TWO—
MAN'S VOICE/WOMAN'S VOICE:
QUESTIONS OF GENDER
Engendering the Lyric:
Her Image and Voice in Song
Grace S. Fong
In the song lyric genre, a conceptual "feminine" occupies a paradoxical position of centrality and alterity. There has always been within its poetics a nexus of the "feminine" around which complex issues of voice, representation, stylistics, and critical debate have revolved. Yet the song lyric as literary discourse was fashioned almost exclusively by male poets and critics. If this nexus of the "feminine" is a male construction, a reflector of male values and preferences, and if women had almost no active part in shaping the genre, it would be germane to begin by examining this "feminine" nexus in the song lyric, to articulate its origin and components in the poetics and critical discourse of the song lyric, and to ask what this poetic "feminine" has meant for women poets writing in the genre.
Since an important aspect of the "feminine" in the song lyric—perhaps the originating force of its theoretical and critical importance—is the representation or re-presentation of the image of woman, the implications for women poets attempting self-representation in the song lyric are especially significant. I wish to begin this study, therefore, by approaching the gendered aesthetics and poetics of the song lyric, part of which involves contextualizing the representation of women in relation to the history of the gaze in Chinese poetry, before proceeding to discuss if and how women poets re-created themselves in the feminized space of the song lyric.
Yin/Yang
Gender as a conceptual category of difference has always been implicated on some level in the poetics and critical perception of the song
lyric. In praxis, gender was often made into a prominent trope, deployed in rhetoric and affecting stylistic patterns, lyrical voice, and persona. When the song lyric became established as a distinct literary form, it was primarily associated with the boudoir theme, with images of women and love, and, therefore, with the "feminine" in language and sentiment. Evidence of this association is legion in the anthology Hua-chien chi (preface dated 940), the founding monument of the song lyric as a genre.
The perception of the "feminine" as an aesthetic and thematic value in song lyric poetics did not occlude the binary subdivision that took place. Gender-marked oppositional poetics appeared: alongside the female persona and feminine style commonly found in early song lyrics, a male voice and a masculine style developed.[1] But in the hierarchy of gender-marked styles evolved in the genealogy of tz'u poetics, the male-voiced, masculine (hao-fang ) style was generally held as derivative or unorthodox. In mainstream criticism, the wan-yüeh style, coded as "feminine," came to be privileged as orthodox; thus, some aesthetic notion of femininity was regarded as a defining characteristic of the genre. Though certain critics championed the "masculine" style, the orthodox view, with its roots in the late Sung, came into currency during the Ming, and informed discourse on the song lyric during the Ch'ing.[2] "The song lyric in its essence excels by charm; it valorizes a feminine and pliant [yin-jou ] kind of beauty."[3] This statement on the aesthetics of the song lyric made by the distinguished scholar Miao Yüeh several decades ago represents the crystallization of a long-standing view. More recently (1982), in an essay on the characteristics of the song lyric, Miao refers to the lyrics of the late T'ang and the Later Shu, that is, of the Hua-chien chi , as "having a delicate and refined style" that suited the thematic content and performance context of contemporary song lyrics,
[1] The male voice is already evident in song lyrics by literati of the late T'ang, Five Dynasties, and early Northern Sung. But the masculine style, with its dramatic change in theme and diction, is introduced in a large number of song lyrics by Su Shih.
[2] In the Southern Sung, the term hao-fang , "heroic-flamboyant," was already used to refer to song lyrics in the masculine style. The masculine style was apparently problematic for the music, that is, for singing. See Shen I-fu, Yüeh-fu chih-mi , in Tz'u-hua ts'ung-pien , ed. T'ang Kuei-chang (Peking: Chung-hua shu-chü, 1986), 1:282. The term wan-yüeh , in opposition to hao-fang , was first used in the Ming. See Kao Chien-chung, "Wan-yüeh, hao-fang yü cheng-pien," Tz'u-hsüeh 2 (1983):150–53. In the late Southern Sung–early Yüan, however, Chang Yen had already judged tz'u to be "more wan [graceful, feminine] than shih poetry when expressing feeling"; see his Tz'u-yüan , in Tz'u-hua ts'ung-pien , 1:263.
[3] Miao Yüeh, Shih tz'u san-lun (rpt., Shanghai: Shang-hai ku-chi ch'u-pan-she, 1982), p. 68.
and as "having a kind of feminine beauty." He further glosses this "feminine beauty" by Wang Kuo-wei's characterization of the song lyric genre as "lovely and ornamented" (yao-miao i-hsiu ).[4]
The very nature of the feminine style, however, problematized the writing of song lyrics for some male poets. If the status and meaning of poetry (shih ) were changing within the intellectual and moral climate of the Northern Sung, the status of the popular new genre of party songs was questionable and unstable at best.[5] On a limited scale, Su Shih's mocking remark to Ch'in Kuan that Ch'in had been learning to write in Liu Yung's style aimed at devaluing precisely the sentimental, overly feminized language of song lyrics.[6] More profoundly, the feminized song lyric as the site for the expression of private, "unmanly" (and thus unseemly?) emotions, and of erotic love and passion in particular, seems to have brought out deep unease and called for moralistic reaction and self-censure in some male poets. As early as the Five Dynasties, Sun Kuang-hsien (d. 968), a well-known song lyricist whose works are included in the Hua-chien chi , devoted an entry in the Pei-meng so-yen to his contemporary Ho Ning (898–955), whose song lyrics are also included in the Hua-chien chi . Sun noted that "the prime minister of Chin, Ho Ning, was fond of composing song lyrics in his youth. His lyrics had
[4] Miao Yüeh and Yeh Chia-ying, Ling-hsi tz'u-shuo (Shanghai: Shang-hai ku-chi ch'u-pan-she, 1987), p. 30; quoting Wang Kuo-wei, Jen-chien tz'u-hua , in Tz'u-hua ts'ung-pien , ed. T'ang Kuei-chang, 5:4258. The phrase comes from the "Hsiang chün" of the "Nine Songs," where it is used to describe the beautiful features of the goddess, "lady of the lovely eyes and the winning smile"; tr. David Hawkes, The Songs of the South: An Ancient Chinese Anthology of Poems , by Qu Yuan [Ch'ü Yüan] et al. (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1985), p. 106.
[5] The function of shih was questioned within the moral view of literature espoused by the neo-Confucians (Tao-hsüeh school); a sure indicator of the changing status of poetry composition relative to the body politic was its removal as a requirement for the civil service examination. Literature—that is, wen (prose)—functioned as the vehicle for the expression of the Tao, and shih lost the cosmic significance one senses, for example, in the poetry of the great T'ang poets, Tu Fu in particular. It became a smaller tool for the individual poet seeking self-expression. Although the problem is more complex and requires further investigation, it is worth noting that the tension between the old conception of the shih genre and this new change in status, coming at a time when a young, somewhat "frivolous" genre was drawing interest and creative energy, is related to the evolution of a gender-based, inter-generic hierarchy of poetry in which the shih is the marked term, the privileged genre. It is in this binary view of the two genres that the organicism and dualism of Chinese cosmology found perhaps its most obvious and at once insidious expression in literary history: the yang genre had located a yin counterpart, and the song lyric became the "shih -surplus" (shih-yü ), the Eve of Chinese poetry.
[6] Quoted in Lung Yü-sheng, T'ang Sung ming-chia tz'u-hsüan (rpt., Hong Kong: Shang-wu yin-shu-kuan, 1979), p. 142.
spread all over Lo-yang. When he assumed the post of prime minister, he expressly sent people to try to collect and burn them all without exception. To be minister of the state, however, means that one [must] be dignified and virtuous, so in the end he was disgraced by the erotic song lyrics [yen-tz'u ] he had written."[7] In the sexuality of its language and subject matter, the genre was felt to have beauty to seduce and power to corrupt, like any temptress. Sexual analogy underlies much of the discourse.
From Female Voice to Male Gaze: Molding the Feminine Image
The Chinese lyrical tradition has a history of female-voiced songs that are often anonymous and have folk or popular origins.[8] Examples can be found in the Book of Songs and yüeh-fu ballads of the Han, but it is in Southern Dynasties yüeh-fu folk songs that we find records of their flowering.[9] These lyrical female voices are fresh and direct in expressing emotion; they are often sensual when they sing of their love and desire. In the famous "Songs of Tzu-yeh" ("Tzu-yeh ko") cycle of the Wu region in the southeast, we hear the sinuous voice of a young woman in love:
Long night, I cannot sleep,
how brightly the moonbeams gleam.
Thinking I hear a vague voice calling,
vacantly I answer "Yes?" into the air.[10]
[7] Quoted in Shih I-tui, Tz'u yü yin-yüeh kuan-hsi yen-chiu (Peking: Chung-kuo she-hui k'o-hsüeh ch'u-pan-she, 1985), p. 159 n. 1. Other well-known examples of lyricists are Lu Yu, Wang Shih-chen, and Kung Tzu-chen. They all indulged in song lyric composition when they were young; some regretted it later and wisely stopped once they had grown mature and responsible, but some remained unfortunate addicts.
[8] Cf. the useful discussion of female-voiced songs in John F. Plummer, ed., Vox Feminae: Medieval Women's Lyrics (Kalamazoo: Western Michigan University, 1981), p. v.
[9] Since the Book of Songs (Shih-ching ) occupied a special place in pre-Ch'in diplomacy, education, and culture and was canonized as a Confucian classic during the Han, it inspired schools of interpretation and exegesis that drew a veil across its contents' lyrical innocence, and the songs were consequently never quite read in a literal sense for their lyrical value.
[10] Kuo Mao-ch'ien, ed., Yüeh-fu shih-chi (Peking: Chung-hua shu-chü, 1979), 2:643; hereafter referred to in the text as YFSC .
In this as in many other songs, we do not "see" the physical attributes of these women but simply "overhear" the musings of their hearts, the lyricism of their declarations of love. They sing openly of their excitement, joy, and grief, using the double entendres characteristic of the regional style.[11] The woman's voice in the following song, from the group preserved as "Western Melodies" ("Hsi-ch'ü ko") from western Hupei, is unabashed in the confession of physical desire:
I've been waiting to see my lover for four or five years.
It really has annoyed my heart.
I wish we could find a place where no one's around,
so I could turn around and let him hold me in his arms.
( YFSC , 3:715)
An interesting feature of these songs is that they are often strongly marked by the subject of utterance, not only in tone but actually with the first person wo , and more often with nung in the Wu dialect; and the lover, whether in evidence as the second-person addressee or absent from the lyrical present, is referred to with the characters huan , "pleasure," or lang , "young man," doubling as second- or third-person pronouns. Since these songs are anonymous, it is not sure whether they were authored by men or by women or, most likely, by both. But as women's songs, that is, love lyrics with a female speaker, they represent some of the strongest expressions of a female lyrical subject in the Chinese tradition.
Also found among these songs are those that are more descriptive, reproducing in words the physical image of the woman, or at least certain of her attributes. The voice in some of these descriptive songs tends to become ambiguous. While clearly female in some, with the female subject referring to her own physical appearance in the song, in others it becomes an impersonal singer/narrator who, assuming the male lover's proximity to the woman, views and describes her emotional and physical attitude:
Presuming love, she seems on the point of entering;
still shy, she's not quite willing to come forward.
[11] See the list in Hsiao Ti-fei, Han Wei Liu-ch'ao yüeh-fu wen-hsüeh-shih (Peking: Jenmin wen-hsüeh ch'u-pan-she, 1984), pp. 208–10.
From carmine lips a sensuous song bursts forth,
while jade fingers play on seductive strings.
( YFSC , 2:644)
Though the song above belongs to the "Songs of Tzu-yeh," the female voice in it is silent, having been displaced by an image of singing. In male vision, the female figure devolves into a sign of seductive surfaces that can be played with and manipulated.
That the female-voiced popular love songs found an interested audience in the court and literati poets of the later Southern Dynasties, especially the Ch'i and Liang, is attested to by the imitations of these songs produced by those poets. The preserved collections of southern folk songs might even represent versions of the songs brought to the southern courts—an interesting intersection of genuine folk tradition and elite (male) interests working on "native" (feminized) traditions. Significantly, these songs contributed to the formation of a sexual poetics in the confluence of the court poets' interest in woman/surface/object and the salon poetry of the period. In literary transformations of these songs and in the extensive collection of love lyrics in the sixth-century anthology Yü-t'ai hsin-yung compiled at the Liang court, male poets also wrote in a first-person female voice, but the tendency was to write a description of woman, to reproduce a female persona external to feminine subjectivity. Since to describe the physical appearance of a female persona calls for discriminating taste rather than emotional empathy or identification, it would seem to be more easily and naturally accomplished by male poets; moreover, the descriptive mode accommodated the fashionable interest in playing with surfaces present in late Six Dynasties poetics. Thus, these songs indicate a shift from "hearing" the female voice to "seeing" the female image:
Idly she goes to the pillow by the northern window,
the sun has not yet angled over the southern eaves.
The hook pulled, the gauze screen rolled down,
the plectrum put away, the lute is hung up.
Smiling as she dreams, lovely dimples appear;
sleeping on her chignon, crushed petals drop.
Patterns of the bamboo mat impressed on jade wrists,
fragrant perspiration soaks the red silk.
Her husband keeps her constant company,
so don't mistake her for a courtesan!
Liang Chien-wen-ti[12]
The male gaze is blatantly implicated in the poem above, and the reader with it, as the movement of a voyeur's eyes leads to a visual caressing of the female body. The female body/object lies there, eroticized in its passivity and silence, and vulnerable to the transgressive gaze that ravishes the fragile surfaces of skin and silk. The impropriety of the gaze renders the female sign referentially ambiguous (is this a promiscuous body?), and the clever, self-conscious closure slides the signified "wife" underneath the signifier to contain the ambiguity. Even if the closure were intended just as one of those ingenious devices to surprise and delight so prized in palace-style poetics, this gesture calls attention to and thematizes the power of the gaze to contaminate and reinscribe the sign with its own desire.
Whether in stasis or in motion—sleeping, sitting, dancing, waiting for her lover, or putting on her makeup—in palace-style verse the female figure is translated into an erotic object constituted by male gaze and desire:
By the northern window she faces the mirror in the morning,
the brocade canopy has been hung aslant again.
So charming in her coyness—she will not come out,
she says still her toilet is not done.
Kohl patted on lengthens the contour of brows,
rouge of Yen highlights her cheeks.
When she is brought out in front of everyone,
she will certainly win the name of Loveworthy.
[12] Hsü Ling, comp., Yü-t'ai hsin-yung (rpt., Ch'eng-tu: Ch'eng-tu ku-chi shu-tien, n.d.), p. 177; hereafter referred to in the text as YTHY .
Liang Chien-wen-ti ( YTHY , p. 170)
In this poetry the female figure's surface is valorized while her interiority, when not left opaque, is colonized as the exclusive domain of love and longing. This moment of transformation has profound consequences for the representation of women in Chinese poetry: it constructs the poetic paradigm of a female image subordinated to the gaze and the play of desire.
Another Beginning: The Feminine in the Song Lyric
In hindsight, the obsession with femininity in palace-style verse represents a powerful but momentary rupture of repressed sexuality and desire in elite literature. In the subsequent development of T'ang poetry, literary imitations of female-voiced yüeh-fu songs and poems representing women remain only a minor subgenre. Shih poetry in the T'ang, as in most periods of Chinese history, is a male discourse essentially founded on a poetics that is apparently non-gender-specific and "universal." Yet the "universal" poetics of shih poetry has all the underlying assumptions of male perspective and orientation. When literary ideology makes no allowance for the insertion of female subjectivity as such, in writing poetry women adopt the rhetoric and voice of subjectivity developed by male poets. This largely accounts for the usual lack of a distinct voice, poetics, or even sensibility that might be gender-based in most shih poems written by women. Women did not, in fact, have a language to write in.
