Individual Autonomy and Responsibility in Late Imperial China By ...

would have become extinct long ago. 好貨好色人之欲也。[…] 無情欲則人類久絕。¹⁰³

Although Yuan Mei too acknowledges the necessity of moderation, which in his view comes from one’s ability to distinguish real conditions from possibilities,¹⁰⁴ he identifies personal gusto as the ultimate criterion of judgement, independent from current opinions, habits, and authority.¹⁰⁵ Yuan’s blame for intolerance and pedant moralism is evident in many stories.¹⁰⁶ The cruel and sadistic punishments given by strict officials to women for “sexual crimes” such as adultery, prostitution, and illicit love are presented as perverse cases of injustice and unjust impositions on people’s private lives.¹⁰⁷

Despite the destabilizing function of playing between normal and deviant as well as objective and subjective narratives of personhood, freedom and control of desires, the zhiguai and other literary genres being addressed in this section are not used in an iconoclastic way. In Pu Songling’s Strange Stories from the Studio of Liao, the challenge of such mental attitudes is not directed against those same Confucian virtues that are often eulogized. In Honglou Meng, Jia Baoyu becomes an antihero for his “lust of intent” (yiyin 意淫) and disregard for social roles, but still, the fact that he does not believe in the existing social order does not mean that he denies it as a whole; his individualism is based on a peculiar aesthetic distinction, not too different from that of the personages in Yuan Mei’s fiction. In the Unofficial History of the World of the Literati (Rulin Waishi 儒林外史), one of the main characters, Du Shaoqing 杜少卿, is considered “different from others” (butong 不同), a “strange” (qiren 奇人) and “uncommon” (busu 不俗) man because he is indifferent to honors and wealth (gongmingfugui 功名富貴), yet he represents a paragon of filial piety. This glorification of obsession and foolishness, of manias and excessive behaviors, not only gradually acquired value in society but also became a means of self-expression.

The foregoing describes the attempt of Ming-Qing intellectuals to elaborate a new range of qualities for another self, which departs markedly