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.