Arthur Murphy’s Views of Confucianism and Gender
Hsin-yun OuAssistant Professor, National University of Kaohsiung
ABSTRACT
By exploring The Orphan of China in the social scenarios of both Chinese and English gender ideologies in terms of the reciprocal relationships between women and the sites of power, this essay discusses the radical departure of Murphy’s play from his contemporary Europeans’ notions of Chinese women in Confucian society. Murphy’s tragedy conflates the Chinese heroine’s political and domestic confinements into the antithesis of the emerging gender trend in eighteenth-century England, and uniquely denounces Chinese gender practices through the heroine. Significantly different from the Jesuits and other European critics in the eighteenth century, Murphy draws on gender ideologies and practices as the predominant factors on which he bases his criticism of Chinese culture.
Keywords : the eighteenth century, English drama, Jesuits, Confucianism, gender, patriarchy, Habermas, public and private spheres.
亞瑟．墨菲對儒家與女性的觀點
歐馨雲 國立高雄大學西洋語文學系助理教授 摘 要 本文探討〈中國孤兒〉劇中所呈現之中國與英國社會的性別觀念， 尤其是女性與權力的交互關係，藉以探究墨菲此劇對儒家社會中之中國 女性的觀點為何與當代歐洲人迥異。墨菲將其中國女主角在政治上與家 庭中所遭遇之困境，與十八世紀英國性別觀念的新趨勢做一強烈對比， 並藉此角色批評中國性別習俗，使此悲劇在當時頗具特色，因墨菲以性 別意識與習俗為主要觀點來批評中國文化，與十八世紀耶穌會教士或歐 洲其他評論者所採用的觀點極不相同。 關鍵詞： 十八世紀、英國戲劇、耶穌會教士、儒家思想、性別、父權、哈伯瑪 斯、公領域與私領域Arthur Murphy’s Views of Confucianism and Gender
Hsin-yun Ou
In imperial China, official support for Confucian values was partially intended to stabilize the sovereignty and to promote a mode of administrative dominance. Several Chinese emperors consolidated dynastic authority through comprehensive identification with the ethical basis of Confucius’s teachings (Woodside 247). Since the seventeenth century, the Jesuits in China, in order to win support from Chinese emperors and literati for their Christian missions, accommodated their doctrines to aspects of the Confucian rites. By the late eighteenth century, the term ‘Confucians’ in Europe evoked associations such as ‘deference, urbanity, wisdom, moral probity, reasoned and not slavish classicism, and a learned, paternal authoritarianism,’ which were the ‘desiderata of Europeans doubtful of the institution of monarchy and despairing of religious war’ (Jensen 8). In spite of the Jesuits’ fabrication of the European presumption of Confucius as an icon articulating Chinese native inimitability, Confucianism has been incessantly approached from a spectrum of perspectives. This essay explores how Confucianism was received in Murphy’s time and how the reception was dramatized in his play to rewrite European perceptions of China. Murphy’s views of Confucianism, into which he inclines to conflate traditional Chinese cultural practices, are significantly different from those of the Jesuits, for Murphy criticizes Chinese culture in terms of the nation’s treatment of women, though he endorses other traits of Confucian ethics.
In the Chinese Yüan drama, The Orphan of Zhao, a loyal physician sacrifices the life of his own son in order to rescue his master’s orphan. The absence of the loyalist’s wife in the Chinese play reflects the circumstances of the Chinese playwright’s society, in which a woman was not expected to express any opinions, even concerning the life of her son, not to mention taking any action in the male political scenes. On the other hand, Arthur Murphy’s adaptation of the Chinese play, The Orphan of China (1759), is more concerned about women’s issues. The self-assertion of the loyalist’s wife concerning her right to judge and act for her family serves as the centre of attention. As Murphy’s depiction of his Chinese heroine holds a mirror up to the shifting contemporary English views of women, Murphy’s
tragedy is a social, cultural and historical product of its own era and arena.1 It is therefore imperative to consider Murphy’s theatrical adaptation not only within the context of the European concepts of Chinese culture, but also in the specific social and theatrical contexts available to Murphy in mid-eighteenth-century London. By exploring Murphy’s play in the social scenarios of both Chinese and English gender ideologies in terms of the reciprocal relationships between women and the sites of power, this essay first discusses the radical departure of Murphy’s play from his impression of women in Chinese society, which he tends to regard as being heavily influenced by Confucianism, and then attributes this deviation to the eighteenth-century gender debates in England, to reach the conclusion that, in Murphy’s tragedy, woman figures prominently in the definition of a national culture.
Murphy’s Notions of Confucian Gender Ideologies
To shed light on Murphy’s portrayal of his Chinese heroine in relation to his views of Confucian gender ideologies, it would be helpful to identify how much Murphy may know about Chinese culture. In several points of the play, Murphy is keen to demonstrate his knowledge about Chinese cultural practices. For instance, the final scene mentions the Chinese custom of worshiping the dead by offering incense. The royal orphan Zaphimri announces to build up a monument for the loyalist Zamti and his wife Mandane:
To these a grateful monument shall rise, With all sepulchral honour--frequent there We'll offer incense. . . . (V. 352-54)
1 Murphy’s play may not have any Chinese audience in mind, though eighteenth-century playbills record Chinese spectators in London. On Dec. 21, 1756 at Covent Garden, The Country Lasses and Orpheus and Eurydice were performed for ‘the Entertainment of the Chinese Mandarins’ (Public Advertiser). On 19 June 1735 at Lincoln's Inn Fields, Chinese Mandarins (spectators) attended The Careless Husband by Colley Cibber, the ‘Poet-Laureate.’ On 19 Dec. 1718 at Lincoln's Inn Fields, Les Chinois; ou, Arlequin Major Ridicule (pantomime) was performed ‘for the Entertainment of che-sazan outsim, etc., the Chineze Mandarines, lately arrived in England, on a Tour through Europe, being the only People of that Nation, who have been in England since the Reign of King James I.’
Also, the Epilogue mentions Chinese ‘taste and fashions,’ including women’s confinement, foot-binding and the Chinese way of writing words. All these indicate that Murphy seemed to have access to accurate information about Chinese cultural practices. To locate possible sources of Murphy’s knowledge of Confucianism, I base my assumption on evidence in contemporaneous English publications about China as well as Murphy’s play itself.