If, as stated earlier, the feminine inscribes the language and sensibility of the song lyric, does the song lyric then offer a viable medium in which women can wrest their own voice from the two extremes of a silent female image constituted by the gaze and a lyrical voice that suppresses the complexity of gender? Traditional views on the subject would answer that it is not only possible but quite natural for women to express themselves, their feminine sensibilities, in the language of the song lyric, at least theoretically. I believe the forces at work are rather more complicated. The naturalness may simply mean the availability of a male-constructed female modality that women can internalize. If we recuperate some fragments and traces of women's voice in the history of the song lyric—and they are indeed but fragments and traces that have
managed to break that vast silence in which women lived—we can attempt to explore their relation to image and self-expression. The account that follows is necessarily schematic, focusing as it does rather exclusively on issues of the "feminine" through a diachrony of materials.
In the anonymous popular and quasi-popular song lyrics of the eighth and ninth centuries preserved in the Tun-huang manuscripts there is evidence of the resurfacing or, depending on one's point of view, continuity of a vibrant female voice in the popular tradition.[13] Within the diverse body of Tun-huang songs, which encompass a wide range of themes and diction, subject matter, and typology of characters from both the secular and religious sectors of T'ang popular culture, the female-voiced songs and the songs descriptive of a female persona form a stable repertory.[14] Furthermore, this repertory of women's songs, as we might expect, takes on the themes of love and desire exclusively. These song lyrics incorporate an established convention that binds women to love, and the gaze is inscribed in the constitution of the female, even as speaking subject. In a culture and society where women are defined by their subordinate relationships to men, women's self-images become reflections of men's desired images of them. In literature as in life, women are accustomed to seeing themselves as they are seen in the eyes of men; in the love lyric, women value themselves according to the valuations they glimpse in the mirror of the male gaze, in which appearance is the figure of value. Consider the following anonymous song:
Hair bound in coils like clouds over the Hsiang River,
in light makeup,
an early spring flower exudes fragrance next to her face.
Jade wrists slowly emerge from silken sleeves,
offering a wine goblet.
Slender hands playing the ling melody blend with lithe green willows,
from her white throat songs issue forth and wind around the
ornamented beams.
How can any young man keep himself from
not losing his head?
[13] The dating of these songs spreads over two to three centuries. For the text of the songs from Tun-huang, see Jen Pan-t'ang, Tun-huang ko-tz'u tsung-pien (Shanghai: Shang-hai ku-chi ch'u-pan-she, 1987); hereafter referred to in the text as THKT .
[14] All but one of the thirty-three song lyrics in the Yün-yao chi are women's love songs; see Jen Pan-t'ang, Tun-huang ko-tz'u , pp. 1–308. There are an additional forty or so love songs either written in the female voice or using the female persona.
Tune: "Huan hsi sha" ( THKT , 1:185)
With the emphasis put on the surface allure of the woman, this song gives the impression of a promotional pitch for a singing girl—and that could well have been the case in this and several other songs. Even when calling attention to her musical skills, the description joins artistic talent to sensual appeal, if not subordinating it, as the syntactic ordering of images would suggest. As Jen Pan-t'ang notes, these love lyrics from the Yün-yao chi contain numerous references to various parts of the woman's body, her clothing, ornaments, deportment, and performance skills—references mostly to visual details.[15] Since women are supposed to adorn themselves to be seen, the poetic image of the female is constructed according to an assimilated male gaze.
Since the discovery of the Tun-huang manuscripts, there has been much discussion of the influence of the popular song tradition on the development of the literary song lyric.[16] It is especially relevant to the late T'ang, the earliest period from which a significant corpus of song lyrics by literati is extant. Influence no doubt flowed in both directions as the appeal of new song forms brought two social cultures, those of the literati and the artisans (musicians, singers, and courtesans), into points of interaction. The representation of the female image in song particularly formed an axis of mutual influence, it would seem. In the Tun-huang lyrics on the one hand, the language of description focusing on appearance and sensual appeal has partly incorporated aesthetic values derived from elite and literati connoisseurship of the feminine image. On the other hand, early song lyrics by literati preserved in the Hua-chien chi appear to be obsessed with the depiction of the female figure in the popular image of the singing girl.
Aside from the anonymous popular songs with a first-person female
[15] Jen Pan-t'ang, Tun-huang ko-tz'u , p. 189.
[16] See Kang-i Sun Chang, The Evolution of Chinese Tz'u Poetry: From Late T'ang to Northern Sung (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), pp. 5–25; and Marsha L. Wagner, The Lotus Boat: The Origins of Chinese Tz'u Poetry in T'ang Popular Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984).
voice, the gender of whose authorship is in any case uncertain, the evolution of the song lyric was largely shaped by the vision and practice of male poets—that is, until a gifted, assertive, and outspoken woman poet came along who registered her opinion in the discourse of the genre. Li Ch'ing-chao spared no man in her "Tz'u lun," a sweeping critique of her male predecessors in the song lyric genre: Liu Yung's song lyrics were vulgar, those by Chang Hsien and several others were fragmented, eminent scholars such as Ou-yang Hsiu and Su Shih simply wrote shih poems with irregular line-lengths, and Yen Chi-tao, Ho Chu, Ch'in Kuan, and Huang T'ing-chien's lyrics were all stylistically deficient in one manner or another. Worst of all, with few exceptions most of them did not seem able to distinguish the song lyric as a genre in praxis, that is, according to Li Ch'ing-chao, to recognize that one of its essential qualities was a precision in tonal decisions regarding the words that answered the demands of the music.[17]
What is interesting about Li Ch'ing-chao's critique from the perspective of this discussion is the tone of snobbish connoisseurship that she initiated into critical discourse on the song lyric. Criticizing with the voice of authority of an accomplished poet and connoisseur of the song lyric genre, Li was not concerned with the question of gender even though the objects of her criticism were all male poets and much of the genre's "distinctiveness" came from a privileging of feminine sensibility in the masculine/feminine antithesis of its poetics and from its playing the role of the feminine, the other, to shih poetry.[18] In her critical passage, she intimates an exclusive epistemological position for the true adept of the song lyric (Li Ch'ing-chao herself and a few select males?). Though she does not explicitly link her views and implied expertise to an implicit feminine praxis, male critics have been acutely conscious of the fact that she was a woman. If, as one modern scholar suggests, Li's unsparing criticism indeed represents her reaction as an accomplished woman poet to the condescending male attitude toward women's writing,[19] her attack implies the high esteem in which she held her own song lyrics but does not affirm women's song lyrics or writing. Neither can we expect such an affirmation from Li Ch'ing-chao, since in her
[17] See Hu Tzu, T'iao-hsi yü-yin ts'ung-hua—hou-chi (rpt., Peking: Jen-min wen-hsüeh ch'u-pan-she, 1981), pp. 254–55, and Lin Shuen-fu's discussion of the essay elsewhere in this volume.
[18] Though she also wrote shih poetry, it would seem quite inconceivable for Li Ch'ing-chao to have written a similar diatribe in the context of that genre.
[19] See Chiang Chün-hsün, Tz'u-hsüeh p'ing-lung shih-kao (Hong Kong: Lung-men shu-tien, 1966), p. 38.
time women's writing did not form a recognizable tradition, nor were women recognized in the dominant tradition. The language of the song lyric does, however, have peculiarities with feminine connotations. How then do women poets negotiate the use of this language with its appropriation of the "feminine"?
When Women Write Their Songs
In the formation of the "song lyric," a sort of langue féminine was introduced and promoted by popular practice. Whether as speaking voice or the more commonly figured persona, reproduction of the female role riveted the interest of literati poets in the late T'ang and early Sung. Elsewhere I have pursued the manipulation of the female persona and its implications for role-playing, masking, and self-revelation in song lyrics by male poets.[20] Here I wish to concentrate on the poetics of the feminine created by this trend and its implications for female poets.
For women poets attempting to write in the high tradition of the song lyric, in their own voice and as their own subjects, clearly the persona of the early song lyric, projected as either erotic object or lovelorn voice, though centered on the female, would not have been considered morally appropriate subject matter. Even for male poets, it was this erotic feminine center that was seductive and troubling. The popular tradition would have provided the context for an anonymous female voice to complain about her lover's absence and fickleness and then, desperate for his presence, to use her body as bargain and bait, as in the following Tun-huang song lyric:
Deep in my chamber,
empty and quiet.
How useless, guarding my body and heart, engendering loneliness.
Waiting for him to come,
I naturally pray to the gods.
Don't ever love a young man wild about flowers.
Light, my makeup,
seldom do I go around,
all because there's no sign of my young man, roaming afar.
The snow of my breasts
I'll let you bite,
so worried that you'll spend your gold on the smile of another.
[20] "Persona and Mask in the Song Lyric," Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 50 (1990): 459–84.
Tune: "Yü-ko-tzu" ( THKT , 1:276)
A post–May Fourth scholar of the song lyric might even appreciate the frank eroticism of this lyric as a facet of the genuine and direct voice found in popular songs. It may even be interpreted on some level of "realism" as depicting the life and predicaments of a singing girl. Had this song been found in the collection of Li Ch'ing-chao's lyrics, however, it would have scandalized the most liberal critic. To participate in writing, women were expected to internalize the stern moral attitude society held toward their gender. When Li Ch'ing-chao, or any woman of her time (and later times), learned to write song lyrics, she learned already established conventions of the representation of images and feelings, and she assimilated and reproduced a horizon of expectation (or we might say boundaries) defined not only by the genre, but also by her gender.
Li Ch'ing-chao was severely criticized by her contemporary Wang Cho (d. after 1149) in his treatise on the song lyric, the Pi-chi man-chih . The moralistic condemnation is worth noting for its ad feminam tone. Wang begins by duly recognizing Li Ch'ing-chao's incomparable literary talent among both her male and female contemporaries and noting that in her old age Li had remarried and sued for divorce. He then praises Li's consummate skill in writing song lyrics but condemns her for "using at will the dissolute language of vulgar neighborhoods [entertainment quarters]" and decries the fact that "there has never been a woman with literary talent from a good gentry family as unscrupulous as she was."[21] He goes on to quote examples of so-called dissolute, erotic lines of verse from other poets' shih and tz'u , emphasizing their mildness as a foil for the recklessness of this woman's style. Whether for reasons of propriety or because of the familiarity of Li's lyrics at
[21] Wang Cho, Pi-chi man-chih , in Tz'u-hua ts'ung-pien , ed. T'ang Kuei-chang, 1:88.
that time, Wang does not provide a single example of her imprudent language. But a seemingly innocuous song lyric such as the following might well have offended the moral sensibilities of a Wang Cho:[22]
From the flower vendor's load
I bought a branch of spring about to blossom.
Teardrops dye the light and even hue
that still carries traces of rose clouds and morning dew.
Afraid that my young man might look and say
that my face is not as pretty as the flower's face,
I pinned it aslant on my cloudlike hair,
and just want to make him look and compare.
Tune: "Chien-tzu mu-lan-hua"[23]
The mirroring of her beauty in the flower does not suffice for the lyric persona's perception of herself. That beauty exists merely on the order of equivalence. In her self-confidence she introduces a third term, the lover's gaze, to disrupt this equivalence and institute herself as the winner. Despite the self-assertive and defiant tone in this lyric, the final constitution of the female image remains within the domain of the gaze. When the lyric persona is historicized, as Li Ch'ing-chao in this instance, the self-assertion and desire for the gaze produce a compromising image in the tradition: a sequestered woman of good family and a coquettish charmer displaying herself are images of the feminine at odds with each other. Thus, a female image that is an unmitigated reflection
[22] There are problems of attribution regarding this and other song lyrics by Li Ch'ing-chao, and it is worth noting that the discussions of authenticity often have moral overtones. Chao Wan-li, the editor of a collection of Li Ch'ing-chao's song lyrics, the Sou-yü tz'u , has noted that "the idea in this song lyric is shallow and obvious; it indeed does not resemble her other lyrics." And Wang Chung-wen has expressed reservations about authenticating a lyric on the basis of its content and expression although he includes it among genuine lyrics by Li in Li Ch'ing-chao chi chiao-chu (Peking: Jen-min wen-hsüeh ch'u-pan-she, 1986), pp. 71–72.
[23] Included in T'ang Kuei-chang, ed., Ch'üan Sung tz'u (Hong Kong: Chung-hua shu-chü, 1977), 2:932; hereafter referred to in the text as CST .
of the male gaze proves to be a dubious means of self-representation for women poets, as it has also proved to be a limited typology in the genre.[24]
Even as the song lyric was gradually shorn of the female surface in the image of a persona, a feminine diction and sensibility remained as its distinctive marks.[25] The following statement may be a gross simplification, but despite all the formal and rhetorical variables—in period styles, in the poetics of short or long melody patterns, degrees of simplicity or artfulness, generalized or personal tone—the ideal program of a song lyric of the mainstream feminine wan-yüeh style was to articulate subtle and elusive moods, perceptions, and states of feeling and emotion by means of feminized, "domesticated" imagery and diction.
The song lyric was identified with ch'ing , with the evocation of mood and the figuration of emotion; cultural stereotyping also equated woman with emotion. Through this common denominator the song lyric thus came to be seen in the poetic tradition as offering women a "natural" mode of expression. As mentioned earlier, since a condescending attitude was held toward the feminized song lyric among male poets, self-censure sometimes disrupted the writing of song lyrics; no such critical disapproval was expressed specifically toward women writing song lyrics. On the contrary, when a significant number of women began to take up the writing of song lyrics in the Ch'ing, prefaces to anthologies of tz'u by women often emphasized an affinity of sensibilities between the female gender and the feminine genre. It was considered "natural" for women to write song lyrics—within "clean" boundaries, to be sure.
Voicing Emotion: Who Would Look Upon My Joy and Happiness?
When we examine tz'u by women, the emotional picture obtained often seems bleak indeed. On the one hand, this bleak picture collectively reflects women's empirical experience in traditional Chinese society, where they were circumscribed physically, emotionally, and intellectually: the confinement and isolation imposed on the lives of women pervade their lyrics. Melancholy, loneliness, depression, emptiness, and vague, unfulfilled longing are common themes in their songs. On the other hand, the morbidity is reinforced by and exaggerated in the normative emotional categories of the song lyric. The tension and
[24] Grace Fong, "Persona and Mask in the Song Lyric," pp. 459–65, 484.
[25] Li Ch'ing-chao's contribution to this perception of the song lyric by virtue of the conjunction of her practice and her gender is significant.
alienation wrought by social and emotional immurement at times have broken into song—into a smoldering, desperate voice of intense ch'ing , intense emotion. This section, then, presents a particularized women's "subculture"; it explores an emotional dimension that is associated with tz'u by gifted women who were extremely unfortunate in their life circumstances.
Springtime Resentment
Alone I walk, alone I sit,
alone I sing, alone I drink, and lie down again alone.
Standing long hurts my spirits,
but there's nothing I can do about this light chill that teases one.
This feeling—who will see it?
Tears have washed away the faded makeup, hardly any left on.
Sorrow and illness, one follows the other.
I have trimmed the entire wick of the cold lamp,
still dreams have not taken shape.
Chu Shu-chen, tune: "Chien-tzu mu-lan-hua" ( CST , 2:1405)
The voice in this song lyric is well defined: it is a trapped voice. The insistent opening repetition ("Alone . . . alone . . . alone . . . alone . . . alone . . . ") inscribes the rhetorical structure with an unrelieved psychological state that is later exacerbated by insomnia. The motif of the female persona confined in the boudoir and garden here is transformed into a living nightmare told by a female voice trapped in extreme isolation (the teasing touch of an anthropomorphized chill is the only physical contact she feels). All her movements are refractions of ch'ing —emotion, feeling—and the lyric captures a moment of imprisonment, without hope of communication or understanding: "This feeling—who will see it?" To whom can she sing of her melancholia? Who is the audience/perceiver? The song foregrounds the problematic relationship between being and being seen. The self-conscious positing of the male gaze, or, more correctly of its absence, seems to efface the feminine identity—it washes away with the makeup.
By turning the emotional and psychological immurement of women inside out, this lyric thematizes radically the fate of talented women as outcasts in the tradition. While male poets participate in a tradition with role models from the literary and historical past, not to mention the friendships they enjoy with like-minded and understanding contemporaries (Tu Fu can admire a Li Po; Su Shih can look to a T'ao Ch'ien), women poets, while marginal at best in their relation to the male-dominated tradition, lack their own tradition and community.[26] Along with Pan Chao, Li Ch'ing-chao must be regarded as an extraordinary phenomenon in the conjunction of factors that allowed for her literary accomplishments. No other woman achieved the kind of literary identity and influence Li had in the elite, male-dominated tradition.
