Mandarin Ducks and Butterfly Fiction

1. Mandarin Ducks and Butterfly Fiction Historical background • collapse of the Qing dynasty • lack of central control • failure of attempt at parliamentary system • Yuan Shikai establishes Confucian Religion Society; 1913 puts down second revolution attempt by southern Nationalists; 1914 Confucianism established as state religion; 1915 Yuan acts out Confucian rites at the Temple of Heaven and declares self emperor of China; 1916 dies • second restoration of Zhang Xun 张勋 (1917); attempts to put Pu Yi back on throne • 21 Demands (1915) (signed by Yuan Shikai) by Japan on sovereignty in Shandong • collapses into a state of warlord factionalism (1916-27) Yuan Shikai

2. May Fourth Period Historical background • all of the above led to an extreme sense of disillusionment among the second generation of reformers and showed them that political reform was not enough to truly transform China • desire for escape through popular fiction • Reaction to "alienation" of industrialization • interestingly, though, this same disillusionment also feed the rise of the May Fourth, or so it is said

3. Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies Fiction Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies School (鸳鸯蝴蝶派) Fiction • popular, commercial, entertainment literature from the 1910s to 1930s • Genres include: knight-errant stories (wuxia武俠) detective fiction (zhentan偵探); scandal fiction (heimu黑幕); love (xieqing寫情); comic (youmo幽默) Cover of issue of the “low brow” literary journal Short Story Monthly

4. Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies Fiction the urgency of the May Fourth movement’s rhetorical attacks on contemporary Butterfly literature reflects a desire to quell the disruptive power represented by that literature, and simultaneously to harness and reappropriate that same power for the May Fourth movement’s own purposes—Carlos Rojas, intro to Rethinking Chinese Popular Culture, p. 2 May Fourth attitude • despised by “progressive” May Fourth intellectuals as superficial entertainment fluff • Zhou Zuoren 周做人, Ye Shengtao 叶圣陶, and Mao Dun 茅盾, “Naturalism and Modern Chinese Fiction” (自然主義與中國現代小說) • Attacked it because they saw it as superficial and/or having a negative moral effect on its audience, or without a worldview or purpose Struggle for cultural capital and reading public • Reflects a battle over readership, legitimacy, symbolic capital, and ultimately a role for themselves and their literature in History

5. Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies Fiction Marxist Attitude • totally exclude it from the concerns of “new literature” (新文学); in this sense, they accept uncritically the May Fourth view Post-Mao resurrection • scholars such as Fan Boqun 范伯群and Wei Shaochang 魏绍昌 have revived interest in it, but still have a moralistic taint; Chen Pingyuan 陈平原is less so • part of the revisionist May Fourth views

6. Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies Fiction Sociological reasons for rise: • emerging middle class in Shanghai • growth of publishing industry • newspapers and “supplements” as media for fiction • rapid growth of schools and reading public • readership of most popular of Butterfly stories may have reached 1/2 million to a million  Writers: • many from Suzhou • scholars of conservative bent whose fathers had often died and who “failed” to move into the progressive stream • Important writers: Xu Zhenya 徐枕亞, Bao Tianxiao 包天笑, Su Manshu 蘇曼叔, Li Hanqiu 李涵秋, Xiang Kairen 向凱然, Zhang Henshi 張恨水, Cheng Xiaoqing 程小青, Xu Zhuodai 徐桌呆 Readership: • “petty urbanites” (小市民) Bao Tianxiao

7. Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies Fiction Development • early period (1910s) characterized by pseudo-classical language, traditional themes • through the influence of the May Fourth, 1920s Butterfly fiction is almost always in the vernacular and has more contemporary themes and settings. • however, even in 1916, the Xiaoshuohuabao小说画报 (Fiction pictorial) adopted the vernacular for its Butterfly stories Fiction Pictorial, early vernacular Butterfly publication

8. Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies Fiction Short story vs. Novel • contrary to what the scholar Slupski writes (“In the pre May 4th period short story writing seems to have been scarce and not very popular”, p. 3), the short story was very popular during the 1910s. Perry Link claims that short stories “easily outnumbered the long novels” (p. 15-16). • This fact suggests a greater importance for the Butterfly writers and a positive influence on the development of the short story form in the May Fourth period. • however, such a view should not take away from the radically different type of short story that appears in the May 4th

9. Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies Fiction Stage one • Jade-pear Spirit (玉梨魂; 1912-13) set the stage for the popularity of of love stories in the 1910s, yet there are ties with the novels of sentiment in the late Qing (ie. Sea of Woe) and with the “scholar-beauty” (才子佳人) tradition of the late Ming and Qing • sets the pattern of love triangles (sensitive man in love with two different women); e.g., Su Manshu 苏曼殊“Broken Hairpin” (碎簪记; 1916) Stage two (social novel) • satire: e.g., Li Hanqiu 李涵秋, Tides of Yangzhou (廣陵潮) • detective fiction (Cheng Xiaoqing’s 程小青 series of the Chinese Sherlock Holmes, or Huosang 霍桑) • scandal fiction (黑幕小说) exposes corruption, sometimes used vindictively to get back at an enemy  Stage three (knight-errant) • Xiang Kairen 向恺然, Biographies of Marvelous Knights of the Rivers and Lakes (江湖奇侠传; 1923-24), et al. • perhaps an indirect response to imperialism

10. Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies Fiction When you are exhausted from a night out and return home, you can turn on the light and open the magazine, or enjoy a spirited conversation on the stories among friends, or peruse the stories with one’s beloved wife sitting by one’s side. And when your interest flags, the remainder can be put away for the next day. When the morning sun shines through the windows and the sweet fragrance of flowers permeates the seats, all worries will vanish with a copy of the stories in hand. Is it not happiness indeed to enjoy a day’s leisure and repose in such a manner after an entire week of grinding labor? . . . Everyone loves reading fiction, particularly that in Saturday, which is so portable and full of such interesting stories—Wang Dungen 王钝根, “Remarks on the Publication of Saturday”礼拜六出版赘言 (1914) in Denton 1996: 244 • published in journals such as The Saturday

11. May Fourth Period Example: “For the Love of Her Feet,” by He Haiming 何海鸣 Shanghai street circa 1920s (above); fashions of the 1920s (left)