A Study On Elegance And Popularity In Superfluous Things

Superfluous Things authored by Wen Zhenheng is a representative literary work about scholar’s daily life in the late Ming Dynasty,which advocates Elegance and belittles popularity.Elegance and popularity are a pair of aesthetic category in the history of Chinese aesthetics,the connotation of which varies with social background all along.According to Superfluous things,it is a core principle of aesthetic appreciation that Elegance is superior to popularity.However,the boundary line of elegance and popularity is quite ambiguous,and Superfluous Things cannot provide a unified criteria to classify them.On the one hand,Wen Zhenheng identifies himself as a cultural legislator by distinguishing the specific objects on the limited list between elegance and popularity.One the other hand,Wen Zhenheng emphasizes that the ability to distinguish elegance and popularity in daily life exclusively belongs to the gentry class.The worship for nature and antique are the main thoughts about elegance in The Superfluous Things.The worship for nature shows in two ways:bringing the original ecological nature into the living space and obscuring the artificial traces of artifacts.The worship for nature is the projection of gentry class’s " Shi Ying"strategy against political storm in the late Ming dynasty.The worship for antique is to pursuit the ancient cultural traces in daily life through collecting antiquities,artistic conception and narrative strategies.Since the hierarchical order of the "four peoples" in the late Ming dynasty threatened the group dignity of the gentry class,the gentry class took the worship for antique as a strategy.The Superfluous Things aims to maintain the orthodox position of gentry class by distinction between elegance and popularity,emphasizing the gentry class’s traditional order as "the first of the four peoples".