to recreate fragments of mental representation concerning ‘private life’ in late imperial China.”1 Largely based on a catalogue of different feelings (“fear,” “shame,” different categories of desire), the work is what Santangelo calls a first stab at “une histoire des mentalités,” in reference to the Annales School.2 To him, emotion is a fundamentally psychological and universal phenomenon to be discerned through texts, which themselves are largely transparent. In The Spatiality of Emotion in Early Modern China, Ling Hong Lam takes a radically different tack, arguing that theatricality and emotion in late imperial China were essentially the same thing, or at least impossible to disaggregate. He argues for “the spatiality of emotion as external.”3 The subject’s experience is not interior, but projected exteriority. Lam’s argument—illustrated with a range of texts—largely understands emotional expression through non-­ verbal tableaux, as “a peculiar spatial problematic: the spectator/subject is not quite in a position where she can feel, or she feels only by moving away from where she is standing.”4 What these two literary historians share is an understanding of emotion and language as fundamentally separate. Oddly, it falls to the cultural historian Dorothy Ko to place language in a far more central role. Her essay “Thinking About Copulation” begins with the case of Li Gong 李塨 (1659–1733), a proponent of a practical school of Neo-Confucianism who famously logged his everyday life in an effort at self-improvement.5 Li turned introspection into a kind of earlymodern spreadsheet, in which interiority devolved into external signs. Take this example: “Examine self to see if I harbored secrets in my heartmind. Draw a stroke (-) if yes; a cross (x) if no. A longer stroke denotes a secret hidden for a longer time.”6 Using Li as a springboard to theorize emotion, Ko calls on a tripartite practice, two of which are the premise for our own collection of essays and barely merit discussion: to regard emotion as worthy of study and to resist the temptation to smooth away issues of translation. It is the middle practice I want to consider at greater length: “second, we need to appreciate the performative and ritualistic aspects of Chinese writing: toward this end we should learn the generic conventions that distinguish one genre of written texts from another.”7 When we follow through with this injunction (by studying “the performative and ritualistic aspects” of Li Gong’s writing, the diaries in particular), what emerges

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makes impossible any assertion of emotional universals or unitary subjects that channel feeling through different genres. For a general audience, Ko’s description of Li’s diaries as “the texts with which Li wrote and drew his life into existence”8 needs some cultural explication. Everything about the parameters of self-expression was thoroughly enmeshed within NeoConfucian understanding of feeling. The Ming state (1368–1644) governed through an uncommonly powerful orthodoxy that was at once the core of all education, the object of the examinations, and even had begun to penetrate culture beyond the ruling class. That orthodoxy, often called Neo-Confucianism, or ChengZhu Thought after its most celebrated proponents, emphasized the study of the Four Books, and these were not only primers for young students and the object of the examination system, but also sacred texts. One of these Four Books was The Great Learning (the Daxue 大學, ca. 6th century BCE), whose crux is the relationship between interiority and a public life, with interiority occupying a distinctly secondary position, important only as a means to a specifically political end: The ancients who wished to illustrate illustrious virtue throughout the kingdom, first ordered well their own States. Wishing to order well their States, they first regulated their families. Wishing to regulate their families, they first cultivated their persons. Wishing to cultivate their persons, they first rectified their hearts. Wishing to rectify their hearts, they first sought to be sincere in their thoughts.9

The Great Learning funnels all self-reflection into self-improvement and thence into social improvement. Li Gong’s journals—with their tick marks and circles that record the results of introspection—represent one way to take The Great Learning seriously; this notation enacts the text’s hierarchy of values, in which feeling is expressed and rendered into something not just useful, but fundamentally public in its values. Even if Li Gong’s journals stand at an extreme, I would argue that for all seventeenth-century Chinese people entangled in the Confucian legacy of textual study and self-reform, introspection could not be disaggregated from a drive for self-­ improvement, and notably also from self-discipline. On proper emotional expression hinged the proper cosmological space for humanity itself, as Hajime Nakatani writes: “the possibility of realization [of human and cosmological order] revolved around the self-discipline of the individual members of the scholar-official class.”10 Even if the vast majority of

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feelings cannot be accommodated by Li Gong’s charts, “emotion” cannot be theorized outside of this institutional and ideological context. Thinkers in many fields have wrestled with the relationship between culture and feeling; the anthropologists Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Margaret Lock write that “without culture we would simply not know how to feel.”11 But the “culture” in the case of seventeenth-century China was deeply invested in how feeling is to be translated into writing in particular. No genre of classical Chinese literature—meaning that produced by elite people, in genres connected to the classics and classical poetry, even the kind of informal prose I discuss in this paper—could remain fully untouched by this enterprise. At the same time, these genres were institutions buttressed by a state apparatus, and the ways in which they disciplined emotion by subsuming it to public values were core to state legitimacy in early modern China. But the relationship of language to these public values was itself complicated. Let me return to Li Gong’s assignments to himself: “Examine self to see if I harbored secrets in my heart-mind. Draw a stroke (-) if yes; a cross (x) if no. A longer stroke denotes a secret hidden for a longer time.” Or this one: “Lying in bed at night, examine self to see if I have learned anything about moral law, human nature, and statecraft. If yes, draw a big red circle in the morning; if not, a big black dot.”12

The resulting marks and crosses and circles reveal interiority only through quantification, as if language itself with its attendant ambiguities, contradictions, and allusions were too dangerous.

II. Li Gong’s diaries point to a dynamic that reaches far beyond this little curiosity of a text: on one hand, writing forms part of the disciplinary process that transforms introspection to well-ordered states; but on the other hand, the same process strips words of their expressive power. I have spent most of my academic life working on texts whose distance from classical models means that they are far less bound by these constraints; in early modern China, heterodoxy was often its own proof of spontaneity and sincerity, as many in this age of eccentrics and hobbyists knew. Written partly or entirely in vernacular Chinese, fiction and plays enjoyed liberties of expression that more venerable genres did not, precisely because of

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their distance from genres associated with the state-sponsored examination system. I do not want to give the impression that fiction and drama do not largely align with statist orthodoxy, because many stories and plays do, while others have a more nuanced relationship to orthodox values. For example, characters might pursue romantic love even in a cultural setting in which all marriages were arranged, but by the end of a story or play the young lovers either had to be married or punished. Or: villains might voice alternative perspectives, but always with the contextual understanding that these are the bad guys. Nonetheless, fiction and drama can articulate, or at least ventriloquize, what cannot easily be formulated in the first-person in other genres. Let me expand on what I mean with an example from the novel The Plum in the Golden Vase (Jinpingmei cihua 金瓶梅詞話, 1590s), which tells of a wealthy extended household (a polygamous man and his six wives) who famously indulge in their lusts and in what were a full spectrum of crimes: adultery, bribery, theft, murder. By late Ming dynasty standards, the fifth wife Pan Jinlian might be close to the worst woman imaginable, and in chapter 78, she even makes her mother cry, by refusing to give money to pay the sedan bearers who bring her for a visit. No scene was more likely to generate a universal knee-jerk response in late Ming China. Filial piety (or deference to parents) was nominally the single most important shared social value. Didactic literature of this period features many exempla who demonstrate extremes of filial behavior, even serving up bits of flesh as food or medicine to heal parents and parents-in-law. But fiction, built out of polyphony, muddies what elsewhere are moral absolutes, and the disagreement between Pan Jinlian and her mother Pan Laolao does not end with Pan Jinlian’s punishment, or even consensus among the characters. Instead, multiple characters reflect on the conflict between mother and daughter and explain it from their own perspectives. Pan Laolao compares the generosity of Pan Jinlian’s sister-wives to the stinginess of her own daughter. The other wives gossip smugly about Pan Jinlian behind her back, voicing the conventional perspective: How unfilial Pan Jinlian is! But another voice chimes in as well, when Pan Jinlian’s maidservant Pang Chunmei provides us a nuanced defense of her mistress. Instead of a bad daughter, Chunmei says, she is proud, too poor to afford the sedan fare, and loath to beg. All of these characters’ perspectives are motivated by their own contexts, none more persuasive on its own than the others.

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Finally, Jinpingmei not only lacks a narrator to tell the reader what to think, but also does not provide the reader a privileged entry into anyone’s mind. In the place of interior monologue all the reader has are competing interpretations. The other wives’ explanation, which we might call conventional, is that Pan Jinlian is an unnatural monster when it comes to her mother, just as she is a monster of sexual promiscuity. But another interlocking series of alternative interpretations are not silenced and remain open until the end of the novel. Please note first their emotional and interpretive nuance, but also the way in which The Great Learning, with its priority on public life, simply cannot accommodate their approach to emotion and interiority. Does Pan Laolao herself fan the flames of conflict with her daughter by bragging about gifts she has received from the other wives? Are the other wives kind to Pan Laolao precisely to make Pan Jinlian look bad? Is the shared ethos of “filial piety” just a cudgel that some can use against others? Are the other wives not so much generous as flaunting their own wealth to shame Pan Jinlian for her own poverty? Is Pan Jinlian ashamed that any show of generosity on her own part would be inevitably compared to that of others and appear, because of her modest means, miserly? Or is it simply easier to make a show of filiality to someone who isn’t your own mother? This polyphony never collapses into a single voice, even when the idea that a daughter might be justified in making her mother cry was literally unsayable in a late Ming context. I have dwelt on this fictional passage at length partly to contrast Jinpingmei’s treatment of interiority with Li Gong’s, so that the reader can see what fiction can do that a genre more closely attached to the orthodoxy cannot. But I would also argue that even as this mode of interpretation originates in fictional narrative, it is not contained by fiction. Instead, this kind of interpretation turns into a hermeneutic posture that can be directed toward non-fictional texts, where the character to be analyzed is sometimes the subject being written about and sometimes the author himself.

III. Although he lived in a time when some literary men of his class also wrote fiction and drama, Chen Jiru focused only on classical forms. A distinguished calligrapher, he was well known for his poetry, textual commentary, and criticism, and especially among various classical prose forms, biography. He wrote scores of these, but the three I will be discussing

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were unusual in that they concern qing 情 (passion), a theme strongly associated with the theater. To late Ming people, death of lovesickness was both a literary topos—explored most famously by the play Mudan ting 牡 丹亭 (The Peony Pavilion, 1598)—and a proof that interior feeling existed and could be written on the body. I have already provided some context for the morbid appeal of death by lovesickness: since heterodox feeling (i.e., romantic love) could not be both spoken and validated, it had to be enacted in some incontrovertible way, such as through dying itself. All three of these biographies wrestle with the same problematic that I have already outlined: how can emotion be written when the place of emotion in elite life is circumscribed linguistically, when as Li Gong’s diary reveals language itself is suspect? In all three of these biographies, the issue of love and feeling ends up turning on the problem of classical Chinese: whether it can depict a world outside of other classical Chinese texts or whether it is always allusively pointing to other texts. The biography (zhuan 傳) originated with the Shiji 史記 (Records of the Grand Historian, first century BCE), and formed the core of every subsequent history sponsored by the imperial state. In fact, the form can probably not be understood outside of the context of the empire, since these official biographies situate their subjects within imperial space and time, listing their birthplaces, their birth years, and then public accomplishments, including official ranks. Chen Jiru’s biographies are of a wide range of people, most of them of no official distinction, but at the heart of this form as he practices it remains an effort to situate a person’s public life— even when the writing is explicitly a biezhuan 別傳 (alternative biography) or a waizhuan 外傳 (unofficial biography). Just as in Europe and Japan, commercial wealth upended other hierarchies in early modern China, and the diversity of early modern life also demanded variety in the biographies. The literary historian Chen Shaotang separates the many biographies that Chen Jiru wrote into four primary categories: first, a classical type of a public figure with public accomplishments; second, a semi-­autobiographical variety; third, a category comprised of anecdote and caricature; and finally, a kind that resembles a classical tale (or chuanqi 傳奇).13 On one hand, Chen Shaotang’s taxonomy shows how varied the textual influences on Chen Jiru’s biographies were. But it also suggests that Chen Jiru had to deploy multiple kinds of biography to depict different kinds of people, with the last three lacking the public profile that was core to classical biography.

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In his biography of Zhang Shengqing (died 1622/1623), written in the late 1620s, Chen Jiru depicts a life that superficially conforms perfectly to familial and social values: Zhang solicitously cares for his mother in illness; he serves his uncles as if they were his father and tenderly nurtures his nephews; his father is incorruptible; the family, abstemious. But these values are also aesthetic and cultural, and the biography paints a charming picture of elite life and friendship. Zhang borrows Chen’s books and writes careful commentaries; the two share all-night conversations so engrossing that neither is wearied. They socialize in outdoor arbors. They enjoy a wide range of elite past-times: poetry writing, music, fishing, chess, boating. But all of it is conventional to the point of clichéd and capped off by Zhang’s last words, spoken on his deathbed as he dies of lung disease while still a young man: “In seeking help, don’t be hurried; in taking up an office, don’t be premature; in arranging a tomb for your parents while they are still alive, don’t delay. As far as the income from the estate, spend half on your clansmen, and half on good deeds.”14 Those objects he’d loved in his life were given to family and friends, including a bequest to Chen Jiru himself. But the biography does not come to an end here. Instead, Chen Jiru records a conversation between himself and his dead friend that turns on classical allusions, with each friend imagined as a cultural figure of bygone times: He sometimes teased me about how I knew so much about prosody, just like Dai Yong [a legendary recluse from 337–441]. If I’d lived during the reign of Song Wendi, I’d have been granted a troupe of official entertainers. But he was so fond of rowing, just like Zhang Zhihe [a recluse fisherman and poet, fl. 8th century], that if he’d lived in the reign of Tang Xuanzong [reigned 713–756], he’d have been granted Qiaoqing and Fisherboy [an enslaved girl and boy given to Zhang Zhihe by the sovereign].15

But the punch line happens afterward, in a passage I can only make sense of if Zhang Shengqing spoke the words, leaving them to Chen Jiru to try to piece together. “Now Fisherboy is well, but Qiaoqing is as vanished as a pink cloud, riding the winds and flown off. How could I possibly have any zeal for life?” He was probably referring to the prostitute Youyan of Nanjing. I will record her biography separately. I copied this biography and then burned the d ­ ocument before his coffin as an offering. I made vows to him, poured a libation of three cups, and wept, before I left.16

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These allusions imbue all that follows with a certain ambiguity. As is not uncommon for classical texts, Zhang Shengqing refers to himself as a historical antecedent and not in the first person, while at the same time, the grammar of classical Chinese allows for the omission of pronouns. Still, the parallel between Zhang Shengqing and the eighth-century Zhang Zhihe remains obscure, with the identity of the Fisherboy never explained. Zhang Shengqing leaves things sufficiently oblique that even Chen Jiru lacks full certainty as to the identity of Qiaoqing: “He was probably referring to the prostitute Youyan ….” By pointing to another text, Chen Jiru concedes the biography’s own inability to convey core truths about Zhang Shengqing, and this sense is confirmed by “The Alternative Biography of Yang Youyan” (Yang Youyan biezhuan 楊幽妍別傳), which reads not just as a supplement, but as a key to Zhang Shengqing’s biography. For example, one mystery in the biography is resolved immediately: the identity of “the prostitute Youyan.” “The Alternative Biography” describes how shortly after they meet, in praise of her fine voice and devotion to Buddhism, Zhang Shengqing gives Yang Youyan a pet name “Kalavinka” (Sanskrit name transcribed as Jialing in Chinese), a part-bird, part-human creature that comes from the Western Pure Land to preach the Dharma in bird-like tones. With that information in hand, the reader can finally understand the two mentions of Jialing in Zhang Shengqing’s biography, identified in that piece only as “an attendant” (gender neutral in Chinese, just like the Kalavinka itself): “when drunk he ordered his attendant Jialing to sing another song.”17 Jialing appears again at the biography’s deathbed (again without identification): “Jialing cared for him in every way, requesting to take his place, asking to die for him, but he did not get up.”18 Within the classical biography, Chen Jiru stakes uneasy ground, neither explaining the source of the name Jialing (though its obvious Sanskrit origins make it an unusual one for an enslaved person) nor erasing “this attendant” from his account of Zhang Shengqing’s life. But in addition to breaking the code of Zhang Shengqing’s biography, “The Alternative Biography” feels like it emerges out of another genre entirely. The details evoke the world of late Ming fiction and theater: her childhood in the pleasure quarters of Suzhou, how Yang Youyan and Zhang Shengqing fall in love, their separation because of the examinations, her cruel treatment at the hands of her madam, and finally Zhang Shengqing’s purchase of her. But then the reader of both texts encounters an insurmountable contradiction.

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In “The Alternative Biography,” Yang Youyan’s tragic outcome unfolds much like her backstory in predictable, familiar ways. But it is a struggle to assimilate the timeline of “The Alternative Biography” to that of “The Biography of Zhang Shengqing.” In “The Alternative Biography,” she falls ill and dies very shortly after entering Zhang Shengqing’s household. Zhang Shengqing is at her deathbed, not the other way around. He grieves her extravagantly, once again in ways that echo fiction and drama. His desire to commemorate the dead through a perfect portrait is a fictional and dramatic commonplace: I wish I could get ‘an immortality drug’ or beg for ‘the incense of resurrection’ and make her rise up from beneath the earth, but I can’t. Or I wish I could smelt a metal statue of her, or embroider her out of silk, or hire a painter to paint a hundred portraits, but they won’t necessarily be good likenesses.19

But the perfect portrait Zhang Shengqing seeks is not one of paint, but one made up of words, and so he asks for Chen Jiru’s help: “Why not ask you to allow the departed to live again?”20 An ambitious claim for the text we are reading—and yet one that cannot coexist with the picture of Zhang Shengqing’s public life. “The Alternative Biography” is neither an extended footnote for Zhang Shengqing’s biography nor just a private supplement to a public life; in returning again and again to the distance between literary sources and actual life, it is also about the power of writing and what any single text’s relationship to other texts and to the world is. The text is, in other words, also an act of literary criticism. In musing about Youyan, “The Alternative Biography” returns again and again to the problem of whether it is a story based on real life, or a real-life version of a story. After the lovers’ initial separation, she is struck down by illness, and a mutual friend, Wang Xiuwei, remarks to Chen Jiru: My whole life I have not known what lovesickness looked like, and also did not know what kind of person Zhang Shengqing was. Now I see the pathetic state to which Miss Yang has been reduced, and I see that Zhang can cause one to sicken, and that the patient wants to die for him. If he doesn’t care, she is about to be dried into a corpse.21

I think this last line (so unfortunately infelicitous in English)—“she is about to be dried into a corpse” 立枯为人腊矣—refers to another famous literary

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lover, Yingying’s lover in Yuan Zhen’s ninth-century “The Story of Yingying.” Mr. Zhang pleads his case by saying that if he cannot see Yingying soon he will only be found in “a dried fish store” 枯鱼之肆. Writing about emotion (and its incontrovertible variant, fatal lovesickness) can only be a literary problem. Wang Xiuwei wonders whether such people and such ailments exist in the real world; and at the end of “The Alternative Biography,” Chen Jiru too muses on the line between life and art. He lists various literary antecedents who died “with one cry of sorrow” and then adds, “I had thought that this was all so unrealistic, but now I believe that they actually happened. People like Youyan and Shengqing, to judge them mercifully, were karmically bound. Did they die of passion or did they die of fate?”22 Readers of both Youyan’s alternative biography and Zhang Shengqing’s biography find themselves in a curious position, at once enjoined to integrate them, but also incapable of creating a single consistent picture. Contrast the way the reader has to toggle back and forth between these two classical biographies with the climax of “Du Shiniang Sinks Her Jewel Box in Anger,” a story in the vernacular collection Stories to Caution the World (警世通言 Jingshi tongyan, 1624). The courtesan Du Shiniang excoriates her faithless lover and drowns herself: There was not a dry eye among the onlookers, all of whom cursed Li for being the fickle ingrate that he was. Ashamed and exasperated, Li shed tears of remorse and was about to apologize to Shiniang when she threw herself into the middle of the current…. The horrified onlookers cried out for her rescue, but with a heavy mist hanging over the raging waves, not the slightest trace of her could be seen. How tragic that a celebrated courtesan as pretty as a flower and as far as jade fell prey to the fish of the river!23

It is not just the onlookers who agree as to what they are seeing and how to respond, but the fickle lover Li Jia himself shedding tears of remorse, and the narrator interjecting an exclamation of “how tragic.” The scene is a demonstration of immediate emotional response, shared by spectators, participants, narrator, and reader. Why has Chen Jiru written two deathbed scenes, one in which Jialing faithfully attends Zhang Shengqing (“The Biography of Zhang Shengqing”), and the other in which Zhang Shengqing is partaking of New Year’s toasts at the same moment at which Jialing is dying? We cannot answer even so basic a question as which of the two lovers died first. (For that matter, even the biography itself cannot keep this detail straight,

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with Jialing in attendance at Zhang Shengqing’s deathbed, while Zhang Shengqing sighs to his friend Chen Jiru that Qiaoqing—another classicallanguage stand-in for Yang Youyan—has vanished.) Within the confines of a classically bound form, the problem of expressing emotion turns into something that appears meta-literary, even proto-modernist. Both of these biographies wrestle with generic forms: Do stories convey the truth? Can biographies describe people? Are individual texts necessarily fragmentary, demanding that other texts always step in to supplement them? But the odd interlacing construction of the two biographies also puts into question the act of reading itself. Perhaps in a world that fiction has penetrated, readers engage with some classical-language biographies— even those about real-life friends—as if the people involved were characters, who in different versions might experience different outcomes. Wang Xiuwei seems to understand Yang Youyan and Zhang Shengqing that way. But the effect might be even further reaching, in effect placing Chen Jiru himself front and center, positioning Chen as a character, so that the reader wonders what his motivations might have been for writing multiple versions of the same story.

