Anne McLaren has given us an extraordinary find: 1,022 thoughtfully translated and sensibly analysed lines of a cycle of bridal laments from a Shanghai regional repertoire current in the 1920s. Unlike the corpus of Pearl River delta bridal laments, which were literary in flavour – their performers labelled them “abstruse” – with set forms and complex references to written characters, these Nanhui performances were “highly colloquial and irregular.” Also marking their dissimilarity to the already available Pearl River delta laments is their persistence into the 1980s, when this cycle was recorded and preserved by the Nanhui Cultural Bureau. Tujia and Sichuan bridal laments have been recorded that resemble those of Nanhui in their preservation of commoner language, but according to McLaren the Nanhui corpus is by far the most extensive and comprehensive of the materials through which this oral art can be understood (p. 14). In consequence, it offers perhaps the best example we shall ever have of the words of old-society Chinese women. McLaren's book has three sections: the text itself; its interpretation; and a historical reconstruction of the origins of grieving as a bride approached her unknown and fearsome future. The fresh, direct language and the social and emotional complexity should be enjoyed before tackling McLaren's interpretation of it.
The text, of course, is not innocent. The oral performance of Ms Pan Cailian was transcribed from its topolect (by how native a speaker?) into characters used for Wu languages, and from there into putonghua by Pudong-Nanhui native Chen Qinjian of East China Normal University. McLaren's translation was deepened by field trips (p. vii) and given authenticity by keeping close to the “earthy” quality of commoner speech. Cleverly, she “relied as far as possible on the pre-Latinate resources of the English language” (p. 121). Her transmission, unavoidably filtered and layered by those linking us to Pan's unknown teachers, sounds like village women speaking.
The laments borrow little from China's ruling ideas, but focus on subjects of immediate significance to village women. The thousand lines are divided into duets by mother and daughter and solos by daughter to father, paternal grandfather, maternal uncle, matchmaker (two variants), the fortunate woman (a ritual specialist), elder brother's wife (two separate songs), and those the bride sings in the sedan chair, on the bridal boat, and while approaching the house of her marital family. They are rich in detail about kinship relations, domestic work, how women evaluate themselves and are evaluated, and the anxiety that must accompany a girl entering a new and largely unfamiliar home. The degree to which the girl is evaluated on the basis of her capacity for work fits well with generalizations I have heard about a bride as a sort of long-term labourer but colours the picture with fresh paint. An advantage of marrying into a more prosperous family, for example, is that a new daughter-in-law can do the riverside laundry dry-footed on a stone stair rather than in soaking shoes on a muddy bank.
McLaren's central theme is the way in which laments make explicit how the bride's value will be assessed. “For the bride, the language of the marriage exchange was nothing other than the language of the marketplace” (p. 16). Girls knew that female babies were sometimes killed or adopted out in infancy; that they could be sold, indentured or semi-married as concubines. To be formally married at puberty was a sure sign that her family valued her. What she was allotted in dowry assayed that value in material terms. A bride lamented in part to push kin seniors to increase the goods she took to the marital home. These served not only as symbol, but as material evidence that a bride's family valued her, freed her from the obligation to ask for things from her new in-laws, and might offer comfort and support should the marriage turn sour. Would the marital family see their new daughter-in-law's dowry trove and its implied social backing as grand enough to achieve this aim? Or would their greater wealth assess dowry, bride and bride's kin as contemptible? Hypergamy is the ubiquitous assumption against which these calculations must be made.
Fully recognizing the asymmetries of China's gender and age hierarchies, McLaren steers a scholarly path between the agent versus victim arguments of previous analysts. In her laments, the bride is given space to wheedle more dowry, to curse the matchmaker and, more subtly, to criticize the shortcomings of her natal family and the probable weaknesses of the one into which she will marry. McLaren recognizes that pre-marital lamenting gave girls the chance to cement her bonds with her agnates through individual skill and wit. She rejects, however, the tendency of some analysts of bridal laments to see them as anti-patriarchal resistance. Nanhui people, like people generally, are capable of being agents and victims at the same time, of recognizing this fact, and of making art from the contradiction.
The part of the book dealing with bridal lament origins suffers from the same limitations of most efforts to develop meaningful history from the extremely ideological and class-biased materials of China's deeper past. McLaren argues that bridal laments derive from a partial fusion of two traditions. The south, with its overwhelming preponderance of non-Han peoples, maintained song as a living means of expression and socialization. The north contributed an ancient imperative to wail and weep ostentatiously at funerals, acting out the state-sponsored kin hierarchy. Since marriage for a girl is often seen as the death of her old life, and since even happy brides might express sorrowful filiality on leaving home, the two traditions melded in various ways at various times. McLaren gently sidelines the Marx/Morgan explanation that brides wept because marriage was once a matter of rapine. What sustained the custom, she argues, was its ritual capacity to fend off maleficent spirit entities during a risky social passage. This fits well with commoner habits such as giving a beloved little boy an ugly name to make him inconspicuous to jealous ghosts, and is the indigenous commoner position (p. 111).
In discussing this aspect of the bridal lament tradition McLaren sums up a subordinate but important theme of her book. In contrast to scholars who have argued for the maintenance of social order in imperial China through orthopraxy – shared symbols and practices – she refuses the “either/or” approach: “The paradox of the bridal lament … lay in [allowing] the bride to verbally defy the process of her alienation from the home of her parents, while at the same time [she was] compelled to conform to the ‘ritual order’ enacted in the wedding ceremony” (p. 115). It is in her evidence-based de-simplification of the immense unknown quarter of Chinese humanity – girls and young women – that McLaren gains a readership stretching into the future.
Performing Grief will fascinate readers and enliven classrooms. It is a solid contribution to Chinese and women's studies and to the kind of scholarly work that intelligently ignores departmental boundaries.
