Books: "Polygamy and Sublime Passion"

Keith McMahon, Polygamy and Sublime Passion: Sexuality in China on the Verge of Modernity (University of Hawaii, 2009)

What could be more fun than a tour through the world of "polygamist-philanders," Chinese men of prestige who both maintained multiple spouses and visited courtesans and prostitutes? Surely only a volume that would not only indulge any healthy reader's fascination with sexuality and desire, but affirmed that the cultural extinction of Chinese polygamy both figures modernity and leaves its psychic traces on the present.

In the introduction, we meet the antagonists of the polygamist-philanders (with their fantasy of themselves as "male masters") in the form of the "remarkable women," who sought and attained agency (of a sort: they could be scheming only in the name of "passive polygyny," i.e. picking out their husband's wives and mistresses). And this despite birth in a deeply polygynous world (in Chinese, the regime of 一夫多妻, the 妻妾制度). Moreover, "male consorts" were allies to the remarkable women. For both, greater virtues lay in the utmost loyalty between two persons, a love McMahon will call "the sublime passion."

All this by way of meta-narratological pondering after reading a great many Ming and Qing love stories, including Pinhua baojian 品花寶鑑 (The Precious Mirror of Boy Actresses, 1849; suddenly this book leaps back onto my mind's desktop again as a possible first novel to translate). Halfway, through, though, McMahon reveals that his master readings are undergirded with Lacanian propositions about sexuality, that sex antagonizes sense, that the subject is split and that the adulterous woman is a symbol of the fear that the man's totality is only a concept never graspable in reality, and so man must fantasize of himself as master, as a universal exception. (10-11). Lacan's terms "master," "university," "analyst" and "hysteric" draw and color the roles polygamist-philanderer, remarkable woman, and male consort, even when they don't appear, or so says McMahon of his coming chapters.