Liu Shih and Hsü Ts'an:
Feminine or Feminist?
Kang-i Sun Chang
Introduction
Liu Shih (1618–64) and Hsü Ts'an (ca. 1610–after 1677) are two outstanding and representative women tz'u poets of the Ming-Ch'ing transition. They came from strikingly different backgrounds and apparently received educations of different sorts, but they were equals in terms of literary distinction. In many ways, they provided the basis for two new models for women engaged in literary careers—models that contrast somewhat with those of earlier periods, for the Ming-Ch'ing transition is marked by a differentiation of women poets into the courtesan tradition, represented by Liu Shih, and the gentry-woman tradition, represented by Hsü Ts'an.
The fact that these two distinguished women poets appeared at this particular time in the history of tz'u deserves our special attention, especially because by the early seventeenth century the song lyric had already been viewed as a "dying genre" for more than three centuries. It was Liu Shih, the courtesan-poet, who helped her lover Ch'en Tzu-lung (1608–47) establish the important Yün-chien school of tz'u revival.[1] Interestingly, while a number of male Ming authors seem to
I would like to thank Haun Saussy, Ron Egan, Yu-kung Kao, Anthony Yu, and two anonymous reviewers for offering helpful comments and suggestions. To Shih Chih-ts'un (Shi Zhi Cun) of Shanghai I owe a special debt of gratitude for all the important materials and information he has given me. I am also indebted to my students in the Ming-Ch'ing Women Poets seminar, and especially to Cheng-hua Wang, who provided me with valuable sources on Hsü Ts'an.
[1] For details about Ch'en Tzu-lung's role in the Yün-chien school of tz'u revival, see chapter 4 of my book The Late-Ming Poet Ch'en Tzu-lung: Crises of Love and Loyalism (NewHaven: Yale University Press, 1991). See also Yeh Chia-ying, "Yu tz'u chih t'e-chih lun ling-tz'u chih ch'ien-neng yü Ch'en Tzu-lung tz'u chih ch'eng-chiu," Chung-wai wen-hsüeh 19, no. 1 (June 1990): 4–38.
have been largely unaffected by the revival movement, tz'u suddenly became the main expressive vehicle for many late Ming women, notably Hsü Ts'an, who is known primarily as a tz'u poet (rather than a writer of shih ) and has been praised by many scholars as the best of the women tz'u poets of late imperial China, perhaps "even superior to the Sung poet Li Ch'ing-chao."[2] Clearly, Liu Shih and Hsü Ts'an were exemplary women writers who lent color to seventeenth-century China and considerable stature to the tz'u genre.
To understand the role of women in the revival of tz'u , we must first ask why there were such unprecedented numbers of women poets in the late Ming. (In the tz'u genre alone, there are more than eighty late Ming women poets whose works have been recorded in modern anthologies.)[3] One obvious reason is the rise in female literacy from the sixteenth century onward, which no doubt provided women with the skills and made viable the aspirations that were necessary for literary creativity.[4] As they grew in number and confidence, these women began to write in a great variety of poetic genres and eventually found their way into print—hence the proliferation of collections and anthologies of poetry by women at that time.[5] But a more important reason, I think, has to do with the effort of many contemporary "male feminists," who not only served as the editorial brains behind most of the anthologies of women poets, but also actively tried to "canonize" women's writings by associating them with the classical canons, the Shih-ching and "Li-sao."[6]
[2] See Hsü Nai-ch'ang's foreword to Hsü Ts'an's Cho-cheng-yüan shih-yü , in his Hsiao-t'an-luan shih kuei-hsiu tz'u (1896), ser. 2. (Further references to this volume will be abbreviated as CCYSY in the text.) Note that more than one hundred tz'u by Hsü Ts'an have survived, while only three of her shih poems are extant.
[3] See, for example, I Po-yin, ed., Li-tai nü shih tz'u hsüan (Taipei: Tang-tai t'u-shu ch'u-pan-she, 1972), pp. 133–61, 215–16. Henceforth abbreviated as LTNST .
[4] Joanna F. Handlin, "Lü K'un's New Audience: The Influence of Women's Literacy on Sixteenth-Century Thought," in Women in Chinese Society , ed. Margery Wolf and Roxane Witke (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975), pp. 13–38. See also Paul S. Ropp, "Love, Literacy, and Laments: Themes of Women Writers in Late Imperial China," Women's History Review 2.1 (1993): 107–41.
[5] See Hu Wen-k'ai, Li-tai fu-nü chu-tso k'ao , rev. ed. (Shanghai: Shang-hai ku-chi ch'u-pan-she, 1985). See also Chung Hui-ling, "Ch'ing-tai nü shih-jen yen-chiu" (Ph.D. diss., National Cheng-chih University, 1981), pp. 92–135.
[6] See my "Canon-Formation in Chinese Poetry: Problems of Gender and Genre," presented at the ICANAS Panel on the Concept of the Classic and Canon-Formation inEast Asia (Toronto, August 21, 1990). For the relationship between canon-formation and anthology making in ancient China, see Pauline Yu, "Poems in Their Place: Collections and Canons in Early Chinese Literature," Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 50(1990): 163–96.
Many of these male editors—chief among them Chao Shih-chieh and Tsou I—argued that since the female substance was composed of the "purest cosmic essences" (ling-hsiu chih ch'i ), women's writings were superior to men's.[7] In fact, one scholar even suggested that poetry by women, created out of the spirit of such purity and hence devoid of any political affiliations or biases, could be used as an ideal remedy for the confusing array of literary positions and schools in the Ming.[8] Perhaps because of this faith in the corrective function of women's poetry, most Ming (and later, Ch'ing) anthologists insisted on including contemporary women's works, which was indeed a departure from the traditional model of the anthology as containing works that were often different from, and even ran counter to, the prevailing taste of the present.[9] Chou Chih-piao, for instance, selected works of fourteen late Ming women poets for his two anthologies. The titles of both of these anthologies contain the phrase nü-chung ch'i ts'ai-tzu (seven female talents)[10] —a phrase apparently implying a comparison of contemporary women poets to the famous "Former Seven Masters" and "Latter Seven Masters" who so dominated the configurations of the Ming literary scene.
