Yu and Qing as Raw Materials of Love: Rethinking Desire and Sentiment in Ming-Qing Novels

Abstract

Through literature, authors attempt to both elucidate and more profoundly understand the nature of the world around them, simultaneously expressing and refining their own beliefs and perceptions. For this reason, literature is an important vehicle to understanding the nature of human inquiry and the questions occupying the minds of authors and their contemporaries. The Plum in the Golden Vase and The Story of the Stone are two late imperial Chinese masterworks involving the interplay of the sexual and the social, the psychological and the relational. Through these works, the novels’ authors both critique and question social reality, human nature, and their ties to moral responsibility. Our examination endeavors to better understand the novelists’ perspectives through consideration of philosophical and social developments leading up to and during China’s late imperial period. While relying on a firm grounding in Chinese thought, this examination also considers insight drawn from the Catholic philosophical tradition. This intercultural perspective is justified by the universal nature of the questions at stake (despite specifically cultural manifestations and variations in form), as well as certain similarities between the Neo-Confucian and Catholic outlooks. Through this investigation, we are able to identify sentiment and desire as primary agents acting as both ingredients of and impediments to virtuous love.