Diagnosing, Misdiagnosing, and Rediagnosing Women’s Anger in the Jin Ping Mei

Abstract

This article seeks to resituate the Jin Ping Mei (The Plum in the Golden Vase) within the late-Ming medical milieux through the prism of women’s anger. By teasing out the rich layers of discursive contestation revolving around women’s anger and their varied approaches to this emotion, the article contends that the work selectively negotiates with its contemporaneous medical writing. More precisely, the rendition of women’s anger enables us to detect the stronger resonance of the Plum with the etiological than with the pathological strand of medical thinking. The physicians’ pathological consideration of anger’s corporeal impacts on female bodies initially appears to assume diagnostic authority in the work. However, lay explanations in turn complement and complicate the pathological perspective, drawing the reader’s attention more toward an etiological vision. Furthermore, the etiological consideration of women’s anger solves the seeming paradox in the Plum that certain physicians feature diagnostic authority but provide inefficacious treatment. In this way, the article advances a more nuanced repositioning of the work in reference to its surrounding medical contexts. In the meantime, the focus on anger significantly broadens the emotional horizon of late imperial Chinese literature beyond romantic love and sexual desire.