All this demonstrates that Chinese women poets like Liu Shih and Hsü Ts'an were fortunate in at least one respect: unlike many English-speaking women poets,[11] their poetic vocation did not arouse resistance on the part of male scholars and critics. In fact, late Ming women such as Liu Shih and Wang Tuan-shu were encouraged to become editors of poetry anthologies and were free to express critical views on individual
[7] Chao Shih-chieh, Ku-chin nü-shih (1628); Tsou I, Hung-chiao chi (printed early Ch'ing). See Hu Wen-k'ai, Li-tai fu-nü , pp. 889, 897.
[8] Chung Hsing, ed., Ming-yüan shih kuei (ca. 1600). See Hu Wen-k'ai, Li-tai fu-nü , p. 883. Some Ch'ing scholars, among them Wang Shih-chen, seriously questioned the editorship of this anthology. But even if Chung Hsing did not edit the volume, someone else in his time must have done it.
[9] This traditional view of the true canon has been summed up by Pauline Yu in her "Poems in Their Place," pp. 188–94.
[10] Hu Wen-k'ai, Li-tai fu-nü , p. 844.
[11] For the dichotomy of poetry and femininity in the English tradition, see Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), pp. 540, 546.
authors[12] —which they did with a self-assurance that they seem to have inherited from the Sung poet and woman of letters Li Ch'ing-chao, the first literary critic of either sex to write so confidently about tz'u poetry. What Lawrence Lipking has said about the sexist tendencies in Western criticism—that "historically men have shown no interest at all in a woman's poetics"[13] —does not seem to apply to the Chinese poetic tradition. Various sources have proven that Ming-Ch'ing men were truly interested in writings by women. As Ellen Widmer has observed, "contemporary women writers strove to be included in women's poetical anthologies, and such books were read and admired by contemporaries, male and female."[14]
Liu Shih and the Courtesan Tradition
Underlying the male enthusiasm and support for women's works is the traditional respect for "talent" (ts'ai ). Chinese women, however suppressed and mistreated socially, were taken seriously for the literature (especially poetry) they produced. Since the T'ang, the concept of "talented women" (ts'ai-nü ) has represented the literati poets' attempt to create a special image of women. The courtesan was the prototype of the "talented woman," whose singing and verse writing, along with her beauty, gave men the comforting illusion of meeting a goddess in a fairyland—and courtesans hence were called "goddesses" (shen-nü ) from the T'ang dynasty forward. Po Chü-i and Yüan Chen captured the mystique of the alluring courtesans in their shih poems,[15] while the courte-
[12] Hu Wen-k'ai, Li-tai fu-nü , pp. 433–34, 894. Liu Shih's anthology of women poets, included in Ch'ien Ch'ien-i's Lieh-ch'ao shih-chi , has become a standard text of poetry by women. Her Ku-chin ming-yüan shih tz'u hsüan , bringing together both shih and tz'u poems by female authors, was perhaps the earliest anthology in the late Ming period to have included so many representative tz'u works (totaling four hundred or more) by women. Wang Tuan-shu said that her Ming-yüan shih-wei (preface dated 1661), an anthology of women poets in all major genres, was meant to compete with the classical Shih-ching , a claim that the male scholar Ch'ien Ch'ien-i (who wrote the preface to the collection) apparently endorsed.
[13] Lawrence Lipking, "Aristotle's Sister: A Poetics of Abandonment," in Canons , ed. Robert von Hallberg (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), p. 87. Also in Lawrence Lipking, Abandoned Women and Poetic Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 211.
[14] Ellen Widmer, "The Epistolary World of Female Talent in Seventeenth-Century China," Late Imperial China 10, no. 2 (Dec. 1989): 22.
[15] K'ang Cheng-kuo, Feng-sao yü yen-ch'ing (Honan: Jen-min ch'u-pan-she, 1988), pp. 216–19.
san Hsüeh T'ao herself became a real shih poet, not a symbol.[16] In the late T'ang and the Sung, poets composed tz'u for courtesans to sing, weaving tender emotion and sensual love into the song lyric genre. In the seventeenth century the reputation of courtesans accelerated decisively, largely because many of them had become true artists specializing in poetry, calligraphy, painting, or the dramatic arts. These courtesans were respectable "women of learning," and their works were published privately or included in contemporary anthologies.[17] They were able to enter into the cultural elite of the Chiang-nan cities, and they often concluded romantic marriages with literati and scholar-poets. At the same time, these courtesans became identified with a role so familiar in contemporary fiction and drama, that of the talented woman who marries a gifted man (ts'ai-tzu )—though in reality they often ended up being merely the concubines of these men.[18]
In many ways, Liu Shih fit into the popular image of the talented woman. She became an accomplished poet-painter and calligrapher in her teens, and many literati in the Chiang-nan area came to admire her literary learning. She published her first collection of poems, Wu-yin ts'ao (1638), at the age of twenty and enjoyed a reputation as a courtesan of superb talent and beauty. Her intense love relationship with the young poet Ch'en Tzu-lung, and her later marriage to the literary giant Ch'ien Ch'ien-i, made her a legendary figure in the field of literature. Most important, her numerous love poems to Ch'en Tzu-lung (and for that matter, Ch'en's to her) engendered a whole new interest in tz'u , a genre characterized by intensity of emotion. Since traditionally proficiency in song lyrics was closely associated with the courtesan culture, we might expect that Liu Shih greatly influenced the tz'u revival—not only by her writings but also by serving as a "symbol."