A tremendous amount of information about Confucianism was available in London long before Murphy wrote his play about China. European intellectual interest in China had originally been stimulated by travel literature and Oriental tales by the Jesuits, traders and the
philosophes. Murphy read French and Latin, and eighteenth-century
London rapidly translated and published works of other European languages. In his 1759 letter to Voltaire (appended to The Orphan of China), Murphy refers to Du Halde’s Description de la Chine as one of his direct sources. Du Halde's collection was the most popular book about China since Louis Le Comte published his Memoirs and Observations, which also compiles Jesuit writings on China's ‘countenance, Air, Language, Disposition, Civilities, Manners and Behavior’ (126). Du Halde’s Description reproduced some letters and illustrations from Le Comte’s book, and the frontispiece of Du Halde’s first volume copied the mirror image of Le Comte’s frontispiece—an illustration of ‘Confucius: the celebrated Chinese philosopher.’ Also, the third volume of Du Halde’s collection was devoted to the worship of the ancient Chinese, moral virtues and Confucius’s philosophy. The contemporary English interest in the Chinese women in Confucian society was further suggested by the several reprints of excerpts from Du Halde and Le Comte in, for instance, The Chinese Traveller concerning Confucius (1: 1 ff.) and women’s small feet and dependence without liberty (1: 121 ff.).
Earlier, Arnoldus Montanus, a Dutch missionary, published a book about Japan (1669; translated into English in 1670), which served as a major source of information about Japan during the 17th and 18th centuries. His writing about China, with faithful delineations of Confucian rites, was translated into English in 1671. Nonetheless, Eusebius Renaudot’s
Confucian ethics for its lack of principles. Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) further despises Chinese people and government:
I must confess it seemed strange to me, when I came home, and heard our people say such fine things of the power, glory, magnificence, and trade of the Chinese; because as far as I saw, they appeared to be a contemptible herd or crowd of ignorant sordid slaves, subjected to a government qualified only to rule such people. (qtd. in Dawson 34) Marquis d’Argens published a detailed critique on the Chinese play The
Orphan of Zhao in his Lettres Chinoises (1739; English 1741), which
Oliver Goldsmith imitated in his Chinese Letters (before 1760).2 George Anson’s A Voyage round the World (1744) condemns Chinese moral practice for its hypocrisy. Montesquieu’s L’esprit des lois (1748; English 1750) offers the first systematic repudiation of Chinese governmental practice, and criticizes Confucius for confounding all customs, laws, and religions into the category of virtue: ‘The works of Confucius, which confuse an immense detail of civil ceremonies with moral precepts, thereby putting the most trifling things on the same plane as the most essential, greatly affect the Chinese mind’ (41). Yet still, in many European philosophical writings, such as Leibniz’s ‘On the Civil Cult of Confucius’ (1700) and Voltaire’s Essai sur
les moeurs et l’esprit des nations (1756) and Dictionnaire philosophique
(1757), Confucius personifies China's advanced political morality and rationality, and principles of Confucian patriarchal law are emblematic of China’s pervasive spirit (see Cook and Rosemont; Reichwein 80).
All the aforementioned sources may have informed Murphy of Chinese culture, and formed his notions of Confucianism. The Prologue to The
Orphan of China first unfolds the theme of the play as Confucian morals, for
the play ‘boldly bears / Confucius' morals to Britannia's ears’ (7-10). Through the theatrical representation of a fabricated realm of China, Murphy interrogates if Confucianism is effective in encouraging patriots, since during this period Britain, threatened with a possible French siege, had to consolidate the nation through patriotic spirit. Confucian morality is reiterated in the first act of Murphy’s tragedy, especially when the Chinese
2 Goldsmith also borrows information from Le Comte, Du Halde, Voltaire (see Porter 395-411), and Horace Walpole’s Letter from Xo Ho to his friend Lien Chi at Pekin (1757).
loyalist Zamti condemns the Tartar invaders’ damage to Chinese civilisation cultivated by Confucius’s teaching:
In vain Confucius
Unlock'd his radiant stores of moral truth; In vain bright science, and each tender muse, Beam'd ev'ry elegance on polish'd life— Barbarian pow'r prevails. (I. 150-54)
Zamti invokes Confucius’s name and adheres to Confucian principles in most parts of the play. The other two heroes in the play, the orphaned Prince Zaphimri and Zamti’s real son Hamet, are also followers of Confucian ethics. Hamet commends his mentor Morat for teaching him Confucius’s moral lessons:
With him and contemplation have I walk'd The paths of wisdom; what the great Confucius Of moral beauty taught. (II. 303-05)
Although Oliver Goldsmith complains that in the play Murphy ‘has, perhaps, too frequently mentioned the word virtue. . . ; to repeat it too often, it loses its cabalistic power, and at last degenerates into contempt’ (436), Murphy’s reiteration of the term ‘virtue’ accentuates that virtue is the principle of the Confucian world. Even the Tartar king Timurkan is overwhelmed by the dominant power of ‘virtue’ when he repeatedly questions himself: ‘What art thou Virtue?’ and ‘where does it lie?’ As the principal virtuous figure, Zamti follows Confucian decrees and subjects his parental affection to his duty to his nation. Moreover, he compels his wife Mandane to observe the same tenets.
Murphy’s attitude towards Confucianism, however, is mitigated between contemporary European polarized views that celebrate or attack Confucian ethics. Murphy depicts Zamti as a Confucian disciple who sometimes could turn into an inhumane patriarch, a ‘marble-hearted father’ (III. 344), as Mandane calls him. Mandane goes beyond the role of a conventional virtuous woman in Confucian terms, and is portrayed with sympathy as a woman who chooses her own role as an affectionate mother
when she is unable to play simultaneously her other roles as an obedient wife and a loyal subject. This Chinese woman as envisioned by Murphy is far different from what most Confucian followers could have expected according to their gender notions.
