Hong Shen’s Wilde: Productive Confusion and the Making of Chinese Spoken Drama

John Zou

（Chongqing University）

Hong Shen’s Wilde: Productive Confusion and the Making of Chinese Spoken Drama

John Zou

（Chongqing University）

The Young Mistress’ Fan, Hong Shen’scoup de theatre,is often said to have revolutionized the Republican stage. There is little sustained consideration, however, of its dialogue with the so-called Nora Plays following the arrival of Ibsen in May Fourth China, and its intertextual strain vis-à-vis Oscar Wilde’sLady Windermere’s Fan. This paper explores the facetious conservative advocacy in Hong’s masterpiece, and makes a point to highlight an often unrecognized conservative agenda seated deeply in the semi-colonial discourse of the May Fourth New Culture Movement. Such an agenda takes the core issues of modernity as suff iciently resolved in modern Euro-America, and the mission of Chinese modernists are relegated to nothing more than translation, transmission, or transparent rendition.

Hong Shen; Oscar Wilde; Rendered Plays; Localization; Postcolonial Modernity; Semicolonial Modernity

The fact is, the greatest drama of all time, and the larger part of the drama of the past twenty years, uses action much less for its own sake than to reveal mental states which are to rouse sympathy or repulsion in an audience.

George Pierce Baker

In May, 1924, a singular play premiered in Shanghai and effected permanent change in the theater-making of modern China.[1]The paper that exists in its present form was originally composed for a presentation at the International Symposium “China and Global Modernity (1784—1919)”, May 27—29, 2016, at Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, China. I thank the conveners of the Symposium, Profs. Gan Yang ［甘阳］ and Qingsheng Tong ［童庆生］ for the kind invitation, and other participants for inspiration and comments.Hong Shen’sShaonainai de shanzi(The Young Mistress’ Fan), rendered from Oscar Wilde’s drawing room comedy,Lady Winderemere’s Fan, was an instant hit with those who had by then acquired a taste for the western spoken form since the outbreak of May Fourth movement in 1919, but yet to witness its Chinese execution in live performance. The play is about a proud young wife, barely of age, who mistakes the husband’s generosity to another woman and is incensed enough to be taken by the idea of eloping with an admirer and giving up her family and new born child. But this other woman, who turns out to be her incognito mother and who twenty years ago did exactly what she is about to do and is only crawling back to respectable society through the f inancing of her husband, extends a redeeming hand and narrowly withdraws her from the brink of peril. Mrs. Erlynne, or the disreputable Lady Jin (i.e., Lady Gold or indeed Golddigger) by Hong Shen’s bolder christening, has been stealthily milking the son-inlaw for cash because of his jealous protection of the credulous wife’s good name and conscience. A critical moment of the play, the misleading discovery of the husband’s surreptitious spending constitutes Wilde’s, and then Hong Shen’s, breakout scene where the sexualized f igure of nemesis, whose maternal truth her daughter is never to uncover, f irst assumes veritable delineation after she wanders about in the Hamletian fashion of an ominous rumor.

Trained in porcelain engineering at Ohio State (1916—1919) before jumping ship to George Baker’s Workshop 47 at Harvard (1919—1920), Hong Shen, son of a disgraced Republican bureaucrat implicated in a high prof ile political assassination, allegedly systematically overhauled Chinese theater after his return to Shanghai in 1922.[2]Hong Shuzu ［洪述祖］, Hong Shen’s ［洪深］ father, was arrested in 1914 and executed on April, 5, 1919, for involvement in the alleged assassination of Song Jiaoren ［宋教仁］. 1919 also marked a traumatic break in Hong Shen academic career. In the image of Baker, a new father was born, so to speak. See 陈美英 Chen Mingying、宋宝珍 Song Baozhen, 《洪深传》Hongshen Zhuan ［A Biography of Hong Shen］（北京［Beijing］：文化艺术出版社［Culture and Arts Press］，1996）, 33—36。OfShaonainai de shanzimuch has been said. If Hu Shi, one-time student of agriculture at Cornell, broke ground in dramatic literature for the country with hisZhongshen dashi(The Most Important Event of Life, 1919) that borrowed from middle Ibsen, it was only appropriate that an apostate of porcelain making from Havard pioneer her taste for the modern western stage by localizing a signature piece of Wilde. Insisting upon the rehearsed rigor of early 20th century American theater, his demonstration of some quasi-Aristotelian plan of action, especially via Baker’s version of the well-made play, was undiluted triumph. In 1928, now the goto person in China for doing “modern drama” right, he further coinedhuaju(spoken drama), a term that then took on a life of its own, for a rowdy phenomenon that had since the late 1900s gone through several transient designations.

