Sexuality and containment, Ling Mengchu's erotic stories

grantor: University of TorontoThis thesis is a cultural study of a group of stories about illicit sex in the short story collections 'Pai'an jinqi' and ' Erke pai'an jingqi', both of which were written by the late Ming writer Ling Mengchu (1580-1644). The whole thesis consists of two parts: introduction and translation. The translation includes four erotic stories selected from these two collections and these four stories have never been rendered into English before (though some of them have French and German versions). The introduction, instead of a potpourri of rudimentary generalizations about the author and his works, is a monograph mainly focussed on a paradox of these stories, i.e., the tension between the presentation of sexual pleasure and its containment for a moral purpose. To give a convincing explanation to this tension, the thesis examines the context--the life of the author and the society in which he lived as much as it analyses the text--the aspects of sexuality and the repressive mechanisms the author imposed on his erotic descriptions. In so doing, it tries to demonstrate the eroticism in the way that may help understand not only how the principle of pleasure is related to the economic base of the late Ming but also how, owing to the functioning of the state ideology, it is morally contained, contrary to what has been assumed by some Western scholars (e.g. Foucault) that "pleasure is not considered in relation to an absolute law of the permitted and the forbidden, nor by reference to a criterion of utility, but first and foremost in relation to itself." And it is the conclusion of this thesis that these stories about illicit sex, erotic as they are, are actually mildly explicit in terms of sexual description, belonging, in its three-tier typological schema (i.e., the schema that divides late Ming erotic fiction into three basic kinds: lust, lust-love and lust-sex) of the late Ming erotica, to the category of "lust."Ph.D