The Chinese original of Murphy’s play was written in the thirteenth century (Yüan Dynasty), but Murphy’s contemporaries witnessed China during the eighteenth century (Qing Dynasty). Chinese women’s situations varied between these two eras. After the Mongols of Yüan Dynasty completed their invasions of China, Chinese administrations adopted Yüan patrilineal marriage laws and inheritance laws, which deprived women of property rights, economic independence and personal autonomy (Birge 279-82). Qing policies strengthened patriarchal authority even more, and restrained the independence of women in arranged marriages, economic production, etc. (Wakeman 2: 1094). Even though the numbers of learned women in China expanded continuously from the seventeenth century on (Mann, Precious Records 225-26), and even though the entry of women into the discourse of politics is a distinguishing feature of the Ming-Ch’ing transition (Mann, “Women, families, and Gender Relations” 432), most Chinese women were mentally and physically immobilized and reduced to slaves by the patriarchal order of crippling foot-binding and family oppressions. A Chinese man derived his authority from the fact that he belonged to the lineage of ancestors, from which women were excluded (Kristeva 71). A Chinese woman lived as a stranger among her own family and later in her husband’s family, until her first male child was born and reached maturity, since the only way a Chinese woman gained acknowledgement by society was as the mother of the father’s sons (Wolf 111). Regarded as merely a means of bearing children, a Chinese woman was subjugated to her husband, and even to her son. Since most Confucians defined man as the master, and woman as the servant without any right to the male feudal hierarchy, the Confucians equated women with ‘slaves’ or ‘inferior men’ (Kristeva 70). Accordingly, the highest of the virtues were mostly applied from men to men, and the key concept to guide human relations in Confucianism was jen, meaning ‘humanity’ or gender-specific ‘manhood’ (Chan 107-29), in contrast to the ‘jen of woman’ as folly.
According to Du Halde’s Description de la Chine, the most influential book in Murphy’s time in the field of European sinology, Confucianism was founded on the cult of ancestor worship and therefore constructed a moralistic rationale based on paternal authority. Confucian morality emphasized the importance of fulfilling one’s proper role in society, either as ‘fathers and children; prince and subjects; husband and wife; elder and younger brothers; friend to friend,’ as an essay in Description de la Chine identifies (Vol. 3: ‘Of Moral Philosophy among the Chinese’). Du Halde’s book astutely states that Chinese women’s modesty ‘seems to be born’ with them, as shown by the fact that they ‘live in a constant retirement’ and ‘are decently covered even to their very hands’ (2: 131). Even foot-binding is regarded as a manifestation of Chinese women’s modesty: ‘Such is the force of custom, that they not only undergo this inconvenience readily, but they increase it, and endeavour to make their feet as little as possible, thinking it an extraordinary charm, and always affecting to show them as they walk’ (2: 139).3
Indeed, some Confucians claimed that they intended their prescription of gender roles in the Chinese society’s best interest. They observed that the rulers of Chou Dynasty (1050-256 BC) brought about an ideal society, because the founders’ wives and mothers contributed to their husbands’ success by separating male and female, thereby eliminating licentiousness. As a result, Confucians believed that mastering the ‘Female’ and the ‘Male’ was a precondition for effecting a well-ordered government, and that their model ruler had to learn how to appreciate the ideal ‘Female’ and the ‘Male’ types, and how to assign appropriate tasks to males and females (Goldin 152-53). Men and women were therefore requested to confine themselves to their proper spheres, men in the public social world, and women in the private domestic realm. Haiping Yan points out an irony that frequents Chinese classical drama: the woman who fights gendered violence is also a woman adhering to the patriarchal Confucian codes for female behaviour, the gendered codes that are part of such violence (71). The official Confucian conduct book, Record of Rites (Li Chi), accentuates obedience of the woman to man and of wife to husband: ‘the woman followed the man. In youth she followed her father and brother. Married, she obeyed her husband,
3 Similarly, Argens’s Chinese Letters regards foot-binding as a rational conduct to maintain social order.
and after the husband’s death, she obeyed her son’ (6: 38). The Morals of
Confucius, published in England in 1691, asserts that the Chinese women
‘were very Virtuous; and in their Habits and all their Fashions great Modesty was observ'd’ (8). This image of modesty, as expected of Chinese women by the Confucians, establishes a tradition of European views of Chinese women, as manifested in William Alexander’s History of Women (1779):
In China, one of the politest countries in Asia . . . no being can be so delicate as a woman, in her dress, in her behaviour and conversation; and should she ever happen to be exposed in any unbecoming manner, she feels with the greatest poignancy the awkwardness of her situation, and if possible covers her face that she may not be known. (16: 5)
Gender Issues in Eighteenth-Century England
On the other hand, Murphy’s presentation of his Chinese heroine in The
Orphan of China reacts to the active contemporary English debates about
gender roles, and echoes viewpoints expressed in his other writings. When Henry Fielding dedicates his first play Love in Several Masques (first acted in 1727) to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, he commends her talent, which was falsely attributed only to men:
You are capable of instructing the pedant, and are at once a living confutation of those morose schoolmen, who would confine knowledge to the male part of the species; and a shining instance of all those perfections and softer graces, which Nature has confined to the females.
(Dedication) Murphy demonstrates a similar attitude towards woman in his biographical essay on Fielding (1762), published in Fielding’s Works. In this essay, Murphy praises several female writers and artists, among whom is Sarah Fielding, Fielding’s third sister, ‘well known to the literary world, by the proofs she has given of a lively and penetrating genius, in many elegant performances, particularly David Simple’ (7). Murphy also shows his respect for actresses, believing that they can often help the playwrights achieve success. He commends Mrs. Kitty Clive (who also wrote farces): ‘As this excellent actress received great advantages from the opportunities
Mr. Fielding’s pen afforded her; so he, in his turn, reaped the fruits of success from her abilities’ (22).
In The Orphan of China, similarly, Murphy’s view of woman differs from Confucian gender concepts, as his Chinese heroine Mandane embodies a resolute force against patriarchal domination. Murphy’s authorial voice can be heard in Mandane when she conveys his objection to either Zamti’s Absolutist Monarchy or Timurkan’s colonialism, and she has the sympathy of all the major Chinese characters at the end of the play. She challenges the masculine authorities in a play that is ostensibly a heroic tragedy, which usually centres on heroes of prowess and honour and heroine with unalloyed faithfulness to the heroes. Mandane’s rebellion against Zamti’s loyalty to an Absolutist Monarch, in accordance with the English political trend of Constitutional Monarchy, consolidates her position as representing a significant chorus figure of Murphy’s play in reacting to the current social and political changes. Also, Mandane interrogates Zamti’s authority as a patriarch in her family through her emphasis on contractual patriarchy, which requires a husband to abide by his marital vows before he can rightfully demand his wife’s subjugation, much as the modified kingship under Constitutional Monarchy needs to observe constitutional duties to the people.4 Mandane is therefore not convinced by Zamti’s argument about his primary duty as a subject rather than as a husband or a father, and she declares that Zamti acts against their marital vows:
You were a savage bred in Scythian wilds, . . . --oh! thou inhuman father,
You woo'd me to your nuptial bed? . . . Cruel, say,
Are these your vows?--are these your fond endearments? (II. 423-27) Condemning Zamti’s failure in his family duty to protect their son, Mandane places more emphasis on the notion of loyalty to one’s family than to a monarch. Murphy’s theme reconsiders the virtues of patriarchy and patriotism, while clearly directing these to notions of gender and nationalism in British society.