Yet the work smacks of scandal. Other than its legacy in stagecraft, the ideological topicality and commercial success of the story itself, together with its inspiration for an enormous assortment of localized renditions of the western canon and popular repertory, remain virtually unaccounted for since dramatic modernism became a legitimate academic and journalistic subject in the late 1920s.[3]向培良Xiang Peiliang，《中国戏剧概评》Zhongguo xiju gaiping ［A General Commentary on Chinese Drama］（上海［Shanghai］：狂飙丛书［Piping Wind Books］，1928）。For students trained on the passions of May Fourth, that its critics and historians should avoid the narrative ofShaonainai de shanziand its Wildean “master text” like a plague was but predictable reaction. To the extent that Hong Shen’s Chinesecoup de theatreentered the fray of the 20s by dint of its f igural partiality to a young woman exiting an established domestic institution, the framing pitch of both seemed to celebrate her return upon the good advice of a wayward mother. If the High “May Fourth” was launched in June 1919 by Hu Shi’sZhongshen dashi, where a homequitting Nora Helmer is adopted to address a China in radical transition,Shaonainai de shanzi, in reference to Margaret Windermere’s near fall upon the unwholesome path of adultery and distress, lulls its audiences to the peace and protection of paternal domesticity. What must have, explicitly or implicitly, embarrassed scholars to no end then points to a scenario where between the two primal movers of modern Chinese drama, the ideological impetus of one and the logistic wherewithal of the other were locked in unyielding opposition. The f issure was nowhere more pronounced than the blatant implementation of the anxiety-provoking Lady Jin as anti-Nora within the May Fourth scheme of derivative modernization. If Ibsen’sfemale protagonist and the modern Chinese women developed by Hu Shi and his followers in her image encouraged contemplations over the illogic of traditional family, Lady Windermere made a powerful case for its necessary vindication. To Nora and the Noraesque women’s resolute exodus, Hong Shen’s countermove or f igural engagement was to bring about an older and indeed former Noraesque woman who dismisses her youthful impetuousness on stage, complains of the excruciating tax its incurred, and earnestly pleads that her daughter not condemn herself to the same trajectory of immediate satisfaction and an endlessly painful recovery. The play’s unmistakable anti-Enlightenment proclamation for Republican China was, then, that the boisterous youth, even as they come of age, are no more than hapless, tantrum-prone children, continuously in need of the kind of guidance whose genius is made possible only by the human folly of preceding generations. Whether out of considered antipathy or a f lash of spite,Shaonainai de shanzioccasioned a literal, systematic denunciation of Hu Shi’s Tian Yamei, who seeks to realize her best interest against parental counsel. It delivered a rebuttal to the High May Fourth to the extent that radical autonomy, especially given the def initively limited human understanding, borders on self-destructive truancy that pays no regard to sense and sensibility.

