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Lingering Fragrance: The Poetry of Tu Yaose and Shen Tiansun Ann Waltner and Pi-ching Hsu In the silken boudoir, bosom friends're rare; Xue Lingyun trims the wick and embroiders. The night is cool, the bright moon low in the window. Still in her orchid chambers, she writes a letter in "fallen chives" script.1 Tu Yaose, "Presented to Qixiang on an autumn evening" One of the most exciting developments in the study of Chinese women's history in the past decade has been the result of increased awareness of poetry composed by women, particularly by women of the Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911) dynasties. By using these poems, we can trace social networks and uncover the imaginative lives of these women in ways that are quite remarkable. The poetry of hundreds of Ming and thousands of Qing dynasty women was pubhshed and has been preserved;2 it is our task now to locate, read, and interpret this wealth of information about the lives and inner worlds of women in late imperial China. It is already apparent, from the work of EUen Widmer, Kang-i Sun Chang, Dorothy Ko, Susan Mann, Maureen Robertson, Paul Ropp, and others, that despite social rules which mandated gender segregation and seclusion for women of the elite, women participated in the literati culture of Jiangnan (the prosperous area south of the Yangtze River) in the late Ming and Qing periods.3 The poetry written by these women covers a wide range of topics, including religious devotion, romantic longing, and meditations on the natural world. This paper is a first look at the body of poetry written by Tu Yaose (1576-1601) and Shen Tiansun (c. 1580-1600), two young women of the literati class who lived in Jiangnan. Their poems show ways in which imaginative young women in the late Ming might negotiate their lives within the restrictions that governed their mobihty and access to public arenas. Poetry had always been a mode of expression deemed especiaUy appropriate for educated women. By the late Ming, this had taken on an added dimension, with a widespread (though by no means universally accepted) conviction that many of the poems in the canonical Book of Songs were in fact the work of women. Thus, when Tu Yaose and Shen Tiansun write their poems, they are claiming a place in a © 1997 Journal of Women's History, Vol. 8 No. 4 (Winter) 1997 Ann Waltner and Pi-ching Hsu 29 long imagined tradition of remarkable women, a claim they elaborate and articulate in their poetry. The poem at the opening of this article is written by Tu Yaose for her sister-in-law Shen Tiansun to celebrate their friendship, and affords the reader a glimpse into the women's quarters where a woman labors at text and textile. The fact of enclosure is strongly presented: two different terms for women's quarters appear in this poem: aige [silken boudoir] in the first line and langui [orchid chambers] in the last. The enclosure is broken by light—we can see in the window—and by words—which are sent out from the enclosure. Tu Yaose, enclosed in the women's quarters, writing and embroidering, writes of another enclosed woman, who also writes and embroiders. Letters and poems are physical objects which break out of enclosure, connecting women with one another and forming imaginative connections with women in China's past. Xue Lingyun, to whom Tu Yaose compares her friend, was a beautiful consort of Emperor Wei Wendi in the third century. Xue's skills as a seamstress were legendary: she was known as the "needle goddess" and reported to be able to sew in the dark. According to legend, the only clothing that Emperor Wendi would wear was that made by her. Xue embodied two of the four Confucian virtues for women (side), gracious comportment and skillful handiwork, and was hence a befitting literary model for the young Ming poetess. The poem suggests several themes important in the study of women's culture— friendships among women, the use of poetry and other Uterary means as mechanisms to maintain those friendships, and the role literary models played in...

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