It was no accident that Liu and Ch'en's tz'u revival took place at a time when the late Ming notion of ch'ing (love) encouraged a cultural reevaluation of human feeling. In late Ming fiction and drama, the "talented man" and "gifted woman" (ts'ai-tzu chia-jen ) who exchange
[16] Of course, as Jeanne Larsen points out, men at first were ambivalent about these liberal-minded women poets, as may be seen in the many scandalous stories they created about Hsüeh and other T'ang courtesans. See Jeanne Larsen's introduction to her Brocade River Poems: Selected Works of the Tang Dynasty Courtesan Xue Tao (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), p. xiv.
[17] For example, in Chou Chih-piao's Nü-chung ch'i ts'ai-tzu lan-k'o chi and Mao Yü-ch'ang's Ch'in Huai ssu-chi shih (The four courtesans of Ch'in Huai). See Hu Wen-k'ai, Litai fu-nü , p. 844.
[18] See chapter 2 of my book The Late-Ming Poet Ch'en Tzu-lung , pp. 9–18.
poems are portrayed as lovers nearly consumed by passion but eventually saved by their unchanging devotion to each other. Love has the supreme power to defeat time and death (as in Mu-tan t'ing ); and it bestows virtue upon the lovers (as in Tzu-ch'ai chi ). The late Ming literati were the first to make the shift in values from allegorical love to real love based on reciprocity between male and female. The dramatist T'ang Hsien-tsu opens his play Tzu-ch'ai chi with the following words that affirm this new idea of ch'ing : "In this world, where can one find examples of love's longings? / Just see how people like ourselves are devoted to love."[19]
Liu Shih and Ch'en Tzu-lung's tz'u poetics was clearly patterned on the late Ming notion of reciprocal love. Liu's numerous poetic exchanges with Ch'en—in some cases, her poems are more elaborate in scope and length than Ch'en's—are framed as personal letters, telling the secret of a passion felt by two equally talented poets. Liu was no longer a mere singer like the Sung courtesans whose prime duty was to perform song lyrics for men. As a talented poet herself, she acquired a personal voice breathing the very spirit of purity, all the while addressing her lover as an equal. In her perhaps most brilliant song-series, "Meng Chiang-nan" (subtitled "Thinking of Someone," in twenty poems), she tells the moving story of her relationship with Ch'en, recounting her struggles with love's agonizing passion and describing the dreamlike nature of being in love. In the last song of the series she openly admits her love:
Where was he?
He was by my pillow side.
Nothing but endless tears at the quilt edge—
wiping them off secretly, but only inducing more,
for good or ill I want his love.[20]
Elsewhere, again in plain and sensuous language, Liu Shih analyzes her condition as if she were a heroine in a romantic play—for self-
[19] T'ang Hsien-tsu, T'ang Hsien-tsu chi , ed. Ch'ien Nan-yang (Shanghai: Jen-min ch'u-pan-she, 1973), 3:1587.
[20] The translation is taken from my book The Late-Ming Poet Ch'en Tzu-lung , p. 126, with modifications.
expression and self-dramatization are both at the heart of her tz'u poetics. In her "Chin-ming ch'ih : On the Cold Willow," she describes her dreams of love by evoking the images of the plum and moonlight borrowed from T'ang Hsien-tsu's romantic play Tzu-ch'ai chi :
How I wish to invite the plum spirit in:
at evening, by the dim moonlight,
we could quietly speak of deep longing and love.[21]
(lines 26–28)
Such a candid and emotional poem demands, as always, a response from the beloved, her "male counterpart" who suffers from the pain of love and pining. Indeed, in his "Chiang ch'eng tzu" for Liu Shih, subtitled "Getting up Ill When the Spring Is Over," Ch'en Tzu-lung confesses to being overcome by symptoms of lovesickness.[22] Clearly, Liu Shih and Ch'en Tzu-lung, by working through an original but stylized use of the literary convention from contemporary lyrical drama, have assumed the roles of hero and heroine exchanging love poems in tz'u . This is a bold revision of the song lyric tradition; but at the same time Liu and Ch'en were rescuing the genre from prolonged neglect, and in time their Yün-chien school was to set the models for imitation.
I think late Ming courtesan-poets like Liu Shih are the ultimate symbol of tz'u poetry, for human emotion defines itself in the song lyric. To the courtesan-poets, love is power; personal meaning is determined by the intimate male-female relationship. Thus, the courtesans Wang Wei (Hsiu Wei) and Cheng T'o (Ju-ying) dwell on images of consuming passion, vowing undying love and perpetual longing. Yang Wan creates unmistakable fantasy, dreaming about the pleasures of "holding hands" with her beloved. Ma Shou-chen broods over the beautiful lyrics given her by her departed lover and continues to love in mournful solitude. And Chao Ts'ai-chi in her "Everlasting Longing" ("Ch'ang hsiangssu") emphasizes her sufferings as a lover, using words such as hsiang-ssu (longing) and ch'ing (love) to dramatize feelings of tenderness, fidelity, and devotion.[23]
[21] Ch'en Yin-k'o, ed., Liu Ju-shih pieh-chuan (Shanghai: Shang-hai ku-chi ch'u-pan-she, 1980), 1:336–37.
[22] Ch'en Tzu-lung, Ch'en Tzu-lung shih-chi , ed. Shih Chih-ts'un and Ma Tsu-hsi (Shanghai: Shang-hai ku-chi ch'u-pan-she, 1983), 2:616.
[23] For the poems referred to above, see LTNST , pp. 153–54, 153, 150, and 152, re-spectively. Works by Cheng T'o, Ma Shou-chen, and Chao Ts'ai-chi were brought together in the seventeenth-century anthology Ch'in Huai ssu-chi shih . See Hu Wen-k'ai, Li-tai fu-nü , p. 844.
