When Women Take Center Stage is a blog series on dramacircle.org exploring plays that feature female protagonists. The third play we’ll look at is the 13th Century Chinese (Yuan) play “Snow in Midsummer” by Guan Hanqing in a translation by Yan Xianyi and Gladys Yang.
A Woman's Virtue Vindicated (but only after Death)
By Mark Perry
[Review of Snow in Midsummer (c. 1300) by Guan Hanqing, with translation by Yan Xianyi and Gladys Yang]
When the Mongols conquered China in the 13th Century, they swept out many of the Song Dynasty’s emblems of high culture. Fortunately, the theatre was not among those. And so instead it flourished beneath the Mongols, or the Yuan. Guan Hanqing (1245-ca.1322) is the most eminent of playwrights from this period. His play, “Snow in Midsummer” (originally, “Dou E Yuan” or “The Injustice to Dou E”), focuses on the adversities faced by a young woman, who responds with traditional virtue that will only be vindicated after her death.
Chinese Playwright, Guan Hanqing
Summary
The play begins with a few expositional episodes introducing us to the characters and world. It’s a corrupted world, where usury, murder and extortion seem like ready avenues for average people. The shining light of integrity is Dou E, the daughter of Dou Tianzhang, an upright, but poor scholar. In her life, Dou E faces one misfortune after another. She lost her mother at 3, and her father leaves her with his creditor, Mistress Cai, at 7. She made the best of it, marrying Cai’s son, for whom she faithfully mourns when he dies a couple years later. Mistress Cai, a widow, is shown to be usurious, but otherwise a victim herself. While collecting a debt, she is strangled by the debtor, Doctor Lu. She is saved by two men—Old Zhang and his wild son, Donkey, only to have them in turn demand she and her daughter marry them, or else they will strangle her! She assents and brings the men home to tell Dou E, delivering the play’s inciting incident.
This expositional section takes less than 10 minutes of stage time, and the rest of Act I consists of getting to know Dou E and seeing how she responds to Mistress Cai’s news. First, we learn how she is longing to escape the misery of her life. Then, the notion of Mistress Cai marrying at her advanced age fills her with indignation, and she flat out refuses Donkey. This is a formidable female character—headstrong and virtuous. The Act ends with Zhang, Cai and Donkey going off to drink.
Act II finds Donkey extorting Doctor Lu for poison, with which he intends to kill Mistress Cai so Dou E will be forced to marry him. At home, Dou E makes mutton tripe soup for her ill mother-in-law, all the while decrying female faithlessness and lamenting the loss of the central Confucian virtue for women—loyalty. The standard she seeks is that of legendary wives, who would kill themselves before compromising their virtue. Donkey poisons the soup, but his father Zhang drinks it first and dies. Both Donkey and Mistress Cai immediately pass over the grieving stage and begin pressuring Dou E to marry Donkey. He will drag her to court under accusation of murder if she refuses. True to her word, she chooses court.
The characters of Donkey and Dou E in “Snow in Midsummer” (Print from 17th/18th Century)
In Act III, the play quickly reaches its climax. Brought in front of a corrupt judge, Dou E is tortured with the bastinado. She refuses to confess until the Prefect turns to torture Mistress Cai. Out of loyalty to this mother figure, she hastily confesses to the crime. Pleased with his day’s work, the Prefect goes home to drink. Dou E shares some poetic, pathos-raising lamentation and further evidences of selfless loyalty, and then she is executed. Her last words prophesy three signs of the purity of her life and injustice of her death: her blood will not stain the ground, snow in midsummer will cover her dead body, and three years of drought will strike the land. The Executioner congratulates himself on the beheading stroke and goes off to drink.
Dou Tianzhang returns in Act IV, having only made a brief appearance at the beginning of the play. He is now a high ranking official—a counsellor for state affairs, but he still mourns his lost daughter, whom he has been unable to locate. Arriving in a new, drought-stricken district and charged by the emperor with rooting out corruption, Dou sets himself the task of reviewing past cases. The first file he comes across is that of Dou E, whose surname is surprisingly the same as his. (It was Mistress Cai who renamed her, as her given name was Duanyun.) Since murdering a father-in-law was an unpardonable crime, he places the file at the bottom of the stack. Just then, he is overcome with drowsiness. The ghost of Dou E enters, lamenting the injustice that ended her life.