4 Yet, even Whig writers, who believed firmly in the subject’s right of political resistance, rarely extended this right to wives. See Pearson 78-79.
Murphy’s portrayal of Mandane’s emotional outburst, however, exhibits irrational female passions that are dangerously subversive to a stable English society dominated by patriarchal patriotism. Mandane’s fervour in defending her son’s right to live, as well as her defiance against her husband’s commands not to reveal their son’s identity and not to commit suicide, designates a mode of rebellion that potentially jeopardizes the prospect of a nation founded on patriarchal rationality. To explore the ambivalence of Murphy’s representation of his Chinese heroine, it is imperative to examine it within the context of the contemporary implications of English women’s social marginality in relation to the construct of English nationalism.
The understanding of the differences between the sexes was changing historically, as social appreciation of women’s qualities evolved. An important impetus to the notion of gendered spheres as public and private in the eighteenth century has been the work of Jürgen Habermas (1929-) on the ‘authentic public sphere’ as the civic space of political participation. According to Habermas, the authentic public sphere is constituted by private people in private spaces such as salons, coffee houses and taverns, and women are central to the sociability constituting the main practices of this ‘public’ sphere. Habermas’s concept is applicable to the gender situation between 1750 and 1850, when private and public spaces in England were subject to sharper differentiation, but men had the privilege to operate at will in both spheres (Tosh 217-38), and women influenced both domains. The opposition between a masculine public sphere of political power and a sphere of privacy is complicated by Habermas’s concept of the public-within-the-private, which suggests that the relation between public and private may be fluid (Guest 11-12). Thus, even though women’s exclusion from the public sphere, or marginalisation within it, perpetuates the distortion of the political involvement of both men and women, some Enlightenment historians construct women’s history as a movement away from patriarchal tyranny toward greater self-determination (see Falco 3-14).
Correspondingly, Murphy advances a woman-centred awareness closely associated with a confidence in women’s reasoning capability. Murphy’s characterisation of Mandane relates to the widespread contemporary debate about the public and private roles of women. In the Age of Enlightenment, also an age of sexual enlightenment, attitudes
towards gender served to heighten the differentiation of the sexual division of labour. Remarking on the restrictions imposed on women when involved in political affairs, Kathleen Wilson observes that
. . . the Seven Years’ War and its journalistic and historical narratives anticipated later wars in both calling on women’s participation in the public sphere and erasing their presence there, as well as in using empire itself to construct gendered definitions of citizenship. (203) Amanda Vickery asserts that these women did have access to political affairs. She discusses the availability of public life to eighteenth-centurywomen from commercial, professional and gentry families, who entered and sometimes presided over a considerable range of public venues. Vickery reconstructs the potentialities of public life for these women to illuminate that, though the women she studies ‘were obviously severely disabled when it came to institutional power, they did not lack access to the public sphere, as they understood it’ (227).
Therefore, eighteenth-century English women were restricted but had opportunities to join political affairs, and the separation of social life into a female private sphere of family and a male public sphere of politics failed to accommodate the presence of women in the public domain. The family was appropriated into the rhetoric of power production, testifying to the fact that the private is the public (Backscheider 238-9). Since political struggles are constituted by the organisation of relations of public and private life (Siltanen 14-15), the boundary between private and public arenas does not mark the limits of the political. The eighteenth-century women writers manifest that women are participating in an arena in which the private assumes public significance, as it is impossible to separate the private from the public sphere in a meaningful way. The existence of a ‘liminal space’ between the public and private spheres is now widely established, as numerous recent essays detail the ways in which the distinction between a public sphere and a private domestic sphere break down on linguistic, economic, and social levels.5 Although the interests of
5 For instance, Craig Calhoun, ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere (London: MIT Press, 1992); Dario Castiglione, and Lesley Sharpe, eds., Shifting the Boundaries: Transformation of the Languages of Public and Private in the Eighteenth Century (Exeter: U of Exeter P, 1995).
the English public sphere may have long been presented as the interests of the nation, the matters of the nation in effect incorporate the civil and domestic forms of both public and private life.
As such, in Murphy’s time, women’s social status was in gradual ascendance, and the theatrical symbol of woman was also charged with protean transformations. To contextualize my argument about The Orphan
of China surrounding women’s status, I will now examine other
woman-centred plays in the Restoration, and plays that had the most performances on the London stage between 1755 and 1759 (the five years before the first performance of Murphy’s tragedy), to investigate whether some aspects occur that are similar to Murphy’s use of the authorial female voice. Comparisons relating to plays with dominant or sympathetic female characters may indicate how special Murphy’s Chinese heroine is and how she can be seen as the authorial voice.
Recent feminist scholarship has demonstrated that many Restoration female playwrights dissolve the assumptions of femaleness by male dramatic tradition, and interrogate gender-based oppression. With their presentation of manly women and unmanly men, they protest against male domination over women (Quinsey, Introduction; Pearson 169-201). Aphra Behn and her successors protest against the gender bias inherent in contemporary views of wives’ subjection to their husbands. By creating sexual reversals which celebrates women’s wit, they praise independent women making their own choices, attack sexual stereotyping, and make conscious use of female perspectives (Pearson 252-55). Enjoying unique popularity in the early eighteenth century, Susanna Centlivre creates independent female characters who invent unusual social roles for themselves. Her plays assert that women’s role in the family was analogous with the subject’s role in the state according to the Whig ideology, as both had rights to liberty and self-determination (Pearson 202-28). Belonging to the mainstream of the theatre and commercially produced in the patent theatres, these women writers’ plays nevertheless suffer from obscurity due to canonical neglect rather than their intrinsic insignificance (Case 36-40; Clark 332).
On the other hand, the mid-eighteenth century continually revived the ‘she-tragedies’ by Thomas Otway, John Banks, Thomas Southerne and Nicholas Rowe. These tragedies abandoned the concept of poetic justice in favour of a focus on the suffering of an innocent heroine—a distressed and
pathetic mother, daughter, sister or wife—that deserves sympathy (Canfield 208). They treat women with reverence, but praise the passive woman and her self-sacrificing, patience and submission. Above all, they rarely question the sexual stereotypes of the previous male-dominated tragedy, as they still employ the old polarisations of female saint and female monster, a favourite pattern, in which good women suffer silently and bad women act (Pearson 49).