The connection between song lyrics and love, or other emotions, is no doubt what makes the tz'u genre "feminine." But femininity is not the same as femaleness.[24] Femininity in Chinese poetry is an aesthetic quality, the cultivation of refined elegance and tender feeling—a quality akin to the "delicate restraint" (wan-yüeh ) typical of the majority of Sung tz'u written by men. Women poets did not invent femininity in tz'u ; male poets did. Even if the song lyric was long thought to be a "feminine" genre, most major tz'u poets before the Ming were male, with the notable exception of Li Ch'ing-chao and Chu Shu-chen. But male scholars of the seventeenth century, in their enthusiastic attempt to promote women poets, began to argue that women, being "female," were able to produce better song lyrics.[25] This common confusion (or convergence) between femaleness and femininity no doubt encouraged many Ming-Ch'ing women to engage in tz'u writing, inadvertently bringing about a reflowering of the genre.
Most women tz'u poets of the seventeenth century, however, understood that "femininity" was only a generic trait of the song lyric. Thus, although their tz'u songs were generally characterized by refined imagery and eloquence of emotion, their shih poems were filled with references to Confucian morality, social injustice, political crises, and historical events.[26] In Liu Shih's poetry in particular, we find a clear sense of generic discrimination: whereas her tz'u are written in the language of emotional realism and passionate love, her shih often evoke an aura of sublimity and philosophical reflection, and were occasionally praised for a "heroic" tone generally associated with the works of male writers.[27] Such a sense of genre falls perfectly within the tradition of early tz'u criticism. The Sung scholar Shen I-fu says in his Yüeh-fu chih-mi : "Writing tz'u is different from writing shih . Even in writing about flowers, a tz'u
[24] Camille Paglia makes an important distinction between "femininity" and "femaleness" in her recent book Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), pp. 56–60.
[25] For example, Yu T'ung, in his preface to Lin-hsia tz'u-hsüan (an anthology of tz'u by women, printed sometime after 1662), made such an argument by drawing examples from many female Ming poets. See Hu Wen-k'ai, Li-tai fu-nü , p. 895.
[26] See, e.g., LTNST , pp. 129–31, 165–206.
[27] See my Late-Ming Poet Ch'en Tzu-lung , p. 80. Also Ch'en Yin-k'o, Liu Ju-shih pieh-chuan , 1:112.
poem must evoke love and feeling [ch'ing-i ] or touch on matters concerning the inner chamber."[28]
Hsü Ts'an and the Gentry-Woman Tradition
The theme of the "inner chamber" is another element central to the song lyric. The term I have translated as "gentry-women poets" literally means "poets of the inner chamber" (kuei-ko shih-jen ). Unlike the courtesans who usually saw themselves with reference to their gentleman friends, the gentry-women poets of the late Ming often considered women as a group, in a spirit of female-bonding.[29] These women regularly formed poetry clubs in intimate, domestic settings to promote their literary interests and expertise, and those invited were usually limited to female relatives and friends—in sharp contrast to the courtesans who usually belonged to male literary societies like the Fu-she and Chi-she and moved about more actively. In the gentry women's societies, members served as teachers and pupils to one another and often exchanged poems set to the same rhyme patterns. Hsü Ts'an was known as one of the "Five Talented Poets" (wu-tzu ) in the most prestigious female poetry club in Chekiang, the Banana Garden Club (Chiao-yüan shih-she).[30]
There seems to have been some fragmentation or split among contemporary male scholars over the issue of publication with regard to gentry-women poets. On the one hand, an unprecedentedly large number of collections and anthologies of works by women in the late Ming convinces us that gentry women were encouraged by their male relatives or friends to publish their poems—a classic example being Yeh Shao-yüan (1589–1649), who published works of his wife, Shen I-hsiu (1590–1635), along with poems by his three talented daughters, Yeh Wan-wan (1610–32), Yeh Hsiao-wan, and Yeh Hsiao-luan (1616–32).[31]
[28] T'ang Kuei-chang, ed., Tz'u-hua ts'ung-pien (Peking: Chung-hua shu-chü, 1986), 1:281.
[29] Ellen Widmer observes that relationships between gentry women "show the importance of solidarity among women themselves, rather than associations centered on men, in developing female talent." See Widmer, "The Epistolary World of Female Talent," p. 3.
[30] According to one source, the other four "talented poets" were Ch'ai Ching-i, Chu Jou-tse, Lin I-ning, and Ch'ien Yün-i; see Chung Hui-ling, "Ch'ing-tai nü shih-jen," p. 126.
[31] Yeh Shao-yüan, Wu-meng t'ang ch'üan-chi , in Chung-kuo wen-hsüeh chen-pen ts'ung-shu , ser. 1, vol. 49 (Shanghai: Pei-yeh shan-fang, 1936). I have benefited from readingChung-lan Wang's "The Tz'u Poetry of Shen I-hsiu, Yeh Wan-wan, and Yeh Hsiao-luan" (Term paper, 1990).
