ABSTRACT
This third chapter examines a single dominant character, Wang Xi-feng, cast in the ancient Chinese literary prototype of the shrew. The novel tests ‘true-life’ against the prototype, questioning patriarchal marital verities and bringing the character vividly alive but, in the minds of many of Xueqin’s readers, rather than redeeming the prototype, this very realism ultimately confirms Xi-feng as the image of the ‘modern’ shrew.
An alternative reading explored in this chapter suggests that Xueqin has created in Xi-feng a modern ‘strong woman’ whose story follows a tragic trajectory similar in many ways to the five-act structure of Western classical tragic drama. Shakespeare’s Hamlet, acting the theatrical avenger in his salvationary role of restoring the purity of the ‘royal bed of Denmark’, in the process becomes embroiled in his own contradictions and himself the object of revenge; Xueqin’s Xi-feng, theatrical in her self-presentation, confidence and competence, aspiring to the role of model wife to shore up the ‘tottering’ great house of the Jia clan, inventive and resourceful in acting out this role, becomes trapped in all its contradictions, finding herself turning into its opposite – the failed wife and outcast shrew. As with the drama of Hamlet, it is the complex modernity of her struggle in The Story of the Stone that elevates her story to tragic status.
This reading of Xi-feng is consistent firstly with her placement as one of the Twelve Beauties of Jinling, fictional versions of those ‘wonderful girls’ the author memorialises in The Story of the Stone to preserve them from ‘pass[in]g into oblivion’ (1.Intro.21); and secondly with the author’s sustained creative investment in dramatising her fortunes, as much or more so than for any of the other ‘number of females’ whose lives are celebrated in the novel even as they are mourned. The exploration is undertaken through tracing Xi-feng’s fortunes in the extended narrative as if she was a tragic heroine in a five-act drama approximating the structure of Western classical tragedy.
The chapter is organised in three parts: Introduction: Reading Wang Xi-feng through Hamlet; Section One: The shrew literary prototype and the contemporary social and political context; Section Two: The tragedy of Wang Xi-feng, in five acts.
