James Cahill dies at 87; scholar of Chinese art

9: The Audiences for the Part-Erotic Albums

9: The Audiences for the Part-Erotic Albums

What was it that the erotic paintings evoked and provoked? What was it about these pictures that so fascinated the Manchu rulers and their courts? Certainly they offered much more than simply prurient visual stimulation. The older, less sophisticated type of erotic album, made up of a plainer series of pictures of sexual acts, served well enough for straightforward scopophilic-pornographic turn-ons, and presumably was known and available to the Manchu rulers in some form. The new type, to which both of the palace projects belong, offered much more. Some leaves conjured up the lure of the perilous and forbidden, others of imagined romance and intrigue. Some presented sexual goings-on in exposed domestic settings that in real life would hardly have permitted them. All flouted Confucian moral strictures against nudity, immodesty, promiscuity, the free mixing of the sexes. The emperors were, if anything, over-supplied with consorts and concubines, and the same was true, mutatis mutandis, for other men—princes and other Manchus, bannermen of Han descent, Han Chinese of the middle and upper classes in the cities-- who made up the principal clientele for most erotic albums. Rich men could collect concubines; others less well off could, within certain restrictions, pursue courtesans or simply frequent prostitutes.[1] There was no shortage of available sex for men, and nobody with even modest means was likely to be physically frustrated for long. But to say that misses the point: what the pictures evoked were the pleasures of flirtation and complicity, the excitement of seduction, the danger of discovery, the thrill of the illicit. Keith McMahon quotes a saying of the time: A wife is not as good as a concubine, a concubine as good as a maid, a maid as good as a prostitute, a prostitute as good as “stealing,” i.e., somebody else’s wife.[2]

That rising scale of excitement accounts for some of the attractions, on the simplest level, of erotic fiction and paintings. The pictures reflect in some respects the real lives of their consumers, in other respects their desires, especially male desires: for ever more sensual elegance of living, more sexual permissiveness and variety than their own wives and circumstances ordinarily permitted--in short, for that enjoyment of excess by which luxury, at least from the late Ming on, was defined. The dangers of sexual excess were recognized, but scarcely diminished its allure.[3]

The part-erotic albums, however, like the best of the writings, worked on deeper levels than simple graphic playings-out of familiar male fantasies and stimulation of new ones. They also embedded the salacious events in diverting, often witty quasi-narratives and surrounded them with pictorial evocations of romantic love, playful or passionate flirtations, complex personal relationships. Sensitive viewers of the time, no doubt including some women as well as men, must have enjoyed them not merely as titillating, but also as infused with that quality of qing, emotional feeling, that they most valued in fiction and drama.

Nostalgia for the greatest age of dedication to qing, the late Ming period, runs through much of the amatory and erotic culture of the later seventeenth and the eighteenth century, whether or not it is expressly stated. Some prominent writers in the late Ming had argued, contrary to traditional Confucian precepts, for the worthiness of devoting one’s life to the pursuit of sensual pleasures, even though the effects of doing so might be ruinous to one’s health and fortune.[4] Exemplars of that practice, men we might today call voluptuaries, played their part in the romantic ideal, adding to it a tinge of the cautionary, since they frequently came to bad ends. Another part in it was played by the prominent scholar who took on a favorite courtesan as his concubine and literary companion, giving actuality to the old caizi jiaren, scholar-and-beauty, pattern. Multitalented women emerged from among the cultivated courtesans and attained prominence on their own; writers of poetry and prose began to appear as well among gentry women, or guixiu. And there were many shades of beliefs and behavior and accomplishment between and around these.

Already by the early Qing, in a world profoundly changed by the social and political upheavals that attended the Manchu conquest, these realizations of romantic scholar-beauty ideals had become the stuff of nostalgia. Courtesans were no longer accorded prominent roles on the literary scene; the leading women writers were, instead, gentry women of cultivated families, whose poems were more concerned with their own domestic situations and their relationships both with men and with other women.  It is just at this time that the development of the part-erotic album by Gu Jianlong and his contemporaries opens the way for pictorial expressions of themes having to do with romantic and erotic relationships within the household, setting a pattern that was followed in much of the erotic painting of the century afterwards, including the work of the Qianlong Albums Master.

