5 - The Bouquet of Eros

Summary

The link between aroma and eros is a time-honoured theme across cultures, and yet in the 1920s Chinese literary repertoire of amour, what mesmerize the modernizing men and women is not cultured scents of perfume, but biological odours of libido. Chapter 5 investigates the phenomenon of olfactophilia emerging in modern Chinese literature. Considered ‘perverted’ in late nineteenth-century Europe, olfactophilia was symptomatic of the discourse of emancipation in May Fourth China. The Chinese modernists discovered in the primitive sense of smell the true essence of being human, a gesture of defiance against Confucian culture. Embedded in their pursuits was the aporia of modernity, a parable about the porous boundary between purity and contamination. I analyse three sets of texts: early works by members of the Creation Society, which functioned as a trendsetter for olfactory expressions; Lu Xun’s 1924 short story ‘Soap’, an artful anatomy of the ambivalent modern psyche wrapped in an ambiguous whiff of olive aroma; and Mao Dun’s early fictional oeuvre of the late 1920s teeming with libidinal odours and revolutionary vigour.