Jin Ping Mei 金瓶梅 is a novel of manners composed in semi-vernacular Chinese during the late Ming dynasty. It provides a realistic account of Ming society that resembles a cultural encyclopedia. However, despite the richness of its descriptions of almost every aspect of life at the time when it was written, the book is best known mainly for its portrayal of sex. The author of Jin Ping Mei (hereafter referred to as JPM) made innovative use of small-scale elements of daily life, such as clothing and ornaments, for narrative development and characterization. In this novel of everyday activities and mundane affairs, the characters’ clothing often expresses their thoughts and feelings. In recent decades, researchers have increasingly attended to the novel’s intricate descriptions of the clothing and ornaments worn by its female characters, and English translations of the book have been discussed in a few scholarly works. However, little attention has been paid to the translations of these ornamental features and the symbolic meanings.

The present dissertation explores the origin, history and development of crucial divisions and categories of female clothing and ornaments in JPM, their original images in Chinese historical records and the representations in the English translations. Two English translations are examined: 1) its first English translation, by Clement Egerton, which was first published in 1939; 2) its first strictly complete English translation, by David Tod Roy, which was published between 1993 to 2013. The methodology of the present study is mainly corpus-assisted textual analysis. Two parallel Chinese-English corpora were constructed by collecting and aligning the two source texts and the two English translations. This was undertaken together with the review of the relevant literature including historical records, research articles, and assisting materials such as picture books depicting the appearance of women characters in late imperial China. The theories related to material culture, sexuality as well as translation studies were referenced when exploring and discussing the relevant issues of the texts.

This study focuses on representations of female clothing and ornaments in the novel, especially prominent among the “unorthodox beauties” for whom dress, and ornaments were powerful means of border-crossing and achieving transcendence in late imperial Chinese society. In this dissertation, unorthodox beauties refer to a group of female characters in JPM who are marginalized by the mainstream values, and strive to realize the promotion of status through unconventional or “conventionally displeasing” actions such as remarriage, or immoral behaviors such as adultery in the case of JPM. In a Chinese society traditionally ruled by a tightening and oppressive regime of Confucian teaching, their dresses, ornamentations are one of the limited tools at their disposal to rebel against the traditional norms and conventions of virtuous or submissive women. These include but not limited to: consorts such as Pan Jinlian, Li Ping’er, Meng Yulou, servant girls such as Pang Chunmei, Zhang Ru’yi, courtesans include Li Guijie, Zheng Aiyue, Zheng Aixiang, Wu Yin’er, and adulterous women such as Lin Taitai, Song Huilian and Wang Liu’er.

The process of choosing clothing and ornament, invariably had a subversive undercurrent, as government regulations were unable to curb the public trend of increasing extravagance at a time of economic development. By the Wanli 萬曆 period, when JPM was supposed to be written, transgression through clothing and ornaments had become ubiquitous. This is illustrated in the novel by the clothes worn on a daily basis by its unorthodox female characters. Juxtaposing foremost the source texts with the reproduction in the translated texts the portrayal of unorthodox beauties among other female characters, this study sheds light on the connection between female fashion and power in the late imperial Chinese society, revealing from a microscopic perspective the construction of unorthodox female figures, and possible ways of translating clothing related concepts.