Fundamental to the appeal of the part-erotic album for men, and presumably for some women as well, is its capacity for representing in its varied leaves a highly attractive, seemingly ideal integration of everyday life with erotic freedom and fulfillment, a dream of living continually in an erotic mode, enjoying a certain exemption from pressures to conform and abstain. For well-off men, the pressures were in actuality not so onerous, nor was the outcome of transgressing so severe: maids and lower-class women in big households had little choice but to be compliant when approached for sex by men of superior status, and the men mostly risked little more than domestic discord or scolding by their elders.[5] And, as noted above, sex was for them easily available, although something of the thrill of pursuit could still be enacted in the prolonged and expensive procedure by which one took a popular courtesan as lover, and played out for a time the scholar-beauty romance--which by the eighteenth century existed only hazily in the past, essentially unrecapturable and only to be recalled as a palliative to the more earthy and commercial transactions that were by then the norm for men seeking sex outside the household.[6] Moreover, love and intimacy within the household now enter, more than before, the thematics of poetry and painting: as Susan Mann points out, "women's writings opened new paths to intimacy, revealing wives, daughters, and sisters as masters of high culture who were newly intelligible as human beings to their erudite husbands, fathers, and brothers."[7] For the most part, then, the albums represented an imagined ideal fusion of everyday life with a complete emotional and sexual fulfillment that even money could not buy, and that even the emperor could not easily create for himself.

Both Manchus and Han Chinese, as is well known, subscribed in principle to a strict, even repressive Confucian morality; that they were overtly prudish, even puritanical, in much of their daily-life dealings is equally well known. But against these social injunctions must be set a widespread and continuing pattern of breakouts and transgressions, to which a large body of erotic literature and art, coming increasingly to light, richly attests. Subject to official disapproval and repeated attempts at censorship, condemned in virtually all writings about it, it flourished nonetheless, producing a wide spectrum of works from the shoddy to the masterly. One is reminded of Victorian England, with its public abhorrence of the improper and its private fascination with some of the most lurid erotica ever produced. The disparity between public stance and private conduct is deeply engrained in traditional Chinese society (as it is, indeed, in others): a public position contrary to Confucian morality incurred scorn and condemnation, but considerable laxity was permitted in private affairs. Something like this situation obtained also in art. For the Manchu rulers to commission and hang large numbers of Orthodox-style landscapes and write enthusiastically about them was a public stance, a move in the large project of dynastic legitimization. But the same rulers, if my observations and inferences are correct, commissioned both soft-core and hard-core erotica for more private enjoyment.

The same was doubtless true for Han-Chinese buyers and consumers of paintings: we have no reason or basis for separating the (unidentifiable) clients for the erotic albums from those for literati landscapes. The distinguished sinologue Derk Bodde guesses that late-period erotic literature and art was "probably all produced for . . . a small, well-to-do, predominantly mercantile upper class." But this is no more than Bodde's way of dismissing them, in keeping with his own response to Chinese erotic pictures: "One cannot but be struck by their aesthetic crudity, painful literalness, anatomical clumsiness, and general unattractiveness."[8] The examples seen by Bodde might well deserve such a harsh judgment, but the high-quality erotic albums produced by Gu Jianlong and his successors decidedly do not, and must have exerted their appeal over a broad range of taste, from the lowest to the most cultivated.  Gu's good friend and patron Wang Shimin, that most orthodox of Orthodox-school landscapists, might for all we know have been one of the admirers--and owners?--of Gu's erotic works. We can recall that the earliest recorded mention of Jin Ping Mei is in a letter praising the novel written in 1596 by the poet and literary theorist Yuan Hongdao (1568-1610) to Wang Shimin's teacher Dong Qichang, from whom Yuan had borrowed part of a manuscript copy.[9] (That Dong Qichang, while he admired the book as a work of literature, believed that it "should certainly be burned" is another indication of the ambivalent feelings of educated Chinese toward erotica.)[10]

The erotic albums, then, deserve our attention if only because they can broaden our understanding of what kinds of pictures Chinese viewers liked to look at, in different situations and moods. We can, if we want to, arrange the types on a long scale, with literati landscapes at one end and the erotic albums at the other. But we cannot continue to assume that such a scale will correspond neatly to any scale of social or intellectual standing, with “lofty gentlemen” gazing by preference at the landscapes and “vulgar merchants” at the erotic pictures.

Fig. 61

As for women, we are still short of being able to write a detailed and well-grounded account of their involvement with erotic paintings, but a few clues have come to light that allow some provisional observations. A number of pictorial and literary representations of couples looking at erotic albums together were cited or illustrated above (Figs. 1, 2, 3, 60). Related to these but different in theme is a leaf from Album N (Fig. 61), one of the works of the Qianlong Albums Master, in which a girl is seen absorbed in an erotic album, apparently of the old type (both of the facing leaves depict couples having sex), with two more albums,  presumably of the same kind, on the table beside her. For the girl to be alone changes one’s reading of the scene: her assumed arousal cannot be quickly satisfied (she may well be young and unmarried in any case), and in our imagination she joins the company of countless lone and longing women in Chinese love poetry. A late Ming Suzhou courtesans’ song of the type called shan’ge (“mountain songs”) tells of the response of such a lonely woman who comes upon an album of erotic pictures in her bedroom:

“Sister is in her bedchamber, eyes blurry with sleep,

When she chances to see a book of erotic pictures and her whole body    goes limp.

This kind of template [she thinks] makes a number of sophisticated men appear in my mind.

