Adultery in Enemies Enamoured: Questions of Value, Morality, and Erotics in Late Seventeenth-Century Urban Jiangnan

Abstract

Enemies Enamored (Huanxi yuanjia) was a late Ming collection of 24 erotic short tales, several of which were expanded into pornographic novels in the early Qing. While the artistic taste and style of this collection can be read as more or less a continuation of Feng Menglong’s Sanyan or Ling Mengchu’s Erpai, it moves almost entirely away from drawing on story-lines from history and refocuses on everyday contemporary urban life. This paper will explore the interrelation of recurring themes of adultery and emerging modern valorizations of material and sexual desires. In contrast with widespread literary representations of women’s devotion to upholding the chastity cult in the late imperial period, Enemies Enamored portrays a very different imaginaire prevalent within the world of the urban masses. Where conventional love stories are always located in the domestic courtyard or garden (houhuayuan) and portray touching love between gifted young scholars and virtuous beauties, this genre finds its home along busy urban streets and public spaces where the struggle to maintain a livelihood is the setting for longed for love and relationships. This mix of pressures means that love, morality and money are equal in, or at least compete for, importance in the hearts of male and female protagonists. Furthermore, love, morality and money come under pressure themselves as the author’s refuse to either condemn or valorize adultery, treating it as one among many other facts of ordinary urban existence. With this new genre questions of shame and guilt so common within orthodox moral discourse are pushed well into the background, and new values and morals emerge as men and women negotiate common sense solutions to their predicaments. Very often solutions are phrased in terms of judgment, justice and equality of exchange that once agreed upon (and made public) allow all parties to accommodate less orthodox arrangements than would ever be considered by the elite, while at the same time persuading the reader to agree that these unorthodox arrangements also represented a form of morality, a form of morality closer to modern forms of accounting than established and time-honored virtues.