The dream world of love-sick maidens: A study of women's responses to the 'The Peony Pavilion', 1598-1795

This dissertation is an attempt to understand the impact of The Peony Pavilion on Chinese women from 1598 to 1795 by examining twenty cases of their responses to the play. Both circumstances under which such impact was generated--from reading the play or from attending its performance--will be taken into consideration, even though most information we have concerns the female readership. The scope of study encompasses the primary sources written by women themselves in response to The Peony Pavilion, as well as the representations of these responses in such secondary sources as anecdotes, dramas, and fictions.;With the advent of the late imperial period, knowledgeable women who could both read and write became a visible group in Chinese society. Their visibility resulted in part from increased opportunities to publish their writings; in part from the proliferation of their stories. Among such stories, those about Yu Niang, an anonymous woman from Neijiang, Xiaoqing, and Jin Fengdian stand out as a category, because all four women are said to have died untimely because of having read The Peony Pavilion. This study traces the evolution of these stories and discovers that most of them are fictional or are inlaid with fiction.;My study also shows that the less well-known cases of women's response to The Peony Pavilion are often more authentic, and that they are not rendered in any fictional or dramatic forms simply because they do not fall into the category of "love-sick maidens"--a stereotype constructed by late imperial Chinese men to codify women who came under the influence of The Peony Pavilion.