Revolution of the Heart begins weeping, in the late Qing, and ends wailing, roughly a century later. In the pages between, Haiyan Lee makes a powerful argument for the centrality of feeling—especially romantic love—to the imagination of the nation, reform, and revolution in twentieth-century China. Lee's aim is to confront literary and social scientific approaches to the question of modernity with each other, and to demonstrate the fundamental interdependence of the “modern subject” and the “modern political community.” This interdependence is mediated by structures of feeling that manifest themselves through literary texts allegorizing the fate of the nation, challenges to received marriage practices, discussions of the most appropriate way to manage love, and even web-based advertisements for mourning services.
To this end, Lee joins close readings of canonical twentieth-century texts such as The Sea of Regret and The Biography of Ah Q with a thorough consideration of a wide variety of Western theories of modernity, including those of Hannah Arendt, Richard Sennett, Alastair MacIntyre, and Charles Taylor. As indicated by the subtitle of the book, Foucault's concepts of “genealogy” and the “epistemic break” serve as the discursive foundations for this project. Raymond Williams's formulation of “structures of feeling” constitutes an important supplementary dimension; Revolution of the Heart presents Confucian, Enlightenment, and Revolutionary structures of feeling contending for the hearts of writers and readers throughout the first half of the twentieth century.
One of Lee's most striking arguments is that “free love” and “free marriage” served as key tropes through which a new national community could be imagined. Instead of families or lineages, the nation is to be constituted of individual autonomous citizens, of whom a defining quality is none other than each one's ability to fall in love with and choose to marry any other, “regardless of genealogy and social station” (p. 7). The emotional life of the individual subject works to construct a determinate relationship between that subject and the new political order.
The majority of texts discussed are among the best-known works of the early twentieth century, whether drawn from the May Fourth canon (Lu Xun and Ding Ling are prominently represented) or the late Qing (The Travels of Laocan); as such, they have accreted significant scholarly interpretive traditions. Lee for the most part characterizes past approaches accurately and has new contributions to the ongoing conversations about these works. Many readers, however, may be most interested in chapter 4, “The Micropolitics of Love,” and the first half of chapter 5, “The Historical Epistemology of Sex,” in which Lee moves beyond the canon and looks in detail at less studied texts such as Zhang Jingsheng's rules for love and Pan Guangdan's analysis of the poet Xiaoqing. Here, Lee makes effective use of Foucault's genealogical approach to trace the specific development of a “repressive hypothesis” in early twentieth-century China and to demonstrate the ways in which romantic attachment is transformed from a transcendent and wholesale commitment of the self to a phenomenon to be managed and disciplined to ensure its productive engagement in the broader sphere of everyday life.
The concept of the epistemic break is somewhat more problematic, especially in the study of Chinese cultural history, where an emphasis on radical discursive shifts in which the very foundational truths that all participants in arguments take for granted are transformed can end up reproducing stereotyped ideas of tradition and modernity. Lee is clearly aware of this possibility, for she notes at one point that the “Confucian structure of feeling” should in fact be plural, and refers to it as “a catchall for the dimensions of the early modern experience that remain unassimilated to the master narrative of modernity and therefore appear archaic, quaint, or incomprehensible to us” (p. 38). Elsewhere in the book, however, the Confucian structure of feeling operates less as an arena accommodating a variety of mutually contradictory discourses and more as a singular, relatively self-consistent category of analysis. Li Zhi, for example, appears first as an example of late Ming iconoclasm, only to find himself recuperated as part of a Confucian order that cannot be understood as a “precursor to the twentieth-century sentimental revolution” (p. 34).
Revolution of the Heart leaves a number of intriguing questions open. Given that European revolutions (and the American Revolution, for that matter) tended to imagine their new citizenry in homosocial terms (fraternity) rather than along the lines of heterosexual romance, it would be interesting to hear more about the eclipse of yi (which Lee translates as “righteousness” and discusses briefly as the central ethos of the rhizomatic jianghu realm, pp. 30–33) by qing in late Qing and May Fourth–era fiction that aimed at political and cultural reconstruction. And although Lee examines the ties between nationalism and romance in the first half of the twentieth century in telling detail, the concluding discussion of nationalist passions of the 1990s and 2000s is not as clearly articulated to changes in sentimental subjectivity in the post-Mao era. This is to say that Lee's central insight, that the personal is not only political but is, in fact, the arena in which the very possibility of the political is first presented in twentieth-century China, sets the terms on which a wide variety of questions central to modern Chinese cultural history can be addressed.