But conservatism also had its own pitfalls. It is noticeable that to check f ilial erraticism, maternal involvement was given substitutive and thus problematic inf luence. Relieving the daughter of a career of f iery rebellion and ensuring the play’s comic ending, Hong Shen/Wilde also turned her into a docile puppet that ultimately adopts the mother’s desire and action plan as her own one way or the other, allowing the older woman to correct indirectly a historic wrong, to use progeniture for a vehicle of atonement. Already by Wilde, Lady Windermere enters a process of regression into a part or extention of the maternal body. She begins by doubling Erlynne’s proud, youthful def iance, and ends as the latter’s fetish, i.e., the mother’s partially reconciled cause for personal gratif ication.[4]Melanie Klein, “Some Theoretical Conclusions Regarding the Emotional Life of the Infant”, Envy and Gratitude and Other works 1946—1963 (New York: The Free Press, 2002). In the Wilde play, Lady Windermere is a unilaterally recognized daughter, the once abandoned child, and not as her full person, to Mrs. Erlynne. The reversed maternal clinging to the daughter is then of course not a unique semi-colonial perversity.The psychological interior of the younger woman is gradually colonized by her estranged, strong-willed and yet unstoppably affective maternal “author.” When she returns to her childand husband, Lady Windermere’s robotic action only exteriorizes Mrs. Erlynne’s intensity of design and purpose, just as Hong Shen the dramatist habitually wore Baker’s, and now Wilde’s, agenda on his sleeves.

As the mother renews her lively enterprise of courtship, now a bird of prey informed in the full sobriety of marital calculations, with the silly but moneyed Lord Augustus sporting dyed facial hair and irrelevant jokes, the daughter is poised to fade away in her thankful, restored goodness and mother-like appreciation of worldly caprice. She sublimates allegorically into the self-erasing irony of a homely modern woman risen above the wanderlust of “modernist adventurism.” In the case of her Shanghai disciple the Young Mistress (Chen Yuzhen), maternal regression takes on a further twist as it points to both her Chinese mother and English model. If the Wildean scenario merely reassigns the origin or purpose of action from daughter to mother, for Hong Shen’s play the psychic interior, now a derivative f igure, is unfailingly presented as a space already originated rather than original. Not only the Young Mistress’ early grievance is an echo to that of Lady Windermere, but Lady Jin’s commanding presence also mirrors closely that of Mrs. Erlynne. To the extent that the daughter only functions as the exterior for the mother’s interior at the end of Wilde’s play, the Young Mistress acts as some Chinese avatar for a cosmopolitan secret sharer throughout Hong Shen’s localization, be she keyed to Lady Windermere, or to Lady Jin and ultimately Mrs. Erlynne. Beginning with the localization ofShaonainai de shanzi, the psychic interior thus carried the discursive distinction as an embattled entity in Chinese spoken drama. To the extent that it received prominent delineation, it constituted a mere virtual presence, i.e., a spectral locus for the origination, or motivation, of modernist action. Psycho-staging of George Baker’s kind thus set forth in the localized phenomenon an articulation of unfulf illed promise, of observable actions gravitating to the individual mind’s inner working that was persistently denied anchored representation. Given that much of the implicit rationale for the anti-operatic modern spoken drama in China was to conf igure the psychic interior, a landmark of localized drama such as Hong Shen’s masterpiece strangely denied its strategic registration.

The critical inconvenience of his adaptation and those that appeared in its wake came to a head then since in a context where theater making became increasingly tied to singular directorial intention, an important part of theater’s script development had obviously entered an unbounded process that compromised authorial singularity with violated textual boundaries. That is to say, whereas HongShen, by way ofShaonainai de shanzi, modernized Chinese theater by bringing stage representation under the director’s consistent oversight, he highlighted at the same time a practice in which the director’s singular creative process effectively counterpoints a particular mode of modernized script formation. Following his landslide success, localization of western works evolved quickly into something of a movement, whose standout pieces from Gu Zhongyi’sMei Luoxiang(1925), to Ouyang Yuqian’sYumo(1939) and Shi Tuo’sDa maxituan(1948), rendered respectively from Eugene Walter’sThe Easiest Way, Tolstoy’sPower of Darkness, and Andreyev’sHe Who Got Slapped, witnessed Republican experiments in spoken drama from the mid-20s all the way to the late 40s. For a lack of systematic research on localization as a sizeable and I would argue essential constituent of modern Chinese culture formation, Patrick Hanan’s observation regarding “translation” in the early 20th century Chinese f iction may provide initial coordinates for analysis. In a commentary on the exploitative approach to western f iction among Chinese writers, Hanan observes that “［t］he variation among translations can be described in general terms as ranging between two poles, preservation in all respects and assimilation in all respects. By preservation, I mean the attempt of the translator to replicate — or at least represent, so far as possible — all of the discernible features of the original work ... By assimilation, I mean the translator’s modif ication of the original into a form with which the general reader is familiar. These are extremes, of course, and the vast majority of translations fall somewhere in the middle.”[5]Patrick Hanan, Chinese Fiction of the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 90—91.Instead of pursuing the categorical difference between originality and mediation as Guo Moruo and detractors once did, Hanan brings into focus two different modes of composite authorship often f latly grouped, and disregarded, under the rubric of translation: roughly the text-centered preservation and reception-centered assimilation. For its extensive pragmatic modif ications, the work of localization that we witness by Hong Shen and others’ masterpieces may seem to take up the end of assimilation in such a spectrum.

