The Question of Elite- and Non-Elite Popular Literatures in Late Imperial China

Abstract

Mention of vernacular literature (tongsu wenxue) from Ming and Qing China usually brings to mind The Romance of Three Kingdoms, The Plum in the Golden Vase, The Story of Stone, etc., however, given that such works were the products of literati men, the themes, values, and tastes they convey are aligned with the cultural elite of the day. A similar situation exists for the Sanyan erpai and similar collections, even though the popular origin of their tales remains evident within their elite reframing. Stimulated by newly uncovered lower-class songbooks that circulated in northern China during the mid-late Qing period, this paper seeks to identify two different streams of traditional Chinese popular literature—literati and commoner, as well as outline their different positions in relation to values, aesthetics, and attitudes towards love, marriage and sexuality. In Ming and Qing literati popular narrative genres, for example, the male protagonist most attracting the interest of women in romantic tales is generally the “talented scholar,” and this has become something of a commonplace within much of the research on masculinity in traditional Chinese society. Yet, reading songs where women narrate episodes of love, sex and marriage in late Qing popular songbooks from northern China, we find a phenomenon that goes against the usual grain of “popular literature,” which is a near complete absence of themes along the lines of “a scholar down on his luck rising to top the palace examination list.” On the contrary, the male protagonists are men we would expect rural women to meet, such as farmers, peddlers, craftsmen, while the songs they tell of their flirtation, affairs, passion, violence, and family disputes paint a far more quotidian picture of the realities of commoner women’s lives. Drawing on a body of little-studied late Qing commoner songbooks, this paper will consider the distance between how women position and relate to men in this low-status genre and in literati vernacular literature, and furthermore, to suggest the need for greater sensitivity toward elite and non-elite popular threads and their mixture in traditional Chinese literary genres.