Yù Lí Hún 玉梨魂
Soul of the Jade Pear by 徐枕亞 (撰)
About the work
Yù Lí Hún 玉梨魂 is a celebrated sentimental novel in 30 chapters (zhāng 章) by 徐枕亞 Xú Zhěnyà (1889–1937), first serialized in the Mínquán Bào 民權報 (Shanghai) in 1912 and published as a book by the Zhonghua Book Company 中華書局 in 1914. It is written in an ornate classical Chinese (wényán 文言) prose style enriched with parallel prose (piánwén 駢文) passages and embedded cí 詞 poems (the novel culminates in a long sequence of lyric poems), and tells the tragic love story between a young male tutor, Hé Mèngxiá 何夢霞, and a young widow, Bái Lìyǐng 白梨影, set in a Jiangnan village near Wuxi 無錫. The title refers to Bái Lìyǐng, whose spirit (hún 魂) is compared to the “jade pear” (yùlí 玉梨, a variety of pear blossom), and the opening scene — in which Mèngxiá watches the falling petals of a pear tree — establishes the central image of the novel.
Tiyao
No tiyao found in source.
Abstract
Yù Lí Hún is one of the most celebrated works of the “Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies” school (Yuānyāng Húdié Pài 鴛鴦蝴蝶派) of early Republican-era popular sentimental fiction. Its author, Xú Zhěnyà 徐枕亞 (courtesy name unrecorded; born 1889 in Changshu 常熟, Jiangsu; died 1937), was a schoolteacher in a village near Wuxi when he composed the novel largely from autobiographical inspiration.
The plot: the protagonist Hé Mèngxiá arrives at a Jiangnan village school as a private tutor. He falls deeply in love with Bái Lìyǐng, a young widow and the mother of one of his pupils, whose personality is refined, melancholy, and intellectually accomplished. The two communicate their feelings obliquely through poems they exchange. Mèngxiá is also pursued by Bái Lìyǐng’s sister-in-law (or cousin) Cuìwū 翠娬, whom he does not love. Bái Lìyǐng, bound by Confucian morality and her duty to her deceased husband’s family, cannot acknowledge her love openly; she instead engineers Mèngxiá’s marriage to Cuìwū, then dies of grief. The novel ends with Mèngxiá’s sustained lament and a collection of his cí poems mourning the dead woman.
The novel is notable for its literary style: the narrative prose is dense with allusion, enriched by frequent embedded poems (cí lyrics, particularly in the final chapters), and self-consciously modeled on the rhetoric of the great romantic chuánqí 傳奇 drama tradition (Mǔdān Tíng 牡丹亭, Xīxiāng Jì 西廂記). The chapter titles use single-character emotional abstractions: 葬花 (Burying the Flowers), 夜哭 (Weeping at Night), 詩媒 (Poetry as Matchmaker), 情耗 (The Love Dispatch), 魔劫 (Demonic Calamity), 鵑化 (Transformed into a Cuckoo — an allusion to the soul of the spurned lover), 斷腸 (Heartbreak). This quasi-poetic chapter-title structure reinforces the novel’s claim to be as much lyric as fiction.
Yù Lí Hún was an enormous commercial success when serialized and published; it went through dozens of reprints and is said to have sold over 100,000 copies within a few years of publication. It made Xú Zhěnyà one of the most popular fiction writers of the early Republican period and established the template for the sentimental novel (āiqíng xiǎoshuō 哀情小說) of the 1910s–1920s. The novel draws on the author’s own experience as a village tutor; his autobiographical investment in the story is widely acknowledged in literary history.
The Kanripo text is classified in the Qing dynasty section, but the novel was composed and published in 1912 (the first year of the Republic of China). It belongs to the late Qing/early Republican transitional period in Chinese literary history. The catalog’s dynasty field “清” reflects the Kanripo corpus convention for works of the general period up to and including the early Republic.
Translations and research
- Link, E. Perry. 1981. Mandarin Duck and Butterfly: Popular Fiction in Early Twentieth-Century Chinese Cities. University of California Press. The standard Western-language study of the Butterfly school; discusses Yù Lí Hún as a key representative text.
- Hanan, Patrick. 2004. Chinese Fiction of the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries: Essays. Columbia University Press.
- Wang Dewei [David Der-wei Wang] 王德威. 1997. Fin-de-siècle Splendor: Repressed Modernities of Late Qing Fiction, 1849–1911. Stanford University Press. Places the sentimental novel tradition in context.
- Liu Ts’un-yan [Liú Cūnyán 柳存仁]. Various studies of early Republican popular fiction.
- Fan Boqun 范伯群. 2000. Zhōngguó jìndài tōngsú wénxué shǐ 中國近代通俗文學史. Jiangsu Education Press. Comprehensive history of modern popular Chinese literature with treatment of Xú Zhěnyà and Yù Lí Hún.
Other points of interest
The novel’s closing sequence — dozens of cí lyrics in various tunes — is unusual in Chinese fiction of any period and makes Yù Lí Hún as much a poetry collection as a novel. The embedded lyric poems use tunes such as Jiě Liánhuán 解連環 and Sòng Rù Wǒ Mén Lái 送入我門來 that are associated with the elegiac cí tradition. This generic hybridity — prose fiction that becomes lyric poetry — is one of the work’s defining features and a major reason for its contemporary success among readers trained in the classical literary tradition.