Chinese Women in the Imperial Past: New Perspectives (review)

This substantial collection of essays on various aspects of women and gender relations in China from the Song to the Qing periods grew out of a workshop, "New Directions in the Study of Chinese Women, 1000-1800," held at Leiden University in 1996. It is edited by Harriet Zurndorfer, who also edits the new Leiden-based journal Nan Nü: Men, Women, and Gender in Early and Imperial China. The journal was, in a real sense, one of the other offspring of this 1996 workshop. As Zurndorfer notes in her preface, the intention of this volume is to bring together the fruits of recent scholarship across the globe on women and gender relations in China. The global reach of the volume is one of its noteworthy features, as it includes contributions by scholars from Australia, the Netherlands, Hong Kong, Italy, Taiwan, and the United States.

The first essay in the collection is an excellent survey and something of a cautionary tale by Wilt Idema, "Male Fantasies and Female Realities: Chu Shu-chen and Chang Yü-niang and Their Biographers." By analyzing the two collections of poetry by these famous Song-dynasty women authors, and subsequent biographies about them, Idema demonstrates how much of the surviving materials on these women reflect male concerns, especially about female chastity and loyalty to men.

Duanchang ji (A broken heart), is a famous collection of poems and song lyrics by Zhu Shuzhen, apparently compiled by a male scholar, Wei Zhonggong, with a preface dated 1182. Wei claims to have heard many of Zhu's poems, suggesting to Idema the importance of an oral tradition in the creation of this collection. Idema finds the collection reminiscent of the poems attributed to the Tang monk Hanshan, in that both collections contain precious little biographical information on the "author," and the poems themselves are sufficiently diverse to suggest multiple authorship. "Perhaps it is safer to read the poems in Duanchang ji¹ not so much as the product of a single, specific individual, but rather as a reflection of twelfth-century male conceptions of what typical effusions from the inner quarters should be like" (p. 24). The real appeal of Zhu Shuzhen, and the reason for the survival of poems attributed to her, Idema suggests, was that she symbolized loyalty and its importance for Southern Song male literati.

Jiang Yuniang's collection of poems and lyrics, Lan xue ji (Orchid and snow) first appeared in the late thirteenth century. It contains little information about her life, although later biographers claimed that she starved herself to death to follow her fiancé, a student named Shen, after his untimely death, and that her two servants and pet parrot (!) were so moved by her own loyalty that they in turn followed her in death. Idema traces the development of Jiang Yuniang's story into the Ming and Qing periods, as each succeeding century seems to supply more details about her shining example of chastity and loyalty.

Idema's conclusions are quite skeptical, noting that in both of these cases of famous women poets,

[O]ur earliest sources already reflect local legends. And while popular tradition may turn the female poet into an object of veneration and even adoration, elite male discourse will try to fashion her into the very embodiment of chastity, an example of loyalty to men. Each new statement in this ongoing debate is both a reaction to earlier texts about the poet and a reaction to contemporary societal issues the poet is made to serve. As information is copied and recopied, "authoritative" works turn misunderstandings and fictions into fact. Modern scholarship on women motivated by its own agenda, still, too often, allows itself to be victimized by the fantasies of dead males.

(p. 48)

Christian de Pee's essay, "The Ritual and Sexual Bodies of the Groom and Bride in Ritual Manuals of the Sung Dynasty...