But on the other hand, there were men who did not wish to see their own daughters, wives, or mothers becoming excessively intellectual—though it seems to have been acceptable to them that courtesans attain literary renown.[32] Moreover, there had been a tradition—somewhat out of fashion by the late Ming—of gentry women burning their own poems for fear of exposing their poetic talents to the outside world. In any case, compared to their courtesan contemporaries, gentry women were more restricted in their educations, it seems: they studied prescribed classics like the Nü Ssu-shu (Four books for women) and were taught "improvements in morals" and "household management."[33] Perhaps for this reason, the famous gentry woman poet Hsü Yüan (incidentally, a great aunt of Hsü Ts'an's) had been accused of "fishing for fame but lacking in learning" (hao-ming wu-hsüeh ). It is interesting to observe that the well-rounded and unusually learned courtesan Liu Shih agreed that there might be some justification for such severe criticism, though she was also trying to speak in defense of Hsü Yüan.[34]
By all accounts, Hsü Ts'an, a favorite of her father, was extremely privileged in her education from early childhood on. She grew up in Soochow, a cultural center in the late Ming, and became well versed in poetry and art at a young age. Well born, well educated, and well married (her husband, Ch'en Chih-lin, of the prominent Ch'en family of Hai-ning, later became a chief minister), Hsü Ts'an should have been the envy of many contemporary women. But unfortunately, Hsü Ts'an had to endure a fate that had haunted Chinese gentry women since times of old: sometime in the early 1640s her husband acquired a concubine, who apparently lived with him in the capital at Peking while Hsü Ts'an remained at home in the south.
A Chinese woman in such circumstances was expected to exercise the virtues of a supportive wife. In the late Ming we can find many instances of such exemplary wives. The wife of Mao Hsiang (one of the "Four Aristocratic Youths") may be most well known to modern readers. Mao Hsiang wrote in his Ying-mei-an i-yü that his virtuous wife even went out of her way to bring Tung Pai (the famous courtesan who was
[32] Widmer, "The Epistolary World of Female Talent," pp. 29–30.
[33] Jonathan Spence, The Search for Modern China (New York: Norton, 1990), p. 9.
[34] See Liu Shih's section on women poets, in Ch'ien Ch'ien-i, Lieh-ch'ao shih-chi hsiao-chuan (Shanghai: Shang-hai ku-chi ch'u-pan-she, 1983), 2:752. According to Hu Wen-k'ai, Liu Shih was responsible for the extensive annotations on women poets anthologized in Ch'ien Ch'ien-i's Lieh-ch'ao shih-chi . See Hu Wen-k'ai, Li-tai fu-nü , p. 433.
Mao Hsiang's lover and later his concubine) to their house so that the two lovers could be formally united.[35] Unlike Mao Hsiang's wife, Hsü Ts'an refused to accept her fate in silence. She expressed her feelings of resentment in many song lyrics, with a candor and directness rarely encountered in a literary tradition where women's emotions were expected to be moderated. Hsü Ts'an viewed herself as an "abandoned wife," suffering the mental torments of jealousy, disappointment, and helpless resignation—a situation that reaches back to the "Nineteen Old Poems." In a tz'u addressed to her husband, "I Ch'in-o," subtitled "Spring Feelings," Hsü Ts'an complains that she has suddenly been "abandoned" (p'ao-p'ieh ):
My heart aches as if crying,
as if crying,
old love gone, when new love found.
( CCYSY , 1.9a–b)
Ironically, in his preface to his wife's collection of song lyrics, Cho-cheng-yüan shih-yü , Ch'en Chih-lin praises Hsü Ts'an for her expression of wen-jou tun-hou (meekness and gentleness), a phrase coined in reference to the Shih-ching , the foremost of canonical sources. Wen-jou tun-hou is the quality of emotional restraint, long celebrated in traditional Chinese literary criticism. Obviously, like all conventional Chinese literati, Ch'en Chih-lin was perhaps a bit too anxious to find "sorrow without anger" (ai erh pu-yüan ) in all "abandoned wife" poems, including those by his own wife. He was perhaps reading into Hsü Ts'an's lyric the ideal virtue of the queen in the first poem of the Shih-ching ("Kuan-chü"), who was lauded for her conscientious efforts to find her husband a suitable young concubine (as some Confucian commentators would read it). Indeed, it is most interesting that Ch'en seems to have missed completely the tone of protest and defiance in Hsü Ts'an's song lyrics.
Generally, in evaluating a poem with the theme of the "abandoned wife," we must first ask whether the language is personal and original or conventional and formulaic. This is an especially crucial question because since the times of Ch'ü Yüan (d. 315 B.C.?) and Ts'ao Chih (192–232), the Chinese poet, when demoted or exiled, had been accustomed to speak through the female voice of the "abandoned wife" (ch'i-fu ), in-
[35] Pan Tze-yen, trans., The Reminiscences of Tung Hsiao-wan , by Mao P'i-chiang [Mao Hsiang] (Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1931), p. 38.
tending the words to be read as political allegory. In fact, the whole theme of the "abandoned wife" in Chinese poetry can be said to have been made popular by male poets. But what happened when women poets finally began writing poetry?
To a large extent, women poets since Pao Ling-hui (5th cent.) had been trying to model their works on those of male authors (naturally enough, given that the female poetic tradition was yet to be shaped).[36] But the "abandoned wife" poems of women guided by personal experience and female sensitivity added a new dimension to Chinese poetry—they are concrete, confessional, and often filled with realistic detail. Most important, they speak in a language of their own, a true, rather than an allegorical, voice. In tz'u poetry in particular, we find women poets like Li Ch'ing-chao writing out their lives, creating a wonderful poetic fusion of convention and originality, of the female and male traditions. And that is what Hsü Ts'an and other Ming-Ch'ing women poets set out to do in their song lyrics—to find some way to incorporate the male tradition in the expression of their own pure, personal, unmediated feelings as women.
In sharp contrast to contemporary courtesan-poets like Liu Shih who took romantic love as the main theme in their tz'u , Hsü Ts'an and other gentry-women poets focused on self-pity or on their complaints as "abandoned wives."[37] Courtesans were, of course, often—if not more often—abandoned by men too, but in their song lyrics they tended to dwell on the power of passion and the vivid memories of love. Gentry women, on the other hand, emphasized the passivity of their situations and their feelings of abandonment (even when they were not actually abandoned, only separated from their husbands). There is a basis in real life for this sharp distinction between poetic styles: unlike the courtesans, gentry women who were married were not free to write overtly passionate love songs lest they be accused of extramarital liaisons. (Even unmarried women were concerned about guarding their reputations.) The unwritten rule since ancient times was that when husbands were away, it was inappropriate for chaste wives to dress up or adorn themselves.[38] Of course, women also tended to neglect personal appear-
[36] For Pao Ling-hui's poems modeled on the "Nineteen Old Poems," see Anne Birrell, trans., New Songs from a Jade Terrace (New York: Penguin, 1986), pp. 122–24.
