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.