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| Singapore edition of Heroic Sons and Daughters, a major Confucian Romance. |
For centuries, polygamy was a basic organizing principle of Chinese families, and so romance stories in China need not denigrate "polygynous-philanderers," and "remarkable women" can organize concubines for their men with no loss to their virtue, at least in theory. Drawing on Lacan's analysis of narrative as fantasy, McMahon reads a wide variety of late Imperial Chinese literature to show us the tension between the deeply conservative Confucian patriarchy and a rapidly emerging native form of romanticism -- what McMahon calls "qing egalitarianism." Accepting McMahon's model of qing egalitarianism, I show how Yang Jiang's fiction and essay merge the model of the "remarkable woman" with still more notions of sexuality and family responsibility inherited from the Western picaresque and comedies of manners. Where McMahon concludes by saying that China's heritage of polygamy continues to exert a "shadowy influence" on sexuality in China today, I argue that Yang Jiang's appropriation of the category of "remarkable woman" is one way that Confucian notions of virtue inform her social and political values.
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