Women, therefore, if they were trained to write, wrote mostly undistinguished poetry as a light literary exercise, as many did in the late imperial period. But to some, such as Chu Shu-chen, high songstress of melancholia, writing poetry, especially the song lyric, would have provided a rare emotional outlet, a channel for the expression of feelings otherwise suppressed or ignored. Such poetry has its origin in the psychology of its practitioners. By focusing on her emotions (without an objective eye), a woman poet tends toward self-obsession in her poetry; she writes about herself over and over again.
On the Shadow
Low, the winding railing
locking in the secluded courtyard.
At night one tires of keeping smooth hair and attire.
In a vast, vast sea of regret,
I feel this body has already drowned.
How can one put up with this meddlesome lamp,
adding on one tiny shadow
when evening has only just arrived?
I really don't know what to do with you.
Even though I make it a point to care for you,
you don't know how to care for me.
Why are you again at the study window,
following me whether I walk or sit?
I guess it would be hard to drive you away,
but to avoid you should still be easy.
Hiding from your search, I pull open the bed-curtain and lie down.
[26] There is more evidence of female friendships and literary circles in later periods; see the next section.
Wu Tsao, tune: "Chu Ying-t'ai chin"[27]
One cannot help being struck by the difference in tone and mood between this tz'u and Li Po's famous "Drinking Alone under the Moon" ("Yüeh-hsia tu cho"), which also personifies shadow. Perhaps animation is more appropriate in describing the male poet's relationship to his shadow: Li Po is the master puppeteer pulling the strings that bring the moon and shadow to life for his sole and supreme enjoyment. But here, in apostrophizing the shadow, Wu Tsao creates a problematic companion that is incapable of providing the loving companionship she craves. The lyric only foregrounds her state of loneliness and alienation. In contrast to the general exuberance and final invitation to transcendence in Li Po's poem—"Let us join in travels beyond human feelings / and plan to meet far in the river of stars"[28] —this lyric moves toward increasing confinement and isolation. The world closes in slowly from all sides: from an enclosed exterior space to a confined interior space, from daylight to engulfing darkness, from a self-consuming psychological space to a final symbolic interment in a bed of loneliness that obliterates light, consciousness, and symbolic companionship. The woman's voice extinguishes itself in monologue. Yet she sings of herself again, in another name:
[27] Wu Hao, ed., Kuei-hsiu pai-chia tz'u-hsüan (1914, Sao-yeh shan-fang ed.), pp. 5b–6a.
[28] Trans. by Stephen Owen, The Great Age of Chinese Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), p. 138.
In this world only deep feelings are hard to divulge.
Swallowed tears well up again.
Hands twist wilted flowers,
wordless, leaning against the screen.
I am shocked, seeing myself in the mirror,
a thin, straight form.
It's not a face of spring,
It's not a face of autumn:
can it be Shuang-ch'ing?
Ho Shuang-ch'ing, tune: "Shih lo-i"[29]
As sometime readers of tz'u , we would agree that the lyric speaker in this song is a woman. Obvious feminine signs are deployed: teardrops, flowers, screen, mirror, and the gestures surrounding them. Something seems to disturb the conventional surface of the lyric, however, something held back, something threatening to subvert the sentiments and gestures. No languorous desire or longing seems to inhabit the words, only some deep, hidden emotion whose expression has been consigned to impossibility: "In this world only deep feelings are hard to divulge." The emotion is displaced in the subject's silent tears and her fidgeting with a faded flower. Speech is denied or lost; she is "wordless" both within and without the discourse. Taking the poetics of song lyrics that defines her , she writes within it and undoes it. Without it she would be "wordless," yet she sees herself outside the poetics and is "without words" of her own. Only the song form remains to tell an enigma, a paradox.
The mirror, a substitute for the gaze, usually reflects an image of feminine beauty or a woman's fear of losing that beauty. Here the male gaze is displaced; the woman sees herself through her own eyes. When
[29] Shih Chen-lin, Hsi-ch'ing san-chi (hereafter referred to in the text as HCSC ); in Chung-kuo wen-hsüeh chen-pu ts'ung-shu , ser. 1, vol. 5 (Shanghai: Shang-hai tsa-chih kungssu, 1935), p. 66; see also n. 33.
the subject looks into the mirror, she discards the metaphors that she has been transformed into—"a face of spring," "a face of autumn"— and sees an imaginary other/self with which she hesitates to identify herself. It is an image of ambiguity and dissociation. Yet through this doubling, ambiguity, and dissociation, a distinct voice is established. Paradoxically, the speaker inserts her identity by inscribing her name in a question of self-doubt: "Can it be Shuang-ch'ing?" But the paradox is only apparent. The rhetoric of negation, by discarding the gaze, creates the possibility of a female subject.
In the song lyrics of Ho Shuang-ch'ing, we find the lyric trope of self-reflexivity in the peculiarly feminine form already exhibited in Wu Tsao's song lyric on her shadow. That splitting or doubling of the self, which is projected onto an object in order to speak (of herself), recurs in Ho Shuang-ch'ing's lyrics:
Fading Lamp
Already dimming—I forget to blow on it:
were it to shine brightly, who would trim it?
In front of me, no flame that glows like fireflies.
I listen to the cold rain on the earthen steps
dripping through the third night-watch,
alone by myself, sick and sleepless.
Hard to extinguish—
you too are excessive in feeling.
The scented oil is finished,
but your fragrant heart has not cooled;
do keep company with Shuang-ch'ing for awhile.
Star after star
Fades gradually into motionlessness.
But I hope you will suffer through
and then blossom forth again.
It will surpass those fishing lamps swaying
in the chaotic wind on the wild pond.
When autumn's hardworking moths scatter,
I am already ill,
and when has my illness ever diminished?
Long we watch each other,
vaguely sleep comes upon me. . . .
In sleep I am frightened awake again.
Tune: "Feng-huang-t'ai shang i ch'ui-hsiao" ( HCSC ,
pp. 105–6)
A woman alone, at night, no longer waiting for or complaining about her lover, a woman "without a mirror" talks to a dying lamp ardently, with great feeling. It is so obvious in this song lyric that the personified burning lamp is a figure of the self. The identification is drawn on the basis of ch'ing , that intense, objectless, unnamable emotion that translates here into a will to live completely at odds with destiny: "Hard to extinguish—/ you too are excessive in feeling./ The scented oil is finished,/but your fragrant heart has not cooled." That single, self-consuming flame of the lamp only illuminates the encroaching darkness: it marks the site of struggle between the forces of destruction and survival. As she watches its slow dissipation, she sees an analogy for her own life that is wasting away. She thus tries to console and encourage the lamp as a way of encouraging herself. Yet ultimately there is no escape from imminent destruction. We can guess only too easily at the fate of the lamp as she starts up again from having drifted off to sleep.
Both in the ever-stressful wakefulness of the insomniac world of darkness and confinement, and in an apparently idyllic world of nature that conceals dangers and deceptions, the self's doubles take on different forms and shapes. It is often the survival of these object-doubles that concerns Ho Shuang-ch'ing. About chrysanthemums she says, "I feel gladdened that the flowers' stems have not grown thin:/incessant rain
they have endured past the Double Ninth / and fortunately survived to the time of Small Spring";[30] and she counsels the wild goose, "Do go along a sandy shore or half a stream/just to pass the fleeting years: / with the rice grains recently used up, / the nets are just waiting in earnest."[31] These innocent creatures of nature—Ho Shuang-ch'ing's doubles, her scattered selves—are threatened by destructive forces that are not within their power to avert: even the enduring chrysanthemums finally "droop their heads" in the killing frost, and the companionless wild goose, "fatigued from flying, lodge by mistake in the fields" where the nets must lie hidden.
The impulse for an addressee/friend is so compelling in Ho Shuang-ch'ing's autobiographical discourse through song lyrics on objects that in a most telling example subtitled "Taking Food to Do Spring Ploughing" (tune: "Ch'un ts'ung t'ien-shang lai," HCSC , pp. 175–76), she transforms spring and springtime creatures into both agent and recipient of her emotions with whom she achieves a momentary sharing. Yet the duplicity of nature, in the ominous subtext of spring, disrupts that unitary vision. The first stanza begins in a narrative mode as she sets out on her farm chores in an idyllic setting:
Purpled paths bright in spring weather.
Slowly I tie a spring gauze scarf on my head
and eat by myself while spring ploughing.
The small plum tree is thin in spring,
fine blades of grass glisten in spring.
At each step along the fields spring springs to life.
At this point during her sprightly walk to the field, memory intrudes with a troubling subtext that punctures the glistening, innocent surface of spring:
I remember, that year in a fine spring
to a spring swallow
I blurted out spring feelings.
And now at this time,
[30] To the tune "Erh-lang shen"; HCSC , p. 93.
[31] To the tune "Hsi huang-hua man"; HCSC , p. 93.
I think spring letters and spring tears
have all melted with the spring ice.
The meaning of spring suddenly leaves its agrarian context and assumes the conventional poetic connotations of love and romance; the seasonal context has provoked a sudden remembrance of a failed love. It is a supremely vague, typological confession of the sentiment, ch'ing , that suits the connotative, subtle, "feminine" poetics of the song lyric; it is therefore immaterial whether that love in the past actually had a recipient or was simply the vague stirring of a young woman's heart that remained unfulfilled. The stanzaic structure of the song lyric also allows that ambiguity to be suspended, deferring its resolution.
The second stanza returns to a self-contained present with an anthropomorphized nature/spring as a companion with whom she shares the food she has brought:
I cherish spring, dote on spring—for how many springs?
By an expanse of spring mist
the spring oriole is locked in.
You present gifts to a springtime me,
and I offer presents to a springtime you:
am I, or are you, the spirit of spring?
Yet nature, to whom she turns and by whose office she seeks to lose her solitary state, is belied by its very duplicity and brings disenchantment, as she has intimated in her songs on the sad fates of its creatures. She seems to point to the delusory nature of the positive, innocent aspects of spring and finally slides back into a postlapsarian anguish, in which spring acquires a demonic mask:
You can count on the start and end of spring,
but in spring it'll be hard to count on my waking from a spring dream.
Why does the spring demon
make a whole spring of spring sickness?
Spring has misled Shuang-ch'ing.
The late Ch'ing critic Ch'en T'ing-cho greatly admired Ho Shuang-ch'ing's song lyrics; among his praise and comments on her song lyrics in the Pai-yü-chai tz'u-hua , he notes that while they contain the characteristics of the "feminine" style, her diction does not resemble that of any of the master orthodox poets such as Wen T'ing-yün and Wei Chuang of the late T'ang, or Chou Pang-yen, Ch'in Kuan, Chiang K'uei, and Shih Ta-tsu of the Sung. He concludes inconclusively: "So, is she an immortal fairy or a ghost? I can't name her realm [ching ]."[32]
Ho Shuang-ch'ing's song lyrics do indeed have a highly individual and intense voice. The uncanny subjectivity and the overwhelming psychological dimension of these songs sometimes make them appear like the disturbed visions of an alienated woman. At the same time, her lyrics are crafted pieces with a naturalness and flow that conceal the artifice, in ways reminiscent of Li Ch'ing-chao's art. Certain poetic devices, such as effective use of reduplication and cumulative repetition of words, are obvious emulations of Li Ch'ing-chao's famous style. In the song lyric on spring ploughing quoted above, the character ch'un , "spring," occurs in every line. Since spring is a double-edged metaphor, its repetition is both apposite and central to the metamorphosis of meaning. In another example (tune: "Feng-huang-t'ai shang i ch'ui-hsiao" quoted below), reduplication is used unobtrusively in almost every line to produce a cumulative emotional force.
So far I have deliberately avoided giving any historical or biographical context for Ho Shuang-ch'ing's song lyrics, when in fact they would frame an interesting set of questions regarding the "feminine" modality of the song lyric, questions that lie outside the scope of this paper but deserve to be explored. Briefly, Ho Shuang-ch'ing came from a peasant family native to the rural regions of the southeast, and the way she learned to read and write and compose poetry was quite by accident. She had an uncle, a teacher in the village school, who, seeing that as a child she was extremely intelligent and quick to learn, taught her how
[32] In Tz'u-hua ts'ung-pien , ed. T'ang Kuei-chang, 4:3896; see also pp. 3895–97.
to read and write. When Ho Shuang-ch'ing grew up, her family, observing the class boundaries and social hierarchies of the time, married her off to a peasant. Her husband was not only illiterate, he was a perfect brute as well. Together with his mother, the proverbial evil mother-in-law, he abused Ho Shuang-ch'ing physically and emotionally. Suffering from malaria, she managed hard farm work and the household chores, although constantly berated and often beaten by her husband and his mother. Ho Shuang-ch'ing seems to have borne their abuses well, being the very model of a submissive and virtuous wife and daughter-in-law. She had the habit of writing poetry, especially song lyrics, which were much admired and sought after by the scholars and literati of the region. Not wanting her lyrics to be preserved, however, she often wrote them on leaves, using powder in place of ink, making them perhaps the most ephemeral compositions ever written. All in all, only about fifteen lyrics have been preserved. Most of these have appeared in anthologies of works by women poets of the last two hundred years, and they have all been acclaimed by some of the most astute critics and scholars of the song lyric in the late Ch'ing dynasty and the twentieth century.
Everything we know about Ho Shuang-ch'ing, including her extant poems, comes to us from a work called Hsi-ch'ing san-chi (Random notes from the western green) by Shih Chen-lin, a relatively unknown and unsuccessful literatus who lived in the eighteenth century.[33] Shih had traveled in the Hsiao-shan region where Ho Shuang-ch'ing lived. His work, which reads something like a diary, records his encounters with Ho Shuang-ch'ing, the tragic story of her life, her wasted talent. He tried, in short, to preserve her life and work for posterity. Some twentieth-century scholars, skeptical of the unverifiable source, have questioned Ho Shuang-ch'ing's identity, claiming that she is a fabrication of the author. Interestingly, the basic presumption of the non-fictionality of Chinese poetry has naturally led to a reading of her poems as records of the empirical experience of a historical person. And with their intense and passionate tone, her poems seem to stand out as records of emotion. Yet might not the author be exploiting precisely this empiricist assumption in the reading of poetry to create a fictional character with historical verisimilitude, and the genre's association with the "feminine" to construct the gender of this fictional character? Or, in a less convoluted manner, might he not have exploited the "feminine"
[33] Ho Shuang-ch'ing is called simply Shuang-ch'ing in this work. It is not clear how or when she came to be referred to by the surname Ho. Lin Yutang has translated Shih Chen-lin's preface to the Hsi-ch'ing san-chi in Translations from the Chinese (The Importance of Understanding) (Cleveland: World Publishing Company, 1963), pp. 86–88.
mode to create some unique poems to attribute to a real woman whom he portrays as Ho Shuang-ch'ing? Or, simpler still, might he not have "edited" the poems as he recorded them, along with fragments of their author's life? The questions as they are phrased presume a complex set of motives and manipulative moves on the part of Shih Chen-lin, and an attempt to probe for answers would involve, to begin with, a careful reading and analysis of the content of Hsi-ch'ing san-chi and an examination of its textual strategies in a comparative context in relation to motives and modes of discourse in late Ch'ing China.
Here we have to conclude, like Ch'en T'ing-cho, with an inconclusive question: who wrote the following song lyric, Ho Shuang-ch'ing or Shih Chen-lin? According to Shih Chen-lin, Ho Shuang-ch'ing had a friend in a bright neighbor girl, a peasant who, though illiterate, had loved Ho Shuang-ch'ing's calligraphy and had asked her to copy out the Heart Sutra and to teach her to recite it. This girl was leaving the area soon to return to her new marital home after a visit at her parents'. Sick with a bout of malaria, Ho Shuang-ch'ing was unable to attend the farewell dinner, so her friend sent over some food she had wrapped up herself. On receiving it, Ho Shuang-ch'ing wrote two song lyrics, on leaves, lamenting the loss of the friendship.[34] The following song lyric is the second of the two:
Inch on inch of scant clouds,
ray after ray of fading light,
being there and not there, flickering, will not vanish.