IV. A third biography by Chen Jiru actually does begin with Chen Jiru himself,24 and not its subject Fan Muzhi. “The Unofficial Biography of Fan Muzhi” (Fan Muzhi waizhuan 范牧之外傳) opens by reflecting on how the writer has come to know about the subject and whether it is even possible to reconstitute “a life” when some aspects of the person have been elided from the official record. Fan Muzhi was not only an elite man, but even a degree recipient, and yet instead of a zhuan that records public life beginning with his birthplace, the “Unofficial Biography” (waizhuan) begins thus: My house was next door to Muzhi’s. I heard as a youth that Muzhi had died of lovesickness, but I did not dare ask my elders about it. In the last ten years, having received learning about the transformation of people through education, I more or less understood the situation, and so I promised Muzhi’s son to write his biography.25

What Chen Jiru has known from childhood on is that Fan Muzhi’s love affair cannot be spoken. It is only now after education in the

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classics—“transformation through education” was the fundamental Confucian enterprise—that the adult Chen can articulate the unspoken. Chen Jiru describes how after Fan Muzhi and the sex worker Miss Du become involved in a passionate affair, all of respectable society cuts him off. Muzhi’s family demand that he sell Miss Du to a merchant, but he makes plans instead to hide her, and the two of them flee together to Chang’an, where their love affair comes to a sad end: “After living in a house in Chang’an for three months, Muzhi died of lung disease.”26 Miss Du for her part throws herself into a river and drowns, her hair fanned out all around, her hands clinging to keepsakes from her dead lover in yet another scene that echoes both fiction and drama.27 Chen Jiru returns to the problem introduced by the biography’s opening, the central mystery to Fan Muzhi’s life. To resolve the same mystery in Zhang Shengqing’s life, Chen Jiru had to resort to two separate biographies, one more or less about his public life and the other more or less about his private life, but here the single text explicitly asks how a public life and a private one can be integrated: “I have heard that in serving his parents, and in his treatment of his brother, [Fan Muzhi] was in every single way filial and a good friend, and a true Confucian. But because his karma was to be bewitched, in the end he was ultimately depleted by this prostitute. How could that be?”28 Using techniques this passage hints at, fiction resolves this problem with plot: a story might well trace the karmic entanglements that led to Fan Muzhi’s affair with Miss Du; what each had done in a previous life that led to this one.29 But in a classical biography, “how” is answered not psychologically or causally, but through literary allusion: how this turn of events can be rendered consistent with historical antecedents and legible to readers of classical literature; how this otherwise unwritable event can be turned into something that fits into a classical canon. In the sentences that follow, Chen Jiru first compares Fan Muzhi to Xiang Yu 項羽 (232–202 BCE) and Han Gaozu 漢高祖 (256–195 BCE), who challenged one another for the empire after the fall of the Qin dynasty and who themselves were involved in famous love affairs. Then he understands Muzhi through the prism of the Daoist classic, the Daodejing: “Was Muzhi not someone as the Daodejing says—‘A man with outward courage dares to die’?”30 In describing the lovers’ commitment to one another— “their vows to one another/never to be forgotten”31—Chen Jiru cites The Book of Odes (eleventh to seventh centuries BCE). By the end their names no longer signify people, but are instead layer upon layer of allusion: “Looking back at it, I know that Miss Du owes

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something to Du Mu [杜牧, the great Tang poet, 803–852, famous for his poetry about the pleasure quarters] …. With Du Mu, she shared the same last name; with Fan Li 范蠡 (ca. 500 BCE), he shared the same last name; over these two thousand years, they were combined into Fan Muzhi. Alas, is it so or not?”32 The lovers are transformed into ciphers of earlier literary history: Miss Du, an amalgam of a poem and the poet whose surname she shares; Fan Muzhi himself, a composite of earlier romantics—the same poet Du Mu and Fan Li, the minister who ran off with the great beauty Xi Shi, all the way back in the Spring and Autumn period. Fan Muzhi, the real-life next-door neighbor, whose behavior had been unspoken taboo, is explained not through personal acquaintance but solely through historical and literary antecedent.

V. I suspect that embedding the lovers’ names into literary history might have seemed like cathexis even to a late Ming reader, just like the deliberately clumsy interweaving of Zhang Shengqing’s and Yang Youyan’s biographies. This tendency of the speaker to foreground himself is even more marked in other writings. The Chen Jiru “voice” is no longer clearly situated at a reliable distance; if the nature of public writing is consensus about the authority and distance of the speaker, here attention is drawn to that space, in a way that is reminiscent of modernism. Traces of formal experimentation can be found elsewhere in his writings as well, as in “The Biography of Master Li” (Tang Li gongzi zhuan 唐 李公子傳), a picaresque tale about the adventures of a Tang dynasty aristocrat who eventually ascends to the heavens as an immortal. Modeling itself after Tang tales of the supernatural (傳奇chuanqi), “The Biography of Master Li” survives in two main variants, one of which begins as if it were a genuine biography, by identifying Master Li as the son of the historical Li Bi 李泌 (722–789). The other version opens with a short prefatory passage about Chen Jiru himself (the same way in which “The Unofficial Biography of Fan Muzhi” opens and with the same effect, problematizing the speaker’s distance to the events in question). Famously, Chen Jiru published separate collections of his own writing during his lifetime, so that neither of these versions is definitive. Chen Meigong ji 陳 眉公集 (Collection of Master Chen Meigong, 1615) lacks the prefatory material, while it is included in Wanxiangtang xiaopin 晚香堂小品(Small works from Wanxiang Studio, Chongzhen reign, 1628–1644). This prefatory passage opens: “After I failed to pass the exams and returned home,

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I fell into a depression that I tried to wash away with Daoist texts.”33 Chen Jiru then claims not to have written but to have found this biography; it is in this retelling an actual Tang dynasty artifact. He speculates as to which of Li Bi’s sons “Master Li” might be. The presence of the preface changes the focus from the fictional Master Li to the relationship between the text—whose “discovery” is of course a fiction—and the speaker Chen Jiru. Indeed, what is foregrounded are the psychological circumstances of examination failure, which in turn renders the picturesque story set in the Tang dynasty entirely secondary. The reader reads not the story, but the reasons Chen Jiru might channel his psychological energies into writing it. Imagine reading “The Biography of Master Li” (with its preface), “The Unofficial Biography of Fan Muzhi,” and “The Alternative Biography of Yang Youyan” all together, as they are grouped in the eighteenth juan (or chapter) in Small Works from Wanxiang Studio.34 Rather than reading them as discrete pieces, they almost form a single narrative that begins with Chen Jiru’s description of his immersion in Daoism after examination failure, goes on to describe his memories of childhood, and then takes on what he could not know as a youth. I imagine that virtually every seventeenth-­century reader of these biographies had also read reams of fiction and drama. If one imported those reading techniques here, then the subjectivity one pries into ceases to be Zhang Shengqing’s or Fan Muzhi’s, but that of Chen Jiru himself: why is he writing this? Is he giving us a roman à clef to understand his own inner state? What is he repressing and not saying? In that case, the sort of psychological interpretation in which readers of vernacular fiction were well-practiced is not effaced in Chen Jiru’s classical biographies, but only deferred and displaced. Consider finally another genre of classical writing, the epitaph (muzhiming 墓誌銘), a commemorative form that situates the deceased in public life, and was probably the main means for conveying biographical information in pre-modern China. Chen Jiru was by no means the first or only writer of classical genres to write his own epitaph. These self-written epitaphs were a commonplace by the Tang dynasty, with Ming-era peers of Chen Jiru’s dabbling in the form as well. The self-written epitaph allowed writers like Xu Wei 徐渭 (1521–1593) and Zhang Dai 張岱 (1597–1684) to appraise their own lives in the third person. Zhang Dai’s self-written epitaph is particularly famous and dwells on his much-straitened circumstances after the fall of the Ming dynasty in 1644. Some passages are straightforward (“As a youth, he was a real dandy”), but others suggest the literary potential of a third person that every reader knows is actually a first person. Take this passage, for example, in which the third person allows

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Zhang Dai to assert his erstwhile wealth: “in the past, even when wearing simple clothes, he compared himself to lofty dukes and earls; but in the present time, though coming from a distinguished family, he classed himself with lowly beggars. Thus were the wealthy and mean confounded.”35 In Chen Jiru’s self-written epitaph, he takes a form whose very premise is the shifting back and forth between third and first person (a rhetorical element we have noticed in his biographies) and generates an actual fiction out of a non-fictional genre. Rather than using the self-written epitaph simply to say things about himself that he could not say otherwise as Zhang Dai does, Chen Jiru sets a scene, in which he describes an imaginary, dying Chen Jiru, who has invited all of his loved ones to a memorial service at which he himself is present. At the prompting of this imaginary Chen Jiru, the event turns from a maudlin death watch into something like a party. Some of them began to sing funereal songs between rounds of drinking. The sadder the singing, the more everybody drank; the more everybody drank, the better the singing. The master was so pleased that he got up and danced. He pinned flowers to his cap and twisted and clowned like a child. Nobody was allowed to leave until he was thoroughly drunk.36

The scene is not simply a fictionalized version of the author’s own deathbed; even the character of the fictional dying Chen Jiru gets to see precisely what mortals are usually denied, our loved ones’ mourning for us after our deaths. In other words, Chen Jiru ventriloquizes the dying Chen Jiru seeing his own deathbed. Right before death, the imaginary Chen Jiru wonders why no vision has appeared. After he expires, a rainbow bridge appears, soaring straight into the sky—a vision denied to the imaginary, now dead Chen Jiru, but granted to the reader and provided by the living author. Most self-written epitaphs feature just two versions of the subject: the writer and the deceased, now frozen in time and no longer able to ruminate on the self. Chen Jiru’s, by contrast, features a not-quite deceased, still actively mythologizing self, with the epitaph itself turning into a fiction.

VI. I began this essay by showing how the problem of pre-modern emotion has foregrounded the disciplinary divide between cognitive studies and literary criticism. A closer look at specific texts and a specific writer makes

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it clear that—within classical genres that were themselves products of institutions whose legitimacy rested on a specific understanding of what writing does—Chen Jiru deals with emotion precisely as a literary problem, wrestling with it through the prism of genre itself. By the early seventeenth century, I have argued, one of the primary ways for classical prose to treat emotion was to import a kind of positioning from fiction, demanding that the reader understand the speaker as a character. Readers could be asked to understand a series of classical-language sources in the same way that they understood vernacular fiction. Within that kind of reading, emotional possibilities that could not be framed explicitly could be hinted at obliquely. In these prose pieces, genre is not comprised of traits inherent to texts. Genre does not function like a police force that monitors the lines demarcating fiction and non-fiction, classical and vernacular languages, classical and non-classical forms. Instead, this case study argues for a more expansive way of considering genre as habits of mind and reading, backed up by institutions and texts, but always fluid, always ready to escape one context for another. Travis Foster has written that genre is less about form than about repetition: “Genres and generic performances move: they move, on the one hand, externally as modes of expression encountering social forms and institutions; and they move, on the other, internally as intra-generic conventions jostling with and against one another.”37 That movement is on full display in these ostensibly non-fictional texts.

Notes 1. Paolo Santangelo, Sentimental Education in Chinese History: An Interdisciplinary Textual Research in Ming and Qing Sources (Leiden: Brill, 2003), p. 7. 2. The Annales School were a group of French historians of whom Lucien Febvre and Ernst Bloch were the most famous whose goal was to chart the world view of common people of the past, what they called mentalités. 3. Ling Hong Lam, The Spatiality of Emotion in Early Modern China: From Dreamscapes to Theatricality (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), p. 5. 4. Lam, p. 6–7. 5. Li Gong was strongly associated with Yan Yuan 颜元 (1635–1704) and a version of Neo-Confucianism that stressed daily practice and behavioral changes.

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6. Dorothy Ko, “Thinking About Copulation: An Early-Qing Confucian Thinker’s Problem with Emotion and Words” in Remapping China: Fissures in Historical Terrain, ed. Gail Hershatter, Emily Honig, Jonathan N.  Lipman, Randall Stross (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), p. 65. 7. Ko, p. 62. 8. Ko, p. 66. 9. The Four Books: Confucian Analects, The Great Learning, The Doctrine of the Mean, and the Works of Mencius, with English translation and notes by James Legge (China: Commercial Press, 1930), pp. 310–312. 10. Hajime Nakatani, “Body, Sentiment, and Voice in Ming Self-Encomia (Zizan),” in Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews (CLEAR), vol. 32, 2010, p. 74. 11. Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Margaret Lock, “The Mindful Body: A Prolegomenon to Future Work in Medical Anthropology,” in Medical Anthropology Quarterly, vol. 1, 1987, p. 28. 12. Ko, p. 65. 13. Chen Shaotang 陳少棠, Wanming xiaopin lunxi 晚明小品論析 (Hong Kong: Bowen shuju, 1980), pp. 36–38. 14. Chen Jiru, “The Biography of Zhang Shengqing” 張聖清傳, Meigong xiansheng Wangxiang tang xiaopin, Chongzhen ed. (1628–1644), juan 17, p. 45. Unless otherwise noted, all references to Chen Jiru’s writing are to this edition. https://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-­3:FHCL:17942480. 15. “The Biography of Zhang Shengqing,” p. 46. 16. “The Biography of Zhang Shengqing,” pp. 46–7. 17. “The Biography of Zhang Shengqing,” p. 45. 18. “The Biography of Zhang Shengqing,” p. 45. 19. Chen Jiru, “Yang Youyan biezhuan” 楊幽妍別傳, Meigong xiansheng Wangxiang tang xiaopin, Chongzhen ed. (1628–1644), juan 18, p 27. 20. “Yang Youyan biezhuan,” p. 27. 21. “Yang Youyan biezhuan,” p. 26. 22. “Yang Youyan biezhuan,” p. 28. 23. “Du Shiniang Sinks Her Jewel Box in Anger” 杜十娘怒沉百寶箱, in Stories to Caution the World 警世通言, comp. Feng Menglong, trans. Shuhui Yang and Yunqin Yang (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005), p. 564. 24. Yuan Hongdao’s 袁宏道 much more famous “The Biography of Xu Wei” 徐文長傳 also begins by describing how the author has come to know of the subject. 25. Chen Jiru, “Fan Muzhi waizhuan” 范牧之外傳 in Meigong xiansheng Wangxiang tang xiaopin, Chongzhen ed. (1628–1644), juan 18, p.  21. Fan Muzhi died in 1577, when Chen Jiru was in his late teens.

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26. Chen Jiru, “Fan Muzhi waizhuan,” p. 23. 27. Chen Jiru, “Fan Muzhi waizhuan,” p. 23. Her death most clearly resembles that of Du Shiniang, the courtesan who drowned herself after being betrayed by her lover and after casting the contents of a jewel box into the water (Story 32 in Jingshi tongyan, 1624). 28. Chen Jiru, “Fan Muzhi waizhuan,” p. 23. 29. Consider the mid-seventeenth century novel Xingshi yinyuan zhuan 醒世 姻緣傳 (Marriage Destinies to Awaken the World) which uses reincarnation to explain the behavior of characters. 30. Chen Jiru, “Fan Muzhi waizhuan,” p.  24. Daodejing 73, trans. Philip J. Ivanhoe, Readings in Classical Chinese Philosophy, ed. Philip J. Ivanhoe and Bryan Van Norden (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2003), p. 199. 31. Chen Jiru, “Fan Muzhi waizhuan,” p.  24. “You yan fuxian 永焉弗谖” alludes to “you shi fuxuan 永矢弗諼” (“He swears he will never forget” from “Kaopan” 考槃, the Odes of Wei, in The Book of Odes.) 32. Chen Jiru, “Fan Muzhi waizhuan,” p. 24. 33. Chen Jiru, “Tang Li gongzi zhuan” 唐李公子傳, juan 18, p. 15. 34. Chen Jiru, Meigong xiansheng Wangxiang tang xiaopin, juan 1, table of contents, p. 53. 35. Zhang Dai, “A Self-Written Epitaph” 自為墓誌銘 in Mingren zizhuan wenchao 明人自傳文鈔, ed. Du Lianzhe (Taibei: Yiwen yingshuguan, 1977), pp. 217–218. Translated by Jonathan Spence, Return to Dragon Mountain: Memories of a Late Ming Man (New York: Viking, 2007), p. 273. 36. Chen Jiru, “Tomb Epitaph for Mister Blue Sky” 空青先生墓誌銘 in Mingren zizhuan wenchao, pp.  252–253. Translation by Wu Pei-yi, The Confucian’s Progress: Autobiographical Writings in Traditional China (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990). 37. Travis Foster, Genre and White Supremacy in the Post-Emancipation United States (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), p. 91.

Bibliography Chen, Jiru 陳繼儒. Meigong xiansheng Wanxiangtang xiaopin 眉公先生晚香堂小 品. Harvard-Yenching Library Chinese Rare Books Digitization Project-­ Collected Works. China: S.n., 1621. https://iiif.lib.harvard.edu/manifests/ view/drs:51673030$1i. Chen Shaotang 陳少棠. Wanming xiaopin lunxi 晚明小品論析. Hong Kong: Bowen shuju, 1980. Daodejing, trans. Philip J. Ivanhoe. Readings in Classical Chinese Philosophy, ed. Philip J. Ivanhoe and Bryan Van Norden. Indianapolis: Hackett, 2003. Du Lianzhe杜联喆, ed. Mingren zizhuan wenchao 明人自傳文鈔. Taipei: Yiwen yingshu guan. 1977.

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Feng Menglong 馮夢龍. Stories to Caution the World, trans. Shuhui Yang and Yunqin Yang. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005. Foster, Travis M. Genre and White Supremacy in the Post-Emancipation United States. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. Greenbaum, Jamie. Chen Jiru (1558–1639): The Development and Subsequent Uses of Literary Personae. Leiden: Brill. 2007. Ko, Dorothy. “Thinking about Copulation: An Early-Qing Confucian Thinker’s Problem with Emotion and Words” in Remapping China: Fissures in Historical Terrain, eds. Gail Hershatter, Emily Honig, Jonathan N.  Lipman, Randall Stross. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996. Lam, Ling Hon. The Spatiality of Emotion in Early Modern China: From Dreamscapes to Theatricality. New York: Columbia University Press. 2018. Nakatani, Hajime. “Body, Sentiment, and Voice in Ming Self-Encomia (Zizan).” Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews (CLEAR) 32 (2010): 73–94. Santangelo, Paolo. Sentimental Education in Chinese History: An Interdisciplinary Textual Research in Ming and Qing Sources. Leiden: Brill, 2003. Scheper-Hughes, Nancy, and Margaret Lock. “The Mindful Body: A Prolegomenon to Future Work in Medical Anthropology.” Medical Anthropology Quarterly 1 (1987): 6-41. Spence, Jonathan. Return to Dragon Mountain: Memories of a Late Ming Man. New York: Viking. 2007. The Four Books: Confucian Analects, The Great Learning, The Doctrine of the Mean, and the Works of Mencius, trans. by James Legge. China: Commercial Press. 1930.

