Presence and Presentation: Women in the Chinese Literati Tradition (review)

This collection emerges from a series of colloquia about Chinese women at several annual meetings of the International Congress on Medieval Studies. The editor's preface includes a brief review of recent developments in our understanding of women in the Chinese literary tradition, so we need not duplicate such an assessment here. The appearance of Presence and Presentation in a series devoted to The New Middle Ages marks another positive step in the development of Women's studies in traditional China. However, given recent achievements by historians like Patricia Ebrey and Dorothy Ko and by literary historians like Ellen Widmer, Kang-I Sun Chang, Keith McMahon, and many others, one reluctantly concludes that this volume makes only a small contribution to the state of the field. The scholarship in most entries seems competent but derivative, and some of the remainder—with one notable exception, the opening essay discussed below—is unreliable.

Problems begin with the introduction, whose three-page history of the "literati tradition" includes a highly dubious sequence of generalities. Most egregious includes the assertion that medieval Chinese thought emerged from the fusion of "this-worldly" Confucianism with the "radical otherworldliness" of Daoism and Buddhism (p. xvii). First of all, Daoist adepts hope to cultivate this physical body and perfect it, enabling them to gain rank in a celestial bureaucracy in every way continuous with our mundane one. Ultimately, one hopes to become a god, and Daoist gods belong to this world. You can call on them in prayers, imbibe their qi by breathing and ingesting sunlight and starlight; you can bring them into your body and focus their powers to perfect your own viscera.

Second, the Chinese Buddhist ideal or bodhisattva bends every effort to save sinners in this world; bodhisattvas do not leave. Among indigenous Chinese forms of Buddhism, none proved as enduring or influential as Chan; when considering the chief traits of Chan masters, you would immediately list an overwhelming focus on the particular, the here and now, of mundane life in this world. At best, "radical otherworldliness" makes a bad translation for chushi, which really means devoting oneself to spiritual cultivation rather than remaining mired in the paths of family and government service. On the next page we read that "women in the classics and histories remain familial and passive." For this sentence to work, you would have to add "model" before women. Otherwise, how could you account for the feisty dames in the Book of Songs, the powerful and dangerous mother of Duke Zheng who menaces in the very first tale of the Zuo zhuan, the seventh chapter of Liu Xiang's Biographies of Women titled "The Depraved and Pernicious" (which Professor Sophia Lai cites on p. 110!), or Confucius' exasperated comment that "women and petty folk are impossible to keep at home!" How could Gan Bao (fl. 340) illustrate Wei's decline by invidiously contrasting its noblewomen's conduct with Zhou's celebrated "virtue of queen and consort"? How could Fan Ye (398-445) present the Eastern Han's collapse as owing to the poor regulation of palace women, culminating with the depredations of six consecutive dowager empresses? Although you could multiply counterexamples, let's just quote one of the many cautions about women from the Zuo zhuan:

A woman's potency has no limit; a wife's rancor has no end.¹

On page xix of the introductory essay we read with bemusement the one-line dismissal that the subjects in the poetry of Li Qingzhao remain "well within the Confucian confines of conjugal love and history." If the editor had either carefully read Li Qingzhao or at least seen my recent examination of Li's verse, this cavalier treatment of China's greatest woman poet would never have stood. To refute this requires a lengthy dissertation; to justify it means taking "love and history" broadly enough to swallow nearly all traditional Chinese poetry.^2...