There follows a lovely scene where the ghost makes the lamp burn low and, while her father is trimming the lantern’s wick, she replaces her file on top of the stack. This stage action repeats a few times, as Dou narrates his surprise and subsequent placing of the file back at the bottom. Dou E then reveals herself to her father, who bemoans how his daughter could have degraded the family name through this crime. He lists the [highly patriarchal] Three Principles and Four Virtues of Confucius for women that she was brought up to embody. She then explains the whole story and calls him to avenge her. He weeps and recalls a similar story from the Han Dynasty. The play ends with Dou sentencing to death Donkey and Doctor Lu, dismissing the Prefect from his office, and offering Mistress Cai care and lodging. Thus, justice is returned to earth, and the vindicated spirit of Dou E is free to go to heaven.
“Snow in Midsummer.” The end of Act III (Royal Shakespeare Co, 2017)
Analysis
The playwriting here is not modern, but it does have undeniable poetic beauty and a discernible understanding of effective staging. There seem to be four modes here: narrative exposition in prose directed by the character to the audience, narrative exposition in prose by characters to each other, poetic lamentations and remonstrations almost exclusively by Dou E, and then sections of dialogue and action, where there is generally a reversal of some sort. The play is relatively short, at least on paper, and quite effective for its brevity. The plotting of the story is direct and engaging. The characterization is simple, so the theme may be amplified.
One strange element to a modern reader is the repetitive expositional monologuing, where characters, upon each entrance, reintroduce themselves and their backstory. Perhaps this theatre environment was one where audience members would come and go during a play. I take it the environment of this theatre was more like the teahouse and less like the temple. Saying that, if Acts I through III felt more like Kabuki, Act IV did have elements of Noh.
Katie Leung in “Snow in Midsummer,” Royal Shakespeare Co, 2017.
The central character of Dou E (Duanyun) is forceful and fated, in much the same way as Antigone. She embodies a conservative virtue in the face of amoral expedience and the general corruption of the times. Not unlike Antigone, her speech can seem surprisingly conservative and even shrill to us. In the framing of these classical plays, dauntless steadfastness may prove a woman’s undoing in this world, but it will be to her glory in perpetuity.
The villainous characters—Doctor Lu, the Prefect, Donkey—are all treated with an interesting irony, as if they and their evil are not to be taken seriously. They often make mocking, self-incriminating statements, and they seek refuge in drink after their evil deeds. They fail to embody Confucius’s first duty for men—"cultivating nonviolence and gravity of bearing.”
This ironic presentation of evil men in a corrupted world—at least for the first three acts—feels somewhat Brechtian. (Of course, Brecht was himself influenced by Chinese drama.) This is contrasted with the sincere treatment of the stalwart virtue of the central character—not unlike Kattrin in “Mother Courage”. Turning to the archetypal device of judgment delayed—that is, the introduction, disappearance, and triumphant return of a just judge, this is one we also find in Shakespeare (e.g., the Duke in “Measure for Measure”).
Part of the play’s dramatic effectiveness is how it gives a voice to virtue that despairs when it has been swallowed up by vice. Dou E laments:
“Yet Heaven cannot tell the innocent from the guilty;
And confuses the wicked with the good!
The good are poor, and die before their time;
The wicked are rich, and live to a great old age.”
This is both the voice of Job and of Mother Courage. The audiences hears out loud in that moment their despair, their festering fears of being trapped on a rudderless ship on a contrary sea. This play, like the Bible and unlike Brecht, reaffirms their faith, as it ends with the vindication of the good and the triumph of justice.
“Let the Donkey be killed in public,
The prefect dismissed from office;
Then let us offer a great sacrifice
So that my daughter’s spirit may go to heaven. ”
Now we wonder: is this play patriarchal or “proto-feminist” (as claimed in the Norton Anthology of Drama)? Like “Antigone”, it seems to be a bit of both. The central character is a female with a strong voice and an indomitable will. She has no agency in her world, however, and is a sacrifice to its evil, while the father lives on. Antigone, at least, was guilty of virtuous action and not of false accusation. Plus, let us not forget that the virtue Dou E espouses is Confucian, whereby a woman’s submission to men is codified for the entirety of her life. As her father lectures: “The Three Duties are obedience to your father before marriage, obedience to your husband after marriage, and obedience to your son after your husband’s death.” [Act IV, 80-82]
“Snow in Midsummer” is included in the Norton Anthology of Drama, 3rd Edition.