[37] Lawrence Lipking would call both kinds of women "abandoned women," as they both experience similar kinds of "passive suffering." See his Abandoned Women and Poetic Tradition , p. 3. But in the context of tz'u , I feel it is useful to make the distinction, however fine, between the lover and the abandoned wife.
[38] K'ang Cheng-kuo, Feng-sao yü yen-ch'ing , pp. 42–43.
ance when feeling "abandoned."[39] This explains why one pervasive theme in "abandoned wife" tz'u is a woman's self-evaluation of her fading beauty (which she notices when looking into the mirror)[40] and her reluctance to comb her hair (a theme that is also prevalent in Li Ch'ing-chao's song lyrics)—all so she can demonstrate her husband's mistreatment of her and her own adherence to the rules.
In response to the social pressure and poetic decorum imposed upon traditional wives, Ming-Ch'ing gentry-women poets seem to have found another, new outlet for their repressed emotional lives by expressing their friendship with other women as though it were romantic love. In tz'u addressed specifically to female friends, they often used such words as hsiang-ssu (love's longings), tuan-hun (heartbroken), and lien (love),[41] and even made references to courtship poems of the Shih-ching that could be literally interpreted as alluding to a lover's frustration at being separated from a loved one.[42] Indeed, the language used in these song lyrics is often so full of erotic overtones that many of these poems could easily be interpreted by modern readers as expressions of lesbian love.[43]
Hsü Ts'an, however, used a different channel for expressing her feelings of "lovesickness," converting personal love into political loyalty:
My old country, far away,
how can a boat take me there?
The setting sun flows with the river, gone . . .
( CCYSY , 1.11)
[39] Anne Birrell calls this the "neglect syndrome." See her "Dusty Mirror: Courtly Portraits of Woman in Southern Dynasties Love Poetry," in Expressions of Self in Chinese Literature , ed. Robert E. Hegel and Richard C. Hessney (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), p. 59.
[40] Mary E. Kivlen, "Beyond 'the Mirror of Time': Reflections on Mirror Imagery in Ming-Ch'ing Women's Verse" (Term paper, 1990).
[41] See, for example, LTNST , pp. 135–36.
[42] A good example may be found in Wu Shan, a female artist known for her painting and calligraphy. See Ruth Rogaski, "A Woman Named Mountain: The Life and Poetry of Wu Shan" (Term paper, 1990), p. 12.
[43] Apparently lesbian love was rather common among traditional Chinese women (see Ch'en Tung-yüan, Chung-kuo fu-nü sheng-huo shih , [1937; rpt., Taipei: Shang-wu yin-shu-kuan, 1977], pp. 212, 300). It was not, however, generally considered a poetic subject, though it appears frequently in prose fiction and memoirs from the seventeenth century on. The nineteenth-century woman poet Wu Tsao broke taboos in the tradition of poetry by women by celebrating lesbian love and introducing sexual frankness into the song lyric, perhaps most explicitly in her tz'u addressed to a certain courtesan namedCh'ing-lin. See Wu Tsao, Wu Tsao tz'u , Tz'u-hsüeh hsiao ts'ung-shu, no. 9 (Shanghai: Chiao-yü shu-tien, 1949), pp. 41–42; and Judy Liu, "World of Words: Wu Tsao and the Conversion of Life into Art" (Term paper, 1990), pp. 21–22. See also Kenneth Rexroth and Ling Chung, trans. and eds., Women Poets of China , rev. ed. (New York: New Directions, 1982), p. 135, where Rexroth and Chung call Wu Tsao "one of the greatest lesbian poets of all time."
These lines remind us of Li Yü's tz'u mourning the fall of his kingdom of Southern T'ang. But far more interesting for us here may be those song lyrics in which Hsü Ts'an juxtaposes two kinds of emotion—personal loss and loyalist passion—for it just so happened that the fall of the Ming dynasty coincided almost exactly with Ch'en Chih-lin's acquisition of a concubine. The woman poet suffered two losses, endured two forms of "mourning"—but one kind of abandonment, abandonment by both her country and her husband. In her song lyric to "Shao-nien yu" subtitled "A Kind of Feeling," Hsü Ts'an expresses her longings for the "past dynasty" in the first stanza, while in the second stanza she subtly laments her fate as an abandoned wife. In her more elaborate tz'u set to the tune "Man chiang hung," she uses a similar procedure by first describing how the "rivers and mountains" remind her of the fallen Ming and then complaining about her husband's "breaking his vow."[44]
And it was not just a personal vow that Hsü Ts'an's husband was breaking: Ch'en Chih-lin had surrendered to the Ch'ing, and in 1645 he began to serve the Manchu government in Peking—an act of betrayal that his wife apparently condemned. In her song lyric to "Ch'ing-yüan," Hsü Ts'an writes:[45]
The misty water knew nothing about the wrongs of human affairs;
warships extending tens of thousands of miles
all lowered their sails to surrender.
Do not blame my slow lotus steps.
( CCYSY , 2.4a)
These lines suggest that the boundaries of Hsü Ts'an's tz'u stretched far beyond the limits of the inner chamber. Few readers of song lyrics by women had met her likeness before, for Hsü Ts'an, in her loyalist tz'u , incorporated into her basically feminine style the strong voice of "masculinity" typical of the "heroic" (hao-fang ) school of tz'u . The Sung
[44] For the lyrics cited above, see CCYSY , 1.7a and 3.4a, respectively.
