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.