Self Reconfigured in Recollected Dreams: Xue Cai’s (1595–1665) Journal During the Manchu Conquest of China Xiaoqiao Ling

The Manchus were descended from the same Tungusic tribal people who had founded the Jin Dynasty (1115–1234) that drove the Song imperial house south and ruled most of north China.1 With the rise of Nurhaci (1559–1626) in the early seventeenth century, the Manchus had posed an increasing threat to the borders of Ming China (1368–1644).2 In the summer of 1644, when peasant rebels led by Li Zicheng 李自成 (ca. 1605–1645) sacked the Ming capital (Beijing) and forced the last emperor of the Ming (the Chongzhen 崇禎 emperor, r. 1627–1644) to commit suicide, a Ming general opened the fortification pass for a Manchu army to enter the central land of China to combat the rebels. But the Manchu force did not withdraw after defeating peasant rebels as Ming officials had

X. Ling (*) Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Stefanovska et al. (eds.), Emotions in Non-Fictional Representations of the Individual, 1600-1850, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84005-1_8

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hoped. Its military commander established himself as regent of the Qing court in Beijing and proceeded to launch a campaign south of the Yangtze River the following year (1645) and sacked Nanjing, capital of the shortlived rump Southern Ming court. The invasion of south China lasted for two more decades until the fall of the last rump Ming court in 1662. The Manchu conquest of China was a prolonged period of warfare and social disorder characterized by regional imbalances. In northern China, where social order had been disrupted by looting Manchu soldiers, bandits, and peasant rebels, local elites were more willing to collaborate with the Manchu court to restore order. By contrast, the south, especially the wealthy Jiangnan area located at the lower Yangtze Delta, underwent some of the bloodiest clashes with the Manchu invaders.3 It was also largely as a measure against the Jiangnan elites that the Qing court implemented the notorious haircutting policy mandating that all non-clerical male subjects of Han ethnicity shave their foreheads and plait their hair according to the Manchu custom. This led many Han scholar-officials, especially those in the Jiangnan area who thought they resided at the very center of cultural refinement, to find themselves caught in an apocalyptic moment—not only did the socio-political order crumble, but their very individual identity was also jeopardized when they had to assume a “barbarian” look by violating the body bestowed by parents.4 Xue Cai 薛寀 (1595–1665) was a member of these southern elites from the Taihu area in the modern Jiangsu Province. In 1637, he was appointed Prefect of Kaifeng 開封, a city under severe attacks by the roving rebel armies of Zhang Xianzhong 張獻忠 (1605–1647) and Li Zicheng, who were eventually to bring down the Ming empire. After some clashes with high officials deputed by Beijing, Xue requested to resign and, upon denial of his request, simply abandoned office and returned home in the winter of 1638–1639.5 He started to keep a journal in the year 1642, but what started as scholastic jottings on art, literature, and local customs and commemorative writings in honor of his elders and literary associates darkened into emotionally invested contemplations on the rapidly deteriorating local order.6 The journal ended abruptly in the spring of 1646 before the Manchu subjugation of Fujian that led to the collapse of the equally shortlived Longwu 隆武 court (August 1645–November 1646).7 Xue Cai subsequently took to hiding in the mountains, where his participation in a local community of scholars who took the Buddhist tonsure in order to avoid hair-shaving was documented in Ye Shaoyuan’s 葉紹袁 (1589–1648) diary between 1646 and 1647. Xue Cai left the mountains after surviving

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a raid by the Manchu authority in the spring of 1647. He managed to return to his home estate, where he lived a life of quietude until he died in 1665. In the period between 1644 and 1646, Xue Cai was moving frequently between his living place in the city of Changzhou, in the countryside, and his mountain estate as he attempted to take refuge from rumors and alarming news on the Manchu invasion of the south. His journal therefore allows important glimpses at how a literary man dealt with his own emotional experience during this trying time. But what truly makes Xue’s journal distinctive is the fact that he has recorded a total of forty-two dreams, alongside his waking-hour ruminations, as direct responses to this tumultuous time. Xue Cai lived in an age fascinated by dreams.8 Writers from this period had fully explored the rhetorical potential of the dream as a symbol of the ephemeral nature of worldly endeavors and as a literary device to examine the potency of individual subjectivity.9 Dream interpretation was also a significant part of the popular knowledge structure in seventeenth-century China—commercial publishers produced voluminous encyclopedia on ways to decipher dreams.10 Xue Cai had sought hope in the face of grim reality by contemplating his recollected dreams. Two days after hearing about the Manchu army launching their southern campaign by crossing the Yangtze River, he recorded two dreams with the following interpretive frame: “When I was at home I had various sorts of ominous dreams, therefore the past month I had suffered from alarming reports and had to constantly run for safety. Now, trying to avoid turmoil here in the mountains, I remain just as ill at ease as when I was staying in town. Yet one night I had two auspicious dreams.11 I suppose the time for the legitimate heir to be restored to the throne and the moment for me to return home is not far away,” 予在家時 凶夢種種, 故旬月來有警報奔竄之苦. 茲避亂山中, 洶洶不減於城邑, 而一 夕兩得吉夢, 想嗣主中興返里之期近矣.12 Even when the fall of the rump Southern Ming court dashed such hopes, Xue continued to seek promising signs for local resistance activities by recording what he had overheard from his son-in-law’s own dream talk about slaying a snake and beholding a dancing phoenix, proclaiming that these were “auspicious signs for Restoration” 中興利見吉兆.13 The act of slaying a snake and the sight of dancing phoenixes are signs of the majestic power of the Confucian monarchy, the former associated with Liu Bang’s 劉邦 (256 or 247–195 BCE) hacking a big snake into two pieces before his rise to become the founding emperor of the Western Han

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(206 BCE–25 CE)14 and the latter a reference to the sage ruler Shun’s 舜 Shao music that brought tributes from phoenixes in The Classic of Documents (Shujing 書經).15 Xue Cai’s interpretation of dreams therefore follows a model of classic references rooted in the canonical textual past. His perception of two “auspicious dreams,” one on attending his son’s wedding ceremony and one on finding out that the new top civil service examination candidate was a close associate, points to his steadfast attachment to the social norm indicative of political legitimacy despite the moment of crisis, as is shown in his own words: The marriage accords with the proper time with the zither and books intact, allowing the father and the son, the nephew and his uncle, the teacher and brothers, peers and friends all to gather in joy in one chamber—truly this is a blissful event! Adding to this is the dream from the same night signaling that the imperial court, despite the flux of [military] documents delivered by feathered [arrows], does not abandon the rites of the pistil roster inaugurating one’s membership at the Ying Islet.16 This heralds [the occasion of one of ours] riding a grand chariot in the middle of the day dressed in brocade, bringing glory to our neighborhood.17 婚嫁及時, 琴書無恙, 得以父子甥舅師弟朋友歡聚一室, 洵大快事. 且合之同 夕一夢, 是朝廷雖羽書旁午而蕊榜瀛洲之典不廢, 抑可以乘軒晝錦為里門榮.18

Xue Cai was therefore engaging his dream experience to reinforce his conviction in political legitimacy and ritual propriety as a Confucian scholar’s attempt at seeking hope amidst the crisis of Manchu conquest. This preoccupation also explains why the majority of Xue Cai’s recorded dreams unfold in social settings that are extractions from real-life circumstances. Xue Cai has often commented on his dream experience as a direct result of his fraying mind upon hearing shocking news from day times: “alarming reports of all sorts about the southern capital came to me, and my mind was filled with a hundred scattered thoughts” 予聞南都種種警報, 百端橫 胸19; “all those scattered thoughts [in my dreams] were signs of my spirit and mind being rattled; they are therefore truly alarming and frightful” 夢 魂顛倒種種, 皆屬神識飛揚, 可驚可懼.20 Recorded dreams are thus products of Xue’s conscious recollections in waking hours as extensions of his anxieties during the day. I share Lynn Struve’s approach to Xue’s dreams as essentially memories of dreams that are analogous to memories of other wakeful experiences:

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“The approach of the present study is to treat waking-state memory of dream content (itself comprised of memories) as analogous in its ideational and psychological dynamics to ordinary memory of wakeful experiences. In other words, despite their frequent bizarreness, dream records are viewed as raising the same sorts of issues—for instance, of motivation, emotional salience, self-representation, and narrativization—as texts that purport to relate personal memories from waking-state consciousness.”21 As such, the representations of dream scenes as remembrance go through the same process of mediation as the experiences of waking times. In particular, the way Xue Cai maintains direct correspondences between his dream experience and the contemporary socio-political situation invites a reading of his dream experiences against the journal entries from his waking consciousness as contrasting modes of self-expression. It is therefore worthwhile to compare the two sets of experiences to get a sense of how Xue Cai engages dreams to come to terms with his sense of self.

Journal Writing as Self-Monitoring of Public and Private Emotions In his leisurely scholastic records during the early phase of his journal-­ keeping, Xue Cai presented himself as a private person, a scholar who was jotting down notes on memorable local affairs and acquaintances. He started adopting a public persona when alarming news from the Ming capital reached him in the spring of 1644: The third month of the jiashen year (1644), I heard news of bandits besieging the imperial capital. I was in an agitated state, sorrow and anger burning inside me. … Unrestrained comments were rampant at court, and His Imperial Highness indiscriminately heeds all opinions, allowing treacherous demons to stab Heaven—this is why the orphaned subject Cai weeps toward Heaven until he coughs blood. 甲申三月聞賊犯京師之報, 徬徨憤悒…盈廷橫議太囂, 皇上聽言太廣, 坐令 么麼帬飛刺天, 此孤臣寀所為仰天嗚嗚而咯血也.22

Coughing blood is a figure of speech that traces back to the legend of Lord Wangdi 望帝 of Shu who, after being forced to abdicate, turned into a cuckoo that cried till it coughed blood.23 As an “orphaned subject,” Xue Cai has used this figure to evoke sentiments that align with such public emotions as pains over one’s endangered State. The figurative shedding of

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blood here, however, turns into real blood when Xue Cai learns that Chongzhen had hanged himself: “Since I learned of this I coughed blood for days, my floor covered with phlegm. I had no choice but to go to the mountains for treatment. Among those who had chosen death following His Highness, I have chosen those whom I knew to mourn them with poetry and pay tribute with prose,” 寀從此嘔血經旬, 咯痰滿地, 就醫山 中, 良非得已. 於殉難中擇平日相知者業為詩哭之、為文奠之.24 The fall of the Ming and the Chongzhen emperor’s suicide marked a major turning point in Xue Cai’s journal taking. Not only does it put to end the scholastic mode of casual records, but it also triggered Xue Cai’s consistent adoption of a public persona as a “dismissed orphaned official” 罪廢孤臣 when commenting on socio-political matters despite the fact that he was writing “privately, stirred by indignation” 感憤而私記也.25 The maintenance of his public persona as an erstwhile Ming official is clearly meant as a mode of self-identification, a gesture all the more poignant when the Manchu army, having overthrown the rump Southern Ming court, started to implement the hair-shaving policy in the summer of 1645. As Xue Cai laments: “Those in the south all [wear their] hats with plaited hair. They no longer know of the beneficent influence from the Zhu’s imperial lineage for two hundred and eighty years,” 江南軍民皆 帽辮髮, 不復知有朱氏二百八十年恩澤矣.26 Xue Cai’s self-reference as a public person therefore signals his existential choice not to comply with the Manchu authority. It also allows him to justify his refrainment from joining the rump Southern Ming court by claiming political allegiance to only the Ming proper. In one journal entry “composed privately in tears” 灑淚而私論之, Xue Cai explained that he did not have the charisma to pacify an age of chaos while expressing contempt toward fawning officials who sought benefit from serving the rump Southern Ming court.27 After the fall of the Southern Ming court, Xue Cai manages to sublimate his sense of loss by arguing that his sense of guilt over having failed his official duty was only toward the Chongzhen emperor who committed suicide, not the Hongguang 弘光 emperor (1607–1646, r. 1645–1646) who had filled his court with venal officials.28 This public persona also shapes the way Xue Cai monitors his own emotional experience—he assumed a somewhat stoic posture in his journal entries, committed to recording information and to offering political analysis (often lashing out at the collaborators and bemoaning the ineptitude of the rump Ming government). When recording news of his close acquaintances being slain, Xue Cai curbs his personal feelings, instead

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attributing their deaths as heroic gestures “in repayment of the benefits they had received as officials of the state” 一死酬國恩.29 Only in one incidence does he allow his personal feelings of guilt to filter through his public persona, when he is prescribing the proper venue through which to express one’s sorrow: “Their lives ended on the same occasion, in addition they had forfeited life on account of righteousness. What is there to feel sad about? It is just that they make those of us who are alive—breathing shamefaced in the human realm—choke with tears,” 人生同盡, 矧以義死, 又何足悲? 但令我輩靦顏人間者不禁悽咽耳.30 Ultimately the public voice allows Xue Cai to evoke Heaven’s mandate to denounce the Manchu authority as a barbarian breed, thus attaining a rhetorical upper hand despite the socio-political reality. Xue Cai has achieved this by enlisting orthodox legitimacy as a concept deeply rooted in moral philosophy: the Chinese civilization presides over peripheral regions as the barbarian other.31 The following record was jotted after the Manchu forces had sacked Jiangyin, the strongest anti-Manchu hold in the Jiangnan area. Given the little hope reality had to offer, Xue resorts to citing heavenly justice, maintaining that the Manchu invaders were to meet their own doom as a result of fighting an unjust war, his supercilious tone amplified by an open expression of pity: I find it a shame that, when the eastern barbarians (the Manchu army) chased after Li Zicheng on our behalf, their name of righteousness was truly resounding. Yet now, their greed and cruelty beyond limits, they snatched away Hongguang’s half of the State and further ravaged his people. Even if they had the luck to fulfill their desires, they would eventually suffer extermination by Heaven, not to mention they are already showing signs of decline. All this would only give the insolent bandit Li Zicheng the hope for a come-back. This is why I could never muster enough of myself to hate them. Rather I quite pity them. 吾所惜者, 東虜為我逐李自成時, 義聲一何赫翕, 而今日貪殘無厭. 既攫弘 光之半壁, 又幷其民而蹂躪之, 即幸而得志, 終遭天誅. 況敗形已見, 徒使李 賊乘機萌再颺之志. 吾所為始終不暇恨之而轉憐之耳.32

To a large degree, Xue Cai was modulating his own emotional responses to the Manchu conquest as a way to cope with the gloomy news—the fall of the Ming empire, the corrupt officials who made Restoration impossible, the encroaching Manchu force, the humiliating hair-shaving policy, and the chafing local gentry. Pity as a public emotion, in particular, allowed him to assume a rhetorical position of superiority by standing on a high

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moral ground. It is exactly with this tone that Xue Cai recorded the last of his daytime comments in early 1646. By this time, the Manchu invasion has posed a far graver threat to the Chinese civilization than peasant rebels, so much so that Xue Cai acknowledges the political legitimacy of Zhang Xianzhong (leader of peasant rebels) for holding his ground against the Manchus in western Sichuan, even though Zhang had not yet received the imperial decree of the Longwu emperor (of the second rump Ming court). The urgency of hope to stave off despair is encapsulated in this concluding remark: “The great impetus for Restoration lies precisely in men’s deliberations. The Supreme Lord of Heaven, deeply enraged, shall certainly exterminate the perverse barbarians on account of their unchecked brutality, so that he may return this ancient land to us who are descendants of an unbroken lineage of those who adhered with the Way,” 中興大勢惟 在人謀. 上帝赫怒, 殄淫虐之逆虜而還我有道曾孫故土耳.33 In contrast to such remarks so charged with publicly monitored emotions as to ring hollow, Xue Cai’s recollected dreams capture a much richer gamut of complex, private emotions individuals from this period likely experienced: guilt, fear, anxiety, and embarrassment.34 Since the snippets of social situations represented in dreams are synecdoches of how the real world is, the dreaming subject’s emotional experiences may very well coincide with what Xue Cai had felt in life situations but had been constrained by social protocol and his public persona from giving full, or even partial, expression. Recollections through dreams are therefore most informative in the unfolding of such emotional episodes because what tends to be controlled by the waking subject as improper, either in expression or revealing some aspect of the self, is liberated in dreams. The night after hearing the news that the Manchu army had crossed the Yangtze River and were ready to launch their southern campaign, Xue recorded in his journal his deep consternation as a setting for his dream: “The evening of the tenth day of the fifth month in the yiyou year (1645), I had just learned that the Manchus had crossed the (Yangtze) River. These were such shocking and painful news that my guts were splitting apart and my bowels twisted more than nine times within a single moment,” 乙酉五月初十夕, 正聞渡江信, 驚愴膽裂, 腸不啻一刻九迴也.35 In the recollected dream that was a continuation of this emotional state that night, Xue Cai was taking the civil service examination together with his friend Qian Zhan 錢旃 (1597–1647). Both were asked to compose two lines with the first one ending with the rhyming word qi (strange/ marvelous) and the second ending with zhi (a third-person pronoun).

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Xue’s couplet reads: “I am ashamed that I am yet to proclaim my mind and courage to be exceptional, / They are more frail than a thread on which hang the [nine] cauldrons,” 慚予心膽未稱奇, 細甚於絲鼎繫之.36 Qian’s couplet reads: “On the central land, dead is the handsome steed that galloped, / How can one bear to replace it with a worn-out mount,” 中原死駿負權奇, 忍以駑駘竟代之.37 While both couplets are self-effacing remarks from someone expecting to assume public office, Qian’s seems to carry a sense of heroic pathos that resonates with the critical situation of the Southern Ming.38 But the examiners prefer Xue’s composition on the ground that the pages look cleaner. Here the dreaming subject did something quite inconceivable in real life: I hurriedly stepped forward and protested: “What kind of time is this! Even literary talents are no urgent matter; how much more so a minor indiscretion over an ink stain! By rights, Xue Cai dares not rank higher than Qian Zhan.” 寀趨前爭曰:「此時何時? 即才藻非所急, 況區區筆墨小謹? 薛寀義不敢居 錢旃上.」39

The inconceivability of such a scenario in reality certainly has to do with the unlikely prospect of an examinee upbraiding an examiner. But more importantly, the gist of the argument cuts deeply into the fundamental self-conception of a traditional man of letters: the primacy of one’s literary talents in a time of crisis. The dream, then, provides an outlet for the unleashing of a deep-seated sense of ambiguity regarding the value of such an essentializing self-identification of the traditional literary man. There is no little irony that as such a man of letters, Xue Cai fully engages the evocative power of language to represent the dreams that undercut his own abilities. Even were we to see this dream narrative as artifice, such an account still significantly indicates something so deeply embedded in the subjective mind that wakeful experience hardly dares to reveal. In one of a series of dreams that display Xue’s distraught mind upon hearing the alarming news concerning Hongguang’s Southern Ming court, the dreaming subject finds himself on the way to visit Zhou Yanru (1593–1644), an already disgraced and deceased official who had presided over the civil service examination in which Xue Cai received his jinshi degree. Public opinions shared by late Ming scholar-officials held that Zhou was a greedy and incompetent minister who met his rightful end by committing suicide.

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At night I dreamed of visiting the Master Examiner Zhou Yizhai (Yanru) with Tang Xueling. When we first set off, I had forgotten that he was the master examiner. But once I saw him, I became aware of this and paid him my proper respect as a student. A dog was barking in our face. It collapsed after a single strike, but kept on making growling noises. Yizhai looked at me and said: “This beast is not easy to exterminate. One has to subdue it with the imperial chariot.” Startled, I woke up. 夜夢同湯雪翎過周挹齋座主. 初往時尚忘其為座主也. 既見始悟而執弟子 禮. 一犬迎吠, 擊之斃, 猶狺狺作聲. 挹齋顧予曰: 「此畜未易殲, 除非以鑾 駕壓之耳.」遂驚覺.40

Xue Cai had this dream the night after he had just recorded his critique of the Hongguang emperor’s infamous trial of an impostor who claimed himself to be the Chongzhen emperor’s heir apparent.41 Clearly Xue’s frustration with the Southern Ming court was still raging when he recorded the dream with a description of the dog that, for a traditional Chinese reader, would most certainly recall a very similar line in “Nine Debates” (“Jiubian” 九辯) from the canonical Chuci 楚辭 poetic tradition: “Ferocious dogs greet me with growling and barking; / The passes and bridges are closed, and I cannot pass,” 猛犬狺狺而迎吠兮, 關梁閉而不 通.42 According to Wang Yi’s 王逸 (ca. 89–ca. 158) influential commentary, this line alludes to “treacherous sycophants clamoring around the throne” 讒佞讙呼而在側也. Xue Cai’s choice of words gestures toward such a parallel in the literary lexicon to serve as an interpretive frame of the dream. The image of barking dogs from “Nine Debates” as a political metaphor for venal officials who block the advance of worthy men is transported to the dream as an implicit comment on the corrupt officials of the Southern Ming court. Nevertheless, the emotional experiences of the dreaming subject are still rife with possible referents and remain ambiguous in ways that are exclusive to dream experiences. To begin with, it is significant that Xue Cai at first “forgot” that Zhou was his examiner. Could it be that, given Zhou’s notoriety, the dreaming subject was so embarrassed to have attained the jinshi degree from this corrupt official that he had cast aside the fact that he was once a beneficiary of Zhou? Is there a hint of misgiving when Xue recalled his indebtedness only after seeing Zhou and then paid his respect to mend his convenient forgetfulness? Interestingly, in the dream, Zhou Yanru was the one who articulated what may have been on Xue Cai’s mind: it takes the imperial authority to subjugate the dog as the

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equivalent of corrupt officials—none other than the likes of Zhou Yanru.43 But then Hongguang as the emperor could hardly be expected to aspire to good government, as Xue Cai had made clear in the journal entry from the day before. How can an inept monarch keep himself from malignant influences at a court dominated by venal officials is a tormenting question for any loyal subject—perhaps this has what startled the dreaming subject to waking up? The unfolding of Xue Cai’s dream recollection follows a “grammar” of textual reference to the Chuci tradition as an essential poetic form of self-­ expression. The apprehension and rage at treacherous subjects who sway court decisions with their malignant influences are emotions codified in “Encountering Sorrow” (“Lisao” 離騷), the most canonical poem of the Chuci tradition attributed to Qu Yuan 屈原 (ca. 340–278 BCE), the slandered minister of Chu kingdom who drowned himself in order not to compromise with the topsy-turvy world. The ambivalent emotions of the dreaming subject that structure Xue Cai’s recollection (embarrassment and unease) arise from a combination of textual knowledge of the Chuci tradition and Xue Cai’s own lived experience as a protégé of a disgraced official. What also anchors and structures the dreamscape is the physical body with its sensory perceptions and emotional contours. Just as in real life, the physical body also inhabits the dream world and is a locus of both sensation in waking experiences (at once undergone and imagined, physical and mental) and those same sensations of experience in dreams (e.g. sensory perceptions such as hearing, vision, and touch; how the body moves in a given space and how it feels its way around).44 Emotional episodes structured by bodily experience of the place bring the past into contact with the present in such meaningful ways that recollected dream narratives are particularly illuminating in the creative process by which men of letters attempted to locate their sense of belonging in a conquered world. Xue Cai’s recollected dreams are therefore indispensable in helping us piece together his emotional experience as a disenfranchised official during the Manchu conquest of China.

