Loading...
Sublime Love and the Ethics of Equality in a Homoerotic Novel of the Nineteenth Century: "Precious Mirror of Boy Actresses"
McMahon, Keith
McMahon, Keith
Citations
Altmetric:
Abstract
Precious Mirror of Boy Actresses is the most serious piece of fiction about male love
since the late Ming and the lengthiest of all in Chinese literary history. It is remarkable
in its extension of the egalitarian implications of the qing aesthetic that
it inherits from the late Ming and from earlier Qing literature such as Dream of the
Red Chamber. In the homoerotic relationship it idealizes, lovers who are rigidly
separated in terms of status nevertheless experience a sublime love which necessarily
results in the liberation of the man of lower status. The novel makes unique
use of the qing aesthetic's idealization of the feminine to arrive at this ethically
pragmatic conclusion whereby liberation is achieved. The foregrounding of this
sublime love and the qing-perfected characters who embody it, moreover, link the
novel with other works of the period which portray a China that is ultimately a
stable and invulnerable entity. Thus Precious Mirror's interpretation of qing carries
a historical significance in spite of the novel's obliviousness of the social and po¬
litical turmoil of China in the mid-nineteenth century.
Description
This is the publisher's version, also available electronically from: http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/156852602100402332.
Date
2002
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Brill Academic Publishers
Research Projects
Organizational Units
Journal Issue
Keywords
Citation
McMahon, Keith. “Sublime Love and the Ethics of Equality in a Homoerotic Novel of the Nineteenth Century, Precious Mirror of Boy Actresses,” in the journal Nannü: Men, Women and Gender in Early and Imperial China 4.1 (2002): 69-109. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/156852602100402332