Just at this moment, the brokenhearted soul is severed,
reeling and swaying.
I gaze and gaze at the hills and streams—
the figure moves farther and farther away, indistinct.
From now on,
pain and plight
will be only like tonight.
The blue sky is remote.
I ask heaven, it does not respond—
look at tiny little Shuang-ch'ing,
weak and frail and listless.
Even worse, whom do I see and who sees me?
Who would dote on the flower's charm?
Who would look upon my joy and happiness
and secretly sketch them in plain powder?
Who would still care, age after age,
night after night, day after day?
[34] Hsi-ch'ing san-chi , pp. 127–28.
Tune: "Feng-huang-t'ai shang i ch'ui-hsiao" ( HCSC , p. 128)
In its "feminine" discourse, there is again that intense preoccupation with the relationship between being and being seen. The subject, in order to constitute its identity, needs an external perceiver. Though the perceiver would function as a reflector, thereby affirming the being of the woman perceived, it is not just the mirror, the male gaze, but that longed-for, absent chih-yin , the understanding and caring friend who can break through the boundaries of loneliness and alienation to touch the heartstrings of the self. Ch'ing , emotion, desires its fulfillment in the other. Who is the feminine subject of the song?
Toward a Dream: When Literary Women Found Each Other
During the late imperial period of the Ming and Ch'ing dynasties, the freedom and movement of women, and of those women belonging to the gentry and upper classes in particular, seemed more restricted than ever with the by then entrenched practice of foot-binding and more repressive social and legal codes enforcing virtuous conduct in women.[35] Even
[35] The account provided here of the social and literary circumstances of women during the Ming and Ch'ing is skeletal. For a more detailed and complex picture, see, among a number of studies available, the excellent articles by Ellen Widmer, "The Epistolary World of Female Talent in Seventeenth-Century China," Late Imperial China 10,no. 2 (December 1989): 1–43; and Paul Ropp, "The Seeds of Change: Reflections on the Condition of Women in the Early and Mid Ch'ing," Signs 2 (1976): 5–23.
so, and perhaps because of the increasing oppression of women, there also arose male advocates for liberalization of the measures and norms governing women's lives. They called for increasing the availability of education to women; it would take the cataclysmic changes of the twentieth century, however, before Chinese women could actively take up their own cause alongside their male sympathizers. In Ming and Ch'ing China, the patriarchal social system made women passive recipients of fates and destinies defined for them by the male world. Even those more liberal-minded scholars and literati who championed education for women did so within the accepted boundaries of gender ideologies. Women should be taught to read and write, not so that they could function in society and certainly not so that they could compete with men, but in order that they might further cultivate their womanly virtues. Special books on feminine conduct, family instruction, and biographies of exemplary virtuous women constituted their textbooks. Since poetry had always been held to have an edifying, didactic, as well as artistic function, it was not excluded from the education of women. The eighteenth-century poet Yüan Mei even accepted a number of female students and disciples whom he taught to write poetry and whose work he edited and had printed in collections.
As more and more women wrote verse, they began to compile anthologies of contemporary women's poetry; Ming and Ch'ing collections of verse written by women and edited by women are still extant today. Women of gentry and elite families also began to form their own literary circles patterned on the male literati models. One exemplary member of such circles was the woman poet Ku Ch'un (also known by her tzu T'ai-ch'ing [1799–1870s]), who was a prolific writer of both shih and tz'u but was much better known for the latter. Ku came from an educated, aristocratic, and probably Manchu family. Talented in the arts of poetry, painting, and calligraphy, she was happily matched in marriage (as a concubine) to I-hui, a prince of the Manchu imperial clan. Until I-hui's relatively early death (he died in his forties), husband and wife had an enviable conjugal relationship, actively sharing their many interests in the arts. Ku's poetry is shaped by her experiences as a woman living in an elite social and cultural milieu. From the themes running through her poetry and the informational prefaces she wrote to her verse, we get some understanding of the broad spectrum of her social and artistic activities and the circle of women friends she moved in. These women
were usually from the southeast, members of families accompanying high officials who had been posted to the capital. Much in the manner of male literati poets, these women often made excursions together and celebrated the occasions in verse, or they would write parting poems to friends leaving the capital and epistolary or commemorative verse to friends far away or departed from this life. Poetry for women of this class, then, was a genteel pastime and a cultivated art, with an actual audience and readership among its practitioners—a situation quite different from that of earlier women poets who wrote in isolation.
The collection of Ku Ch'un's shih poems and tz'u reads like a record of her daily life because of the detailed prefaces she provided for the individual pieces.[36] The prefaces to her song lyrics often indicate the date and occasion of the composition, whether the lyric was an inscription on a painting, an epigraph to a collection of poetry by a woman friend, a lyric written to match the rhymes of another lyric by her husband, a piece composed during a visit to a temple with a party of women, a farewell poem to a parting friend, or an epistolary poem sent to a distant one. The range of occasions is amazingly broad. This practice of writing occasional song lyrics in social settings with accompanying prefaces finds its model in the literati tradition of the song lyric initiated by Su Shih. Except when writing generic "exercise" pieces matching rhymes or imitating styles in the song lyric canon, Ku Ch'un puts the song lyric to social or occasional and self-expressive functions—functions conceived in the elite male tradition but situated within a female literary and social context.
Indicative of her education and learning, and therefore reflective of the literati model, Ku's song lyrics contain a measure of allusive language and contemplative themes. Both are less common in song lyrics by women and deserve attention as examples of a female poet's attempt, in self-definition, to insert her self (her image and her voice) into a male role. The following lyric, prefaced "Composed at Random," for instance, clearly adopts the detached attitude of the Taoist sage:
Human life is an endless struggle—
the post-horse and ploughing ox.
[36] Her collected shih poetry, T'ien-yu-ko chi , is included in the Feng-yü-lou ts'ung-shu . The only complete manuscript of her collected tz'u , the Tung-hai yü-ko in six chüan (hereafter referred to as THYK in the text), was formerly in the private collection of the Japanese sinologist Naito[*] Konan and is now in the rare books collection of the Kyo-u sho-oku in Osaka. A three-chüan edition consisting of chüan 1, 3, and 4 was printed by the Hsi-ling yin-she in 1913; chüan 2 was published in Tz'u-hsüeh chi-k'an 1, no. 2 (Aug. 1933): 152–66 (hereafter referred to as THCK in the text).
On the brows of the Taoist sadness never sets:
in leisure holding the Book of Immortality,
sitting by the window, what is there to seek besides this?
Bright scenes in time depart far, far away,
impossible to detain the months and years.
In a hundred years everyone becomes a pat of mud,
so arrange for a peaceful and steady place in the
self's mind.
And move the boat with the flow of the stream.
Tune: "Lang t'ao sha" ( THYK , 1.7b–8a)
This song lyric could easily pass for one of Su Shih's. It is indeed intended to be read in that tradition: the philosophical message overwrites any feminine signs. The term Taoist, tao-jen , is male-gendered. Yet in this song lyric it is a thin disguise, a persona for the poet—a woman, sitting by the window and, rather than embroidering, engaging in the unusual activity of reading a Taoist classic and contemplating the meaning of life, contemplation that can take an objective turn to observation or comment on the false and misleading drama of life. In Ku's often-anthologized piece on puppets, the satiric force of the description and rhetoric promote a metaphorical reading of the puppet theater:
Puppets on the stage, they behave most brashly:
passing on false stories, they beguile foolish children.
The founding tales of the T'ang and Sung are all spurious;
their magic lies in the clever transformations of devils and demons.
Riding red leopards,
attended by striped foxes,
with their fetching caps and gowns they put on a mighty pose.
Once they come down the stage and hang up high, what is their use then?
Carved wood and pulled strings—just this one moment.
Tune: "Che-ku t'ien" ( THCK , pp. 152–53)
In one song lyric Ku Ch'un actually makes reference to the image of the feminine in what is in fact a gesture toward difference: "You know that I don't share in the fashions of the world,/so why bother to ask, 'Are you painting your eyebrows dark or light?'" ("Pu Ch'an-kung," THCK , 1.2 [1933], p. 163). The literary arts certainly seem to have offered her a form of fulfillment, but they also brought disappointment:
Sitting at Night
I laugh at myself trying to work up some verses in those years—
those old traces are hard to find even in dreams.
How many scrolls of poems?
How many sheets of sketches?
How much time has been . . .?
The jug broken from tapping, I scratch my head often,
wearing out my old aspirations.
And now all I've succeeded in getting is
a thousand strands of tears
and one sorrowful heart.
"Ch'iu-po mei" ( THYK , 5.n.p.)
While poetry might have become a nice social art for women and a form of exchange or support among them, it did not connect to any "larger" purpose, since it was still confined within their world—and there women were still outsiders to the male-dominant world of recognition, achievement, and fame. Until women could be integrated into
society, the desire for broader experience and participation could only remain a frustrated dream, even, to a large extent, for the most talented and enterprising:
Recording a Dream
Haze envelops the cold water, moonlight envelops the sand.
Floating on a magic raft,
I visit the immortals' home.
A clear stream all along the way,
the two oars row, breaking the mist.
Just after the little bridge the scenery changed:
under the bright moon,
I saw blossoming plum trees.
Shadows of myriad trees of plum blossoms intertwined.
To the edge of the hills,
to the edge of the waters.
Reflections fall into the heaven in the lake,
their beauty certainly worthy of praise.
I wanted to travel all over the sea of fragrant snow—
startled awake from the dream,
I blame the cawing crow.
Ku Ch'un, tune: "Chiang-ch'eng tzu" ( THYK 1.28b)
Coda: The Heroic Feminine
In this filthy, grimy world,
how many brave and noble souls are there among men?
Only in the detachment of fair women
do we sometimes hear of an outstanding hero.
Ch'iu Chin, tune: "Man chiang hung"[37]
The values and import of his world are articulated in the dominant writing practices. In the song lyric, however, where gender constructs in language and representation were at first predominantly feminine and the genre was coded as "feminine"—an alterity in relation to shih —thematic values of the public, male world were largely excluded. Ironically, this strongly feminized poetics generated an intensely masculine mode of discourse in the song lyric. In order to embody the values and ideals of poetry as conceived in the high tradition—in other words, to speak of a public and private world outside the symbolic space of the boudoir and garden—a strongly marked male image and voice unadulterated by feminine coding had to be constructed. In forceful formulations, the hao-fang , or "heroic," mode is self-consciously masculine. The "masculine" quality is constructed chiefly through the choice of theme and diction within particular registers of "male" emotion, and the lyrics are written to appropriate tune patterns considered vigorous and virile in sound. By effacing the feminine, the song lyric participates in the dominant poetic tradition.[38] Man speaks:
Hair bristling with anger, bursting from its cap,
at the railing where I lean the beating rain has come to a stop.
I raise my eyes, gazing up, and howl long at heaven,
A stout heart fiercely rent.
At thirty my deeds and name are merely dust and dirt,
an eight-thousand-li route under moon and clouds.
Don't idle around—
when youthful head has turned to grey,
we will mourn in vain.
The Ching-k'ang reign's disgrace has not yet been wiped out.
The anguish of officers—when will it be dispelled?
Driving the war chariot, I will trample
the pass at Mount Ho-lan.
Manly ambition will feast hungrily on barbarian flesh,
[37] Ch'iu Chin chi (Peking: Chung-hua shu-chü, 1960), p. 106; hereafter referred to as CCC in the text.
[38] Later on in the reading tradition, the same aim was attempted by allegorizing the feminine. See Yeh Chia-ying, "The Ch'ang-chou School of Tz'u Criticism," Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 35 (1975): 101–31; and my "Contextualization and Generic Codes in the Allegorical Reading of Tz'u Poetry," Tamkang Review 19 (1988–89): 663–79.
amidst talk and laughter we will quench our thirst with Tartars' blood.
Let us begin again by recovering our former land
and paying our respects to the court.
Yüeh Fei, tune: "Man chiang hung" ( CST , 2:1246)
There are many variations of the heroic song lyric (including the antiheroic), but this paradigmatic version, attributed to the Southern Sung general Yüeh Fei (1103–41), maintains a degree of celebrity probably equalled only by Su Shih's "Nien-nu chiao," subtitled "Recalling the Past at Red Cliff" (CST , 1:282). It made "Man chiang hung" the most popular tune pattern for hao-fang lyrics, particularly those expressing loyalist or patriotic sentiments. The sustained drive, the barely contained anger and frustration, and the persistent intent (here, revanchism) are sentiments traditionally perceived as typically masculine. Although the passionate tone and violent language in which they are expressed, especially in the lines speaking of cannibalism, cannot but violate a generic sense of decorum, at the same time the radically masculine poetics declaims its difference and deviation from its "feminine" counterpart, without which it would not appear so marked.
Predictably, the heroic mode, being the very antithesis of the feminine mode established in the song lyric, was not much adopted by
women poets—and here gender poetics delimits and complicates boundaries within the genre. While the reproduction of a female persona across the distance of the feminine interior was accepted practice for male (and female) poets, the reverse does not hold in the tradition. The male persona, when it is self-consciously gender-marked as the heroic persona is, cannot be reproduced from a point outside the male interior; it can only be represented by its own (male) voice. There are instances, however, of women poets who sought heroic models of their own gender as subjects for their song lyrics. Ku Ch'un, for example, wrote a series of allusive song lyrics on martial heroines figuring in ch'uan-ch'i tales of the T'ang, using a tune pattern with hao-fang associations, "Chin-lü ch'ü."[39] When writing reflectively on historical themes, women poets would also adopt an erudite, allusive language—a language without feminine associations—that was more appropriate to such themes. In "Crossing the Yangtze River," the woman poet Shen Shan-pao (a literary friend of Ku Ch'un's) combined contemplation of history with meditation on the fate of women. Note that she employs the tune "Man chiang hung" (and follows Yüeh Fei's rhyme):
Rolling on and on, the silvery waves
cannot write out all of that hot blood in my heart.
I ask about that year with those battle drums at Gold Mountain—
it was the achievement of a woman.
On my elbow Su Ch'in's seals of office will not be hung,
and in my bag there remains only Chiang Yen's brush.
Since ancient times, how many heroes can we count among women?
Too grieved to speak.
I look toward Mount Pei-ku in green autumn haze,
point to Mount Fu-yü, where the autumn sun rises.
I've been leaning by the boat's window,
beating time until the jar breaks.
Rain and tears soak into the wanderer's robes,
while frost alights on my parents' thinning hair.
I ask heaven on high, in giving me life, what did you want me to do?
Just to suffer ordeals?
[39] See Tung-hai yü-ko, chüan 2, in Tz'u-hsüeh chi-k'an , pp. 155–56. The heroines are Hung-fu, Hung-hsien, and Hung-hsiao; all either had martial qualities or dedicated themselves to heroic men and their goals.
Tune: "Man chiang hung"[40]
While crossing the Yangtze on boat, one woman recalls another woman in history: Shen Shan-pao thinks of Liang Hung-yü, the heroic wife of the Southern Sung general Han Shih-chung, who helped her husband's army to stay the Chin soldiers from crossing the river with her vigorous drumming.[41] Shen's admiration for the heroic achievements of an exceptional woman, however, leads her to lament the general restrictions placed on women's lives. While writing does provide a means of demonstrating their talent, women have no hope for advancement in the public world. In the end, she questions the purposelessness of her life and her suffering as a woman; she shakes her fist at heaven, even though she is powerless. Shen negotiates the masculine model of poetics to voice her frustration at the limitations imposed on women's lives.
A much more forceful attempt to appropriate the masculine image and voice for self-assertion can be read in the life and poetry of the late Ch'ing revolutionary martyr Ch'iu Chin (1879–1907).[42] Dedicating her life to the salvation of China, Ch'iu Chin left the feminine functions of
[40] Yeh Kung-ch'o, comp. Ch'üan Ch'ing tz'u ch'ao (Hong Kong: Chung-hua shu-chü, 1975), 2:1730.
[41] See Han Shih-chung's biography in the Sung shih 364.11361.