In Otway’s The Orphan (20 performances between 1755 and 1759), the orphan Monimia kills herself when she realizes that she has mistakenly had intercourse with her brother-in-law. In Otway’s Venice Preserv'd (9 performances), Belvidera’s husband Jaffeir places her in the charge of the leader of the conspirators as a pledge of his loyalty, and she suffers from attempted rape, her father’s life endangered, and her husband’s suicide, leading ultimately to her death in distress. Rowe’s Jane Shore (11 performances) recounts the decline of the mistress of Edward IV when she is victimized by the male politicians. In Thomas Southern’s Oroonoko (11 performances), a stage adaptation of Aphra Behn’s novella, there is a parallel between women and slaves implicit in the characterisation of Oroonoko’s constant and helpless wife, Imoinda. In The Careless Husband (19 performances), Colley Cibber celebrates Lady Easy’s silence, passivity and total submission to the laws of the patriarchy, an ideal archetype of women in theatre popularized by patriarch. John Gay’s The Beggar's Opera (28 performances) tells the story of a love triangle between the highwayman Macheath, his fence's daughter Polly Peachum and the jailer's daughter Lucy Lockit. The girls’ business-minded fathers try to profit from Macheath’s notoriety as a highwayman, but both girls intercede on behalf of Macheath. The world of this opera is a patriarchal one, in which women are dominated and manipulated by men, father or husband.
Meanwhile, the heroic drama during this period featured several exotic
femmes fortes, set in contrast to the patriarchal Christian ideal of the silent
woman like Cibber’s Lady Easy. Like the threats behind Amazon forwardness in the seventeenth century (see Shepherd 16), the female threats represented in eighteenth-century drama emphasize female desire to overthrow patriarchal authority by imitating men in using social power. In John Vanbrugh’s The Provok'd Wife (14 performances), Lady Brute’s unhappy marriage to Sir John for his money drives him to debauchery, and
she is torn between her conscience and her desire for adultery when encouraged by her niece and pursued by her suitor. In George Farquhar's
The Recruiting Officer (19 performances), Captain Plume attempts to recruit
men for his regiment and women for his bed. The gender role-reversals brought about by Melinda and Silvia's sudden elevation to higher financial ranks raise issues pertaining to women’s situation.
Most of the male-authored plays mentioned above present women either as victims of social injustice, or as dangerously treacherous and transgressing women. Murphy’s The Orphan of China also focuses on the distress of the heroine as a female victim of oppression who intends to transgress her limited role, but the play goes beyond a dichotomous classification of female submissive or subversive roles. Murphy’s heroine suffers, but not silently, and her attempt at reaching out for her freedom of choice is not presented as an act of treacherous transgression, but as a courageous act as celebrated by the aforementioned Restoration female playwrights. The play further investigates eighteenth-century views of marital and maternal love, and presents a female character with her own willpower insistent on her maternity and her participation in national matters. Although, being outspoken, Mandane approaches a female image that threatens the security of the patriarchy by gender transgressions, Murphy’s sympathetic characterisation of Mandane surpasses the limiting strictures of a male-defined femininity and achieves theatrical innovation in his time.
Murphy’s Chinese Heroine within the Chinese/English Gender
Contexts
Murphy’s presentation of shifting territories of the public and private spheres is consistent with the historical milieu of the gender issues as discussed above. When Mandane is required to give up her motherhood for the cause of patriotism, her maternity is frustrated due to the male struggle for power in the public sphere. Yet, Mandane’s defiance affects the public political realm, and is subversive of its patriarchal hegemony. Through the connections between women and national affairs, Murphy’s representation of the heroine is not confined to the private sphere. Murphy challenges the ideas of women in his time, when the issue of the female body is central to the concern of eighteenth-century England. His rhetoric of maternity
interrogates the contradictory notions of maternity presented in male-authored conduct books and female-authored mothers’ advice books written in the sixteenthand seventeenth centuries, which caricature women as wasters of male-produced products, or ascertain them as producers of children and their education and culture (see Miller 161-84).
Murphy’s portrayal of his heroine represents a female embodiment of the nation that contrasts public duty with private passion. The first scene commences with Mandane questioning why she has to suffer more in addition to the twenty-year war the Tartars have inflicted on China. Her femininity is shown in that she views the ‘public’ catastrophe through her ‘private’ sorrow:
This heart, revolting from the public cause, Bleeds from a private source; bleeds for the woes That hang o'er Zamti's house— (14-16)
Mandane speaks as a familial person, caring more about family calamities: ‘. . . daily the cries / Of widows, orphans, father, son, and brother / In vain are sent to heav'n’ (21-23). For Mandane, the Tartars, ‘these barbarians, --these accurs'd invaders’ (24) are invaders not only to her country, but also to her family. The play highlights the mother-son relationship in Mandane’s speech: ‘there lies the thought / That wakens all a mother's fears--alas! / I tremble for my son’ (I. 53-55). Thinking about her real son, who was sent away to Corea twenty years ago, Mandane places her maternal role, as a mother of a son in danger, before her role as a citizen of an invaded empire.
Thus, the first act of the play draws on issues pertaining to family as an essential constituent of a nation, indicating Murphy’s belief in the familial private space as no less important than the public sphere of national wars in the foreground of the play. In effect, in many of Murphy’s other writings, he underlines family as the centre of human life, notably in his journals participating in a controversy concerning the cause of Lear’s insanity. In the Adventurer (5 January 1754), Joseph Warton asserts that Lear’s madness has resulted from his loss of power. In the Gray's Inn Journal, however, Murphy replies that ‘filial ingratitude’ has unbalanced Lear’s mind and produced ‘the finest tragic distress ever seen on any stage’ (The Works of
on the Plays of Shakespeare,’ decides that Murphy ‘a very judicious critick,’ who ‘has evinced by induction of particular passages, that the cruelty of his [Lear’s] daughters is the primary source of his distress,’ and that Lear is more ‘the injured father than the degraded King’ (Johnson 9: 331-2; Foot 60).
In particular, Mandane regards family ties as more important than the divine right of kings. Zamti’s faith in the divine kingship, therefore, is not tolerable for Mandane when her family is victimized. In her prayer for the unfortunate captive, whom she suspects to be her real son Hamet, Mandane lists her king at the end, suggesting that her primary concern is her family: ‘O ye pow'rs! / Protect my son, my husband, and my king!’ (I. 267-72). By ‘my son’ she means her real son Hamet. Even so, she knows that her king, the royal orphan, is her adoptive son Etan, a member of her present family. Murphy’s portrayal of Mandane appears to focus on female sensibility and domesticity by assuming the heroine’s experience as wife and mother.