[45] Cheng-hua Wang, "On Hsü Ts'an's Poetry" (Term paper, 1989), pp. 12–13.
poet Li Ch'ing-chao had of course explored patriotic concerns in her shih , but never in her tz'u (being a purist in genre properties). And Liu Shih, though involving herself in all sorts of loyalist resistance movements after the fall of the Ming and though known as a woman of courage and chivalry, did not at all develop the topic of loyalism in her song lyrics.[46] In sharp contrast to all these female poets, Hsü Ts'an adopted a special and rather unusual poetic strategy in tz'u in order to bridge what was thought to be an infinite gap between gentle femininity and heroic masculinity, and ultimately to cross generic and sexual boundaries in poetry. Just as femininity in tz'u is not necessarily female, Hsü Ts'an seems to argue, masculinity as expressed in the hao-fang mode is only an artistic strategy and is therefore not necessarily male. In a way, women poets like Hsü Ts'an may be called feminist in their tz'u ,[47] while Liu Shih and other courtesans were primarily feminine in theirs—although in their life roles they seem to have been exactly the opposite.
For her loyalist lyrics, Hsü Ts'an deliberately chose tunes that were traditionally associated with patriotism, such as "Man chiang hung" (made famous by the Sung hero Yüeh Fei) and the well-known "Yung-yülo" (recognized as typical of the Hsin Ch'i-chi style). In all of her experiments with the theme, Hsü worked toward a balance between masculinity and femininity, so that the impression created is femaleness made more heroic, femaleness realized by being freer and more concrete. Thus, in one of her song lyrics to "Man chiang hung," Hsü describes both "heroic deeds" (ying-hsiung yeh ) and "heartbroken steles" (tuan-ch'ang pei ), mixing extremely masculine images with refined words of feminine sentiment—no doubt in an attempt to identify femaleness with creative self-liberation.[48] Generally Hsü Ts'an uses the style of "heroic abandon" in the first stanza of her loyalist poems but reserves the second stanza for a more "delicate and restrained" expression of private feelings. A case in point is her "Yung-yü lo," subtitled "Thinking of the Past While on a Boat," where she writes in the first stanza:
[46] See my Late-Ming Poet Ch'en Tzu-lung , p. 17.
[47] Some modern critics may argue that Hsü's adoption of the hao-fang style, a mere male convention, is not enough to make her a feminist, because feminism (as we understand it today) seems to imply some challenge to the male order, not simply a willingness to participate in it. Viewed historically , however, there is no doubt that for seventeenth-century female tz'u writers Hsü Ts'an's new poetics represented a true liberation of women. Hers was indeed "an outlook that transcended the accepted value systems of the time," which is, of course, one aspect of feminism. See Cheris Kramarae and Paula A. Treichler, "Feminism," in their Feminist Dictionary (London: Pandora Press, 1985), p. 158.
[48] CCYSY , 3.4a–b.
The dragon is gone, the swords disappeared—
how many heroes' tears and blood?
Sorrows of a thousand ages—
rivers and mountains, how many still remain?
But in the second stanza she dwells on smaller and more refined images:
Human affairs are as fleeting clouds,
this life is like floating catkins—
Enough to make the heartbroken apes grieve and cry.
( CCYSY , 3.6b)
Hsü Ts'an's song lyrics seem completely to have escaped the attention of Ch'en Tzu-lung, the leader of the Yün-chien revival for whom the wan-yüeh , rather than the hao-fang , style was suited to tz'u writing. For Ch'en, even loyalist song lyrics were to be written as love poems from beginning to end, encoding passionate longings in refined, even sensual, images.[49] But it was perhaps because of Hsü Ts'an's ability to transcend the purely wan-yüeh style of the "inner chamber" tz'u that Ch'en Wei-sung, a poet known for his style of "heroic abandon," later came to praise Hsü so highly, regarding her as "the greatest gentry woman poet since the Southern Sung."[50] Hsü Ts'an's husband, Ch'en Chih-lin, also argued that what distinguished her from Hsü Yüan, her great aunt and an eminent tz'u poet, was Hsü Ts'an's experience of suffering as a Ming loyalist and her ability to record that experience vividly in song lyrics.[51] In this regard, Hsü Ts'an seems to have set an example for other contemporary gentry-women poets to follow—Wu Shan, for example, called herself a "female loyalist" (nü i-min ) and expressed loyalist sentiments in her tz'u .[52] Interestingly, it was the "masculine" side of these seventeenth-century song lyrics by women that later came to influence
[49] See my Late-Ming Poet Ch'en Tzu-lung , pp. 83–101.
[50] See Ch'en Wei-sung, Fu-jen chi (Chao-tai ts'ung-shu ed.), 36.3b–4a.
[51] See Ch'en Chih-lin's preface to Hsü's Cho-cheng-yüan shih-yü , 1b–2a.
[52] Rogaski, "A Woman Named Mountain," p. 16.
the works of patriotic female poets like Ch'iu Chin at the end of the Ch'ing dynasty.
Conclusion
Can we then make the assumption that there was an absolute distinction between the courtesan tradition and the gentry-woman tradition in seventeenth-century tz'u ? The problem with such an assumption is that some Ming-Ch'ing women did change their marital status and social affiliations in the course of their lives. For example, Liu Shih became a gentry woman after marrying Ch'ien Ch'ien-i in 1643, and came to be actively associated with other gentry women (like Huang Yüan-chieh) as well as distinguished courtesans (like Lin Hsüeh). The same is true of Ku Mei, the well-known courtesan and artist of Chin-huai, after her marriage to Kung Ting-tzu. As Ellen Widmer has pointed out, for courtesans, literary and artistic achievements often led in the "desirable direction of marriage with gentry men."[53] However, we can certainly argue for a relative distinction between the courtesan and gentry-woman traditions purely in terms of poetic style and rhetoric, as I have attempted to do in this chapter. For these two styles, the feminine and the feminist, two different kinds of literary construct found in seventeenth-century tz'u , remained the crucial elements in song lyrics written by women. One of the surprises encountered in studying these two poetic traditions was learning that the courtesan-poets are, generically and thematically, more timid than the gentry-women poets.