[42] An excellent biographical study is provided in Mary Backus Rankin, "The Emergence of Women at the End of the Ch'ing: The Case of Ch'iu Chin," in Women in Chinese Society , ed. Margery Wolf and Roxane Witke (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975), pp. 39–66.
wife and mother to join the male ranks of revolutionaries. The male characteristics she assumed are largely derived from the traditional image of the hero. In addition to her prodigious ability to drink, her horseback riding, swordsmanship, and other legendary masculine traits, she is also known to have cross-dressed. By appropriating the male surface, cross-dressing became a signal gesture toward denying and deconstructing the male-constructed, often eroticized image of the feminine. The masculine hao-fang mode offers literary cross-dressing as a means to reject the conventional poetic "feminine." The following song lyric is also written to the same heroic tune:
Short sojourn in the capital,
so once again it is the fine festival of midautumn.
There beneath the hedge, the yellow flowers are all in bloom,
their autumn looks seem cleansed.
As songs lingered on the four sides, Ch'u was finally penetrated;
after eight years, vainly I long for the local flavors of Che.
How unkind to have sent me by force to be a woman—
surely there has been no caring.
My body cannot get into the ranks of men,
but my heart burns more fiercely than men's.
Let me say that in my life my mettle has often been roused to fury
for others.
What vulgar man would have a mind to know me?
For the hero, there would be ordeal at the end of the road.
In this ill-bred world of red dust,
where can I seek an understanding friend?
My green robe is tear-soaked.
Tune: "Man chiang hung" ( CCC , p. 97)
The voice we hear is at first "neutral" in gender, speaking of the season, the Midautumn Festival, and the conventional longing the two arouse for one's native region. But at the end of the stanza, this voice emerges as a female voice, resentful of having been born, without choice, a woman. In the second stanza, while still speaking as woman, this female voice adopts what is clearly masculine rhetoric. If the poet has been trapped in the physical and social constraints of her gender, she now inserts her voice into a masculine poetic form to call those constraints into question. In another lyric to the tune "Man chiang hung" Ch'iu Chin declares that "three inches of bow-shaped shoes are just too absurd, / they should be changed" (CCC , p. 10).
Because Ch'iu Chin valorizes heroic emotion, men become vulgar and worthless when they fail to live up to the heroic ideal. She believes that she is more "heroic" than most men, and her ideological distance from traditional typologies of gender roles makes her feel alone and friendless. By complicating voice and image in relation to gender, she conveys in the song lyric the social and emotional difficulties experienced by a woman who has rejected her traditional domestic and sexual roles for a greater purpose in life. It is not that women such as Shen Shan-pao and Ch'iu Chin did not write conventional song lyrics in the "feminine" style. On the contrary, most of their song lyrics are rather generic pieces in the wan-yüeh style. But when voicing their discontents as women, when trying to break the shackles of gender in literature, women had to reject the image and poetics of the feminine constructed in the dominant tradition. In trying to find a new voice and language to represent this consciousness in themselves, women realized in the song lyric a way to accomplish this by pressing into service the gendered poetics so clearly constituted in the genre. They tried to assert a "new" feminine, in contradistinction to the old, by appropriating the masculine.
The Poetry of Li Ch'ing-chao:
A Woman Author and Women's Authorship
John Timothy Wixted
The poetry of Li Ch'ing-chao (b. 1084)[1] —both her tz'u and shih —prompts fundamental questions when viewed from various twentieth-century Western perspectives, especially feminist ones. Is there a separate women's literary tradition in China? If so, what is her place in it? Has her corpus of writings been viewed as being specifically female, and has it been viewed differently by men and by women? Is there a distinct female consciousness operative in her writing as well as that of other women writers? In what sense, if any, might she be viewed as being a feminist? And finally, what light might analysis of her work shed on current Western theoretical debate about women's writing, which is often couched in universalist terms?
As for the question of whether there is a separate female literary tradition in China, this can be only partially addressed here. It is clear
[1] Li Ch'ing-chao's date of birth follows Chiang Liang-fu, Li-tai jen-wu nien-li t'ung-p'u (1937; rpt., Taipei: Shih-chieh shu-chü, 1974), p. 284, which is confirmed by Hsia Ch'eng-tao, T'ang Sung tz'u lun-ts'ung (Shanghai: Ku-tien shu-chü, 1956), pp. 190ff. The text followed in this article is Chung-hua shu-chü Shang-hai pien-chi-so, ed., Li Ch'ing-chao chi (Shanghai: Chung-hua shu-chü, 1962).
Song lyrics (tz'u ) by Li Ch'ing-chao are numbered sequentially as found in that text; page numbers follow, referring first to this 1962 edition, and then to vol. 1 of the Ch'üan Sung tz'u , ed. T'ang Kuei-chang (Peking: Chung-hua shu-chü, 1965) (hereafter cited as CST ): e.g., "song lyric #1 (1962, p. 1; CST , p. 927)." Note that song lyrics numbered #45 and above are identified by the editors of the 1962 edition as being of doubtful attribution to Li Ch'ing-chao.
Shih poems by Li Ch'ing-chao are also numbered consecutively (#S-1 through #S-17) as they appear in the 1962 edition, page references being to the same work: e.g., "#S-1, p. 62." Shih fragments (#F-1 through #F-7) are similarly cited: e.g., "#F-1, p. 68."
that Li Ch'ing-chao, the granddaughter of a first-place examination candidate and the daughter of a literate mother as well as father, does not reveal in the extant writing reliably attributed to her any special awareness of works by earlier women writers:[2] Pan chieh-yü (48?–after 6 B.C.),[3] Pan Chao (45–ca. 117), Ts'ai Yen (fl. 200), Tso Fen (fl. 275), Hsieh Tao-yün (fl. 376), Li Yeh (fl. 756), Hsüeh T'ao (770–832), Yü Hsüan-chi (ca. 844–68), and Hua-jui fu-jen (10th cent.).[4]
It is true that one or two of Li Ch'ing-chao's poems are surprisingly similar to those of her Sung predecessor, Wei fu-jen (ca. 1040–1103);[5] but these similarities may only be coincidence, made all the more possible in a genre like tz'u where theme and language are so subject to convention.
If Li Ch'ing-chao did not look to earlier female writers as models, one might legitimately ask to what extent did Li Ch'ing-chao herself, along with her near contemporary Chu Shu-chen, become the terminus a quo ,[6] if
[2] "Conditions under which the writings of early medieval gentry women may to some extent have circulated, been collected, or anthologized but subsequently lost remain unclear. In the bibliographical sections of the T'ang and Sung dynastic histories, and in independent Sung bibliographies, at least seven collections of women's writings (all but one titled simply Fu-jen chi , "Collection of Writings by Women") are listed: two from the southern Sung [Six Dynasties], two each from the Liang and Sui, one from the later Wei, and one from T'ang. These collections have not survived." Maureen Robertson, "Voicing the Feminine: Construction of the Female Subject in the Lyric Poetry of Medieval and Late Imperial China," paper prepared for the Colloquium on Poetry and Women's Culture in Late Imperial China, University of California, Los Angeles, October 20, 1990, p. 17.
[3] The titles chieh-yü, chü-shih, fei, fu-jen , and tao-jen are retained (unitalicized and lower-case) when citing names.
[4] It is true that Li Ch'ing-chao's residence outside Chi-nan in Shantung was named after Hsieh Tao-yün, which reflects conscious association with the earlier writer (see the poem by Tung I cited below). Song lyric #53 (1962, p. 46; not in CST ) also includes an allusion to Hsieh Tao-yün, but the poem is of doubtful attribution.
[5] There is the use of the crab apple (hai-t'ang ) in Wei fu-jen's song lyrics #2 and #13 (as numbered sequentially in CST ; CST , pp. 268 and 269), later celebrated in Li Ch'ing-chao's song lyric #2 (1962, p. 1; CST , p. 927). Note the reduplication in Wei fu-jen's song lyric #1 (CST , p. 268)—T'ing-yüan shen-shen shen chi-hsü —found also in Li Ch'ing-chao's song lyrics #26 and #27 (1962, pp. 18 and 19; CST , pp. 929 and 933), as well as in a famous line by Ou-yang Hsiu (1007–72).
The dates of Wei fu-jen (and for Sun Tao-hsüan, cited below) follow Jen Jih-kao, Sung-tai nü-tz'u-jen p'ing-shu (Taipei: Shang-wu yin-shu-kuan, 1984), p. 33 (and p. 36). For Wei fu-jen, see also n. 54 below.
[6] The dates for Chu Shu-chen are problematic. Jen Jih-kao has "ca. 1040–1103"; Sung-tai nü-tz'u-jen p'ing-shu , p. 32. T'an Cheng-pi has "fl. 1131"; Chung-kuo wen-hsüeh-chia ta-tz'u-tien (Taipei: Hsiang-kang Shang-hai yin-shu-kuan, 1961), p. 675. And C. Bradford Langley states that "the most reliable evidence . . . places her in the Northern Sungrather than the Southern"; "Chu Shu-chen," in The Indiana Companion to Traditional Chinese Literature , ed. and comp. William H. Nienhauser, Jr. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), p. 334.
The dating is important, as some critics place Li Ch'ing-chao before Chu Shu-chen and would have her influencing Chu (e.g., Ch'en T'ing, cited immediately below), and others have it the other way around.
not for a tradition of separate female writing in China, at least for a tradition of female tz'u writing. My own reading of the poems by the fifty-nine writers in the Ch'üan Sung tz'u easily identified as being by women (fifty of whom postdate Li Ch'ing-chao),[7] as well as the five women writers included in the Ch'üan Chin Yüan tz'u , does not reveal any special awareness or actual emulation of Li Ch'ing-chao's tz'u by later women writers. Nor have I found any use of language by this group of writers that could be termed distinctively female.[8]
There is little critical reference to Li Ch'ing-chao being used as a model by women.[9] Chang Yen (fl. 1526) states that Chu Shu-chen modeled herself on (tsu ) a specific poetic line by Li Ch'ing-chao.[10] In more general terms, Ch'en T'ing (fl. 1515) states, "Women tz'u writers of the past like Li Ch'ing-chao and Sun fu-jen [Sun Tao-hsüan (fl. 1131)] all had their collected writings circulate in the world. As Chu Shu-chen followed in their footsteps, it can be said that every generation has its worthies."[11] Ch'en Wei-sung (1625–82) says of the woman writer Hsü Ts'an (fl. 1653), "In her tz'u she looked upon Chu Shu-chen as a younger sister, and she was nurtured by Li Ch'ing-chao as one might be by an aunt."[12] And Yeh Shen-hsiang (Ch'ing dynasty) says in refer-
[7] Or at least are listed in the Ch'üan Sung tz'u as postdating Li Ch'ing-chao. Note that Jen Jih-kao finds a total of ninety-six women tz'u writers in the Sung, not all of whose work is extant or included in CST; Sung-tai nü-tz'u-jen p'ing-shu , pp. 32–78.
[8] Note that in their introduction the editors of the volume resulting from the 1982 conference Women and Literature in China state: "Considering that even in texts written by women in our own language we are hardly able to pinpoint traces of a women's language, our failure to tackle this issue may be more easily understood." Anna Gerstlacher et al., eds., Women and Literature in China (Bochum: Studienverlag Gerstlacher, 1985), p. ii.
[9] Of course, this begs two complementary questions: whether Li Ch'ing-chao was used as a conscious or unconconscious model by women, without critics' or poets' stating she was being used; and whether or not a statement that someone has used Li Ch'ing-chao as a model is necessarily the case.
[10] Ch'u Pin-chieh, Sun Ch'ung-en, and Jung Hsien-pin, eds., Li Ch'ing-chao tzu-liao hui-pien (Peking: Chung-hua shu-chü, 1984), p. 40 (hereafter cited as LCC tzu-liao hui-pien ).
[11] Ibid., p. 38.
[12] Ibid., p. 72.
ence to another woman writer, "Chu Hsi-chen [dates uncertain] wished to succeed on the same level as [chi-mei ] Li Ch'ing-chao."[13] Such statements are all couched in fairly general terms. There is virtually no discussion of any specific language of Li Ch'ing-chao's being used by later women writers, as there occasionally is about its use by men writers.
Li Ch'ing-chao is linked retrospectively with women writers who precede her. For example, Tung Fu-heng (fl. 1607) states, "Her expressions and strains outreverberate others' of her age, making her one with the group of Pan chieh-yü, Tso Fen, and Ts'ai Yen."[14] In a poem by Tung I (Ch'ing dynasty) she is yoked implicitly with Hsieh Tao-yün:
In her postface she recalled past happiness,
And growing old following military ships, crossed the Yangtze in hardship.
Her fragrant chamber is wrongly compared with that of Ming fei—[15
] Li Ch'ing-chao of Willow Catkins Spring.[16]
And in a context referring to her remarriage, Li Ch'ing-chao is compared unfavorably by Lang Ying (b. 1487) with another earlier woman writer: "Alas! How removed from Ts'ai Yen she is!"[17]
It is clear that Li Ch'ing-chao becomes the standard by which virtually all later women writers are measured. Of Wu Shu-chi (Northern Sung dynasty) it is stated:
At her best, she is not inferior to Li Ch'ing-chao.[18
] Huang Sheng (Sung Dynasty)
People say she is not inferior to Li Ch'ing-chao, but in fact she does not measure up to Li Ch'ing-chao in warmth and classical elegance [wenya ].[19
] Lu Ch'ang (Ch'ing Dynasty)
[13] Ibid., p. 100.
[14] Ibid., p. 51.
[15] Ming fei, i.e., Wang Chao-chün (a palace lady during the reign of Emperor Yüan of the Han [r. 49–33 B.C.]).
[16] LCC tzu-liao hui-pien , p. 123. Willow Catkins Spring was Li Ch'ing-chao's home in Shantung. The name has associations with Hsieh Tao-yün, who was called a "willow catkins talent."
[17] Ibid., p. 32. The circumstances of the remarriages of the two were different. Ts'ai Yen, who had been forced into her first marriage with a Hsiung-nu leader after being captured by "barbarians," married a Han Chinese after being released and returning to China.
[18] Ibid., p. 20. Note the variation by Yeh Shen-hsiang (ibid., p. 99): "At her best, she does not surrender place to [i.e., is not in any way inferior to] Li Ch'ing-chao."
[19] Ibid., p. 104.
At her best, she is a match for Li Ch'ing-chao. Regrettably, no one knows about her.[20
] Yüeh-lang tao-jen (Ch'ing dynasty)
Chou Ming (Ch'ing dynasty) compares Hsü Ts'an quite favorably with Li Ch'ing-chao:
Hsü Ts'an is good at writing and well versed in both calligraphy and painting. In her tz'u she has succeeded in achieving a Northern Sung style, absolutely rejecting the habits of delicate complicatedness and frivolousness. Where she is stately, Li Ch'ing-chao should concede her position. Hsü Ts'an is the top-ranked one [female], and not only for this dynasty.[21]
And Li Ch'ing-chao is compared with both women and men tz'u writers by Ho Shang (fl. 1681):
In tz'u writing, that which is difficult and beautiful is deemed well crafted, but in truth it does not approach the marvelousness of language of fundamental color [i.e., that which is true, basic, unadulterated, pen-se ]. [One line each of the following five tz'u poets is then cited by way of example: Hsiao Shu-lan (dates uncertain), Wei fu-jen, Sun Kuang-hsien (d. 968), and Yen Jen (fl. 1200); the line cited for Li Ch'ing-chao is the third one in song lyric #46 (1962, p. 42; CST , p. 934), one of the poems whose attribution to her is doubtful.][22]
There is little premodern criticism by women regarding Li Ch'ing-chao, the following poem by Chang Hsien-ch'ing (late Ming dynasty) being exceptional:
On Reading Li Ch'ing-chao's Shu-yü chi
What talented woman has there been to compare with her?
Polished jade and strung pearls—vessels well laden.
As for "One more gracile than chrysanthemums,"[23
] She is like a chrysanthemum at the end of autumn.[24]
Reference to a separate tradition of women's writing, one involving Li Ch'ing-chao, can perhaps be read into the following two statements, the first by Li P'an-lung (1514–70): "In terms of writing in a woman's voice [hsieh ch'u fu-jen sheng-k'ou ], Li Ch'ing-chao, together with Chu
[20] Ibid., p. 107.
[21] Ibid., p. 90.