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Bodily Sensations and Emotional Organization of Space Recollections of emotions felt in dreams can evoke the remembered physical sensations of the body in new spatial configurations. This accounts for the seemingly unrelated localities that appear sequentially in linear (i.e. in time) narratives in recorded dreams. One example comes from a set of dreams that Xue Cai recorded not long after he moved to the mountains in the last quarter of 1644, after learning about Chongzhen’s suicide, while going through a phase of justifying this act of withdrawal to himself in his own journal-writing: On the thirtieth evening of the eleventh month, I dreamed about discussing current affairs with my cousin Zhaosheng, and we marveled at how Lu Anxian—who passed the examination with me—had become “a feather exemplar” for the court with his unyielding integrity.45 Then, I felt as if we were at the eastern chamber of the West Ancestral Hall at our country villa. We had walked to the middle bay, and saw a coffin there on the right side, the shape of its cover humped like a palanquin carried by mules. In the top was drilled a hole the size of the palm of a hand. When we looked through it, there seemed to be two compartments inside. The lower one is the place where the corpse of the deceased Vice Minister of the Imperial Stud46 has been gathered. The upper one was completely empty and it was for storing me. Zhaosheng said to me with a laugh: “This is such a small hole, how could you get in? There is no need to worry.” Then he hastened out and I followed him, first walking on stairs, then we turned into a long corridor—both crowned in the middle and were slippery; on the side there were several feet of deep mud. The exterior double-doors had just been locked, but my cousin Zhaosheng opened them with his hands and went out. I saw that the mud outside was worse, so I halted. Two beggar-­boys, covered in stinking filth, stood on either side of the outside door. I quickly closed the inner leaves, but then I saw a beggar woman, even more filthy, hastening from inside, cursing as she rushed along: “What were you two doing taking off without waiting for me?” I was afraid to make contact with her filth, so I stepped to the south to dodge her, meanwhile informing her: “Those two are still nearby. If you hurry up you can catch up with them.” The beggar woman indeed sped away, and my heart felt somewhat calmed. Then I woke up. 甲申十一月三十夕, 夢與從兄肇升共談時事, 嘖嘖予同年陸闇先骨鯁, 為朝 廷羽儀. 髣髴在鄉居西祠堂東間, 步至中間, 見一柩停其右, 棺蓋隆起似騾 轎狀, 上穿一竅, 如手掌大. 視其中似有兩格, 下一層云是先太僕屍斂處,

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上一層空空無物, 言將藏予. 肇升笑謂:「此小竅, 爾何從入? 可毋憂也.」已 而趨出, 予亦隨行. 初則堦砌, 旋行長廊, 皆中間稍阜而滑, 旁則泥深數尺. 雙扉方鐍, 肇升兄手啓而出. 予望見門外泥淖轉甚, 停足不進. 兩乞兒滿身 糞穢, 夾立外門旁. 予急掩內扉, 復轉見一丐婦糞穢更甚, 自內趨出, 且行且 詈曰:「汝二人何不少待而先行為?」予恐其污觸, 少避而南, 且諭之曰:「彼 二人尚在近, 可速追之.」丐婦果疾趨去, 予心少安, 遂覺.47

The self figured in this recollected dream goes through three emotional states, each of which conjures its own physical setting to spatially divide the narrative into segments. At the beginning, Xue expresses his admiration of a fellow jinshi degree holder from the same class for his “unyielding integrity.” This admirable quality contrasts sharply with Xue’s self-­ perception of his own behavior at this current moment of his life (he had abandoned his office serving the Chongzhen court and refrains from serving the southern Hongguang court) and gestures toward Xue’s sense of inadequacy. In the second scene of the oneiric drama, as in response to Xue’s anxiety about his own inadequacy in contrast to such a moral exemplar and the possibility of that leaving a stain on his illustrious ancestral line, Xue then had the sensation that he was at the ancestral hall of his old country abode, facing the remains of a deceased relative and a vacant space supposedly reserved for him. The cousin’s remark—the hole is thankfully too small so there is no need to worry—seems to address the dream subject’s anxiety about entrapment—being locked down to eternal shame in proximity to a distinguished member of the family (or carrying the contrast of unyielding integrity and inadequacy to the grave).48 The consequent desire to break out of such entrapment is triggered by the hasty withdrawal of his cousin, which gives him the opportunity to leave. Now, as the two head out, fear at defilement takes over: there is mud on the ground and two filthy boys flank the outer doors to block the subject’s exit. Even worse, more filth emerges from inside in the form of the running beggar woman. It is only when Xue sends her away chasing after her cohort that his fear and revulsion subside and his dream reaches its end. Admiration, shame, and fear succeed one another as they organize the space of the dream through emotions generated as the body moves through various surroundings with the heightened physical senses of proprioception: the floor of the hallway with its crowned and slippery surface enhances a sense of insecurity; the lock on the door imposes a sense of blockage—the physical body cannot get through closed doors without someone else’s help with the lock; the directions in which the subject

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moves suggest a sense of body memory within space—the body jerks intuitively to the south to dodge the beggar woman, and the body’s visceral repulsion at filth suggests a connection to a deeper mental state. In this dream highly emotional episodes are linked narratively through bodily experience at different sites, where the body reacts with its own memories of a lived space. The West Ancestral Hall must have been so familiar a place to Xue Cai that even in his dream, the body intuitively understood exactly in which direction it was moving. We can also see this from the way the dream experience is plotted: east, north, south—implying a central point from which direction is conceived within a familiar landmark. Dream experience simply cannot be complete without the body’s own engagement with its intuitive memories of place. If in this dream, Xue Cai’s consciousness seems to suffer from a fear of entrapment that corresponds with his decision to withdraw in the mountains upon learning about the emperor’s suicide, his quest for the right place continues in a dream he recorded in the spring of the following year (1645), before he learnt about the Manchu army’s crossing of the Yangtze River: In the evening of the fourth night [of the second month], as if in a trance I dreamed of entering the morning audience at the imperial court. It also felt like I was in the inner garden of Prince [Zhou]’s mansion.49 First I was in the hall where I saw a hundred entertainments being staged amidst singing, reed music, and acrobatics. Those in official caps and robes and those in silk attires filled the place like clouds and mist. I was fidgeting for having no place to sit, just like when I was a youngster taking the exam about to get my seat-designating stick. In my hesitation there was indeed one who gave me a stick on which was inscribed “Number Seventeen of Far-Reaching Austerity.” I took it, and then hurried out of the pathway. The towers and terraces up in the air were even more formidable, layering against one another like hills and mountain peaks. On silver bridges were chariots laden with brocade, and there were many immortals commuting back and forth on phoenixes. I then saw lamp lights glittering in such splendor unrivaled at any Lantern Festivals. Yet the Far-Reaching Austerity was nowhere to be found. One person led me to head toward the southeast. After passing several layers of damask screens, he finally said this was the place. When I raised my head, what I saw was even more splendid than before. Several desks stood in lines all equipped with books and fine vessels. Those who were reading by the desks were gentlemen wearing official caps or soft caps and informal gowns—all tall and

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imposing like figures in old paintings. My deceased father was in the first row, … but I did not recognize the rest of them. 先是四夕, 恍惚夢入朝, 又似在王府內苑. 初在堂上, 見百戲競陳, 歌吹雜作, 冠裳紈綺如雲如霧. 予徬徨無坐處, 甚類少年就試掣籤時. 遲疑間遂果有授 以一籤者, 籤上書「威遠第十七號」. 予接得乃自甬道趨出. 空中樓臺愈奇, 重巒疊嶂, 銀橋綵輿, 仙人乘鸞鵠往來者甚眾. 又見燈火燦爛, 為元宵未有 之盛, 而威遠號茫無從覓. 一人導予向東南行, 過錦屏數重, 始謂是矣. 舉頭 所見更絢麗于前. 其地列數桌, 桌上皆有書冊器玩. 據桌披閱者或冠紳或角 巾深衣, 一一魁岸雄俊, 儼古畫圖中人物. 前一行為先君…餘人皆不相識.50

The dream starts with the self in a royal setting in front of a lavish performance feeling out of place because of the lack of seating. The uneasiness felt prompts the dreaming subject to revisit his memory as a fidgeting youngster participating in the local exam. This emotional memory is so deeply entangled with its physical surroundings that it evokes the material presence of the place in the subject’s anticipation at the civil service exam site, as he receives a stick that designates the section “Far-Reaching Austerity” where he is to take the exam. On his way to look for this examination slot, the self finds himself in a place full of immortals. But the subject continues his search disregarding the spectacle—even an extravaganza of lantern display does not keep him from seeking the place. When the self finally reaches his destiny with the help from another, he finds the scene in front of him “more splendid” than all of the spectacles he had encountered so far (i.e. the boisterous royal mansion, the realm of the immortals, and dazzling lantern displays). What lends splendor to this place is the cultural capital associated with a community of scholars surrounded by desks that display fine books and vessels. While this seems to be a scene lifted from memory—the scholar-officials in formal and informal attire resemble those who typically figure in ancient paintings, the presence of Xue Cai’s deceased father adds to this scene a sense of home-­ coming. Interestingly, the dream subject refrains from articulating whether he has found his place and the record of the dream conveniently ends without any commitment of the body for having found the place. Driven by the subject’s attempt to ease his anxiety, the quest proffers, in spatial terms, several possible existential choices, none of which the body claims as home. In both records, the physical body anchors the dreaming subject’s perceived physical locations as seat of emotions that fuse memories of the past

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and present, whether it is fidgeting in anticipation of the civil service exam or feeling ashamed in the ancestral hall. Such ambiguous emotions also trigger the movement of the body as it escapes from the ancestral hall or presses ahead in search of an examination slot. Eventually, it is the failure of finding a place the body can identify as home that characterizes these recollected dreams. The dreamscape therefore brings to the fore the problem of the public and social place the dreaming subject feels bereft of.

Concluding Remarks As we have seen, recollections through dreams open up an alternative narrative space for Xue Cai to explore different facets of emotional experiences as he responds to the deteriorating local socio-political order. In these recorded dreams, the seemingly confused and random procession through time and space allows the subject to explore complex and private emotional episodes that remain unspoken in the public discourse of his waking hours. The recurring motif of the subject’s feeling anxious about not belonging, as well as the pursuit of a place in which the body can comfortably fit, makes it difficult to decide, in the end, if these are real manifestations of his psyche or carefully crafted literary representations. Indeed, the impossibility of solid interpretations, eventually, may very well be what prompted Xue Cai to record his dreams alongside with day-time ruminations—he can examine his emotional state while maintaining a sense of ambiguity. It is exactly in this spirit that we see one of the last dreams recorded before Xue Cai took the Buddhist tonsure to hide in the mountains in 1646. In the twenty-fourth evening of the last month (yiyou year, early 1646), I dreamt of heading east of the country villa, where I suddenly found the streets neat and broad, exactly the looks of the Southern Capital. Under the hanging willows fragrant chariots came and went, with canopies erected above saddled horses just like how things were in past years of peace. At the time I heard that my paternal uncle Zixuan had passed the provincial exam. Did this dream come from something I was thinking about or because of some exterior cause? 臘月二十四夕, 夢自鄉居東行, 街衢忽整闊, 儼然南都風景. 垂楊下香車往來, 鞍籠掌扇, 猶當年太平事耳. 時聞子鉉叔中舉, 想耶因耶?51

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This dream unfolds with a scene of metamorphosis: Xue Cai was at his country villa when he found his surroundings evocative of Nanjing—the southern capital of the Ming and the recently sacked capital of the Hongguang court—with such uncanny resemblance that the dreaming subject felt as if he had been transported to the southern capital, now restored to its full splendor in peaceful days with chariots carrying beautiful courtesans coming and going along a road flanked by hanging willows. The waking consciousness interprets such a scene in the context of the civil service examination held by the second rump Ming regime, the Longwu court at the end of the yiyou year (early 1646). The sense of order related to the reinstitution of the exam and the promise of a regular path to upper social mobility for Confucian scholars in the dream assumed the form of broad streets that came to define the southern capital. While the dream subject seems to have simply returned to a simulacrum of the past, Xue Cai, via his representation of the dream as an account of his memory, then ponders whether such a scenery of order and free movement is an extension of his own hopeful thinking, brought on by uplifting news regarding the Longwu court or a providential sign that the second rump Ming court will restore the land lost to the Manchus. The dream resists any interpretive enclosure to shed light on ways in which the alternative interpretations provide a fruitful ground on which Xue Cai can muse about a range of possibilities without having to make any specific commitment to their meaning. What forms the bridge between dreams and wakefulness in these representations are bodily sensations that the mind registers as real whether they are felt in waking life or in the imagined body of the dream—the mind treats them the same. Here is where the body as a mediating figure plays an important role for our understanding of Xue Cai’s experience during the Manchu conquest. As seat of both perception and being, the body figures in recollected dreams as a trigger that unleash various sets of complex emotional experiences. It also intuitively engages its own memories of proprioception in dreamed spaces to bring the past unbidden into the present. The self reconfigured in recollected dreams therefore gains a temporal-spatial depth that allows us to understand the range of pressures brought to bear on the literati experience of the Manchu conquest of China. Xue Cai’s dream records, as we have seen, are just as deliberately monitored as his ruminations from day times. Such a high level of self-­awareness points toward the nature of writings as a means of cultivation of the self as a social and moral person, a process defined as the “Confucian’s progress”

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in Pei-Yi Wu’s seminal study.52 The crisis of the Manchu conquest has further compounded existential questions of the Confucian person, leading to the wide spectrum of authorial presence in the rich body of “ego-­ documents” from the seventeenth century.53 Xue Cai has shown us how the self emerges from written texts as cultural and social constructs, both as an orphaned official commenting on worldly affairs in his waking hours and as a dreaming subject beset by a range of ambiguous emotions in search of a place of belonging. Yet the underlying principles that structure both sets of experiences remain bound by social institutions such as the civil service exam and the local lineage. In this sense, even when he was keeping a private journal, Xue Cai was also participating in an imagined community of Confucian scholars who shared his belief in ritual propriety and political legitimacy. Recorded dreams allowed the subjective self to voice deeply ambiguous feelings and emotions, yet eventually the subjective self, both awake and in the dream, participates in this communal sense of architecting a Confucian Culture of Ours.

Notes 1. Frederic Wakeman, The Great Enterprise: The Manchu Reconstruction of Imperial Order in Seventeenth-Century China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), p. 55. 2. For a detailed discussion on the rise of Nurhaci and the military expansion of Manchu forces in the north, see Wakeman, The Great Enterprise, pp. 49–82. 3. For details on regional differences regarding the Manchu conquest, see Wakeman, The Great Enterprise, pp. 436–47 and 646–50. 4. For details on the various existential choices Chinese literary men had to make during the conquest period, see Wai-yee Li, “Introduction,” in Trauma and Transcendence in Early Qing Literature, edited by Wilt Idema, Wai-yee Li, and Ellen Widmer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2006), pp. 1–70. 5. For more details, see note ten of Lynn Struve, “Dreaming and Self-search during the Ming Collapse: The Xue Xiemeng Biji, 1642–1646,” T’oung Pao 93 (2007): 163. For a detailed introduction of Xue Cai’s life before 1642, see Lynn Struve, “Ancestor Édité in Republican China: The Shuffled Journal of Xue Cai (1595–1665),” East Asian Library Journal 13.1 (Spring 2008): 37–38. 6. The journal remained in manuscript form preserved by patrilineal descendants until it was first printed in two volumes (I will divide them as A and B) in 1939 in a lithograph edition under the name Jottings by Master Xue

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Xiemeng (Xue Xiemeng xiansheng biji 薛諧孟先生筆記) with a postscript by the editor Xue Tao 薛弢 (fl. 1930s) dated 1927. For a detailed discussion of Xue Cai’s legacy in the Qing Dynasty, the preservation of his manuscript, and the printing endeavors of his descendants, see Struve, “Ancestor Édité,” pp. 46–50. All citations in this paper are from a copy of this lithograph edition preserved in the National Library of China in Beijing. 7. For a detailed discussion of the struggles of the Longwu court, see Lynn Struve, The Southern Ming, pp. 1644–1662 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), pp. 75–97. 8. For a discussion of the late Ming fascination with dreams as a literary device, see Judith Zeitlin, Historian of the Strange: Pu Songling and the Chinese Classical Tale (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1993), pp. 135–40. 9. One good example is Tang Xianzu’s 湯顯祖 (1550–1616) southern chuanqi play The Peony Pavilion (Mudan ting 牡丹亭), in which the playwright uses the dream as a device to explore the rhetorical potentials of affect and identity. For an insightful study of the play from this perspective, see Tina Lu, Persons, Roles, and Minds: Identity in Peony Pavilion and Peach Blossom Fan (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2001), pp. 19–141. 10. A 1636 compendium, An Explication of the Profundities in the Forest of Dreams (Menglin xuanjie 夢林玄解), for example, catalogues and organizes nearly 5000 dream samples grouped under various techniques of deciphering. For a study of this massive encyclopedia, see Brigid E. Vance, “Textualizing Dreams in a Late Ming Dream Encyclopedia” (PhD Dissertation, Princeton University, 2012). Also see idem, “Exorcising Dreams and Nightmares in Late Ming China,” in Psychiatry and Chinese History, edited by Howard Chiang (London: Pickering & Chatto Ltd., 2014), pp. 17–36. 11. The first dream was about finding out that the new top civil service examination candidate was a close associate and the second was about attending his son’s wedding ceremony. I will discuss these in more detail. 12. The entry was recorded on the twenty-fifth day of the fifth month, the yiyou year (1645). Jottings, A.39a. 13. “The two dreams that Tianshi had in which he slew a snake and [saw] a dancing phoenix are certainly auspicious signs that it is fitting to see restoration,” 夫天石二夢斬蛇舞鳳, 固中興利見吉兆. Eighteenth day of the run sixth month, yiyou year (1645). Jottings, B.3b. The phrase lijian 利見 comes from the line judgment of the fifth yang in the Qian乾hexagram: “When a flying dragon is in the sky, it is fitting to see the great man,” 飛龍 在天, 利見大人. For the translation, see Richard Lynn, trans., The Classic of Changes: a New Translation of the I Ching as Interpreted by Wang Bi (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 137.

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14. See “Basic Annals of Gaozu” (“Gaozu benji” 高祖本紀) of Sima Qian’s 司 馬遷 (145–87  BCE) Records of the Grand Historian (Shiji 史記). Sima Qian, Shiji (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1959), juan 8, p. 347. 15. “The ‘Shao’ music of the panpipes is played in nine movements. The phoenixes come and arrive,” 蕭韶九成, 鳳皇來儀. Sun Xingyan 孫星衍 (1753–1818), The Current and Old Scripts of The Classic of Documents with Annotations (Shangshu jin gu wen zhushu 尚書今古文注疏), punctuated and collated by Chen Kang 陳抗 and Sheng Dongling 盛冬鈴 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1986), juan 2, p. 130. Translation from David Knechtges, trans. and annotated, Wen xuan or Selections of Refined Literature, Volume Three (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), p. 100. 16. One of the many stock references to successful examination candidates. 17. A reference to the parade that celebrates top examination candidates. 18. Jottings, A.39b. 19. Jottings, A.37b. In the dream he had this night, Xue is in the middle of a casual chat at his country abode when earth-shattering noises break out accompanied by flying debris of a busted city wall and flocks of war victims fleeing for life. 20. Recorded on the thirteenth day of the ninth month, yiyou year (1645). Jottings, B.10a. 21. Struve, “Dreaming and Self-search,” 164. While my research on Xue Cai’s journal is much indebted to Lynn Struve’s pioneering work, I depart from her argument that the text substantiates the conquest generation’s alienation from the Confucian culture. 22. Jottings, A.16b–17b. 23. The story first appears in Li Ying’s 李膺 (110–169) Gazetteer of Shu (Shuzhi 蜀志) and was broadly anthologized in compendia from late imperial China, such as Tao Zongyi’s 陶宗儀 (1329–1410) Environs of Fiction (Shuofu 説郛, Siku quanshu edition), juan 107, 9a–b. 24. Jottings, A.17b. 25. This comment concludes Xue’s diary entry on the fourteenth day of the run sixth month in the yiyou year (1645). Jottings, B.1b. 26. Jottings, A.43b. There is a spot left vacant before the word “hat,” likely as a self-censoring act of excising a taboo character. 27. Second day of the eighth month, jiashen year (1644). Jottings, A.32a. 28. This record comes from the thirteenth day of the sixth month, yiyou year (1645). Jottings, A.44b. 29. Eighth day of the seventh month, yiyou year (1645). Jottings, B.5b–6a. 30. Eighteenth day of the eighth month, yiyou year (1645). Jottings, B.7b. 31. For a book-length investigation of the shaping of Chineseness and barbarism under the discourse of ethnocentric moralism in medieval China, see Shao-yun Yang, The Way of the Barbarians (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2019).

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32. Sixth day of the ninth month, yiyou year (1645). Jottings, B.9b–10a. 33. Twenty-first day of the twelfth month, yiyou year (early 1646). Jottings, B.11b. 34. These private emotions are “sites of emotional negativity” that Sianne Ngai identifies to be “ugly feelings,” feelings that are weak in intent (hence less object- or goal-directed) and less narratively furnished. In Ngai’s discussion, ugly feelings (e.g. envy, anxiety, paranoia, and irritation) acquire a colloquial status as opposed to aesthetic emotions that are moral and cathartic (e.g. sympathy and shame) and hence closely connected to action. Being politically ambiguous, these ugly feelings can therefore broaden the range of socio-historical dilemmas they can be used to interpret. Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005), pp. 1, 3, 7, 26. 35. Jottings, A.38b. 36. The nine cauldrons is a stock reference to an imperial ruler’s claim to political legitimacy, so it also symbolizes the empire at large. 37. Such a precise recollection of the couplet may invite the reading of Xue’s dream account as a literary fabrication. However, as Lynn Struve has noted when discussing “authorial dreams” (lexico-compositional elements in literati dream reports): “During Ming times, poems that purportedly were written entirely in a dream, that were composed around a word or phrase derived from a dream, or that were ‘completed’ from fragments remembered from a dream became common fare in the collected works of literati and remained so through the Qing period.” Lynn A. Struve, The Dreaming Mind and the End of the Ming World (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2019), p. 44. 38. Jottings, A.38b. 39. Jottings, A.38b. 40. Recorded on the twenty-ninth day of the fourth month, yiyou year (1645), Jottings, A.38a–b. 41. For Xue Cai’s comment in the journal, see Jottings, A.36a–b. The trial of the imposter was considered by contemporaries as a most telling example of the political chaos that beset the Southern Ming court. The trial instigated Zuo Liangyu’s 左良玉 (1599–1645) revolt in the name of cleansing the court of pernicious influences. As the southern court deployed military resources to suppress Zuo’s force, the Manchu army in the north was literally left free to cross the Yangtze River. 42. “Nine Debates” is included in the corpus of the Chu songs attributed to Song Yu 宋玉 (ca. 298–ca. 222 BCE). 43. It could, of course, be a double irony that Zhou Yanru himself was accused by other, equally self-interested officials and consequently fell out of the imperial favor.