In Mandane’s frantic manner, the play presents a sharp distinction between father/mother construct, and figures the maternal passion as a Romantic expression of ‘nature.’ Zamti struggles to choose between his patriotic loyalty to his king, which he regards as his duty, and his parental love, which he regards as a true human ‘nature.’
. . . here nature's voice
Speaks in such pleadings:--Such reproaches, Morat, --Here in my very heart--gives woundings here,
Thou can'st not know--and only parents feel— (II. 109-112)
The term ‘nature,’ referring to the intuitive fundamental human nature, is feminized and invested with feminine quality, as ‘nature’ is constantly compared to a woman. Conversely, motherhood is part of ‘nature.’ In Act I, Zamti talks about Timurkan’s brutal slaughters of the Chinese, for which ‘frighted nature / Start from her couch, and waken to a scene / Of uproar and destruction’ (I. 349-51). Later, when Mandane condemns Zamti’s sacrifice of their son for violating human nature, she questions him: ‘Is human nature exil'd from thy breast? / Art thou, indeed, so barb'rous?’ (II. 390-91). In the previous scenes, terms like ‘barbarous’ and ‘savage’ are used to describe Timurkan, but now Mandane applies them to Zamti, considering him not much different from Timurkan when Zamti disregards the essential ‘natural’
human affections. Informed of his real son’s arrest by Timurkan, Zamti endeavours to suppress his ‘natural,’ instinctive parental affections when he speaks of his grief in his aside: ‘Now virtuous cruelty repress my tears. / --Cease your soft conflict, nature’ (II. 353-54). Zamti is aware that his loyalty is unnatural ‘virtuous cruelty,’ and he repeatedly claims that his patriotism, condemned by Mandane as barbarity and inhumanity, operates against human nature, which Zamti relates to female characteristics such as ‘tenderness’ and ‘softness.’ Zamti appears to represent a man from ‘the Age of Reason,’ whereas Mandane figures an absence of rationality, or an expression of ‘nature’ prefiguring the Romantic sensibility. Much as the presence of passion in the ‘Other’ is often figured as a woman in Romanticism, Mandane’s passion contains an excessive feminine passion implying the ‘Other.’
The construct of mother/father figures in the play, therefore, contrasts these two social roles as those between tender natural familial affection and rational public duty. At the poignant moment of reunion between Mandane and her real son Hamet, Mandane’s attention to her son contrasts Zamti’s rational detachment. She craves to know what happens to Hamet in the past twenty years, as she asks several questions in sequence:
Oh! tell me, tell me all; how hast thou liv'd With faithful Morat?--how did he support In dreary solitude thy tender years?--
How train thy growing mind?--oh! quickly tell me,
Oh! tell me all, and charm me with thy tongue. (III. 311-17)
Reacting to Mandane’s enthusiastic attention, Hamet is delighted to find his mother a woman of ‘native dignity’ (III 309), ‘[i]n virtue firm, majestic in distress’ (III. 320). Mandane’s motherly grief and bravery deeply touch Hamet:
Lost
In the deep mists of darkling ignorance, To me my birth's unknown--but sure that look, Those tears, those shrieks, that animated grief Defying danger, all declare th'effect
Yet, Murphy’s characterization of Zamti sometimes deconstructs the play’s father/mother construct. The first time when Zamti sees his adult son Hamet, his aside indicates his male tenderness:
I cannot look upon him,
Lest tenderness dissolve my feeble pow'rs, And wrest my purpose from me— (II. 338-40)
When Zamti reveals to the orphaned Prince the tragedy of the royal family, Zamti is also telling about his own family tragedy, his sacrifice of his own son for the orphan:
. . . see that child,
That royal infant, the last sacred relict
Of China's ancient line--see where a mandarine Conveys the babe to his wife's fost'ring breast, There to be nourish'd in an humble state; While their own son is sent to climes remote; That, should the dire usurper e'er suspect The prince alive, he in his stead might bleed, And mock the murd'rer's rage.-- (III. 76-89)
Zamti tells the story by accentuating Mandane’s suffering in seeing her son sent away in lieu of the royal orphan. Thus Zamti can only externalize his parental sentiment by projecting it onto Mandane’s maternal affection.
On the other hand, some male politicians in the play attempt to exploit woman’s maternity to achieve their political goals. The Tartar king tries to retrieve from Mandane information about the royal orphan, but Hamet intervenes. Earlier, when Hamet first realizes that Mandane is his mother, he wishes to live on for her sake, but when Timurkan tries to release him in exchange for the Chinese prince, Hamet will not allow his mother and himself to become traitors to their nation. Like Zamti, Hamet considers it a glorious act to die for his King. Zamti, proud of his patriotic son, acknowledges Hamet as his son and embraces him, and tells Mandane that he forgives her ‘lovely weakness’ (III. 401) in failing to keep Hamet’s identity a secret, but again he orders Mandane to conceal information about
the royal orphan by saying: ‘I charge thee by a husband's right. . .’ (III. 402). Timurkan, however, sardonically interrupts Zamti:
A husband's right!--a traitor has no right-- Society disclaims him--Woman, hear-- . . . renounce
All hymeneal vows, and take again,
Your much lov'd boy to his fond mother's arms,
While justice whirls that traitor to his fate. (III. 403-09)
Here Timurkan tries to disrupt a marital relationship by manipulating a mother’s love for her son. The Tartar King denunciates Zamti’s right as a husband because Zamti is a traitor to his family and his new king. This refutation also paradoxically equates Zamti’s marital dominance over Mandane with the political tyranny with which Timurkan operates. Yet, Mandane rejects Timurkan’s commands, since Zamti has acknowledged Hamet as his son and disclosed his fatherly affection for Hamet. She will not betray her husband, because of the matrimonial love between the two of them for the past many years:
Thou vile adviser!--what, betray my lord, My honour'd husband--turn a Scythian wife! Forget the many years of fond delight, In which my soul ne'er knew decreasing love,
Charm'd with his noble, all accomplish'd mind! (III. 411-15)
Since Timurkan is unable to obtain from Zamti’s family any information about the Chinese prince, he imprisons the three of them. When Octar asks Mirvan to lead Hamet to Mandane, again Octar tries to exploit Mandane’s ‘fond’ or ‘tender’ affection for her son, as he tells Mirvan: ‘Lead him to where Mandane's matron grief / Rings thro' yon vaulted roof,’ so that
When the boy clings around his mother's heart In fond endearment, then to tear him from her, Will once again awaken all her tenderness, And in her impotence of grief, the truth At length will burst its way. (IV. 218-28)
Mandane nevertheless resists the Tartars’ exploitation, and Zamti announces that his family is unified to defy Timurkan’s tyranny and to defend their honour. Chi-ming Yang, a Chinese scholar, remarks that, at this point of the play, ‘while each member demonstrates a form of authenticity—genuine nature, patriotism, fraternity, filial piety—as a collective of self-sacrifice and a total system of affective virtue, the family stands for an unconquered China’ (326-346). Nevertheless, Yang ignores the fact that among these virtues there may be mutual conflicts that render inoperative this ‘total system of affective virtue’. Zamti and Mandane have to struggle between their parental affections and their patriotism, and Hamet has to choose between filial piety to live for his mother and his patriotism to die for the royal orphan. The order of priority established by Confucian ethics leaves these Chinese characters in a dilemma when they try to accomplish all these virtues simultaneously.