Of course,for localized theater to score success, it is important to realize that it “assimilated” as much as it “preserved,” instead of necessarily distancing from one pole when nearing the other, insofar as adaptive f inesse and the radicality of foreign form often reinforced each other. Given that the rendered work by HongShen and his colleagues often subsisted on deploying the psychologized form of spoken drama, no matter how much resourcefulness was involved in linguistically converting a western text into a Chinese looking and Chinese sounding one, certain aspects of the former persisted as the organizing and originating principle of the latter. Also, for the convenience of discussion, another issue that has to be clarif ied at this point is that, what Hanan means by “assimilation” refers to a process of cross-cultural transmission at signif icant variance with how colonial “assimilation”is understood to have operated. Instead of initiating the colonized subject into the cosmopolitan culture of a “mother country,” Hanan’s term addresses the traff icking of western literary artifacts particularly for the consumption of a Chinese public. Furthermore, it is obvious that in the last Imperial and early Republican decades, the traff icking of western “cosmopolitan” resources in the semicolonial context was set apace not by the colonial state apparatus. At work was an acquisitive interest that presupposed a Chinese horizon of reception. The current paper makes the case, in regard to this reception then, that the general neglect ofShaonainai de shanziand its major sister acts is resulted not only from their ideological antagonism to liberal May Fourth spoken drama galvanized by the Noraesque f igure. It is also a consequence of the inevitable discomfort regarding the play’s uncertain national and authorial origin within the largely nation — and author-bound horizon of modern criticism. And in particular, it is issued from an overlooked discursive double-blind of May Fourth modernity, where the very mandate for autonomous action was often mediated in a referential process that undermined such autonomy and turned it into something of a myth and scandal. In the Republican localized plays, a corpus that I label Hong Shen’s obscured but perhaps more signif icant legacy in tandem with his logistic reform in theater production, I contend the overwhelming mother, a f igural argument against modern authorship, may be repeatedly observed via characters such as the maternal wife, lover or friend.[6]For a treatment of the centrality of mother f igures in modern Chinese literature, see Sally Taylor Lieberman, The Mother and Narrative Politics in Modern China. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1998).见参考文献.

In the study of cultural conservatism in Republican China, it is no news that the phenomenon has often been approached somewhat haphazardly, that is, according to ostentatious historical and political benchmarks rather than logical consistency. By and large, it is either identif ied with agendas, preferences and tastes that persistedamong certain Confucian literary and cultural f igures who embraced China’s cultural past, or somewhat more polemically singled out in a defaulting inclinations toward nationalism especially after the post-1927 establishment of the KMT government. But if we take conservatism to be a generic framework or representational strategy instead of allegiance to any specif ic and positive values, ideologies, or institutions, it is not diff icult to see its work at the very core of May Fourth visions of radical westernization. For early practitioners of spoken drama such as Hong Shen, the acquisition of a basic literacy in the unfamiliar, western forms of expression and art making, such as via George Baker’s blandly eff icient system, postulated an essentially preservative and aff irming disposition. But closely connected to such a disposition, I suggest, there was also a more profound passivity via identif ication with the preserved values, as if the fundamentals were already worked out, and what remained to be done was no other than a matter of transmission, reproduction and practice. For certain May Fourth modernists, this second aff irmation may be characterized as a wishful identif ication to the western canon, to the bluest eyepaceToni Morrison, an implicit decision to not frame its tenets as fundamentally falsif iable, or the process of modernist transmission as inherently fraught, in the fashion that I highlighted in the Young Mistress’ rendition of Lady Windermere.[7]Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye (New York: Vintage International, 2007).