[22] Ibid., p. 82. Note that the same lines are cited by T'ien T'ung-chih (Ch'ing dynasty), except that Wei fu-jen is omitted; ibid., p. 95.
[23] Song lyric #18 (1962, p. 11; CST , p. 929).
[24] LCC tzu-liao hui-pien , p. 64.
Shu-chen, dominates tz'u [literally, "dominates the flower of tz'u ," tz'u-hua ]."[25] And Chang Yen, who (as earlier noted) spoke of Chu Shu-chen's modeling herself on a line by Li Ch'ing-chao, added to that comment, "Could it be that there is a special secret [hsin-fa ] that women pass on to each other?"[26] Li P'an-lung's comment can be taken to be a figure of speech, however, and Chang Yen's to be a rhetorical expression of praise. They do not constitute recognition of a separate tradition.
Criticism of women writers was generally not benign, as exemplified by the following comments of Tung Ku (fl. 1522):
From the Han on, women capable of writing poetry and prose, like T'ang-shan fu-jen [a favorite concubine of Emperor Kao of the Han (r. 202–195 B.C.)] and Pan Chao, set down words to serve as moral instruction; their style being ancient and their learning correct, they were not easy to follow. Ts'ai Yen and Li Ch'ing-chao can be censured for having violated chastity [by having remarried].[27] Prostitutes like Hsüeh T'ao are not worthy of mention. Since Chu Shu-chen suffers from excess of sadness and disaffection, she too was not a good woman. And the wife of Tou T'ao [Chin dynasty] gave over to her emotions. Apart from these, there are not many to note.[28]
Ch'en Chi-ju (1558–1639) cites a woman who makes a statement that is construed as being a general criticism of a failing common to women tz'u writers:
Meng Shu-ch'ing [fl. 1476] of Ts'ai-chou, the daughter of Assistant Instructor Meng Ch'eng, was skilled at writing poetry [shih ]; her courtesy name was Ching-shan chü-shih. She once wrote a poem discussing Chu Shu-chen:
In writing poetry one must evolve from the embryo and transform
one's temperament,[29
] Only when Buddhist priests' poetry is without the whiff of incense is
its informing spirit [ ch'i ] fine.
By the same token, it [Chu Shu-chen's writing, and that of women writers in general] should not have a powdered look to it. Chu Shu-chen did in-
[25] Ibid., p. 38.
[26] Ibid., p. 40.
[27] Cf. the remarks of Lang Ying cited above.
[28] LCC tzu-liao hui-pien , p. 40.
[29] For discussion of the Huang T'ing-chien (1045–1105) expression, which this line is a variation of, see Adele Austin Rickett, "Method and Intuition: The Poetic Theories of Huang T'ing-chien," in Chinese Approaches to Literature from Confucius to Liang Ch'i-ch'ao , ed. idem (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), pp. 109–15.
deed suffer from the malady of commonness [vulgarity, su ]. Li Ch'ing-chao could also be mentioned in this regard.[30]
More fundamentally critical is the following view expressed by a woman, one doubtless reflective of a more general societal attitude; it is related by Lu Yu (1125–1210): "When Sun fu-jen [Sun Tao-hsüan] was young, since she was quite bright, the wife of Chao Ming-ch'eng of Chien-k'ang, surnamed Li, who was famous for her writing [i.e., Li Ch'ing-chao], wished to instruct her. At the time the girl was only in her teens. But she declined, saying, 'Literature is not a proper pursuit for a woman.'"[31] Finally, a different critical standard operative for women is suggested by Hsü Ang-hsiao (Ch'ing dynasty): "In crafting this tz'u [i.e., song lyric #40; 1962, p. 31; CST , p. 932], Li Ch'ing-chao is original and graceful; but whereas each line is fine, a broader unity is lacking. Could it be that people of the past did not chastise her for it, excusing her because she was a woman?"[32]
Yet Li Ch'ing-chao is generally compared favorably not only with female authors but also with male ones. Yang Shen puts her on a par with Ch'in Kuan (1049–1100) and Huang T'ing-chien.[33] Wang Shyhchen (1634–1711),[34] as well, speaks of Li Ch'ing-chao and Ch'in Kuan as being equally outstanding;[35] and he places her, together with Yen Shu (991–1055) (and/or Yen Chi-tao [11th cent.]), Ou-yang Hsiu, and Ch'in Kuan, as an exemplary author in his broader category of "literati tz'u " (wen-jen chih tz'u ).[36] The Ssu-k'u ch'üan-shu editors pair her with different male authors: "Even though Li Ch'ing-chao was a woman, her poetic framework [ko ] is lofty and refined.[37] She can justly be matched
[30] LCC tzu-liao hui-pien , pp. 45–46. Note that the editors of this volume punctuate the text so as to make the final part of the citation all part of Meng Shu-ch'ing's poem, which does not work prosodically. Moreover, the final line could also be read, "Li Ch'ing-chao ought to have brought it up with her."
[31] Ibid., p. 10. Compare the case of Han Yü-fu (12th cent.), a woman said by Lu Ch'ang to have studied with Li Ch'ing-chao; ibid., p. 104.
[32] Ibid., p. 120.
[33] Ibid., p. 35.
[34] The romanization Wang Shyh-chen is used for the Ch'ing dynasty critic, and Wang Shih-chen for the Ming dynasty one (whose names would normally be romanized the same).
[35] LCC tzu-liao hui-pien , p. 78.
[36] Ibid.
[37] Note the definition of the term ko made by Yoshikawa Kojiro[*] when explicating Kao Ch'i's (1336–74) use of it in his criticism: "Ko is the rhythmic feeling that derives from a poem's sound and meaning." Five Hundred Years of Chinese Poetry, 1150–1650: The Chin, Yuan, and Ming Dynasties , trans. John Timothy Wixted (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), p. 113.
with Chou Pang-yen [1056–1121] and Liu Yung [987–1053]."[38] She is paired with Li Yü (937–78), albeit along clear gender lines, by Shen Ch'ien (1620–70): "Among males, Li Yü, and among females, Li Ch'ing-chao, are those who have ultimately captured the fundamental color [pen-se ]."[39] Indeed, Li Ch'ing-chao is sometimes specifically spoken of as being superior to male authors:
Among young ladies of the Sung, Li Ch'ing-chao stands out as a writer in her own right, one not inferior to Ch'in Kuan and Huang T'ing-chien. Not a single tz'u composition by her is poorly crafted. Where her writing is well tempered, she may wrest position from Wu Wen-ying [ca. 1200–ca. 1260], and regarding beauty of language she deserves to be classed with Lü T'ien-ju [Ming dynasty]. Not only does she look out over womankind, she also overwhelms the male world.[40]
Li Ch'ing-chao also influenced later men writers, Hsin Ch'i-chi (1140–1207) most obviously, but also Chu Tun-ju (1080/81–ca. 1175) and others.[41] However, her work simply becomes part of the ocean of material that later writers draw on.[42] Its language is not marked as female language. The male authors Li Ch'ing-chao is compared with
[38] LCC tzu-liao hui-pien , p. 98.
[39] Ibid., p. 69. For explication of the "fundamental color," see the Ho Shang citation above.
[40] Ibid., p. 97; Li T'iao-yüan (fl. 1778). Yang Shen (1488–1559) finds a poem of hers better than one by Chou Pang-yen to the same tune; ibid., p. 33. (Yang Shen's attribution is wrong; the poem is in fact by Ch'in Kuan and not Chou Pang-yen. But his intended comparison of the two poets still holds.)
[41] See the comments by Yang Shen and Hsü Shih-chün (fl. 1636) in ibid., pp. 35 and 61. For a poem by Hsin Ch'i-chi written "In Imitation of the Style of Li Ch'ing-chao," see ibid., p. 13. Hsin Ch'i-chi's use of Li Ch'ing-chao as a model seems to have created some anxiety in his admirers; Hu Ying-lin (1551–1602) felt prompted to write in Hsin's defense: "Hsin Ch'i-chi and Li Ch'ing-chao both took part in the general move south, the one not long after the other. Besides, both of them were crafters of tz'u . How can one say that Hsin robbed from [p'iao ] Li?" (ibid., p. 43). (For pre-Sung passages criticizing plagiarism, including one by Han Yü [768–824] in which p'iao is used, see John Timothy Wixted, Poems on Poetry: Literary Criticism by Yuan Hao-wen [1190–1257] [Calligraphy by Eugenia Y. Tu], Münchener ostasiatische Studien, no. 33 [Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1982], pp. 302–3.)
Note also that Sung Lo (1634–1713) is quoted by Hsü Ch'iu (1636–1708) as saying that a tz'u to the tune "I-chien mei" by Tung I-ning (fl. 1666) is "extremely similar to [k'u-ssu ]" Li Ch'ing-chao's song lyric #25 (1962, p. 16; CST , p. 928); LCC tzu-liao hui-pien , p. 88.
[42] The only exception to this I have noted concerns Shen Ch'ien (1620–70), who says that when young, he did not dare to write a poem following Li Ch'ing-chao's "Sheng-sheng man" (song lyric #40; 1962, p. 31; CST , p. 932) "for fear of being laughed at by women"; LCC tzu-liao hui-pien , p. 69.
(or whom she is said to influence) are all tz'u writers; this is understandable, since it was her tz'u poetry that was exceptional. Still, inasmuch as the song lyric as a genre remained suspect, it is less surprising that a woman became viewed as one of its great practitioners.
In sum, Li Ch'ing-chao's poetry draws little on the writings of earlier women; nor do later women writers especially emulate her actual writing, even though many of the female authors who pre- and postdate her (regardless of the genre they were writing in) are retrospectively grouped together with her by later critics in the implicit class of "woman writer," for which Li Ch'ing-chao becomes the standard. From the material that is extant, there seems little evidence for a separate female literary tradition in China until the late imperial period, in terms of either lineation or language. Female authors are looked upon negatively by some critics; but Li Ch'ing-chao is compared favorably by other critics with the greatest tz'u poets, her work being acknowledged as having served as a model for male authors.
The preponderance of criticism concerning Li Ch'ing-chao's writing has been positive. It is instructive, however, to look at the comments that are negative to see to what extent her being a female is injected into the discussion.[43] The earliest such comments come from Wang Cho (fl. 1162):
Li Ch'ing-chao wrote "long and short lines" (tz'u ), molding them so intricately to suit her will. They are light, skillful, sharp and original, with infinite moods and postures. The fantastically vulgar expressions of the back alleys and streets, whatever suited her mood, she would write down in her poetry. Since time immemorial among the lettered women of cultured families there had never been one so completely defiant of convention as Li Ch'ing-chao.[44]
Wei Chung-kung (Sung dynasty), commenting on Hua-jui fu-jen and Li Ch'ing-chao, states, "It has been said, the writing of exquisite lines definitely is not for women. Hua-jui fu-jen of Shu and Li Ch'ing-chao of recent times are especially famous. Each has tz'u and yüeh-fu that circulate in the world. But those that everyone likes and knows number only
[43] Negative comments by Tung Ku and Hsü Ang-hsiao have been noted above.
[44] LCC tzu-liao hui-pien , pp. 4–5. Translation by Hsu Kai-yu, "The Poems of Li Ch'ing-chao (1084–1141)," PMLA 77 (1962):525. Cf. the translation of the latter part of the passage by Chung Ling: "She uses openly the lewd language of the streets. Since ancient times I have never known a woman writer from the gentry who was as shameless as she is." "Li Qingzhao: The Moulding of Her Spirit and Personality," in Women and Literature in China , ed. Anna Gerstlacher et al., p. 150.
one or two. They are not all fine."[45] Yang Wei-chen (1296–1370) makes a group out of Pan Chao, Li Ch'ing-chao, and Chu Shu-chen. They each may have a single poem or a single letter that moves people, he says; "But since they issue from a limited view and constricted intelligence, and are hampered by lowness of spirit and habit [i.e., are not cultivated], they do not accord with what is correct in individual temperament and feeling."[46] The remarks of P'ei Ch'ang (Ch'ing dynasty) are the most critical ones in ad hominem terms: "Li Ch'ing-chao, being very self-assured about her talent, looked down on everything. Her poetry is scarcely worth preserving. However, that a woman should be so outspoken [hyper-literally, 'should open such a big mouth,' neng k'ai tz'u ta-k'ou ]—this is presumptuousness that need not be questioned and folly that is unequaled."[47] Finally, Chou Chih-ch'i (1782–1862), citing two earlier critics who praised Li Ch'ing-chao for her "Sheng-sheng man" poem (song lyric #40; 1962, p. 31; CST , p. 932), states, "Only Hsü Kao-lu [dates uncertain] of Hai-yen notes that she displays a considerable amount of vulgarity [ts'ang-ch'i ] [in the piece]. He can be called a discerning critic."[48] Although there is a fair amount of additional negative comment about song lyric #40,[49] most criticism about the "lowness" or "vulgarity" of her writing seems to have been prompted by lines in only three of Li Ch'ing-chao's poems,[50] all of which are of questionable attribution. As some of the above quotations illustrate, not all of the negative comments about Li Ch'ing-chao make reference to her being a woman.
Many of the male writers and critics who comment on Li Ch'ing-chao's writing evince surprise that such good writing could come from a woman. They comment on how difficult it was for a woman to manage such an achievement:
Such expression is hard for a woman to accomplish.[51
] Hu Tzu (fl. 1147), in reference to song lyric #18 (1962,
p. 11; CST , p. 929)
To think that a woman can be as originally creative as this![52
] Lo Ta-ching (fl. 1224), in reference to song lyric #40
(1962, p. 31; CST , p. 932)
[45] LCC tzu-liao hui-pien , p. 17.
[46] Ibid., p. 26.
[47] Ibid., p. 87.
[48] Ibid., p. 101.
[49] E.g., by Hsü Ang-hsiao, as cited in ibid., p. 121.
[50] Song lyrics #45, #46, and #48 (1962, pp. 42, 42, and 43; not in CST ).
[51] LCC tzu-liao hui-pien , p. 6.
[52] Ibid., p. 21.
That such creativity could come from a woman—how exceptional![53
] Shen Chi-fei (Ming dynasty), in reference to the phrase
cited in the next quotation
Who would have expected that these four words, "[the] green [is] fat, [the] red thin," are those of a woman?
Yüeh-lang tao-jen, in reference to song lyric #2 (1962, p. 1; CST , p. 927)
Such comments are not limited to Li Ch'ing-chao's tz'u . Indeed, it is in reference to the following shih poem by Li Ch'ing-chao, which had contemporary political implications, that Chu Hsi (1130–1200) writes in a combination of surprise and admiration, "Such expressions—how could they be written by a woman!"[54]
On History
The two Hans succeeded one another as one dynasty;
The new House [of Wang Mang (r. A.D. 9–27)] was like an excrescence.
It is for this reason that Hsi K'ang
Until his death denigrated the Yin and Chou.[55]
Good shih poems by women on political topics, if anything, evince greater surprise and admiration than do tz'u poems. As one scholar has noted: "If we consider the aesthetic function of literature written by Chinese women and that of literature written by Chinese men, we see that the former was not meant to have a wider sphere of impact than was [sic ] the environment of its origin (family soro[r]ities, courtesans' circles and their friends), while the aesthetic function of the latter was intended to have a wide field of activity, to affect, if possible, the entire intellectual sphere of Chinese society."[56] Hsü Po-ling (late Ming dy-
[53] Ibid., p. 46.
[54] Ibid., p. 12. Chu Hsi (ibid.) also spoke of Li Ch'ing-chao as "one of only two literate [neng-wen ] women of the dynasty," the other being Wei fu-jen, the wife of the prime minister Tseng Pu (1035–1107). This latter statement by Chu Hsi is a reformulation of the words by Chung Hung (469–518) in the Shih-p'in : "Li Ling [d. 74 B.C.] and Pan chieh-yü together spanned roughly a century; but discounting the woman, there was only one poet for the period." Ch'en Yen-chieh, Shih-p'in chu (1927 rpt., Taipei: K'ai-ming shu-chü, 1960), p. 2.
[55] #S-10, p. 66. The precarious situation of the Sung vis-à-vis the Chin is said to be similar to the one Hsi K'ang (223–62) found himself in regarding the possible founding of a new dynasty; he criticized even the Yin and Chou for displacing, respectively, the Hsia and Yin dynasties.
