Abstract
In this article, I argue for a reading of the long fiction Plum in the Golden Vase that does not simply excavate the text for facts but instead considers the genres of Ming imaginative literature as theories of social hierarchy. The novel’s sui generis form can be understood, I argue, as a socially symbolic act, particularly relating to the trafficking of human beings and especially of women. The Plum in the Golden Vase places at the very core of society the radical transactability of women. Finally, I interpret seventeenth- century debates about the text—namely, how to rehabilitate the text from its sexual content by reading these debates as relating not merely to aesthetics but also to social theory.
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