The determining conservatism relevant to May Fourth modernity then pertained not merely to the remnants of Imperial Confucian culture after the fall of Qing, and the staid call to the nation that sought to validate the indigenous in cosmopolitan terms. Rather one must also work toward an agenda that aff irmed the western canon in modern Chinese culture, and its implicit but persistent endorsement of theCultura Euro-americana, or the western-dominated geocultural, if not geopolitical,status quo. As a May Fourth modernist, Hong Shen certainly had his personal moments of eruption later glowing typically in the revolutionary treatises of Frantz Fanon, such as his famed 1930 protest againstWelcome Danger, a Hollywood tale exploiting San Francisco Chinatown.[8]For a detailed account, see 陈美英、宋宝珍，《洪深传》。The f ilm acquired notoriety in China under the title 《不怕死》。But the postcolonial recognition of “［t］he violence with which the supremacy of white values is aff irmed and the aggressiveness which has permeated the victory of these values over the ways of life and thought of the native” does not seem to have f igured with tangible prominence in HongShen’s giddy dramatic legacy. And the same may be said signif icantly of the global perspective of the May Fourth dramatic modernism and May Fourth cultural modernisms promoted by Hu Shi and disciples. The “［r］epressed and buried knowledge of the cruelty and injustice that recur in diverse accounts of imperial administration” of the colonies was effectively delinked with “white values”per se. A denomination of the latter, cultural modernity of the west thus had a good chance to come across, not in the form of a diligent accomplice of administrative “cruelty and injustice”, but as some historically neutral fountainhead of instrumental strength, e.g., as the formal logistic of a universalist modern drama.[9]Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1961), 43. Paul Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholia (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005).No doubt, one may enlist the absence of a fully operational, coercive colonial state and a chronological breaking point of decolonization to form a disownable experience temporalized as past to serve as conditions for such indulgence. But it is obvious that the geopolitical crisis of semicolonialism did not necessarily lead to geocultural awareness even among the May Fourth Left, to which Hong Shen later aligned himself. Instead, extending the geoculturalstatus quo, or reiterating the western cultural supremacy, became a crucial means to address China’s geopolitical crisis. A part of May Fourthxin wenhua(New Culture) thus described, at least in regard to the play in question, a culture of disorientation, or ofstrategicallyconfused, and productively self-defeating, orientations.

What categorically distinguishes the semicolonial moment of cultural reference, however, may be discovered in the fact that a play such asShaonainai de shanziis not merely an unfaithful copy. It is in itself a process of forward-leaning acquisition. Given that postcolonial mimicry, whether in the sense of Fanon or Bhabha, entails belatedness in the cultural subject’s temporal position relative to the availability or enforcement of colonial inf luence, acquisitive traff icking of the semicolonial cultural subject tends to involve him, or her, in a temporally preceding, though discursively retroactive, position ofcontrappostoin regard to such inf luence.[10]Contrapposto is Joseph Roach’s term to describe the stage performer whose body is at once turned to different directions by the knees, pelvis, torso, and head, indicating tension and uncertainty. See Roach, Joseph, It (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007).If the colonial establishment of the Euro-American canon’s extra-Euro-American authority represents a surfeit of presence ready to spill over in the making of modern culture in the colonies, introduction of the same by semicolonial adoptionregisters a def iciency of, and its attendant obsession with, western inf luence among certain post-May Fourth Chinese modernists, for whom the western and modern are inseparable. To follow this rapturous, May Fourth logic of cultural modernization, Chinese authorship continued to be openly, f launtingly problematic with Hong Shen less because it was indefensible than because it was much more important to track Chinese modernity to a source beyond itself. Against Hanan’s generically limited analysis, dramatic localization represented not only a movement between linguistically def ined cultures, but also prioritized a historical scenario critically highlighted in Lydia Liu’s discussion of translingual practice, which in the context of May Fourth theater-making of course asks for further theorization. As Liu signif icantly shifts the focus of postcolonial studies from migration to localization, she does not proceed to tally with the fact that there is, for one thing, an intrinsically conservative strain within localization and, for another, that localization involves a categorically introductory, or acquisitional, logic of semicolonial modernity that analytically precedes the mimetic, “reproductive” logic of postcolonial coauthorship.[11]Lydia Liu, Trans-lingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity—China, 1900—1937 (Stanford: Stanford University, 1996).

