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Abstract
This dissertation investigates the possibility suggested by late sixteenth-century to eighteenth-century Chinese drama and fiction that emotion, instead of being interior in oneself, is rather uncannily exterior. This exteriority of emotion is best captured by theatricality---pervasive in both drama and fiction---in which emotion is enacted on behalf of and for the eyes of the other rather than self-expression and absorption. Conversely, the vernacular novel, thanks to its nature as a silent reading material, embeds drama in such a way that the orality of performance is inverted by textuality, a process crucial to the fabrication of interiority. Put together and mutually informed, drama and fiction demonstrate how emotion is "other-wise" rather than "self-possessed," how interiority is constructed when performance is punctuated by reading, and how such construction is demystified in dramatic performance and fictional representation.
My introduction illustrates that the exteriority of emotion, both grounded and obscured in traditional philosophy, came to be expressed in the theatrical culture of Ming-Qing China, hence constitutive for what can be called the "early modern." Chapter One discusses the "theater of doubling" developed in the sixteenth-century novel Journey to the West, its sequel, and its dramatic versions, where emotion figures as an uncanny haunting from without. Chapter Two analyzes the historical conditions in which women performed and "published" emotion in place of men who failed in their own expression, as epitomized in the formation of the collection of women's writing Wumengtang ji and reflected upon by Ye Xiaowan's play Dream of the Mandarin Ducks (1636). Chapter Three presents an obscure courtesan Xu Feng murdered right before the Ming's collapse, whose portrait, poem, drama, and ultimately death and revenant paradoxically failed and oversucceeded in performing prescribed emotions, thus cracking the male literati nostalgia. Chapter Four explores the difference between silent reading of a play and listening to its performance with regard to the construction of interiority, as dramatized in the eighteenth-century novel The Story of the Stone. The epilogue shows a complex picture in which traces of theatricality linger in the contention between tropes of intoning and silent reading in nineteenth-century fiction and drama.