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44. Here I am using Edward Casey’s definition of habitual body memory as “an active immanence of the past in the body that informs present bodily actions in an efficacious, orienting, and regular manner.” Edward S. Casey, Remembering: A Phenomenological Study, Second Edition (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2000), p. 149. I find the phenomenological approach to experience as “various modes through which a person knows and constructs a reality” pertinent here, as it goes beyond the Cartesian duality of the body and mind to accentuate the role of the body in mediating self-experience in the process of recollection. Yi-fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977), p. 8. 45. The term “a feather exemplar” (yuyi 羽儀) comes from the line judgment of top yang of the jian 漸 hexagram (53): “The wild goose gradually advances to the highland. Its feathers can be used as a model, for they mean good fortune” 鴻漸於阿, 其羽可用為儀. Translation from Lynn, The Classic of Changes, p. 477. 46. This is Xue Cai’s granduncle Xue Fuzheng 薛敷政 (jinshi 1607). 47. Jottings, A.34a–b. 48. Lynn Struve notes that the small hole implies that Xue cannot meet his ancestor’s stringent standard. Struve, “Dreaming and Self-search,” 175. 49. Prince Zhou is Zhu Youdun 朱有燉 (1379–1439), whose Enfeoffment was in Kaifeng and whose posthumous name was Prince Xian of Zhou. My gratitude to Stephen H. West for bringing this detail to my attention. 50. Jottings, A.36b–37a. 51. Jottings, B.11b. 52. Pei-Yi Wu, The Confucian’s Progress: Autobiographical Writings in Traditional China (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990). 53. Lynn Struve, “Chimerical Early Modernity: The Case of ‘Conquest-­ Generation’ Memoirs,” in idem, edited, The Qing Formation in World-­ Historical Time (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2004), pp. 339–47.

Bibliography Casey, Edward S. Remembering: a Phenomenological Study, Second Edition. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2000. Knechtges, David, trans. and annotated. Wen Xuan or Selections of Refined Literature, Volume Three. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996. Li, Wai-yee. “Introduction.” In Trauma and Transcendence in Early Qing Literature. Edited by Wilt Idema, Wai-yee Li, and Ellen Widmer, pp.  1–70. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2006.

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Lu, Tina. Persons, Roles, and Minds: Identity in Peony Pavilion and Peach Blossom Fan. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001. Lynn, Richard, trans. The Classic of Changes. New  York: Columbia University Press, 1994. Ngai, Sianne. Ugly Feelings. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005. Struve, Lynn A. The Dreaming Mind and the End of the Ming World. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2019. ———. “Ancestor Édité in Republican China: The Shuffled Journal of Xue Cai (1595–1665).” East Asian Library Journal 13.1 (Spring 2008): 33–65. ———. “Dreaming and Self-search during the Ming Collapse: The Xue Xiemeng Biji, 1642–1646.” T’oung Pao 93 (2007): 159–192. ———. “Chimerical Early Modernity: The Case of ‘Conquest-Generation’ Memoirs.” In The Qing Formation in World-Historical Time. Edited by Lynn Struve, 335–72. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2004. ———. The Southern Ming, 1644–1662. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984. Sima Qian 司馬遷 (145–87 BCE). Shiji 史記 (Records of the Grand Historian). Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1959. Sun Xingyan 孫星衍 (1753–1818). Shangshu jin gu wen zhushu 尚書今古文注疏 (The Current and Old Scripts of The Classic of Documents with Annotations). Punctuated and collated by Chen Kang 陳抗 and Sheng Dongling 盛冬鈴. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1986. Tao Zongyi 陶宗儀 (1329–1410). Shuo fu 說郛 (Environs of Fiction). Siku quanshu edition, vols. 876–882. Tuan, Yi-fu. Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977. Vance, Brigid E. “Exorcising Dreams and Nightmares in Late Ming China.” In Psychiatry and Chinese History. Edited by Howard Chiang, pp. 17–36. London: Pickering & Chatto Ltd, 2014. ———. “Textualizing Dreams in a Late Ming Dream Encyclopedia.” Ph.D. Dissertation, Princeton University, 2012. Wakeman, Frederic. The Great Enterprise: The Manchu Reconstruction of Imperial Order in Seventeenth-century China. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985. Wu, Pei-Yi. The Confucian’s Progress: Autobiographical Writings in Traditional China. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990. Xue Cai 薛寀 (1595–1665). Xue Xiemeng biji 薛諧孟筆記 (Jottings by Master Xue Xiemeng). Edited by Xue Tao 薛弢 (fl. 1930s). Lithograph, 1927 (National Library of China). Yang, Shao-yun. The Way of the Barbarians. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2019. Zeitlin, Judith. Historian of the Strange: Pu Songling and the Chinese Classical Tale. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993.

PART V

Personal Memoirs: From Elite to Popular Expressions

Emotions in the Face of Silence in the Memoir of 1805: The Memoirs of Lady Hyegyo ̆ng. The Autobiographical Writings of a Crown Princess of Eighteenth-Century Korea Marie-Paule de Weerdt-Pilorge

“The tragedy of the imo year (1762) is unparalleled,”1 and “The calamity of the imo year (1762) was unprecedented in history,”2 these are the words that open and close the Memoir of 1805, in which Lady Hyegyŏng narrates the terrible story of how her husband, Prince Sado, to follow the orders of his father, King Yŏngjo, was forced to climb into a rice chest where he would stay locked up until his death eight days later.3 Emotions most certainly run high in this text, one in a series of four Memoirs. The Memoir of 1795 attempts to justify the survival of Lady Hyegyŏng after the death of

M.-P. de Weerdt-Pilorge (*) University of Tours, Tours, France Saint-Ouen Les Vignes, France e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Stefanovska et al. (eds.), Emotions in Non-Fictional Representations of the Individual, 1600–1850, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84005-1_9

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Sado by recounting her happy childhood and her arrival at the Chosŏn court in the eighteenth century; the Memoir of 1801 defends her youngest brother, a Catholic convert, and her paternal uncle, who were both executed;4 and the Memoir of 1802 concerns the reactions of Prince Chŏngjo, the son of Sado, after the death of his father and details Lady Hyegyŏng’s attempts to restore their family’s honor. The extraordinary impact of the Memoir of 1805 and its continued fame in Korea are not just due to the remarkable nature of the death it describes or to the unnamable emotions it elicits in the reader through its extreme (and frankly unbearable) tension. It is true that this Memoir, which is written in Korean, is more accessible to modern readers than other masculine chronicles of its time, which were produced in literary Chinese. But what makes it unique and remarkable is that in East Asia, there are very few female autobiographies, and the ones we have are generally focused on the private sphere. In eighteenthcentury France, for example, there is a separation between a female writing of the intimate self that is in the process of being invented,5 and the domain of historiography, which had always been open to men, notably through memoir writing. Important exceptions to this are, of course, the works by the marquise de La Rochejaquelein and Mme Roland, who both lived through the upheaval and political events of the revolutionary period, and who do take on the terrain of history. However, in a certain sense, these women move to this new territory and abandon their feminine prerogative partly because of the events. But the Memoir of Lady Hyegyŏng infringes upon masculine territory in another way, because it sheds light on dynastic history (and therefore on history in general) though it is a private, familial drama. As Jahyun Kim Haboush, who translated the Memoir into English, puts it, “That a woman would narrate a royal filicide, the most public of incidents that can be only described as the ultimate in male power rivalry, makes Lady Hyegyŏng’s memoirs unique in autobiographical literature.”6 Moreover, the Memoir of 1805 competes with official historiography, which is for the most part silent about this event. Lady Hyegyŏng presents herself as an irreplaceable witness, the only person who can possibly maintain dynastic order and deliver history to her grandson in all its complexity. This text’s horizon contains the profiles of a culture that is unique to the Chosŏn court and of a Confucian ethic, which both profoundly nourish the chronicle and configure a norm in which the text inscribes its specificity. How does factual writing play with ongoing social norms? How does the narrative composition of this tragic and

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painful event—how, in particular, do the emotions of the narrator—allow Lady Hyegyŏng to construct an identity of her own in the face of silence and the unspeakable, in the face of human tragedy?

Silence and the Unspeakable This Memoir, titled “Records Written in Silence” or “Memoirs Written in Silence” in Korean, sets out to break the silence that weighs on this gruesome tragedy and, with this act, to lift certain censures. The narration begins with the destruction of royal records of the event under the express orders of King Chŏngjo, Sado’s own son.7 These orders are proof of his filial affection, as the memorialist emphasizes, but certainly also of his desire to preserve the dynastic security of the Chosŏn court. That is to say, even at the heart of her own family, Lady Hyegyŏng writes with imperatives that largely transcend her private interests. She also uses her narrative to counter different rumors that have brought political troubles regarding which, for the most part, she keeps silent, preferring to focus her narrative on a drama that appears private at first glance. She only evokes these rumors at the outset of the text: some suggest that Sado was not sick at all, but that King Yŏngjo, his father, must have taken these extreme measures because Sado slandered the king (he committed a capital offense). Other rumors suggest that the king was not the author of this scandal, but that his officials committed the act. At the end of the text, she returns to two versions of the story. In the first version, Sado is a criminal that his father eliminated as one would eliminate a public enemy; “In this case, what would become of Prince Sado and where would this leave the late King, his son?”8 In the second version, Sado was not ill and the king did hear his son slander him, so “Of what malfeasance does this accuse His Late Majesty?”9 These two questions express reticence through their grammatical construction; the narrator uses questions so as not to completely reject the innumerable consequences we might draw from her account. Between the father and the son, or in other words, between her father-in-law and her husband, Lady Hyegyŏng’s dilemma is terrible and not exclusively familial. On the one hand, the King might solely be concerned with maintaining order in his kingdom and the security of his dynasty without any humane feelings for his son. On the other hand, Sado might be a criminal who, forgetting his filial sentiments, would, in this case, tarnish his whole lineage. Through her narration, Lady Hyegyŏng reestablishes truth and raises the veil covering these treacherous rumors. In this way, she opposes

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royal and dynastic censure as well as court censure.10 It is to these heavy silences, to these insidiously circulated rumors that she must respond. After all, if she is attached to her husband by natural and dynastic ties, then she is even more indebted to her father-in-law, the King, for her status and her life. Throughout her text, she aims to end the self-censorship that weighs heavily on her. Indeed, in Confucian culture with a grand part of patriarchy and patrilineality, filiality is the determining foundation not only of the family but also of society to the extent that a harmonious family contributes to social and transcendental harmony. In late Chosŏn Korea, filial duty is still extremely important. A daughter is indebted to her parents and, as soon as she marries, she becomes indebted to her parents-­ in-­law. This is the principle of which Madam Yi reminds her daughter, Lady Hyegyŏng, when she marries: “Your Ladyship’s duty requires that you ever more exert filial devotion [to the elders of your new family]. That is the best way to serve your natal family,”11 The young woman will not forget her mother’s advice, and through her whole chronicle, she frequently recollects all that she owes to her father-in-law, especially after Sado’s death, after the King has her son’s entourage put to death, after he spares her life, and after she attempts suicide several times.12 Her account breaks a social and cultural taboo in a Chosŏn court rife with Confucianism. Written in the silence of a human culpability that does not know how to voice itself, the Memoir of 1805 is also written against an unbearable silence imposed by the court. By bearing witness to the inexorable tensions at the very heart of producing speech, it reduces a social pressure that nevertheless will not disappear completely. Of course, Prince Sado’s internment in a rice chest is named from the outset a “tragedy,”13 a “terrible end” or “the truly tragic death of a father and husband,” the “most cruel death by the gods of Heaven,”14 but it is also referred to with all manners of euphemisms, understatements or circumlocutions such as the “incident,”15 the “event,”16 or “an incident of such immense consequences.”17 But in reference to Sado, nothing is hidden with respect to his murderous madness (e.g., he cuts off a eunuch’s head and presents it at court), or to his “phobia of clothings,” a condition that leads him to repeatedly try on clothes and then beat or kill his servants if he is unable to find a suitable piece of clothing to wear. But sometimes Lady Hyegyŏng’s emotion is so strong, it arrives at such a point of saturation, that it goes beyond the mechanisms of language and cannot be expressed except through negation or a reluctance imbued with pathos. We see this, for example in references to the “phobia of clothings,” which drives Sado to acts of incredible violence: “I

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cannot begin to speak of the hardships and heartaches this terrible symptom wrought,”18 or “I cannot describe the anguish and helplessness that I felt. Suffice is to say that I longed for death so that I might pass into oblivion.”19 However, once Sado’s madness reaches such heights that he pronounces threats against the King himself, Lady Hyegyŏng holds herself back from exposing his intentions and shows all of her restraint: “I can hardly bring myself to write of it. Gripped by rage, the Prince ordered eunuchs and ladies-in-waiting to say truly unspeakable things. Frightened as they were for their lives, in lèse-majesté, they would shout these blasphemies at the top of their lungs.”20 In some ways, this is yet another silence that Lady Hyegyŏng encounters, the silence of an unsustainable emotion that recoils in horror before a story that, in its final terms, will put a father and son face-to-face, with the latter begging the King not to commit an irreparable act: “Father, Father. I have done wrong. Herewith, I will do everything you say, I will study, I will obey you in everything, I promise. Please do not do this to me.”21 Lady Hyegyŏng sees a world crumbling before her, and that is not a rhetorical device: “[…] the sky and the earth seemed to come together; the sun seemed to be losing light, and everything went dark. I had no desire to linger in this world for even one more second.”22 At the same time that she wants to put an end to her life, the drama of filial devotion focuses on the end of a symbolic world from a Confucian perspective. Thus, the narrative confronts two unspeakable things: a tragic death and an indescribable emotion, which still communicates its chilling horror and unfailing resonance even in silence. This Memoir, written in silence but against a deceptive silence, leaves emotion hanging as if on the edge of an abyss: the unspeakable.

The Human Drama The unspeakable nevertheless takes on the qualities of a family drama:23 it is, in effect, his father’s rejection of him as a child and then as a young man that will lead Sado to madness. The separation of the child from his parents brings about an inescapable catastrophe: “Small mishaps grew into catastrophic problems, and finally they became unspeakable horrors.”24 The steady, predictable buildup in the story will only get worse: Sado is entrusted to odious ladies-in-waiting, including Palace Matron Han who initiates him in martial arts: “One shudders to think of the havoc that Han woman wreaked.”25 Even when young Sado becomes the regent, an administrative duty that gives him certain responsibilities, his father does

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not stop reproaching him, humiliating him in public. He never invites his son to any festivities nor to very important visits to ancestors’ tombs, and, for example, he accuses the prince of drinking and admonishes him to the point that Sado takes the blame for a wrong he did not commit. Submitted in this way to perpetual psychological mistreatment, manifestations of indifference or hatred, the young prince, terrified, remains prostrate before his father throughout violent scenes. It is also true that the court rituals do not leave much space for expressing personal sentiments, as Lady Hyegyŏng points out: “When I came into the palace, I was struck by the strictness of life at court. […] Laws were severe and rituals elaborate, with no allowance for private sentiment.” The child, for example, sits before his father “in a prostrate position just as the officials did. I thought this extreme.”26 Little by little, the Prince sinks into madness: hallucinations, “phobia of clothings,” countless assassinations of eunuchs or of “ladies-in-­ waiting,”27 acts of violence against the members of his own family, including threatening the King himself, such are the terrible symptoms of his alienation, which is nothing more than lovelessness. The temporal progression of the narration of this drama narrows progressively as one approaches the end of the story. It seems that this tragedy is focused essentially on the relationship between father and son, even while Sado receives the support of his father-in-law and the tender and discreet concern of his wife who cannot do anything to intervene with royal authority. This support, which the narrator mentions in analepses, is ultimately incapable of slowing the inevitable progression toward death. A case in point is the passing of Sado’s grandmother, which gives the memorialist an occasion to revisit the tender affection and concern that Queen Dowager Inwŏn felt for her grandson and showed through some delicate acts of kindness. Likewise, an analepsis suggests that the palace quarrels could have inflamed the father-son relationship. In 1751, the king falls in love with his lady-in-­ waiting, a woman named Mun, and has a child with her. The entire Mun clan, including the brother Mun Sŏnkkug, “a cunning and vile creature”28 drunk on power, is against Sado. Mun Sŏnkkug observes Sado’s acts and gestures and reports them to the King, who then grows even more suspicious of his son: “It was the misfortune of the nation that such a cunning woman and such a scheming thief achieved power.”29 These analepses, which are just as numerous as the parentheses in this ineluctable chronology, emphasize a narrative recomposition that accentuates the infernal tête-à-tête and leads us to fear a patricide when the story actually ends in an infanticide. Nevertheless, for Lady Hyegyŏng, the point is not to blame

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anyone in particular in an all too human attempt to refer to this tragedy’s underlying psychological motives. She reminds her grandson Sunjo, to whom she offers this Memoir, of the intangible principle according to which one must read the chronicle: “To denounce His Late Majesty King Yŏngjo, insisting that Prince Sado was not ill, or to blame the ministers of state for the incident, will only distort the truth, failing to do justice to His late Majesty, to Prince Sado, or to the late King. If one understands this basic principle, it is not too difficult to be just to all concerned.”30 Moreover, time and again over the course of the Memoir, she explains the immense virtues of Sado. He is intelligent, full of humanity, of familial piety and filial devotion, as long as he is not in the throes of his terrible sickness. And the King is distinguished by “filial devotion to his parents, the proper service of his ancestors, reverence for Heaven, and concern with the welfare of the people,”31 all while being obligated to face the political problems that she evokes very quickly. Without being able to explain it, the memorialist records a significant paradox in the king who, while he is meticulous about details, can also become almost understanding when he learns of the murders his son commits. In any case and from either side, all of these virtues are quite real, and the memoirist attests to this again and again, as she maintains at any cost a fragile balance between familial ethic and social ethic, and keeps her sight set on the ideal of perfectibility at the core of the Confucian model.32

Fatality and Emotionality Nevertheless, the narrator’s fatalism and emotionalism punctuate the account repetitively, and even obsessively. From the beginning, the story is riddled with irrational elements that transcend the dimension of human feeling and give the entire account a fatalistic, tragic tone. Although “one might say that it is just the narrow and prejudiced view of a woman,” Prince Sado, as a child was placed in the Chŏsung Pavilion facing a place where Lady Chang “had practiced black magic to bring death to the saintly Queen Inhyŏn,”33 and when later, as an adult, he falls sick and loses consciousness, Lady Hyegyŏng consults diviners to understand the cause of his strange illness. In these cases, the response is always the same: “Chŏsung Pavilion was an inauspicious place […],” “I had prayers offered and incantations read to the gods and spirits to cleanse the place of evil influence (…).”34 Dreams also play a role in maintaining a dynastic connection between different heirs. While she is pregnant, Lady Hyegyŏng

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dreams of Sado’s deceased sister and later notices a blue mark on her newborn son’s shoulder and a red spot on his stomach. The king sees these marks as signs of his daughter’s reincarnation, while Sado dreams of a dragon, a good omen of the birth of a new son, which is considered a gift from the ancestors for the nation. But above all, the forced march toward catastrophe is regularly punctuated by curses directed toward destiny and toward the fatality that can only explain this drama, as the narrator’s oft-­ invoked emotions highlight her complete impotence as much as her extreme empathy. When the child is separated from his parents, she points to “his ill-starred fate, a predetermined misfortune for the nation; thus it was beyond human control. Yet my grief and bitterness are inestimable.”35 She remarks that because of their virtues, the father and the son could have made an effort to demonstrate that widely desired human perfectibility and come to a mutual understanding, but “Perhaps one should attribute this to the will of Heaven or to the nation’s fate, something beyond the control of human powers. Nevertheless, I can relive scene upon scene, each vividly alive, with pain deep in my heart. Writing of these things now, I am overcome by guilt, feeling that my descriptions might in some way cast a blemish on their virtue. But I cannot withhold the truth. Filling each page places a great weight upon my chest.”36 And all the human behaviors that refer to the tragedy (like the submission of the son to the father to the point of admitting wrongs that he has not committed) find their justification in destiny: “Oh, bitterness! It was so strange! Whatever His Majesty suspected and accused him of doing, he would invariably do just that. This happened so consistently that it seemed that Heaven was making him to do it all.”37 Sado appears happy and fully confident when he is invited to the seventieth birthday of the dowager queen, a sign that if his father, the king, had shown some respect or regard for his son, maybe nothing would have happened. “Some unknown forces seem to have been driving father and son apart, however. They seemed to act toward each other almost against their wills. What can I attribute this to but Heaven? Oh! Cruelty!” In short, destiny completely invalidates any other narrative trajectory and rejects any other outcome as impossible. When Sado decides to leave the royal palace and obtains authorization thanks to his sister’s intercession on his behalf, the narrator asks if his sister might have moved things toward a different outcome. But she goes on to remark, “Things came of the will of Heaven and it was Heaven that brought forth this situation.”38 This drama, then, is not human, it is the product of a destiny that hounds this dynasty so relentlessly that the