Note additional translations of the poem by Liang Paitchin, Oeuvres poétiques complètes de Li Qingzhao (Paris: Gallimard, 1977), p. 110; and Kenneth Rexroth and Chung Ling, Li Ch'ing-chao: Complete Poems (New York: New Directions, 1979), p. 66.
[56] Marián Galik, "On the Literature Written by Chinese Women prior to 1917," Asian and African Studies (Bratislava) 15 (1979): 70.
nasty), speaking of the above poem, also states in befuddled admiration, "A woman could not write this!"[57] Two other shih poems by Li Ch'ing-chao written to match the rhymes of a composition by Chang Lei (1054–1114) elicit similar comments:[58] "That a woman should be placed among these authors [i.e., contemporary Sung poets who wrote shih on the same topic]—unless a person [i.e., Li Ch'ing-chao] has really profound thought, would that be at all possible" (from the Ch'ing-po tsa-chih , as cited by Wang Shyh-chen);[59] also, "Although the two poems are not fine pieces, it was no simple matter that they issued from a woman's hand; need one mention her truly exceptional works [i.e., her tz'u pieces]? Therefore, I have recorded them" (Wang Shyh-chen).[60]
As citations in the above sections suggest, Li Ch'ing-chao is seldom spoken of in premodern times in the way that most modern critics favor, as being quintessentially expressive of female sensitivity.[61] Yet one might legitimately ask about any corpus of material by a woman author: if read without authorial attribution by a reader versed in the tradition of the genre (something of an oxymoron), would the text be identified as being by a woman?[62] (And conversely, in how many instances would the writings of male authors, if read without attribution by such a reader, be taken to be written by women and to be expressive of a separate female consciousness?) Regardless of whether such a consciousness or sensitivity exists (and if it exists, whether it is limited to
[57] LCC tzu-liao hui-pien , p. 63.
[58] #S-4, p. 63, and #S-5, p. 63. They were prompted by the recent discovery of an eighth-century monument celebrating the restoration of the T'ang court after the An Lushan Rebellion.
[59] LCC tzu-liao hui-pien , p. 78.
[60] Ibid., p. 76. Note the similar comments by Ch'en Hsi-lu (Ch'ing dynasty) about the shih fragment by Li Ch'ing-chao (#F-4, p. 69); LCC tzu-liao hui-pien , p. 92. The same sort of comment can be found in reference to her famous postface to the Chin-shih lu : "In this piece, the expression of feeling is fine and exquisite; it does not at all seem to be expression emitting from a woman. The writing is truly delightful!" Chu Ta-shao (Ming dynasty), as cited in LCC tzu-liao hui-pien , p. 42.
[61] The examples among present-day writing on the poet, including Western-language discussion, are legion. For example, in a footnote appended to his translation of song lyric #56 (1962, p. 49; not in CST ), James J. Y. Liu states: "This poem has also been attributed to Chou Pang-yen, but I am inclined to assign it to the poetess Li Ch'ing-chao, as the sentiments and sensibility seem particularly feminine." The Art of Chinese Poetry (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962), p. 51 n. 1.
[62] Cf. the comment by Chung Ling concerning Li Ch'ing-chao's shih poetry: "In other words, a reader, versed in classical poetry, would have taken her shi[h] poems to have been written by a man, unless he was aware of the authorship." "Li Qingzhao: The Moulding," p. 159.
women, or whether all women necessarily have it), one item is clear: historically, most readers' expectations of Li Ch'ing-chao's work have been different precisely because it is identified as being by a woman.
Many tz'u by male authors have been praised for the understanding they are said to reveal of female psychology. Most such tz'u , as feminist critics would probably point out, tell us not of how women think or feel, but of how such male authors perceive women: how they think, or fancy, or would have it, that women think and feel.
The problem here is partly one of the genre and its conventional themes concerning women. What makes Li Ch'ing-chao different is that, as a woman, her writing is taken to be autobiographical in a more direct way than tz'u by male authors, specifically those written in the personas of women, possibly can be. In a word, Li Ch'ing-chao's tz'u are, in large measure, read as if they were shih : that is, as being revelatory of an experienced world. With only one exception I have noted so far, none of Li Ch'ing-chao's commentators even considers the possibility that the persona in any of her poems is fictive. That one exception, the critic Wang Fan, has written perceptively about many of Li Ch'ing-chao's tz'u , pointing out, for example, the two types of woman found, respectively, in song lyrics #3 (1962, p. 2; CST , p. 932) and #45 (1962, p. 42), both to the tune "Tien chiang ch'un":[63] the former represents the more helpless, listless sort of woman found in many Hua-chien chi poems; the latter presents a more spirited, playful, and seductive type of woman.[64] (There is nothing, of course, to preclude the autobiographical critic from finding different aspects of the poet's personality reflected in such different verses.)[65] The question highlights the porousness of the boundary between shih and tz'u , the latter having genre conventions that must have made authors, female as well as male, write in fictive guises. There has, of course, always been a thrust to read male authors' biographies into their tz'u poems as well: consider, for example, the supposed addressee of Wei Chuang's (836–910) "Yeh-chin men" tz'u ,[66] the political (and other) circumstances read back into Li Yü's poems,[67] and
[63] Wang Fan, Li Ch'ing-chao yen-chiu ts'ung-kao (Huhehot: Nei-Meng-ku jen-min ch'u-pan-she, 1987), pp. 119–24.
[64] There is the question of the reliability of the attribution of the latter poem to Li Ch'ing-chao.
[65] And this is precisely what Wang Fan does in the majority of cases.
[66] Song lyrics #23 and #24 (as numbered in John Timothy Wixted, The Song-Poetry of Wei Chuang [836–910 A.D.] [Calligraphy by Eugenia Y. Tu], Occasional Paper no. 12 [Tempe: Center for Asian Studies, Arizona State University, 1979], pp. 64–67). She was said to be the poet's concubine, later appropriated by the ruler Wang Chien (r. 907–25).
[67] Note Daniel Bryant's fun parody of the circularity inherent in this kind of ex-plication; with slight modification it could well describe how Li Ch'ing-chao's poems are categorized and treated as biographical data.
Li Yü's lyrics can be divided into three (sometimes it is two, or even four) groups on the basis of their content, and these groups correspond to the major divisions of his life. That is, there are, to begin with, the carefree and exuberant poems of his youth, before he came to the throne, in which he celebrates the luxurious and unrestrained life that he enjoyed as a pampered prince. Then, there are the sadder poems of his middle period, when he was beset by the cares of state and afflicted by the successive deaths of his son, wife, and mother. Finally, there are the great lyrics of his last years in captivity, in which he pours out his homesickness and remorse. Of course we know that he was happy in his youth, for example, because we have those carefree and exuberant poems that he must have written then because that was when he was so carefree and exuberant, as the poems show . . . Lyric Poets of the Southern T'ang: Feng Yen-ssu, 903–960 , and Li Yü, 937–978 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1982), p. xxviii.
the question of which female entertainers in Liu Yung's life are said to have inspired which poems.[68]
The received view concerning Li Ch'ing-chao's domestic life is that she and her husband were ideally suited to each other, sharing antiquarian interests. The earliest instance I find of their being portrayed as the ideal conjugal couple—in the comments of Lang Ying—however, dates from nearly four centuries after the two lived.[69] And the source for the view, Li Ch'ing-chao's postface to the Chin-shih lu , was written in 1134, five years after her husband had died and thirty years after the idyllic incidents it describes; also, the piece itself contains a strong countercurrent of suppressed discontent with the marriage as it evolved, reflected in the way Li Ch'ing-chao tells of her husband's developing mania for
[68] As James R. Hightower notes:
There is little excuse for reading most of his songs as autobiographical, but no need to deny their author's familiarity with the milieu that is their setting. . . . It can be assumed that his songs were written to be sung by professional entertainers, and after them by their hearers, as were most tz'u before Su Shih; they were not primarily a vehicle for the expression of the poet's private feelings. This means that it is more appropriate to deal with this corpus of song words directly, without continually appealing back to the person of the poet and his presumed circumstances. "The Songwriter Liu Yung," pt. 1, Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 41 (1981): 340–41.
[69] Note also the reference to their happy marriage by Fu Chao-lun (Ch'ing dynasty); LCC tzu-liao hui-pien , p. 142. Ting Shao-i (Ch'ing dynasty), however, looks at five marriages involving literary women and finds only one of them (not Li Ch'ing-chao's) ideal: "Good marriages like this [between Chao Te-lin and Wang fu-jen]—why is heaven so stingy about them?"; ibid., p. 129.
collecting artifacts.[70] If an autobiographical reading of her poems is maintained, she was clearly also unhappy when married.[71] One might also ask, if she and Chao Ming-ch'eng were such the loving couple, why was he so insensitive to her feelings of loss when he went away for extended periods to collect rubbings (a loss taken to be expressed in the poems she is said to have written at such times)? Furthermore, there is the story about song lyric #18 (1962, p. 11; CST , p. 929), the one with the famous lines: "How undeniably heartrending! / When the west wind stirs the blinds— / One more gracile than chrysanthemums." Chao Ming-ch'eng is said to have shut himself away to write fifty poems trying to match hers; when he presented his work mixed with hers to a friend to read, he was told that only three lines were exceptional: the ones by her, quoted above. If there is any basis to the story, one might find reflected in the incident additional pressures in their marriage.[72] Finally, reference to the difficulties members of her family are said to have had because she was their relative cannot be ascribed wholly to misogyny; Yeh Sheng (1420–74) says, "Wen-shu [her father] had the misfortune to have her as a daughter, and Te-fu [her husband] had the misfortune to have her as a wife."[73]
It is noteworthy that there is no reference in the poet's writing to the fact that she and her husband had no children. It is even more remarkable that none of her critics or commentators draws any conclusions from it: none criticizes her for it, in the few cases where it is noted,[74] in relation either to her marriage in general or to her roles of wife and potential mother.
The supposed remarriage of the poet is a different matter. Much ink has been spilled trying to deny that this apparently disastrous union took place.[75] Presumably, the remarriage of a widow carried little
[70] Stephen Owen has written perceptively on this point; "The Sources of Memory," chapter 5 of Remembrances: The Experience of the Past in Classical Chinese Poetry (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), pp. 80–98.
[71] The modern critics Ch'eng Ch'ien-fan and Hsü Yu-fu note that even though she was most compatible with Chao Ming-ch'eng, there must have been a void in her life that she needed to fill; Li Ch'ing-chao (Kiangsu: Chiang-su jen-min ch'u-pan-she, 1982), p. 10.
[72] The incident is recounted by I Shih-chen (early Ming dynasty), as cited in LCC tzu-liao hui-pien , p. 28.
[73] Ibid., p. 31. The comment is dismissed by Chang Yen (Ming dynasty) as being unworthy of mention; ibid., p. 40.
[74] E.g., Chai Ch'i-nien (Southern Sung dynasty), as cited in ibid., p. 25.
[75] There is an entire volume of reprinted essays devoted to the topic: Chu Ch'uan-yü, ed., Li Ch'ing-chao kai-chia wen-t'i (Taipei: T'ien-i ch'u-pan-she, 1982).
stigma at the time;[76] it is later critics who, applying their contemporary standards, were scandalized at the possibility that such a famous figure (by definition a good woman who could not have done such a thing) not only remarried but also divorced,[77] and they took pains to deny it.
As for the question in what sense if any might Li Ch'ing-chao be viewed, albeit anachronistically, as being a feminist, it is to the circumstances of her life and to both her shih poetry and prose writing that one must turn, not to her tz'u . She is famous for the lines addressed to her father-in-law, the New Laws–faction prime minister, requesting that her father, a conservative critic, be spared the current purge of anti–New Laws officials:
Under the burning hand of authority, the heart turns cold;
How much greater, the feelings of a daughter for her father.[78]
Although Li Ch'ing-chao's appeal proved of no avail, her lines do reveal an independence of spirit and a willingness to challenge authority both within the family circle and beyond it. Although only seventeen shih poems by her are extant,[79] many can be read to have direct political significance. It is through them that we know her hawkish views encouraging non-appeasement of the Chin. A couplet from one of these poems is revealing about the poet as woman, as a woman in society, and as a woman of affairs. It appears in one of two poems dedicated to important officials, old family acquaintances who are about to set off north as legates to sue for peace with the Chin:
What do I, a widow living in humble circumstances, know?
But it is with a missive written in an oath of blood that I beseech you.[80]
[76] Ann Waltner, citing a 1980 unpublished paper by Patricia Ebrey, "Widows and the Structure of Society during the Sung," summarizes its findings as follows: "While remarriage was not seen as the preferred course of action for widows during the Sung, neither was it discouraged very strongly." "Widows and Remarriage in Ming and Early Qing China," in Women in China: Current Directions in Historical Scholarship , ed. Richard W. Guisso and Stanley Johannesen (Youngstown, N.Y.: Philo Press, 1981), p. 129 n. 3.
[77] Note the comments by Lang Ying and Tung Ku above.
[78] These lines are poetic fragments (#F-1, p. 68, and #F-2, p. 68), taken by some critics to be from the same poem. The first is always cited in the context noted.
[79] Nineteen by the count of some scholars, who split #S-7, p. 65, and #S-14, p. 67, into two; e.g., Wang Yen-t'i, Shu-yü-chi chu (Shantung: Shan-tung wen-i ch'u-pan-she, 1984), pp. 71–97.
[80] #S-7, p. 65. "I beseech you" is a tentative rendering. The poem is translated by Liang Paitchin, Oeuvres poétiques , pp. 127–30; and by Rexroth and Chung, Li Ch'ing-chao , pp. 62–65.
The poet as woman is inscribed in the text. Is she here literally abasing herself as a woman? (Doubtful.) Is Li Ch'ing-chao simply employing a variation of the self-deprecatory language one might find in any such poem of political comment and implied exhortation? (Yes; but women would have an additional pool of such terms to draw on, to fit the expectations of potential readers and the more immediate male addressees of the poems.) There is the further possibility that, as with all such language of self-effacement, the expression is really an inverted expression of pride (of the sort, "I'm just a Hoosier, but . . ."), which can serve to gull those foolish enough to think less of the speaker because of the role being donned. (This is surely also the case here, given the forcefulness of the rest of the poem.) In view of the political advice offered later in the poem, the writer is also laying the rhetorical groundwork for that self-assertion.
Other non-tz'u writings by Li Ch'ing-chao also reveal her to be a strong-willed person. As a critic, she expresses independent judgment, presuming to point out the shortcomings of many famous male predecessors in the genre, including Liu Yung, Su Shih (1037–1101), Ch'in Kuan, and Huang T'ing-chien.[81] Additionally, her rhymeprose "Ta-ma fu" is more than a piece describing a gambling game; as Liang Paitchin notes, "Dans ce long poème, l'amour du jeu se fond avec celui de la patrie en péril. Personnages, événements, batailles: tout est évoqué pour faire sentir un coeur palpitant de révolte et d'indignation; tout est soutenu et animé par une pensée impérieuse dont l'inspiration est profonde, et la marche, rapide."[82] Even Li Ch'ing-chao's postface to the Chin-shih lu inspires praise for its presumed no-nonsense approach.[83]
[81] As summarized by one modern scholar: "She was a keen literary critic, expressing appreciation of the contribution of Liu Yung to rhyme and rhythm but disapproving of his vulgarity, admiring the genius of Su Shih while noting the erratic strain in his compositions. She remarked that Ch'in Kuan stressed affectivity at the expense of daily realities of life, while Huang T'ing-chien emphasised these realities but made mistakes of composition." Julia Ching, "Li Ch'ing-chao," Sung Biographies , ed. Herbert Franke, Münchener ostasiatische Studien, no. 16 (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1976), 2:538.
[82] Liang Paitchin, Oeuvres poétiques , p. 35; the fu is translated in ibid., pp. 143–48, as "Le Jeu de petits chevaux." In English translation, the quotation reads: "In this long poem, love of the game is found together with that of the fatherland in peril. Personages, events, battles: all is evoked to make felt a heart beating in revolt and indignation; all is sustained and animated by an imperious thought, the inspiration for which is profound, the pace rapid."
