Abstract
This essay probes the nuance of the image of the lady in Tao Qian's ”Xian qing fu” (”Quieting the Passions”), focusing on the beginning of the fu (lines 1-28). Tao Qian breathes new life into this image. Three elements-love, music, and seduction-play a particularly important role in molding the lady's character. Through a close reading of ”Xian qing fu” and an exploration of its intertextual relations, this essay brings to light the significance of this lady in the particular tradition of fu in which woman and music are employed as aesthetic and cultural symbols. This essay observes that Tao Qian has constructed a spiritually consanguineous being; that Tao desires, besides physical intimacy, a union of souls. These associations of well-disposed companionship notwithstanding, Tao Qian's fu takes a strong erotic interest in the lady. The two interests, companionship and sexual desire, are closely intertwined: Tao Qian gives the lady a lyrical and contemplative voice that is never heard from her precedents; the topos of the musical seductress has transcended its former purpose as mere sexual entree in the fu tradition. Still, Tao Qian shapes the speaker's yearning for the lady in a quest for a soul mate and pleasure. The ten amorous wishes in the middle of the fu are bare and bold in Chinese lyrical traditions, but at first the lady's seduction strikes the reader as minimal. Yet the seductiveness of Tao Qian's fu grows stronger and stronger as the intertextual relations of the text unfold. This essay suggests that the underlying structure of ”Xian qing fu” lodges in the human psychology of desire: unfathomable, with indulgent, unpremeditated, disjointed, painful and pleasurable moments. There is no erasure of eroticism in the fu. Tao Qian engages it and struggles to flesh it out, catching many, perhaps including Tao himself, unprepared.