But Peony herself is less alluring. Despite the book's overripe use of flowery touches, she lacks color and variety. She suffers. She schemes. She is frequently surprised, hurt, devastated and shocked by cruel twists of fate. And the preaching never stops. When she meets her grandmother in the afterlife, the book delivers one more screed on the vast superiority of loving, artful, creative women to selfish and oppressive men.
Peony in Love provides sufficient background about the Cataclysm, the Manchu overthrow of the Ming regime beginning in 1644, to put the men's fearfulness in some kind of context. And as she did in Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, See dwells on the kinks provided by the binding of women's feet for reasons of eroticism, caste and subjugation. But this novel is more commonplace than its preoccupations with history, ritual and the afterworld would suggest. It relies heavily on its heroine's one-note scholarship and false naivete, neither of which is a source of drama or inspiration.
For all its attention to formal rules, Peony in Love becomes puzzlingly inconsistent once it wafts Peony out of her earthly body. She becomes a vapor, but she is still able to hug, speak, think about her clothes and drip tears on her tunic. She watches her family from a balustrade above them, but she can also invade the body of a woman to put thoughts in her mind or unite sperm and egg in her womb. And she is not beyond carnal pleasures, even to the point of participating in Wu Ren's wedding nights.
One timeless quality common to all the book's realms: ambition. "Isn't it a miracle?" Peony exclaims, when at long last the trio of wives finds a publisher. "We're all going to be remembered and honored." Despite the tragedy that stalks this 17th-century martyr from the cradle to beyond the grave, See finds a very modern way to make her live happily ever after.
RSS