凝視與窺視：李漁〈夏宜樓〉與明清視覺文化

Abstract

Li Yu's story ”The Summer Pavilion” in which a telescope plays the role of matchmaker for a young couple, is more than renovating the romance of ”talented scholar and beauty.” Represented as the ”God's eye,” the novelty from the West establishes the ”gaze” as a new way of seeing, significantly turning a new leaf for Ming-Qing visual culture. Apart from the ”glance,” the mainstream practice of vision developed from a long and prestigious tradition of ”literati painting,” the trope of ”peeping” increasingly appears in popular fiction and drama since the fourteenth century and the peeping merges with the gaze in Li Yu's story. From the optical sense strengthened by the telescope engenders the desire for male gaze, ambiguously entangling with patriarchal order and power relations. Yet different from the visual technology leading to scientific discoveries in the West, the ”God's eye” is represented against indigenous humanist backdrops, complicatedly intertwined with the trends of ethics, gender, garden aesthetics, and pornographic literature. Provided with a mode of embracing and appropriating Western visuality, ”The Summer Pavilion” is revelatory to the formation of visual culture in modern China.