The aff irmation of the Euro-centric canon of spoken drama in May Fourth China, if we place it next to the “discovery” of the Bible in colonial India as allegorized by Homi Bhabha, may then yield a heuristic distinction between the semicolonial and postcolonial emphases in modernist culture making.[12]Homi Bhabha, Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 103. I thank Prof. Liu for alerting me to the Bhabha chapter many years ago.To the extent that in the postcolonial scenario the western book remained stubbornly“a partial presence,” in the semicolonial reception of Baker’s theater of “mental action,” the partial presence of his system, or the imperfect cosmopolitanism via transmissive attrition of colonial circulation, was ironically replenished. The“transparency of reference,” a cognitive practice that Bhabha reckons asforciblyinsisting upon the colonialist faithfulness between the Englishness of the Bible and its Hindi translation, and worshipping “a certain obvious presence,” rather than displaying “the necessary deformation and displacement,” cannot be taken for granted as an oppressive institutional fact in May Fourth China. Instead, this fanciful presence, in the fashion of Lacanian Big Other, only makes for a spectral, actively pursued target as a promising, often quite indispensable source for Chinesemodernism. By Bhabha’s ingenious word play, “［t］he discursive ‘transparency’is best read in the photographic sense in which a transparency is also always a negative, processed into visibility through the technologies of reversal, enlargement, lighting, editing, projection, not a source but a re-source of light.”[13]Homi Bhabha, Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 110.What does not receive enough stress in this formulation is that the reversal, projection, resourcing of light, etc. could and did excite a counter-active obsession with the originary truth by the preservative fantasy regarding such transparency.

Within the extensive corpus of Republican spoken drama, the localized phenomenon, as unbounded texts, certainly brought forth introductory modernism in a differentiation in the modes of expressive crisis. The liberalism championed by Hu Shi and his cohort unambiguously tipped the balance between western “remedy”and Chinese “malaise” to favor an emphasis on the latter, thereby upholding a prospect of overcoming the country’s troubles via modernization. Hong Shen and his followers, by their works of marked unoriginality, did very much the opposite in claiming a vision of modernity with no sustained inward looking or self-accusatory strategy. At their worst, he and adaptation buffs in the form of Gu Zhongyi, a highly prolif ic author of numerous pieces of localizedhuaju, took to writing compositional manuals. Drawing crushingly boring textbook rules for creating drama, as if art could be produced on demand, in volume, through packaging, they seemed oblivious of the fact that the signif ication of traff icked values is always occasioned amongst an assortment of contingent interest.[14]See洪深 Hong Shen, 《电影戏剧的编剧方法》Dianying xiju de bianju fangfa ［Script Writing Methods for Film and Drama］（南京［Nanjing］：中正书局［Zhongzheng Press］，1935），《戏剧导演的初步知识》Xiju daoyan de chubu zhishi ［Initial Steps toward Directing Stage Plays］（重庆［Chongqing］: 中国文化服务社 ［Chinese Cultural Service Society］, 1943），and顾仲彝 Gu Zhongyi,《编剧理论与技巧》Bianju lilun yu jiqiao ［Theories and Techniques in Script Writing］（北京［Beijing］：中国戏剧出版社［Chinese Theater Press］，1981）。The motivational contour of this practice consisted therefore in the embrace of cultural authorities whose relevance was “globally” validated but somehow yet to be fully established in Chinese. In a manner of speaking, for the homeopathic project of cultural recovery, the legend of “remedy” was strengthened to such an extent that it became uncoupled from the particular “malaise” for which it is f irst mobilized.