Mandane’s tenderness eventually turns into stubborn silence. In Act V, the orphaned Prince risks his life to rescue Zamti’s family but is arrested, and Octar tortures Zamti and Mandane. Mandane ceases arguing with Zamti about what they should do to rescue their son. It may be because Mandane is now in total despair, as Timurkan has imprisoned her whole family, and may be also because she is moved by the Prince’s bravery. While Mandane apologizes for her ‘mild maternal love’ (V. 16) that has devastated the whole family, Zamti comforts her by reconfirming her role as a faithful wife (V. 18-23). Zamti is grateful to Mandane for her willingness to sacrifice the family by keeping the prince’s identity a secret, but Mandane is now in total desolation: ‘my dearest husband, / My son,--my king,--all in the Tartar's hands: / What then remains for me?--Death,--only death’ (V. 25-30).
In the final scene, Mandane’s death is staged as the centre of attention. Though the Chinese conspirators have defeated the Tartars, Zamti is dying on the wheel, and Mandane has killed herself. One of the Chinese patriots, Mirvan, describes Zamti’s poignant lamentation over the loss of his wife:
He reach'd the couch, where lost Mandane lay;
There threw his mangled limbs;--there, clinging to the body, Prints thousand kisses on her clay-cold lips,
Mandane’s body is then discovered when ‘the great folding doors open in the back scene.’ This stage direction is significant when compared with that in Act II, in which Timurkan enters from a door in the back scene: ‘Two large Folding-gates in the Back-scene are burst open by the Tartars, and then enter Timurkan, with his Train.’ When Mandane’s body is ‘brought forward, Zamti lying on the couch, and clasping the dead body,’ Mandane occupies the centre of the stage as much as, or even more than, Timurkan does in the previous scenes. Although the final scene of The Orphan of
China, with Mandane’s corpse on a couch, resembles what Elizabeth Howe
calls ‘couch scenes’ in Restoration plays, when ‘female characters were directed to lie on a couch, bed or grassy bank where, attractively defenceless and probably enticingly déshabillée, their beauty unwittingly aroused burning passion in the hero or villain who stumbled upon it’ (39), I nevertheless have a different interpretation of this scene as other than a scenic display of female seduction that was commonplace in Restoration drama. Held by Zamti in his arms, Mandane inhabits the centre of the stage, and her death becomes the focus of the male survivors’ deliberation rather than the sexual object of male desire.6 Through this arrangement, Murphy again demonstrates his empathy with Mandane’s situation. Zamti expresses his delight to die with Mandane:
My soul with pleasure takes her flight, that thus Faithful in death, I leave these cold remains Near thy dear honour'd clay.— (V. 87-89)
The sympathy shared by all the other surviving characters for the fate of the couple dignifies the dead. The royal orphan, now the King, describes the dying Zamti embracing the dead Mandane:
And see,
See on that mournful bier he clasps her still; Still hangs upon each faded feature; still
6 For the view of Restoration actresses as more than sexual objects, see Deborah C. Payne, “Reified object or emergent professional?: Retheorizing the restoration actress,” Cultural readings of Restoration and eighteenth-century English theatre, eds. J Douglas Canfield and Deborah Payne Fisk (Athens, Ga.: U of Georgia P, 1995).
To her deaf ear complains in bitter anguish. Heart-piercing sight!— (V. 269-73)
Zamti, clasping the dead body of Mandane, cries in despair (V. 275-78). The new King Zaphimri mourns Mandane’s death and questions: ‘Are these our triumphs? / --these our promis'd joys?’ (V. 279-80). The dénouement thus proposes an anti-climax of the heroic deeds that a heroic play is supposed to glorify. It ironically indicates that the patriotic triumph cannot compensate the family loss. Interestingly, this is exactly Mandane’s viewpoint all the way throughout the play. With her death, Mandane becomes even more of the focal point of the play; her female perspective becomes the focus of the theatrical perspective; and her declarations remain the echo of the playwright’s authorial voice.
The stage action at the end of the play illustrates that the dying Zamti moves physically between his wife and his king, symbolizing Zamti’s inner struggle between his loyalty for his king and his love for his family. Seeing the royal orphan restored to his kingship, Zamti rises from Mandane’s body, and, according to the stage direction, ‘runs eagerly to embrace Zaphimri; his strength fails him, and he faints at his feet.’ Zamti is happy for the new king, calling the latter: ‘My prince! my king!’ before he soon returns to his grief for his wife’s death: ‘see there, there lies Mandane!’ His mood shifts between ‘these strong vicissitudes of grief and joy’ (V. 287). Ultimately Zamti requests other characters to lead him to Mandane. Again he calls Mandane ‘the faithful woman’ who ‘utter'd heav'nly truth’:
Is that the ever dear, the faithful woman? . . . Cold is that breast, where virtue from above Made its delighted sojourn, and those lips
That utter'd heav'nly truth,--pale! pale!--dead, dead! (V. 290-97) Before the first performance of The Orphan of China, Murphy revised his script several times, but he rejected William Whitehead’s proposal to make Mandane lament Zamti’s death in the final scene (Foot 146 ff.). Instead, Murphy’s dénouement ends with Zamti mourning Mandane’s death before his impending death, and the ending recalls David Garrick’s inimitable role as King Lear. Upset by the sorrowful scene between the couple, the new
King Zaphimri nearly loses his willpower to live on: ‘Then take, ye pow'rs, then take your conquests back; / Zaphimri never can survive—’ (299-300). Zamti, however, entreats the King to ‘live the father of a willing people’ (V. 311-22), implicating the notions of Constitutional Monarchy. The King finally promises to live on for his nation, and for the sake of Zamti and Mandane.