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narrator turns to a different dimension. In this way, she portrays the actors in this story as innocent. She gives them virtues, dignity and honor, and she works to reestablish dynastic filiation between different members of the lineage. With respect to emotions, they will play the same role across different generations, like a kind of compensatory salve. The sorrow of the narrator, her pain, her suffering, her harrowing curses, her pathetic exclamations, the constant terror she experienced when Sado was alive, the aborted suicide attempts after her husband’s death, all give life and physicality to a drama that previously seemed disembodied. Thus, she writes, “My heart and my blood are in this record. While I wrote it, the pain and terror returned. My heart grew heavy, my spirits fled in fright, and my innards felt as if punctured. For each character, a tear fell; because of these tears, characters could not be completed and because of these wasted characters, sheets of paper were spoiled. Can there be another such as me in this wild world? Ah! Grief and sorrow.”39 One could explain these recurrent addresses to cruel fatality and to unbearable emotions as an attempt to alleviate the accusations that she brings against a father who is indifferent to his son, in a similar way that describing the virtues and positive qualities of King Yŏngjo and Prince Sado are an attempt to mitigate the cruelty of the family drama. In this sense, Lady Hyegyŏng stays faithful to the Confucian ethic, to the filial devotion that she owes her father-in-law according to tradition and even more so after Sado’s death. But that strange and painful threnody, at once unbearable and inexplicable, transforms the historical into a personal drama in which pain is personified and made flesh. The text expresses a purification of pain and sorrow, feelings that are certainly personal but that also refer to a common destiny to which she remains tied. Lady Hyegyŏng repeatedly trespasses into an emotional terrain shaped by official bans, but she does this not in what one might call “the Western sense,” by creating a space of intimacy, but in a Confucian sense by using filial devotion to maintain a fragile equilibrium. She makes the inhuman human and the unintelligible intelligible. Consequently, she expresses emotions at the cost of dwelling on events to the point of exhaustion, and this tradeoff becomes the main vector between an inhuman explanation and an overly human explanation. Lady Hyegyŏng brings out the humanity in the coldness and stiffness of an indifferent father and in the ecstatic prostration of a son who is subject to and terrorized by paternal authority. And while the humanity Lady Hyegyŏng crafts is powerless, it is also infinitely compassionate, so much

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so that it symbolically and posthumously offers Sado the sentiments, emotions, and affection that he has always longed for. The Memoir of 1805 appears as a symbolic compensation for a perpetually unfulfilled lack. It is more than just the unconventional testimony of the person who has lived this infernal descent the most closely. Lady Hyegyŏng uses narrative recreation to craft a commemorative monument (i.e., in the Confucian sense, a moment of homage to the ancestors) that she places at the feet of her grandson. What was once forbidden to Prince Sado, that is, visiting the tombs of ancestors as a demonstration of familial and filial piety, is now possible for the grandson thanks to Lady Hyegyŏng. From this moment on, he can conserve a filial tie with his grandfather through the text. The Memoir symbolically reestablishes an intergenerational link. The unheard of and the unspeakable become audible and speakable once more. The Memoir of 1805 is a drama that focuses closely on familial questions, especially on the duel between a father and son, and that partially excludes political quarrels in the court and the nation. The memoir personifies a drama of solitude in which Sado suffers a voluntary exclusion by his father and a familial exclusion from the perspective of the narrative recomposition. Those who attempt to help the young man in the grips of a destructive illness are confined to the account’s peripheries. The Memoir is also a drama about powerlessness, particularly the powerlessness of Lady Hyegyŏng, who is the astonished witness of that fight to the death. Her relative disengagement as the action unfolds and her refusal to name any guilty parties can be understood according to a Confucian ethic of modesty and of fidelity to filial and marital devotion, but this ethic does not completely conceal a culpability that cannot speak its name. In this factual narrative, emotions are far from being liberated. They mark the relentless cadence of a funereal march and an exacerbated lamentation. They remain largely conditioned by a curial and dynastic culture with its sights set on Sunjo, the grandson. The Memoir endeavors to present him with the truth while preserving familial honor. Emotions, therefore, are at the heart of the commemorative monument that is the Memoir of 1805; they sparkle like black diamonds in a memorial stone. EA 62 97 ICD (Interactions culturelles et discursives).

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Notes 1. Jahyun Kim Haboush (ed. and trans.), The Memoirs of Lady Hyegyo ̆ng. The autobiographical writings of a crown princess of eighteenth-century Korea, University of California Press, 1995, p. 241. All the references to this text will be given from this edition, under the simplified title, Memoirs of Lady Hyegyo ̆ng. 2. Ibid., p. 332. 3. The enclosure in a rice chest is a way of avoiding the appearance of a criminal execution. To understand this in more detail, see Jahyun Kim Haboush, ibid., p. 354, note 26. 4. For more on religious questions, see Charles Dallet, Histoire de l’Église de Corée, Paris, Librairie Victor Palmé, 2 volumes, 1874; James Huntly Grayson, Early Buddhism and Christianity in Korea, Leiden, Brill, 1985; Kim Chang-seok Thaddeus, Lives of 103 martyr Saints of Korea, Seoul, Catholic Publishing House, 1984. 5. Jean-Marie Goulemot, Littérales, “Tensions et contradictions de l’intime dans la pratique des Lumières,” 1995, n°17, p. 13–21. 6. Jahyun Kim Haboush, Creative Women of Korea: The Fifteenth Through the Twentieth Centuries, Young Key Kim Renaud, Routledge, “Private memory and public history: The memoirs of lady Hyegyong and testimonial literature,” 2015, p.  123. Jahyun Kim Haboush points out this idea in somewhat similar terns in the Introduction to the Memoirs of Lady Hyegyo ̆ng, op. cit., p. 5. 7. Haboush Jahyun Kim (ed. and transl.), The Memoirs of Lady Hyegyong. The Autobiographical Writings of a Crown Princess of Eighteenth-Century Korea (University of California Press, 1995), introduction, p. 2. In addition, a 1764 decree declares Chŏngjo, the son of Sado and Lady Hyegyŏng, “a posthumously adopted son of Prince Hyojang (1719–1728), the deceased older brother of Prince Sado,” in such a way that Sado’s tragic end does not tarnish his descendants. 8. Memoirs of Lady Hyegyo ̆ng, ibid., p. 335. 9. Ibid. 10. For a more precise analysis of Chosŏn’s court in the eighteenth century from a comparative perspective between the Orient and the Occident, see Laure Levet’s Témoignages, vie sociale et vie politique à la cour royale en France (fin XVIIe siècle-début XVIIIe siècle) et au Joseon (Corée, au début du XVIIIe siècle) au travers de Mémoires, a collection of research under the direction of Marie-Paule de Weerdt-Pilorge, University of Tours, 2013–2014. 11. Cited in Jahyun Kim Haboush, “Filial Emotions and Filial Values: Changing Patterns in The Discourse of Filiality in Late Chosŏn Korea,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, Vol. 55, No. 1 (Jun., 1995), p. 138.

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12. On the possibility of Lady Hyegyŏng’s suicide as a personal and social resolution of this drama, see Jahyun Kim Haboush’s conjectures, in his Introduction to Memoirs of Lady Hyegyo ̆ng, op.cit. p. 2. 13. Ibid., p. 241 et 245. 14. Ibid., p. 242. 15. For example, this term appears twice on page 241 and three times on page. 242. 16. Two appearances on page 241. 17. Ibid., p. 242. 18. Ibid., p. 281. 19. Ibid., pp. 282–283. 20. Ibid., p. 312. 21. Ibid., p. 321. 22. Ibid. 23. It is well understood that this family drama goes far beyond this initial framework because human relations in Chosŏn Korea are all determined by respect. Francis Macouin thus reminds us: “affection entre le père et le fils, justice entre le prince et le sujet, distinction entre le mari et la femme, gradation selon l’âge, fidélité entre amis. Leur respect assurait l’harmonie dans l’univers” [affection between father and son, justice between prince and subject, distinction between husband and wife, gradation according to age, fidelity among friends]. Francis Macouin, La Corée du Chosŏn, 1392–1896, Paris, Les Belles Lettres, 2009, p. 63. 24. Memoirs of Lady Hyegyo ̆ng, p. 244. 25. Ibid., p. 249. 26. Ibid., pp. 251–252. 27. For more on the constitution of the Court and its different members, see Shin Myung-ho, Joseon Royal Court Culture, Ceremonial and daily life, Dolbegae, 2004. 28. Memoirs of Lady Hyegyo ̆ng, p. 280. 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid., p. 243. 31. Ibid., p. 256. 32. Le Joseon, the name of Korea between 1392 and 1896, is from Confucian obedience in the eighteenth century. Dayez-Burgeon Pascal, Histoire de la Corée, des origines à nos jours, Tallandier, 2012. 33. Memoirs of Lady Hyegyo ̆ng, op.cit., p. 246. 34. Ibid., p. 252. 35. Ibid., p. 244. 36. Ibid., p. 259. 37. Ibid., p. 269. 38. Ibid., p. 297. 39. Ibid., p. 243.

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Bibliography Haboush Jahyun, Kim, ed. and trans., The Memoirs of Lady Hyegyo ̆ng. The autobiographical writings of a crown princess of eighteenth-century Korea, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1995. Chang-seok Thaddeus, Kim, Lives of 103 martyr Saints of Korea, Seoul, Catholic Publishing House, 1984. Dallet, Charles, Histoire de l’Église de Corée, Paris, Librairie Victor Palmé, 2 tomes, 1874. Dayez-Burgeon, Pascal, Histoire de la Corée, des origines à nos jours, Tallandier, 2012. Goulemot, Jean-Marie, Littérales, “Tensions et contradictions de l’intime dans la pratique des Lumières,” 1995, n°17, p. 13–21. Haboush, Jahyun Kim, “Filial Emotions and Filial Values: Changing Patterns in The Discourse of Filiality in Late Chosŏn Korea,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, Vol. 55, No. 1 (Jun., 1995). Haboush, Jahyun Kim, Creative Women of Korea: The Fifteenth Through the Twentieth Centuries, Young Key Kim Renaud, Routledge, « Private memory and public history: The memoirs of lady Hyegyong and testimonial literature », 2015. Huntly Grayson, James, Early Buddhism and Christianity in Korea, Leiden, Brill, 1985. Levet, Laure, Témoignages, vie sociale et vie politique à la cour royale en France (fin XVIIe siècle-début XVIIIe siècle) et au Joseon (Corée, au début du XVIIIe siècle) au travers de Mémoires, mémoire de recherche sous la direction de Marie-Paule de Weerdt-Pilorge, 2013–2014. Macouin, Francis, La Corée du Chosŏh, 1392–1896, Paris, Les Belles Lettres, 2009. Myung-ho, Shin, Joseon Royal Court Culture, Ceremonial and daily life, Dolbegae, 2004.

Hemlock and Hair Shirts: Class Mobility and the Emotional Habitus in the Mémoires of Valentin Jamerey-Duval Dorthea Fronsman-Cecil

As a literary genre that straddles the boundary between historical text and fiction, the autobiography presents a compelling, if sometimes confounding subject for scholars of more than one academic discipline. On the one hand, historians gauge their reliability as factual record and attempt to discern their social significance as commentary on their own era. On the other hand, literary scholars interpret autobiographies for their aesthetic features and attempt to find where they fit into movements in literary history. Memoirs of eighteenth-century France—an era in which memoirs as literary self-writing, rather than as accounts of one’s own role in history, were first becoming a common genre—must therefore be understood as “contested texts.” Since many of them were first studied, edited, and published by historians, questions about the nature of their representation of history continue to influence their reception. To examine these memoirs as literature, we must consider how their authors use literary strategies to

D. Fronsman-Cecil (*) Lafayette College, Easton, PA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Stefanovska et al. (eds.), Emotions in Non-Fictional Representations of the Individual, 1600–1850, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84005-1_10

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represent themselves not merely as persons, but also as individuals of their historical time whose personal and social subjectivities are enmeshed. Therefore, I will address the memoir of peasant-turned-professor, Valentin-­ Jamerey Duval—the subject of this chapter—with these considerations in mind. Although Duval was born into a family of peasants, spoke a patois, and spent his youth tending to and herding livestock, historians who have analyzed his work have been nearly unanimous that it is not “A finally discovered example of the word of the peasants, breathed forth from destitution and from the earth itself.”1 Being that Duval wrote his Mémoires as a man of advanced age who had enjoyed many years as a professor, a celebrated numismatist, and an associate to the Duke of Lorraine, historian JeanMarie Goulemot suggests in his introduction to the memoir that the reader accept the work as a “The ambiguous product of an apparently successful cultural assimilation.”2 Insisting upon the facticity of Duval’s narrative, Goulemot proposes that the reader ask about whom and for whom Duval wrote his account and question “la nature et la mise en œuvre du témoignage lui-même” (the nature and the carrying out of the testimony itself).3 Although I will concede that viewing Duval’s memoir as an artful literary text is reasonable, I disagree that Duval’s literary ambitions nullify the “paysan” (peasant) perspective of the memoir. In fact, I contend that in addition to these assumptions about Duval’s motivations for telling his life story, Goulemot’s commentary makes some debatable pronouncements about what “upward mobility” entails for the class consciousness of individuals whose socioeconomic status changes. In his introduction, Goulemot argues that “More than the formation of his affective personality, Duval tells his readership about what is, in his eyes, most essential: his social and intellectual personality.”4 Presenting Duval’s memoirs primarily as a narrative of social ascension characterized by Duval’s putative “dénigrement” (denigration) of his own origins, Goulemot insists that Duval’s memoir casts his youth as a “néant culturel” (cultural void), portrayed as lowly by Duval in order to flatter his noble readership.5 Goulemot suggests that Duval’s accession to “culture”—a questionable term, as it implies that courtly life is the only “culture”—was contingent not only upon his acquisition of new habits and tastes, but the “effacement” (erasure) of old ones.6 Furthermore, Goulemot interprets Duval’s descriptions of the dehumanizing conditions in which the peasantry lives as indications that Duval has rejected his origins, adopted an aristocratic view of the peasantry, and decided to move “other” aristocrats to feel a sort of condescending pity. I find this part of Goulemot’s

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interpretation curious, in that Duval repeatedly portrays aristocrats as faithless, cruel scoundrels and shows the French peasantry as typically honest, kind people whose king has treated them cruelly. Goulemot’s thesis about the educational, political “essence” of Duval’s self-portrait is in line with other scholars’ theories of the rhetorical function of emotional language in the writing and culture of eighteenth-­ century France. In Anne Coudreuse’s book Le Goût des larmes, Coudreuse demonstrates that the era’s lexicographers and writers considered “accents pathétiques” (accentuated pathos) in writing as stylized, often disingenuous appeals to the emotions of readers rather than reflections of genuine sentiments on the part of their writer.7 However, I would argue that Duval’s work is replete not only with appeals to the reader’s sympathy— descriptions of peasant misery, including his own experiences—but also with vivid, moving descriptions of his emotional life, both in private and among other people. The semantic field in Duval’s memoirs is filled with affective language: first, as in Coudreuse’s analysis of writing in the era, Duval centers “larmes” (tears), with at least six episodes of tears shed at the suffering of peasants or the beauty of nature and art. The memoir narrates nine episodes of “malheur” (misfortunes), numerous mentions of “cruel” people, eight “transports de joie” (being elated), five episodes of “misère” (misery), eight episodes of “passion,” ten discourses on “sentiments,” five discussions of Duval’s “plaisir” (pleasure), and seven descriptions of himself, as well as the exploitation and misery of the peasant class, as “triste” (sad). While Duval is undoubtedly attempting to incite his reader’s emotional responses, he first develops a poetics of passion by showing his own unbridled feelings about everything from near-death experiences to episodes of leisure. Duval fears the intensity of his feelings from a young age; he notes that after escaping from a pit of slippery mud as a young boy and going from mortal terror to ecstatic joy “I should have learned then how much I had to fear from my passions.”8 At the same time, he enjoys a passion for art and knowledge, as well as political and ethical passions, or a sense of compassion for peasants, animals, and even historical personages. While Goulemot’s introduction does take note of Duval’s sentiments in the passages detailing Duval’s scorn for the nobility and empathy for the poor, he characterizes them as an original form of political rhetoric rather than a depiction of emotions that Duval sincerely felt at any time. Yet, from the start of his narrative, Duval professes that his life from his early childhood onward has been characterized by “certain inner storms that

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often threatened to deprive me of my reason.”9 Moreover, Goulemot’s argument minimizes how Duval’s “class ascension” is repeatedly complicated by his struggles to contain and master his passions, speak coolly, keep an expressionless face, and stand still as the noblemen do. In this chapter, I maintain that Goulemot has misrepresented Duval’s narration of his emotions and his unregulated outbursts by framing them as rhetorical accents in a historical narrative rather than as poetic strategies in a literary memoir. I examine Duval’s life story not as a tale of “successful cultural assimilation” or ascension, but a confession of living between classes and social milieus, striving to find a way to perform accepted manners of feeling and expressing emotions while not extinguishing his passions, which he compares to a fire within.10 I dispute Goulemot’s claim that the pathos in Duval’s writing indicates that Duval rejected peasant identity and accepted courtly identity, and I refute the notion that the “distance” felt in the narrative is anything other than the usual facticity of the autobiographical genre. Even if we question ourselves about Duval’s writing process, intended audience, or the reasons for which he wrote this testimony about peasant life, must we assume that he portrays the dehumanizing conditions of poverty as an appeal to the finer feelings of the nobility? Why should we assume that Duval—a man of his time, moved by democratic sentiments and sympathetic to the poor after his own impoverished youth—did not write to please a wider audience, including a contemporaneous working class who read and wrote memoirs? Should we question the sincerity of the author’s portrayal of his emotional life or his peasant essence simply because he also shows himself as a rational being? This chapter analyzes Duval’s semantic field of passions and emotional regulation alongside his critical, political, and theoretical ideas in order to countervail the existing body of scholarship on Duval’s work, which has up to this point frequently insisted that his representation of his emotional life is little more than a backdrop to his education. I wish to address the argument that Duval’s manner of representing peasant life is “aristocratic” due to his intellectual culture—a troubling idea in light of the then-­ burgeoning culture of literacy and political engagement among the classes populaires of the era. To address the issue of Duval’s “sentimental education” and struggles to embody another socioeconomic class’ essence through attempts to regulate his effusive passions, I use sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of the habitus to explain the emotional, aesthetic, and embodied facets of class. By examining Duval’s memoir through this

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Bourdieusian lens, I demonstrate that Duval’s narrative exposes the impossibility of simply “erasing” one’s class origins and cultural, personal traits as one takes up company with another class.

Popular Prose: The Emergence of the Literate Working Class in the Wake of Autobiography in Enlightenment-Era France Scholarship on the intellectual culture of eighteenth-century France has long built a narrative in which the Enlightenment’s brightest stars were its elite intellectual class of philosophes; however, a deeper examination of the century reveals that the parallel explosion of literary innovation touched, inspired, and eventually grew out of a newly literate working class. Alongside Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie and the salons, touted as gender-integrated “laboratories” of Enlightenment thought (and Ancien Régime sociability), the novel truly came into its own in France; literary historian Elisabeth Zawisza counted 2830 novels written and published in France during the eighteenth century.11 The genre of the “véritable autobiographie moderne” (the real modern autobiography) also took shape at the same time.12 Meanwhile, the democratization of education created a newly literate working class who recorded their working lives alongside their social, political, and emotional lives in writing. Historian Daniel Roche notes that before 1789, in Paris alone, almost 500 elementary schools (mostly parochial schools) offered instruction more or less free of charge to children from families of modest means.13 Roche, who surveyed the “everyday, banal objects” of the French classes populaires during the eighteenth century, found that many of these newly literate Parisians began keeping more printed or written materials and materials for writing around their homes, such as newspapers, notarized documents, chalkboards, quills, Bibles, and other books.14 With both the intergenerationally literate aristocratic classes and the newly literate classes populaires, the emergent literary genres of the novel and the autobiography were widely read, and both classes became more interested in producing memoirs.15 Why, then, should scholars make a distinction between the uses of rhetoric (including metaphors, appeals to an audience, and semantic choices) in aristocratic and popular memoirs? One reason is that scholarly definitions of the literary memoir center around specific ideas of how the author’s contemplation of their moi, their self, must operate. Yves Coirault noted that while some mémorialistes such

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as the Cardinal de Retz and Saint-Simon could be considered “des autobiographes avant la lettre” (“autobiographers before their time”), they were also “impure autobiographers” whose narratives were more historical and less personal.16 Coirault refers to autobiographies that plunge more into the inner life of the author as “autobiographies romanesques” (novelesque autobiographies), calling attention to how the autobiographical form began to assume more literary qualities as the genre of the novel grew in popularity. With the use of metaphors and other narrative and aesthetic devices that underline the sense of “le spectacle de la vie” (spectacle of life),17 the autobiography bore the marks of a work of art fashioned by an inventive, contemplative storyteller rather than a dry account of history. Literary theorist Jean Rousset observed that the autobiographical form derives from the presence of an “interval” between the events in the narrator’s life and the moment at which they write.18 This is a possible reason that most of the best-known memoirs in eighteenth-century France were written by nobility or by intellectuals who frequented the court, individuals whose lives (and livelihoods) were built upon sociability and intellectual labor: few others had the luxury of time for contemplation. However, as Daniel Roche argued, it is evident that literacy deeply transformed the French working classes’ mentality, perception of the world, and view of themselves; with the habits of mind and knowledge acquired through reading, their sentiments on politics, expressions of romance, closeness with family, and the arts changed. Working-class literacy permitted political debates in cafés, the popularity of seditious pamphlets, a new class of Jansenists, exchanges of correspondence between families and friends (and lovers), and the reading of novels sold by colporteurs (traveling salespeople).19 Roche and other historians, including Jean Hébrard and Roger Chartier, have examined how the reading and writing practices and the tastes of these new readers differed from the practices and tastes of the nobility whose families had been literate for multiple generations. Some historians, such as Robert Muchembled, argued that the working class’ new acquaintance with the literature and other culture of the elites alienated them from themselves, spawning a “mass culture” of imitations of “high culture” and stifling “authentic” working-class culture.20 Yet, as Roger Chartier asserted, Muchembled’s study does not account for the fact that this “high culture” was not received passively: “The description of the contents of mass culture says nothing about how it is … deciphered, interpreted, reconsidered … its consumption is not at all incompatible with an attitude of defiance, or even resistance.”21 Remaining conscious of