Insofar as the daughter is locked in the mother’s hold, and the mother threatens to relive and redeem her own life through the daughter, Wilde’s half-facetious conservative remedy undergoes delicious delineation in a work that further corrodesautonomy and self-authorship in Republican drama. The Young Mistress’ roundtrip between home and the lover’s hotel suite on one evening replicates in temporal miniature Lady Jin’s grand travel between good society and its moral wilderness drawn out in twenty years. Yet in her axial turn, the mother is no more one, but turns into two separate specters of vexation. The daughter decisively rejects the younger mother, as she does not bring to fruition the repetition of the maternal past, thus her triumphant modernity in subscription to the May Fourth call for a wise detachment from history and its entrenched, mindless repetitions. The irony of course subsists in that she accomplishes the latter only by transforming herself into the older mother, as she rejects maternal example but takes maternal advice, i.e., as she internalizes a profound self-hatred nurtured upon decades of gnawing repentance. Traversing through a past that is now no more specif ically Chinese, the daughter encounters a de-nationalized mother in possession of a wisdom, in which she only partakes on the brink of self-destruction. Given that the Young Mistress achieves her modern, “morally” unscathed, womanhood as net benef iciary of Lady Jin’s prolonged and accidentally extended travail, her achievement is the result of both the mother’s anti-Noraesque tirade and indeed a demoralized pragmatism that signals only a most dubious species of voluntary choice, in which the returned woman’s restored domestic bliss is anchored. At the same time, Lady Gold-Digger also seems resolved with her own breed of modernism by her decisive precipitation of the daughter’s resolution. It is with real risk to herself that she enables the conservatively enlightened daughter’s withdrawal from the hotel suite without notice by the husband and his friends. To the extent that Lady Jin helps her child, without the latter’s proper appreciation, to resist youthful temptations of a disturbing and inevitable bottleneck in a woman’s life, and to register both its evil and inconsequence, Hong Shen’s attack on the Nora Plays underscores that there is no history upon which modern redemption is categorically closed. Though a very strange modern f igure, Lady Jin embodies a discursive moment to whose representational primacy the truancy-prone daughter, as stand-in for the otherwise Noraesque Chinese, should now be woman enough to cede the place of honor.

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Gilroy, Paul. Postcolonial Melancholia (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005).

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——, 《少奶奶的扇子》Shaonainai de shanzi ［The Young Mistress’ Fan］ in《洪深文集》Hong Shen wenji ［Hong Shen’s Works］(北京［Beijing］：中国戏剧出版社［Chinese Theater Press］, 1957)。

——,《戏剧导演的初步知识》 Xiju daoyan de chubu zhishi ［Initial Steps toward Directing Stage Plays］ （重庆 ［Chongqing］: 中国文化服务社 ［Chinese Cultural Service Society］, 1943）。

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洪深重写王尔德：制作困扰和中国现代戏剧的形成

邹 羽
（重庆大学）

一般评论都视洪深名剧《少奶奶的扇子》为民国舞台表演的一次革命，但对于剧本自身在“五四”出走剧中的地位，以及它与王尔德《温德米尔夫人的扇子》之间的关系，就甚少深究。这篇短文的目的在从洪深编译剧以嘲讽形式传递的文化保守主义价值出发，特别说明处于半殖民地“五四”话语深处的一种通常未受注意的现代保守主义，即认为现代文化的根本问题都在欧美现代得到充分解决，中国现代主义者的任务无非翻译、转述和表达。

洪深；王尔德；编译剧；地方化；后殖民主义现代性；半殖民主义现代性

邹羽，重庆大学高研院教授，美国伯克利加州大学比较文学博士。研究兴趣包括比较文学、文艺理论、戏剧研究和电影研究。

John Zou is Professor of Literature at the Institute of Advanced Studies, Chongqing University. He

his PhD in Comparative Literature at the University of California at Berkeley and works in Comparative Literature, Literary Theory, Theater Studies and Film Studies.