Murphy’s play exemplifies the cultural construct of the differential masculinities and femininities at play in eighteenth-century England, and sheds new light on the entanglements of nation and empire in shaping gender identities. While the contemporaneous preoccupation with the freedom of the individual extended only as far as men and stressed women’s mental and physical fragility, an emerging trend glorified family life and natural motherhood (Rousseau 1). The eighteenth-century ideal of the rational mother endowed her with greater independence in society, and her role as mother was one that man could not assume (see Browne 5). The public and private spheres thus reveal the unstable boundary between them, ‘as if public and private are shifting territories on a map’; and women have been rescued from being positioned in private domesticity (Brewer 8-9). Murphy’s heroine registers against her prescribed disappearance from public affairs through her family relationships fraught with political meanings, illuminating the fact that to be a wife or mother was also to live one’s life as a national subject.
Mandane's maternity represents a force of revolutionary subversion originating from the female body and signalling a potential for disruption of male patriarchy. It implies a revolt against the hegemony of Timurkan the colonialist tyrant and Zamti the family patriarch. Murphy’s play presents two kinds of oppressions: the political repression as exerted by Timurkan on the Chinese, and the patriarchal suppression that wives like Mandane have suffered from. Zamti and the Chinese patriots acknowledge themselves as heroes when they rebel against Timurkan’s tyranny for national liberty, but Mandane’s struggle for her freedom to act upon her motherhood is initially regarded by the male characters as an indication of transgression, irrationality and madness. Mandane’s frantic reaction against her husband’s plan to sacrifice their son might be defensible in view of the fact that, during the seventeenth century, outraged motherhood sometimes justified the abandonment of wifely submission, as women often used their
maternal experiences to claim authority, though whether a woman’s obligations to her children were seen to outweigh the claims of her husband is a difficult question (Crawford 11-13, 28-29). As Claudia Opitz observes,
The motherhood discourse of the Enlightenment was in itself ambiguous: It required a lot of self-renunciation, even self-sacrifice from women. At the same time, it gave women a good deal of authority, a better education and a widely accepted public role as governors of their (little) children. (Opitz 86)
This paradox concerning maternity is probably the question Murphy has in mind when he depicts a heroine whose character converges with contemporary social and theatrical scenarios of gender issues. At the end of the play, all the major Chinese characters demonstrate their sympathy for Mandane, and, in response to Mandane's death, Zamti states: ‘tears will have their way— / forgive this flood of tenderness’ (V. 305-6). Here the male shares the female tenderness, and illuminates the fact that there is ‘male’ and ‘female’ in every one of us.7 The play thereby undermines prevalent contemporary notions of woman and testifies to the fact that women’s position, as Carole Pateman puts it, is not dictated by nature, but is a matter of social and political contrivance (225).
In light of the common belief in the inferiority of woman shared by Chinese Confucian and English patriarchal theories, Murphy’s representation of his Chinese woman suggests a distinct feminist view, as she conforms less to patriarchal ideologies. Refusing to wait for the male to take the subject position of action, Murphy’s heroine Mandane takes the initiative to act, to argue against her husband’s decision to sacrifice their son, to protest to the tyrant in order to rescue her son, and to make her own decision to commit suicide against her husband’s command. In a culminating moment of defiance against her husband and the tyrant, she endeavours to convey repressed female thoughts and emotions, through her forced entry to the male-dominated political realm and her questioning of male figures of authority. Seemingly an irrational and displaced female character, Mandane is in effect in possession of the authorial voice of Murphy’s play.
7 The statement is consistent with Backscheider’s observation: ‘Finding and expressing the woman within, the tender sentiments, is essential for even the most powerful man’ (240).
By transforming woman into a speaking subject from her marginal position as the object of men’s confinement, Murphy’s play reconceptualizes woman’s identity not as the object of man’s desire, but as the subject of her own actions. It therefore subverts the conventions of female modesty, and challenges the Chinese/English patriarchal limited view of female destiny.
The Epilogue to Murphy’s play pays tribute to England’s better treatment of women, and therefore reinforces the play’s feminist presentation of an unusual Chinese heroine in reaction against Chinese patriarchy. This Epilogue makes contrasts between Chinese and English cultures in terms of woman’s domestication. Whereas English wives are able to walk about rapidly and happily to join various activities, the bound feet of the Chinese wives keep them at home.
And then they lead such strange, such formal lives!-- --A little more at home than English wives:
Lest the poor things shou'd roam, and prove untrue, They all are crippled in the tiney shoe.
A hopeful scheme to keep a wife from madding!
--We pinch our feet, and yet are ever gadding. (Epilogue 20-25) Over the thousand years, the widespread practice of footbinding, especially throughout late imperial China in which Murphy’s European contemporaries witnessed China, has been the most oppressive patriarchal code in Chinese female culture, and designated Chinese intellectuals’ attempt to consolidate the boundaries of gender, sex and hierarchy. Attending to Chinese patriarchal suppression of women, the Epilogue to Murphy’s play satirises the Chinese female culture and criticise footbinding as signs of an inferior patriarchal society. The Epilogue also reflects the economic status quo for English wives, who could keep their own ‘pin-money’ (27), while Chinese wives have never heard of it.8 The term ‘pin-money’ (OED: an allowance to a woman from her husband for clothing and other personal expenses) suggests that men are the principal sources of income for a family, but it also refers to the freedom of the English wife to dispose of her savings without
8 In fact, wives of rich Chinese families did have ‘pin-money’ every month, at the latest since the late imperial period, and they did play games at home, according to popular contemporaneous novels such as The Dream of the Red Chamber by Cao Xueqin.
the control of her husband. Thus, the Epilogue observes that English wives have more physical and financial freedom than Chinese wives.
Accordingly, Murphy’s play indicates that English wives are more liberated and therefore English society is more civilized and superior. Indeed, it was a commonplace view that women were better off under English law than under that of any other country, according to the most influential law book of the century, William Blackstone’s Commentaries on
the Laws of England. Similarly, in Murphy’s tragedy, the Chinese woman’s
political and domestic confinements are conflated into the antithesis of English cultural superiority. Murphy’s play thereby repudiates Confucian gender ideologies. Distinctive from the eighteenth-century Jesuits and other European commentators, who evaluate China mainly by scrutinizing Chinese political, economical, religious or aesthetic institutions, Murphy uniquely criticizes Chinese culture by focusing on women’s social status.
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[Received 15 January, 2007; accepted 21 April, 2007]
