A “Mei Lan Fang aestheticism:” Marianne Moore and the Famous Chinese Dan Performer
In a letter to Monroe Wheeler dated November 20, 1932, the American modernist poet Marianne Moore writes, “Japan I am sometimes interested in, but China is the magic place. I have just recently been trying to write something about dragons, ‘true’ dragons and the malign variety.” Like many of her contemporaries, Marianne Moore became fascinated by all things Chinese as a young adult and sought to incorporate Chinese imagery, ideals, and philosophy into her own work. Although many of her references are to works of art that she had access to through New York galleries, it was her encounter with the world-famous Chinese dan performer Mei Lanfang that had the strongest impact on her poetics.
Mei Lanfang
In 1930, Mei Lanfang embarked on a six-month theatrical tour of the United States. As a dan, Mei played the roles of leading women from Chinese operas. He enjoyed great success in the U.S., as in China, for what American reviewers carefully praised as his remarkable ability to maintain his masculine virility while also impersonating femininity. As Mark Cosdon writes, while the New York leg of his tour was initially slated to last only two weeks at the Forty-Ninth Street Theatre, Mei’s act was so popular that “his engagement was later moved to the larger auditorium at the National Theatre, where he remained an additional three weeks.” According to her letters, it was near the end of this latter engagement, on March 19, 1930, that Marianne Moore attended “a program of four plays and dances by the Chinese actor, Mei Lan-Fang and his company.”
Mei’s effect on Moore is apparent in a number of letters she sent following this encounter. In a letter to Monroe Wheeler dated March 3, 1933, Moore writes, “To have seen Mei Lan Fang would in itself be enough reward for going to China—let alone several times, and personally, as you have. I liked him so much the one time I saw him in New York, that I was well satisfied not to go to anything else at the theatre afterward that season.” Later, Moore’s language reflects a deepening admiration for Mei, as she adjectivizes his name and begins to hold him up as the standard by which creativity and the fantastic might be judged. In a July 24, 1934 letter to Bryher, for example, Moore writes, “Your thought that there will be a kind reception for [my latest book of poetry] from others beside yourself is your Mei Lan Fang touch of magnificence, I’m afraid.” Mei left a lasting impression on Moore through at least the 1940s and 50s, as evidenced in several letters she wrote during those decades. For instance, in a letter to Dorothy and Ezra Pound dated July 31, 1952, Moore comments, “I take an avid interest in Mommsen, in the zealous Achilles Fang; could he be a relative of Mei Lan Fang? A masterpiece of whom I would be ignorant if it *had not been for Gilbert Seldes, who warned me not to miss him.” Although she saw him perform only once, Moore was not alone in her sustained interest in Mei. “Though China’s greatest actor did make subsequent tours to Japan and the Soviet Union,” Cosdon writes, “he never returned to the United States. Yet, the memory of Mei’s American triumph was never forgotten; his career and life were consistently noted in the New York media following his 1930 tour.”
While Moore never directly refers to Mei in her poetry, his influence on her poetics is palpable. In her 1957 poem “O to be a Dragon,” Moore uses the Chinese dragon to enact the transformative gender play she observed in Mei’s performance:
If I, like Solomon,…
could have my wish—
my wish…O to be a dragon,
a symbol of the power of Heaven—of silkworm
size or immense; at times invisible.
Felicitous phenomenon!
Marianne Moore by George Platt Lynes (1935)
Moore costumes herself in images of Chineseness, performing the role of the “true dragon” of Chinese mythology that was said to be able to shift between forms, as opposed to the static, “malign variety” in Western mythologies. Examining Moore’s sources more closely, we see that the dragon’s compound nature and ability to change are the qualities that make it a ripe metaphor for her own desires. In her notes to the poem, Moore gives one of her sources as Mai-mai Sze’s The Tao of Painting. Sze writes, “The dragon, as a symbol of the power of Heaven and of analogous ideas is a composite being and a composite symbol…it is described as having resemblance to nine other creatures.” It is this composite nature, the both/and quality of the dragon that links it to Mei Lanfang’s dan performances. As Elien Arckens writes, “This dragon, as a nongendered combatant, offers a clue to the eccentric woman who thrives behind the tame, reserved exterior. It is this visible-invisible and gendered-nongendered discrepancy that contributes to Moore’s idiosyncratic queerness.” Like Mei, the Chinese dragon is transgressive—it resists one form or coherent identity and serves as an image through which Moore can explore her own desire for nonconformity.
What is appealing to Moore about the Chinese dragon is its transformative power—its ability to encompass masculine and feminine qualities simultaneously, to slip between different aspects of the self at will. For Moore, who was deeply invested in a poetics of change, the China of the American Modernists is “the magic place” because the poets and actors who enter its cultural spaces are granted access to the slipperiness of the Chinese imaginary. Pulling from Sze’s description of the dragon for her poem, Moore selects images that are intimately connected to contemporaneous gender expectations. Sze writes, “The dragon was described as being capable of extraordinary transformations—‘at will reduced to the size of a silkworm or swollen till it fills the space of Heaven and Earth’—and it had the gift of becoming invisible.” In “O to be a Dragon,” Moore enjambs the fourth line to shift our focus to the silkworm, a creature as unlike the Western dragon as it could possibly be. The silkworm is small and ostensibly powerless. Nevertheless, it is highly skilled and produces the silken string necessary to create one of the most expensive and highly sought-after materials on earth. Evoking images of the textile industry and weaving—work that has traditionally belonged to women in both China and the United States—the silkworm serves in the poem as a kind of analog to the feminine. In the very next line, Moore uses a caesura to emphasize the dragon’s ability to become “immense,” to take up spaces—a privilege typically only extended to men in the 1950s U.S. But this quality, too, is quickly traded for another, as the dragon disappears altogether. By moving her speaker between roles like an actor shrugging off one costume for another between scenes, Moore uses the Chinese dragon to demonstrate the human capacity to hold multiple selves: masculine, feminine, and everything in between, a truly “Felicitous phenomenon!”
Xiamara Hohman is a visiting assistant professor of English at Baldwin Wallace University. Her research has appeared in Reading Flannery O'Connor in Spain: From Andalusia to Andalucía and in the Ohio Journal of English Language Arts. She has contributed to numerous digital projects, including the Lili Elbe Digital Archive, the Amy Lowell Letters Project, and The Charles Harpur Critical Archive. Her current research focuses on American poets’ engagement with China and Chinese mythology.