chapter 3

The Plum in the Golden Vase

A Prelude to the Androgyny Craze

In the late Ming literary arena, gender imperatives are probably nowhere
more peremptorily challenged than in The Plum in the Golden Vase (1596).1
Its heroine, Pan Jinlian, the murderess of her two husbands, shatters the tra-
ditional ideal of womanhood with such a vengeance that the precocious
Qing commentator Zhang Zhupo (1670 – 1698) vehemently alleged: “Jin-
lian is inhuman”(Jinlian bushi ren).2 In traditional Chinese writings, Jinlian
is virtually a byword for debauchery, malignity, and depravity; correspond-
ingly, in Western criticism she is often referred to as a vampire,3 a succubus,4
and a demon. In Yenna Wu’s study of Chinese termagants, Jinlian is re-
garded as the most extreme example of virago in Chinese literature, a com-
posite of jealous shrew, adulteress, and femme fatale.5
A more tolerant and even sympathetic attitude, however, emerges in
modern China, concurrent with the infiltration from the West of such dis-
courses as women’s liberation during the May Fourth Movement and fem-
inism of the contemporary age. Prominent among the exonerators of this
Chinese virago are Ouyang Yuqian (1889 – 1962) and Wei Minglun, who re-
cast Jinlian’s image on the Chinese stage to free her of her moral stigma.6