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Peach Blossom Fan
The legendary play created during the early Qing Dynasty by Kong Shangren has kept its integrity over three hundred years because of the quality of the material. And also it has maintained it's verve because of the dynamics between the characters and the themes that are so poignantly presented.
What are some of the relationships between the citizen and the society (or the state), in this play? There are many examples of the relationships between individual citizens and the society (the state) in this play. In Scene 1, page 7, Ch'en sings that the royal authority is being tested in Nanking; indeed, there is war and battle and the drumbeats can be heard. It is so intense that citizens are afraid to cross the river albeit it is flowing so peacefully and entices people as it winds through the groves of the willows and the orchards. Wu explains that the government's battles with the bandits are not going well (the dynasty is in trouble) and this has a profound effect on the citizens. The future of those living in central China is unclear because those citizens are vulnerable....
The point here is while the state battles the interlopers, the citizens are affected, as they are in any war zone situation.
On Scene 3, "The Disrupted Ceremonies" Juan attends a sacrifice in the Temple of Confucius, but the social set (the society called the Revival Club) pounces on him, led by Wu, who asserts that Juan's guilt as a traitor is well-known and that Juan has no right to be in the temple. "You guzzle iniquities and gobble filth," Wu charges (p. 28), "Shooting secret arrows into the Eastern Forest, Weaving your plots in the Western Shed…" (Wu, 28). Juan argues that he has every right to attend the sacrifice, given that he is a disciple of Chao Chung-I and that he is a worthy person. But instead of listening to his justification for his attendance, he is physically beaten by the Master of Ceremonies (p. 29), reviled for his part in the Eastern Forest Party, and Wu urges everyone to attack him, which they do. This an individual against the society at hand, and he is treated mercilessly and cruelly. Later, in Scene 4 Juan rages at the way politics has entered into the…
Works Cited
Kong, Shangren. The Peach Blossom Fan. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1976.
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