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the fact that the working class of the era was not merely a passive audience of imitators permits a more complex vision of their literature. We must remain attentive to these writings as hybrid cultural products that savvily refashion existing literary forms to accommodate the language, values, culture, and tastes of the classes populaires. The acquisition of literacy, cultural capital, and skills of contemplation—the ability to observe and appraise oneself and one’s place in the world—does not “erase” workingclass subjectivity. Indeed, some highly contemplative memoirs written by working-class people have been the objects of study among historians whose scholarship examines the culture of the classes populaires of the eighteenth century as well as literature scholars. Daniel Roche, who edited the Journal de ma vie of compagnon Jacques-Louis Ménétra, noted that the compagnons (members of professional guilds of artisans who received some formal education during training in their professions) had a higher rate of literacy than most working-class Parisians.22 Eminent eighteenth-century literary scholar Catriona Seth edited and published the memoirs of two working women, Rosalba Carriera (a Venetian miniaturist and painter who lived in Paris for much of her life) and seamstress (and revolutionary) Marie-Victoire Monnard, in the anthology La fabrique de l’intime.23 The memoirs of Pierre Prion—scribe, pastry chef, mason, butler, and indispensable jack of all trades for the Marquis d’Aubain from 1740 to 1759—chronicle nearly 20 years of working life in addition to memories of travels, infatuations, and near-death experiences.24 Indeed, the small, but much-studied corpus of memoirs written by the recently educated workers of the classes populaires in eighteenth-century France even includes one account of the working and personal life of the rural working poor—the peasantry—from a first-­ person perspective. Here, we use this (admittedly convoluted) qualifier to speak of Valentin Jamerey-Duval’s memoir. Hans-Jürgen Lüsebrink, in his article “Les écrivains autodidactes comme ‘symptômes’ de l’histoire des mentalités,” appraises the scholarly reception of Duval’s memoir contemporaneous to its publication, arguing that the critical response betrays the anthropological preoccupation typical of Enlightenment thought.25 Much as Goulemot does 200  years later, these eighteenth-century critics claim that the memoir portrays the “stades de son education” (stages of his education), or “l’évolution d’un homme” (the evolution of a man), namely “un homme naturel” (a natural man), or noble savage type, who “becomes” upper-class. However, Lüsebrink argues that despite this condescending objectivation of their author,

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Duval’s memoirs carry a strongly critical dimension, as they criticize Louis XIV for abusive taxation and for worsening the famine of 1709, while exposing the deplorable behavior of wealthy priests and noblemen toward peasants, including Duval himself. I agree with Lüsebrink’s description of Duval’s memoirs as criticism and not merely history or narrative. Furthermore, I find that Duval’s memoirs narrate his emotional growth as a key factor in his development as a critical thinker and intellectual, not merely as a means to the end of class assimilation. Duval shows himself recognizing how his perception and judgment of art and intellectual culture combine the “naïve” sentimental responses to art and literature of his “uneducated” self and his later scholarly acumen. In fact, a great deal of this intellectual development happens before he is formally educated, as he is reading books to while away his time while he herds sheep. For instance, when Duval begins reading some rather heavy-handed moralizing in a popular Christian text known as La fleur des exemples, he is first moved in an agreeable way, then frightened: “A thousand examples of marvels and apparitions … filled me with a terror of which I would have been the prey for a long time if a book even more absurd than that one had not removed the scales from my eyes.”26 Yet, as he continues to read popular religious fiction, he comes across a “Letter from God” that awakens his critical judgment. After a few enraptured rereadings, he begins to feel suspicious, and eventually “défiant” (mistrustful) of the idea that he should accept such deceitful writing:27 “Although the narrow limits of my knowledge did not permit me to judge the difference between the styles, I suspected, however, that the letter was not the most divine and that it would not even be impossible for a simple mortal to compose one like it.”28 This notion of aesthetic judgment on Duval’s part must have circulated in the air du temps, as similar as it is to Scottish Enlightenment philosopher, David Hume’s view of the relationship between sentiments and taste in Of the Standard of Taste. In Hume’s view, all sentiments (sentiment refers both to the senses, such as taste or vision, and to emotions) that arise in judgment of beauty become honed and refined through better acquaintance with individual works of art, as well as through knowledge of how to judge beauty. But though there be naturally a wide difference in point of delicacy between one person and another, nothing tends further to encrease (sic) and improve this talent, than practice in a particular art, and the frequent survey or contemplation of a particular species of beauty … before we can give judgment

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of any work of importance, it will even be requisite, that that very individual performance be more than once perused by us, and be surveyed in different lights with attention and deliberation. There is a flutter or hurry of thought which attends the first perusal of any piece, and which confounds the genuine sentiment of beauty.29

Just as Hume’s theory allows for the coexistence of sentiments and judgment in the formation of taste, Duval does not divorce his increased judgment from passionate emotional responses—he claims to feel “stiff” in the presence of the credulous readership of the text, which he cannot help but vituperate as crude imposture. Reappraisals that link sentiments to judgments not only through increased education, but also through increasing emotional maturity, are a motif in Duval’s Mémoires. For instance, as Duval progresses to scholarly works of geography, he recognizes the flaws in the popular geography books that he first read, but retains an affection for them. “It is to these insipid productions that I owe the intense passion that I have always had for geography.”30 This suggests that his naïve judgments and his expert judgments are separated by discernment of the books’ faults, not by a sense of contempt for or a rejection of the passions of his younger self. This passion for beauty leads Duval to more pleasant experiences—for instance, he feels excitement and elation upon hearing a church organ play music for the first time,31 and upon hearing birds in a cage sing, he finds it so beautiful that he feels they must sing for their own pleasure and not just his.32 However, his passion for the beauty of art, music, literature, and then for knowledge that helps him judge art for its quality, frequently inspires a gamut of strange, uncontrollable emotional responses. As his search for beauty brings him into contact with popular manuals of piety, Duval’s increasing discernment leads to him eschewing what is known as “la bibliotheque bleue,” i.e. books sold by local hawkers, for better literature. At first, Duval reads a book of the lives of the saints “avec beaucoup de plaisir et d’empressement” (with much pleasure and eagerness). However, after reading Introduction à la Vie contemplative et La Dévotion aisée, Duval explains that his taste for moving literature has ignited his excessive emotions once again. As he feels “disposed to love God and the saints in the way a lover loves his mistress,” Duval also notices that “les soupirs, les aspirations, les gémissements s’emparaient de mon cœur … il(s) arrive(nt) de produire la gaieté, la joie et le contentement, (mais) il(s)

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cause(nt) souvent le chagrin, la bizarrerie, l’aigreur et la rudesse.”33 Seized with a holy fervor and unable to sleep, Duval compulsively recites psalms. Upon daybreak, Duval finds that his religious passion has evaporated. As soon as his time in the hermitage ends and he takes a place at the court, he learns to control his passion for beauty. Soon, he turns again to contemplating nature; however, he now feels not a fervor, but a more mastered sense of “Veneration and humility at the sight of the greatness of the one who fashioned them, gratitude for his grace and benevolence, respect for his wisdom, submission to his providence.”34 Duval is sensitive not only to textual beauty, but to his milieu; away from the impassioned monks with whom he dwells in the hermitage, his efforts to fit into the emotionally reserved space of the court changes his religious sentiment. As Duval undertakes a series of faltering attempts to regulate his youthful passions into more harmonious emotions, he develops other “passions” that take their place, using the word frequently. He expresses a “passion for geography and for the description of the Earth in general,”35 then for science, history, and the classics: Hornius, Livy, Pliny, the travels of La Montan, the history of the Incas, and Raymond Lulle’s early “encyclopedia.”36 (Curiously, Duval does not mention any familiarity with the encyclopedia of Diderot and d’Alembert.) With further reading and familiarity with literary style, Duval notes an appreciation for other reflective self-writing, especially for the emotional sensibility and style of the Comte de Bussy and the personal correspondence of Madame de Sévigné.37 While at school, Duval has another “fit” of overabundant, manic pleasure upon beginning to learn Latin. His “passion” for logic overflows into an appreciation that is no longer rational; he loves Latin and the symbolic language of logic not for their usefulness, but for their beauty.38 Although Duval does describe his “evolution” as an intellectual, he narrates his life before and after his social ascension with many accounts of his still-untrained aesthetic pleasures, as well as his own suffering. With no small amount of pathos, Duval explains early in his memoir that he left home before reaching adolescence because he and his mother were abused by his stepfather, “un maître impérieux” (an imperious master) to his mother, and “un tigre des plus cruels” (one of the cruelest tigers) to him: “It is a true miracle that I did not give in under the violence of this persecution … if I had to depict Hell, I would only have to represent the arguments, the hatred, the trouble … and the slights that reigned in this deplorable family.”39 As Duval tells it, he often went hungry and barefoot;

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the first three pages of his memoir offer his first representation of the material poverty of the peasant habitus. The episode of leaving home is occasioned by Duval being chased from his home by his stepfather, both of them overtaken by their “rage” and “fureur.” Duval’s errancy through France, on foot, eventually leads him to Lorraine. Yet, a mere paragraph before describing the abuse that drove him from his family home, Duval underscores his sensibility and weakness for beauty, as well as the uncontrollable passions that consume him even at the best of times: “I liked to stay on the river’s banks … this situation had such strong, touching attraction for me … that I trembled at the appearance of any woods … the redness of my face and the tears that I shed on these occasions showed the excess of my contentment as well as my sensitivity … all these movements were also the clear warnings of certain inner storms …”40 By establishing his emotions within the register of the trop-plein and prodigious with words such as “excès” (excess), “tempêtes” (tempests), and the inevitable “larmes” (tears) and “joie” (joy) commingled, Duval represents his insatiable desire for aesthetic pleasure as an Achilles’ heel. Indeed, young Duval loses a job because he dresses his favorite turkey in a flower garland; this garland causes the other birds to be aggressive to the prize turkey, who runs in circles and perishes of overexcitement. Duval and the turkey’s “commun maître,” (shared master) who is furious at Duval’s frivolity, fires him.41 Given Duval’s own tendency for overexcitement in the face of beauty, we can understand his folly with the turkey as an allegorical episode illustrating his trouble with emotional regulation in the face of beauty and novelty. After making his own observations of the unjust conditions of peasant life and fulminating against the greed of the king, Duval discovers the systemic inequalities between the aristocracy and the lower classes in ancient Rome through his reading. He feels sympathy for the “familles des provinces romaines, ne pouvant plus supporter les horribles vexations et les impôts excessifs dont elles étaient accablées, se retiraient dans les pays soumis à ces prétendus barbares et remerciaient Dieu de l’heureux sort qu’elles y éprouvaient.”42 This episode precedes Duval’s first encounter with Duke Léopold and the Baron de Pfützchner, suggesting to the reader that Duval carries this knowledge with him to shield himself from the disdain that he faces as he begins his class ascension and resocialization in the Duke of Lorraine’s court. Since I am interpreting Duval’s memoir as a portrait of his socialization and a key to his social consciousness, I should clarify that by “socialization,”

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I am discussing the tastes, perceptions, behaviors, and language that we learn among our family and friends—what sociologist Pierre Bourdieu referred to as “practices” particular to socioeconomic classes. Bourdieu used the term “habitus” to refer to the physical embodiment of social capital, as well as our social spaces and their physical objects. In La Distinction: critique sociale du jugement, Bourdieu describes the habitus of the modern-day bourgeoisie. Bourdieu argues that even today, the bourgeoisie in France bears the influence of the nobility of Duval’s era, due to their contact with or integration within noble society as noblesse de robe, their purchase of landed titles during the Ancien Régime, and their social influence as wealthy businesspeople.43 Bourdieu writes that bourgeois class standing is signified by what he refers to as tenue: “A low, steady voice, slow and nonchalant speech, a distant or self-assured smile, measured gesticulation, well-fitting clothing.”44 Tenue is inscribed in “l’ordre symbolique des corps” (the symbolic order of the bodies), which carries “l’ordre symbolique des distinctions,” or differences in taste, affect, behavior, speech, tone and volume of voice, and preferences for pastimes.45 In addition to these other distinctions, tenue ‘signifies’ “an entire relationship to the body, of caring for it, feeding it.”46 In short, class-based tastes, affect, and mores are inscribed in the subject’s body as well as in their emotional and intellectual lives. Even as Duval learns more and enjoys new comforts in the court, his appraisal of the nobility and himself become increasingly critical as he perceives not only his lack of noble tenue, but also the disparity between the supposed bonnes mœurs (good mores) of the nobility and their injustices, rudeness, condescension, and ignorance. In addition to noting that nobles always use informal (and thus condescending) language toward peasants while using formal language with each other,47 noting (perhaps sarcastically) that he was shocked to learn that this habit stems from the nobles’ social “education,” Duval perceives how they treat him. One baron criticizes Duke Léopold’s decision to fund Duval’s education, claiming that it will “altérer la santé du corps et de l’esprit.”48 Likewise, another nobleman claims to Léopold that since Duval was born a peasant, encouraging him to pursue his studies would lead him to derangement and hospitalization.49 In another episode, as Duval is recounting entertaining stories of his peasant life to the amused princes (Duke Léopold’s sons, François Étienne and either one of or both of his brothers, Léopold Clément Charles and Charles Alexandre Emanuel), whose bedroom is next to his, Prince François’ valet insults him. Assuming irritation on the prince’s part, the valet pulls François brusquely out of the room by his sleeve as Duval is

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speaking. As a humiliated Duval fumes in his room, composing a letter to demand the valet’s punishment, the Baron de Pfützchner comes into his room; seeing Duval’s distress, he inquires as to its source. While Duval reads the letter, the baron listens with “all the phlegm and tranquillity of a Stoic,” before chastising Duval for his “chaleur” (heat) and telling him that revenge is morally wrong.50 As Duval notes the nobility’s embodied manners of emotional repression, calm voice, and poised demeanor, he resolves (once again, after countless efforts) to bridle his all-consuming passions through education and socialization in the court. However, even if Duval made this effort in his embodied behavior, his text speaks to his continuing passions—for his studies, for the knowledge of ethics and politics gleaned from reading Plato, and eventually a romantic passion that brings him close to death. Having learned to dwell in the detached harmony of intellectualism and prefer the beauty of knowledge and fine literature to simpler things—in other words, to prefer mediating the world through his knowledge and through literary interpretation—Duval is still led to passionate expressions of political sentiment. He narrates his younger self asking a peasant who shares his meager food and shelter why he pays taxes: “You, the very soul of indigence—you are also involved in trying to make the king richer?”51 When the man explains that otherwise he will be stripped of his remaining property and put in prison, young Duval exclaims: “My goodness … the people who lock you up should themselves be locked up like madmen … For I find it extravagant to make someone suffer without any real advantage resulting from it.”52 Duval laments the famine of winter 1709 for “The dreadful misery that this scourge caused among the (working and poor) people, how many unfortunate souls who, sitting in the snow and consumed by hunger, perished in their sad little cottages.”53 Asking the reader to imagine the faces and bodies of the perished peasants may be an “accent pathétique,” but centering the human form in his discussion of politics and poverty is typical of Duval’s intermingling of sentiments and reason, as well as of his repeated demonstrations of how class privilege (or lack thereof) is embodied. Although Goulemot interprets Duval’s descriptions of the poor as derogatory, noting his comparison of peasants to “a type of cattle with a human face,” Duval’s insistence upon placing himself among peasants belies this argument, as does the textual reference made to a passage in Jean de la Bruyère’s Les Caractères that champions the peasantry.54 Duval describes his own starvation “persecuting” him during his time as a

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peasant;55 later, when he tells stories of other peasants, the king’s greedy overtaxation and the hunger and misery it induces are again described as “persecution.” Upon returning to his village as an adult, he meets his grandfather, who lives in a shabby, austerely furnished shack. When two tax collectors “à la mine homicide” (with murderous faces) come to take the last coins out of his grandfather’s pocket, Duval’s astonishment spurs his grandfather to explain: “We owe this general spoliation that astonishes you so much to the rapacious greed of these vultures. Those of us who have kept a few fragments of their (sic) former comofrts are careful to keep them hidden … hoping that out of fatigue, rather than out of commiseration, they (the tax collectors) will someday stop persecuting them (the peasants).”56 A few pages later, Duval interpellates the reader: “Permit me to ask those who love the human race if the traits that I have just described do not deserve to be qualified under the name of persecution … This is the sad fate of the (working poor) people of my province. Despite working like convicts condemned to hard labor, we/they/one often have/has no bread here.”57 Moreover, when he chooses a pronoun for “the (working poor or plebian) people of my province,” it is the ambiguous pronoun on, which can be used to mean either “they” or “we” (as well as an impersonal “you” or “one”). Duval does not deny his identification with the peasantry by choosing a clear third-person plural pronoun such as “ils,” but he also evades the clearer first-person plural pronoun of “nous.” The indexically slippery pronoun on inscribes Duval’s uniquely ambiguous sociocultural location in one small word. Having seen Duval’s expression of his “passions” for literature, science, reading, poetry, music, nature, and God—as well as his equally fiery sentiments about social, political, and economic justice—we should not be surprised that his romantic sentiments should stir him to no small degree. However, we should also not be astonished that Duval goes to his usual lengths to control these passions, which leads him to erratic, risky behavior. After meeting a beautiful and intelligent woman of the court, Duval finds himself consumed with thoughts of her. “I was worried, somber, melancholic, inattentive. Reading, my dominant passion, became unappealing to me … all the faculties of my soul were filled only with the image of my beautiful one …”58 Distressed that he is distracted from his academic pursuits, Duval compensates for his mind’s flight from logic with a mortification of the flesh, perhaps inspired by his days as a shepherd in an hermitage where the monks wore hair shirts, fasted, and slept on the ground: “I made myself a whip composed of twelve strands of rope, each of them garnished with ten to twelve knots capable of making unpleasant

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and painful impressions, and when evening fell, instead of going to the refectory for dinner, I treated myself to a hundred blows.”59 Later, still lovesick even after self-flagellation, Duval is inspired by Saint Jerome’s writing on priests inhibiting their passions with hemlock. Out of desperation, Duval decides to eat a salad with leaves of the poisonous plant, which he has identified and gathered from where it grows just outside his college.60 The hemlock acts as predicted; the next day, still in pain, feverish, dazed, and unable to breathe, Duval notes that his hair has fallen out. To his distress, he still cannot work: “The difficulty that I had with breathing put me out of the state in which I could apply myself as before, and I experienced that as far as love goes, the hemlock had produced as much of an effect on it as one could upon fire … Nothing could warm me up again.”61 Embarrassed, bald, and unable to work, Duval not only feels chilled in his body but also senses that the flame of passion in his heart has been snuffed. However, he has come close to snuffing out his life in the process. Unable to bear his physical sense of cold, Duval finally seeks a cure for the “poison froid” (cold poison) by bathing in hot springs.62 Despite Duval’s intellectual and social cultivation, he remains nearly fatally drawn to beauty, but why did Duval not simply pursue the noblewoman? Was it his awareness of his lack of tenue that spurred him to flee affection and punish his peasant body for not fitting courtly standards of handsomeness? Was it his passion for his studies and his desire to resume them? Was it his fear of being unable to control his romantic passion or retain his fragile sense of self in a romantic union? Was it the mélange of all of these passions at once that drove him to despair and recklessness, and thus to the brink of death? This fluctuation between emotions and reason is the poetic signature of Duval’s memoir of class mobility.

Conclusion I would like to conclude by circling back to the previous discussion of the contested genre of the autobiography, as well as Duval’s contested class identity, in order to yoke them back together. Taking a page from Bourdieu’s theory of the champ littéraire as distinct from the champ scientifique—a champ, or field, is a social space that creates and obeys its own social conventions while also conditioning certain forms of expression— sociologist Gérard Mauger maintains that Duval’s memoirs, like all autobiographies, cannot represent “the historical lived experiences of the lower

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classes.”63 Mauger emphasizes that due to the temporal and often physical distance between past lived experience and the narrator, an autobiography is literature, not historical or sociological record—artifact rather than fact. Mauger thus suggests that “les gens d’en bas,” or people who come from the underclass, who usually write autobiographies or other literature only after entering a higher socioeconomic class after their education, use this distance as a literary asset. I agree with Mauger, and I would add that the distance of autobiography—which Philippe Lejeune described as the origin of a “doubling” of the author (author-as-writer, and author-­ as-­ character)—permits narratives of this sort to take on unique critical qualities as well as literary ones. This doubling permits dialectical movements between other dichotomous features of the self: Duval describes himself gazing at the “ideal” noble body and its tenue, attempts to regulate his emotions, and delights in acquiring the social and cultural capital of education and critical judgment. Yet, even as he strives toward a new class identity, he locates himself (or his self) in the “on” and the starving, rebellious body of le peuple. The experience of changing social classes acquaints people who live through it with the emotional and social landscapes of both socioeconomic groups, permitting a complex understanding of class and economics; however, it poses emotional challenges as well as intellectual ones. The transition between socioeconomic strata can be both felt (perceived in the body and emotions) and thought (analyzed in the mind), provoking an assemblage of “sentiments” (in both senses that David Hume used the term). Considering how self-writing commingles these “sentiments” and “doublings” will help us understand autobiographies as literary portraits of complex whole persons, even when they also hold considerable sociohistorical value as texts documenting lives spent in between two identities.

Notes 1. Goulemot (in Duval) 14. Jamerey-Duval, Valentin. Valentin JamereyDuval: Mémoires, Enfance et éducation d’un paysan au 18e siècle. Avantpropos, introduction, établissement du texte, notes et annexes par Jean Marie Goulemot. Ed. Jean Marie Goulemot. Paris: Le Sycomore, 1981. “une parole paysanne enfin trouvée, exhalée de la misère et de la terre même.” (All translations from the original French are mine, unless otherwise noted.)

