晚清前期女性彈詞小說試探——非政治文本的政治解讀

A Political Reading of Non-political Narratives by Women in the Opening Years of the Late Ch’ing

本文關懷的問題有三：一、文學史上「晚清時期」的分期問題；二、晚清小說理論對文學史建構的影響；三、女性彈詞小說在晚清時期的發展與其政治涵隱。文學史家常以新、舊文學的分野作為晚清文學最大的特色。本文指出進化式文學史觀主宰了五四以來的晚清文學研究，因而忽略了新舊交雜時期的文學作品，亟需吾人重新思考。晚清小說理論中，彈詞小說雖然集舊小說眾惡之大成，但由於其「婦女教科書」的地位，故仍然保有啟迪民智的價值。彈詞小說背負了新的道德使命，重新突顯了新、舊文學的衝突，使得後人輕易忽略了這一批「舊」作品在凝滯與沈悶中展現的「新」意。本文處理三部彈詞小說，分別代表晚清女作家面對變局的三種嘗試。《榴花夢》以古喻今，極力溢美女英雄，指涉十九世紀中期家國有難的挫折感。《精忠傳》將彈詞小說推向一向屬於男性的公領域。宋金／相爭的主題出現在晚清，更留有無盡的詮釋餘地。《鳳雙飛》以新奇為目，專事對男性同性關係的摹寫，全書從內容到形式都洩漏了作者踰越規範的慾望。本文藉著對這三部彈詞小說的探索，思考晚清時期的舊女性如何利用舊形式創作，與興起中的新文學潮流接上榫頭，也與風雨欲來的現實宛轉對應。

This paper focuses on three areas: the periodization of the “late Ch'ing”； late Ch'ing theories of novel and the construction of literary history; the development of t'an-tz'u narratives in the late Ch'ing and their political implication. Literary historians generally agree that late Ch'ing literature features a demarcation between the old and the new. I point out that a linear view of literary history has dominated the studies of late Ch'ing literature since the May 4th period; therefore critics, until now, tend to ignore works produced at the intersection of the old and the new. In late Ch'ing discourse of novel, the t'an-tz'u narrative appeared to be a synthesis of drawbacks. However, thanks to its status as “textbooks for women,” the genre was valued as a vehicle of enlightenment. With this new moral imperative imposed on the t'an-tz'u, the conflict between old and new literatures was again pushed to the foreground, resulting in our neglect of “new” possibilities stagnating in the “old” works. The three t'an-tz'u narratives discussed here represent different attempts of late Ch'ing women writers to respond to the national crisis. Liu-hua meng comments on the present by telling a story of the past. It exaggerates the virtues of the heroine, thereby pointing to frustration about the mid-nineteenth-century national crisis. Ching-chung chuan is a rewriting of the Yue Fei legend, driving the feminized t'an-tz'u genre toward the public sphere that was supposed to be masculine. Furthermore, as this work brought up the conflict between Han and Jurchen people in the context of the late Ch'ing, we are left with infinite possibilities of interpretation. Feng shuang fei aims at novelty and concentrates on the portrayal of one-on-one relationships between men. From content to form, the work reveals the author's desire to transgress norms. By reading these three t'an-tz'u narratives by women, I try to reconstruct the situation in which traditional women writers in the late Ch'ing, while writing in the old form, related themselves to the emerging new literary trends and indirectly responded to the imminent chaos of the developing circumstances.