Dream as “Being”: Du Liniang and her field of “being”(Outline of Lecture)

Zou YuanjiangPhD, Professor and Doctor supervisor, School of Philosophy,

Wuhan University, Wuhan, Hubei, China

The youth edition of Peony Pavilion, Jiangsu Kunju Theatre, 2004.

Tang Xianzu (1550-1616) wrote The Peony Pavilion (1598) during the twenty-six years of the Wanli period in China’s Ming dynasty (1368-1644). The play became so renowned that it almost sidelined The West Chamber (the most popular 13th century’s play of a love story by Wang Shifu) and actors jostled to perform it. For several centuries from the Ming to the Qing dynasty, The Peony Pavilion astonished readers and audiences, particularly great numbers of women who were moved to sorrow by the heroine Du Liniang’s fate in the play.

Generally speaking, the word “field” means a space or time with tangible significance. However, it includes not only a simple place or time, but also the phenomenological concept of the non-object having, and as of yet undetermined “leerhorizont”, although not emptiness. A specific era will form a cultural field and mode of life which an individual is unable to bypass. The survival field confronted by Du Liniang is the restriction of pre-modern women’s carnal desire and soul imposed by the related notions of chastity and virginity-defense established in the Han dynasty (206BC-220AD). This kind of restriction for Du Liniang, a woman living in the Ming

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Dynasty, is embodied in the extremely strict constraint on her living space and spiritual world, both from ideological pressure and constraints on her body. This malformed notion of chastity was not only “held in esteem by the state system”, but often used by those men of letters to express their own unrestrained and vehement ideas on women’s virtue, such that a shocking but popular custom was formed at that time. Furthermore, the bodily constraint is not only evident in the corrupt practice of locking a subjugated woman in her quarters, but in the repressing and denouncing of the woman’s natural physical and psychological desires. It is under the pressures of a specific cultural field that women of the Ming dynasty are subject to anguish and depression. Like Du Liniang, they could only achieve passionate love within their dreams. Although it seems Du Liniang is just venting her physical desire, essentially, her actions are declarations of ultimate emotion. Ultimate emotion is chaotic and personal and thus “cannot be ruled by reason”. However, it is precisely the “certainly uncertain” psychological field of true feelings that is the “leerhorizont,” which can be enriched within intentional perception.

Holderlin says, “Gesang ist Dasein.” That is to say, singing is the product of emotional experience by the subject, and an experience which uses singing to bring the subject’s “being” to the fore. Therefore, to sing is to be. Du Liniang’s song is her “being”. In reality, whether in her body or her mind, Du Liniang has been injured and repressed by the Confucian ethical code and has no “song,” only resentment. In essence, Du Liniang does not “be” because she is alienated from the real world. But once she dreams of love, she enters a condition of boundless life and starts to have a song of her own. Her life is illuminated. From this point of view, for Du Liniang, to dream is to be. Du Liniang really is a character who has suddenly discovered the value of her life and the fleeting happiness of her dreams and for this she is willing to die. Du Liniang being willing to sacrifice her life to preserve her instinctive drive is an act which would have been a shocking “historical event” in the late Ming dynasty, an era confined by the Confucian ethical code. Since Du Liniang does not “be” in the real world and her life is valueless, she would rather risk sacrificing herself to pursue her dreams. She would rather open a dream world, which, although unreal, affirms the value of her life and allows her to “be” within it. While Du Liniang dares to sing that “I’d like to linger where flowers thrive, ‘till death be free while I’m alive, shed my tears without their chide”, she also dares to bear the great pain of death and, from which she enters ultimate “being”. The fantastic tale of Du Liniang expresses the true living conditions of women in the late

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Ming dynasty. Tang Xianzu’s The Peony Pavilion provides a magical and divine way for those love-longing women, hopelessly confined in their quarters, to release their love and desires.

Memorial Archway of Chastity located in Linchuan, Jiangxi, Tang Xianzu’s hometown.

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