[83] Mao Chin (1599–1659) (as cited in LCC tzu-liao hui-pien , p. 59) argues: "At the end [of the Shu-yü chi ] there is the postface to the Chin-shih lu , where one can glimpse the marvelousness of her prose. She was not only more stalwart than other gifted youngwomen of her generation, she also straightforwardly wiped clean the stench of assorted Confucianists after the general move south; she returned upstream to the Wei and Chin."
In sum, without the material available to us from these other sources, we would be hard-pressed to make out from Li Ch'ing-chao's tz'u alone the substantial figure she must have been.
The questions addressed above that most intersect with current issues in Western feminist literary theory concern whether there is a separate female literary tradition in China and whether there is a separate and universal female consciousness that is manifested in women's writing.[84]
Western feminist critics are divided on the latter question. Some argue for "an identifiable, homogeneous, 'essential' female consciousness, literary tradition, or style."[85] Others argue against a distinct female sensitivity, biology, or realm.[86] (The problem with both approaches is that they start with a priori notions that, more often than not, fit the arguer's agenda for what is deemed desirable social change in the world of today. Seldom is either more than an assertion.) There is little in pre-modern Chinese writing by women to argue a case for a universal separate female consciousness.
As for the question of whether there is a separate female literary tradition in China, generalizations about the early shih tradition are difficult to make.[87] Nonetheless, as noted earlier, one would be hard-
[84] Quite useful for their summaries of recent Western scholarship on feminist literary theory are Vincent B. Leitch, American Literary Criticism from the Thirties to the Eighties (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988); and K. K. Ruthven, Feminist Literary Studies: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).
[85] Leitch, American Literary Criticism , p. 312 (referring to Patricia Meyer Spacks and others); see also p. 314. The image of the madwoman comes under this category. Found by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Grubar to be embodied in numerous nineteenth-century fictional characters, the figure "is usually in some sense the author's double, an image of her own" (The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979], p. 78). The madwoman figure, especially in its "angel" manifestations, must be viewed as being culture-bound to the West. The madwoman is simply a variation (albeit a pernicious one) of the demonic image in the West of the poet as the maker, the one breathed into by gods (or muses), the possessed, and above all, the creator or demigod. There is no such tradition in premodern China, where all writing is viewed as being a patterning reflective and revelatory of a self-generating cosmos.
[86] See Leitch, American Literary Criticism , pp. 312–13 and 324.
[87] "The lack of adequate archival sources for medieval women's writings raises a serious doubt about our ability to generalize concerning women's literary culture in earlier China. Even the works of prominent and prolific women associated with the imperialcourt have been lost, except for a handful of pieces in a few instances. The tiny amount of extant poetry by gentry women that survives makes the study of their literary culture and the affinities of their poetry with both the Six Dynasties models and T'ang literati poetry particularly difficult, while the slightly better preservation of the works of courtesans, entertainers, and Taoist women may create a misleading profile for this period." Maureen Robertson, "Voicing the Feminine," p. 18.
pressed to argue for a separate women's literary style in China, certainly in reference to the tz'u of Li Ch'ing-chao and other Sung female writers in the genre. Nor does there seem to be a tradition of sororal emulation of Li Ch'ing-chao among tz'u writers who postdate her.[88]
This is not to deny, as noted earlier, that women's writing has often been labeled and read by many male Chinese readers and critics as being different. Given the "alterity" that this labeling effects in women's writing, what is surprising in the Chinese tradition is how seriously the work of a Li Ch'ing-chao has been taken over the centuries. Apart from the likelihood that the very excellence of her writings compelled their being appreciated, two paradigms may be operative here other than the one of male versus female. One has already been mentioned: tz'u poetry itself is represented in the Chinese literary tradition as being something of the "distaff side" of shih poetry.[89] It may have been more acceptable to find a woman supreme in this "other" (and, on the whole, lesser) realm than in the world of shih . In this regard, however, it is striking to find Li Ch'ing-chao portrayed as the "great patriarch" of the genre. Beginning at the end of the Ming dynasty, the poet seems virtually to have been brought under the category of male author by many critics, given some of the more global labels attached to her. Thus, Wang Shih-chen (1526–90) calls her the "true [correct, standard] patriarch [cheng-tsung ] of tz'u ." (The same term is also applied to her by Hsü Shih-chün, who makes Hsin Ch'i-chi the "auxiliary patriarch" [p'ang-tsung ] of the genre: "Besides these two, no one else occupies these positions.") Li Ch'ing-
[88] One scholar has noted that women in seventeenth-century Kiangnan "formed a loose literary network, exchanged correspondence and encouraged one another's endeavors." Ellen Widmer, "The Epistolary World of Female Talent in Seventeenth-Century China," Late Imperial China 10, no. 2 (Dec. 1989): 2. Note also the discussions in this volume by Kang-i Sun Chang on Liu Shih (1618–64) and by Grace S. Fong on Ku T'ai-ch'ing (1799–1870s).
Compare the categorical assertion by Paul W. Kroll: "There was no discernible Chinese tradition of literature written either by or for women" (emphasis in original); " . . . Fair and Yet Not Fond," a review article of Brocade River Poems: Selected Works of the Tang Dynasty Courtesan Xue Tao , ed. and trans. Jeanne Larsen (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), Journal of the American Oriental Society 108 (1988): 623.
[89] Note the references to this in the chapters by Grace Fong and Pauline Yu in this volume.
chao is "the great patriarch [ta-tsung ]" of tz'u both in the Chi-nan fu-chih and in the writings of Chou Lo (Ch'ing dynasty), and she is "a great patriarch" (i ta-tsung ) of the genre for editors of the Ssu-k'u ch'üan-shu chien-ming mu-lu , as well as for Wu Ch'ung-yao (1810–63). Feng Chin-po (Ch'ing dynasty) makes Ch'in Kuan and Li Ch'ing-chao the "patriarchs" (tsung ) of tz'u . And Liang Shao-jen (b. 1792) even makes her the "patriarch of Northern Sung tz'u ."[90] Granted, the term tsung in such usage is largely metaphorical. It is nonetheless ironic, given the strongly pejorative tone with which the term "patriarchy" has been used in current Western feminist discourse.
Another paradigm probably operative is that of the culture and society of Han Chinese versus anything that does not approach the society wholly in its own dominant culturalist terms. The acceptance of writings by sinicized authors of non-Chinese origins—Yeh-lü Ch'u-ts'ai (1189–1243), Kuan Yün-shih (1286–1324), and Na-lan Hsing-te (1655–85)—may provide a parallel typology. The writing of each of these "foreigners" has always been marked as being by an "other." But as long as that "other" fully accepts dominant Han Chinese cultural values, he or she can to a greater or lesser degree become an "inside outsider." Put in feminist terms, Li Ch'ing-chao for the most part accepts (or at least does not question in a threatening way) the dominant societal values of her time;[91] and this probably helped allow for the
[90] LCC tzu-liao hui-pien , pp. 41, 60, 132, 133, 98, 137, 124, and 122. An image strikingly exceptional to those just cited is the one employed by Sung Ssu-ching (Ch'ing dynasty). In his preface to Li-tai ming-yüan shih-tz'u (An anthology of poetry by famous ladies through the dynasties), he refers to three earlier female writers, characterizing them in masculine terms, and then adds to the list "Li Ch'ing-chao, the high priestess [ta-wu ] of the Chao-ruled Sung" (LCC tzu-liao hui-pien , p. 104).
[91] In one of her shih poems, Li Ch'ing-chao does express the view, "May the Empress have many, many sons [nan ]!" (#S-15, p. 68; cf. the translations by Liang Paitchin, Oeuvres poétiques , p. 113; and Rexroth and Chung, Li Ch'ing-chao , p. 68). This could be interpreted as a conventional wish, but one arguably also reflective of the poet's "victimization" by current societal values. (The role and status of the empress, however, may make for something of a special case here. Also, the verse was part of a group of poems that Li Ch'ing-chao wrote on behalf of a relative.)
Julia Kristeva (after citing a passage in the "Ta-ma fu," using the Liang Paitchin translation) summarizes her thoughts on Li Ch'ing-chao:
An identification with men, an insistence on the values of the literati , a fascination with power and success: So be it. But there is also in Li Qingzhao a reminder of the political power of the (astonishingly accurate) written word, a defence of personal initiative against all orders. And all this in a musical, precise, and economical language that no translation can hope to reproduce. Li Qingzhao is the perfect example of the kind of excellence a woman can achieve on the condition that shecease to live as a woman. About Chinese Women , trans. Anita Barrows (New York: Urizen Books, 1977), p. 93.
In looking for female feminist writers in China, it is useful to note the quasi-parallel provided by British women novelists writing from 1840 to the present. Elaine Showalter in her study of such authors, A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), posits three periods—as summarized by Leitch, American Literary Criticism , pp. 312–13:
The initial "Feminine phase," from 1840 to 1880, involved imitation by women novelists of the dominant tradition and internalization of its literary and social standards. The second "Feminist phase," from 1880 to 1920, entailed protest against prevailing modes and advocacy of minority values and rights. The final "Female phase," from 1920 onward, evidenced a turning inward in search of identity and a relaxation of dependency on opposition.
We may see some analogy in the work of Li Ch'ing-chao and other premodern women poets who imbue themselves with the dominant tradition and internalize its literary and social standards. Apart from exceptional comments such as the one by Yü Hsüan-chi regretting that, not being a male, she cannot take the civil service examinations,* protest by women writers does not occur until the late imperial period, becoming more pronounced in modern times with the introduction of Ibsen's Nora onto the scene (see Vera Schwarcz, "Ibsen's Nora: The Promise and the Trap," Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 7.1 [Jan.–Mar. 1975]: 3–5). Showalter's third "Female phase" probably also then starts almost simultaneously, all three phases being in evidence at the same time in the twentieth century.
*Ch'üan T'ang shih (Peking: Chung-hua shu-chü, 1960), 804.9050; as translated by Jan Wilson Walls, "The Poetry of Yü Hsüan-chi: A Translation, Annotation, Commentary and Critique" (Ph.D. diss., Indiana University, 1972), p. 174:
I resent the silken gown
that subdues my poetry
as I look up and envy in vain
the names on the Honor Roll.
Yü Hsüan-chi is also famous for her lament, "A priceless treasure is easy to seek / but a man with a heart is hard to find." Ch'üan T'ang shih , 804.9047; translation by Walls, "The Poetry of Yü Hsüan-chi," p. 87.
Note also that in the Fan-hua meng by the woman writer Wang Yün (dates uncertain), "[t]he author precedes the play with a tz'u poem in which she clearly expresses her regret that unlike men, she cannot have a good career of her own." Sharon Shih-jiuan Hou, "Women's Literature," in The Indiana Companion to Traditional Chinese Literature , ed. William H. Nienhauser, Jr., p. 192. (This article must be used with care. Note the many corrections provided by David R. Knechtges and Chang Taiping, "Notes on a Recent Handbook for Chinese Literature," Journal of the American Oriental Society 107 [1987]: 296–97.)
possibility that she be accepted as the superb practitioner of tz'u that she both was and, for the most part, was appreciated as being. She is still a "woman poet" for many, just as Na-lan Hsing-te is a "Manchu" one.[92]
[92] Along the same lines, it is no accident that Ch'ien Ch'ien-i's (1582–1664) mam-moth anthology of Ming dynasty shih poetry, Lieh-ch'ao shih-chi , has as its final catchall section the assembled poems of Buddhist priests, Taoist adepts, women, eunuchs, foreigners, and so on. They are all marginalized.
The work in contemporary Western criticism perhaps most useful for examining tz'u in general, even more than the specific writings of Li Ch'ing-chao, is Lawrence Lipking's Abandoned Women and Poetic Tradition . One can argue that the figure of the abandoned woman (so central for Lipking), which in shih poetry can be traced back to the famous poem attributed to Pan chieh-yü about her fan (a symbol of her rejection), is the major topos of early tz'u . Much of the Hua-chien chi is simply a variation on the theme.[93] Although the topic is never not to be found in the corpus of any major tz'u writer, much of the development of the genre in Sung times can be traced in terms of its becoming only one of several topoi employed. Tz'u by Li Ch'ing-chao and Chu Shu-chen have traditionally had a special impact on readers because the authors, being women, are presumed to have been writing directly from their own experiences as "abandoned women."[94] Poems on the theme of the abandoned or jilted male—found especially in tz'u by Liu Yung, but also ambiguously present in many other tz'u , for example in those by Wei Chuang—although expressed with considerable feeling, do not engender the empathy that the writings by these women do, nor even the affect of poems written by men about abandoned women (other than the more conventional ones). There is, of course, an implied social dimension to all such readings. As the settings make clear, the women in such poems are literally cooped up or otherwise socially constrained; the men, even when heartbroken, are still free to move about in society. The accoutrements of the bedchamber become emblematic of a female condition; and even young female entertainers, as Liu Yung sardonically notes, have to make a living. So even if only two strata of female society are explicitly referred to in tz'u , their condition, by extrapolation, might be taken to stand for women in general.
Lawrence Lipking writes with considerable insight and sensitivity of the pervasiveness of the "abandoned woman" theme in Western writings by both men and women, and of the implications to its being embodied in the personas of Ariadne, Sappho, Sybil, and his own creation, Aristotle's Sister. The theme, he finds, can be understood in the
[93] Interestingly, Li Ch'ing-chao is seldom mentioned together with Pan chieh-yü in the Chinese critical tradition. Both are mentioned by Yeh Shen-hsiang among a series of writers said to have been moved by personal circumstances to write; LCC tzu-liao hui-pien , p. 99.
[94] The term is here applied in the broad sense used by Lipking.
following ways, which (to widely varying degrees) are potentially relevant to its Chinese manifestations. The abandoned woman can be read
as a record of the oppression of women (in the terms noted in the preceding paragraph),
as an emblem of all oppressed people (possible only through a forced reading of Chinese examples),
as the instrument of religious love and yearning (although not applicable in the sense described by Lipking, the theme of personal rejection is linked with that of religious search or fulfillment in the poetry of Yü Hsüan-chi),[95]
as the voice of repressed psychological fears (operative in many tz'u by women, to the extent one adopts a psychobiographical approach), and
as the writing of the archetypal poet and figure of poetry (suggested, albeit in an attenuated way, by Li Ch'ing-chao's reference to her own writing in her shih ).[96]
There has been a good deal of criticism of Lipking, part of it in reaction to the idea that the abandoned woman might serve as the archetype of the woman poet, part of it in reaction to the critic's being male. His work is invaluable for making an apparently limited theme far richer in implication than might otherwise be appreciated.
[95] Ch'üan T'ang shih , 804.9049, 9050, and 9050–51; as translated by Walls, "The Poetry of Yü Hsüan-chi":
Disjoined, but not for long,
in the end I have found fulfillment;
I see the emptiness of rise and fall,
the meaning of True Mind. (p. 146)
We've been living on the same lane
but through the year we've [I've] had no call,
. . . .
The Taoist nature is colder than snow;
The Zen mind scoffs at gorgeous silks.
My steps have risen to the ends of the sky
where no roads reach down to the misty waves. (p. 151)
I set free my feelings,
cease resenting my heartless mate;
I nourish true nature,
toss off the waves of the bitter sea. (p. 179)
[96] #S-1, p. 62; cf. the translations by Liang Paitchin, Oeuvres poétiques , p. 120 ("Moi, je m'isole, faisant des poèmes derrière la porte close"); and Rexroth and Chung, Li Ch'ing-chao , p. 55.
Early viewed as being an outstanding writer or woman writer, Li Ch'ing-chao became the standard by which virtually all female Chinese writers, and many male writers of song lyrics, were compared. Yet her writing did not greatly influence actual writing by later women, nor is there much evidence to argue for a separate tradition of tz'u writing by women in the Sung-Yüan period, in the sense of women consciously modeling themselves on earlier women as part of a separate stream of writing. The reception of Li Ch'ing-chao's work, however, provides important data for the study of images of women and views of female writing in China. Premodern critics in their comments often lump together various women authors, sometimes quite disparate ones, in a way that emphasizes their shared "otherness." At the same time, many critics seem to treat Li Ch'ing-chao as an exception—in effect, as a (female) male among males, even as a "patriarch" in the ("other") world of tz'u .
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.