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  • The Beauty and the Book: Women and Fiction in Ninetenth-Century China
  • Patricia Sieber (bio)
The Beauty and the Book: Women and Fiction in Ninetenth-Century China, by Ellen Widmer. Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2006. 407 pp. $49.95.

Ellen Widmer’s The Beauty and the Book explores the social and literary events leading up to the publication of the first extant female-authored Chinese novel in 1877. Conventionally, women’s fiction in China has been associated with the May Fourth Movement (1919), growing out of an explicitly reformist, if not outright feminist consciousness. More recent [End Page 380] scholarship has enlarged this female-authored canon to include works written under feminine pseudonyms in the first decade of the twentieth century. In one form or another, such twentieth-century works have been explained as cultural negotiations tied to China’s intensifying interactions with Japan, Europe, and the United States. By contrast, Widmer’s book details the involvement of women in traditional Chinese narrative, both of the novelistic (xiaoshuo) and prosimetric (tanci) variety, prior to the ascendance of European-inspired cultural and aesthetic norms.

Widmer seeks to show that one of the significant differences between women’s literary culture in the seventeenth century and in the nineteenth century concerned the multifarious ways in which elite women (guixiu) engaged with fictional narrative. As has been documented by Chinese and Western scholars, women had written prose and poetry since at least the first century CE. Every dynasty boasted of some famous women writers, with systematic efforts to publish women’s writing reaching its first peak in the late sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries. However, women were not, despite their amply documented practice of other forms such as poetry, drama, and prose, recognizably engaged with novels until the nineteenth century and even then in very limited form. Through a number of case studies, The Beauty and the Book seeks to establish to what extent we can speak of an actively conceived female reading public, explicitly female-authored literary genres such as prosimetric narrative (tanci), and female responses, including the authoring of novels, to the male-defined novel (xiaoshuo), and to what extent such developments were facilitated by the growing commercialization of publishing.

In the first of these case studies centering on Li Ruzhen’s (1763–1830) well-known novel Jinghua yuan (Flowers in the Mirror, 1818), Widmer argues that this novel went well beyond the established trope of male literati lamenting their own misfortunes in a female guise. She shows that this novel, though rhetorically ambiguous about the overall import of female talent, nevertheless circulated widely among a network of men and women known to have been sympathetic to women’s literary aspirations. In particular, four of the preface writers for the 1828 edition prepared by Li himself were women who, contrary to the longstanding taboo against women’s reading of popular fiction, invited other women to enjoy and benefit from the trials and tribulations of the one hundred talented female protagonists featured in the novel.

In the second case study, Widmer turns to Hou Zhi (1764–1829), a woman editor and composer of a female-identified narrative genre, the prosimetric form of tanci, which provided inspiration for Li’s novel. From its first female-authored publication in 1651, tanci continued to be written, edited, published, hand-copied, and read by women into the early twentieth century. Linguistically a southern genre with roots in oral storytelling, [End Page 381] tanci focused on virtuous or heroic women. Nurtured by some of her male relatives and inspired by her literary friendships with other well-known women writers, Hou appears to have turned from poetry, with its association of premature female death, to tanci, a genre that held no such lethal associations but might instead serve to entertain senior female relatives, help supplement the meager family finances, and promise a measure of literary renown. Hou Zhi made her name by editing and publishing the most famous example of the genre, Zaizheng yuan (Reunion in the Next Incarnation, 1821), a story about an elite woman, who, disguised as a man, becomes prime minister in 1821. Even though Hou’s own tanci seek to temper the...

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