Lecture | China Seminar
Following Fate or Falling in Love: The second marriage of the Kitchen God’s wife in the rewriting of Chinese Folk Literature in the 1950s and its enduring legacy
- Date
- Wednesday 9 April 2025
- Time
- Series
- LIAS China Seminar
- Location
-
Lipsius
Cleveringaplaats 1
2311 BD Leiden - Room
- 2.01
Abstract
One of the most popular deities of traditional China was the stove god (also known as the kitchen god) who is already mentioned in the Analects. When gods acquired personal names and mortal lives, one of the most popular legends credited the stove god with the surname Zhang 张 and a wife named Dingxiang 丁香. She is responsible for the wealth of the family, but he insists on divorcing her. Upon remarriage she makes her second husband a rich man, while her first husband becomes a beggar. When they meet again, he is so ashamed on recognizing her that he jumps into the stove—eventually he is appointed as god of the stove. The story was widely popular in various genres of folk literature especially in the area of east central China. In contemporary textualizations of this legend such as the Henanese folk epic Guo Dingxiang 郭丁香, Dingxiang marries her second husband (a hard-working, honest, and handsome peasant) out of love, but in pre-1949 ballads and plays she moves in with his family when her old ox refuses to move any further upon arriving at his mother’s hovel. In this talk I trace this change back to the revision of traditional plays on this legend of the 1950s, when the New Marriage Law demanded that marriages were to be based on mutual love. Such rewritten plays of the 1950s were outlawed during the Cultural Revolution, and upon their revival in the final decades of the twentieth century welcomed as authentic folklore. While the vilification of landlords of the 1950s was mitigated in the most recent versions of Guo Dingxiang, romantic love was even more stressed.
Wilt L. Idema, The Kitchen God and His Wives: A Modern Chinese Folk Epic. Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 2025.
Biography
From the Harvard University website (Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations):
Wilt L. Idema obtained his BA and MA from Leiden University (The Netherlands). Following continued study and research in Japan and Hong Kong, he returned to Leiden to teach. He obtained his doctorate in 1974, and was promoted to Professor of Chinese Language and Literature in 1976. From 2000 to 2013 he taught at Harvard as Professor of Chinese literature. His research was originally focused on traditional vernacular fiction, but later shifted to early traditional drama and popular ballads and tales. He has also published on women’s literature of the premodern period.