Repositioning The Injustice to Dou E in a Global Generic Context

Abstract

The Injustice to Dou E (窦娥冤) by Guan Hanqing is a masterpiece of Chinese drama that has been translated into English many times by different people, as is reflected in the multiple variations of its title in the target language: The Injustice Done to Tou Ngo, Injustice to Tou O, Snow in Midsummer, and The Injustice to Dou E. Despite enormous stylistic differences among various English translations and adaptations of this text, one thing remains fairly constant in the process of cultural translation; that is, these translated texts are always anthologized either as a representative piece of a particular historical period or as a sample of its author’s literary oeuvre. The former situation, for instance, applies to Six Yuan Plays, where The Injustice Done to Tou Ngo is selected as an exemplary piece of dramatic literature that characterizes the culture of Yuan Dynasty of China, whereas the latter situation can be found in Selected Plays of Kuan Han-ching, where Snow in Midsummer is anthologized as a constituent part of Guan Hanqing’s overall theatrical craftsmanship. Little, however, is mentioned of the fact that The Injustice to Dou E is one of the greatest tragedies ever produced in the history of Chinese literature. There are many reasons why the “generic” identity of this text as well as many others that belong to the same subcategory of dramatic literature has been neglected in the institutional practice of anthologizing translated Chinese texts. First among them is the pervasive misbelief that tragic art is absent from Chinese and most other Asian cultures with the quietist Buddhist religion being the main culprit. “All men are aware of tragedy in life,” so says George Steiner in his 1961 book, “but tragedy as a form of drama is not universal. Oriental art knows violence, grief, and the stroke of natural or contrived disaster; the Japanese theater is full of ferocity and ceremonial death. But that representation of personal suffering and heroism which we call tragic drama is distinctive of the western tradition.” Steiner’s statement is obviously inapplicable to The Injustice to Dou E, where the audience witness not only untold suffering heaped upon a kindhearted woman but also unparalleled heroic resistance on the part of the protagonist that is deemed to be essential to tragedy. Another reason often used against reading The Injustice to Dou E as a tragic text is that, like most Chinese dramas of woe, the play contains a happy finale, which is considered detrimental to tragedy. What the naysayers fail to see is that “happy ending” is actually a common occurrence both in Greek tragedy and its Renaissance successor. The fact that happy ending occurs both in Western and Chinese dramas of woe suggests that it should not be viewed as an enemy to tragedy but rather as a different structural manifestation of tragic art. Most scholars today are of the view that tragedy as a form of art has witnessed two periods of prosperity in its entire history of development: one in ancient Greece of fifth century BC and the other in Renaissance Europe of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but there are also theorists like Raymond Williams who try to expand the history of tragedy into the modern era, where playwrights such as Henrik Ibsen and Arthur Miller continue to narrate stories of human suffering. What this paper hopes to reveal is that independent of the Western tradition, the Yuan Dynasty of China also witnessed a small surge of tragic drama of its own. Many dramas of woe (苦戏) were produced in this historical period, including The Injustice to Dou E, Autumn in Han Palace, The Orphan of Zhao, and The Story of Pipa. By repositioning them as members of the tragic genre in the global context, we can better appreciate these texts not only as representative works of a particular period or a specific individual writer but also as different manifestations of tragic art as a universal language of human agony. This offers us one more dimension of literary art where playwrights from the East and the West exchange views on the most fundamental moral and political issues often reflected in tragedy.