When can my lover come copy the model to act out just that sort of living diagram of pleasure?.”[11]

Since the song is of a type sung by the courtesans to men, and since it is found in a collection compiled and edited by a man (Feng Menglong, 1574-ca. 1645), the usual doubts can be raised about whether it represents a woman’s real feelings or merely male imaginings, to which the courtesans might have been catering. The same is true, as noted earlier, of all the pictures and literary accounts of men and women looking at the albums together. But to dismiss them all so easily is, I think, to diminish the capacity of late Ming and Qing women, or any women, to have varied and personal responses to sexual stimuli, whether fiction or pictures. We can recall that some of the tirades against erotic books and paintings, and the edicts prohibiting them, are directed specifically against their “penetration into the women’s quarters,” meaning their acquisition and enjoyment by women. And the point is made by the writers of these that the pictures are worse than the writings, since they can exert their corrupting influence on people who are semi-literate or illiterate—as many middle- or even upper-class women in this period were, in spite of a rising rate of literacy among them. It is difficult to believe that these were all groundless fears; some reality must underlie them. It may well be that the question of erotica for women, like that of the erotic albums generally, has been subject to an excessive and unneeded protectiveness that has hampered open-minded consideration of it.

The anxiety aroused in men by women’s transgressions of the boundaries laid down for them runs through late Ming and Qing writings by males. The engagement of women in that period with the new fiction and drama of the time was seen by many as such a transgression; that attitude is well attested and has been widely studied. That erotic stories and novels were among the fiction that women read with pleasure is a fair assumption, as it is for England and elsewhere; in both China and Europe, it followed upon a great increase in women's literacy.[12] In PUP (Chapt. 4 and 5) I speculated about women’s probable preferences in pictures, with some clues from literature and some likely candidates among extant works. Similar speculation, based on common assumptions about women's responses to erotic materials in both old China and the present-day West,[13] can be made about the erotic albums.

Several of the albums introduced above might well have appealed especially to women: the “Qiu Ying” and Gu Jianlong albums (Albums B and C) for their portrayals of tenderness between lovers and their avoidance of blatantly open scenes of sex; the “Leng Mei” album (Album M) for its subtleties and for the theme of women’s sexuality (albeit imagined by a presumably male artist) that runs through some of the leaves; certainly the V&A album (Album S) for the suggestions of romantic involvements among the women and girls depicted in some of the leaves. The part-erotic album as a form, because the complex imagery of its leaves encouraged viewers to imagine captivating narrative situations around them, would have had a special appeal also to those limited in literacy, as many women were; they could project their repressed desires onto the people in the pictures. In a later section of this book we will consider an album, by another anonymous artist whom I will call the Secret Spring Master, with characteristics that even more strongly suggest it was made for the enjoyment of women, and so will return to the question of a Chinese women’s erotica.

[1] Manchus, bannermen, and Han Chinese officials in the capital were restricted in their patronage of the opera, in engaging in gambling and betting, and in “seeking favors of prostitutes, which was not illegal before 1644,  [but] was declared illegal by the mid-18^th century, with dismissal from one’s post the punishment . . . “ See Mark Elliott, The Manchu Way: The Eight Banners and Ethnic Identity in Late Imperial China (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 2001) 188.

[1]Keith McMahon, Causality and Containment in Seventeenth-century Chinese Fiction (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1988), p. 79.

[1] On the dangers of sexual excess as “threatening to the interior order but above all to the social order,” see Paola Santangelo,  “The Cult of Love in Some Texts  of Ming and Qing Literature,” East and West 50/1-4, Dec.  2000,  444.

[1] A good discussion of this development is in Martin W. Huang, Desire and Fictional Narrative, ch. 1l, “Desire, Anxiety, and Ambivalence During the Late Ming.”

[1] Matthew H. Sommer, Sex, Law, and Society in Late Imperial China (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000), pp. 45-54, discusses the legal standing of sexual relations between master and servant in different periods. For the most part, intercourse with a servant girl was considered to be "favoring" her, unless she was married. Being thus "favored" might, but need not, give her the status of a "chamber wife.,"

[1] Grandmother Jia in Hong Lou Meng makes fun of the scholar-beauty ideal in literature; see West and Idema, the Moon and the Zither,  pp. 122-23.

[1] Susan Mann, "Women, Families, and Gender Relations," in Willard J. Peterson, ed., The Cambridge History of China, Vol. 9 Part One: The Ch'ing Empire to 1800 (Cambridge and New York, Cambridge University Press, 2002) p. 447.

[1]Derk Bodde, Chinese Thought, Society, and Science: The Intellectual and Social Background of Science and Technology in Pre-modern China (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1991), p. 281.

[1]Roy, The Plum in the Golden Vase, vol. I, preface, p. xx. The relationship between Gu Jianlong and Wang Shimin is discussed in PUP Chapt. One, pp.     .

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