One final point that needs to be considered is the fact that while courtesan-poets of the seventeenth century enjoyed a position of equal importance with the gentry-women poets, by the eighteenth century courtesans were virtually excluded from the literary world and their poems were generally rejected from respectable anthologies of poetry by women. This marks a sharp contrast indeed with late Ming times, when male anthologists like Chou Chih-piao were eager to preserve writings by courtesans and even referred to these women poets with the respectable title nü ts'ai-tzu (female talents).[54] The suppression of courtesans' writings during the Ch'ing dynasty was greatly influenced by the views of some Confucian moralists, for most editors then considered it immoral to print works by those "undisciplined" women. Not surprisingly, some male scholars began to criticize late Ming anthologists like
[53] Widmer, "The Epistolary World of Female Talent," p. 30.
[54] Hu Wen-k'ai, Li-tai fu-nü , p. 844.
Ch'en Wei-sung for collecting poems by "morally indecent courtesans" and for discussing poetics with such women.[55]
Even more poignant is the fact that women themselves began to adopt the same moralistic view. (This of course may seem to have been inevitable, in view of the fact that most women poets were wives of men who would have been attracted to the courtesans—no gender solidarity here.) A case in point is the female scholar Yün Chu, editor of the prestigious anthology Kuo-ch'ao kuei-hsiu cheng-shih chi (1836), who boasted of having excluded all courtesans' poems from her collection (which represents works by close to one thousand gentry-women poets) solely on moral grounds.[56] Another woman, the wife of Hsü Shih-fu, threatened to burn her two-hundred-some poems for fear of being included in the same anthology as courtesans.[57]
It is no surprise, then, that Liu Shih, who enjoyed the privilege of being the foremost courtesan-poet of the seventeenth century, was now excluded from most later poetry anthologies. But it is ironic that although Liu Shih the person was rejected by the eighteenth-century moralists, poems of hers collected in privately printed volumes became secret models for poetically talented gentry women. One female poet called Yeh Hung-hsiang, for example, modeled her "Wang Chiangnan" lyrics after Liu Shih's "Wang Chiang-nan" song-series, using almost identical sentence structures and images.[58] The truth is that the courtesan tradition in tz'u had not died; it was simply being absorbed into the gentry-woman tradition.
In the meantime, several factors made the eighteenth-century gentry women the legitimate successors to the late Ming courtesans. First, under the influence of people like Yüan Mei, many gentry women began to meet outside their homes and mingle socially with male literati, a kind of freedom formerly restricted to courtesans or, to a certain extent, Taoist nuns. Second, it had become possible for gentry women, whether widows or estranged wives, to support themselves by selling their paintings and poetry[59] —in an earlier age many of these talented and self-supporting women would have had no alternative but to become courtesans. Third, increasingly common were marriages that reflected the
[55] Ibid., p. 915.
[56] See Yao P'in-wen, "Ch'ing-tai fu-nü shih-ko ti fan-jung yü li-hsüeh ti kuan-hsi," in Chiang-hsi shih-fan ta-hsüeh hsüeh-pao 1985, no. 1:57. See also Hu Wen-k'ai, Li-tai fu-nü , p. 918.
[57] K'ang Cheng-kuo, Feng-sao yü yen-ch'ing , p. 326.
[58] LTNST , p. 223.
[59] Widmer, "The Epistolary World of Female Talent," p. 33.
ideal match between "talented husband and gifted wife" who exchanged poems regularly and had mutual access to each other's intellectual and emotional lives[60] —a relationship that reminds us of the popular literatus-courtesan model of the late Ming. Indeed, this was an age when gentry women had the confidence to claim both sides of the female poetic tradition for their own, both to preserve the late Ming legacy and to value their own innovations.
It was this same pluralism that eventually promoted the position of female tz'u poets from the marginal to the legitimate. The increasingly large number of collections of tz'u written by women and anthologized by women was undoubtedly instrumental in this process. In fact, only a few years after Liu Shih's and Hsü Ts'an's deaths, four respectable women poets of the Ch'ing published an ambitious anthology of tz'u called Ku-chin ming-yüan pai-hua shih-yü (1685), in which works of women poets from the Sung to the Ch'ing were arranged according to the sequence of the four seasons, a symbolic device associating the women with the hundreds of flowers (pai-hua ) that bloom in the spring, summer, autumn, and winter.[61] Thus, being female, the four editors (Kuei Shu-fen, Shen Li, Sun Hui-yüan, and Shen Chen-yung) also symbolized certain qualities of tz'u —kao-ya (lofty and elegant), ch'ing-hua (pure and flowery), and so on—qualities that make tz'u the quintessential vehicle for women's self-expression, for "the song lyric is nothing less than the expression of personal qualities" (tz'u-yün erh jen-yün che yeh ).[62] In retrospect, Liu Shih and Hsü Ts'an, apparently so dissimilar, are equally important female personas of the complex, rich, and inexhaustible resources of the song lyric.
[60] K'ang Cheng-kuo, Feng-sao yü yen-ch'ing , p. 341. During the Ming, such an ideal match as Shang Ching-lan's marriage to Ch'i Piao-chia (who never took a concubine) must have been considered an exception.
[61] Hu Wen-k'ai, Li-tai fu-nü , pp. 899–900.
[62] Ibid., p. 900.