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2. “produit ambigu d’une assimilation culturelle apparemment réussie.” Goulemot (in Duval) P. 14. 3. Ibid. 4. “plus que (de) la formation de sa personnalité affective, Duval entretient son lecteur de ce qui représente à ses yeux l’essentiel: sa personnalité sociale et intellectuelle.” Goulemot (in Duval) 59. 5. Goulemot (in Duval) 56. 6. Ibid. 7. P. 27. Coudreuse argues in her book that this newfound taste for tears derived from the turn to materialist, humanist philosophy and away from religion; without a philosophical guarantee of an eternal afterlife as recompense for human suffering, French society and its art became more interested in depicting this suffering. Yet Duval’s use of tears not only serves as a rhetorical accent to underscore human misery and elicit pity; it also provides either a description of or perhaps a metaphor for his other passions such as romance, indignation, or joy in the face of beauty. Furthermore, although these rhetorical tears do often flow when he describes his reverence before humanistic marvels such as art, logic, geography, and philosophy, Duval is equally likely to use them to express his passionate, yet pious sense of awe before the grace and beauty of what he sees as God’s creation. For this reason, I argue that Duval’s work hybridizes different rhetorical and/or poetic uses of tears and provides an intriguing exception to Coudreuse’s thesis. Coudreuse, Anne. Le Goût des larmes au XVIIIe siècle. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1999. 8. “j’aurais dû m’apercevoir dès lors combien j’avais à craindre de mes passions.” Duval 80. 9. “certaines tempêtes intérieures qui ont souvent manqué d’être l’écueil de ma raison.” Duval 78. 10. Duval 276. 11. Zawisza, Elisabeth. L’âge d’or du péritexte: Titres et préfaces dans les romans du xviiie siècle. Paris: Hermann, 2013. 12. P. 18. Lejeune, Philippe. L’Autobiographie en France. Paris: Armand Colin, 1971. 13. P. 282. Roche, Daniel. Le peuple de Paris. Paris: Editions Aubier Montaigne, 1981. 14. Roche 275, 287. 15. I should note here that my use of the term “working class” corresponds to a notion of the proletariat and to the term “classe(s) populaire(s),” which when translated into English describes not only the more stable “working class” but also the “underclass” of the working poor and the indigent, who are also excluded from the bourgeoisie. While this terminology is anachronistic when used to describe early modernity, it is based in sociological

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t­ heory. The official terminology used to designate different populations of French citizens during the Ancien Régime did not divide the Tiers-État (the Third Estate, comprised of French citizens who belonged to neither the nobility nor the clergy) into different sectors. However, in the twentieth century, sociologists popularized the tendency to classify populations based on their wealth, mores, tastes, ways of life, social status, and location, and many other social scientists followed suit, including historians who examined earlier eras. For instance, Daniel Roche distinguished urban working poor and tradespeople (less prosperous populations) as the “peuple,” an assemblage of “classes populaires” distinct from the bourgeoisie, in early modernity. My discussion of “classes populaires” and the “working class” derives from this idea, seeking commonalities based upon the shared lack of prosperity, need to work for income (as opposed to the ability to gain revenue from owning property), lack of access to political power, and the social mores, tastes, and ways of life of the classes “below” the bourgeoisie. In other words, I am looking at the proletariat, but with an interest in the social resemblances between different sectors of the “peuple.” For this reason, I find it useful to examine Bourdieu’s concept of habitus, which distinguishes the habits, tastes, mores, and ways of life of the social groups and socioeconomic classes fitting under this rubric from those of the bourgeoisie. 16. Coirault, Yves. “Autobiographie et Mémoires (XVIIe-XVIIIe siècles) ou existence et naissance de l’autobiographie [with Discussion].” Revue d’Histoire littéraire de la France, 75e Année, No. 6, L’Autobiographie (Nov.–Dec., 1975): 937–956, p.  939. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40525444. Accessed: 26 April 2017 17. Coirault 941 18. Rousset (cited in Coirault) 139. Rousset, Jean. Narcisse romancier. Essai sur la première personne dans le roman. Paris: Editions José Corti, 1973. 19. Roche 273, 283, 284, 296, 298, 311, 345. 20. Robert Muchembled, Culture populaire et culture des élites dans la France moderne (XVe-XVIIIe siècles). Essai. Paris: Flammarion 1978. 21. “La description du contenu d’une culture de masse ne dit rien sur la manière dont elle est … déchiffrée, interpretée, repensée … sa consommation n’est point incompatible avec une attitude de défiance, voire de résistance.” Chartier, Roger. “Robert Muchembled, Culture populaire et culture des élites dans la France moderne (XVe–XVIIIe siècles). Essai [compte-rendu].” Revue d’Histoire Moderne & Contemporaine (1979) 26.2: 298–300. 22. Ménétra, Jacques-Louis. Journal de ma vie: Jacques-Louis Ménétra, compagnon vitrier au 18e siècle. Ed. Daniel Roche. Paris: Albin Michel, 1981. 23. Seth, Catriona. La Fabrique de l’intime. Mémoires et journaux de femmes du XVIIIe siècle Paris: Laffont, Bouquins, 2013.

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24. Prion, Pierre. Pierre Prion, scribe. Mémoires d’un écrivain de campagne au XVIIIe siècle. Eds. Emmanuel le Roy Ladurie and Orest Ranum. Paris: Gallimard, Collection Archives (n° 97), 1985. 25. Lüsebrink, Hans-Jürgen. “Les écrivains autodidactes comme ‘symptômes’ de l’histoire des mentalités.” Mélanges: Volume aixois. Sociétés, mentalités, cultures, France (XVe–XXe siècles). Michel Vovelle, ed. 343–352. Aix-enProvence: Publications de l’Université de Provence, 1997. 26. “Mille exemples de prodiges et d’apparitions … m’avaient rempli d’une frayeur dont j’aurais peut-être été longtemps la proie si un livre encore plus absurde que celui-ci n’eût contribué à me dessiller les yeux.” Duval 142. 27. Duval 144. 28. “Quoique les bornes étroites de mes connaissances ne me permissent pas de juger de la différence des styles, je soupçonnai pourtant que celui de cette lettre n’était pas des plus divins et que même il ne serait pas impossible à un simple mortel d’en composer une semblable.” Duval 143. 29. Paragraphs 18 and 19. Hume, David. Of the Standard of Taste. Available in Of the Standard of Taste and other Essays. J.  Lenz, ed. Indianapolis: University of Indiana, 1965. 30. “C’est à ces insipides productions que je suis redevable de la forte passion que j’ai toujours eue pour la géographie.” Duval 141. 31. Duval 85. 32. Duval 191. 33. “Disposed to love God and the saints in the way a lover loves his mistress …” “The sighs, the deep breaths, the moans took possession of my heart … Sometimes, they produced great joy, but at other times, they caused sorrow, bizarre thoughts, bitterness, roughness …” Duval 154. “Disposé à aimer Dieu et les saints à peu près comme un amant aime sa maîtresse.” 34. “vénération et d’humilité à la vue de la grandeur de celui qui (l’a) formé, de reconnaissance pour ses bienfaits, de respect pour sa sagesse, et de soumission à sa providence.” Duval 164. 35. “[p]assion … pour la géographie (et) pour la description de la Terre en général,” Duval 166. 36. Duval 167. 37. Duval 185. 38. Duval 264. 39. “C’est un vrai miracle que je n’aie pas succombé sous la violence de cette persécution … si j’avais à dépeindre l’Enfer, je n’aurais qu’à représenter les débats, la haine, le trouble … et les imprécations qui régnaient dans cette déplorable famille.” Duval 78. 40. “I liked to stay on the river’s banks … this situation had such strong, touching attraction for me … that I trembled at the appearance of any

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woods … the redness of my face and the tears that I shed on these occasions showed the excess of my contentment as well as my sensitivity … all these movements were also the clear warnings of certain inner storms …,” Duval 78. 41. Duval 97–99. 42. “These provincial Roman families, no longer able to tolerate the horrible indignities and the excessive taxes that afflicted them, withdrew into the countryside and lived under the rule of these supposed ‘barbarians,’ thanking God for the fortunate fate that they met.” Duval 174. 43. Bourdieu, Pierre. La Distinction. Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1979. 44. “la voix grave et bien posée, la diction lente et désinvolte, le sourire distant ou assuré, le geste mesuré, le costume de bonne coupe.” Bourdieu 194. 45. “The physical order of the body … the symbolic order of distinctions.” Ibid. 46. “Tout un rapport au corps, de le soigner, de le nourrir.” Bourdieu 210. 47. Duval 192. 48. “… alter the health of his body and mind.” Duval 201. 49. Duval 177. 50. Duval 248. 51. “Vous qui êtes l’indigence même, vous vous mêlez aussi d’enrichir le roi?” Duval 105. 52. “Parbleu … les gens qui vous enferment méritent eux-mêmes d’être enfermés comme des fous … Car je trouve de l’extravagance à faire souffrir quelqu’un sans qu’il en résulte aucun avantage réel.” Ibid. 53. “L’affreuse misère que ce fléau causa parmi le peuple, combien il y eut de malheureux, qui assiégés par les neiges et consumés par la faim, furent trouvés morts dans leurs tristes chaumières.” Duval 110. 54. “Une espèce de bétail à figure humaine” Duval 110 (Duval’s description echoes a passage from seventeenth-century philosopher Jean de la Bruyère’s Les Caractères that describes the misery of peasant laborers, critiquing the dehumanizing language that the nobility used to describe them and arguing for their rights: “L’on voit certains animaux farouches, des mâles, et des femelles, répandus par la campagne, noirs, livides, et tout brûlés du soleil, attachés à la terre qu’ils fouillent et qu’ils remuent avec une opiniâtreté invincible … quand ils se lèvent sur leurs pieds, ils montrent une face humaine; et en effet ils sont des hommes … ils épargnent aux autres hommes la peine de semer, de labourer et de recueillir pour vivre, et méritent ainsi de ne pas manquer de ce pain qu’ils ont semé.” [“Certain wild animals, male and female, are scattered over the country, dark, livid, and quite tanned by the sun, who are chained … to the land they are always digging and turning up and down with an unwearied stubbornness …

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when they stand erect they discover a human face, and, indeed, are men … they spare other men the trouble of sowing, tilling the ground, and reaping for their sustenance, and, therefore, deserve not to be in want of that bread they sow themselves.”] Duval, an avid reader, would have been familiar with la Bruyère; he also uses a similar argument in his descriptions of the peasants in his province of origin. It is worth noting that la Bruyère, imagining himself being asked to choose whether to identify with “great men” who have no soul or the plebeians (people) who have no esprit (wit, culture), answered firmly: “Je ne balance pas: je veux être peuple (I should select, without hesitation, being a plebian).” P. 407. Bruyère, Jean de la. Les Caractères. “De l’homme” XI, n°128. Paris: Garnier Frères, 1876. Bibliothèque Nationale de France Gallica. https://gallica.bnf.fr Accessed 30 March 2021. Translation from The ‘Characters of Jean de la Bruyère. Trans. Henri van Laun. London: Nimmo, 1885. Project Gutenberg. https://www.gutenberg.org. Accessed April 6 2021). 55. Duval 120. 56. “C’est à la rapacité de ces vautours que nous devons la spoliation générale qui cause votre étonnement. Ceux de nous qui conservons quelques fragments de leur ancienne aisance ont soin de les tenir cachés … espérant que par lassitude, plutôt que par commisération, on cessera quelque jour de les persécuter.” Duval 214. 57. “Qu’il me soit permis de demander ici aux amateurs du genre humain si les traits que je viens de rapporter ne méritent pas d’être qualifiés du nom de persécution … Tel est le triste sort du peuple de ma province … Malgré des travaux comparables à ceux des forçats, on y manque souvent du pain.” Duval 216–217. Note the resemblance to the citation from Jean de la Bruyère in footnote 54. 58. “J’étais inquiet, sombre, mélancolique, distrait. La lecture, qui était ma passion dominante, me devenait insipide … Toutes les facultés de mon âme n’étaient remplies que de l’image de ma belle …” Duval 271. 59. “Je me fis … un fouet composé de douze cordons, chacun garni de dix ou douze noeuds capables de faire d’assez désagréables et douloureuses impressions, et lorsque le soir fut venu, au lieu de me rendre au réfectoire prendre ma réfection, je me régalai de cent coups.” Duval 273. 60. Duval 275. 61. “La difficulté que j’avais de respirer me mit hors d’état de m’appliquer comme auparavant et j’éprouvai qu’à l’égard de l’amour, la ciguë avait produit autant d’effet sur lui que l’on en pourrait produire sur le feu … rien n’était capable de me réchauffer.” Duval 276. 62. Duval 276.

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63. “Vécu de ceux d’en bas” P. 32. Mauger, Gérard. “Les autobiographies littéraires. Objets et outils de recherche sur les milieux populaires.” Politix. La biographie. Usages scientifiques et sociaux. 7.27 (1994): 32–44. doi: https://doi.org/10.3406/polix.1994.1862. https://www.persee.fr/ doc/polix_0295-­2319_1994_num_7_27_1862. Accessed 10 April 2018.

Bibliography Arnaud, Sabine. L'invention de l'hystérie au temps des Lumières. Paris: Editions de l'Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, 2014. Bruyère, Jean de la. Les Caractères. “De l'homme” XI, n°128. Paris: Garnier Frères, 1876. Bibliothèque Nationale de France Gallica. https://gallica.bnf.fr Accessed 30 March 2021. ———. The “Characters” of Jean de la Bruyère. Trans. Henri van Laun. London: Nimmo, 1885. Project Gutenberg. https://www.gutenberg.org. Accessed 6 April 2021. Chartier, Roger. “Robert Muchembled, Culture populaire et culture des élites dans la France moderne (XVe-XVIIIe siècles). Essai [compte-rendu].” Revue d’Histoire Moderne & Contemporaine (1979) 26.2: 298–300. Coirault, Yves. “Autobiographie et Mémoires (XVIIe-XVIIIe siècles) ou existence et naissance de l'autobiographie [with Discussion].” Revue d'histoire littéraire de la France (1975): 937-956. Corbin, Alain. “Histoire et anthropologie sensorielle.” Anthropologie et sociétés 14.2 (1990): 13–24. Coudreuse, Anne. Le Goût des larmes au XVIIIe siècle. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1999. ———. Le refus du pathos au XVIIIe siècle. Paris: Honoré Champion, 2001. Coulet, Henri. “Un homme du peuple acculturé au XVIIIe siècle: Valentin Jamerey-Duval.” Recherches et travaux, 44, 1993, p.  101s. Publication de l’Université Stendhal, Grenoble 3. Dornier, Carole. “La liberté de l’enfant errant. Le témoignage de Valentin Jamerey-Duval.”, Enfants perdus, enfants trouvés. Dire l’abandon en Europe du XVIe au XVIIIe siècle. Florence Magnot-Ogilvy et Valls-Russell, J., ed. Paris: Classiques Garnier, coll. « Rencontres », 2015. Farge, Arlette. Dire et mal dire. L'opinion publique au XVIIIe siècle. Paris: Seuil, 1992. Fillon, Anne. Fruits d'écritoire: société et mentalités aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles. Le Mans: Laboratoire d'histoire anthropologique du Mans, 2000. Frijhoff, Willem. “AUTODIDAXIES, XVI e-XIX e SIÈCLES: Jalons pour la construction d'un objet historique.” Histoire de l'éducation (1996): 5–27. Goulemot, Jean Marie, and Daniel Oster. Gens de lettres, écrivains et bohèmes. Paris: Minerve, 1992.

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Gusdorf, Georges. “De l'autobiographie Initiatique à l'autobiographie genre littéraire [with Discussion].” Revue d'Histoire littéraire de la France, 75e Année, No. 6, L'Autobiographie (Nov.–Dec., 1975), pp. 957–1002. Hébrard, Jean. “L’autodidaxie exemplaire. Comment Valentin Jamerey-Duval apprit-il à lire ?”, Pratiques de la lecture. Roger Chartier, ed. p. 29–76. Paris: Payot, coll. « Petite bibliothèque Payot », 1993. Hume, David. “Of the Standard of Taste.” Of the Standard of Taste and other Essays. J. Lenz, ed. Indianapolis: University of Indiana, 1965. Jamerey-Duval, Valentin, Correspondance de Valentin Jamerey-Duval, bibliothécaire des ducs de Lorraine, t. II (4 janv. 1746- 1er déc. 1760), Paris, Honoré Champion, coll. « Bibliothèque des correspondances, mémoires et journaux», 2015, 1006 p. Édition d’André Courbet. ISBN: 9782745328311. Jamerey-Duval, Valentin. Mémoires: enfance et éducation d’un paysan au XVIIIè siècle. Jean-Marie Goulemot, ed. Paris: Minerve, 2011. Lüsebrink, Hans-Jürgen. “Les écrivains autodidactes comme ‘symptômes’ de l'histoire des mentalités.” Mélanges: Volume aixois. Sociétés, mentalités, cultures, France (XVe–XXe siècles). Michel Vovelle, ed. 343–352. Aix-en-Provence: Publications de l'Université de Provence, 1997. Mauger, Gérard. “Les autobiographies littéraires. Objets et outils de recherche sur les milieux populaires.” Politix 7.27 (1994): 32–44. Maynes, Mary Jo. Taking the hard road: Life course in French and German workers' autobiographies in the era of industrialization. Chapel Hill: Univ of North Carolina Press, 1995. Ménétra, Jacques-Louis. Journal de ma vie: Jacques-Louis Ménétra, compagnon vitrier au 18e siècle. Ed. Daniel Roche. Paris: Albin Michel, 1981. Miraux, Jean-Philippe. L'autobiographie: écriture de soi et sincérité. Paris: Armand Colin, 2009. Muchembled, Robert. Culture populaire et culture des élites dans la France moderne (XVe-XVIIIe siècles): essai. Paris: Flammarion, 1978. Prion, Pierre. Pierre Prion, scribe. Mémoires d’un écrivain de campagne au XVIIIe siècle. Eds. Emmanuel le Roy Ladurie and Orest Ranum. Paris: Gallimard, Collection Archives (n° 97), 1985. Daniel Roche et Anne Monjaret. “L’historien et les ‘choses banales.’” Socio-­ anthropologie 30 (2014), 201–212. Roche, Daniel. Le peuple de Paris: Essai sur la culture populaire au XVIIIè siècle. Paris: Editions Aubier Montaigne, 1981. Roche, Daniel. “Les pratiques de l'écrit dans les villes françaises du XVIIIe siècle.” Pratiques de la lecture. Chartier, Roger et Alain Paire, ed. Pp. unknown. Marseille: Rivages, 1985. Rousset, Jean. Narcisse romancier. Essai sur la première personne dans le roman. Paris: Editions José Corti, 1973.

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Index1

A Academy, 17, 23 Adaptation, 76, 77, 80, 83, 86, 87n8 Addison, Joseph, 45–65 Aeneas, 47, 49–53, 60, 67n25, 68n31 Aesthetic theory, 77 Affect, 4, 6 Affective, 174, 175, 189n4 Algarotti, Francesco, 47, 49–51, 53, 56, 58, 63, 64, 66n12, 67n27, 69n55 Allusion, 113, 116, 120, 121, 125 Anger, 22 Autobiography, 160, 173, 177–188 B Biography, 113–129 The body, 134, 143–149, 154n44

Bourdieu, Pierre, 176, 184, 187, 190n15 Brothel manual, 96, 98–101, 104, 105, 108n18, 109n20, 109n23 Buddhism, 31–41 Burnouf, Eugène, 31–41 C Chinese language, 16–18, 21, 27n33 Chosŏn court, 160–162, 169n10 Class, 6, 173–188 Classical language, 113 “The Classic of Whoring,” 95–107 Cosmopolitanism, 77, 84, 86 Courtesan, 95, 96, 98–107, 107n5

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Stefanovska et al. (eds.), Emotions in Non-Fictional Representations of the Individual, 1600–1850, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84005-1

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INDEX

D The Dial, 33 Diary, 46, 114–116, 119, 134, 152n25 Dido, 47–53, 60, 66n12, 67n25, 68n31, 68n38 Dream, 133–150

I Interiority, 6 Italy, 45–65

E Eighteenth century, 160, 169n10, 170n32, 177, 179 Elysian fields, 50–52, 60, 63 Elysium, 50–52, 63, 64, 68n37 See also Elysian fields Emotions, 3–7, 7n1, 7n2, 8n6, 8n7, 9n11, 9n12, 159–168

K Korea, 160, 162, 170n23, 170n32

F Fatality, 165–168 France, 173, 175, 177–187 G Gender, 6 Genre, 113–129 Grand Tour, 46, 49, 54, 65n2, 67n21 The Green Bower, 100–102, 104, 106, 107, 109n23 H Habitus, 173–188 Heterodoxy, 116 Honor, 17, 22, 24

J Jamerey-Duval, Valentin, 173–188

L London theater, 79 M Manchu conquest of China, 133–150 Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley, 45–65 N Narration, 161, 164 Nationalism, 77 Neoclassicism, 76, 82 O Orthodoxy, 115, 117, 118 P Passion, 3–5, 7n1, 7n2, 8n6, 9n11, 9n12 Private/public, 6, 9n11 Public and private emotions, 137–143

 INDEX 

Q Qing, 4, 6, 8n4, 8n5, 8n6, 9n12, 9n13, 96–107, 108n8, 108n10 Quarrel/dispute, 15–24 R Reason, 4 S Schopenhauer, Arthur, 33 Shakespeare, William, 75–86

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 36, 41n12 Sympathy, 84–86 T Tragedy, 75–78, 80–86, 87n4, 87n9, 89n33 Translation, 77, 82, 83, 89n42 U Unspeakable, 161–163, 168

199