Of Swords and Parasols

This is based around the Chinese opera, The Peony Pavilion, and the book The Three Wives Commentary on The Peony Pavilion, which was written by the three wives of a poet named Wu Ren. I’m only very moderately familiar with the opera and the history surrounding it, so most of my information comes from See’s notes.

The Peony Pavilion is a twenty hour opera (here, broken up into a three night event) about a woman who dies of lovesickness when she is unable to be with her lover. This apparently created a craze of young women starving themselves to death, and feverishly writing poetry as they did so. The father of Peony, the narrator, has the play performed as her birthday celebration when she turns sixteen. Peony is betrothed to a man she has never met, and during the celebration, she secretly meets a young poet several times, falling in love. Afterwards, she sinks into a depression, realizing she’ll never be with the one she loves, becoming obsessed with completing her commentary on The Peony Pavilion. When she dies (her death is revealed in the cover blurb, and is central to any discussion of the plot) she is unable to cross over. Trapped on Earth, she influences her husband’s subsequent wives in completing her commentary, and in being a proper wife.

This reads almost like a guide to Chinese culture, history and mythology for the average American, with mixed results. For me, it works more on a metanarrative level than on a plot or character level. I tend to consume fiction based around mythology (in this case, Chinese ghost stories) differently than I do other fiction, and some aspects of the plot-particularly the ways in which Peony uses Wu Ren’s second wife-I was only able to get through because of my (admittedly limited) familiarity with the mythology involved. See also does a very good job of almost completely sinking into the mindset of the time while still examining the roles of, and relationships between, women from a more modern perspective.

Very interesting and rather engrossing, even if some parts do feel a little close to being a lecture.